Tell Me I'm Worthless(5)

I get off the bus at about twenty to ten, find a bench at the end of the same street the party’s on, and wait until it seems appropriate for me to arrive. The hosts don’t know me, only Jon and Sasha, and Leon, their twink trans guy coke addict friend, know who I am. I can’t turn up and say that they invited me if they aren’t there yet, the social embarrassment would stick in my gut. In my coat pocket, there’s a packet of Gold Leaf tobacco, so I roll a cigarette, thinking about the smoking boy on the bus, hoping he didn’t also smoke Gold Leaf. I finish smoking, stuff the yellow filter in between the wooden planks that make up the bench, and roll another. By the time that’s done, I retch, dryly, until the feeling of nausea in my throat from smoking two cigarettes in a row goes away, and I stand up, getting balance. The party isn’t far from here. It’s five to ten at night and I can’t see the moon or the stars, but I know they’re there beyond the smog and the light pollution.

I have the number of the house, but I won’t need it – all the houses on the street are quiet, many of them empty, holiday rentals in the off-season. This is close to the sea, after all. But one of the houses is alive and as I get closer, I can feel bass thumping through the pavement. The blinds are down in the windows, but I can see silhouettes of people pressed close through them, pink light shining out. It looks busy, and loud. It’s not too late for me to go. I’m cold, I’ve had some wine. I could just go home. Maybe I could get some sleep. The singer might not appear tonight. Just as I’ve decided to turn back, get the bus all the way home, I hear a voice shout “Hey, Alice!”. Jon is walking towards me, Sasha and Leon close in tow. Sasha’s white face peers through a bundle of fake fur, blue eyeliner sharp and pointed nearly to her brows. She tried to teach me how to do that once, but I shook too much. Jon looks like he has rich parents, and he does, richer than mine, one’s a lawyer I think and the other has a senior position at the Guardian. He doesn’t sound rich though, there’s an affected edge to his voice, Ts dropped as often as he can. Until he gets really drunk, or really high, or both. Then that clipped BBC English comes out swinging. He’s not there yet though.

“Hey, Alice, how’re ya?”

It seems mocking, but I can’t tell who it’s meant to be mocking.

“I’m okay,” I say.

“Been busy?”

I laugh. “Good one, Jon. You?”

He shrugs. “Been working a lot.”

Yeah, right…

Sasha comes to me and we hug. The fake fur coat she’s wearing is unbelievably soft, I want to just settle into it and sleep for an eternity, but then she breaks the embrace.

“You look pretty!” she says, really meaning it.

“Got any gear?” asks Leon.

“Jesus, that was quick. You didn’t even say hello.”

“Nah,” he says. “You need to have drugs on you to get into the party.”

“Ah, shit, really?” I have a little Ziploc bag of pills back in my makeup box at the flat, but I thought I wouldn’t be doing anything tonight. Shit.

“It’s okay,” says Jon, “I’ve got like, two extra bags of MD and a bag of Ket that I don’t need.” I hesitate. “You don’t have to use, just give it back to me once we’re in, y’know.”

He holds three bags of identical white powder out to me in the palm of his hand, and I take one at random, not knowing if it’s MD or Ket and not caring. He must have already given some to Sasha, and Leon is probably always carrying anyway. Cops never stop him. He’s small, they mistake him for a white girl, they don’t care, why would they? We exchange curt nods, the sort of acknowledgement you do to one another when you are the only trans people in a situation. Maybe there’ll be more of us at the party, I don’t know the crowd, but probably not.

Jon leads us up the stairs to the house’s front door. It’s a big, ugly townhouse. It hides how old it is, it hides its secrets well. When the door opens, the man standing there says something to Jon that I can’t hear because suddenly the music and the voices from inside are deafening. But Jon holds up one of his white bags, and the host nods. I do the same. The man at the door is only a little older than me. He must live here. He looks at me, looks at my body, looks at the white powder in the bag in my hand, then nods and smiles. I step through the door, hoping that the noise will get less bad once it surrounds me. It doesn’t.

I’m not a party person much now. They used to be my thing, especially over clubs. That’s definitely still true, but I also find them disorienting. They feel dangerous. All these people I don’t know packed into one space, thick with bodies. If a crowd turns on you, where can you go? I push through the hot sweaty treacle of the air, sliding between people I don’t know, following Jon, who seems to be walking with purpose. I turn around. Sasha has taken off her fur coat. Otherwise she’d be boiling to death already. I don’t know the music that’s playing, it’s asynchronous, jarring electronic noises that throw themselves at the walls with the force of a person running. The people I push past look at me like I’m an invasive species.

Jon has found the coat room, which is just somebody’s bedroom with coats and bags piled up on the bed and on the shelves chaotically. I put my coat under the bed, which is probably not where someone wanting to steal things would look. My jeans have pockets anyway, for my phone and my tobacco and keys. We head back out into the party and find a space to dance in one of the larger rooms with a speaker. Leon is already high, he can’t talk much. I try to dance with him, and he offers me poppers. I accept. Take a deep breath of liquid from the little bottle he holds under my nose. Throw my head back, stumble a little, put my hand against someone I don’t know for balance. Feel my brain floating for a couple of seconds, suspended in the air. My asshole opening. Like a flower of evil from Baudelaire. And then my awareness comes crashing back down. Fuck, I think, I want drugs. I didn’t give the bag back to Jon, maybe he won’t even know. I huddle close to Leon, tell him to be still for a moment while I snort crystalline powder off of the end of the key to my flat, fuck, fuck, fuck I missed this, I remember this, I used to do this with Ila. Leon looks at me like I said something horrible and I realised I’d just said that out loud. “I used to do this with Ila.”