THE PARTY

Frank and me had been in the pub all day and were now back in my room, still drinking.

It was pretty late at night and Frank’s eyelids were closing as he lay on my bed, half watching some crappy film on TV while cradling a can of lager in his arms.

Pretty soon he was totally passed out and, not long afterwards, my intercom buzzer went. I didn’t bother to answer it at first. I rarely did, as passing kids would press the buzzers on everyone’s doors just to cause trouble. But whoever it was persisted until I eventually answered. It was past midnight and I didn’t want to wake any of my neigbours up. I lived in a single room in a big house and the walls were like cardboard.

Tom’s voice came through the intercom system, so I buzzed him in.

I could see right away that he was really drunk.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’ve been in the Waterloo drinking with this lecturer guy who just lives down the street. He asked us back for a party.”

“Us? What do you mean us?”

“I told him I had a mate who lived nearby so he said to bring you round. Who’s that?”

He was pointing to Frank, who was snoring on the bed.

“That’s Frank. Fucking hell.”

I had noticed that Frank had spilled his can of lager all over my bed. It was dripping onto the carpet, covering a few papers I had lying on the floor.

“Help me get him up,” I said.

We lifted the still snoring Frank up from the bed and sat him in a chair, then I stripped the sheets off the bed and surveyed the damage. Nothing too bad. It would soon dry in.

“Have you got any drink?” Tom asked.

“In the fridge,” I said. ‘So what’s this guy like then?”

“He’s in his 50s or 60s, probably. He must be loaded. He was buying me drinks all night.”

“Well, I can’t really just fuck off and leave him here, can I?”

“Can’t you wake him up?”

“Look, I don’t really fancy going out. Why don’t we just stay here and watch some telly?”

At this point, as if he had heard the whole conversation, Frank woke up anyway.

“Hey, man,” he said.

I introduced him to Tom who then repeated what he had just told me about this lecturer guy and his party.

“That sounds great,” Frank said. “Can I get another can first, though?”

Soon, we were walking through the cold night air to this guy’s house. Tom had written down the address and it was, literally, just down the street. About five minutes walk away from where I lived.

The houses round there were all huge. It was a posh area, but the place I lived in belonged to a letting agency who rented the individual rooms out to students, people on the dole and sad bastards who had split up with their spouses. I fit into the middle category.

When we got to the address, we rang the doorbell and waited. No one answered.

We rang again and still nothing.

Just as we were about to give up and go back to mine and finish off the beer in my fridge, someone began taking the chain off the door and it slowly opened. A sleepy looking middle-aged man in a dressing gown opened the door and smiled at us.

“Oh, you made it then?” he said to Tom.

“These are my mates,” Tom said.

“Come in then, boys.”

We went inside the house. The hall was massive. The man ushered us into the main room, which was filled with books, old records and decorated with leather furniture. The kind of place you would see in an old Vincent Price movie.

“Care for something to drink?”

He brought a bottle of what looked like expensive red wine from the kitchen and four glasses.

We sat around making small talk while the man sat there in his dressing gown. This wasn’t what I would call a ‘party’.

After we had been drinking for a while, he put on some terrible old classical music shit. Instead of a record player, he literally had a gramophone. One of those ones you have to wind up with a big trumpet thing where the sound comes out. I felt like we had travelled back in time. It was weird being in this stranger’s house in the middle of the night.

I suddenly wondered what I was doing there. Tom had met this guy in a gay bar and now the cunt was obviously expecting some four way orgy to take place.

As the wine kicked in, I became more and more aggressive.

“This music’s fucking shit,” I said. “Don’t you have anything a bit more modern?”

“No, sorry.”

“Got anymore wine then?”

When he vanished into the kitchen for another bottle, I said to the others, “What the fuck are we doing here? This is crazy.”

“Let’s wait till he falls asleep then tan the house,” Frank said.

“Aw, man. Fuck that. I’m going home.”

Just as I was leaving the room, the middle-aged guy returned with more wine.

“The bathroom’s just across the hall,” he said.

I left the room and walked out of the front door.

As I walked down the street I took several swigs from the bottle of wine which I had taken from the guy’s house.

Back in my room, I sat around for a while. I finished the wine and then began drinking some lager from the fridge.

A couple of hours later, when I realised the others weren’t coming back. I went to bed.

It was still wet.