III

Episode Three

White Cats

It was half twelve in the afternoon when I finally got out of bed. I headed into the kitchen to find myself some sort of breakfast when I heard the muffled bass of ominous, sluggish music leaking in from out of Murder’s room – screaming, nightmarish industrial music. I looked over to see a sign taped to the door which read, in Murder’s big, childish handwriting, “divination in progress – do not disturb”. My heart sank. I quickly made some cereal, slunk back into my room and prepared to spend the rest of my day off doing absolutely nothing by myself. I wasn’t someone who enjoyed their own company all that much. There was only so much time I could spend alone before I started tearing my hair out. Me and myself didn’t get on very well.

It was one of those days where a clingfilm of sadness wrapped around my brain. Every sensation was dulled. Every feeling turned softly into a bitter ache. I finally had a day where I was free to do whatever I liked, anything I could think of, for the world was at my very fingertips. But there was nothing I wanted to do. I lay in bed staring at the walls for about an hour, sloshing around the sewage in my head, letting it drop from one pointless thought to another pointless thought, endlessly, until finally I landed on the decision that I should get out of bed and do something before I spent my entire day off soaking in misery.

I started by watching a few episodes of Otranto High, this American fantasy show I’d been watching, the kind with the moody female protagonist thrown into some crazy supernatural situation populated by square-chinned undead romantic interests. I guess the whole thing was a remnant of the time when mixing gothic mythology with modern teenagers was at its most fashionable. I didn’t want to call it a guilty pleasure, since I realised a long time ago that the concept of guilty pleasures is steeped in divisive social bullshit, but at the same time I wasn’t rushing to tell everyone about it. It was pretty terrible. But there was something I liked about its stupidity and how removed it was from reality. There was an innocent enjoyment to be found in those sorts of things.

Not today, though. The episodes ran past and none of it soaked in. What was happening on the screen felt so fake and unimportant. I couldn’t pay attention. The deafening roar of unease inside my head drowned out everything else. I tried hard to immerse myself in something. I slogged through the internet for a few hours, rotating through the same websites again and again. I painted my nails. I drew a picture of a mountain range that looked like shit. I had a long sit in the shower to try and wash myself into a state of mental clarity. Eventually I gave up and crawled back into bed to stare at the brown patch in the ceiling for a little while longer. The ceiling stared back.

At some point during the malaise I heard the front door open. Abby was back from work. I listened to her clunk around the kitchen for a few minutes before I decided to leap out of bed and stroll out into the living room.

‘Hey,’ I said with artificial cheeriness.

‘Hey.’

‘You just got back?’

‘Yeah.’

Abby was piling a bunch of food out of her giant bag. Smoked garlic, feta cheese, three types of lettuce, pork sausages, hollandaise sauce, sweet potatoes, passion fruit, three tins of kidney beans, two lemons, Danish bacon, tortilla wraps, a box of meringues...

‘What’s all this?’ I asked.

‘This,’ Abby replied as she pulled out a giant bag of pistachios, ‘is the rest of my night. That’s what this is.’

‘You gonna eat all that?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘But I’m gonna try.’

Abby turned the oven on and put in a big rack of ribs. I meandered awkwardly by the door of my room, attempting to look as if I’d come in with some sort of purpose. Abby sat down at the counter and started rolling herself a zoot, her face blank and tired. I rearranged a few things in the fridge and paced around, savouring the company of another human being, even if it was in complete silence and the human being in question didn’t seem to enjoy company of any kind herself.

‘How was work?’ I asked.

Abby lit up her joint, inhaled voraciously and let out a satisfied silver plume.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Think it might be a school vacation today or something? I wasn’t even told. Place was full of kids. It was a fucking nightmare.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Right.’

‘Yeah. How you doin? You had the day off?’

I was still in my pyjamas. ‘Yeah.’

‘Radical. How’d you spend it?’

I shrugged. ‘Sat about. Watched some crap. You know.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ She held the joint towards me. ‘You want?’

I gladly accepted. Abby’s disgust at our old-world tobacco usage in our spliffs meant that after a single toke I was spluttering my guts out all over the place, wheezing until I turned purple. I was embarrassed, but Abby didn’t seem to find anything funny about it. She didn’t even acknowledge it.

‘What’s Murder up to?’ she asked.

I went to speak, but a wet cough came out instead. I pointed to the note on Murder’s door.

‘“Divination in progress?” What the hell’s that mean?’

‘It’s a thing she does.’

Abby squinted her eyes and leaned her ear towards Murder’s room. ‘That black metal or something?’

I nodded. ‘She shuts herself in her room, does a bunch of psychedelics and sits in the dark listening to loud, weird, fucked up music. Every now and again.’

Abby frowned with confusion. ‘Why?’

‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘She’s never given me a good answer why.’

Abby shook her head. ‘That shit can’t be good for you.’

I passed her back the tiny joint. As soon as she grabbed it, she got up out of the chair, grabbed the pack of Doritos and started walking towards her room.

‘What’re you doing now?’ I said suddenly, nervously. ‘D’you fancy... hanging out or something maybe?’

Abby turned around slowly. Her face remained frozen solid. ‘Eva, baby, I would, but I’ve been looking forward to blazing up and zoning out to my boxset of The Twilight Zone for the whole day. A whole day I’ve spent having to think of nice ways of telling little kids to go fuck themselves. I need a bit of me time right now.’

‘Oh, right, yeah, well, no worries then,’ I said.

‘Sorry.’

‘Nah, it’s cool, really.’

I retreated back into my room, shut the door and sank down to the floor; defeated, embarrassed, instantly back in the boring world of solitude. The feeling of loneliness dropped down on me like a cage.

I gave up on the idea of doing something with myself in order to stave off the sadness, and instead I went back down inside myself. I surrendered. Fuck it. All of the tiny insecurities that I’d collected over the past few weeks started to grow larger and burn brighter in the pool of my bored consciousness. Anxiety and melancholy flushed through my bloodstream. After an hour of wall-staring I pulled myself up to the laptop and scrolled through the internet, mindlessly. I put on some Tori Amos to try and rouse some emotion in me and bring about some kind of catharsis. I wanted to let the misery out and weep into my forearms. But that wasn’t the sort of thing I did. This sadness that appeared in me every now and again was blank, dead and invisible to the universe.

It was a long while of nothing later when I heard a knock at my door. When I ran over to open it, Murder was standing before me, her face drained of colour, thick bags swollen under her big, wet eyes.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘How was that?’

Murder stared at me, dead-eyed, for a few seconds before she croaked her mouth open and said: ‘Good’.

‘You wanna hang out?’ I asked.

She nodded furiously. ‘Please.’

We sat ourselves in front of the TV for the rest of the night. It was a sedate sort of vibe, considering I was inexplicably sad and Murder was still reeling from her voluntary sensory overload, but once we managed to get a bag delivered and baked ourselves in front of a few episodes of Parks and Rec, I started to feel alright again. Or more alright, at least.

• • •

Maz, Christopher and Maz’s mate Isaac had invited us out with them to some dank drum n bass night at Black Box, a concrete shithole at the edge of the town that I hadn’t set foot in since back when my hymen was still intact. I wasn’t as keen about going as everyone else, but Maz insisted to me that it was gonna be decent and Murder was getting all adorably overexcited, as she always did when something got her nostalgia G-spot tingling. We sorted ourselves some cheap speed off of Puke for the first time in ages, partly out of a feeling we had that we needed to relive the days back when drugs were new and exciting and we all smashed dirt-cheap amphetamines like nobody’s business. Not to mention that I felt like I was getting too old to ride out a whole night of DnB without being loaded with a bloodstream of semi-poisonous energy.

We paid the extortionate fiver to get in, and the place looked even more shitty and battered on the inside than I remembered it. It was literally falling apart; the pillars were cracked and the bar was like deadwood. The walls were rusting, peeling, crumbling, and rebars stuck out all over the place. It was a deathtrap. You could smell the hepatitis as you walked in. We’d been there an entire twenty minutes, bobbing around the near-empty dancefloor, before we heard that some poor bastard got stabbed to fuck in the smoking area. The place was shut down, and the group of us were forced to traipse back into town and come up with some other way to spend our long night. ‘Fuckin shame, that,’ Maz said, all crestfallen. ‘It used to take at least til the end of the night before people started killin each other.’

It was a cold night, but cloudless, and the few stars that pierced through the light pollution all seemed a little bit brighter than usual. Foxes ran along the pavements and cast creepy silhouettes in the streetlights. My hyperactive pupils latched onto bits of litter caught in the breeze. I kept thinking they were birds, or bats, or people’s faces, or a million other things. A plastic bag blew itself into my face and I shrieked so loud and with such genuine terror that I nearly fell over. Everyone else laughed at me, and I stayed silent for most of the walk back into the centre, out of embarrassment.

On the way back, Murder spotted a pair of old-school wooden crutches in a heap of junk we passed by. She fluttered over, compelled by the voices in her head, picked them up, and hobbled her way into town on them, laughing the entire way. Every time I asked her what the fuck she was doing, she yelled that she’d broken her legs and needed to be carried home, in between bursts of crazed giggling. Maz managed to grab one off of her and the two chased each other about the deserted marketplace while the rest of us tried passionlessly to coax them back into following us.

I was talking with Isaac, who was ruminating about how many root canals he’d had done in the past year, when we heard the sound of shattering glass and a burglar alarm, and turned around to see Murder and Maz legging it away from the other end of the marketplace. Murder grabbed me by the arm and pulled me along with her. ‘Leg it!’ she said. ‘Maz fucked it.’

‘You fucked it!’ I heard Maz shout, offended, as the six of us half-ran confusedly a short distance around the corner, feeling maybe a little bit stupid once we all stopped and took a second to work out what was actually going on.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘M swung her crutch into a Cancer Research window,’ Maz said.

Shena made a whistling sound. ‘Bad karma.’

‘You little fuckin rat-bag,’ Christopher said without smiling.

Murder held her shaking finger up to Maz’s face. ‘That wasn’t my fault, you dickhead.’

‘What’re you on about? You straight chucked it at me. Who’s fault was it, then?’

‘You provoked me, you Polish gobshite.’

‘Fuck off did I!’

The group kept wandering, drugged and distracted, across the bare stretch of semi-empty town towards nowhere in particular.

‘Breakin a window’s seven years’ bad luck, innit?’ Maz said to get a rise out of Murder.

‘Get fucked.’

‘I think that’s only mirrors,’ I said.

‘What about the window of an innocent, defenceless charity shop? I mean that’s gotta be just as bad,’ Maz said. ‘Get a fuckin ASBO on this girl, man. Sharpish.’

Shena, pissed as all christ, started singing loudly some song about being scumbags; I wasn’t sure if she was just making it up or not, since Shena loved to break into song when we were nomadding through town, despite the fact her voice was like nails in a washing machine.

‘Think of the cash they’re gonna have to fork out for that, now,’ Maz said. ‘You’ve just cost the fight against cancer a fair quid, Murder. What’s the matter with you?’

Murder groaned like a drunken animal. ‘Whatever, cunt.’

We wandered around town for a while, trying and failing to come up with an idea of how to spend our time that wasn’t to simply buy a few beers from the late-night offy and head back to the guys’ place. I think we all felt an unspoken agreement that this would amount to some sort of failure. The town was pretty empty, it being a weeknight and everything, and even though it wasn’t cold, there was a trickle of mist lingering over the place, and there were moments where it felt as if we were the only people on earth. This was probably one of my top five feelings.

‘I just wanna go somewhere and get tanked,’ Maz said. ‘Somewhere that’s not ours.’

‘There’s nowhere else to go, though,’ Shena said.

‘Yeah but I’ve been sitting in that room all week,’ he said. ‘It’s driving me mad.’

It took a lot of phet-headed moaning and questioning before Isaac finally piped up from his comparative silence with an idea.

‘Hey, guys! Guys, guys!’

We all turned round to look at him, like he was making some important announcement. Whenever Isaac spoke up, people listened to him. I think it’s because we all thought he was a lot smarter and more rational than the rest of us. We were psychotic idiots compared to him.

‘I know somewhere pretty bangin that we can go check out,’ he said. ‘Something to do.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Murder said.

‘Oi, Maz, you remember that house over, like,’ he pointed, ‘that way? Towards Grieves?’

Maz’s face went blank. ‘You what?’ And then, like a light switched on behind his eyes, he smiled. ‘Oh, you mean the house? When we were K’d?’

‘Yeah, mate.’

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘Me and Isaac found this old house, like,’ and he and Isaac started striding in the opposite direction. ‘You lot wanna see? It’s pretty sick.’

So we turned around and loafed onward, past the crematorium and the old town hall where witches were hanged five centuries ago. We were in a part of town with the Victorian townhouses and expensive real estate, and the old house that Maz and Isaac were talking about was hidden down a street that was so deathly quiet all we could hear was the sound of our own footsteps echoing beneath our gibberish.

‘Number 28, this is the one.’

The house was tall and awkwardly shaped; it appeared to be leaning to one side, and stood freely within a forlorn yard between two rows of grey brick terraces. It was painted a deep, dark greyish-brown, like tree bark, and had two large windows on either side of its mottled red front door, and a broken circular window staring out from the top floor like a big, round eye. The two or three steps up to the porch were broken, and it had weeds and fuck knows what rupturing out of it like tendrilly parasites.

‘It’s abandoned as fuck,’ Maz said. ‘Me n Isaac found it. There’s a way round the back.’

We each shifted individually through the loose wooden planks at the right side of the house that were supposed to constitute a fence. The back of the house was barren and sandy. It was filled with clutter, like tyres, chairs, umbrellas, a broken grandfather clock, a menorah, disfigured garden gnomes, and a rusty bucket filled with paperclips that had toppled over and vomited a multicoloured mess on the ground. It was bigger than it looked from the front of the house.

‘Christ,’ Murder said, ‘how long has this been here?’

‘I dunno,’ Maz said. ‘You wait til we get inside, though. That’s the real cool bit.’

Isaac pushed a baby buggy with an old clown doll in it out of the way and we let ourselves through the battered door. Isaac led the way with the light of his phone. Instantly a sensation of fear swept over me as we entered the pitch-black house. I took my own phone-light out to try and make sense of the place.

The house was surprisingly big on the inside, and had an intensely eerie quality what with the darkness, the drugs and the fact that the whole place was still lightly furnished and covered in as much shite as there was outside. Everything was torn apart. Any doors that were still there were beaten in. We stayed weirdly quiet for a minute or so as the lot of us gazed with wonder through the desecrated rooms, and the bright white phone lights fell across the piles of old clothes, broken toys, bits of cutlery and torn books. There were also a couple of bottles, cans and syringes that showed we weren’t the first scumbags to stumble across this place. The living room had a few bits of uninterested graffiti scrawled here and there in blood red paint. A couple of framed paintings were still hanging, the light glistening off the spiderweb cracks.

‘This is weird,’ Shena said.

‘Yeah, man,’ Murder said. ‘Really, really weird.’

‘It’s just some house where I think smackheads come and sit about,’ Isaac said. ‘Me and Maz snuck in the other day while we were ketting about. All kinds of freaky.’

‘Mate, let’s go upstairs,’ Maz said, ‘we didn’t go upstairs last time.’

The boys headed up, and Murder followed. Me and Shena stayed wandering downstairs for a little bit. We were mesmerised by the amount of shite. There were torn-up family pictures and holiday photos strewn across the corner of the bathroom. Figurines and obsolete computer parts and cardboard boxes loaded with trophies. Shena picked one up and held it up to the light.

‘Third place in the Saracen’s Head Annual Darts Championship, 1981,’ she said. ‘Pretty impressive.’

‘How has no one chucked out all of this stuff yet?’ I said. ‘D’you think it all belonged to one person?’

‘No fuckin clue,’ Shena said. ‘Maybe they went crazy and killed themselves.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘It’s really weird poking through all this stuff, though.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Shena said. ‘If I wasn’t so ratarsed right now this place would scare the shit outta me.’

‘Yeah, man...’

‘Hey, guys!’ Murder shouted from the doorway. Me and Shena jumped and turned around.

‘Jesus christ, Muder,’ I said, ‘don’t do that.’

‘You gotta come upstairs,’ she said, her pale face glowing in the torchlight, her black eyes shining. ‘We found something that’s mad weird.’

‘How weird?’

‘Seriously weird.’

We followed her up the creaking wooden stairs, the carpet stripped away, and were led past the bathroom through one of the doors. Maz and Isaac were already in there, wincing as I shined the light past their eyes. ‘Check it out,’ Maz said, and pointed to one of the walls. There was a huge, blown-up photograph of a woman, staring into the camera with long, black hair, and a blank expression that looked like a mix of confusion, worry and boredom. The photo was circled in red paint, and surrounded with polaroids, all of the same woman. Beneath it was a dresser that had been turned into a kind of makeshift altar, with long-untouched candles, rosary beads and crucifixes.

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘I know, right?’ Murder said, beaming. ‘Messed up.’

‘Messed up and then some.’

‘Who d’you think it is?’ Murder asked. ‘Wife? Mum?’

‘This is freaking me out, guys,’ Shena said, ‘I’m gonna get out of here.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ Maz said.

‘What, you scared, Mazikowski?’

‘I’m not scared, I’m just creeped out,’ Maz said as him and Shena hurriedly went downstairs and out the house.

‘Creeped out’s a kind of scared, you pussy!’ Murder shouted down after him.

Isaac went down after them, but before we all left, Murder was still wandering around the bedroom, peering at whatever she could make out with the streetlights coming in through the window. The place was bare compared to downstairs. Slices of orange streetlight brought out the damp and mould all along the bare wall. The floor was littered with rubbish. A broken double bed sat at the end of the room, directly facing the weird photo of the mysterious woman.

‘Eerie, innit?’ Murder said, fascinated.

‘It’s real eerie,’ I said. ‘So much abandoned crap here... you feel a bit like, I dunno, we’ve walked into someone else’s life?’

‘Mate, this is like walking into someone else’s mind,’ Murder said, staring up at the shrine of the dark-haired woman. ‘Check it out. We’re gonna have to come back here and smoke a spliff.’

‘Definitely.’

Once we’d both had enough of staring around and being freaked out, we left. Outside, the guys were hovering around the outside of the house, shovelling cigs into their mouths.

‘Christopher,’ I said. ‘You didn’t come inside the house?’

‘Fuck nah,’ he said.

‘You hear about the shrine?’

Christopher let out a sigh of wind-chilled tobacco smoke. ‘Fucked up.’

• • •

Taped to the mast of a pylon a few feet from the front door of Maz and that’s house was a piece of paper centred with a .jpg of the despondent face of a large, white cat, with ‘missing’ written above in bold, desperate letters. The cat’s green eyes were staring into the camera. Round, innocent eyes. For some reason, as we were all walking past, the pixellated green eyes of the cat met mine, and I felt a chill ripple through my blood. I found myself breaking away from the others, and then I just stood there, staring into the cat’s eyes, with the music of drugs playing in my ears. The cat’s name was Pluto.

The others were heading towards the house, and I think an argument was breaking out between the boys over who had any keys. Murder came over to me and gave me a curious stare before asking me what I was looking at.

‘Lost cat,’ I said.

‘Lost cat, eh?’ Murder said. ‘Gutted.’

‘Yeah, man,’ I said. ‘Sad shit.’

Murder shrugged. ‘I guess.’ She turned around and wandered back off into the street. I think she expected me to follow her, but for some reason I stayed rooted to the spot. I kept staring at the poster. A million caustic thoughts flooded into my mind. Thoughts about the cat’s owners. Thoughts about the cat’s whereabouts. Thoughts of a beautiful white cat lying pancake-flat across some stretch of tarmac somewhere. Thoughts of teary children stapling posters around town in the desperate hope of being reunited with their beloved pet. The speed sent my imagination up into the clouds. I was trapped in some sort of hypnotic pull. I could feel tears beginning to bloom.

The others had gone into the flat, but Murder must’ve stayed outside or something, as once it got to the point where I was crouching on the floor with my head in hands, tears spilling, I heard her walk back over and squat down next to me.

‘You alright there, Carrot?’ she asked. She was using her ‘concerned’ voice that always sounded annoyingly patronising, but I never let it piss me off too much. Murder seemed to find it difficult to express anything other than a brazen lack of shit-giving. ‘Eh?’

I let out a few grizzly sobs and breathed until I levelled myself out. ‘Yeah,’ I said, looking up at her. ‘Fine.’

‘You, uh... don’t seem all that fine.’

I stood back up and wiped the salty mess from my face. I muttered ‘shit, shit, shit.’

‘You cool to go in?’ Murder asked. ‘You want to, uh, like... talk about anything? You want a cig?’

‘Yeah, it’s... whatever,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. Let’s just go in.’

‘Sure?’

I nodded and started walking.

Murder sighed. ‘Whatever you say, Moaning Myrtle.’

‘Fuck off.’

• • •

Maz, Isaac and Christopher lived in a shithole next to a water treatment facility, and there was always a strange chemical smell in the air, but I didn’t know whether it was from the industrial park or from the houses. It smelt like sewage mixed with M-Cat. The boys’ flat itself stank of booze, rotting food and those jelly-like house fragrance things they’d bought to try and mask the scent, but instead gave it an extra pungent kick. Our place was a mess, but their place was more like a warzone, if the war was fought purely with clothes, drugs and takeaways.

None of the boys noticed I’d been crying when I came in, which I found myself both relieved and slightly disappointed by.

We sank in for the morning, and the hours rolled past as we slayed through an endless collection of music; Maz was tyrannical with the tunes as usual, so I probably heard more drum n bass than I would’ve if we’d actually made it to the night. The boys didn’t seem to appreciate my gradual shift down to Animal Collective, so shortly after the music, weed and valium wound us down from the high we’d all spent on absolutely nothing, we moved on to watching videos of people nearly killing themselves in car crashes, backyard stunts and skating accidents. The boys loved that. I found the whole thing boring as dried shite.

Maz was doing a lot of coke, which I didn’t even realise he had before we left, and was mildly offended he didn’t offer us a line as he usually did, which I told him straight.

‘Didn’t realise you wanted any,’ he said. ‘Thought you were fine with the Lou Reed.’

‘You always used to give me a line,’ I said. ‘You not gonna bother now we’re mates?’

‘It’s my own fuckin cheng, yeah?’

‘I thought you packed that in, anyway.’

‘He’s off the wagon,’ Isaac said.

Maz made a noise like a scoff. ‘I’m a fully-grown man now and I can do what the fuck I like.’

‘The first step is to admit this shit, man.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Oh, Mazikowski,’ Murder cooed, ‘you’re not relapsing are you? Don’t you remember selling all the shit you had in your last house? Remember your decks? I thought I was gonna see you cry for the first time in my life.’

‘Fuckin hell, could you all just get fucked and back off, yeah?’

‘Woah, calm down, Maz, we’re all friends here,’ Murder said. ‘Except Christopher, maybe. Christopher, this mess isn’t your fault, is it? Mister Bad Influence?’

‘I ain’t touched it,’ he said.

‘Yeah, as if.’

‘You pricks just better not steal from me, that’s all I’m sayin,’ Isaac said.

‘Bare love, mate,’ Maz said, ‘bare love.’

‘Yeah, you say that now, but you did it before, though, remember?’

‘Yeah, only twenty bar, though, and I paid you back.’

‘Did you fuck.’

I got up at some point to go to the toilet. The drugs made me feel like porridge was dropping out of my peehole. The toilet had a flickering orange hue that made me feel sick. There was a big, bloody-looking bruise just above my right knee, though I couldn’t remember banging, bumping or even touching anything while we were out. I always bruise incredibly easily. The white paint was peeling off the walls and revealing what appeared to be half-filled bullet holes, but couldn’t have been. I put my finger in one and played with it distractedly for about ten minutes. When I was convinced that my business here was finished, I got up, wiped, and washed my hands, where I caught the glance of my own reflection. I always hated looking at myself while on drugs, let alone when I wasn’t, but I quickly found myself staring, fascinated, into my own eyes, which were curdling and dripping like emerald honey.

There she was. The doppelganger. The girl who resembled me in the mirror was thin as a rake. Her cheekbones were jutting out under her deep, dark eye-bags. Her short, scraggly hair was rippling through the drug lens. This was the girl that could break legs and shift cars with a flick of the brain. That’s what Murder told me, anyway. I still wasn’t sure if I believed it. There was already too much to think about in the real world, like when, if ever, I was going to start aiming towards something resembling a future. Whether there was anything I should’ve been doing to distinguish my pointless life from anyone else’s. Maybe I could just try and find a rich husband and be done with it, I thought. Or drink myself to death by the time I’m thirty. Anyway, I chucked the thoughts out of my head and went back into the living room.

Smoke stung my eyes as I came in. The guys were watching South Park. ‘Where’s M?’ I asked. Christopher shrugged.

‘In the other room,’ Isaac said. ‘Think she’s on the phone.’

‘Really? What time is it?’

‘Bout half eight.’

Who the fuck could that be, I wondered.

I sat down and joined in with the mong-out, realising that I felt a little sidelined and invisible now Murder was out of the room. None of us had the brain function to speak to each other much. The guys just let out a weird guttural noise every now and then that you could barely call a laugh. I was beginning to prang out a little bit, partly from boredom, so I crushed up and snorted one of the valium. Maz called me a dirty bitch. I think I laughed.

After a long while, we all began to hear mad, enraged shouting coming from Maz’s bedroom, which grew with intensity for maybe a couple of minutes, making us all feel a bit awkward and that, but eventually it stopped. After a tiny little lull of relief, a loud crash made us jump out of our skin.

‘Oi, what the fuck!’ Christopher yelled instantly.

I begrudgingly got up and came to see what all the fuss was about, momentarily feeling a little bit like a care worker, or a dog owner. Murder was standing in the middle of the room, her fists at her sides, with her broken phone and scattered fragments of plate laid out in front of her.

‘Hey,’ I said.

‘Hey,’ she said.

I shut the door behind me.

‘Everything alright?’

Murder sighed. ‘Well... obviously not, I guess.’ Her face was red, but her voice had dropped to an eerily calm monotone.

I hesitated a moment before I asked. ‘Who was that?’

‘What?’

‘On the phone.’

‘Oh.’ Murder shrugged. ‘My dad. I guess.’

‘What... as in Simon?’

‘No,’ Murder said. ‘Like my actual dad.’

‘Oh... right,’ I muttered sheepishly. I stood by the door in silence for a few stress-laden moments.

Murder ignored me. She kept her eyes away from me the entire time. ‘Tell Maz I broke a bowl or something. I’ll clean it up.’

‘Alright.’ I went to reach for the doorhandle. ‘Are you sure you’re―’

‘Yeah, Evz, yeah. Like,’ she ran her hand through her raven hair and let out another sigh, ‘you know. Family shit. I can tell you later, like, if you wanna.’

‘Alright yeah, sure, no worries,’ I said, and walked back into the living room.

‘Yo, Evz,’ Maz said, ‘what’s the crack?’

‘Murder broke a plate, she said she’ll clean it up.’

‘So who is Murder shaggin these days, then?’ he asked as I took a seat.

‘It was her dad, actually,’ I said.

‘Christ, that explains a lot.’

‘On the phone.’

‘Everything okay?’ Isaac asked after they’d finished chuckling.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Absolutely chill.’

• • •

I had this seriously messed-up dream when I got some proper sleep after the letdown of a weekend, and it stuck with me, especially since dreams hadn’t really been part of my life for a while ever since I began trying to essentially smoke them out of my head.

I was in my Auntie Barb’s house, which I hadn’t been to in about eight years on account of her being dead and that. She lived in a bungalow over in Sitches, and used to look after me every now and then while my parents were working, or fighting. The place was just the same as it was back then; it had the puke-beige corduroy settee that I spent long hours of childhood watching TV on and waiting for my mum to come pick me up. It had the same peeling green-stripe wallpaper which made me feel sick all those times when I was too ill to go to school. It was a gloriously sunny day outside, but the room filled with the sound of rain.

Murder was sitting on the settee, smoking a gigantic pipe that touched the ground. She didn’t notice I was in the room until I said:

‘Murder?’

She looked up. She was wearing the hat she borrowed from her gran every now and then. She seemed confused, or maybe even a little bit annoyed, that I was there.

‘Shouldn’t you have gone by now?’

‘Gone where?’ I asked.

‘I dunno,’ Murder replied, irritatedly. ‘I thought you said you’d made plans with someone. Weren’t you gonna go bowling?’

‘I told you about that?’

Murder didn’t respond, but took another pull on her massive ebony-and-ivory pipe. I looked down and saw that the bowl was ornately carved into the shape of a ram’s head, with big, curly horns.

‘Who’s this?’ I asked her.

She ignored me. ‘Are you not gonna go cos it’s raining? You can borrow my umbrella.’

I saw the sunshine billowing through the window. The sound of rain hitting the roof was even louder now, almost deafening. I walked up to the window to see what was going on outside, but instead of the usual anodyne middle-suburbia sort of landscape you used to see from Auntie Barb’s place, there were thin, spindly trees and rugged ditches all over the place.

‘Are we in the Dunskills?’ I asked. There was no answer, so I turned around. Murder wasn’t there, but the TV was on, and the pipe she’d been smoking remained suspended in the air, maybe by a wire. I couldn’t tell. The ram’s face was gone, though. The pipe’s bowl was just a smooth, ivory surface. I felt a pang of raw loneliness.

Next I was in a kitchen, I don’t know whose; it was one of those huge kitchens with black tiled floors, like the kind you get in big country homes. I was sitting at the table with some other people. Maz was there, I remember that. He was eating ricotta, or something that looked a lot like ricotta. I felt bored, so I was looking around the room, feeling slightly left out of the conversation that was going on, although I’m not sure if I could see anyone actually talking to each other. I felt a brush against my leg.

I looked down and, to my surprise, saw a white, plush shape moving cautiously underneath the table. Instantly, I knew it was the cat from the poster. Pluto. The lost one. I remember getting this strange feeling, I’m not sure how to put it, and obviously in the dream you don’t know that you’re dreaming, so I think I felt this weird compulsion to go after the cat; you know, to rescue it or whatever. For the reward, maybe, I dunno. Either way, I got down on all fours and started chasing it around the room, at super speed, racing about the kitchen floor. I remember this being a significant section of the dream.

Eventually I chased the cat so far that we’d ended up in this weird cavern/cove sort of place, which seemed bathed in lamplight although I don’t remember seeing any lamps. The cat must’ve disappeared or something, since my next memory is standing in the damp cove (or cavern), staring at this pale, bald man who I’d never seen before in my life, yet felt strongly familiar, somehow. He also had jet-black eyes. As in his eyeballs were dark, black spheres. I think I remember saying:

‘I know you, don’t I?’

The man didn’t move. His skin was ghostly pale. It looked cold.

‘Are you... death?’

The guy shook his head and frowned, as if he found this question deeply offensive. I remember feeling all regretful and embarrassed.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

The man put his hands on my shoulders and sighed. I could tell that he was looking right into my eyes, even though he didn’t have any pupils. I tried to move, but I couldn’t. Instead of panicking, which in hindsight is what I would’ve done in any other circumstance, dream or otherwise, I just accepted it and stood there, staring into this man’s plain, black-eyed expression.

‘So are you going to explain any of this to me, then?’

The dream ended there. I woke up tangled in my sheets, laid flat and horizontal at the opposite end of my bed. My pillows had been flung across the room. I felt sick and curled up like a child.

• • •

‘I had this well crazy dream last night,’ I told Murder the next day on the way to go hang out with everyone at the skate park. There wasn’t a single second of silence between the words leaving my mouth and her snapping round towards me and saying ‘Fuck yes, tell me everything!’

I stammered for a little while before knowing where to begin. ‘Well, there was this- this guy there―’

‘Did you fuck?’

‘Uh, no. We just sort of... stared at each other.’

‘Oh,’ Murder said, disappointed. ‘That’s boring.’

‘Yeah, it is, I guess. He did have black eyes, though. Like, completely black eyes.’

‘Like me?’

‘No, as in totally black―’

‘Was I in your dream?’ Murder asked with the excited fervour of a little kid.

‘Oh, yeah, you were, actually.’

‘Did we fuck?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Lame,’ Murder sighed. ‘So what did happen?’

‘You were smoking this really big pipe...’ I paused to try and bring back the image in my head, ‘I think.’

‘Yeah? Anything else?’

‘Erm...’ I tried rifling through my brain, feeling a little bit embarrassed that this dream, which had so affected me on some powerfully deeper level the night before, now sounded crushingly uninteresting as I tried to describe it with actual words. ‘I chased a cat around a kitchen for a bit.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Murder sounded like she was trying her hardest not to be patronising. ‘Were you on all fours?’

‘I was, actually.’

‘Huh, crazy,’ was all she could reply with. ‘Mental.’

There was a lull of birdsong and car horns which indicated that the conversation had reached a sad and early conclusion. We were walking the long road that led up towards the dump. Cars passed us, carrying bin liners stuffed with unwanted crap.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘that was lame, telling you my dream. It just... seemed so much better at the time. Like, in my head.’

Murder chuckled to herself. ‘You don’t have to say sorry, Carrot, jesus. I like you tellin me your dreams. I always wanna know what’s knockin round that old noggin of yours.’

‘Do you actually?’

‘Course I do!’ Murder was looking at me through her red-plastic-frame sunglasses; the light was glinting off them so much, I had to look away. ‘You’re one of my favourite people in the universe, Evz. I’m always up for knowing what you’re thinkin n all that.’

‘Aw,’ I muttered.

‘Besides, it might shed some light on, y’know, those latent psychic abilities of yours. Or not-so-latent anymore, I guess.’

‘Murder!’ I said, paranoid.

‘Oh, what – we’re not allowed to talk about it now? I think we’re past that point, Eva.’

‘Yeah but...’ I looked around, ‘not outside.’

‘Do you think it has anything to do with all that shit?’ Murder asked, ignoring me. ‘Like, did it feel like there was any connection between the two?’

‘I dunno.’ I shrugged. ‘How am I supposed to know?’

Murder shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess so.’

We made it to the skate park; a perfectly square island of public ground, which was disproportionately small considering the amount of skater kids that lived in Ranford, and there were always tonnes of broken bones. Overlooking it was this artificial mound of grassland, which made a sort of seating area for onlookers, non-skaters, skaters’ girlfriends and other wasters. It used to be our number one social hub back in the day, before we all started feeling too old to hang out there anymore, and the next generation of kids rose up from underneath us. It was still a decent enough place to waste out and get stoned, though. A couple of kids we knew were already about; Joe and Chen and some of them boys were out skating with the same skill and finesse as when we were thirteen. They didn’t notice us come over the ditch. We decided to sit down next to Rod and Sophie, who were draped over each other like the sickening young-in-love couple that they were.

Sophie was telling us about her bus journey into town. ‘There was a wanker on the bus. As in, literally, a wanker on the bus. As in some guy was caught wanking.’

‘Oh, gross,’ I said.

‘I was sitting at the back, but there was this guy I dunno a couple of seats in front of me, and I thought he was being weird the whole way. He was like thirty-five or something and, like, I had my headphones in, but he still caught my eye just cos he was kinda I dunno... wriggling.’

‘Yeugh.’

‘Innit. This is like still way out of town so there’s fuck all people on the bus, but then this woman started looking at him from I dunno, the side bit? Where people sit facing the side. I dunno, but yeah, she got up to tell the driver, and I watched the whole thing; the driver stopped in a lay-by or whatever and came over to―’ Sophie began giggling, ‘I dunno, talk to him?’

‘And he was wanking?’

‘Well, the two of them start arguing, so I take my headphones off, and him and the driver argue for about five minutes with the guy yelling at him and saying that he wasn’t and stuff. But, like, his trousers were undone, and I couldn’t see anything, but when the driver was like “get the fuck out”, I could see him redo himself as he got up, so like, yeah. He was doin it.’

‘Fuck me,’ I said.

‘I dunno what’s wrong with some people, ya know,’ Rod said, ‘I really fuckin don’t.’

‘I know, like why would somebody do that?’ Selma said. ‘You’re so obviously gonna get caught.’

‘People are fucked.’

‘Maybe he wanted to get caught,’ Murder said. ‘That’s a thing, innit.’

‘Yeah, but why?’

Murder shrugged. ‘Fuck knows. Maybe the danger gets him goin.’

‘But just...’ Sophie sounded aghast, ‘on the bus? In the morning? Like, fucking hell.’

‘People are fucked,’ Rod repeated.

I turned to Murder. ‘Would you ever have a wank on the bus?’ I asked her.

‘Christ, Eva, who d’you think I am?’ Murder’s face looked expressionless behind the sunglasses, so I couldn’t tell exactly how serious she was being.

‘Give the fuck over, that sounds well like something you’d do.’

Sophie and Rod were chuckling. Murder decided to take off the glasses and look me square in the eye with her glistening lumps of coal.

‘That’s fuckin slanderous, Eva, you can’t just assume I’d do some kinda sex crime just cos I’m more sexually creative than you are.’

I hated when Murder told me she was more ‘sexually creative’ than I was. She never seemed to mind berating me about her perceptions of my sex life as being ‘vanilla’ or ‘pedestrian’ (actual quotes), which she bases on no evidence whatsoever. Just because I once said I didn’t want a guy to whip me, or to whip them, and I disagreed with her that fucking a guy with a strapon would be ‘fuckin mega’. I tried to turn it back on her, making it out as if she was the weird one for posturing as some exotic deviant all the time, but to tell the truth, when the invisible self-esteem vampires came to visit me every now and then, it still turned into something I became genuinely worried about.

‘I’ve wanked on the train before, though,’ she said, putting her sunglasses back on.

Me and Sophie recoiled. ‘Bullshit have you,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well, me and Colin used to bone on the train. When we went down to London n that. It was a long way.’

‘It’s like two hours.’

‘Yeah, so I thought, well, fuck it, it’s a toilet, innit? It’s a locked door. Why not?’

‘Jesus christ,’ I said.

‘What?’ Murder sounded genuinely aggro. ‘It’s in a toilet! It’s not like that guy, doin it just in the middle of everyone, that shit’s fucked.’

‘Actually, to be fair,’ Rod said, ‘I have wanked in the train toilets before.’

‘See?’

Sophie smacked him round the back of the head.

‘Ow, what the fuck was that for?’

‘That’s messed up! Don’t wank on the train, Rod, you weirdo!’

‘Well, why not? It’s like she said – it’s just a toilet.’

‘What, so do you wank in the toilets of other people’s houses?’

There was a pause. ‘Well―’

‘You’re a fucking pig.’

‘I’ve done it too,’ Murder said while staring down at the tuft of grass she was playing with.

‘Well, you’re both pigs.’

I couldn’t help but laugh. Sophie found most things beyond the line of historic English decency utterly repulsive, and her genuine reactions to stuff like that always made me laugh, even though I was pretty disgusted by this as well. Sophie was a blessing.

Later on, Dolla showed up on the scene, with her backpack, wearing a snapback I haven’t seen before. She shouted over at us as she walked across the skate park. ‘Oi, cunts!’ I remember thinking to myself that Dolla looked as if she was walking dangerously close to the edge, basically brushing the top of one of the bowls.

‘Yo, Dolla,’ Murder shouted, ‘what’s up?’

I think Dolla was beginning to shout back when, lo and behold, this pint-sized skater kid flies up the side of the bowl and, somehow, smacks Dolla hard across the side of the head with the edge of the board. She dropped like a sack of shit. There was a huge ‘ohhh’ from the crowd on the embankment, since Dolla caught everyone’s attention with her yelling.

‘Fuck.’

‘Oh, shit!’

Dolla was back on her feet in seconds, although with shaky legs. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she seemed to be saying to the few skaters and onlookers that were seeing if she was alright. She had one hand on the side of her head and the other waving people away at her side.

‘Get out of the way, you dozy bitch!’ one of the skater kids shouted.

‘Hey, get to fuck, she was at the sides you little cunt!’ Murder shouted back with instant protectiveness.

Dolla eventually came up and sat with us. ‘Hey, guys,’ she said, with her hand still at the side of her head. ‘What you sayin?’

‘Mate, are you alright?’ Rod asked.

‘Yeah, sound, man,’ she replied, ‘sound as a pound.’

She took her hand away from her head, which instantly revealed a bloody red mess underneath, and that her palm was covered in blood.

‘Oh, christ, Dolla,’ I said, ‘holy fuck.’

‘What? Is it bad?’

‘There’s like a bit of... skin flapping off.’

Dolla looked at her hand, then kept touching around the wound on her head to check the bleeding, which was slowly making its way down past her ear. Instinctively, she pulled out her phone with her bloody hand, and used the camera to check how it looked.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said, with calm fascination, ‘shit.’

She pulled up the little flap of lacerated skin and gently patted it back into place until it stayed there. ‘There we go,’ she said, putting her phone away as if that was the problem solved.

‘Jesus, Dolla, don’t you wanna go to a hospital or something?’ Selma asked. ‘It looks pretty bad.’

‘Yeah, could use some stitches,’ Rod said.

‘You think so?’ Dolla sounded unsure. ‘I dunno, I reckon it’ll be fine if I just leave it like this. Can’t be fucked goin to the doctor’s again.’

‘Looks like it’s still bleedin quite a bit,’ Murder said.

‘Ohh,’ Dolla moaned, ‘but I just sat down, for fuck’s sake.’

‘It’s gonna get infected, girl.’

Dolla huffed at us like a pissed-off teenager. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘I’ll go in a minute. I’m havin a spliff first, though.’

She began to take the crap out of her bag, when she realised her hand was still covered in blood. ‘Ah, fuck, Murder, can you roll it for me?’

We all maybe shared a second or two in wondering if we should morally intervene in any way, but Dolla was someone who never took care of herself, whether or not you tried to force her. Murder took the stuff as Dolla passed it to her and began to skin up.

To her credit, the bleeding did seem to stop by the time we’d passed the joint around and eventually she got up to make her way to the hospital. When Joe and Chen had finished doing whatever down in the skating pit, they didn’t even say ‘hey’ or ‘how’s it goin’ when they came over to see us.

‘Yo, you see Dolla get knocked flat earlier?’ Joe said. ‘Fuckin funny shit.’

‘She’s an idiot,’ I said.

After another zoot or two, we were all beginning to enjoy getting munted and laying around in the bright but decidedly not-warm sunshine. At one point Chen asked us what we were doing that weekend. I said we didn’t know, since we didn’t.

‘You not goin to that night at the Nine Nuns?’

‘Fuck, is that place still goin?’ Murder said.

‘Yeah, Ryan’s gonna play a set,’ Chen said.

‘You mean DJ Infant Mortality,’ Joe corrected sarcastically.

Chen let out a chuckle. ‘Yeah, sorry.’

‘Ryan’s playin a set?’ Murder asked. ‘What sorta shit?’

‘I dunno. Witch house or something.’

‘The fuck?’

‘Yeah, newsflash, Ryan’s goth all of a sudden,’ Joe said, ‘or he’s hanging round with that crowd now, anyway.’

Murder laughed. ‘You don’t say? Course he is. Fuck it, I’d happily go to see that. You down, Evz?’

I shrugged. ‘Sure,’ I said, reining back my interest because it was Joe’s suggestion.

‘How was that night at Black Box the other day?’ he asked. The question was directed at me. ‘Me n Phil were gonna come but we got too baked n that.’

‘It was shit,’ I said.

‘Yeah, someone got fucked up and they shut it down,’ Murder said.

‘What, like, battered?’

‘Stabbed.’

Joe was beaming. ‘No way!’

‘Yeah man, we were there like twenty minutes. Five quid.’

‘Bullshit,’ I said.

‘Fuckin too right it’s bullshit.’

‘Mate, that sucks,’ Joe said. ‘I didn’t know round there was still dogshit.’

‘This whole town’s fuckin dogshit,’ Murder said.

• • •

Puke had recently come back into possession of some supposedly high-quality ketamine, so me and Murder grabbed ourselves a bag to split between us, plus a couple of cheap pills, then put on our blackest clothes and rolled along to the Nine Nuns. The Nuns boasted the biggest karaoke night in the whole of Ranford on its usual pub-but-not-a-pub weekends, but occasionally, on nights such as this, it lent its bottom half to the occasional ‘night’ sort of night. The one before this was some kind of crust-punk gig, I think; Murder went, but I didn’t go, seeing as I had the sads and all. These things usually only stick around for one night, two if they’re lucky, so I was fairly determined not to miss the one dark electronic night I’d seen put on in Ranford Centre.

We got there and the place was jumping, or at least as jumping as it ever gets for a rural pub/snooker hall combination. It was a surprisingly diverse turnout of kids, as in trackies and trainers amongst the goths and greebos. Not sure why that was. Probably because everyone in town knew Ryan, despite, or probably because of, his flitting around from subculture to friendship group like a shapechanging social butterfly. Good for him, I suppose. If you check out everything there is to offer, eventually you’ll pick up something that’s right for you. Or something. The girl who we paid to get in was a skinny, bitchfaced rivethead with a mohican and one purple contact lens.

When we came in, some standard thud-thud-thud industrial was being spun and there were only a few hardcore enthusiasts bobbing unenthusiastically around the dancefloor. The lineup, which I’d spotted on a poster that looked like it was Photoshopped by a five-year-old, was:

NECROFANTASIA

†††F3AR IT5ELF†††

$₡▲ß₡H▲₽∑L

DJ INFANT MORTALITY

COLD_CUTS

I was a little spooned out when we arrived, for sure, but Murder’d somehow ended up completely star-crossed, and was slurring things at me while I followed her aimlessly around the emptied dancefloor.

‘What?’ I shouted.

Murder continued to garble impatiently at me.

‘What?’ I shouted, again.

Eventually she stopped, and threw her hands around my ear, nearly knocking me over. ‘I saaaid... let’s go find that cunthole Ryan.’

‘Oh, right.’

Ryan was sitting at the back of the makeshift DJ pit, his face creepily lit by a laptop screen. He still had his dreads, but it looked like they were dyed black. And he had a black t-shirt on. Otherwise he looked the same as always. The guy could’ve at least put a little more effort into his all-new darkcore image.

‘Aw, mate, is that DJ Infant Mortality over there?’ Murder yelled about a foot away from Ryan’s face. ‘He’s one sick bastard, makes me feel totally sad.’

He pulled the headphones out of his ears, but didn’t look up at us. ‘Oh. Murder. Good to see you,’ he said without any expression. The music was slow-cooking in the background; it was all 808s and grizzly synth notes.

‘Mate, I wouldn’t miss this for nothin, mate,’ Murder slurred as she wiped her mouth. ‘When’re you on?’

He nonchalantly tilted his head back and forth like he was trying to crick his neck. ‘I dunno, when this kid finishes, I guess.’

‘How cryptic,’ Murder said. ‘You gonna play Time Waits for Bad Bitches, then?’

Ryan screwed up his eyes in disdain. ‘I’m not gonna play that! That was five years ago. I’ve got way new darker shit comin out now.’

‘Is it goth?’

‘Fuck no is it goth. It’s industrial sadcore. Techno n strings. Real bassy fuckin shit, y’know. Real bassy. And epic.’

‘Bassy? Well, fuckin... how exciting.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’

‘So it’s not witch house, then?’

‘Ugh, no,’ Ryan shook his head, ‘I’m not into any of that shit. Fuckin wannabe ghetto bull shite. I wanna make music that really gets its teeth into your deepest emotions, y’know.’

‘Mate, wannabe ghetto bull shite used to be your rayzon dettra.’

‘Well, it’s not anymore.’ He turned to look at me. ‘Sorry, Evz, I didn’t see you there, how you doin?’

‘I’m okay,’ I said meekly, raising a spindly hand. ‘So you’re not witch house? I thought this was a witch house night.’

‘Nah, this is just an anything-goes dark electronica night, I’m afraid,’ he told me. ‘EBM n that.’

‘Oh. Cool,’ I found myself saying.

‘You want any ket?’ Murder asked him.

‘What, you got K?’

Murder nodded violently. I pretended I wasn’t annoyed that she’d already started handing out our ketamine to whoever she felt like. I wondered if she was planning on shagging Ryan. It wouldn’t have surprised me, especially since he’d changed from Devvo to Trent Reznor within the last fortnight.

‘Nah, I can’t be doin that,’ Ryan said. ‘It’ll kill me.’

‘Oh, go on! Don’t be such a fuckin loser.’

‘I got a set to play, in’ I? I’ll be wasted after like one key.’

‘Pffffffffffft,’ Murder spat from her lips like a child.

I had a feeling that they were going to go on like this for a while without paying me much more attention, and Murder’s raggedness was making me feel as if I needed to get a little more wasted, even though in all honesty I probably didn’t. I felt like a solo trip to the toilet, so I asked M for the bag of ket and left them to it.

The cubicle I picked had a drawing of a goat-looking thing on the wall, which I stared at for what felt like an eternity while I had a quick piss. There was a speech bubble next to it with ‘EAT UR SOUL DICKHEAD’ scrawled inside it. The speech bubble had been drawn before the lettering, so that the letters didn’t fit properly, like the way a toddler would draw. I gazed into the two black dots that represented the goat-thing’s eyes until I disappeared from planet Earth, then suddenly jolted back into full consciousness as soon as my piss ran out. That calls for a line of ketamine, I thought to myself.

The line hadn’t hit me by the time I left the toilets, but the anticipation was giving me an extra little buzz, and I nearly stacked it on my way back into the main room. I caught a glimpse of Zara standing by the doorway, a drink in one hand and her head in the other.

‘Zzzara Zarazarazarazara Zara Za-raaaa,’ I sang to her.

‘Hi.’

‘How you doin?’ I asked. ‘You... here alone?’

‘No,’ Zara said. She pulled her hand away from her face and turned to look at me. The lighting in the place wasn’t great, but I could still tell immediately that her face was shining with tears, although her face was frozen in the same unimpressed expression as she always had.

‘Oh, man, Zara, are you okay?’

She nodded, sniffed a little and then took a moment to clear her throat before saying ‘I’m good, thanks.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, right. Nothing’s the matter,’ she said. ‘Well, nothing’s actually the matter. As in... I’m not really crying. If that’s what you’re talking about.’

I didn’t know how to respond to this. I thought that for a moment she might be trying to throw me off the subject, or maybe she was so heavily in denial about whatever the problem was that she was pretending that the whole crying thing wasn’t even actually happening.

‘Yeah?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ Zara said as she wiped her nose with a sniff.

‘It’s just that...’

‘Well, obviously I am crying,’ she admitted. ‘But it’s not real crying. I’m just a little bit too fucked, is the fact of the matter.’

‘Oh,’ I said, sort-of beginning to understand. ‘You really drunk?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Exxon.’

‘What, ecstasy?’

‘Exxon.’

I looked at her, confused, as the ket begin to leak into my system and slow things down a bit. ‘The fuck is that?’

I could see that Zara’s lip was quivering just a little bit. Her voice was wavering. ‘Well,’ she coughed into her hand, ‘it’s this new kind of downer. It’s like a cross between benzos and... uh... MD, I guess. But instead of making you feel euphoric it just makes you feel emotional. Weeping. Like, seriously emotional.’

I curled my face up at her. ‘Why would you wanna do that?’

I watched as fresh tears began to trickle out of Zara’s icy blue eyes. ‘It’s incredible,’ she told me. ‘You want one?’

She pulled out a baggie with a couple of small, rose-coloured pills inside. I looked at the bag, then at Zara’s slicked wet cheeks, then back at the bag again.

‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘How does it go with ket and a bit of gin?’

Zara shrugged. ‘Can’t tell you, but with vodka, it makes you want to curl up in a ball and scream into the carpet.’

‘So you’re saying I shouldn’t.’

Zara let out a deep, depressed sigh. ‘No, I’m saying it’ll be life-changing.’

I thought about it for a whole three seconds. ‘I’m alright, I think, actually.’

Zara put the bag back somewhere in the darkness of her dress. ‘Suit yourself.’ Her eyes fluttered with salty wetness, and she turned to face into the crowd while letting out a pitiful-sounding groan. Suddenly I felt very uncomfortable.

‘Well... I’ll see you later then, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ Zara said, and she took a long swig of her beer.

• • •

Rick showed up, of course. After all, his obsession with gothic crap had been why I found him so irresistible, I guess, in the beginning. I mean, I pretended that I secretly hated it and it was just a part of him that I had to put up with, but to tell you the truth, I found something seriously appealing in his overblown effort to cast himself as this massive sociopathic freak. He showed up during a particularly depressing time in my formative teenage years, so his weirdo style of rebellion was probably just what I was looking for. I was a lot more of a romantic in those days. And a whole lot stupider.

I’d spotted him across the venue chatting with some pretentious douchebag mates of his, but I still made the effort to avoid going over to speak to him – out of habit, I suppose, even though his presence at shit like this wasn’t the same drain on my sanity as it had been maybe a month or two ago. Murder didn’t hesitate to point him out, though, to try and get a rise out of me. However, when I saw that he’d brought his girlfriend here, my heart dropped a thousand floors, probably because I watched her awkwardly trundle through the main door in a wheelchair. Both her legs were in casts, and her mates must’ve carried her down since this place had no access ramps or anything. I felt like my soul had dropped through my body and splashed into a rancid puddle on the floor. She was smiling, but when the light hit her face you could make out the dark, sunken pits that’d appeared around her eyes.

‘Who the fuck’s wheelchair girl?’ Murder asked when she saw Rick and his girlfriend talking to each other.

I almost didn’t respond, but Murder seemed genuinely confused. ‘It’s his girlfriend,’ I said.

‘What?’ Murder yelled, sounding even more confused. But then something lit up in her brain and I could see her face drop into a wide-eyed, uncomfortable sort of expression. ‘Oh, fuck,’ she said. ‘Yeah, shit.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Wow, you really fuckin gave it to her, didn’t you?’

I felt like I was going to be sick. ‘Oh my god,’ I said.

‘Well, at least she’s out of the hospital,’ Murder said.

‘Ughhh,’ I groaned with a rock in my stomach. ‘Fuck’s sake. For fuck’s sake.’

Murder turned to me: ‘Maybe you should go talk to em.’

‘No way,’ I said. ‘I can’t deal with that crap right now. Holy shit. Fucking... fuck’s sake! For fuck’s sake.’

‘Woah, Eva, calm the fuck down, yeah?’ Murder stepped in front of me, which stopped me anxiously pacing about like a nutcase. ‘Take it easy. Seriously, just go over and say hi. It’ll take, like, a minute, and then you won’t look like this massive bitch who’s still so hard-done-by over your ex getting a new drinking hole.’

‘Oh christ, Murder, don’t say that.’

‘You know it’s true, mate. Go smooth things over. Go do it. Cos I’ve been plannin on having fun tonight and I don’t wanna have to drag you around guilting all over the place being a massive sad-act, so show a bit of civilness or whatever and maybe you’ll be able to forget about it, yeah?’

I had to look away from Murder’s bloodshot red eyes; eyes that burned into your head like the twin suns of hell. I hesitated at the idea of taking Murder’s advice on how to act in an awkward social situation, but I couldn’t pull together any sort of reasoning for going against it. It made sense. I was pissed off.

‘Alright, alright. Fine,’ I said. I took a huge final swig of beer, clunked it on the side and started walking to the other side of the room. I’d have asked Murder to come with me, but I knew that she’d only make things worse, so after psyching myself up, I dampened all my feelings of shittiness and meandered tentatively towards the happy couple.

As I approached, Rick’s girlfriend noticed me before he did. To my surprise, she stretched her toothy smile out even wider and waved at me as I came over. Rick turned around, and when he realised it was me, his face dropped into a scowl. I knew that face; something was up. But it was too late, I couldn’t turn back now.

‘Hey, uh, how’s it going?’ I said to them both.

‘Hi! You’re Eva, right?’ She waved a tiny hand up at me. ‘What’s up, how are you?’

What the hell was her name, I thought to myself. Grace or something. Maybe Gemma? Something ‘G’.

‘Oh, uh, not bad, you know.’ I turned to Rick, who was standing beside her, silently drilling a stare into me. ‘Hey, Rick, how you doing?’

‘Yeah,’ was all he said.

‘Good, good,’ I said. ‘Cool. Yeah. Hey. You, uh, keen on the set tonight then? Pretty good that they’ve, uh, put this night on and that, innit? Can’t remember last time they had a goth night like this, y’know?’

Rick scoffed – he loved to scoff, it was his favourite reaction to everything. Now that I wasn’t with him, I realised how much it pissed me off. ‘Yeah, some goth night. Feels like an office Halloween party. I want to shoot myself.’

‘Oh, get a grip, Rick,’ his girlfriend said, ‘you’re the one who dragged me along here tonight.’ She looked up at me. ‘He can take himself a bit seriously at times, can’t he?’

She laughed, so I laughed back. What a disturbing situation this has turned out to be, I thought. Gabbie! That was it. Her name was Gabbie.

I realised that I hadn’t asked about the leg. Legs. I felt like I should, if only out of some warped kind of politeness. ‘How’s the, uh, legs, then?’ was the best I could come up with. I winced as I said it.

‘Oh,’ Gabbie let out a half-sigh, half-giggle, ‘not too bad. Got out the hospital the other day. They said I’ll be back walking again in maybe another month or two, who knows? Still, pretty happy to be out again, that’s for sure.’ She laughed again, and so I laughed again, nervously. She did like to laugh a lot. ‘Bad luck, I guess, eh? Went crazy with my legs, twisted them up, got two compound fractures!’

‘Wow. That’s, uh, fucked up,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I know, right? So bloody typical. This is the kind of thing that could only happen to me. Gonna stop dancing like a maniac from now on. If I can ever dance again, that is!’ She let out another laugh. I sort of smiled a little bit, but couldn’t join in. Rick wasn’t laughing at all. He was still leering at me from the corner of my eye.

Gabbie tugged at Rick’s trousers. ‘I’m gonna go talk to Steven,’ she said. Rick didn’t even say anything back. ‘Nice to see you,’ she said to me. ‘I love your hair, by the way!’

‘Oh, uh, yeah, thanks.’

She turned and rolled off in some other direction. I looked at Rick, but he was now staring at Gabbie as she trundled away from us. Eventually I heard him say: ‘What are you doing here?’

‘What d’you mean?’ I said. ‘I’m just here to support Ryan and that. And, y’know, to get fucked up. Why, is that a problem?’

He didn’t say anything for a moment, then suddenly he stepped in front of me so that we were seeing eye-to-eye. Rick’s face was a white breezeblock of passive-aggression.

‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ he asked me all of a sudden.

‘What?’ I felt the sweat bead up along my palms, so I clenched them tight. ‘Like what?’

Rick didn’t respond immediately, but carried on staring at me. I could see his eyes darting around and looking all across my face, which I’d figured out a long time ago meant that he was thinking as hard as he could of something to say.

‘What?’ I asked again, trying to keep eye contact. ‘What is it?’

He kept looking like he was just about to say something, but he kept saying nothing. I could tell he was holding something back, but to be honest, I knew that I really didn’t want him to say it.

‘Forget it,’ he said, finally, and his whole face suddenly relaxed into a familiar, less intense scowl. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s good to see you too.’

I walked away from him without saying goodbye. When I found Murder again, she asked me how it went. ‘He knows,’ I told her.

‘Huh?’ she slurred at me. ‘What d’you mean he knows?’

‘As in he knows!’ I recoiled as I realised that I was shouting.

‘About what?’

I hesitated. ‘You know. About me and the… staring.’

‘What? He doesn’t know about that, how the fuck could he know? What’d he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything but, like, I could tell, he fucking knows!’

Murder shook her head. ‘You’re trippin out, girl.’

‘For christ’s sake, Murder, I’m not tripping out!’

‘Well, what’d he say exactly?’

‘He didn’t say anything, but... but...’ I started to notice a tense knotted-up feeling inside my chest. I grabbed it and noticed that I was starting to breathe just that little bit too quickly.

Murder grabbed my shoulder. ‘Yo, Evz, Evz, calm it down, yeah? Calm it down. Just breathe.’

I nodded and started to breathe; slowly, deeply. As deep as I could manage. One breath, two breaths, three breaths.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You okay?’

I nodded and kept breathing deeply. How fucking embarrassing, I thought.

• • •

Ryan’s set wasn’t as terrible as I’d imagined it was going to be, but then again, my expectations were so low that the very fact he even managed to mix one or two of the songs together without fucking up was an improvement of whatever I’d imagined in my head. I’m not sure where he found this stuff, presumably via a quick tag-search on Soundcloud, but it sounded like industrial techno with an overly sentimental edge to it, if you can imagine such a thing. I thought it was dire, but the crowd seemed to be liking it, or at least tolerating it, which I was glad about, as Ryan may have been the biggest poser of the 21^st century, but he was a decent guy, all things considered.

Beth Dicks turned up with her sister Theresa, who was smoking an e-cig, and wore a black beret over beautiful straightened brown hair that dropped to her waist. I hadn’t seen the Dicks sisters together in a long, long time, since their personalities were so far apart that they always ended rubbing each other up the wrong way and igniting some kind of shouting match before the end of the night.

‘Theresa, how’s things?’ I said, ketty, but functional. ‘I like your jumper.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ she replied in a voice that sounded as if she was smiling.

‘And the beret, too. Pretty cool, super French.’

Her eyes suddenly narrowed into a glare. ‘What, you think I look French? What’s that supposed to mean?’

Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought, here we go.

‘What you on about?’ I said. ‘Nothing bad, just... it’s a beret, innit? Like I said, it looks good. It looks sick.’

‘Yeah, I’m not trying to be French, though,’ Theresa spat. ‘Fuck’s sake, I’m not a poser, it’s just a fucking hat, alright?’

‘Alright, alright, yeah! I’m not saying you’re a poser.’

‘But you implied that I look like a poser?’

‘I never said anything about you being a poser! I just meant it’s a nice hat, that’s all.’

‘Ugh.’ Theresa turned away and sent angry clouds of vapour into the air, like a self-obsessed train.

I decided to talk to Beth instead, who was standing next to us, looking at her phone.

‘Having a good night?’ I asked her.

‘Yeah, not bad,’ she said. ‘I dunno if I’m that into the music, but...’

‘Nothing else to do, right?’

She let out a sharp sigh. ‘More or less. Actually, speaking of, you don’t know anywhere me and sis can get some drugs round here, do you?’

‘Uh...’ I hesitated for a second. ‘I dunno who’s about but... I saw Zara and she had some Exxon or whatever.’

‘Exxon?’ Theresa cut in, semi-disgusted. ‘Christ, I didn’t know that stuff had made it to Ranford.’

‘What’s that, is it good?’ Beth said.

Her sister pulled an unfriendly smile. ‘I don’t know if it’s your sort of vibe, y’know, sis...’

‘Oh, piss off, Tess, stop trying to act hard.’

‘I’m just saying, is all. You wig out so easily.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’

Murder kept wandering around, telling me that she was going to get a drink or go to the toilet, then later I’d find her standing and swaying by herself, her eyes rolling back into her head. Seeing how fucked she was filled me with a strange mix of concern, annoyance and jealousy.

‘Are you alright, Murder?’ I asked her, just to get her to notice me.

‘I’m alright, Carrot, are you alright, mate?’ she replied, her red eyes snapping on me like she’d known I was there the entire time. ‘Where the fuck’s Ryan?’

‘He’s over there,’ I said.

‘I’m gonna go tell him his set was dogshit.’

We went over to where Ryan was standing around talking to some depressed-looking factory goths, and immediately Murder leapt on him, almost literally, and showered him with garbled half-joke-half-insults. His mates stood there in unimpressed silence. I thought that this was the sort of thing Murder did when she was drunk which never failed to seriously irritate people, but Ryan was always completely unfazed by her obnoxiousness. Ryan was completely unfazed by everything, come to think about it. He could get sucked into a tornado and probably still keep that placid half-smile on his face.

‘Ryan, mate, when’re you and Scott Speedcore gonna start that thrash band, huh?’

‘Oh, yeah, shit, forgot about that. We were gonna get Wes to drum, but he’s been sent down again so fuck knows if that’s happenin anymore.’

‘I’ll drum for ya.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ he said sarkily. Ryan was nursing a beer and staring out into nothing. He never made much eye contact; the first time I met him I thought he was blind. Murder was at his side, and her eyes were locked on to him, like a cat staring at a bird.

‘How’s DJing for this crowd?’ she asked. ‘Not your usual pilled-up meatheads, are they?’

‘They’re alright, yeah... lil bit freaky, I guess. Know their tunes, though. Fuckin Fear Itself goes hard, she’s a proper dark-factory girl. Lunatic. Never seen her smile, either.’

‘Yeah, some of this lot look a bit on the weepy side,’ she said, looking around. We were looking at the front of the scattered crowd, where people were starting to enter the next level of drug-minded skankery. A couple of dark-looking fanatics were just nodding to the grind, though, while wiping the tears from their eyes. Zara was stood, wet-faced and motionless, next to a guy who was crouched down on the floor with his head buried in his hands.

‘Emotional guys,’ Ryan said. ‘Love their Exxon.’

‘I’ve noticed. I ain’t done that shit before, you like it?’

Ryan cocked his head and grimaced. ‘Not my scene, man. I’m more about the coca. I don’t think any of this lot are down with that, they’re all about their weird trips and all the fucked-up shit they do for spells or whatever.’

‘Spells?’ I said. ‘What, as in... like, magic spells?’

‘Yeah, as in magic spells. Harry-Potter-fuckin-hocus-pocus sorts of spells. They love it. I saw Necrofantasia was sitting in a pentagram with a bong in her hand before the place opened. They’re all nuts about it. Bunch of wacked-out mentalists.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Murder said. ‘That’s cool as fuck!’

Ryan looked as if he’d just been slapped with a palmful of wet shit. ‘Is it?’

‘You’re not converting to Satanism, are you, Ryan?’

Ryan sipped his beer. ‘I’m just here for the music. Leave the Halloween shit to the kids.’

On the way to get myself a drink, I ended up coming across Chen puking viciously into a big plastic bin, with Joe standing next to him, pupils dilated, looking patiently unfussed.

‘Christ, Chen, you alright?’

‘He’s fine,’ Joe told me. ‘He had a bad balti, I think. And a bottle of vodka.’

Chen looked as if he was about to compose himself, wiping his mouth and lifting himself away from the black pit of the bin, but then his body jerked about again and a long stretch of pinkish meat-substance ejected itself from his mouth and hit the floor with a splat.

‘Oh, god,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, Chen’s got it covered, ain’t you, mate?’

Chen murmured something as a thick string of gloop dangled from his mouth.

‘He knows what he’s doing. Anyway, wow, this music sucks, doesn’t it?’

The music was EBM, some of the unashamedly self-aware kind; apocalyptic cyberpunk, broken up by parts with a booming voice narrating some depressing scenario every so often.

‘I can get down to this,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I thought you might. You and Murder only like weird shit for the sake of it, don’t you?’

‘Ah, get to fuck, Joe, you’re the one who doesn’t like shit for the sake of it, you fucking wannabe.’

‘You always seemed to think I had awesome tastes, if I remember right.’ Joe was smirking at me, like he did when no one else was around. The ket softened the blow, but something inside me still twitched.

‘You’re pathetic,’ I told him.

Joe sniffed and wiped a crust of something from his nose. ‘Yeah, yeah, sure, Eva. You hate me. Whatever you say.’

‘I don’t hate you, Joe, you’re just a loser.’

‘Yeah, say whatever you want to make yourself feel better, Evz.’

I groaned. Joe was still smiling. His pupils were quivering like two little rabbit nostrils. Chen had finished puking and was leaning up against the wall, eyes closed and pointed at the ceiling, a tiny river of gunk painted down his front.

‘You boys have a fun time, yeah?’ I said, and started navigating my drug-addled psyche through the sea of social outcasts, back towards Murder and Ryan.

Unsurprisingly, by the time I caught sight of them again, they were making out. Murder was slithering all over him like a horny octopus; Ryan, as always, remained completely rigid (not in the exciting way, although I couldn’t tell at that distance).

I did the thing people do in light-hearted movies where they cough sarcastically to make themselves noticed, and felt like a moron the instant I did it. I’d have let them be, but I couldn’t risk her feeding all our ket to her new meat plug.

‘Evz!’ Murder said, instantly snapping her lips away from Ryan, ‘Evz Evz Evz, what’s the crack? What’s― what’s happenin?’

‘Can I have the stuff, please?’ I said.

‘Sure, sure,’ she said, pulling the bag out of her jacket pocket. ‘Seize the day, gorgeous.’

‘Thank you.’ I snapped the bag out of her hand and concentrated hard enough on my balance to make it all the way to the toilet.

I sat for about fifteen minutes with an empty head and my pants round my ankles. There was something at the bottom of my mind that was keeping me from leaving the comforting bright light of the toilet and going back into the dark, dingy depression factory. I was having one of those scarily unusual moments when I actually felt much better being on my own. The four beige walls of plastic felt like armour.

People were milling about around me, pissing and snorting and bitching and such. The background chatter turned into static pretty quickly, but there was one conversation that shook me out of my tranquilised state.

‘Oh, shit me, did you hear about Max Hannigan getting fucked up in a car crash a couple of weeks ago?’ a high-pitched voice squeaked.

‘Oh, yeah, what happened with that?’ came a husky reply.

‘Well, he apparently took this sket out for a drive at Freedland’s party―’

‘Oh, standard.’

‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ Squeaky giggled. ‘Anyway, he was charlied up as per, lost control of the car or whatever, crashed into a wall. He got proper fucked up.’

‘God, that’s terrible.’

‘Yeah, innit.’

‘He was a fucking arsehole, though,’ Husky said.

‘He’s not dead, he got out of his coma the other day, apparently.’

‘Oh, well bloody good for him.’

Squeaky giggled once again. ‘Always nice to see your human side, Sarah.’

A dam burst inside my head and hateful, guilty thoughts started pouring out. The four armoured walls of the cubicle suddenly felt more like a jail cell. I bit my lip and steadied my shaking hands as I pulled out the bag and lay a beefy white slug of ketamine down on the face of my phone. Fighting back the sickness I felt creeping through my nervous system, I shovelled it up through a fiver with a struggle, and winced as I felt the horse paralyser melt into my bloodstream. I breathed deeply as the world tightened around me. Everything stretched.

I slowly redressed myself and staggered out of the toilet with the world curving in on me and my vision turning everything into plasticine. When I got back in the main room, the darkness swallowed me up. I fell over and spilt my gin and tonic. The sinking feeling of ket went straight to my head. I spent five minutes or so trying to find Murder again before realising that the music was beginning to ramp up into some hard industrial that felt more like nonphysical assault and battery, and I didn’t want to be in this place anymore. A few pale and disinterested faces peered at me from under the club lights. I slunk across towards the exit.

Beth Dicks was sitting by herself next to the doorway, looking as if she was having some sort of attack. I came over to see what was going on, even though I could barely see anything.

‘Alright Beth? How’s it going?’ I tried to say, the words slipping out like grease.

She looked up, her blue eyes shining with tears. ‘Oh, god, Eva,’ she said, ‘it’s shit. It’s all so fucking shit.’

‘What’s wrong?’ I said. ‘You... you get some of that stuff then?’

Beth sobbed and grabbed her hair at the sides like the reins of a horse. ‘I’m so fucking ugly, Eva. Why did nobody tell me how ugly I was?’ Her voice shook and withered as she sniffed. ‘I hate being me. For fuck’s sake, why do I have to be me? Everyone thinks I’m a fucking joke. I... I hate myself so much. I hate myself so much.’

I tried to think of something to say to her, but the words wouldn’t come out, and I’m sure that the gin and tonic and tranquiliser wasn’t helping.

‘Mate... Beth... don’t say that. You’re lovely. You’re beautiful.’

Beth carried on bawling her eyes out. I decided to shut up, since my voice seemed incapable of reaching even the smallest level of enthusiasm or sincerity. I stood there awkwardly for a few moments as she wept in front of me, until eventually Theresa showed up. Her face was beet red and wet with tears, too, but strangely enough, there was a smile on her face.

‘I told her, didn’t I?’ was the first thing she said to me. ‘I bloody told her.’

‘Shut up!’ Beth screeched before curling back up into a ball of self-loathing.

‘I told you you wouldn’t be into this, Beth.’ She turned to me: ‘God’s sake. I remember my first line of Exxon, too. I didn’t speak to anyone for a week, I thought the world was going to end.’

‘Why the fuck would you take this?’ Beth said venomously.

Theresa looked at me and smiled. I tried mumbling a few platitudes. The only thing that came out was ‘Shit’s fucked’.

‘She’ll be alright,’ Theresa told me. ‘I think if the music wasn’t so intense she’d be having the time of her life.’

‘Are you... having a good time?’ I asked.

Theresa grinned and let out a half-sob, half-giggle. Her smile was devilish, but her eyes were thick with pain.

‘Emotion is a beautiful thing, sister,’ was all she said to me.

• • •

I struggled my way up the staircase to the car park outside and enjoyed the liberating feeling of air on my face. The lights outside were casting big, bright pools of white onto the tarmac, and a few figures were shuffling around and devouring their cigarettes. I fumbled embarrassingly with my cig stuff; my head was spinning out. I walked off into the shadows to keep away from the small crowds of miserablists and douchebags, as I felt paranoid and assumed that everybody was staring and laughing at me, though obviously they weren’t. There was something like a layer of wet sand at the pit of my stomach.

A few broken-looking trees were standing around the venue. The surrounding scenery looked like the cardboard set of some old, black-and-white German horror film. One or two cars glided past and their lights turned the plaster and concrete of the surrounding buildings into oil paintings. I was getting more fucked up by the second. I gave up trying to roll a cigarette and decided to just scroll on my phone instead, but it died at 20% battery after about three uninteresting minutes. I was about to head back in and try forcing myself to get down with the threshing machine vibes, but something white and radiant caught my eye, like the spots you get after being blinded by the sun. I nearly threw myself to the ground in spinning about trying to catch a glimpse of it, but after my vision settled down, I finally managed to recognise it: a snowy white cat slinking across a short brick wall at the edge of the darkness.

Was it...? I swallowed a gob of nervous phlegm and stalked over towards it, sticking my hand out and making those weird kissing noises people make to get cats’ attention, quietly enough so that the randomers wouldn’t hear me. It looked like it was cleaning itself; at least that’s what I guessed it was probably doing.

‘Hey,’ I said, after making those noises just ended up with me spitting all over myself. The quivering white shape didn’t respond. ‘Hey,’ I said again, this time louder. ‘Oi!’

The cat stopped what it was doing and flung its head round, expressionless but glowing with fury. Its eyes were as green as a summer field, and I felt a cold sensation rush down my spine. My hand-eye coordination was ruined, but I still tried to stick my hand out and coax it towards me.

Just as I thought it was taking an interest in me, the cat pulled back in terrified revulsion and scarpered across the brickwork. I stumbled after it for a second or two, before getting a hold of myself and watching it bound down into the street and off into the night. A feeling like quicksand came over me. I started feeling numb, and wavy, and the fat line of ket finally clutched its woolly fingers around my brain. I sat down on the hard, stony ground and felt like I was going to be sick. Then I was sick. An unexpected surge of gruel-coloured puke dropped out of my mouth and onto the ground with an echoing splat. I heard the ironic cheers of the onlookers as my brain felt like it’d been flushed away like toilet water. I felt like my body collapsed into a pile of ribbons. Before I knew it, everything real that was standing around me dissolved into a bunch of flashing lights, and I dropped out of life and into a deep, black hole.

• • •

There was short window in my life where Eva Carrow didn’t exist. She wasn’t there. What took the space that might’ve been viewed as ‘her’ was instead a phantasmagorical stream of kaleidoscopic images rattling around the nervous system of her body. If she had a soul, it had, for all intents and purposes, momentarily vanished. Lights and colours and synthetic hypnagogia came and went; entire worlds and cosmic spaces rose and crumbled. Pyramids, spirals, stars, shimmering beams, and circles over circles over circles flickered in and out over a background of the deepest, darkest, never-ending blackness that a consciousness had ever touched. Black as space. Eva Carrow wasn’t lingering in the neurons of an intoxicated cerebrum anymore; she had shot across galaxies into the furthest limits of the unobservable universe. She was where heaven, hell and all departed thoughts resided. Eva Carrow had disintegrated.

I remember sound coming back to me, a few seconds before I could see again. It was like my mind had dropped back into my head like an eight-ball into a pocket. I woozily tried to focus and let my drunk senses fit themselves back into something recognisable. Someone had their hands on my shoulders. There was a wide collection of feelings beginning to make themselves known to me across my tired body – a bit of pain, a bit of warmth, a bit of wetness, or something like wetness. I looked up and eventually my crooked eyeballs met with Murder’s jet-black spots. She was repeating my name to me.

I mumbled something incomprehensible.

‘Fuckin hell...’ I heard her mutter to herself. ‘Evz, you there? Are you with us?’

‘I’m with you, Murder,’ I mumbled as she came back into focus. To my anaesthetised horror, a small crowd of people were standing around me, which was to be expected, I suppose. For some reason they all looked extremely tall and distant, like they were looking down at me from somewhere higher up.

Murder smiled. ‘Christ, there we go. Thought we were gonna have to ring an ambulance when I saw you out here.’

I groaned in appreciation.

‘How’d you get so fucked, mate? What happened? You were solid bout an hour ago.’

I shrugged and gently wiped some saliva (or whatever) from my lips and chin. My feelings of stupidity and sadness were balanced out by my numb fuckedness. ‘Can we just... go or something?’ I said. ‘I’m battered.’

‘Uh, yeah, sure,’ Murder said. ‘The thing’s over now, anyway.’

‘It’s over?’

‘Yeah, Necrofantasia just finished. I thought you’d left or something, I dunno. Now I see you’ve been sittin out here hoovering up our ket, eh?’

‘Nah, I just...’

‘I’m jokin, Eva, I’m jokin. Let’s get you up... oh, uh, yeah...’ Murder trailed off as she spoke. My heart would’ve jumped, if it hadn’t been tranquilised.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Nothin, just... I dunno, but,’ she drew her head closer to my ear, ‘don’t freak out when you stand up, okay?’

Oh god, I thought. Murder always did that – tell me not to freak out about something, which caused me to become instantly terrified. I think she genuinely believed doing this would protect me from becoming freaked out, since she was always shocked whenever I lost my shit over something immediately afterwards. I wondered what’d happened. I’ve pissed myself, haven’t I, I thought. Or maybe I’ve shat myself. Oh, christ, I hope I haven’t shat myself.

Murder pulled me up on my feet. I was still feeling ropey, so at first I didn’t notice anything weird going on, but after a head rush and a couple of seconds to get my balance, I realised that the car park wasn’t quite as I left it. I thought it was just my depth perception going to shit, but as I tried to walk away from the half-circle of onlookers, things became disturbingly clear. ‘What the... fuck... what...’

‘Yeah,’ Murder said. ‘Yeah.’

The exact spot where I’d passed out had become the centre of this weird circular dip in the ground, halfway between a crater and a pothole, several feet across and maybe a couple of feet deep. It was like the ground had given way beneath me. But something told me that that wasn’t what’d happened. The hole was perfectly formed, like it had been immaculately cut into the ground. It was perfect. Like the mould of a half-sphere. It looked completely unnatural. Suddenly I noticed something in the eyes of the people standing around, looking down at me. My grotty, ketty nauseousness started to give way into another horrible feeling. Something raw and terrifying.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘I dunno,’ said Murder. ‘The ground’s all bent up.’

‘God, how fuckin heavy is she?’ I heard someone say.

Murder helped me up from the little hole. I was a mess. My hair was mangled. My clothes were all fucked up. I stepped back to take a look at where I’d been sitting. Now I saw it from the outside, the sort-of-dent-hole-thing looked even weirder, a perfect circle carved into a random patch of the car park.

‘D’you think it’s fracking?’ someone said, possibly to me, although I ignored them and continued staring.

‘What happened?’ I said again.

‘Looks like the tarmac broke or something,’ Murder said.

‘Look at that, though!’ someone else said. ‘It’s like, exactly circle-shaped. That’s fuckin well weird!’

‘Yeah, how’d that happen?’ another voice said.

‘Fuck...’ I muttered to myself. My senses were messed up; the world didn’t feel all that real, but I knew it was. Something weird had happened. I could feel my pulse rising, and my breath becoming thicker and harder to pull in and out. People were looking down into the hole, but they were also looking at me. People I didn’t know were looking at me. Everybody was piling out of the club and surrounding us. I could feel the dread tingling out from the back of my neck. That word kept sounding off around me. Weird.

‘Christ, are you alright, Eva?’ came a familiar voice at the side of me. I turned around and, of all people, Gabbie was next to me, cautiously steering herself around the incline.

‘I’m fine,’ I told her.

‘What happened? Rick told me the pavement caved in or something.’

‘It’s fine, don’t worry about it,’ I told her. I looked up and behind her, standing at the other side of the car park, was Rick, his eyes trained on me, not just scowling anymore, but fully leering at me with a strange intensity. My eyes met his, and in the second that they read what he seemed to be trying to say to me, the tingling of dread foamed and fizzed and flushed through my body, and my nerves burned with panic. Panic. Panic. Fuck. My breathing got heavier and heavier. I started to shake.

‘Eva, are you alright?’ Gabbie said to me.

I staggered away from them a bit, but suddenly my chest folded in on itself and I fell to the floor, one hand on the stony tarmac, the other clutching my chest as my brain scrambled to get itself in order and begin carrying out the breathing exercises I’d learned several years ago.

‘Hey, hey, get away from her, back the fuck off! Let her breathe!’ I heard Murder spit. She knelt down next to me and asked me if I was alright. I nodded as I swallowed the air as best I could.

‘You okay, yeah? You okay?’

I forced myself out of the moment and breathed and breathed and breathed until I thought I was never going to calm down. It took a while to steady myself again, but eventually the surging, blood-shivering feeling inside of me finally eased off a little bit, and the invisible hand had let go of my lungs. I didn’t feel like I was going to explode anymore, but I was still terrified. I was still shaking with fear.

‘I’m okay,’ I lied. ‘I’m good.’