‘I don’t want you to, I’m just being hospitable and offering you a line of coke, that’s all. Don’t be so paranoid.’ (This ought to loosen her tongue).
We nipped into the women’s when no one was looking and darted into an empty cubicle, locking the door behind us. I dropped down to my knees and polished the top of the seat with toilet paper to save us snorting up a load of piss while we were at it, then scrapped two decent-looking lines out of my rapidly dwindling gram. Behind me Hazel rolled up a £20 note and dropped down beside me and snorted the first line, then she handed me the note. I did the same and snorted the other, then with a quick sleight of hand, pocketed her twenty and gave her back the tenner I’d already rolled. Well, this stuff did cost money, you know. We dabbed the rest on our gums, waited until the coast was clear then rejoined the pub.
Only then did it occur to me that I’d been alone in a bog cubicle with a woman and some drugs and I hadn’t tried it on at all. Where was my head? I decided to save a couple of lines for later and give it another go then.
Me and Hazel chatted quite amiably for the next half hour, each of us telling the other more and more irrelevant stories about our childhoods as the minutes went by, until the conversation turned around to Susie again and I decided to try another tact.
‘You know, I don’t know why people get so protective about their sexuality. I agree with old whats’erarse when she said that, you know, just being straight is discounting half the population.’ (See where I’m going with this?)
‘Really? So have you ever been with another bloke then?’
‘Me? No, fuck off! I mean, no, I haven’t, but it’s… well, it’s complicated.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh yeah, like I’m going to tell you.’
‘Why not? Go on, tell us. I can keep a secret.’
‘What, and I can’t I suppose, is that it? Birds can keep secrets but blokes can’t.’
‘Hey? I don’t get you.’
‘Your Susie secret. You want me to tell you all about my big secret but you’re not willing to tell me about yours. That’s hardly fair, is it?’
‘There is no secret.’
‘Yeah, well, whatever.’
Hazel spent some time mulling this over then leaned in and lowered her voice so that I could just about hear her.
‘Oh look, it’s nothing really, but you can’t ever tell anyone about it, ever, all right?’
‘Yeah, no, definitely, tell us,’ I urged her.
‘No, you first, tell me your supposed big secret first.’
‘No, that’s not how it works. What if I tell you mine and then you don’t tell me yours?’
‘As if I’d do that. Come on, I will, but I’m not saying anything until you tell me yours.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ I faffed.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll tell you afterwards.’
‘Bollocks. Look, you brought this up, you have to go first otherwise I’m not doing it at all.’
‘We go at the same time,’ I suggested
‘How can we go at the same time? We won’t be able to hear each other speak.’
‘All right then, we’ll write them down. Agreed?’
Hazel agreed and pulled some paper and a pen from her bag. She handed it to me and I had a think about what I could write. Obviously I hadn’t done anything and I was just trying to use it as bait to get her to spill the beans but I had to write something. What could I write that would sound like a deep and dark secret? I wasn’t about to put down that I sucked off geezers every Sunday afternoon no matter how many times she’d sat on Susie’s face, as there was a limit to these things, but it had to be something suitably fruity.
In the end I wrote down that I liked getting shagged up the arse by girls wearing strap-on, as that seemed to be the sort of thing people wouldn’t admit to in public that didn’t involve geezers.
By the way, I don’t.
When I was done I handed Hazel the pen and she spent a few minutes writing her confession down before announcing that she was ready to exchange. We swapped papers and I eagerly unfolded hers to find that she’d written only one word: ‘Sucker.’
I looked over at her as she shrieked with laughter at my bullshit confession and desperately tried to snatch it back out of her hand, but it was like trying to get a small child off a Rottweiler.
‘Oh my God,’ she was laughing as I was wrestling with her over the seats.
‘Give it to me. Give it to me,’ I was yelling, making her crack up even more for some reason. ‘I was only joking that’s just bullshit, I wasn’t serious, I just wanted to hear about you and fucking whatsh’ercunt,’ I yelled as she elbowed me in the guts and kicked me onto the floor.
‘Right, then I’m definitely not telling you anything now.’
I slumped down on the seat, humiliated and fucked off with her and wishing that I’d written something like that too.
‘You’re just a cunt,’ I told her. ‘I thought we had a deal.’
‘Look, don’t worry, I’m not going to show anyone else. I’m only teasing you. Go and get me a drink and we’ll be friends again.’
I told her to go and spin on it but she said she’d show everyone at work what I’d written if I didn’t buy her a drink.
‘You’re blackmailing me?’
‘Yes. Get me a drink, ding ding ding. Go on, I’ll give you this back if you do.’
I went to the bar and bought her a vodka Red Bull and was about to hand one to her when I had a thought and demanded to see what was written in the paper. Predictably, it had ‘Sucker’ written on it again so I withheld her drink until she handed over the real one.
I didn’t get to shag her in the bog later either because her boyfriend showed up and scuppered my last remaining chance of drunken sex.
All in all, the evening had been a bit of a shitter.
I stood in Don’s living room and remembered all of this and wondered what Hazel would do or say about it today... or Monday... or the day after that. I hadn’t heard the last of this, that was for sure, but what could I do short of telling everyone the truth? No one would believe me for a second.
They wouldn’t want to believe me, not when Hazel’s version of events involved me getting banged by strap-ons.
Jesus, you know, this sort of shit has a tendency to follow people around for life. I mean look at Richard Gere. Who hasn’t heard those rumours? He was probably just doing the same as me and trying to get Kim Basinger to admit she’d done it with donkeys or something and look where it got him?
Bollocks.
I picked up my coat and pulled on my shoes, but even as I did, more memories were triggered. It was here, here in this room around this coffee table that me, Paddy, Matt and Don ended up talking and drinking and doing the last of our gear till the very early hours of the morning. Hang on, I’d told Paddy all about my little Hazel episode already and they’d all been cool about it. In fact, oh yeah, fuck, Paddy had even told us the real dirt on Hazel and Susie (he’d gone for Susie a few months earlier with similar suspicions and she’d proved a bit easier to tap up). Apparently, Susie had tried it on with Hazel when they’d both gone over to LA to visit a couple of their photographers. By all accounts (or Paddy’s anyway), they’d both got drunk and a bit coked up after a shoot and carried on drinking back at the hotel when Susie began to kiss and fondle Hazel all over the bed. What had started out as a playful wrestling match ended up in a bit of a snog (as it always does in these lesbian stories) only for Hazel to suddenly freak out just as things started to get a bit interesting and run back to her room. Susie had spent half the night and pretty much every siege tactic in the book trying to get in there with Hazel, but Hazel was having none of it and a rather uncomfortable working relationship was born.
Hee hee hee.