Free Noughties by Ben Masters Page B

the rookies of the twenty-first; old and young, corrupt and innocent, all at once. Innocence didn’t last long, mind. It only took a year, one worldwide NY day, for the last century’s hangover to rekindle into more drunken abuse. Hair of the dog: reckless advice. And so now we’ll spend the entirety of this century—our one stab at a clean slate—running away, Atlassing burden on our backs. But as we well know, there’s no such thing as a clean slate: dates and numbers don’t change a thing, don’t help us forget or remedy. They couldn’t even bring the Internet crashing to its knees like they threatened to.
    7—2—1—8. I enter my PIN at the bar. A line of Jägerbombs for all: my treat. The shots plunge into the long trail of energy drinks—those festering pits of liquid marzipan—a chain of splashing dominoes. We’re going nuclear.
    Another toilet. Not a toilet in a pub. A toilet in a club.
    A toilet in a club, three years ago, on my very first night at Oxford.
    “Freshen up.”
    It was Freshers Week, and I was in a club called Filth. I was a fresher in a toilet in a club called Filth. Not a toilet in a pub, but a toilet in a club, a club called Filth … and I was a fresher.
    “You gots to freshen up. Freshen up for the pussy.”
    These words were being said—shouted, chanted, sung, rapped—by a Nigerian toilet attendant (he attends a toilet in a club called Filth, not a toilet in a pub or anywhere else, but a toilet in a club, and that club is called Filth). They are standardized lines, to be heard verbatim in every two-bit nightclub across the country (which begs the question: is there a training manual for this gig? In fact, these crude one-liners make me nostalgic, reminding me of those formative, underage nights out in Wellingborough, sneaking past unwitting bouncers with our elaborate facial-hair ruses and comically deepened voices. “Nostalgia,” from the Greek
nostos
, meaning a return home, like the return of Odysseus and the other Greek heroes of the Trojan War … and like me tomorrow when my parents collect me and take me back …), but on this particular occasion they were being said—shouted, chanted, sung, rapped—in a very particular club, and that club was called Filth.
    “No spray, no lay.”
    He loitered at the sinks with his array of cheap designer scents, rolls of tissue, a bowl of chewing gum and lollipops, and a saucer for tips.
    “No splash, no gash.”
    (If only I was making this stuff up! But this is no jock hysteria, no vulgar lashings of lad loquacity. This is about as George-Eliot-George-Gissing-naturalistic, Capote-Wolfe-Hunter-new-journalistic as it gets up in here … up here inmy fuddled muddled head, where it’s nothing but a huddle of puddles of beer and shot memory.)
    He wanted to wash our hands for us. I and my fellow cock artists stood staring ahead at the wall while he shouted his idle threats. It’s a piss-take of a sales pitch.
    “No splash, no gash, my friend.”
    The words were so unfortunate, so tragic, poking their elbows and digging their fists as they struggled from his barely anglicized throat.
    “No tissue, no issue.”
    He was suggesting that if I didn’t use his tissues to dry my hands (at a price, of course) I would be free from sexual escapade; sexually unfortuitous; coitally inauspicious. We could go one step further, noting the polysemy of “issue,” and argue that he was threatening me with infertility … which is a bit harsh, mate … I just wanted to take a leak. But he didn’t mean this. He meant no splash, no gash.
    The music boomed from outside. It was brutal. It was violent. It was hard to concentrate.
    “You touch it, you wash it.”
    This one is trickier than his other riffs—more experimental in technique, the meaning more opaque. It doesn’t have the easy rhyme or associative imagery of “no splash, no gash,” or the transparent cause and effect of “no tissue, no issue.” For a start, the logic is