Foam Party Girl
- from Ethan Price
Soho/Brighton/Margate
She’s licking the walls. Rummaging around on the filthy floor, looking for something that isn’t there, never has been or will be. I don’t know where we are, it feels like a vast coal bunker with only coal dust remaining (rave). I tell her to get up — she’s ruining her skirt, bruising her knees— but she only smiles and when I pick her up she falls back down with purpose. So I crouch, we talk about our dead fathers, but it’s not the time really.
Big boys, big red shoulders, big sheets of skin peeling.
On the promenade, she’s lost control again. And again, on Dean street. It’s becoming unbearable, to all around but not to her. She’s oblivious to all as usual, won’t hear any of it, won’t take a word against her. Which is admirable, to be such a force unwilling to be deviated. Not an ounce of remorse. An unflinching belief that anything she does or says is correct and must be accepted, even if those in her path don’t want to be there. It’s admirable, it really is.
On the promenade, we lost control again. But not from the alcohol this time. This time just from the sun; how immaculate it is. And from the fear of time moving past at such a pace. Gripping onto the wide concrete steps, getting the sand into the skin, trying to hold a grain in the twists of the fingerprint, in the cuticle, just to keep something still, something unmoving. Then maybe that tightness in the throat might subside for a moment. But then just have a gin and get over it.
Pretty gnarly relationships on this beach. Helter-skelter boys, sun trap, leather bodies, skin falling off and apart, fluorescent arcade lights, something shifting, alcohol making things shift, a rising in the stomach, something selling out, spilling out, stench of dead things, screaming — coming out of bodies, vomit and the landscape echoing this lurching movement, a truck making the shape of an enormous penis in the mud-sand, music, standing around, nothing and everything to do, grins, big teeth, bottles and cans, sticky liquids, attaching to the sea, plastic six-pack rings caught on toes, things in the hair, everything melting with each other and what a mess.
Funny as hell.
Greasy feelings. A pack a night, missing the clicky bit in the Sterling Dual’s. Will stop, but everything is dripping in whatever you gotta do in the day so you can sleep at night. Sedating, upping, railing the iced latte, ice screeching on the plastic. Stereotypes are true — fast homo walker. Nihilistic homo summer?
Not in the dark and hiding but in the dark to be free. Down something narrow, an alley, a staircase. The waiter pours the white wine into a teapot in the last place open in Chinatown. 4am — no license I guess. A pink fury tuk tuk. The wind catching the fur, my hair, my throat. My friend once told me when she was a teenager her friend used to get them both free rides by snogging the tuk tuk drivers — sounds marvellous, I said. The wind is sharp, hot. Later that night, things smash, disintegrate, but literally this time — two vast pieces of glass. Some bisexual boy sits on my glass coffee table and that’s the end of that. He disappears out my flat with my keys. Reappears with an enormous sheet of glass — a window pane — he found it god knows where. In his 8am addled mind he believes it to be a perfect replacement for the coffee table. It isn’t. He, defeated, takes the glass sheet out of my flat. The thing shatters everywhere at the base of the communal entrance. I start blubbering because my little mind just can’t hack it, and F (my love) has to clear it all up. The boy was, is, rather sweet really. And bad decisions make good stories.
E is finally wearing the Gaultier bikini she’s been longing to wear the whole summer. I’m uncomfortable in my body, but strip as you’re supposed to on the beach. And more clothes come off the more I drink. E tries to teach me how to swim, her hands under my armpits, she says I’m doing it, but we’re both so drunk that everything is blurry. It is impossible to tell if my body is swimming or drowning. Fish without fins. Sun sweeps into the seawater, seawater sluices my mouth cavity. Overlapping, morphing. E’s bikini tie extends several feet away from her back into the waves. It’s mesh and so many colours but a base of purples. Could be radioactive seaweed.
Suddenly it’s dark. Without us noticing we are almost alone on the beach and we stumble up to the promenade because it somehow feels sleazy to be left here just the two of us. And then we encounter the dance. At least a dozen middle-aged couples waltz, circling the inside perimeter of a bandstand with black sea in the distance. Music comes from somewhere. E and I are transfixed, fizzing, possibly hooting. It’s beautiful, but sad, it feels like a scene from the end of the world somehow. We decide to join them in the dance. We ask for tips from one of the couples, they oblige. We are supposed to follow each other’s steps, but I can’t follow my own train of thought. We stumble, and we try our best, but we give up after one song. For maybe a few seconds it does feel like we are a part of them, the dancers.
Sea foam. Foaming at the mouth, white corners of the lips. He’s apparently from Iceland, sounds Irish. He repeats the same story he’s just told us, the only story he’s told us, about the sunburnt forehead he’s hiding under his hat. Falls back off his seat, merges with the pavement, encourages us to follow him to Trisha’s but it’s only 7pm, the sun is still up. Foam for brains.
Inside the party, spilling, bubbling over.
Ethan Price is a writer.