JAMES
16 January 1993
Seventeen
They had reached the stage of the evening when it was imperative that they empty the restaurant of all the champagne on the premises.
That, to James’s increasingly inebriated mind, made complete and utter sense.
‘Here, Jackson.’ He leaned back in the elegant dining chair and gesticulated to the maître d’ of the Cock restaurant, who looked as if he was having a tough night – though why, when he would be amply reimbursed for any damage the Libertines might commit, James couldn’t for the life of him understand. He flung a strong arm around the man’s shoulders and hugged him to him, to Jackson’s apparent discomfort. Having your gaff wrecked by the Libs was a badge of honour among Oxford restaurant staff. Or it should be. Part of university folklore. Tradition. James was a strong believer in tradition – or, rather, he was when he had drunk such an excessive amount he needed something as concrete as this to hold on to, rather than grasping at more nebulous concepts and sounding vacuous.
He didn’t drink excessively, these days. Rowing precluded that. You didn’t become an athlete – a stroke for the men’s heavyweight blue boat – by sating your body with alcohol nor by shirking training or ergo practice thanks to the mother of all hangovers: something he would experience tomorrow, he knew. Which was why it made sense to stop the drinking now and dispose of the remaining Bollinger by some other means. No use leaving anything for other punters to drink, not that any other punters would be visiting this fine establishment in the immediate future. Perhaps they had rather trashed it. His shoe slithered on a sliver of glass beneath his chair as he took in the table strewn with smashed goblets: domes fractured into shards, splinters dusting the lone breadbasket and glinting on the pats of butter. The plates, slick with gravy from the duck, had been whisked away but the side plates had been smashed, Tom standing on a chair and Cassius on the table, which creaked as it took his hefty weight; holding the crockery up high and then throwing them down like a bunch of Greek tourists. Jackson and his staff, including two young waitresses who looked at them wide-eyed, had left the debris – jagged pieces of china and finer parings. He supposed it made sense to wait until they’d seen the full extent of their destruction. The clutter now looked pitiful, though those crashes had been satisfyingly noisy at the time.
His stomach fizzed. That would be the burgundy on top of the champers, the duck and the Dover sole. God, he felt sick: a physical nausea and also something verging on self-disgust or distaste. Of course, his body would bounce back from this night of excess but he was proud of its definition: those abs made getting laid with whomever he wanted a foregone conclusion. He slid his hands under his waistcoat to surreptitiously check his definition was still there.
‘This won’t do!’ Tom, more bladdered than usual, more intoxicated than James, was weaving his way towards him, hips banging against the edge of the table, his broad, pleasant face a cheery red. You wouldn’t know there was a sharp brain beneath the sheen of his skin and that foppish hair. He was on course for a double first for he had the critical ability to judge the exact amount of work required to excel. James had shared tutorials with Tom in the summer term of their second year – a time he had spent rowing, punting and, pre-Sophie, getting laid with as many different girls as possible – and had relied on Tom heavily but had still been surprised by the extent to which his friend had blagged it. Neither of them frequented the Union – old fogeys; has-beens who never had been, in Tom’s words – but despite this, he sensed that Tom, with a place lined up at the Conservative Research Department post-finals, could do as he intended and forge a stellar political career.
Not that you would think it now. ‘This won’t do at all.’ Tom slammed the flat of his palm down on the table with a frenzied beam then sniffed. He had snorted several lines of coke, which helped explain his uncharacteristic volubility. ‘We need more champers, don’t we, Jackson?’ He clamped the maître d’ in a forceful hug. ‘More champers. More champers. More Bolly! We need more Bolly and we need it now!’
There was a general braying of agreement from George, Nicholas and the Honourable Alec, the chaps at their end of the table; and a rallying cry from the other end where Hal was dozing on the floor, his midnight-blue tails dusted with glass; his shirt rucked up from its waistband to expose a delicate, pale arc of stomach flopping out. A dark stain bloomed at his crotch and he gave a low and fruity belch.
‘Let’s not drink it.’ James offered a note of caution. ‘Let’s waste it!’
Tom’s face broke into a smile of comprehension. ‘Come on, Jackson. All the Bolly. All the Bolly-olly-olly. Let’s drink it and then let’s piss it up the walls.’
The maître d’ put his hands up in a mild plea.
‘Come on, man? What’s the problem?’ Tom protested, as Nicholas roared and George undid his flies, preparing to take him literally. ‘We won’t really piss it – put your todger back, George. We’ll pour it away.’ And they half-hustled, half-jostled the man to the champagne fridge and watched as he withdrew the remaining ten bottles to add to the twenty already quaffed.
‘Come on, man!’ George, his penis stuffed back in his pants, the zip hastily pulled up, was in hectoring mood. ‘Open it, open it, open it! Christ. What’s wrong with you? Talk about fumbling . . .’
‘. . . And pour it away,’ Tom roared as Jackson, his hands shaking as he fiddled with the muselet, finally popped the first cork and began to empty it down the kitchen sink, the bubbles fizzing against the stainless steel. One of the waitresses ducked away; but the elder – a dark-haired girl, pretty in an obvious sort of way – stood by her boss, handing over bottle after bottle, her face rigid with disapproval. Small-minded pettiness. Well, bugger her. She was never likely to be able to do the same.
‘And the next!’ James cried. ‘Come on, my good man . . .’ He stood close to the maître d’, conscious of towering over this slight man – five-foot-eight at most – and of the potential threat of his presence. He stepped back a little: no need to be thuggish. It wasn’t his style. The plate-smashing and window-breaking he accepted as inevitable; part of the tradition of the Libertines, the havoc central to the ethos of the club, the general sense of entitlement and invincibility over those who had attended minor public school, or who’d been to comprehensives and whom he barely knew and certainly never mixed with. But there was no need to be boorish. He left that to the likes of Hal and Freddie who were coarse in their brutality; could not conceive of being civil as they were recklessly violent. James always made sure he apologised profusely for their destruction; was the first to whip out his fistfuls of notes and collate the money to compensate for their damage. Courtesy cost nothing, his mother had always taught him; and did much to ease problems and endear oneself.
‘And the next!’ chorused Tom, Nick and Alec. ‘All the Bolly! All the Bolly! All the Bolly! All the Bolly!’ Their voices surged into one great roar as they stomped over the broken crockery and swayed against the burgundy velvet curtains, which Cassius grasped, the velvet falling over him like the end of an act as the pole was wrenched from the wall.
‘Gentlemen, please.’ Jackson’s face was stretched tight, his voice fraught with panic as he glanced at the chunk of plaster protruding above the pole and the flakes of paint snowing down.
‘Whoops!’ Tom, as delighted as an errant schoolboy, beamed then turned to the maître d’ with the solicitude that would allow him to smooth many political differences in the future. ‘I’m terribly sorry, my dear man. We will, of course, reimburse you.’
Jackson still looked unsettled but demurred, exhaustion glazing his face; the awareness that his restaurant would be out of action for a few days and the upheaval this would require apparently registering, though James was sure they had trashed it before.
‘All the Bolly, all the Bolly!’ Alec, coked-up as usual, continued to chant, and they jostled their way to the kitchen and the mass uncorking. Like effervescent urine it frothed and foamed, fizzing down the plughole in one long golden stream.
‘In years to come,’ Tom flung a conspiratorial arm around his best friend, ‘we will be able to say: we were rich enough to pour our Bolly away . . . gilded youths, yup?’ He gave a discreet belch then laughed and pressed his wet lips to James’s cheek.
James extricated himself: not drunk enough to enjoy being kissed by Tom. He thought of other lips.
‘We need some women.’ The need was urgent.
‘Women!’ Tom shook his head. ‘The trouble with women is they’re such fucking hard work.’
George bent over a line of coke he had managed to assemble on the table, threw back his head and laughed.
‘Spike their drinks,’ said Sebastian. ‘Get them so mullered there’s no need for foreplay.’
James shivered. ‘Not my scene. I like them to appreciate what I’m doing.’
‘Jim doesn’t need that,’ Cassius drawled, as he watched him with barely concealed envy. ‘Touch of the Errol Flynn about him.’
James shrugged. No need to deny or confirm Cassius’s supposition. Hung like a Vittel bottle, as a girl once said.
‘Extra double shots of vodka,’ Seb persisted. ‘That’s what the rest of us have to do if we’re not going to stick to buggery. Spike their drink and fuck ’em hard.’
He emptied his glass in three swift gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously, then looked at James, directly, his pale eyes, in his pudgy, still-unformed face, fixed; hoping for a reaction. ‘Or slash their bike tyres so they can’t get away. No choice but to stay and get fucked.’
James didn’t smile. For a second he felt revulsion towards this Christ Church man, the wealthiest member of the club – his family had made millions through retail – but the one he knew the least about; his new money of too shiny a lustre, and not as trustworthy as the old money that bankrolled most of them. Then he shrugged. Seb was callow: a sexually inexperienced first-year trying too hard to be a man, but he was harmless, no? The boy smiled, rubbery lips pulled tight but his eyes still cold, and again James felt a shiver of unease: a need to distance himself; perhaps to get more drunk, or high, if he couldn’t go out and find himself a woman. To seek a fresh sensation that wouldn’t just distract but overwhelm him.
He nodded to George and, for once, bowed to the inevitable, snorting up the clean, sharp coke then waiting for the hit and, Christ, it was good and he felt good, he felt fucking invincible. What was he doing listening to Seb’s shit when he could go and get a girl now? More doing, less talking, because he was fucking gorgeous, wasn’t he? They all knew it: the Libertines, Soph and every other girl in Oxford. He was a fucking love god and he could go for hours; hung like a Vittel bottle, with the stamina of a rower, the tongue of a lizard, the lips of Jagger . . . well, no, not Jagger, fucking ugly bloke . . . but he was shit hot in bed, he knew that, and he was funny too; he was a fucking catch and much as he loved these guys, well, loved Tom at least, there were places to go, girls to see, the night was young and there was a whole night of loving ahead of him if he could scale Soph’s college wall – the spikes by the bike shed – and hammer on her door; or find someone fresh because that was what he craved right now: a new mouth, new breasts, new legs to wrap around his waist or cradle his ears, a new way of whimpering when she came, because of course she would come, this imaginary, new girl who was replete with possibility – because he was shit hot in bed, hung like a Vittel bottle . . .
A giggle – not the manly laugh he was known for but something younger and more joyful, his laugh as a seven-year-old before he was sent off to prep school and learned to man up – slipped out. A laugh of complicity and intimacy because he loved these guys just as he loved his girls, didn’t he? Well, no, not quite in the same way as he loved girls, he wasn’t gay, for God’s sake, but he did love Tom. His best friend since their first year at school; he’d do anything for him. Well, almost anything. God, how he loved him. He’d tell him now just how very much he loved him . . . his dearest friend; the best of chaps . . .
‘Here, Tom.’ He flung his arms around his shoulders and pulled him to him; proffered the kiss that he’d shunned from his friend earlier. ‘Let’s go and get some women.’
‘Women. The trouble with women is . . .’ Tom began.
‘Yeah, yeah. I know. The trouble with women is they’re such fucking hard work,’ he finished, and that giggle emerged again – high-pitched and joyful – because it was fucking funny. He was fucking funny. Why didn’t they all realise how funny he was?
‘The trouble with women is . . .’ Tom repeated.
‘They’ve got no backbone!’
‘No.’ Tom looked confused. ‘They’ve got no cock.’
‘Well, that can be rectified,’ he sniggered.
‘The trouble with women . . .’
The answer was so blindingly obvious, James couldn’t help but butt in, his laughter blasting the words straight out of him. ‘The trouble with women is they don’t know what the fuck they want!’
He doubled over and thought: now, why aren’t the others laughing? Instead of smashing plates or, in Seb’s case, trying to grope that poor girl. Pretty in an obvious way; skirt up to her arse; forehead crinkling as if she was seriously pissed off with him, though Seb was harmless, or he was pretty sure he was harmless, and she was dressed as if she was asking for it . . . skirt up to her arse and blouse cut low.
‘Oww!’ The girl squealed and her black eyes glared at Seb, who must have pinched her bum, he was looking so sheepish and holding his hands up in the air as if he was innocent, though he’d clearly sidled up behind her.
‘Gentlemen. You will have to leave, I’m afraid.’ Jackson’s face was crumpling in on itself like a rotting plum as he came towards Seb and it occurred to James that the girl might be his daughter. They had the same eyes – hard, dark blackberries in a clafoutis face – and he looked as if he wanted to hit him. ‘I really must insist that you leave the premises. Enough is enough. I mean it, now. Enough is enough.’
He pulled himself up to his full height and, for a moment, the air shimmered with the possibility of violence: a tension that radiated between the maître d’ and Seb, taut and tight. No one spoke – the tension spreading throughout the candlelit room as James tried to work out how the atmosphere had changed quite so quickly from something fun and jovial; the good-humoured destruction of the Libs who were gents, really they were, to this: something rather distasteful and socially awkward. The very opposite of the atmosphere they always managed to create.
He opened his mouth as he tried to think of something suitably solicitous but Tom stepped in.
‘My dear man, of course we will. A thousand apologies. Do tell us what we owe you?’ And then to Seb: ‘Come on, man. Let’s get some air. Time to call it a night, hey? Time to go home.’
But Seb was having none of it. ‘What the fuck! A chap pays a girl a compliment. Tells her she’s a bit of a looker – though I take that back; I take that back right now – and she objects. Can’t take it. Can’t take a compliment. What rot! What fucking rot.’ He looked around, incredulous, and for one terrible moment it looked as if his eyes were filling with tears.
‘My good man,’ James was stuffing notes into the maître d’s hand, £100, £200, £300 – not enough to touch the damage but enough hopefully to distract him.
‘It’s fucking rot, I say.’ Seb would not be quietened, wasn’t going to be ushered out gently, and suddenly there was a smash and a silvering of yet more glass as he lifted a chair and, before any of them realised quite what was happening, hurled it through the window and out into the street.
‘Ha!’ Into the dazed silence came a whoop from Hal’s end of the room where the Hon. Alec began clapping, slowly at first and then ferociously. ‘Bloody good show, man; bloody good show.’
But it wasn’t, was it? As George and Nick and Cassius and a dopey Hal, roused by the explosion of noise, joined in the applause and in the destruction; and Jackson moved into the foyer towards the restaurant’s phone, James locked eyes with Tom. A night in the cells wasn’t an option; would be a crushing embarrassment. They were invincible, yes, but neither of them needed this. And – and here he was dimly aware of the coke affecting his usually measured thinking – it would be them, wouldn’t it? The Libs who, Icarus-like, flew closest to the sun? Far better to slip away now, to let the younger chaps, those wreaking havoc now and smashing more glasses and – oh God, George was getting his cock out again while Hal was parking a tiger, a thick stream of vomit splaying from his flabby lips – take the rap.
All this was transmitted in one quick glance; a locking of eyes that required no further confirmation. And then they scarpered. Slipping from the scene as Jackson was on the phone to the police and the poor waitress stood cowering beside him, flattening herself against the wall as they squeezed past. James mouthed a sorry for it cost nothing to be civil, his mother always said, it helped smooth things over, for no one wanted any difficulty; and then they were out into the freezing January night.
‘Fucking hell.’ Tom ran his hands through his light-brown fringe, a compulsive gesture James recognised from his rare moments of high tension: the time aged seventeen when he thought he’d got a girlfriend back home pregnant; that late afternoon at school when they’d been caught smoking spliffs and for a brief moment in the headmaster’s study it looked as if they would be expelled.
‘Shh.’ His warning ended with a giggle.
‘I know. Fucking hell!’ Horror and delight, shock and awe were caught in his voice and then they were off – as a distant police siren began to wail up St Aldate’s towards them and down the High.
We are invincible, fucking invincible, James thought, and then: they’re getting closer – as they raced the sound, coattails flying, hearts thudding, legs burning as if straining to do the mother of all ergos; or the final torturous length of a rowing race.
His heart was throbbing against his ribs, this great muscle that never let him down, and he flew, one last surge of energy pushing him over the cobbles until they were there: had reached the sanctity of Tom’s college, Walsingham. The oak gates were locked and so they breached the wall, tails ripping as they negotiated the spikes; palms stinging as they grazed on the stone. But it didn’t matter for they were half-shushing, half-laughing. They were invincible, really they were. They had outwitted them all; they had made it. They were safe. Home.
He paused as he scaled the spikes, high up on the wall: close to the navy sky, the stars, the heavens and, yes, the leering gargoyles. King of the castle; and of all he surveyed. He caught his breath as he leaned against a tower; feeling the solidity of the stone beneath his fingers, the warmth of it; and its age: here for 400 years or more. Invincible, in a way they would never be.
‘Are you coming or what?’ Tom, safely down, called up; his eyes glinted, pools of warmth and trust. God, he loved him; would do anything to protect him. They’d been buttressed against the world since that first term at school; bound together through sport, prep, adolescence, that headmasterly bollocking; shared first experiences: the drug-taking – the spliffs and coke – and, he supposed, in their joint masturbatory fumbles, sex.
The night loomed down on him, all of a sudden, and he let go, landing lightly in the shadows, where the night porter, ensconced in front of his portable TV in the lodge, was unlikely to spy them; where their footsteps – tapping against the concrete – seemed to melt away.
‘Nightcap?’ Tom flung an arm around him, his breath warm on his cheek.
‘Nightcap,’ he agreed.