Sunday 17 January 2016

Blueness

 
She leans forward at the sink to steady herself, gazing blankly at her reflection staring back from the mirror. Nicola’s busy with a jar of lollipops by the desk in the corner. All Cheryl wants to do is to get rid of this stultifying tension that’s seized her nerves and is threatening to burst out in a flash of anger. The eyes of her reflection gaze out with a studied blankness, her pupils dilated and the irises blazing a brilliant blue. Still unsteadily, Cheryl focuses. That blueness of her eyes is the shimmering calm of a deep sea, a space of oneness and tranquility inviting her to spend all of eternity lost inside it, forever and ever. All those frets of hers suddenly seem so silly when faced with that almighty hue, the worries of the workaday world falling away like the skin of a beautiful fresh fruit proffered before her. As she returns the stare of those two luscious blue orbs, the Drink nightclub toilets seem to melt away and dissolve into a blissful state of pure chromatic pleasure. Cheryl could swim in those eyes until the end of all time.

Sunday 10 January 2016

Real

 
Her magnetism is a fact, this weird psychic energy she’s always had and that even now, on her stumbling route to the Drink nightclub toilets, causes the inebriated crowds to part like the waves of the Red Sea. That hypnotising force has seen her sail through auditions and casting calls since the day she was first spotted aged four doing her silly sequence dancing routines, though for all her charisma she’s always been something of a blank canvas. Even now as Cheryl veers around all the glammed-up Surrey wannabes the girl’s being scrutinised by passers-by for anything, even just a trace of something real, a flicker of genuine emotion, something the heaving crowd might take away from all the immaculate surface lurching before them in lace-up heels. Her blankness is the really terrifying thing and however perfectly the script is stuck to, the potential is there for all the pent-up latent chaos to break through. What it would really need is the right set of circumstances, a certain state of affairs conducive to outbreaks of random violence, a situation involving two wired up, aggressive hedonists looking for an excuse for screams and sensation. Cheryl and Nicola are locked in a cubicle hoovering up the gak they hope might wipe out the messy effects of too much alcohol, and all it’s doing is making Cheryl more angry. She’s still drunk so maybe the drugs aren’t working as they should, or maybe she’s just too far gone to let anything get in the way of her attacking somebody, anybody.

Thursday 7 January 2016

Ice


The two girls stand and sway together on the dancefloor, eyes screening the periphery as a way of killing off all this self-conscious time forced together. Cheryl’s still on edge despite all attempts to anaesthetise her feelings with champagne, so she casually suggests a joint bathroom expedition as a way to fill up the ocean of dead minutes between now and the next chat. Nicola’s happy enough to accompany her friend through the jungle of gyrating bodies barring their way. Tonight's atmosphere inside the Drink nightclub remains uneasy beneath the showy facade of forced bonhomie, the ceaseless gossip about the two members of Girls Aloud being somewhere present here in this very room cutting its way through all the dry ice.

Monday 4 January 2016

Glue


She feels severe disorientation as though she’s staring down from a great height, like from the top of a towering skyscraper in the centre of Guildford, stood on a platform up in the clouds and away from the world of motorway service stations and dead end jobs, looking down onto the faceless masses all milling around anonymously below, each drone leading their own individual everyday boring insignificant lives in accursed suburbia. Then the next second there’s a lurch and the viewpoint is reversed, the perspective doing a 180 degree shift and she’s plunged into the depths of the gutter, gasping for air and submerged into filth and darkness. She’s unable to see or feel anything down here beyond a numb blankness, although it’s intensely suffocating and there’s a desperation that everything will be like this forever, that the void down here is all that everything will ever be. As her senses slalom between the two vistas, Cheryl can make out Nicola’s face suddenly come into focus. But that face is now repellent, with eyes and mouth seemingly collaged from disparate sources, like scrunched up magazine pages stuck down with watery glue, each one seeming to move of its own independent sinister will. Nicola’s face appears as a monstrosity and its eyes have seen all the evil that’s ever been done, eyes that resemble nothing so much as two hollowed out wounds, eyes taking in only darkness and sorrow. Cheryl shudders and tries to focus, blinking her tears away. Nicola reaches round and shakes her friend's shoulder, “You OK hun?”

Saturday 2 January 2016

Sick


Her face is reflected back from every wall she faces out there on the dancefloor of the Drink nightclub. This being Saturday night at Guildford’s premier nitespot, the venue is packed with revellers and the soundtrack of disposable chart hits is thunderous. Cheryl wants to lose herself in the moment but it’s not that easy to do when you’re always the centre of attention. She’d come out here in a party of three that’s somehow expanded to what seems like a hundred hangers on, all cheering and laughing and wooping along with the music as they navigate the crowded mezzanine. She tries her best to keep Nicola by her side at all times. She’s long lost count of how many glasses of champagne she’s been given and unthinkingly knocked back. She can’t hear the words of anyone trying to talk to her, only the distorted roar of the synthesisers. Cheryl feels acutely self-aware and increasingly sick.