one night in Brentwood

I joined Hannah and Chad for an extension to her birthday drinks of the night before. The Swan was uncharacteristically noisy: a live duo performing Beatles covers. Chad bought Hannah a Guns n’ Roses T-shirt, which she decided to change into in the pub. She did it under cover of her zipper jacket, so her hands disappeared and her torso seemed to mutate, bumps forming and disappearing as, so it seemed, her body tried to eat her head. At this point the band started singing: ‘Something in the way she moves…’

An hour or so later she was throwing up in the doorway of W. H. Smith’s. She herself later likened this to a certain scene in Team America: World Police. And it really was like that. Just when you thought she could produce nothing more, a further torrent gushed forth. Rather naughtily, I amused myself by imagining the customers and staff of W.H. Smith’s slipping over in it the next morning. Who says I’m not a corporate man?

What else could the night hold? Plenty, as it turns out. But I can’t talk about that. It’s sub judice. Suffice it to say that we witnessed an ‘incident’ in the taxi rank. Although ‘witnessed’ is a relative term, considering that I was paying an equal amount of attention to the climax of the first Nightmare On Elm Street movie, which was showing on the TV in the cab office. It’s just as well that I didn’t have to give a statement to the police since I would probably have identified the perpetrator as wearing a black and red striped sweater and wielding razor-clawed fingers. As it was, I only had to give my name and number to a policeman with eyebrows so carefully plucked and arched that, if he hadn’t been in uniform, I’d have sworn he was a drag queen.