Send Nudes Read online

  Stop touching me like that.

  Have another drink.

  Is there vodka still?

  There is.

  And then the next morning, suddenly. Maxine woke with a taste in her mouth like an ashtray, George’s shapes under the sheets, the sound of a fly dying against the window, a thick bruise across her left hip, and blood, on the tissue after the toilet.

  What have you done?

  What do you mean?

  His face blank but for a light smirk, his head shaking slowly, his palms turned upwards in front of him. So she left, walked home through the park, with an image in her head that wouldn’t shift: her body as a nut cracked open.

  Come on girls, we’re closing up shop.

  Maxine raised her head to find the club almost completely deserted. She was alone other than Jos, searching through a pile of beer cans in the corner, and the bouncer who was kicking them out.

  Been a big night, has it?

  No, I’m fine.

  Maxine lifted herself to standing and walked slowly outside, through the smoking area, onto the street and down to the bus stop. Commuters sat lined up neat in their cars. Birds tweeted. Jos caught up, swung her arm around Maxine’s shoulders.

  Sorry I wasn’t around much tonight.

  That’s OK.

  They weren’t even pricey.

  Some things are hard to let go of.

  Yeah.

  On the bus, they sat top deck at the very front so that it felt like they were driving. The sky bloomed huge and blue above them. Maxine picked at the crust of mascara hanging onto her eyelashes and looked out across the park, where thousands of new daisies had sprung up without warning, overnight.

  Snakebite

  Lara liked a snakebite. She drank other things but this was her go-to. She was only in it to get fucked; she didn’t care about the taste. She admitted that to me freely, once I got to know her. I took a light interest in taste myself, but mostly I chose my booze by colour. I liked anything vibrant: Aperol or crème de menthe. I worked in a pub called the Queen’s Head, and whenever things got depressing in there I’d pour myself a shot. My manager, Mark, rarely noticed. Unless the schoolgirls were in, he spent most of his time in the back, gambling on his own fruit machines.

  I’d had six shots the night I met Lara. It was Valentine’s Day. The pub was empty but for a single regular sat at the bar, reviewing his reflection in a pint of Guinness. The door opened and a guy came in, Lara following behind. It was raining out. They were both dripping gently, holding themselves. He was perhaps nineteen, in an ugly red and yellow polo shirt, no coat. He had an Adam’s apple like a swallowed blade, hair in a scraggly ponytail. Lara wore fishnets and huge black boots. She seemed to be surrounded by a fine blue light.

  It was only when the guy with the ponytail repeated his order that I realised I hadn’t been listening. There was an edge of shyness to his voice, left over from being with Lara. The raindrops coming off him tapped at the wood floor.

  Sorry, I said, reaching for the pint glasses.

  It’s lager and cider. Equal parts. Cheapest you’ve got.

  I know what a snakebite is, I said.

  He watched me, dead behind the eyes, as I poured. I was wearing a university hoodie, a rain mac, leggings worn thin at the crotch. My hair was clotted with grease, and there was nothing on my face but lip balm. I’d never had a boyfriend, and had just accepted it as the sort of thing that wouldn’t happen to me. I imagined myself married, ten years down the line, to a man who used gel in his hair and cooked burgers on a barbeque for our dumpy kids, but I hadn’t put much thought into how I might get there. The future, to me, was something that would just happen.

  The guy with the ponytail paid in change, then went over to the pool table. He rested his drinks on the felt while he pushed coins into the slot. Lara went to him, lifted a snakebite and drank from it. She looked directly at me, just for a second, over the lip of her glass. Then she put the drink down and polished her cue with a chalk. She broke, and she broke well. The sound echoed through the room like a smashed glass.

  The Queen’s Head was a grotty pub, with streaky glasses and an odd assortment of furniture that had mostly been dragged in off the street. Mark notoriously didn’t ask teenage girls for their IDs so they’d come from all over the city to get served, some not even bothering to change out of their uniforms first. Pervy Mark, they’d whisper to each other, while he used his teeth to crack open their Smirnoff Ices.

  I’d dropped an empty CV into the Queen’s Head midway through my first year, and got the job on the spot. I hadn’t needed the money as much as something to do. University, it turned out, was little more than an empty time slot in which young people could take a stab at small-scale alcoholism before deciding whether or not to launch into the real thing. Halls, where I’d lived in my first year, radiated the slightly sweet smell of vomit. Patches of it would go unclaimed in the corridor for days, until eventually someone had the sense to run a hoover over them.

  In my opinion, drinking was fine, but it wasn’t an activity in and of itself. It didn’t count as doing something. I’d come to university to meet the sort of people who wore berets, stole handfuls of cherries from fruit stalls, talked about art and politics. Here, rugby boys downed entire bottles of rosé followed by bowls of their own piss, then did press-ups in circles.

  For my second year, I’d moved in with a group of medics, all female, with various skin conditions that they would discuss at length. They’d spend evenings on the sofa together watching Take Me Out, splitting a Domino’s and scratching each other’s arms.

  E45? they’d say. Sudocrem? Bio-Oil?

  When I went home to my parents’ house in the Cotswolds for term holidays, a guy called Quaver would take over my shifts. He was at university elsewhere, but his parents lived opposite the Queen’s Head, so he’d return to the city just as I was leaving. We’d crossed paths a few times. In early January, I showed up to my first shift of the year to find him standing on a chair, pulling down the tinsel that I’d stapled up a month before. He had a lip piercing and his hair was shaved and bleached yellow. He called me Babe, lazily, as he was leaving, then helped himself to a packet of peanuts from behind the bar. I remember thinking that Quaver could have been me, in a parallel universe.

  When the game of pool was over, they sat at the corner table again. Lara had her back to me, so all I could see was the triangle of her elbow on the arm of the chair. The guy with the ponytail bought all the drinks. They moved on to lagers after the snakebites, and kept going for hours.

  In this time, I drank two vodka cranberries and inhaled a supermarket pasta salad that I’d brought in my bag. I hand-washed all the pint glasses, sprayed the entire bar with Dettol and wiped it down. I took all the spirits off the shelves, dusted them and put them back. I checked my phone about once a minute, just for something to do. I went to the toilet a lot. My whole body was jittery and feverish. If I wasn’t stealing glances at Lara, I was thinking about when I’d next get away with it.

  At around eleven o’clock, Mark came over for a Strongbow. She’s too fit for him, I reckon, he whispered into my ear.

  I picked up a cloth and set to work polishing the taps, which I’d already done twice in the past hour. I hadn’t noticed, I stuttered.

  At last orders, I went over to Lara’s table, my fingernails dug into my palms. Lara looked up and smiled. She seemed very drunk by then – her eyes were drooping – but that smile was perfect, glinting like a coin in the dim pub light.

  You’re on my course, she said.

  I, um.

  Anthropology?

  Yes.

  Thought I’d seen you around.

  My fingertips felt slightly wet. Sorry, I said. I don’t recognise—

  It’s cool, my attendance is shit. I’m almost never in.

  Right, I said. Same.

  This wasn’t true. I always went to my lectures. I was actually quite fearful of what might happen if I didn’t. It wasn’t that
I was worried about getting into trouble, more that I’d be completely forgotten, that I’d disappear.

  You’re cute.

  It came out of nowhere, like a trick. I thought it was, at first.

  Isn’t she cute?

  The guy with the ponytail looked me up and down.

  So, er, it’s last orders, I said.

  What’s your name? asked Lara.

  For a moment, I forgot even this simple thing. Meg, I said finally. Yours?

  She told me, and I started to turn away. I wanted to get back behind the bar, to safety.

  Wait, Lara called. We should hang out.

  I turned back. I was struggling to concentrate.

  I need a girl mate, she explained. Too many boys around, you know?

  I nodded as if that resonated with me.

  Here, she said. Put your number in. We can get pissed.

  Lara had one of those brick phones that could be dropped from any height and survive. It was battered at the edges. I punched in digits. My fingers were numb, perhaps someone else’s.

  I’ll text you, she said.

  I went back to the bar and started getting everything together for close. I did two shots of blue curaçao, just to calm down. I got the mop out and started sloshing it around the sticky floor behind the bar.

  Later, Meg.

  I said bye, but I didn’t look up until I guessed Lara was almost out the door. Her ankles were unsteady, crossing over each other in their huge black boots. Once I got to know Lara, I noticed she wore those boots all the time. The girls I’d met before would put high heels on to go clubbing, and walk home barefoot with mascara running down their faces. Lara wouldn’t have worn heels to a wedding, and I certainly never saw her cry.

  The guy with the ponytail was propping her up with his arm. He touched her like she belonged to him. She wouldn’t text me, I thought, as I watched her silhouette waver in the glass panels of the door.

  ◆

  I received a text that Saturday. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and I was in bed fully clothed, eating own-brand cheese puffs with stained fingers. Lara wanted to meet at a karaoke bar, eight o’clock that evening.

  The venue had red walls, a fuzzy projector displaying YouTube lyrics onto one. Lara sang ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams, but she made it punky, somehow. She was wearing red lipstick one shade darker than the walls. The crowd loved it. She had us in the palm of her hand. At my turn, I refused to sing. I told her I didn’t know any lyrics.

  That’s the point of the screen, she said. It’s karaoke.

  I can’t read, I told her.

  She laughed. I hadn’t meant it as a joke; I’d meant it as a lie. Anyway, she dropped trying to persuade me.

  We drank rum and cokes. Lara made friends with various men in the audience. She introduced me to some of them over the music. I’d nod briefly and then stand in silence, pretending to be interested in whoever was performing. I could feel the nervousness in my collarbones, the insides of my neck.

  It wasn’t even eleven before Lara leant into my ear and shouted that she was leaving. She threw her thumb over her shoulder, gesturing to a student with a rip in his T-shirt and a dog tag. I lingered for a few minutes after she left, looking around aimlessly, convinced that I’d blown it, and then I went home myself.

  After that night we saw a lot of each other. Lara would invite herself around to mine. I’d make her dinner, usually beans on toast, while she looked up club nights on Facebook. She lived a few blocks away from me, in a house full of computer science students that she’d found online. I never met any of them.

  My house is dead, Lara would text. I’m coming over.

  After we ate, we’d get ready to go out. Lara liked to dress me up. She told me I suited eyeliner, so I let her draw big flicks on the corners of my eyes. She’d make me wear one of her tiny lace thongs under a pair of her black skinny jeans, with the thong pulled high so you could see it above the waistband. The thong was so uncomfortable I ended up with a rash, and Lara’s jeans made me feel like a rodent being squeezed to death by a boa constrictor. I didn’t protest. I understood that I was her project.

  Lara dragged me along to various clubs, carrying nothing but her driving licence in her bra. Men would buy her drinks, and occasionally they’d buy mine too. I still wasn’t good at conversation, but it turned out that I didn’t need to be. My new outfits could do the talking. I went out with Lara night after night, staying far later than I could reasonably handle. I’d exhaust myself into oblivion, then spend the daytime swallowing down ill-advised doses of paracetamol, entire bottles of Lucozade.

  It really was a whole new world: music so heavy I could feel it in my ankles, pills that stole hours. I did a lot of squatting on the floors of smoking areas, Lara blowing rings. I don’t know if I was enjoying myself or just in a continual state of curiosity. For the first few months, I felt as if I was gliding through a museum. I once got home in the early hours of the morning – stinking of vodka lemonade, eating a jar of glacé cherries I’d bought from the newsagents on my walk back – just as my housemates were leaving for early lectures. They looked me up and down as we crossed paths in the front garden. I stood with my key in the lock and watched them move towards the bus stop, struck dumb by the nothingness of my old life.

  Some nights, I’d study Lara for flashes of ugliness. I’d take note of the strange angle her wrist bent into when she was doing up her fly in the toilet cubicle, or the crusty flakes of skin that would build up under her lipstick when we’d had a long night, or the way her pupils would roll back in her head on the dance floor, as if she were searching for something inside her mind. I liked these moments; they made me feel closer to her.

  Lara’s beauty elevated her above the rest of us. She could pick up things she wanted like dominoes, and scatter the rest. I’m freezing, she said once, to a kind-eyed stoner wearing one of the nicest Carhartt canvas jackets I’ve ever seen. We were standing in a queue outside a club. The boy shouldered his jacket off and passed it to Lara.

  Give it back once we’re inside, yeah? he said. It was a Christmas present from my mum. She’ll kill me if I lose it.

  As soon as the boy’s back was turned, Lara pulled me by the wrist. We sloped away, her zipping up her new jacket against the night.

  Another time, a few weeks after this, Lara was sitting on a barstool in the Queen’s Head, drinking a pint. A group of schoolgirls were dancing on the pool table, playing Ariana Grande out of their phones. Mark was lingering nearby.

  I met that guy with the ponytail in the petrol station, she said.

  I hadn’t seen him since the night Lara and I first met. What were you doing in there? I asked. You don’t even have a car.

  I wanted to see if I could coax whoever was working out of their shift.

  Why?

  Something to do.

  I didn’t say anything to Lara then.

  Didn’t you notice the Shell logo on his T-shirt? she asked.

  I shrugged. I hadn’t. What did you say to him? I said.

  I just asked if he fancied a game of pool. He left the counter empty and we walked over here. Lara laughed.

  D’you think he got fired?

  She contemplated the idea. Probably, she said.

  I knew that she hadn’t actively been trying to get him out of a job. Lara wasn’t malicious like that. She’d just wanted someone to fuck, and there he was.

  The first time Lara kissed me, we’d just been kicked out a bar. We were wearing matching mesh tops that you could see our nipples through. I looked appalling, and Lara looked great. She’d been caught in the beer garden with a bottle of Amaretto she’d smuggled in under her jacket. I’d told the bouncer it was mine, and we’d both been made to leave. There was a fight going on in the street outside. I’d never seen a proper fight before, not up close like that. I had to watch in snatches, through my fingers. One man grabbed the other’s face and pulled it towards him so the two men were standing nose to nose. He didn’t take his
hand away, and I could see the skin of the other man’s cheek stretched tight over his jawbone. Blood and saliva were dripping from inside his mouth.

  Lara was excited. Whose side are you on? she asked me.

  I don’t know, neither. The police will be here in a minute.

  I like the one with the tattoo, she said. He’s got the edge.

  We stood with the rest of a small crowd to watch. The fight looked equal to me. One second one man was under the other, scraping against the tarmac, and the next they’d swapped places. Finally, the man with the tattoo pushed the other very hard into a car. The windscreen cracked against his head and he slid to the ground.

  Told you, Lara said.

  The winner dusted his hands off on his jeans, as if he’d just finished rolling out pastry. The crowd began to disperse. It was then that Lara put her hands on either side of my face and leant in. Her mouth was molten and luscious. I closed my eyes. Her hand tugged casually at my hair. I could hear the music playing in the bar, and the occasional whoosh of passing traffic. I didn’t question the kissing. I just kept doing it. It was nice. When Lara pulled away, the winner of the fight was looking at us. He had his arms folded across his chest, and he was smirking. Lara nodded at him.

  Hey, she said.

  He nodded back. Hey.

  I glanced down at the loser’s bloodied face on the pavement. He appeared serene, as if sleeping, surrounded by a fine glitter of glass. Someone was knelt down next to him, trying to rouse him awake. I looked at Lara, looking at the winner, and I understood. I said my goodbyes, bought myself a portion of chips with curry sauce, and walked home through the black streets.

  ◆

  Lara and I had been friends about two months when I went home for Easter.

  You look thin, my mother said, the night I arrived. Are you eating properly?

  I’ve been dieting, I lied.

  The real reason I’d lost weight was because I spent most days sleeping, and by the time I got up again it was almost time for another night out. There wasn’t much opportunity for meals.

  My mother looked proud. You must tell me what you do, she said. I’m in a rut with the Atkins.