An Anthrax gig

“You’ve got about three minutes before Pete gets back with the drinks. Are you going to snog me or what?” Your eyes glint in the dim light and I laugh, drunk and thin.

I have given up eating in favour of drinking, and at the moment, it is working out pretty well, I think. I am constantly nauseous but I only weigh seven stone, which as a sturdy girl with big shoulders and tits which are each the size of a grown mans head, hasn’t been the case since I was about nine. I perch on your knee and move in to kiss you, holding the back of your head, hair clipped in short with a barbers electric shaver, savouring the taste of beer and adultery on you.

“That do you?” I ask, all Essex girl eyebrows and innuendo, it’s all very Lolita. You slap my arse. 

“For now, anyway.” You reply.

I am wearing new, pointy, brown suede shoes and I feel very grown up in them. They hurt like hell, and rub my feet and they are visibly bleeding when I take them off, but if these weeks snogging you in darkened corners have taught me nothing else it is that sometimes things hurt and that’s just how it is now, all very metaphorical. Pete returns with the drinks and I happily gulp down Vodka that I am not actually legally old enough to drink. I peek over the lip of the balcony and ask you if you think they’re breaking fire safety laws, people are crammed in here like sardines in a tin. “If a fire starts in here,” you reply earnestly, “we’re toast.” Not just if there’s a fire, I think with an eyebrow ever raised to my imaginary audience.

Pete actually doesn’t know about this whole sex thing. He think we’re just mates with a flirtation. A flirtation and a 13 year age gap. A flirtation and a 13 year age gap and a love of flouting the law. In the week you teach me A Level English Literature, at the weekend we fuck like rabbits. It is a Friday night, so we are in the fucking like rabbits part of the schedule. You squeeze my bum clandestinely and I smile, thinking it’s actually pretty funny that Pete doesn’t know, but then I am pissed so everything seems pretty funny. Not least that we are in love. You and me. In love with each other. Fancy that.

I have been in love with you for probably about five years now, but I don’t tell you that. I just pretend like this is all cool. You have a wife? That’s cool. You’re breaking about fifteen child protection laws every day of your life now? Yeah, whatever. We’re having risky sex at every opportunity in darkened corners? That’s just how I roll. This is so not how I roll. I was actually a virgin until only something like twelve weeks ago. I have only kissed two people with tongues, and you’re the second. I write your surname after mine in the back of my rough book on Wednesday afternoons when I should be having a study lesson and testing my friend Dave on his Italian verbs. I am the least cool person I know. My hair isn’t cool, my dress sense isn’t cool, I don’t like cool music and my favourite television programme is Brookside. I know that being anywhere near you is going to hurt me in the long term. I know it, but I can’t keep away from you either. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. It is like we have no choice. It is like you are a missing part of me. It is like nobody else exists when you are in the room. Even when you aren’t. I think of you insistently.  You are the motivation for every decision I make and everything I do. I am crazy about you. Maybe I am just fucking crazy.

Anthrax are terrible. Truly dire. I genuinely think at one point in the evening that I may have gone deaf because the music, if you can call it music, is so loud. I can feel the bass in my teeth. My gig-going until this point hasn’t been extensive, mind you. I saw Boyzone live at Wembley twice and I went and saw Sum 41 a few weeks ago with some cooler kids. But this is only my fourth gig, and I am starting to think, a bit like losing your virginity: painful and fucking horrible. But you are here and I would go anywhere you were. I would follow you to the ends of the earth. After only six weeks of kissing and twenty-seven shags I know, unequivocally, that I would move to Australia with you tomorrow if you asked. This is what it is all about. Life up until this point has been a rehearsal, a nothing, pointless, it has belonged to somebody else. But now. Now it all begins.

I stare hard at you in the gloom of the darkened room, which seems darker in contrast to the strobe lights which flash every seven seconds and threaten to make me epileptic. You are hopelessly beautiful, short and a product of breeding based on drunken one night stands rather than genes. Your hair isn’t quite blonde but isn’t quite brown and it lays flat and unstyled against your forehead in a way which doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that it’s receding. Your eyes blink behind unfashionable glasses and your lips are newly-bitten pink, wet with overpriced Astoria beer. You are, as Diana Ross sang, everything. Marvin Gaye replies in my head, as I think it, oh everything is you.