Meantime by Frankie Boyle

Author:Frankie Boyle [Boyle, Frankie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery & Suspense, Fiction & Literature
ISBN: 9781399801911
Google: M467zgEACAAJ
Published: 2022-07-14T23:00:00+00:00

22

There was only one time Marina had stayed at mine. It was after the Go-Go’s staff Christmas party. Because we all worked through Christmas, this had been in February. We’d ended up in a shitty club somewhere down by the Clyde that had reeked of dry ice and regret.

We lay in bed still jangling from pitchers of Red Bull cocktails.We were sprawled beside each other watching Blade: Trinity too loudly, and there was a thumping noise coming from upstairs.

‘Last night I fell asleep with music on and the upstairs neighbour came down. He’s this really strange guy: portly, sways at the hips, wears a bumbag at all times. He was wearing it over his dressing gown. He used to have black hair but it went completely white overnight; nobody knew why and nobody wanted to know. Bumbag was so unreadable and perverse that he might have just willed it to happen. Anyway, I realised yesterday that in my head I just call him Bumbag; then, this morning, it struck me that there are people who see me like that – they’ll probably have a nickname for me.’

‘We’re all someone’s Bumbag,’ she agreed, sadly.

With a philosophical cadence that at the time I thought was typically Greek, Marina asked, ‘What’s your least favourite word? For me it’s “cleft”.’

‘Membrane,’ I replied without thinking. It seemed obvious.

She nodded in a satisfied way. ‘Oh, and not a word as such, but I’m sickened by the phrase “soft opening”. What the fuck is wrong with people? I mean, what have we learned from fascism?’

‘Don’t let artists be in charge of anything? Can you believe Kat is seeing that creepy politician guy? He must be nearly sixty. You can see on his face that he can’t believe his luck. She’ll be getting ridden like a stolen bike.’

She laughed. ‘Gary Mount? He fucking loves himself. He has some of those old people spots on his hands. That must hurt – when you look at yourself and think, “If I was a banana, they’d throw me away.”’

Later, we talked with the lights out, as headlights from the traffic below occasionally lit up the curtains.

‘I wonder if there are people whose kink is kink shaming?’ I asked, pleasantly stoned and watching the shadows play on the ceiling.

‘That’s the history of Catholicism,’ she sighed.

There was a long silence where I wondered if she’d fallen asleep.

She cleared her throat and sat up, lighting a half-joint that had been sitting in the ashtray. ‘I went out with a guy when I was at college and I was so drunk I puked on the table in the restaurant. He didn’t consider that a deal-breaker. I ended up giving him head in his shitty dorm room.’

‘Jesus Christ. Epilogue: “I saw him years later in my local newspaper captioned with the words, ‘Police Suspect Real Figure May Be Much Higher’.”’

‘Epilogue.’ She laughed. ‘“Three weeks later, I found out he’d gotten married – he was engaged the whole time.”’

‘I don’t think you can add an epilogue onto a sex story,’ I muttered.

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