I felt myself blanch, even though Ling took the vicious non sequitur as a joke. Her laugh was the warm, spontaneous kind that comes of genuine amusement rather than the awkward, pitiful one of someone who’s just heard an awkward truth spoken as jest.
‘Fuck off!’ I mouthed at Mac when Ling’s back was turned. He held up his palms in an apology that was only partly feigned; even he could tell he’d gone too far. I turned my back on him, shaking at the near miss. Mac knew, was the only one who knew, that Laura was the only girl I’d slept with. The millstone of my twenty-one years of virginity had finally been unhooked from my neck that clumsy night in his freezing flat. It nearly makes me laugh, now, to think that once this was my deepest, darkest secret. I lie awake at night and long to be a 21-year-old virgin. He never missed a chance to tease me about it – ‘Trust you to settle down with the first girl who shows you her tits’ – but always in private; it was more amusing to him to dangle the secret over my head than to tell it, and spend the bullet. This was the closest he’d come to blurting it, and in front of Ling, too. I wanted to belt him. But rather than say anything that might lead us further down this path, I settled for silence and an evil stare that bounced off him like a broken satellite receiver; he’d already moved on to the next thing.
‘If we’re not going to make any money, we could at least liven things up,’ he said. His hand was already in his pocket, the decision made. My spirits sank as he pulled a strip of perforated paper out of his pocket, marked with the suits of cards: diamonds, spades, hearts and clubs. He tore off a little paper square and placed it on Ling’s tongue.
‘No thanks,’ I said, when he offered me one, a doll’s postage stamp, the size of his fingertip, marked with a diamond. I would never have touched LSD with a bargepole. I’d witnessed some bad trips over the years and if that’s what they look like from the outside, I was fucked if I wanted to experience one from the inside.
‘You are such an old fart.’
‘If you say so.’ Mac thought anyone who spent more than twenty-four hours sober or straight was a prude. If this had once been true of me, it had all changed since meeting Laura. Splitting an E with her brought us even closer; it let us crawl around inside each other’s minds as easily as we did over each other’s bodies. The problem wasn’t the drugs but Mac. There was no shared experience to chase with him. Whatever the stimulant, it was always his trip, and he only wanted others along for the ride to justify his own excess.
He rolled his eyes. ‘Ok, you can take one for the team,’ he said, his tone changing completely. ‘I’ll make us all another tea.’
‘Not for me,’ I said, but he dropped a bag into a mug anyway with a smile so sweet that my suspicions were immediately roused. He’s going to spike my drink, I thought. I toyed with the idea of accepting it, then throwing it back in his eyes. I checked my watch; I had about twenty-four hours until Laura arrived.
‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘I can man the stall on my own. You go and have your fun.’
I saw Mac’s hand hover over the mug like a poisoner in an Agatha Christie film. Then he put the tab back in his pocket.
‘Thanks, bro.’
I watched them go, willing him to have a horrific trip. I hoped that he saw Ling’s face melt so that her skull shone through.
There was enough work to make the time pass quickly. The cold sun set and the music was turned up, the boom-boom of the bass plucking at my diaphragm. I sympathy-bought an enchilada from Burrito Jon and ate it listening to the shipping forecast on Radio 4 and brooding interchangeably about the weather, my brother, and my pathetic sexual history.
All eclipses matter but this one seemed more important to me than any before. I wanted Laura to experience the full wonder of the phenomenon. She had shown me so much; this was my chance to let her into my world, and it had to be perfect.
At midnight, all the stages closed and the campfires began. At one, as I was thinking about winding down, our greasy friend from earlier came staggering towards the stall. Bloodshot eyeballs framed microdot pupils.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m shutting up shop . . . mate.’
We didn’t grow up in the kind of house where you call people mate, and I’ve never been able to carry it off.
‘Do us a tea,’ ordered the crusty. ‘Builders, nothing wanky.’ He recognised in me the failings that so frustrated Mac; my obedience only confirmed them. I handed him the mug. A bowl of (fashionable, brown, irregular) sugar lumps sat on the counter. He stuck his whole filthy fist in there and ate a handful.
‘Please don’t do that,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to throw them away.’ He laughed, his teeth the same colour as the brown sugar.
‘Cheers,’ he said, and walked off, taking the yellow mug with him, which I gave up for lost, along with the bowl of sugar I tipped into the bin and the pound I ought to have charged him. ‘Prick!’ he shouted over his shoulder, by way of a farewell.
Feeling about an inch tall, I mixed boiling water from the urn with cold water from the tap into the washing-up bowl to clean the mugs, and was five minutes into the chore when I realised someone was watching me.
‘Is this yours?’ A yellow mug hovered at chest height; behind it stood a girl with black curly hair, white skin and small, dark features pinched tightly in the middle of a heart-shaped face. ‘Some minging old crusty just threw it across the field. Hit me in the leg. I don’t know why he’s being such a knob. Something to do with the eclipse. Confluence of heavenly bodies, probably. Mercury’s in retrograde. Or ley lines.’
‘No, I think it’s that there’s some really strong acid on site,’ I said. She laughed, steam curling from her mouth, and handed me the mug. I dipped it into the sudsy water.
‘I’ll have a cup of chai, please. No sugar but loads of milk.’