Cupid draw back your bow

Today's post is gonna be huge, because something HUGE happened to me last night.

I went to a birthday party, at this bloke Jed's house in Finsbury Park. I went with Tom and Spanish John. (I've just about forgiven him for blabbling to Zosia about my liaison with Tallulah).

Anyway, the party was pretty dull and I was about to leave when an extraordinarily pretty girl appeared out of nowhere.

She was young, maybe sixteen, seventeen, I guessed.

A river’s rush of long dark straggly gypsy hair tumbled down her back. I watched, transfixed.

It was hard to look away.

After a bit, she turned and caught me staring with startling, high-voltage blues eyes. She smiled beatifically back at me.

I half-smiled back, the old face burning so intensely it could have set the carpet alight.

The girl began swaying gently about to the music, fully aware that I was watching her. I swigged my beer, observing her body move in lithe, liquid rhythm to the beat. Quite possibly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, more so when she turned and flashed me another smoldering look.

I swear, my ticker jumped right out of its groove.

Before I could compose myself, the girl came over and introduced herself. She was Amber, she said, Jed’s girlfriend’s cousin.

We got chatting. Amber explained how she was just crashing at the house for a few months. In October, she was planning to go university, to study art.

She wanted to know what I did. I told her I played in a band. Amber said she’d like to play in a band too, but she couldn’t be arsed to learn an instrument.

She had a question for me. When I played songs live, how did I remember all the chords?

I explained I had a memory like an elephant, Indian not African.

“You’ve got a funny accent. Where’re you from?” quizzed I.

“Funny accent?” she replied, head to one side.

“Yeah, sort of country bumpkinish mixed with, um, something strange. I don’t mean it in a bad way. It’s quite appealing.”

“Well, I’m half-Italian. I was born in a small town just outside Verona, but brought up in Suffolk.”

“Half-Italian, eh?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I suppose that explains the smouldering dark looks and the, um, tache.”

Long silence.

“So, um, whereabouts in Suffolk did you say you grew up?”

“A small town, you won’t have heard of it.”

“I might’ve done.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Try me. I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the small towns in Great Britain.”

“Okay. It’s a place called Swefling. Very small town. Lots of windmills. I know you haven’t have heard of it so don’t pretend you have.”

“Swefling... Swefling... Swefling. Hmn, sounds more like the gunk you’d find under a tramp’s foreskin that a place name.”

“Wow, you’re a real charmer.”

Long silence.

“It’s funny,” she began again wistfully. “I was dreaming this morning just before I woke up, but the dream was so vivid I actually convinced myself I was

already awake. And I got up, yeah? And I looked back and I could see my own body, like, still there in the bed, all sweaty and shaking, you know, like how junkies get in a heroin coma?”

Amber stared down at the floor for a while. I just marvelled at her, wondering who the hell she was, which alien planet she’d come down from.

Then she asked me right out if I had a girlfriend. After an uncertain pause, he told her no, I’d split up with my last one a while ago.

“What was her name?”

I found myself discounting my relationship with Zosia entirely and saying Mimi.

“Why did you split up?”

Ooh, she was a nosey so and so this one, but I still answered. “Basically, she struggled with the concept of monogamy.”

“She cheated on you?”

“Yep.”

“Just the once?”

“Well, once was enough for me. She ran off with her yoga instructor.”

“And you really loved her?”

I thought before answering. “Bit of a sore subject so can we change it, please?””

Amber observed me for a bit with those blinding eyes of hers.

“You’re still fucked up about her, aren’t you?”

I didn’t answer, confirming her suspicions.

She dragged me away to her temporary bedroom up on the top floor to show me some collages she’d recently made. She thought they might lighten my mood.

Her temporary bedroom was in the loft and resembled a war zone. Piles of books, art supplies, CDs, clothes (including some positively colourful and flimsy underwear) were strewn about everywhere. Drawings of anorexic girls with huge eyes on large coffee stained sketchpads, poems scrawled in deranged handwriting on scraps of paper haphazardly pinned to the walls. She brought out a wrap. Asked if me if he fancied a toot.

“Does the Pope shit on a bear in the woods…?”

Amber chopped out some lines on a wooden dressing table and handed me a rolled up tenner. I bent down and hovered up a few snorks. The fine white powder hit the inside of my brain like tiny crystal buckshot from a twelve bore.

Amber polished off the rest.

The collage she wanted to show me hung on the wall over an unmade cherry-wood sleigh bed covered in a mountain of pillows. She climbed aboard with her boots still on and insisted I do the same. She wanted me to stand next to her and study the collage up close.

I reluctantly did as I was told.

The collage featured a band she was into called The Dawlish Fungus Infection and was made up of dozens of photographs that she’d taken of the band member’s ugly faces mixed with images of lions, show girls, birds of paradise, a mule, some eye wateringly explicit gay porn, various jumbled images that she seemed to want me to ‘understand’ in all their symbolic complexity.

“I don’t like being judged and I don’t like defining things by placing them in categories or putting labels on them,” she explained. “But, if you were to ask me, I’d say my work is post-modernist retro-futuristic.”

“But isn’t that just a contradiction in terms?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, retro-futuristic. It’s a contradiction in terms.”

“…why?”

“...Because it is.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe it is. But then maybe that’s the point, you know? Art has no rules. Maybe my work is just that, a contradiction in terms.”

She drifted away mentally for a second or two.

As the coke kicked in, Amber became more animated, telling me about the many diverse and emotionally torturous elements that had made up her life, which, she explained, were clearly manifested in her work.

I nodded and agreed to everything she said, but really had no idea what the fuck I was nodding and agreeing to.

As she spoke seemingly without pause for breath, she began to bob up and down on the bed like a little girl on a trampoline, slowly at first, but then with increasing gusto.

She encouraged me to join in.

I worried the bed might collapse under our combined weight. And I felt foolish. I stepped down off the bed.

Amber kept on bouncing enthusiastically for a while longer. I was unable to look at anything but her magnificently pert bobbing tits.

She claimed the bed was probably one of the strongest in the world. It had been made in Norway. She kept right on bouncing. I asked her to stop and chill out for a bit, she was making me edgy.

Amber's final bounce was so big, she flew off the bed and crash-landed on a pile of her stuff over by the far side of the room.

I was sure she’d hurt herself and went to her, but she just lay crumpled up on the floor laughing hysterically.

I helped her to her feet genuinely concerned she’d done herself some harm.

When Amber stopped laughing, we sat together on the edge of her bed. She suggested we smoke a joint to take the edge of the gathering cocaine frenzy.

She put on a CD of some very strange plinky-plonky avant-garde electronic music (The Dawlish Fungus Infection) and located a pre-prepared joint from a tin box high on her shelf.

She sparked up. Within minutes she was fearfully ragged, twisting three different strands of long dark hair round and round her delicate fingers, toking on the joint, talking more absolute shite, a rambling semi-coherent stream of conscious pouring from her sensuously pouty mouth.

I listened as she drew me further into her strange little world.

“I had a bad nightmare last night,” she said.

“Yeah? Was that before or after the one about being in a heroin coma?”

“Before. I was high on peyote playing a nose flute in Leicester Square. And there were all these freaked out little animals tugging at my sleeves complaining at the noise. There was a midget of Peruvian extraction who juggled piping hot cups of tea while I played. Most disturbing.”

“Too much cheese before bedtime, me thinks.”

“Well, don’t think so. I’m allergic to cheese.

“Are you?”

“Um...” Amber giggled to herself. “Actually, I don’t know why I just said that. I’m not allergic to cheese at all.”

“You just made up a cheese allergy?”

“Hmn.”

“Why would you make up a cheese allergy?”

“Not sure. To sound more interesting?”

“And having an allergy to cheese is interesting?”

“Probably not.”

I gazed at her. “I don’t think you don’t need to lie to make yourself more interesting. You’re interesting enough anyway.”

“Really? It’s my subconscious mind. Uncharted territory.”

She took a bang on the joint. “Normally, once I’ve gone to sleep at night, I find it impossible to wake up again the next day before it gets dark.”

A brief pause while we both reflected on that statement.

“Remember that hurricane in Mexico a couple of years ago?”

I didn’t, but nodded and shrugged at the same time anyway, a difficult manoeuvre under the circumstances.

“Well, I was staying at this hotel right near the beach in Cancún when it came ashore and a metal dustbin got blown clean through my bedroom window when I was sleeping. But did it wake me up?”

A long pause while I waited for an answer that didn’t come. “Dunno. Did it?”

“Yep.”

I watched Amber's lips as she placed the business end of the doobie in her mouth for a another long suck and lost myself in thought for a mo’ imagining the joint was the business end of my Long John Silver being tugged on instead.

“I was there on holiday my sister. We met this bizarre half-Polish half-German guy,” Amber continued, breaking my reverie. “God knows why we hung out with him. He was insane. He stuck to us like poo to porcelain for the whole holiday. He was bisexual. Had all these pretty Mexican boys and girls running around everywhere. I remember him explaining it to me once. ‘Mein dear zveet Tallulah, vun hole iz pretty much ze same az any uzzer’. Urgh. Horrible. There was this farm thing near the beach with a bunch of goats grazing in it? He used to stand at the fence staring at them, grunting with desire. He was so out there, you know?”

She stared wistfully up at the ceiling, the tips of her joint-free hand brushing the exposed skin above her breasts by her tattoo. She took another bang on the joint, drifted off in to space.

I decided to stick my neck out, pay her a direct compliment to let her know I fancied her. I asked if, you know, apart from being incredibly beautiful and charmingly insane, was there anything else I should know about her?

Amber frowned, thinking about it.

“Okay,” she began. “Well, I have trouble acting normal when I’m nervous. I have a theory that insects are really aliens that some how settled on Earth millions of years ago and are steadily building their empire until they can take over the world.”

“Okay...”

“I know it's not a very good theory, but it's the only one I’ve got. Oh and I once got recorded on a video entry phone outside a very exclusive restaurant doing a bizarre jig kneeling on my shoes trying to look like a dwarf whilst playing a pretend didgeridoo fashioned from the centre of a toilet roll.” She cringed. “And I only sleep with blokes who can’t fit their stiff willies through the middle of a toilet roll.”

Apart from all that, she assured me, there wasn’t much else to tell.

I considered the matter of the stiff willy toilet roll test. Would I pass a test like that? I knew not, but resolved to find out as soon as possible.

“It’s good shit, isn’t it?” Amber said, nodding at the joint.

“Very.”

“It’s Mexican. I get it from this amazingly black dude down Green Lanes.”

“What, Goliath?”

“Yeah, he is. Fucking huge.”

“That’s the same guy I buy my shit off.”

Amber didn’t respond. She drifted off in thought for a moment. “I love it when I’m stoned. Don’t you?”

“Hmn.”

“Everything seems, I don’t know, so much more real, you know? Art, music, films, sex...”

She stretched out lying on the bed staring at the ceiling and sighed deeply. A few moments of silence passed between us before Amber shifted closer and found my back with the tips her fingers just above the belt.

“We can fuck if you want to, you know.”

I coughed. “You’re not shy, are you?”

“Nope.”

“How old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Well, I’d hazard a guess, but my guessing powers are not what they once were. Last week I took a guess at the outcome of a fight between a monkey and another monkey, and I guessed the wrong monkey.”

“Well, I’m old enough.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Looks can be deceptive, everybody knows that.”

She came closer, slipping her hands further round my waist and up inside my t-shirt, her fingers creeping, crawling, scratching upwards towards my chest.

“Anyway,” she whispered. “How old are you?”

“Ah, you don’t want to know.”

“I do.”

“Thirty and counting.”

“That’s not old.”

“Well, it feels old.”

Amber said something about age being only a state of mind.

“Depends which state of mind you’re in,” I replied.

She stopped fiddling with me.

“Listen, you wanna fuck or not?”

It was a direct question and one that I struggled to find an immediate answer to. So in lieu of an answer and with a sly twinkle in her electric blue eyes, Amber moved her hands down over my stomach to undo the belt and buttons on my trooze. Her fingers delved down through the fly, scrabbling about inside my boxers looking for a way in.

They found my old chap, generating a sharp intake of breath and a few gently whispered swear words.

We kissed for the first time. It was like throwing a match into a pool of petrol and in the subsequent white heat of lust, Tallulah tore desperately at my clothes, a fire blazing in her cocaine crystal blue eyes.

I think I'm in love.