Last One at the Party Page 9

  It wasn’t a klaxon and it wasn’t other survivors.

  In fact, it wasn’t an alarm at all and, if I had had any sense of self-preservation, I would have stopped as soon as I realised that. But I had clearly learnt nothing since seeing the overpass funeral pyre.

  The noise was the monkey house at London Zoo.

  Or, more specifically, it was a chimpanzee in the monkey house at London Zoo.

  She was holding her dead baby in her arms.

  The baby chimp looked as if it had starved to death.

  All of the monkeys looked as if they were starving to death. They were thin, so very thin, but continuously moving; chattering and squealing, trying to pace the floor of their enclosure but falling, tripping and tumbling over constantly. Some of them made attempts to climb the ropes, but slid back down on sinewy arms. They were ripping bark from tree trunks and branches and gnawing it, spitting out the remnants. It was a macabre modern dance of madness and death.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered to the mother chimp, placing a hand upon the glass.

  The other chimpanzees in the enclosure stopped whatever they were doing and swivelled their heads. They rushed to me with a combined force I was sure would break the glass between us. They threw themselves at the glass, screaming and pummelling their fists, throwing their bodies against it. The noise and ferocity of it was terrifying. Their previous fragility was gone, they were fighting for their lives.

  I backed away, horrified by their need.

  Their efforts doubled. Many of them were bleeding, foaming at the mouth, crazy with hunger, thirst and fear.

  Except for the one with the baby. She hadn’t moved. Didn’t even look up at me. She just continued wailing.

  I turned and fled.

  I moved through the zoo with the screams and cries of hundreds of caged animals ringing in my ears. Every animal was now alert to my presence, and it was as if they knew I was their last chance and final hope of survival. They screamed and roared and snorted and trumpeted and threw themselves against glass and wire and fences and stakes, and it was bedlam.

  I screamed with them, put my hands over my ears, and ran.

  I ran out of the zoo, through Regent’s Park, past the open-air theatre, and out onto the A40. I ran down the middle of the street ignoring the abandoned and crashed cars, past Madame Tussauds, past Baker Street station, past Edgware Road, and then up through Sussex Gardens, where I slowed to a jog, a walk, and then finally collapsed into a sobbing, breathless heap.

  I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t stop crying, I ripped off my coat, and lay back on the pavement, letting the rain thrum down onto my face as I gasped for air and desperately tried to think of something, anything, other than the hundreds of animals I had just condemned to death. What could I have done? Found the keys to the cages? Opened the cages? Let them eat me?

  I probably should have.

  I couldn’t do this any more, staying in the hotel, trying to ignore everything that was going on, trying not to cry, not to remember, not to give up, lie down, never move again.

  ‘Someone please help me, please help me, please help me!’ I screamed into the rain again and again.

  The rain fell and the silence around me continued.

  It was Christmas Day and I needed a miracle.

  At that moment I didn’t care what form it came in.

  So I went to Xavier’s house.

  I have never done drugs.

  It’s not that I have anything against them, but I was pretty sheltered and lacking in friends to offer them to me when I was younger, and then, by the time I was old enough to be offered anything, I was best friends with Xav, and drugs were Xav’s thing; so, by default, my thing was staying sober enough to make sure he didn’t accidentally kill himself or anyone else when he was off his face.

  Xav loved drugs. He bloody loved them.

  He told me that a lot.

  Of course, he didn’t need to tell me; his constant consumption was proof enough of his unending romance with anything chemical.

  I’ve never seen anyone so happy to have their appendix removed.

  ‘Pharmaceuticals are the best!’ he’d cackled as they wheeled him off for surgery.

  Truth is, as with many other things in my life, the main reason I didn’t take drugs was because I was scared. Scared of being out of control, of it making me even more mental, of the drugs reacting badly with the sleeping tablets I often took. I was scared of dying.

  And, more than anything, I was scared I would like it, that it would be the one thing that made me feel better and would then be another crutch in my life without which I would be unable to function.

  But that was before 6DM and this was after, and I think my body was currently incapable of producing serotonin or endorphins or whatever the hell is in charge of making you feel better about life.

  So, I knew the risks, and I knew the dangers, and I didn’t care.

  I needed to escape myself, and I knew Xav was an expert in providing the means to do that.

  Xavier lived in a five-storey mansion between Kensington High Street and the Royal Albert Hall. He had inherited the house from his dad. It was worth a fortune, and cost Xav a fortune to maintain. Luckily Xav’s dad had also left him a massive inheritance, so he could well afford the upkeep.

  Standing on Xav’s doorstep in the rain I had a brief urge to turn and run; to pretend my best friend wasn’t, in all likelihood, rotting away slowly inside the mansion.

  But then, from the next-door property, I heard the unmistakeable wail of a caged animal. The tiny Pomeranian that had so irritated Xav with its constant barking and stinking pea-shaped faeces left regularly at the bottom of his steps. The Pomeranian was dying noisily.

  No. No more misery today.

  I entered the security code into the door lock and went into Xav’s house.

  All was quiet, white and peaceful inside. Xav liked clean lines, pristine floors, and furniture in hues of white and grey. He paid a premium to ensure the cleaners that visited three times a week guaranteed whatever hedonistic adventure had recently taken place in the mansion did not leave any permanent marks.

  I sniffed the air and couldn’t smell any telltale scents of decay: food or flesh. But I still needed to know.

  I found him in his master suite on the fourth floor. A vast room that stretched across the whole house and contained a bed big enough to sleep six with no spooning needed. He was in the middle of the bed with a young, tanned Adonis on each side (twins?), gay porn playing on an endless loop on the 64-inch TV, a bottle of Dom clutched in his death grip, and a sandwich bag full of cocaine on the bedside table. All three of them were naked and draped over each other like some ancient bacchanalian scene.

  For one brief flash I was sad. Xav had been sober and drug-free for over a year, and I knew that things must have been fucking awful for him to do this much coke and have a threesome with the Adonises.

  But if the end of the human race didn’t qualify as ‘fucking awful’, then what did?

  I left them to it, but took the cocaine.

  I’ll be honest, having never taken cocaine before, it took me a while to get the hang of it. With every failed attempt to chop, line up, and snort it (I’d never done it, but had seen Xav do it enough times to know the correct terms at least), I had a very clear mental image of Xav’s horrified face as I wasted clouds of premium cocaine by sneezing (cliché) and putting my still damp sleeves in the little piles of powder.

  Finally, I successfully managed to snort a line up one nostril.

  And then, because it is what I had always seen Xav do, I snorted one up the other.

  It was pretty zingy and good and made everything speed up and made me forget almost instantly about the bad things and made me feel that maybe, just maybe, things would actually be all right and maybe, even though everyone was dead they weren’t really dead because my love for them lived on and their love for me lived on too and as long as I was still loved then everything would be someh
ow be okay and wow, that’s really deep and powerful thinking and I wish I had someone to tell it to in fact maybe if I had done this before I could have done it with Xav and I could have told him that I think I quite liked it and we could have gone dancing or to a party as I had lots of parties before where I hadn’t done this and I can see why it would be good to have this at a party and how it might have been good to do it at a party with James because maybe we could have talked about things, like really talked about things and made things better or we could just have danced, yes, dancing would be good on this, maybe I should do some dancing or perhaps I should line some more up because I am not sure how often I should take it or maybe I should do some fun stuff first because it is Christmas Day, or at least I think it is still Christmas Day, it is getting pretty dark so yes, fun stuff and more coke or maybe more coke before fun stuff let me just think …

  This went on for quite a while.

  Finally, I decided it was time to go dancing. Luckily, I didn’t have to go far.

  Xav’s house is essentially a five-storey adult playhouse. As well as his fourth-floor master suite there is a basement cinema and disco, a chef-quality kitchen (which he never used, but which did contain his most prized kitchen possession – a toasted sandwich maker), a huge sitting room complete with open fire and 80-inch plasma smart TV, two floors of guest bedrooms and bathrooms, and a roof terrace that had to be seen to be believed.

  Dancing would make me feel better. It always did.

  I’ve always loved to dance; twirling around with my mum in our kitchen when I was little. Old dance steps and routines that she had done when she was young or had learnt from the hundreds of musicals she watched. Then I graduated to school discos, where my dancing became a more self-conscious bopping from side to side than real movement. Then to clubs and parties with Xav where we would throw crazy shapes and moves safe in the knowledge that all the other dancers were too off their faces to care what we were doing. And then finally to nightclubs, where I danced with sophisticated women, wiggled my hips and learnt my movements could, and would, attract appreciative glances and comments.

  I love to dance, but it’s not the kind of thing you do on your own. I’ve always liked to have someone with me, someone else in the spotlight so that I don’t feel people staring, someone who will take my hand and lead me if I forget my moves, someone to share the joy with.

  But that was my old world.

  This is the new world, and if I want to dance I am just going to have to learn how to do it by myself.

  So I danced, alone.

  James didn’t like to dance.

  That was the first surprising thing I found out about him. He’d sort of shuffle about at the side of the dance floor if forced, but otherwise preferred to stay at the bar. In fact, he wasn’t actually that keen on music, he preferred Talk Sport. Also, the ginger flecks that I thought the sun had streaked into his hair were actually provided by Kirsty at Vidal Sassoon using bleach once a month, and the easy way he initiated conversation and seemed really interested in whatever you had to say was just a salesman technique he used to draw people in.

  These are the sort of things you don’t learn until after you have moved in with someone, especially when you make the decision to live together as quickly as we did.

  But at the time I couldn’t have cared less if things weren’t quite as I thought; if James wasn’t quite as I thought.

  I had been scared and empty and directionless and now I was content and filled with love and had someone who was my map to future happiness.

  It all seemed perfect; the meet-cute, the kiss, the moving in three months later to a flat where the only furniture we had was two garden chairs, a mattress, and the washing machine he had salvaged from his previous relationship. Spending weekends naked, eating heated-up pizza because we couldn’t bear to leave the flat, me making him sandwiches for work and leaving love notes in the Tupperware, him surprising me at the station when I came back from assignments, three-hour baths, day-long drinking sessions, the time we got a whole club evacuated after we fell through the fire exit while snogging like teenagers.

  I was happy. Really, really happy. I felt safe and calm and my heart was so full there was no time or room for worry or panic or thinking about my future.

  Besides, it wasn’t just my future any more. It was our future.

  Xav’s house was perfectly designed for me to live out my dancing dreams, he had a complete disco set-up, with decks and lighting system in his basement. He did some low-level DJing in his early twenties but was never reliable enough to make a proper living at it. So, when he ‘retired’, he moved his entire rig into his basement and set up his own mini club.

  One of the reasons he failed as a DJ was because he couldn’t resist dancing to his own records, so he’d never be back on the decks in time to mix in the next track. So, instead, he started to put together mixes on his Mac to play through the sound system.

  He had mixes for everything: 60s, 70s, 90s, 00s (he refused to do 80s as he thought all music invented then was awful – we had many, many arguments about that). Disco, rap, funk, hip-hop, grunge, emo, reggae, chill-out, gabba, soul, Northern soul, grime, even classical.

  I fired up his Mac, whizzed through his collections (I was doing everything so fast!) and chose an early 2000 dance mix.

  I danced, and occasionally snorted more coke, throughout the mix’s three-hour duration.

  I danced on my own in an empty disco, with three dead men upstairs and thousands more rotting on the doorstep. The combination of the music, the sound system, the lights (and, of course, the drugs) meant that those 180 minutes were probably the last time I ever completely forgot where I was and what had happened.

  I vaguely remember wondering if this was also the last time I would ever be completely happy.

  ‘OF COURSE NOT!!’ my drug-addled mind yelled at me. ‘LOOK HOW MUCH FUN YOU ARE HAVING! THIS IS HOW LIFE WILL BE FROM NOW ON.’

  After three hours of dancing I was exhausted, sweaty, and dying of thirst. I went to the kitchen and stuck my mouth under the cold tap, funnelling icy water straight into it. And then, because I now had a whole new rock ’n’ roll persona, I grabbed a bottle of Dom Perignon from the booze fridge. I thought it was what the new me would probably drink in a hot tub.

  Xav’s hot tub is on his roof terrace: a lush, year-round jungle of foliage, with a bar, huge BBQ, sound system, comfy seating area, and hammocks hung from the leafy green ceiling. It really pissed his neighbours off mainly, I think, because Xav never invited them over to hang out there. It was one of my favourite places in the world.

  It was freezing on the roof terrace, and the previous drizzle had turned to light flakes of snow drifting down from the black night sky. The hot tub was bubbling nicely, kept at an enticingly constant temperature of 100.5°F by Xav’s extortionate electricity bill that he would now never have to pay again. I set a seven-hour chill mix on the sound system, put a couple of towels into the warming cupboard (also filled with huge fake fur blankets for snuggling), opened the bottle of champagne, stripped naked, and jumped in the tub.

  I shuddered blissfully as the warm water enveloped me, and uttered a sigh of pure happiness. I chugged from the bottle of Dom and slipped back to bob on the surface of the tub. My body was exhausted after my three-hour dance session, my mind was blank after the administration of so much cocaine, and my emotions were dull from my horrific visit to the zoo. I was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted, and it felt great.

  I lay in the bubbles, swigged from my bottle, stared up at the stars, and watched the snowflakes swirl around my head as the warm breeze from the tub lifted them back up to the sky.

  By the time the bottle was finished, my racing heart had slowed to a steady pace, but my entire body was still buzzing with energy and my mind was both exhausted and wide awake. This wasn’t good. I wanted to sleep. Then I remembered that Xav had prepared for all eventualities. I jumped out of the tub, wrapped myself in the now-warm
towels, and went down to his bathroom. There were boxes of all kinds of pharmaceuticals – codeine, morphine, Tramadol, random yellow and red pills with no name, sleeping tablets, stuff for constipation and diarrhoea – a fully stocked mini chemist. I gulped down two sleeping tablets and went back onto the roof.

  I wrapped myself in a couple of fur blankets and got into the closest hammock, setting myself to a gentle rock. As the sun slowly started to creep up over the buildings and the snowflakes danced happily around my head, I drifted off into a blissful, dreamless sleep.

  Boxing Day

  Hours later, when the sun was a dull ball high in the cloudy sky and my dreams were long forgotten, I peeled one of my eyelids open and wondered what fresh hell I had woken up in.

  My head pounded, my body ached, my tongue was so dry I had to pry it off the roof of my mouth, and there was a disgusting metallic taste at the back of my throat.

  I rolled (okay, fell) out of the hammock and rifled through the random boxes of meds I had brought up with me the night before and chucked on the floor.

  I grabbed two of the only ones I really recognised (Tramadol), wrapped myself in dry furs, crawled to the bar to grab a can of Coke, took the tablets, and then climbed back into the hammock and waited for them to have some kind of effect.

  It didn’t take long.

  Whether it was my already drug-addled system or the fact I was unused to narcotics, within fifteen minutes I was pain free, smiling gently, lying on my back and gazing beatifically at the sludge-like drizzle that was once more falling from the sky. The can of Coke was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.

  Effects of the Tramadol were arriving in rhythmic waves. If I tried to sit up, I felt a rush of unbalancing giddiness, so I stayed happily rocking in the hammock.

  My mind couldn’t hold a solid thought for more than a few moments and my body was rushing with waves of warm pleasure and it was all very, very enjoyable.

  After about an hour, things had calmed enough for me to roll slowly from my hammock and warm up in Xav’s vast rainforest shower. I was still light-headed and smiling, so crept hand-over-hand down the stairs and raided Xav’s spare wardrobe for clothes. Xav was reed thin, so none of his clothes would have got past my thighs; but luckily he kept a wardrobe full of outfits for those encounters that left his conquests with dirty, ripped or sometimes missing clothing items. I found some massive sweatpants and a flannel shirt, and moved with exaggerated precision down the stairs again to raid Xav’s kitchen for anything edible. As always, his fridge was empty, his freezer had nothing but ice cubes in, and his cupboards held only booze, mixers, maraschino cherries and protein bars, all of which I had for breakfast.