Free Alchemy by Maureen Duffy Page B

tail.
    A fun bunny. Whereas pussy is more dangerous, with claws, naughty and a bit spiteful. Twat is just contemptuous, taken over by schoolboys and shouted on the bus going home.
    After the boat docked at Westminster I walked back along the Embankment elated with booze and lust, not wanting to go tamely home to my studio flat. The city was afloat on the river, the floodlit Shell building, Somerset House and on the opposite bank, the County and Royal Festival Halls were moored ships that seemed to rise and fall with the dark waters as they leaned over their own reflections. Other drunks came towards me out of the night but I was too exultant and pissed to care. I was fireproof, more alive than for years. Would she seek me out? Would I ever hear from Helen Chalmers, my charmer, again?
    The bridges were slung across the Thames on ropes of stars. I turned up Beaufort Street, crossed over King’s Road where London was still swinging its Friday night away. Then memory goes blank. I must have gone on up Dovehouse Street over Fulham Road and up into Earl’s Court, got out my keys, unlocked the house door and climbed up to my first-floor flat but in the morning I remembered nothing after I left the river and my vision of the floating city.
    My clothes were hung up neatly. There was an untouched glass of water by the bed.
    Saturday morning. Nothing could happen for two days. How to pass this time? I could call up Joel and we’d go to Heaven. I felt like dancing. I was still high.
    ‘You wouldn’t like it,’ he said when I told him my great idea.
    ‘Why not? I haven’t had a dance since for ever.’
    ‘That’s the point. We’re too old. It’s strictly for kids now.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘I thought the same as you. You know: haven’t been for a long time. Check it out. It took me half an hour queuing to get in. I thought the bouncers on the door gave me a funny look. I left after another half hour. It was embarrassing. Nobody over twenty. Thirty you might as well be on crutches.’
    ‘Where do all the thirty-year-olds go then?’
    ‘Serial partnerships. “Going steady” it used to be called. They stay home or visit each other’s pads and cook what they’ve seen on the tele. There were some really dishy young guys there though and everyone was on something: pot, pills, speed. Who knows? You have to be to rave on like that all night.’
    ‘Where can we go then?’
    ‘The pub and a pizza, and then the pub.’
    It was our usual routine. Only I’d fancied something different.
    Joel is one of the most stable things in my life. We met when he was being cautious over boy-shags-boy encounters at the height of the Aids scare, when people had just found out that what they’d been doing in fun was killing them. For some it was already too late. Joel and I found ourselves going to too many hospitals followed by too many funerals. That was before they found the drugs to put it on hold. Sometimes I didn’t even know the guy but I’d go along so Joel didn’t have to face it alone, wondering what was happening in his own bloodstream and when the trodden-on rake would jump up and smack him in the face, a favourite image of Dad’s for disaster lying in wait.
    What first brought us together was his accent. ‘You come from Gateshead?’ I said.
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘My parents sound just like you.’
    ‘So what happened to you?’
    ‘I was born here. Corrupted from birth.’
    I can do it of course, talk like Mam and Dad, but it’s fake, imitation, acting. Like assuming a foreign language that you know well. Sometimes my parents make the duty trip to seeageing relatives. ‘Gateshead Revisited,’ Dad cracks. I’ve gone with them when I was still at school, seeing the streets where they were born, touring the homes of great-aunts and cousins. Feeling just that: a tourist. Roger always managed to slide out of it somehow with exams or football: a game he couldn’t miss.
    ‘It’s the Sunday dinners I can’t