I meet a girl with drugs and we go to the bathroom to take them, lock ourselves in a stall and she gives me a handjob while I cut the powder on top of the cistern. She keeps going while I bend over and snort the first line, and fireworks go off behind my eyes while I go off in her hand, then while I slide down to the floor with my pants round my ankles she presses one nostril closed and clears up the other line. She sits on the toilet lid, crosses one leg over the other and rubs the leftovers into her gums. Her face is strikingly attractive, her cheekbones high and her jaw firm, her neck long and smooth, her eyes an alarming shade of blue that seems almost unreal. She wears green heels with an emerald green cocktail dress, has dark hair and pale skin and told me her name is Laurie.
She lights a cigarette and says, “How do you know Ryan?”
Still sitting, I work my pants back up my legs. “From school.”
“Old friends, huh?”
“Guess so. How d’you know him?”
“We’re new friends. I don’t even know how old he is. It’s not on the balloons.”
“He’s twenty-seven,” I say. “Same as me.”
“And his dad owns this hotel.”
“Yeah.”
“How many hotels does your dad own?”
I laugh. “None, but I’m sure he’s working on it.”
She takes her handbag from the floor and reaches inside, takes out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. She lights one, then offers the pack to me but I wave it off.
“They’ll kill you one day,” I say.
She shrugs. “Something has to.”
“Should we go back out?”
Laurie blows smoke in my face. “Let’s.”
We go back out to the party. Ryan’s father, though not present, has given his son usage of his hotel’s largest event room for his birthday party. From the looks of things, everyone Ryan knows, or has ever known, is here. There are faces I vaguely recognise from school, though names are not forthcoming. We go to the bar and grab a couple of drinks.
“So what do you do, Laurie?”
“I’m an actress,” she says.
“Yeah? Have I seen you in anything?”
She gives me a secretive smile and says, “Probably not.”
I look round the room. The lights are dim, the corners of the room mostly in darkness, hiding what the people there are doing. There are entertainers in the crowd, guys and girls done up like clowns and mimes, going round on unicycles juggling, eating fire, squirting water from plastic flowers on their lapels. It’s almost like a kid’s party, except at the end of the room there is a stage, and on either side of it dance naked women while in the centre of the stage stands a man in a tatty jumper with a thick beard reading poetry that no one is listening to, but he seems entirely lost within his own world and doesn’t care whether people are paying him any attention or not. Even if anyone wanted to, no one can hear him over the music.
“This party,” Laurie says, looking round, seeing all the things I’m seeing. “It doesn’t know what it wants to be.”
“That’s Ryan. Throw everything at the wall, then give it enough money to make sure it sticks.”
“I’m looking for the petting zoo,” she says. “You see it?”
I point to the dark corners of the room, the couples there with heads and hands in each other’s laps. “There,” I tell her. “In the dark.”
“Have you seen Ryan?”
“Not to talk to, not yet.” I look round the room. I can’t see him, but chances are he’s probably swamped by the usual crowd of sycophants, telling him what a great party he’s throwing, wishing him a happy birthday, laughing like hyenas at his jokes. Someone knocks against me, a couple dancing though the room is cramped. I don’t recognise the music playing, and I can’t see a DJ, which surprises me, as Ryan isn’t one to simply plug in an iPod and hit shuffle, but it’s early still and I imagine there is more entertainment to come, probably a live band or two.
Laurie finishes her drink and hands me her glass. “I’m going to see if I can find him,” she says.
“Do you want me to come with?”
“No, I’ll find you. I’ll stand in a dark corner and shout Mark! Mark!”
“I’ll come running.”
“Be sure you do.” She turns away and disappears into the crowd, and I’m wondering if maybe she’s one of those sycophants, desperate to be near Ryan, to make sure he sees their face so he knows they were here, knows they made the effort to show up and smile at him and flirt with him and laugh at his jokes, because I can’t see any other reason why she would go off to try and find him.
The dancing couple are now writhing on the ground, dry-humping. I step away, lose myself among the bodies of strangers, carrying Laurie’s empty glass, the rim marked with the red of her lips. I finish my own drink and take the glasses back to the bar, and I’m waiting to order another one and hoping that Laurie will not be long when I feel a hand clap my shoulder and I turn and Ryan is grinning back at me with his ridiculously white teeth.
“Mark,” he says, his voice smooth and laid-back. His skin is tanned like he’s been somewhere hot, and his blonde locks have been bleached lighter. Looking over his shoulder, it seems he’s alone. “I thought it was you. Glad you could make it.”
“Hey, Ryan.” I hold out my hand and we shake. “Happy birthday.”
He shrugs and says, “Shit, it’s just another excuse for a party, right?”
“Since when have you needed an excuse?”
He grins. “How’ve you been?”
“I’m good. How about you – or do I even need to ask?”
He holds out his hands. “Things speak for themselves. Hey, take a walk with me, let’s talk.”
We leave the bar, head out into the centre of the room. He leans close to me, says in a conspiratorial voice, “Something’s about to happen.”
“What?”
He presses a finger to his lips and keeps grinning. “Just wait.”
I look at the stage and notice the poet and the naked dancers are all gone. “Let me guess,” I say. “A band?”
He keeps smiling. “Man, just wait. Anyway, you enjoying yourself?”
“Yeah, I’m having a good time. I met this girl. She’s looking for you actually. You seen her?”
He shrugs. “Maybe.”
“She’s called Laurie.”
The name doesn’t seem to register. “Maybe.”
“She’s wearing a green dress, real beautiful girl.”
“Shit, Mark.” He waves an arm to indicate the room. “They’re all beautiful.”
“Not many of them are wearing green though.”
He laughs. “Yeah, but I’m not really paying attention to the colour of what they’re wearing.”
The lights begin to dim. Ryan’s face lights up like an excited kid, and he holds up a hand. “This is it,” he says. He squeezes my arm then turns towards the stage.
A hush falls over the darkening room, the music cut off, the voices lowering to a murmur, then complete silence. Above the stage, a screen is slowly lowered into view. I turn to Ryan, whisper, “You made a movie?” but he doesn’t answer.
The screen lights up, a distorted image. It begins to focus. I’m half-expecting Ryan to play some homemade sex tape, his latest conquest, wanting everyone in the room to see the latest beautiful model he has bedded. On the screen, there’s a room, the walls discoloured with mould and strips of peeling paper. There is a bed, and on the bed lies a woman. She is naked. I’m not surprised. I look at Ryan beside me, his face lit by the screen, and he’s wearing an expectant smile, all his teeth on show. He isn’t blinking, he’s frozen, rapt.
The woman pushes herself up on one elbow, looks into the screen. From a corner of the room, someone applauds her breasts. Her face is covered, concealed behind a kabuki mask. Her hair is dark, frames her face, covers her shoulders. Her eyes are incredibly blue, the same blue as Laurie’s. The hair is the same too. I stare at the girl a little harder, imagine her in the green cocktail dress, and I remember she said she was an actress.
A man steps into view, his broad back and bare buttocks filling the screen. He rounds the bed. From the front, he has a barrel chest, thick arms, the muscles of a bodybuilder. The girl – Laurie? – follows him with her eyes. When he’s beside her she lies back down. He kneels beside the bed, and he’s wearing a mask too, a Batman cowl that hides the top half of his face, but his mouth is on show, and his top lip has a cleft palate split. His eyes are dark and hungry as he looks the girl over, and he’s smiling.
I feel uneasy. The girl on the screen, I’m almost certain it is Laurie. Glancing round the room I try to find her, but the faces are all identical in the dark. I turn to Ryan. “Who’s the girl?”
He frowns at me, turns back to the screen.
“Is it Laurie?”
He looks flustered. “Who the fuck is Laurie?”
The man is unknown to me. I’ve never met anyone with a cleft palate. He lowers the uncovered bottom half of his face to the girl’s naked body, and he seems to sniff her, his eyes closed, he moves up and down the length of her, taking in her smell. He stops beside her shoulder, opens his eyes and exhales slowly. It dawns on me now that the movie is silent, there is no sound, not even background music. Complete silence.
Then the man wraps his misshapen lips around first one nipple, then the other. The girl writhes below him. Then takes his face from her chest and buries his nose in her hair, smelling it, then he takes her arms and lifts them above her head, clamps her wrists in handcuffs I hadn’t noticed hanging from the headboard. At the foot of the bed he binds her ankles, then crawls up the mattress between the V of her splayed legs. His penis looks hard and vicious. He uses his hand first, and the girl writhes again, her head pushed back into the pillows.
Ryan is breathing hard. His tongue sticks out between his lips and he’s biting it. Feeling unnerved, I look round the room again, hoping to see Laurie making her way towards us, but she’s not. Everyone is standing very still, no one is making a sound. Everyone is watching the screen.
He’s using his mouth now, the horns of his mask bobbing up and now as his glistening tongue probes and slides out of his mouth and the girl is straining against her binds, then he’s up and inside her and they fuck, hard and fast. It doesn’t go on very long before he pulls out and uses his hand to finish, spilling his seed thick and white upon her stomach and chest. The girl lies there, breathing hard. The man gets off the bed. Already his throbbing dick begins to shrink.
He rounds the bed and goes behind the camera, disappears. The girl in the mask faces the ceiling, catching her breath. She turns her face as the man reappears. One arm is behind his back, hiding the Bowie knife he’s carrying. Beside me, Ryan is almost panting.
The man rounds the bed again. The girl shows no sign of alarm, though with her face covered and without volume it’s hard to tell, but her eyes are casual and relaxed. The man is talking to her. There are pauses in his speech, which give the impression she is responding. The man smiles. He lashes out then, grabs a handful of her hair in his left hand, then he brings out the knife. It catches the dim light and gives off a wicked glint. The girl’s eyes are wide now. He slashes the knife across her throat, then brings it down again, buries it deep and begins to hack through the gristle and bone while she convulses on the bed and her blood sprays over his muscular chest, spatters the cowl and his uncovered mouth, and spills onto the bed.
He stops stabbing and cutting, stands before the camera bathed in her blood, the knife coated in it and dripping. The girl lies very still. He comes back round the bed, towards the camera, smiles into the lens with his split lip, then disappears out of shot. The screen goes dark as the room’s lights come back on. I look at Ryan. He’s wearing his usual expression now, eyes half-closed, laid-back stoner smile, the hungry look I earlier saw totally gone. He slaps me on the arm, says, “Enjoy it?”
I don’t know what to say. He’s acting so casual. The rest of the room is going back about their business as if the movie never happened. Music has started to play.
“The DJ will be here soon,” Ryan says. “I’ll see you round.” He turns to go.
“Ryan –” but I don’t know what I mean to say, to ask, and I choke up, and he raises an eyebrow.
“Hey,” he says, “if you find that Laurie chick, bring her over and say hi, huh?”
Then he’s gone.
I stand alone in the middle of the room. I look around, try to see her, but still I can’t. Above the stage, the screen is ascending, gone, like it never even appeared. Ryan is gone, too. I can’t see him anymore. People begin to dance around me as the music gets louder. People are smiling and laughing, having a good time. Someone knocks my elbow, spills a drink down my sleeve. They might apologise, but I don’t hear them.
Stumbling, I leave the dance floor, go to the bar though I don’t want a drink. I need a vantage point, somewhere I can press my back and observe the room, see the faces now the light is better, take everyone in, but still Laurie is nowhere to be found.
An idea takes me then and I go to the toilets. One stall is occupied, I can hear banging from inside. I stand on the rim of the neighbouring toilet and peer over the top, see that the girl pressed against the cubicle wall, her legs wrapped around the man, is not Laurie. “What are you looking at?”
I almost fall off the toilet stepping down. I’m about to leave when I see the man at the sinks, washing his hands. The size of him. He wears a black suit with a white shirt under the jacket. His dark hair is shaved close to his scalp. He feels my eyes and looks up, smiles at me with his split lip. “Hello,” he says. There is a muted quality to his voice, like his tongue has been tied in a knot. Upon his collar I can see red dots, a splash of something.
I leave the bathroom, fall back into the party. On the stage the DJ has set up his table. A cheer goes up as he takes his place behind the decks. The lights begin to dim, then flash. I can’t see Laurie. I can’t see Ryan. It dawns on me that the man washing his hands will soon finish, will leave the bathroom and be right behind me, so I leave, I hurry away.
Light sticks fill the room, fluorescent pinks and yellows and greens shake into life above people’s heads. The DJ plays his music. The people begin to dance.
by 
Paul Heatley
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