The mottled green formica surface around the sinks wasn’t perfect for coke-cutting — too pale, for a start — but we made do. We chopped it with my credit card, rolled a twenty. Jel’s charlie wasn’t quite as good as Humpty’s had been — a bit more cut, though I wasn’t sufficiently expert to tell with what exactly, and the irony that her dad would have access to much better stuff wasn’t lost on us — still, it did the job.
I started telling Jel, in some detail, about my final-year project, which involved imagining famous buildings relit quite differently from conventional floodlighting (all done on computer, no physical models). By this time I’d been thinking seriously about what the job I’d been offered might involve, and had talked at length to some of the guys I might be working with, so I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was required, hence I talked about angles or ‘splayings’, the kind of technique you needed for lighting something A-shaped, like the Forth Bridge, for example. Wide-eyed, leaning in towards me with a look of enormous concentration on her face, Jel seemed rapt, absorbing all this as though she was thinking of taking up a career in creative lighting design herself.
I was making the point that you need to take account of prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions and, ideally, have a dynamic system in place capable of changing according to whether it was dusk, full night, or dawn, what stage the moon was at, whether the weather was clear or misty and how much light spill or contamination there might be from nearby floodlit buildings or other sources, when I sort of took another look at her expression.
‘Like, some — actually most — buildings in China need to be lit taking into account the fact they have this near-continual brown haze …’ I said, then kind of heard my own voice fade away.
Jel was sitting on top of the sink surround, taking the weight off her feet, which brought her face up level with mine. She reached out with a gloved hand, put it to the nape of my neck, and said, ‘I really think you ought to kiss me.’
I took a deep breath, put my hands on her hips. ‘Well, ah,’ I said, decisively. Actually, I hadn’t really meant to put my hands on her hips, if I remember right; they just sort of appeared there. ‘I suppose,’ I said.
‘I know how you feel about me,’ she told me.
Thing is, whatever part of my brain that deals with such matters has come up with a lot of excuses over the past five years for everything that happened over the next five or ten minutes: Hey, we were drunk, coked up at the same time, I’d seen Ellie snogging somebody else, and there is almost a tradition for people about to get married to have one last fling — but in the end it doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t matter who moved forward to whom, who opened their lips first, whose tongue first moved into the other’s mouth, or whether she shimmied her dress to let her legs wrap around me or I did, or whether she reached for my zip or I did.
She froze. ‘Did you hear a noise?’ She stared at the door to the corridor.
‘No,’ I said, then thought, Or had I? There were various sounds to be heard here, including that soft, continual wash of white noise coming from the nearby plumbing and the distant thudding base from the PA system in the ballroom, floors below.
Breathless, hearts pumping, we stared at each other from about a hand’s length away. ‘Into a cubicle!’ she said, nodding past me.
I picked her up, her legs round my waist, thudded into the middle cubicle as quietly as I could, stood there for a moment while she reached down, locking the door, then I sat down on the toilet seat. ‘We should have put the light out,’ I whispered.
‘Oh, fuck it,’ she breathed. We sat there for a moment, listening, but nothing more happened. We started kissing again.
‘Do we need to—’
She shook her head. ‘Pill. Risk it if you will.’
‘How about,’ I said, reaching up inside her dress with both hands. I felt stocking, warm flesh, a smooth thin garter belt.
She laughed roguishly, put her mouth against my neck and bit very gently. ‘Nope,’ she said, ‘went without. Pas de VPL.’
‘Fuck …’ I breathed.
We’d barely begun by the time she thought she heard a noise again; her mouth was hanging open and she was part supporting herself with one gloved hand splayed on each side wall of the cubicle. She stopped, stiffened, motioned silence.
I heard something too this time: what might have been the door to the corridor, opening, then closing.
