This Is Yr Life

Chapter Sixteen

They sat at the table as each song melted into the next and limbs of those around them grew progressively looser. Jessica urged Kyle to drink faster as she tapped her fingers to the beat of the song. To her, it did not matter what song played. She knew it, mouthing the words and throwing her arms up and spinning around in her chair as Kyle sat nursing his drink.

He had decided on ordering the same thing as Jessica when at the bar. The barman catching him off guard when asking what he wanted. He had spluttered and ummed and ahhed and then just decided to say he wanted two rum and lemonades when the barman started looking around for others who knew what they wanted. As the barman had poured the drinks, Kyle surveyed the bar. The crowd was, for the most part, younger than him. They wore t-shirts, the boys anyway, emblazoned with large letters that Kyle couldn’t read in the fleeting light of the spotlights that washed across the room for seconds at a time. The girls wore short skirts and flat shoes and their hair was tied in ponytails that cascaded down their necks.

The barman was the same one who he had served him the last time he was here, but in the darkness, Kyle was sure he did not recognise him. He handed the drinks to him and asked if he had a tab, Kyle said no and instead tapped his card on the reader, watching for the orange light to turn green before going back to Jessica.

She was singing along to whatever song was playing when he returned.

‘I love this one.’

‘What is it?’

‘Kyle, you’re like someone from the past. I swear you don’t even realise what world you live in. It’s amazing. It’s by this band called The Lactose Rave.’

‘I’ve never heard of them,’ Kyle said, but he found himself tapping his foot. Jessica sang along until the song ended and something new came on. Kyle finished his drink.

‘Your round,’ he said and Jessica stared through him.

‘Are you having a laugh? I waited through six or seven songs for you to finish that, you owe me for waiting.’

‘Seriously?’

She went anyway.

‘Here you go, a double rum and lemonade.’ Jessica sat down opposite him and held her drink up for Kyle to clink.

‘Cheers,’ they said together.

‘So, you don’t like music, you don’t seem to know how to act like a normal person, I’m not even wholly convinced you are a real person. What do you do?’ Jessica took a sip at her drink, her smirk magnified behind the glass and the corners of her mouth and her lipstick stretched from behind the weak amber inside. Kyle took more gulps than normal from his glass. It was sweet, but stronger than the ones he had ordered. He coughed.

‘I don’t know. Stuff. Come here sometimes, hang out at home with my friends.’

He had called Finn and Lewis friends just a couple of times before. Once, when his sister was in town and asked if he was free to see her; he had told her that, unfortunately, he was meeting friends for something that had been organised for too long to cancel right now. She should have let him know sooner.

She hadn’t asked him the next time she was in the city.

Other times, he had used them as excuses to avoid meeting people for drinks after work, even after halfway-agreeing in the initial instance. They had asked to join them when he first started at the company, to accompany them down the road once the day ended at four PM on the last day of the week. But Kyle, feeling uneasy about meeting new people, never sure of whether they would talk all night long or if he would be resigned to tearing the labels from beer bottles, or shredding coasters, or reading and rereading menus as they laughed and remembered days and happenings that had come well before, and he would laugh with them, too, but only because he would see them laughing first, and instinctively join in, regardless of him understanding why they were laughing in the first place.

Jessica smiled. ‘Well that’s a start,’ and they cheersed, knocking their glasses together and both spilling some of their drink over their hands. Jessica started giggling, she covered her mouth and said ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ while dabbing at the spilt drinks on the table and wiping Kyle’s hand with a napkin. She scrunched the sodden paper into a ball and dropped it into the empty glass in between them.

‘What do you like? Nah, that’s lame. If you could f**k off work and everything, this town, your responsibilities, whatever, even me and this conversation, what would you do?’

Kyle shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ And he truly did not know.

But he thought of the days sitting with Chloe, and he thought of the travels he could have had. He thought of the things that meant he would be able to get away. He thought of having the chance to run around the world, while now, he’d done little more than walk a mile. He saw himself on planes landing in exotic countries where nobody knew who he was, where he didn’t understand them and they didn’t understand him. He thought of tasting weird foods that couldn’t be made in a microwave. He saw the stamps in his passport and his parents welcoming him back after two, five, ten years, not recognising him.

‘Yeah, I’m not sure. There’s too much, I guess.’

‘You’re an odd one, Kyle.’ She looked around the bar and towards the dancefloor.

‘Shall we dance? The music here is so good.’

‘I can’t dance, though.’

Jessica scoffed and downed her drink, tipping the bottom of the cup towards the ceiling and wiping her mouth after the glass was empty.

‘Neither can I.’

Jessica left her seat and moved towards the dancefloor, one which was already half-crowded by couples and groups. She was the only one dancing by herself. Kyle sat with his drink and watched. The song changed and then changed again three minutes later. He gazed around for Summer and Rebecca and the others. They were sat at their table shouting across bottles and glasses to each other over the music. Kyle watched them from the beginning of one song to the end of the next and all the while they talked and talked without any lag or drop in conversation. As he looked back at Jessica, he saw that the dance floor had filled even more.

In between songs, Jessica moved to the bar and ordered a shot of tequila and another rum and lemonade. She was served much quicker than Kyle, much quicker than anybody else around her who seemed to dissolve into the shadows when she made her way to the bar. Standing on the step that ran around the base, she looked taller than anybody else. She waved her hand at the barman, leaning forward and was handed her drinks almost immediately.

Before doing the shot, she turned to Kyle and offered one to him, too. He thought about it before eventually shaking his head and watching Jessica do the drinking herself. Before returning to the dancefloor, she looked at him and smiled.

It was then that Kyle wished he had gotten a shot, too.

He watched her dance in the middle of the ever-opening space before them. She danced with her drink in hand, somehow avoiding spilling any of it over the rim and down onto the floor or even herself. As she danced, boys in their t-shirts came up to her, leaning in, putting their hands around her waist and Kyle almost stepped in, but she didn’t need his help. She evaded any unwanted contact by twisting and turning and spinning and moving fluidly around in her own space. Anybody who came near soon decided that this girl was definitely not interested in anything but enjoying her time by herself, and so soon she was left entirely alone to her dancing. She was right about not being able to dance, Kyle thought, but he knew he could do little better, perhaps no better at all. She spun once more and saw Kyle with his eyes fixed on her movements. She motioned him to join and he nearly did. He felt his foot tapping again, he felt his shoulders starting to groove with every rise and fall of the beat and he even found himself humming along to music that he did not know or recognise. As Jessica waved for him to join her, he got to his feet and stepped towards the bar.

‘What can I get you?’

‘One tequila, please. A shot of tequila.’

‘No shit.’

Kyle had drunk tequila just once before in his life, during one of those nights when they wandered the fields and skulked back home under a cloud of hungover regret the next day. It was unusual for them to have spirits, and if they ever did it would be vodka or rum or on special occasions, whiskey. But one time, Buzz had brought a bottle of tequila that was mostly full all for them and they had known about shots but felt that if they were going to be properly drinking that night, then they may as well not worry about drinking it like it was supposed to, but instead drank straight from the bottle.

They had passed the bottle around, each glug feeling more wicked than the last and after it had gone round just three or four times, Kyle was unsure, they realised they had passed the point of absolutely zero return. He remembered that it was Hammy who had been the first to throw up into his own lap, too wasted to make it to his feet, but this had worked in the favour of the others as his mishaps, his arrogance, his inexperience managed to more-or-less sober the rest of them up, if only to avoid the inevitability of them having to sleep in a room that reeked of vomit.

The next day, Kyle had walked home alone. He could not describe the pain that he was in and did not want to explain the night’s events to his parents. When he arrived home, he holed himself away in his room with the curtains closed and the lights off and the door locked as a warning to all that he must not be disturbed. He had sworn to himself that tequila was not something that agreed with him.

But now, he was older and already enough drinks deep that the taste, something he still recalled sometimes when hearing anything even remotely related to tequila, shouldn’t be half as bad as he perhaps feared. The barman placed the shot before him.

‘Training wheels?’

‘Training wheels?’

‘Do you want a lemon slice and salt?’

‘Oh, no thanks,’ Kyle said and he took the shot in his hand and tipped it towards his mouth, swallowing it all in one, aside from the few drops that trickled out from either side of his mouth. He slammed the glass down and the barman asked if he would like another.

‘No, I’m good.’

He was trying to act as if he had done this whole ritual a hundred times and more. He stood at the edge of the dancefloor as Jessica still shuffled from side to side all by herself. The people around her were dancing close, their arms flailed, and their heads bobbed up and down. Sometimes, they screamed into the air and as the song started to break down, their knees seemed to buckle from beneath them before they shot back up again in a cheer of total unison.

Chloe’s friends were out of sight. They had not been dancing this time and the view of their table was obscured by the crowd around the bar. They had been made invisible, unseeable, by the riptide of every other body in the room. Throngs of people aching to be seen and noticed and heard and Summer and the others were content to sit and be seen only by those who they wanted to see them.

Jessica was still dancing and Kyle with the taste of tequila still burned into his throat watched her between the lights. He looked at her as she moved her arms and they caught each other's eye. Jessica did not have to urge Kyle to join her. He stepped into the space in front of him and danced beside her. Under the light, they could see only each other.