I put the phone down, grab my coat and keys. I know she’ll be waiting in that dusty porch, with the yellowed lightbulb shining down. In amongst all the muddy wellington boots and damaged skateboards is where I’ll find her, as usual.
Michelle. She is intelligent, beautiful, funny and kind, and somehow still his. He who, at 23, shouts requests to his mother without leaving his room. He who in a group of friends will explain to GCSE level the biology behind fucking Michelle on her period. He who on occasion has tried to slip his hand up my skirt.

As I pull up to the kerb I wonder what it was this time and hope it’ll be the last, though my belief has wilted over the past six months. She sees me arrive and runs down to the car. Her face is grey and red from wiping the running make-up too hard. As she opens the door I see that her t-shirt is being held together by badges pulled off of her satchel. There’s a nick in her bra strap.
And she’s detailing it to me in machine gun bursts between sobs. It seems like every fifth line is ‘but he didn’t hit me’, as the contents of my stomach reach up into the lower half of my throat. She calms down after I hand her the usual flask of vodka and push the car’s cigarette lighter in.
‘He’s never been like that,’ she says as she takes a drag of the cigarette. She stumbles over the words, obviously knowing they’re not true. I keep quiet, giving monotone grunts of reassurance. I put the radio on and turn the volume down. I don’t want to be seen as interfering.

She’s got her thighs pressed together, leaning towards me with her knees touching the gearstick. Her eyes burn through me as I keep mine on the road. My cheek’s becoming flushed where Michelle is staring at me, and I don’t know why she’s doing it. I’ve never understood why she does it. She didn’t when we first met. I was thirteen, and my housewife mother was making me take ballet lessons to shake me out of my ‘wearing black and hating everything’ stage. Michelle was there of her own volition, but perseverance in the face of inability was endearing. She smiled at my limp gestures and sulking face, still coated in dribbling eyeliner but mostly obscured by my uneven fringe.
We would talk for hours on the phone; her about boys and me about horror films from the 1950s. Occasionally she’d get angry that I wasn’t listening to her droning about the latest Steve or Dan or Paul after hearing me laugh at some ridiculous Vincent Price set piece. She never really stayed angry for long. I think she knew as well as I did that those relationships were frivolous and ineffectual. ‘Let’s drive down Thorn Road,’ Michelle says, as she sniffs. She seems to have regained composure and is now smiling, trying to catch my eye. I agree and smile back at her.

Every town has a Thorn Road. The reputedly haunted street with no streetlights that people drive down when they get their licence with a car full of friends. Apparently a homeless guy got run over, and then smashed in with a jack when he wasn’t quite dead, by a fearful driver. Previous drives had ended in fits of laughter at the feeling of the air conditioning being on, or a watch winding itself back to midnight. It was probably an electromagnetic anomaly but it was still fun to pretend.
We get to the middle, where the strange stuff happens, and Michelle leans over, wraps both her arms  around my left. A lump rises in my throat, and a shiver runs down my spine. I wish I could blame a haunting.
‘Ooh I’m scared,’ she clowns. I let out a short giggle. Every bone in my body is frozen still, and I’m suddenly conscious of the saliva in my mouth and how often I’m blinking. She shakes my arm.
‘Ooh I’m possessed! Hahaha!’
I look at her and our faces are too close. The second lasts forever, I feel a wave of sweat run down my forehead and as she blinks Michelle pulls away. Silence. We get three quarters of the way down the road before either of us says anything.

‘Don’t look in the rearview mirror remember,’ Michelle says. Her voice is understated, monotone, cautious. Part of the myth is that the homeless man sits on your backseat, staring at you in the rearview. I do feel like I’m being watched. My cheek is burning again.
‘Which way’s quicker back to yours?’ I ask her, and she signals across the roundabout. It’s about five minutes from here. Michelle’s phone rings and, after checking the screen, she throws it back in her bag. I smile at her. Her reply is one of resignation.
I start a conversation about how good the weekend’ll be; Vanessa’s throwing a party on Saturday, her parents are away and everyone’s going. Michelle replies in monotone confirmations, and when I ask what she’s going to do about drink she dismisses it with a simple ‘I don’t know.’

We pull up outside her house, and she unfastens her seatbelt. I turn to face her, smiling to suggest everything’ll be okay. Michelle bites her lip, and her eyes dart down and to the left. She breathes in as if to say something, but then lets it out in a sigh.
‘Thanks for picking me up. You’re a good friend.’
‘Any time; don’t get down about it. He’s a dick.’
‘Yeah. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow or something. Maybe talk later.’ With this she gets out, without the usual hug.

Sometimes love is the ultimate anti-climax. If you really got what you wanted, you probably wouldn’t know what to do with it. I hope that’s the case here, as I watch Michelle walk up her driveway, pulling her phone out of her bag.

Her apron was filthy. I guessed it had been for days; the hardened stains had fallen apart where it had been scrunched up several times. Patterns seemed to emerge in the lines absent from them. It was half four, so she must’ve been working all day, but her composure implied she had never worked a day in her life. She had her hair tied back into a low ponytail, with a fringe running free that covered her right eyebrow. When I’d ordered my coffee she had seemed like another attractive coffee shop girl amongst thousands of attractive coffee shop girls, but the more I looked at her the less I could look away.

And I was overly aware that I was staring, too aware to explain it as being ‘miles away’ when I was inevitably caught. But I wasn’t caught yet, so I went back to sipping my coffee and glancing at newspapers whenever it looked like I was directly in her line of vision. She was attractive in a way that I only find women when I’m sober. I was affected by the sight of her, and dreamt of knowing why she would touch the centre of her eyebrows every time she opened the cash register. ‘Sabine’ read the name tag, although I know I’d never seen her here before and new workers are always given fake name tags until theirs is made up. Equally she could have illegible handwriting; she could be Sabrina, Sadie or even Nadine if she really couldn’t write. She looked like she could write though. She looked like she had some grand scheme to make everything perfect.

I imagined the house she lived in. Probably still with her parents; I guessed she was about 20, that this was only part time work. You had to walk a little way up to the house through a wooden gate, and the garden was perfectly trimmed. The whole house was white; the doorbell set into a black plastic casing. Inside, the floors were all wooden, and the walls a pristine white. When you looked around, there was a door to each side of you; the one on the right was open, revealing a black leather sofa set against the wall in front of a huge television. This is where her dad watched football on lazy Sundays, drinking a beer with crisps in a bowl on the glass coffee table. On the left, a dining room that went to the back of the house, where a conservatory sat for her mum to paint and listen to Radio 4 in.

If you walked forward, there was the newly fitted kitchen, but to the left, a spiral staircase lead upstairs. Up here was carpeted in shining white. You weren’t allowed to wear shoes up here. Turning left brought you to the parent’s bedroom, through double doors, and if you followed the wall down the corridor you’d reach the bathroom, with its shower made for two and jacuzzi bathtub. But on the right was her room.

Her room was covered in pictures of her friends and posters of adverts from the 50s. A poster of Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie sat at the head of her double bed, covered in overly decorative cushions. On her desk sat a few books; some chick lit, some philosophy. A lined notepad and a sketchbook aligned with the wall.

I took another look at her, making sure she wasn’t likely to catch me, using my peripheral vision. She was still touching the middle of her eyebrows whenever the register opened, as if she was going to do the Catholic crossing of herself but got tired. Maybe this was an in-joke with her friends, or even better, herself.

I could see her on a night out. She was dressed well. No outward signs of sex, but by no means unattractive. Her friends weren’t glamorous or judgmental, they were just out to get drunk and laugh. They walked down streets arm in arm insulting each other and drinking from a bottle of rosé wine. The bars they went to were poorly lit, smoky establishments that softly played blues in the background. They sat in the corner and drank a bottle of wine each before heading to one of their houses. They talked about films and their shitty boyfriends. Sabine didn’t have a boyfriend. I could tell.

As I stared at her again, this time for what seemed like a straight minute, she seemed to exude a bizarre kind of purity. The more she touched the gap between her eyebrows the more naïve and sweet she seemed to me. As if she’d never been kissed or hurt, or hurt anyone for that matter. Her eyes were a strong shade of blue.

I looked away again and stared at my phone for a while. Nothing had changed. Nobody had got in contact with me. There was nothing to expect, but it still felt like a shame. I wanted people to think of me as much as I thought of them. I started to think of names of people I wish would give me a call, or an e-mail, just to let me know they were doing okay; the people who got lost in the desert of post-teenage while I stutteringly went to university.

I looked back up at her, hoping I could once again lose myself in some grand delusional vision of her lifestyle. She opened the cash register, but didn’t touch the middle of her eyebrows. I wondered why. There seemed to be no pattern. For the customer after, she didn’t again, and so on from then. It seemed strange to me – every single person before that that she had taken money from had signified a need to touch the centre of her eyebrows, but they didn’t any more.

I ran out of coffee so gathered my stuff and queued up. I wasn’t finished with sitting around. She had served me before but she didn’t mean anything to me then. I’d invented a world around Sabine without her knowing. The queue was about five people deep, which gave me time to compose myself before I had to order anything.

The queue was moving quicker than before, I could feel it, and I forgot how you order black coffee at one of these places, where you can’t even order a ‘small’, ‘medium’ or ‘large.’ There must be some special phrase I’d used in the past but it escaped me now.
I got to the till and she smiled up at me from behind her fringe. She had thick black eyeliner on that I hadn’t noticed before. I asked for a black coffee, smiling, and she set to making it.

While she did it she started talking to another of the employees. She glanced back at me and, still smiling, I acted like it was nothing. I thought that maybe after this cup I would give her my phone number or something, it had been so long since I’d gone out on a limb with a girl like that and it usually felt good for at least an hour, before the crippling embarrassment kicked in.
But it bothered me that she wasn’t touching the point between her eyebrows any more. I couldn’t say why. As she stood there smiling with her co-worker, she looked at me again, and this time let out a filthy laugh, a cackle that seemed aimed at me. What was there about me to laugh at? I was wearing a purple t-shirt with a black cardigan, and as I checked my reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows my hair was exactly as it should be. My shoes were clean. My grey jeans were tight but not revealing anything. She brought me my coffee and I walked back to my seat.

As I sat down, I looked at her again. The eyeliner around her eyes seemed even thicker now, and her serene smile had turned into one of malice. Her eyebrows seemed pointed downwards. The teeth she showed in that vicious smile were points, and her hair seemed to have been affected by static. I thought again of her house.

She lived in a bedsit above a takeaway restaurant, someone had died in it and so she paid less rent. She didn’t know where her parents went at weekends, and in the week they never contacted her.

When she went out with friends she went out to bring any man in a polo shirt home with her. She drank vodka from the bottle, walking alone and pissing behind industrial bins. She talked to her friends about the cocks of men they’d met the weekend before, and how drunk they’d been. She wore dresses that were level with her vagina, and sometimes her arse fell out, of which there were tens of photos on various websites. There was a video of her pissing filmed on her friend’s cameraphone as she smoked a cigarette and told her to fuck off, cackling. She sent nude pictures of herself to near-perfect strangers in the hopes of seducing them, whether they had a partner or not. She was everything I hated and I refused to drink her coffee. I stood up, and I saw her touch the space between her eyebrows for the last time. Her foundation was so caked on that she had realised it had cracked at this point, and was trying to get it flat again. She looked at me leaving, and as she bared those yellowing, ragged teeth at me in a smile, I kept my head down.

Juliet creeps into my room while I make sure the front door is locked. It’s been a boozy night, and so I can’t remember how she knows which room is mine. I find it a bit strange that she would know which door it is, as we haven’t done this for months, and the last time was the first time.
I take a few seconds at the mirror in the hallway before following her in. My face looks fake, too dry and angular to be human. I stare into my eyes but that scares me even more, the pupils dilating and constricting at differing times and the icy blue iris looks like a colour from what was the future in the seventies. I straighten my hair and clear my throat. My voice has a habit of getting stuck in a high pitch if I don’t, and it unsettles me that I can sound so entirely unlike myself.

I turn the hallway light off and walk into my room; a mess of clothes and empty cans surround the two islands that are the bed and the desk. Juliet sits on the bed, leaning on her forearms in a sickly seductive manner. Her smile is managing to reach from ear to ear without showing any teeth, and the only light source is a desk-lamp that lights her from the side, accentuating a shadow the bridge of her nose casts over one eye. She pats the bed beside her as if this is romantic and clichés can be overlooked. She’s still holding the smile and I tell her I’ll come over in a second.
I open up my laptop to put some music on but the only songs that really grab me are things that don’t set any of the right moods. I really want to listen to Adam Green or The Birthday Party but I know she won’t get it, so I put on the last LCD Soundsystem album. She stills asks what it is, so I just tell her and don’t go into it. I really wish she would leave. I am already tired of this dance.
I sit on the bed next to her, and she starts playing with my hand. She’s sucking my fingers and looking up at me from where she’s lying. This is all about as sexy as a car crash it’s so blunt, and I sort of hate myself for liking it on a physical level. I go to get some drinks, remembering I have a bottle of wine that’ll hopefully put her over the edge. She doesn’t let go of my hand until the last moment, and I have to make a smile that suggests this is what I want.
Now I’m in the kitchen with two clean cups and half a bottle of white wine and I’m annoyed that this is not what I want. I know I should, she’s sort of beautiful in the right light, if her fringe covers the scar on her forehead. I left the nightclub to the smiling faces of men I don’t know who seemed happy for me so why do I feel like this? I shake it off. I’m going back in there with a positive attitude, and after a couple of mouthfuls of wine in the kitchen I head back in. She’s sort of beautiful I repeat in my head. She’s sort of beautiful.
I walk in with the two mugs of white wine and I don’t spot her at first because she’s under the duvet. I take a swig and ask what she’s doing, in a light-hearted way. She just smiles. I don’t know what to do so I hand her one of the mugs and go to sit at the desk. Staring at the floor to avoid the day-to-day shrapnel I spot her black dress, her blue cardigan, pink pieces of underwear. My stomach jumps a little bit, but that might be from the wine. The stomach jump is not an entirely unpleasant thing.
‘Lock the door,’ she whispers.
‘I’m going to have a cigarette and sort out some music, okay?’
‘Okay. But then get in.’
I search the song titles I’m scrolling through for an answer to this situation, but the only one I see is ‘Frozen In Time’ and that doesn’t help at all. I realise we aren’t talking much at all and she’s interpreting that as sexual tension, so I ask what she wants to listen to. She says ‘something upbeat’ and winks which is probably the most disgusting thing I’ve seen a woman do that wasn’t on the internet. It’s probably about two years since I had romantic sex, and while I didn’t expect it from Juliet I did think she would want it. I may have read too much into it, but the combination of ‘something upbeat’ and a wink means this is going to be filthy, treating each other’s bodies as climbing frames. I just put the computer on shuffle and hope nothing too depressing comes on.
I take off my shoes and cardigan and climb under the sheets, the sickly pallor of her naked body sparkling in the low lighting. It’s a single bed so we lie too close for comfort and she goes for my belt. She giggles, saying that it’s unfair how dressed I am compared to her. I push her hands away, smiling so she isn’t offended and pour us both some more wine. I drain half the mug in one move.

‘So how was your day?’ I ask, smiling slightly so she finds it cute rather than delaying.
‘Good….good.’ She goes for the belt again.
Earlier on we’d talked for about an hour, and that had been fine. I bought us drinks and we seemed to get along, so I don’t know why I’m now so against this. She just isn’t relationship material. I don’t know how I can explain why I know that, but I always did I think; even before the taxi journey back here. Now in my bed she’s proving it, having said roughly twenty words in the half hour we’ve been back. She couldn’t even suggest a band for fear that I wouldn’t like them, or wouldn’t have their music.
On top of this I have more than a slight suspicion that she’d describe me to her friends as ‘quirky’ or ‘weird.’ I think people use those words when they have such parochial attitudes that anyone who isn’t exactly like them is an oddball, and that’s unfair. What’s more unfair is me assuming this of her, I suddenly think.
‘What do you want from this?’ I ask, fairly terrified of any response.
‘You.’
‘No, I mean in the long term, like do you really think we suit each other?’
‘Yeah. I think so. My friends think you’re interesting.’
‘Which friends? Is ‘interesting’ another word for ‘weird’?’
I am careful not to show any annoyance. I can sense I’m being unreasonable, but it doesn’t make me want her.
‘It probably is, yeah. But why does it matter? They like you. I like you.’
I suddenly feel awful and realise that although it would be easier to go through with this, I can’t. She’s kind, and while I hate kindness as a virtue the same way I hate ‘nice’ as an adjective, another one-night stand with Juliet would be damning evidence towards me being hateful. I don’t have a clue why I’ve brought her back here. I’m really drunk now and I keep nearly falling out of the bed avoiding touching any intimate part of Juliet, but I’m determined not to give in.
‘This is what you want now Juliet but in the morning we’ll both feel awful.’ I sigh.
‘I don’t think so. Look, this is what I want to happen. I don’t know why you don’t. We’ve done it before so why not again?’
‘Because I know that I will never introduce you to my parents.’ I laugh a little, and quickly hush myself because I realise how mean that broken sentence is.
‘What do you mean?’ She’s quieter now, and stealing the covers, visibly realising she is naked in bed with a man who doesn’t want that.
‘I mean, nothing will happen. Nothing good will happen here. This is a disaster.’
She sits up unaware that she’s revealing her breasts, leans on her knees holding her head. The sight is kind of tragic. She looks really good naked but it can’t be about that, even when I’m this drunk.
‘Well let’s just sleep here tonight. Is that okay? I just want to sleep in this bed with you tonight.’
I kiss her on the cheek and say that’s fine. It’s strange but fine. She’s not angry enough for me to be comfortable. I go to turn the lamp off and finish her drink for her, followed by mine, and then I take my jeans off and climb in next to her. She pulls one of my arms over her and I hold her as I fall asleep, feeling sorry for her.
As I drift off she’s shaking, probably crying, but I’m too far under to wake myself up and comfort her. Even my dream is drunk, and a series of images precede anything resembling a storyline: a bike, Juliet naked in a park, some candles, a Catherine wheel. I’m on a swing, and Juliet is walking towards me naked, waving her finger as if saying ‘no no no.’ She’s wearing knee-high socks and I seem to get higher on the swing the closer she gets to me. I look down and I’m wearing shorts and a vest, a primary school P.E kit, and she’s still coming closer – so close now that I’m afraid I might kick her in the face. I can’t stop the swing and it’s getting higher and faster and she’s getting closer and just before my feet touch her face, I wake up.

I wake up, and through glued-shut eyes and warped physical awareness I realise that Juliet is now on top of me. She’s looking down at me straight-faced, and I’m kind of terrified but at the same time blasé. We’re holding eye contact as she pushes herself on and off of me, and I feel my face closing up. I have no idea what to do.
She really is sort of beautiful up there, I think. By now it’s the early morning, about half past four, and the sun is pushing through my thin curtains, casting her thin but feminine frame in monochrome. Am I being raped? Women usually say it is impossible to rape a man, because he has to want it to be able to penetrate. I disagree. Yet while I’m thinking about the legality of this unwanted act, it is carrying on and I am stuck for an answer.
‘Am I wearing a condom?’ is all I manage.
‘No.’
‘Are you on the pill or anything like that?’
‘No.’
At this I lift her from under the arms and put her down beside me, asking her what she was doing. For some reason my tongue refuses to be as angry as my mind is. She starts punching me in that way girls do, with the side of the fist rather than knuckles. She’s hitting me constantly, in a marching rhythm, switching arms when one lands itself somewhere on my anatomy.
‘What were you doing?’ I inquire after wrestling hold of her arms. She doesn’t reply. She spits at me, but it hits the pillow.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask with gaining disbelief at what I have awoken to. She kicks out at my torso, manages to kick me to the floor where I hit my head on one of the mugs and start to dream almost immediately.
The swing scenario has returned, and this time I realise that the rhythm of swinging is similar to the rhythm that Juliet crashed down and pushed up off and on me. I am aware that this dream is signalling me being fucked again, like when you experience pain from something in a dream and you wake up in a painful circumstance. This time I can’t wake up and I think that the mug must’ve killed me or knocked me unconscious and Juliet is fucking me as I lie there on the floor, helpless to do anything.

She is sort of beautiful.

I step on to the train; take my seat in the first corner I find. I’ve got headphones in, set to a volume where if someone talks directly to me I can hear them. Otherwise I float along, undisturbed, on my way to Guildford.
Kids are everywhere. Stumbling around staring at the floor, feeling sorry for themselves and their disposable incomes. A group of four sit in one of the six-seat sections, all wearing ripped up tracksuits, rolling cigarettes and every so often dealing out a punch or kick to another member of the group.

I remember that type. When I was younger they listened to Oasis. One of the group sat in front of me, he reminds me of this kid who lived near me. He’s the spitting image of him. He used to wait for me in the alleyway as I walked home from school. The alley was the last straight on the 40-minute journey, and the alternative added an extra quarter of an hour.
It felt like every other day for about six months that he would confront me here. Always standing behind the trees at the side of the path, just a bit further than halfway. I would always take my headphones out, so I could hear him. He had this group of younger kids who he hung out with, and one of them had this maniacal laugh that would give away their position.
He’d push me to the wall on the other side of the path, throwing down the cigarette that was constantly in his mouth incorrectly smoked. My adrenaline would always rush at this point. My sentences became less structured, devolving to glottal stops and monosyllables. He’d pull out his knife, and his friends would laugh. He’d hold it to my throat, asking me to say things, threatening to cut me. I never said them. To this day I’m childishly proud of that. I knew he didn’t want a murder on his hands. He was thick but not that thick.
After about three months, my silence to the situation faded. I became immune to the threat of violence, the cries that promised to gut me ‘like a fish.’
‘You don’t gut someone through the throat.’
‘What? Fucking shut up.’
‘Well your knife should be here,’ I said, pulling his arm down to my stomach.
‘Oh he’s asking for it boys.’
‘You’re not going to cut me. You’re not going to do anything.’
I didn’t know for sure he wouldn’t do something. I just didn’t care any more. If he had, I sort of felt like I still would’ve won. He didn’t, and he would continue to do this on a daily basis, but I became more confident as the weeks went by. Slowly the look of crazed malice fell from his eye, to the point where holding me at knifepoint seemed to him to be an act of self-defence. I would push him away, slur words from his level at him. The worst he ever did was to punch me in the face. As my nose bled, I laughed. Wiping the blood on my school blazer, I laughed as fully as I ever had before. I never saw him after that, not in the alley at least.
And then a few years ago I was reading the local newspaper, looking for a job. There was an article about how he’d died of a heroin overdose at 22. I vividly remember smiling to myself. When friends who knew of him brought the subject up in conversation, it was always through the filter of tragedy. I seemed to be the only one who remembered him as a vicious nothing, and the first few times I expressed this belief I was knocked back. To not speak ill of the dead is a ridiculous rule of etiquette in my mind.
The boys sat in front of me have the same gang format that he did. It’s almost a reincarnation, I think. The parallels in conversation, my perceived intelligence of them, appearance; it’s uncanny.

The train reaches the second stop, and a few boys in school uniform get on. A group of four look into the seating area, and head off in the other direction when they see them. One boy, headphones in and a full to bursting satchel, seems not to look, and takes a seat behind them.
They go quiet for a few seconds. The one sitting opposite him is pointing, looking through the gap in the chair and laughing. The others turn around, staring at the schoolboy. I can’t see him any more, so I don’t know how he’s reacting to it. I take my headphones out.

One of the gang takes an empty carton of cigarettes from his coat pocket, starts ripping it into pieces. He rolls them into balls, throwing them at the schoolboy while his friends laugh. They’ve all got a panel of the carton now, falling about in hysterics as they roll new balls and pick from the floor the ones that have bounced back. I prop myself up so I can see over the chairs in front of me. The schoolboy sits there, staring into his lap. I notice he’s checking his pockets.
Across the walkway sit two middle-aged men, wearing branded sweatshirts and occasionally looking at the gang. They seem to cast no judgment at all, sitting there plain faced and paint covered.
The main guy, the ‘gang leader’, he’s got a new idea. His eyes light up, and again they revert to whispering. He rips a strip from his panel of cardboard, and instead of rolling it up, he sets fire to one end of it. He quickly whips it at the schoolboy, who swats it away. He still hasn’t said anything, or moved. He could move to another carriage and avoid confrontation. Why won’t he move carriage?
They’re all doing it now; the grey carriage lit up like a night’s sky during a meteor shower. They’re landing in his lap, on his head. He’s wearing those cheap school trousers that melt rather than singe, but so far he’s not making too big a fuss about it so I assume he’s come to no harm. One of the gang stands up, needing a peak to end his torturous entertainment. He’s going for the satchel, which the boy has immediately pulled back into his arms. I stand up.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I ask the boy, who freezes in place, hands on the satchel. ‘You should all be fucking ashamed of yourselves. He’s like 12.’
They start to laugh under their breath. That smile creeping in, with the dark eyes, on each of their faces.
‘So you’re saying nothing. Stop it. Alright? Stop it.’ The guys in sweatshirts are staring at me as if I’m the main issue here. As if I’m the problem this carriage has had all along. The schoolboy looks at me, and I smile but his face stays the same. The same fear is still present; the same dream of being anywhere else in the world.
‘And you – stick up for yourself won’t you? You’re letting them get away with it. They don’t care if they get a reaction, they’re idiots, they’ll do it regardless. None of them have the guts to kill you so do something about it. Stop being such a pussy.’
I move towards the doors. I take a glance back, see the gang sitting in silence, that stupid unchangeable look on their faces. The schoolboy continues to stare at his lap, until we pull into Guildford when he stands beside me. I press the button to open the doors, and a pellet of cardboard strikes me in the side of the face.

I’m sitting hunched over my plate in the beige conservatory, bombarded by questions that lead nowhere. Yes or no, a light laugh, sometimes just a nod or purr. They’ve obviously been told I’m vegetarian and think that means I’m difficult. They’ve tried I guess, but they seem to have tried in a way that makes me feel more uncomfortable. They’ve replaced the meat in the curry with banana. I stifle a smirk, imagining myself eating banana steaks, banana fillets and banana rashers for my entire life. And I’m choking down these banana slices covered in a korma sauce, nodding at the first tastes and saying how tasty it is. I want to vomit, or at the very least watch myself from afar.

Across the table sits Georgia, next to her mum. She stares at me; obviously hoping I don’t do something awful. She seems to have adopted a pre-emptive look of disgust, so that when her parents say they hate her boyfriend she can say something like ‘oh I know, I only brought him here to break up with him.’
I smile constantly, like a dog with its head out the car window clueless to its imminent castration. Georgia’s eyes look jagged when I check to see how I’m doing. I’m wearing a shirt for fuck’s sake, what more do you want? I want to scream.
Struggling to hear the questions over my nicotine addiction, I reply with ‘yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely’s until someone smiles. I ask what her stepdad does, and I immediately switch off. Her mum asks what I got in my A Levels, what my parents do. As if eyeing me up as a son-in-law. I thought I was being melodramatic when I’d feared meeting parents in the past, and I’d been right until seemingly this instant. I was being weighed up. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had me breathalysed. I would fail it – what else is there to do on a 3-hour train journey?

I feel well dressed. There’s enough of myself involved in my attire, but equally I’ve classed it up for their approval. A silver ring in my ear, but my tattooed arms covered in a flowery shirt. Jeans so tight that I struggle to sit down, but that’s the way I want them to always be. Into my 50s.

I help clear the plates away, and the stepdad pours me more wine. Like I need it. I’m unaware of any part of me beyond my torso. I’m really struggling to think of anything to talk about, so I ask what everyone did today. Stupid.
Georgia suggests we play a board game, and I’m effectively on a double date with a couple 25 years older with an inclination to hate me, about 200 miles from home. My intoxicated mind betrays me, starts to list the worst things that I could do at this moment in time; shove the Trivial Pursuit pieces into my mouth, start dancing.
I let out a ‘fuck’ when I can’t think of the word I’m looking for, and eyebrows are raised and I apologise more than five times. I don’t mean a single one of them. I want to do it again. Louder, and with context. I answer the question as quickly as possible, move my piece around the board and take a mouthful of wine. It goes round again. I almost feel like our disdain at being in this situation has made us a team; Georgia’s the only one showing any enthusiasm. I’m going through the motions, rolling dice or whatever the fuck it is you do in Trivial Pursuit, and my mind is elsewhere.
I’m thinking of this moment in the grand scheme of things. I’m thinking about how I would never force this on my parents. I’m thinking I need to find a gang of attractive orphans I can fall in love with.

The stepdad’s checking his watch every so often; they’re heading out for the evening soon. He tells the time to his wife and she jumps up from the table and rushes to go put some make-up on. Georgia packs up the game and goes to the bathroom. She doesn’t look at me once.
‘So where are you going tonight?’ I ask the stepdad.
‘Oh, just to our friends’ house for some drinks. We shouldn’t be too late.’
‘Ah right, that’s cool.’
We sit in silence for a while, and I contemplate asking where I have to go to smoke but think better of it. It’s as if what little nicotine was in my bloodstream has turned into equal parts acid and self-consciousness. I check my phone, look up and smile at him. He smiles back with a little laugh. It fades very quickly, and his wife comes back through. She asks where her handbag is, and I say I think I saw it in the front room earlier.
‘Where is it?’ She asks him again.
‘He just said he thinks he saw it in the front room.’
‘I already looked there, it isn’t.’
‘Oh right. Well, I don’t know.’
She rushes out of the room, sighing. He looks me right in the eye, so shockingly direct that I struggle to hold his gaze. He turns one side of his mouth up, his eyes squint. He looks down to the right.
‘I better go help her actually mate.’
‘Yeah okay man. Have a good time.’
‘You too.’ He pats me on the back. ‘It gets easier,’ he says, as he walks out the door.
He opens the door and Georgia walks through.
‘So we’re going to go meet my friends at the pub in half an hour, okay?’
I nod my head, try to smile.
Her face doesn’t change.

It never fucking does.

She stood behind the stage, waiting for the first bars of ‘Miss You’ by The Rolling Stones to kick in. She looked out from behind the curtain. She wished she could say all manner of people were there to see her, as if it was a cultural experience, but it wasn’t. It was the same as it ever was; the overweight men – balding disgracefully with comb-overs, reminiscent of the way a baby’s hair first grows. They wore earth tones, t-shirts stained with beer and some out of date slogan. Their dress sense was utilitarian. Anything that didn’t show up too harshly in red light, and jeans that allowed for erections.
They waited achingly with five pound notes; some tens, but she knew those men were trying to look flash. They were the ones that, more often than not, you had to get the manager to deal with. They didn’t see you as staged, a re-enactment; they saw you as a commodity.

Her stage props were a knife and a stripper pole. It was kind of a shady club – no fully fledged fetishism, but more intense than the average stag do establishment. The people who frequented this basement wanted more than nudity. They had quite specific wants.
The bassline kicked in, and she waited until the drum’s offbeat disco pattern kicked in to walk out. The beauty of the stage was that, when lit up so intensely as it was, she couldn’t see the audience. The red blinded her to anyone else’s existence, and it was as if she was dancing in her bedroom again. She hadn’t done that in years. This club had, for all its evils, become a second home to her.

Her tight all black outfit – a corset with denim hotpants – squeezed out all the weight she still carried from her recent pregnancy, like standing on a tube of toothpaste. The underarms were always the clue, pinched up slithers of flesh sat on top of her breasts. Whilst she was aware of these, almost haunted by the presence of these tiny imperfections, nobody watching was.
She climbed up the pole, swirled around on it. She lowered herself slowly, headfirst. The concentration in her face overpowered any feigned enjoyment it had been showing.
Leaning on the pole, she clicked her fingers while Mick Jagger howled about lost love. She worked the buttons on the corset free, going top to bottom. She prayed for the make-up she’d smeared on her C-section scar to hold, and not have worn off on her top. As she ripped it away, the majority of the foundation came away too, but still the scar was only faint. The first three rows were probably the only ones who could see it anyway, she thought. Maybe they’d even get a kick out of it.

She turned her back, walked the catwalk back to the knife. The idea was to cut her shorts off in one swift movement, down the previously weakened seam on the left side. The knife was dull; you could hit yourself with the blade and come out barely scratched, as the manager had showed her earlier. You could’ve ripped her shorts off by sliding a finger down the seam, but fingers were only rarely what got these attendants off.
She did some hip shakes, knew she looked ridiculous. Waving the knife about her head like a drumstick, she stepped back, so she could put more light on the seam she had to cut.
She forced the blade down inside the pant leg, the garment so tight that she had to really work at it. She pulled it outwards, and the shorts came off as planned. She stood naked in front of a silent crowd whilst Keith Richards tossed a guitar solo into the vicinity.

As she took a step forward, to give everyone a better look, a searing pain shot down her leg. She glanced down, and a river of blood the length of the knife was working its way out of her thigh. At this the audience wooped and cheered. One man in the front row stood up, driven into a frenzy by the sight of the wound. His drink flew across the front of the stage. A pool slowly formed, combining the cheap lager with the girl’s blood.
She smiled for the first time in a long time whilst performing. She carried on dancing, the blood coming out in sheets before drying up slightly. At this the crowd returned to their sedate selves. She could make out the manager standing at the back, waving his arms around, eyes popping out of his skull, wearing a grin that could only normally be achieved by drugs.

She slashed the other leg in the same place. Deeper. More people stood up, more drinks went flying through the air. She slashed across the scar previously hidden by make-up that reminded her of her daughter. Just as that cut hadn’t hurt, had been worth the sacrifice, neither did these.
Before she could stop herself she was shredding all the skin the knife came into contact with. She threw the knife from hand to hand, catching it by the handle mostly but not caring when she didn’t.

And she was dizzy with appreciation, and dizzy with blood loss. She slipped in the blood and the crowd threw up a great cheer, one she had never been the recipient of. And it echoed in her head, it seemed endless. And she lay on the floor smiling, the manager the last thing she saw. He winked at her. He threw her a thumbs up.
And Mick Jagger’s harmonica faded out with the rest of the band, and she shut her eyes, content for once.
And the ‘ooh’s and ‘aah’s of The Rolling Stones fell out of the sky, and it was as if they’d always been playing from a moving vehicle.