Nope. Good old internet porn it is. Maybe a hotel office scene featuring a hot concierge who seduces an unsuspecting guest.
I scrabble around for some tissues.
T
EN
Picture a glass tank with glass so thick it’s thicker than the wall of a house.
And in this tank, there’s a perfect specimen of a tiger shark. Jaws hinged open bigger than your face, gums and teeth sticking out so far they look like they’re going to slip out of its mouth.
Suspended, like it’s floating in the air.
Black eyes staring right at you like any minute now it’s going to come back to life, bust itself out of that tank, and when it does, it’s going to eat you up like the tasty little treat you are.
And then just a few metres away from this crazy shark tank, close to the big white wall of the cavernous space, picture a wooden box with a double mattress on it.
There’s a duvet and pillows on it, and the duvet’s all crumpled up. The bedsheets are all coming untucked at the sides in big ruffles, and on the bedsheets there’s brown sweat rings and old tights and dirty discarded pants.
Then on the floor next to this bed, picture a deep blue rug and a bedside table, littered with wrinkled tissues and condoms and cigarette butts and period-stained clothes and lube and pregnancy tests and empty vodka bottles and a stack of Polaroid pictures with a woman in shades smiling and, no playing, a little stuffed white dog.
This is the place Mia took me to our first time hanging out together – an art gallery.
You couldn’t look at that bed and say that the artist had insane technical talent. Or even admire the dedication and hard work they’d put into becoming the best fucked-up bed maker in the world, better than all the other fucked-up bed makers out there.
But in a world where you had to be perfect, and clever, and tall, and handsome, and sporty, and musical, and excel at everything you did, all the time – here, well here were objects that were either ugly, or scary, or disgusting, or just straight up dead.
And behind these objects, there were people. People who took the messed-up things in their lives, and shamelessly turned them into art.
Huge, ugly, beautiful pieces of art that sold for millions of pounds.
But that’s not the point.
The point is, that confidence, that honesty – lying here on this hotel bed, in the dark, with the lightning bolt clarity you get after you shoot your load – I can for sure look back and say that’s what had eighteen-year-old Sean hooked there in that art gallery.
And Mia? Mia was the one who opened up my eyes to all of that.
E
LEVEN
This is me, watching a pile of clothes going round and round, round and round. Frothy water bubbling, washing machine humming.
This is me, sitting in an orange plastic bucket chair, in a row of five plastic bucket chairs, sandwiched between two aunties.
They smell like the sausage my ama used to make.
This is me, hanging out with the oldies under the yellow lights, between walls of washing machines and tumble dryers, with a bottle of Kaoliang in my hand.
This is me, face glowing, heart smashing, brain strobing.
I take my phone out my pocket. I poke the screen. Pokey poke poke.
Can’t find Mia’s message.
Right, right, right, I binned it – and her number.
New message it is then. Tap in the number which I remember like my date of birth.
Got into a car accident. In hospital but don’t worry about me.
No kiss at the end, send. In my head, Sean dusts his hands off and pats himself on the back.
Another swig of Kaoliang is a swig of air, so I drop the bottle and it clunks and rolls on the floor. The old aunties don’t even look up from their magazines.
Eyeballs on the screen, three dots appear under my message. She’s typing.
Three dots disappear. She’s thinking.
Eyeballs on the screen. Nothing.
Keypad. Tap in the digits.
Ring ring, ring ring.
Answer machine says, Hi, you’ve reached Mia. I can’t pick up right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks! Answer machine beeps.
Hi, I say. So basically I got run over by a milk lorry. Not sure how long I’ll be in hospital for.
