Umbrage

Music and its random rot, eating the flesh off memories, making pain a bulimic, taking the weight off the mind, and flooding the veins with empty energy. Alcohol, a fun house of comic and tragic reactions, readily supplying tears and clown-laughter, fermenting the bitter brew discontentment in its pledge of pleasure. Distractions―in the form of rancid rhythms, a hint of casual sleaze, an elapsed toast to celebrate the folly of youth―the handmaiden to our urban megalomania, serving up petit fours of useless kicks and amusement.

And then the convivial mask splits faces; the deadpan actor slips out, a rictus, a dilettante to life. Ten minutes before the club's closing and you're a star, your body a reason of screams, your youth made beautiful by the strobe-lights sprinkling their ultra-violet fairy dust on you. Ten minutes after, the empty streets stretch before your vodka vision, the morning hours silenced with the echoes of your blank, and you realise you're now a has-been. The fawning homage paid―along with an exorbitant cover charge―you stagger into a waiting cab, pretending, perhaps, this could be a pumpkin-carriage, carrying your dreams, like a princess-in-waiting, to your ivory Elysium. The final curtain call, broken only by a rude jolt to the senses as the vehicle screech to a stop―

"14.60, miss," the driver calls the fare, and you realise, like all dreams, there's a price a to be paid.

***

P and I, we brought our raffish love for cheap red wine and fickle men to a questionable part of town. Orchard Towers, where the boys would do girls who are boys who like boys who do girls―I couldn't get the song out of my head as the two of us walk down the street looking like artless schoolgirls, vulnerable and out of place next to the glimmering ladies and their grinning men. The building was down-at-heel, flaking with sleaze: women lingered around like hungry magpies, the Filippinas small and pert and chatty, the Indonesians earthy and eager, the Chinese glamourous but overdone.

Men winked at us―faded men, fat with beer and promiscuousity, made lordly with money for the working girls, jostling in bars like licentious wolves, waiting for meat. The show we wanted to catch―a cabaret of fleshpot trannies, offering low-brow jokes and middling entertainment―wouldn't start for another hour, so P and I found a quiet bar with happy-hour prices, and we settled into our red wine ('One Cab Sauv!' the waiter called, and I cringed―because you would have too) and stories.

'None of my friends would have come here with me,' P remarked, smiling. 'So thank you.'

'You're very welcome,' I said, grinning, relaxed. In the low lights of the bar, P was particularly attractive. Her features are not delicate, but they fit together cleverly on her face. Thick brows arching over deep-set eyes, a slant of asymmetry to her lips, a degree of curve in her nose―pleasantly at odds, yet joined together by an interesting rapport. She's got beautiful hair―commercial quality, long and dark and silky, draping over her chiselled shoulders with erratic grace. Hair that men would love. Men who, unfortunately, are unworthy of P's stoic strength and relentless humour.

We watched as a hefty Caucasian saunter up the bar with his escort, a pint-sized girl, her face too young and unlined for the heavy make-up, her slight body too dainty for the showy black dress. Their drinks were served and the man lit up a cigar, puffing away like a druglord, his gut hanging out of his pants with repulsive nonchalance. She sipped her beer quietly, adopting an expression that was almost child-like; there was no light in her eyes.

P and I fell silent. We may be losers in love, we may be struggling in the race rat of our careers, we may have family problems that run with more melodrama than an average episode of a bad soap series―but at least we're fortunate enough to choose the losers in our loves, to be rich enough in our education to struggle for a grander ambition, to actually have families to call our own, despite their dysfunction and malfunction.

'A toast,' I said, 'to good fortune.'

We drained our bottle and left the bar. Saturday night had begun.