Chapter Five: Matthew

Matt leans against the outside wall of his flat, more awkward and annoyed than Armani model. Rain trickles down the side of his face and his tailored leather jacket isn’t keeping him warm. He wonders if he should go back inside and call Hugo with an excuse: the Novo virus, a broken toe but just as he gets his key out of his pocket a black Bentley pulls over.

Matt My Man! Get in, it’s pissing it down.

Matt slides into the backseat, straight into a Hugo hug: one-armed, one notch too tight.

I thought you said you’d rung me a cab?

Hugo unfolds himself and stretches his arms along the back seat.

A cab? I can’t BEAR cabs these days. The drivers are wankers and they think it’s okay to talk to you. I mean if they spruced their cars up a bit, with iPads and better upholstery I might give them a shot. I’ve got my own cars these days BOY. I’m moving up.

The best thing about Hugo is that he’ll never ask you how you are which was always going to be a lot worse than him. Hugo went to school with Matt and is now a twenty five year old millionaire who, with a small investment from his family, opened up club after club in London. He brings the hipsters into Chelsea and the trust fund kids into Shoreditch. He is a self-proclaimed nightlife philanthropist.

The jet black Bentley tears through the silent South London streets like a dentist’s drill. Drops of rain braid the car window and London lights flicker like faraway airplanes into the dark leather interior. Matt has run out of things to say. Going out was a bad idea.

How’s that girl of yours? Marjorie?

Madeline. No, we’re not…no.

Fuck her!

Well she –

We don’t need that bitch.

No I guess –

She’s just like all the rest of them. Fuck the lot. They’re here for one thing and one thing only: the legacy, they pass on our legacy. That’s it. Fuck Marjorie, you’ll find some other bitch to impregnate.

Madeline was all right you know. I screwed it up myself.

No you didn’t. I’m not having that, not in my car. Women are evil. You know that don’t you? Women are divided into two categories: mothers and whores. We have no business screwing our mothers so what are we lift with? Whores.

Yeah well –

Remember Freddy Bannerman?

Sort of, yeah. Miss Eaton’s English right?

Yeah, maybe. Well Freddy’s a bit of a hot DJ at the moment. He was on the desks at Kate and Will’s reception. Can you believe that? And now he’s been playing at my clubs. He’s an absolute legend. Anyway he has a great line about women. What was it again? I see a woman…No. When I. Yeah. That’s it, got it. When Freddy sees a fit girl walking down the street he thinks: I’m sure it would feel great to treat her well, make her feel special, introduce her to the parents but then …Wait, fuck I’ve forgotten the second part. Shit, it’s so great you’ve got to hear it. You’ve got to.

I’ll ask him whenever I see him.

He’s playing a set tonight. You got to ask him about his line. It’s fucking legend.

The car comes to a stop. Matt is confused:

I thought your club was in May Fair?

Hugo drops his head and rolls it from side to side.

Dude, come ON. May Fair is like a long-term girlfriend. My hot affair is Waterloo.

The boys get out. Matt looks up at a giant arch that frames a full dark mass. They approach the arch and a door appears and a long queue of people and a tall figure on stilts. The figure is dressed up as a pirate; with a large wizard like cane he delegates the line of glittery people that snake in front of him. Hugo walks straight up to the pirate giant and gives him an envelope. They pass the queue. Matt feels something dragging his shoulder down, an achy weight and he turns round and sees that it’s a girl, hanging onto him; acrylic nails digging into his neck. Two bouncers peel her off and walk her out into the night before Matt has a chance to look at her face.

People will do anything to get in.

After Hugo, Matt steps inside.

Darkness has made way for a lighter shade of black but not quite grey, with laser beams outlining silhouettes in front of the bar. This is the biggest club Matt has been to; he is unable to see where it ends.

Hugo broadens his chest like a gorilla:

BIENVENUE CHEZ MOI CASA

And a few surrounding revellers applaud him.

The club is extremely packed, the heat emanating from all the sweaty bodies creates a vertiginous wave that suddenly hits Matt and makes him feel like he has just jumped into a warm ocean. Blue lights reflect from the Freddy’s DJ booth and swim through the air until they bounce off a wall or head or a pole and project into another direction like a school of fish. Matt turns to congratulate Hugo on his club but Hugo is nowhere in sight.

Maybe it’s the location or being around Hugo and his ever-increasing misogyny but suddenly Matt remembers a monologue he performed in drama school. It was an excerpt from Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho.

I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.

Was this what it was like to be Patrick Bateman? Standing in the middle of a club, a club filled with potential, the potential to connect, putting a piece of your flesh into someone else like a plug into a socket yet Matt never felt so completely detached. The feeling was inconvenient because this is what he needed. This is what he needed to get over Madeline but it felt cliché, like a worn out idea. It didn’t feel right.

A girl pops up in his line of sight, like a firework on a dark night in March. She is wearing a see-through top and a garland of flowers around her hair. She looks out of place, like she was running around a field, fell through the rabbit hole and ended up in this place.

Want a drink?

Matt takes the drink she is holding. Like a fairy with pixie dust she rubs her thumb and index finger over his glass. A dull alarm bell sounds at the back of his head. Matt doesn’t do drugs. It’s not part of his psyche; there’s too much control to be lost but this girl, her eyes, the garland it just all flowed from one into another and he takes the glass to his lips and swallows the fizzing liquid.

He expects some immediate change but nothing dramatic stirs inside him. A change in beat accompanied by the confidence of just having taken drugs, WOAH, urges him to be free and just enjoy himself. He could be one of those guys. One of those guys that did drugs, why not? Madeleine hated drugs and together they took an anti-drug stance but she was gone and Matt was on his own, his own person. He could be that person that does drugs. EEEasy.

Matt wants to dance, even though he can’t. Apart from a year of movement studies in drama school he could never move his body in the way others could so he channels what he knew, what he’d learned from his class. His shoulders go up then down, he stretches out his fingers. He organizes his body into shapes and patterns, a systematic approach. He flings his back forward, then slowly rolls down and up again, clicking his spine into shape. He looks at the girl, is she impressed? The girl is gone.

He bends back down, feels his hair brush along the night club floor. He stretches one arm over his chest and rolls his head up slowly. In front of him there’s a flash of face. It’s Madeline. Maddy. Another flash, the face is gone. Then suddenly like flying over a lit up cityscape after hours of black ocean Madeleine’s face appears all around him. Her smile, her blue glow in the dark eyes. Then the drone like base emanating from the DJ booth echoes: Mad-de-line Mad-de-line like the rain sometimes does or the printer or the washing machine. Mad-de-line Mad-de-line. This can’t be real, she can’t be here. She’s in Scotland; she’s with someone else, she is not here and if she was there wouldn’t be this many, there couldn’t possibly be –

Like a cartoon character he shakes the many Madelines from his mind and stumbles back to the bar. To someone, to no one, he shouts for a J&D and coke. The girl behind the bar is busy with another order. Matt shouts again.

J&D and coke.

The girl ignores him.

Hey! Can’t you hear me? I want to order!

Nothing. Rage. Matt feels rage.

This is the problem with you, you know that don’t you? You’re all the same. You don’t listen. SHE didn’t listen. She meant everything to me, I tried to tell her but she chose not to hear me. She just ignored me. And I told her so many times but she wouldn’t take it in and it pushed me away. It was so fucking unfair. She pushed me so far that I became the person who she accused of me of being in the beginning. How fucked up is that? She made me do it. She made me!

The girl looks up at him. She blinks her big anime eyes.

Matt gives up on his drink and turns around to face the infinite sea of people. The girl with the flower garland is back. She is standing about six people away from him. He approaches her, swimming through the crowd only to get there and see she has her tongue right inside another girl’s throat.

WHAT?

The tongue recipient shouts at him. Matt shouts back.

WHAT?

Why are you staring at us?

I wasn’t.

Are you turned on by this?

What?

IS THIS TURNING YOU ON?

No.

WELL THEN FUCK OFF.

Matt storms out of the club, no he runs. Hugo’s words echo through his head like a distress call: all.women.whores, all.women.whores. Matt runs further down the street, running off his rage until he can feel it shed but not completely, like taking off a wet coat and still feeling the damp beneath. Matt catches his breath and notices a big pearly white smile in front of him: Andrew and the MixMax chocolate advertisement. Matt unzips his jeans and aims his piss right inside Andrew’s mouth. He zips up and walks on into the night.

He crosses the bridge, walking back towards the other half of the city but it seems so meaningless, there won’t be anything there for him. A room filled with stuff. What is stuff? An ache erupts in his chest, he recognizes it as loneliness the kind he has only seen in a Wim Wenders films where there’s one man and nothing but a great vast American landscape of nothingness. London past midnight, with vomiting bodies for cactuses, is a lot like nothingness.