It lasted maybe a minute or two — this exile on a faraway moon — and then it passed. The feeling level readjusted; I was no longer ecstatic, and no longer buried in anguish. I was somewhere in-between.
We drank another pint and went outside. It was well after midday. We were drunk, and none of us wanted to go home or to be alone. Its primary effects worn off, the ecstasy continued to work on us, providing a moderate but constant bassline of enthusiasm and pleasure.
‘I wish we had more pills, just one more each,’ said Cocker. But I thought it was better that we didn’t; to take more now would be only to fuck ourselves up and it would mean that the crash, when it came, would be unbearable. Better to slow-drink our way through the day, listening to music if we could, and gradually come down together all the way, easing ourselves back to something like normality.
Jen had told us that her house would be free for the afternoon. Her da was going away for a couple of days and her brothers would be at their girlfriends’ houses, or out on the lash.
‘What about drink?’ asked Rez.
‘We can get some at the offo near my house,’ she said.
We took a bus along the coast. It was a lucid-dream kind of day; the people we saw on the streets, or walking along the strand, seemed hardly to be there at all, like pencil sketches. The sea out past Lansdowne Road was a thick blue, without lustre, drinkable-looking. We sat upstairs on the bus, wary of making eye contact with two crewcut lads in tracksuits in the last row, rolling joints and broadcasting their scorn in abrasive whines. The whiff of their hash filled our nostrils, queasy-making.
We bought sixteen cans of Dutch Gold and drank them throughout the rest of the day, smoking joints from Jen’s ounce of hash, listening to Mogwai and Leonard Cohen and Radiohead. We were quiet whenever Padraig, Jen’s older brother, was in the room, and he ignored us but for a few surly grunts as he made sorties into the kitchen. When he left to go to his girlfriend’s we felt more relaxed.
The light faded outside, sped-up like in a film, until eventually we turned on the lamp in the corner of the sitting room. Our conversations got more jangled and fragmentary, our outbursts of laughter more frayed and weird-sounding. Strange voices gabbled in my mind in the quiet between songs, and my eyes darted randomly, all fucked up and playing tricks on me. I remembered how I’d felt last night, all the grand thoughts I’d had about the universe, about how everything was ultimately alright, redeemed by some immense mystery. Now, frazzled in the gloom, it was hard to connect with those ideas and emotions. A dead girl was just a dead girl, there was no grand solace to be found. My mind was clogging up with dark, confused thoughts and I started to nod off. Just as I was about to sleep I gasped: from the corner of my eye I saw that Kearney was in the room, dressed in black and silently watching me from the couch. I jolted upright, but now I could see that it was only the shape of Cocker’s jacket that had confused me.
Sad, reflective music filled the room. Our talk gradually petered out, then Cocker stretched out on the couch and fell asleep. Rez was sitting up on an armchair, head resting in his hand, an image of desolation.
‘You alright, man?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ he rasped, in a way that made it painfully clear he wasn’t. I didn’t know what to say.
‘Ye sure?’
‘Yeah. I’m grand. Just a bit … down.’
He was making a massive understatement and he knew I knew it, and he wanted me to know it.
‘Okay. Well, em, it was a great day.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m glad you were, ye know, here.’
‘Was I?’ he said, then laughed scornfully at his own pretentiousness. At least he was laughing.
Rez sighed and turned away, back to his bleak thoughts, the labyrinth he was lost in.
Jen was sitting beside me on the smaller couch, and she put her toe into my side and wiggled it. I turned to her.
‘Will we go to bed?’ she asked with a smile.
‘Okay.’
We walked slowly up the stairs holding hands, then into her room, which I had been in a few times before but never as what we were now: more than friends. Lamplight glowed low and soothing; there was varnished wood and soft curves to everything. It was uncluttered but cosy; the kind of room you wanted to be in.
We sat on the bed and kissed slowly. Her hands came up, pulling me towards her. She inhaled sharply, like she was trying to breathe me in. We both smelled of alcohol and drugs. She guided me on to the bed and I held her head in my hand, resting on the pillow. She began to undress me. My heart was thumping, my muscles tensing, partly in anxiety and partly in excitement. I slid my hands up her thin blue cotton top, cupping her breasts in my palms. They felt warm. I drew my right hand down and rested it on her flat stomach. I kissed the pale skin of her neck.
She unbuttoned my jeans, then guided me free with her hand, between the buttons of my boxer shorts. She held it, squeezing slightly, looking in my eyes. We kissed again and I put my lips on her nipples, and rubbed between her legs with my hand. She had started to moan softly, making sounds that seemed to form gasping, melodious little sentences I couldn’t understand. She reached over to the wooden bedside drawer and took out a pack of condoms, then helped me put one on.
We started kissing again. She was moaning more, her eyes closed, almost grimacing as if she was in pain.
She put her mouth to my ear and whispered, ‘Come into me.’
I pressed myself towards her, trying to slide into her without using my hand.
Nothing happened. She opened her eyes and looked into mine. I reached and then looked down. My dick had gone soft. The condom hung loosely on it, curving in the middle. In fast-rising panic I tried to shake and coax it back to action.
She did a little laugh but I was aghast, terrified. ‘What the fuck is happening?’ I pleaded.
‘Relax …’ she began.
‘But what’s going on? Why isn’t it hard?’
I was freaking out, close to despair. She tried to calm me down but I felt humiliated. Visions of lifelong impotence bombarded me, smothering me in horror.
‘Just relax,’ she said. ‘Here, lie back.’ She took it in her mouth and kissed it, licked the tip, flicked her tongue over it. I watched in extreme anxiety.
‘It’s no good,’ I moaned. ‘Why is it happening?’
Eventually, through Jen’s licking and coaxing I achieved what felt like a very precarious half-erection. ‘Now, put it in me,’ she whispered. I obeyed: as soon it was inside her I could feel myself coming. I tried to stop it but it was too late. I closed my eyes, devastated. Something in me seemed to expire, with a final, humiliated groan.
I lay on top of her and buried my face in her shoulder. She was trying to comfort me, saying sshhh and stroking my hair, while I stared in shock and agony at the wall. ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine, it happens to lots of men. It’s all the drugs you’ve taken. That’s what happens, it’s normal.’
But I didn’t believe her: it wasn’t the drugs, it was something badly wrong with me, an affliction I had now for life. I was ruined; there was nothing left for me but to kill myself, or live like a hermit on some mountain, reading books and shunning society. I was ruined.
I pushed her away from me and lay on the bed, shivering with the comedown, helplessly viewing an inner montage of disgrace, humiliation and shame. She put her hand on me but I shoved it away. After that she didn’t try any more. She turned away on to her side of the bed and we lay there in silence, no longer communicating, no longer together. It took me a long time to fall asleep.