As Lou tottered away from her parents she didn’t miss Annabelle sighing to Brian, ‘I told her to cut that fringe before today, didn’t I?’
In the bathroom, Lou tapped away at the numbers on her phone until her SMS read:
Parent problem. Meet you 9.30?
She knew better than to expect an instant reply.
*
It was more like half past ten by the time Lou shoved her way through a thick soup of drinking, yelling twenty-somethings at the Bank Hotel. Her cap and gown were crushed into her canvas backpack, along with the heels she’d swapped for sparkly ballet flats.
‘That’s three hours of my life I’ll never get back,’ Gretchen was yelling into her ear as she was tugged through the crowd behind Lou. ‘And your brother is not hot, you liar.’
‘Had to get you there somehow!’ Lou yelled back. ‘Besides, from what he’s told me lately, you’re really not his type.’ And she pushed on, tunnel vision focused at the back of the pub near the pool table, where Luca could usually be found.
His response to her SMS – K – had only arrived an hour ago and even to Lou’s optimistic, and somewhat tipsy, mind it seemed like a tenuous arrangement.
‘As soon as we find the bastard, I’m out of here.’ Gretchen’s voice was getting hoarser. ‘I’m missing an actual old-school rave to make your graduation dreams come true tonight, friend. A rave with hot DJs.’
‘Fine, I get it.’ They were nearly at the back of the bar and Lou had seen no sign of Luca’s signature bandana.
He was the kind of guy who had a few signatures. The tatty chequered rag tied around his close-cropped hair was one. His battered black mountain bike, which she was almost certain she had spied outside, was another. So was the ever-present Winfield Blue behind his ear or spinning in his fingers. And then there was his cunnilingus technique, which, to Lou at least, was a complete revelation.
Lou and Gretchen stopped by a crop of tall stools behind the pool tables and near the blue-lit entrance to the toilets. The group who’d been using them, sticky drinks in hand, graduation gowns now spun around as capes, were shouting loudly about where to go next.
‘Where is he?’ Lou’s stomach was churning and she felt jittery. She wanted to see him. She wanted him to see her. This was supposed to be a great night. The greatest.
Gretchen hugged her. ‘I’m going, babe. He’s not here, and this’ – she gestured to the heaving mass, pulled a shoe slightly off the sticky floor – ‘isn’t my idea of a good time. Why don’t you come with me?’
‘Nooooo . . . Just another five minutes, Gretch. He’s here somewhere and if you leave then I’m just going to look desperate waiting on my own.’
‘But you are desperate, Lou-Lou.’ Gretchen laughed. ‘Come with me to the ladies, then we’ll have one more look around. But after that, I’m going to the doof.’
To Lou’s frustration, the toilet queue was long, slow-moving and as raucous as the bar outside.
‘This place is so sad-sack,’ Gretchen was complaining. Always cooler than Lou, she had tired of student-filled beer barns just about the time Lou had started enjoying them, preferring obscure raves at deserted warehouses in suburbs too close to Lou’s parents’ house for comfort. But the two of them, tightly bonded from the first terrifying year of teacher training, tolerated each other’s tastes. Up to a point.
Gretchen sighed. ‘There are always some drunken fuckwits having sex in a cubicle.’
The door of one of the five cubicles had remained closed the whole time they’d been waiting. And as they got closer, it became clear that the shuffles and moans and bumps audible even over the churning guitar rock pounding from the bar were not the sounds of someone using the toilet for conventional purposes.
‘We can hear you, you dickheads!’ Gretchen shouted. She banged on the closed door. ‘Go and screw out in the back alley like normal people! You’re holding up the line. It’s unsisterly!’
‘Gretchen, shhh!’ Lou snatched at Gretchen’s arm. Awe and fear mingled in her stomach. ‘They might come out and deck you.’
The door next to the sex toilet opened and the pink-haired girl who came out made a vomiting face at Lou, who was next in line. ‘You might need earplugs,’ she said, moving towards the basins.
Lou shrugged and motioned for Gretchen to go first, but her friend pulled a face and shook her head. ‘I’ll wait.’
The instant Lou slid the lock across the door, she knew who was in the sex toilet; she recognised the particular tenor of the gasps and groans. For a moment, she held her breath. Then she dropped to her haunches and, holding her long hair up and out of the way, peered through the gap between the cubicles.
She saw a pair of men’s shoes facing the toilet. No women’s feet, because, as Lou had already guessed, the girl was standing on the toilet seat. The shoes were beaten-up black Converse sneakers with No Alibi scrawled on them in white-out. Another of Luca’s trademarks.
Lou straightened up, spun around and, still holding her hair back, vomited into the toilet.
When she was done, she wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and kicked the wall between her cubicle and the sex toilet with as much force as a ballet flat would allow, the crash immediately interrupting the moans next door. And then Lou burst out of the cubicle to gulp water straight from the tap. Seeing no sign of Gretchen, she shoved her way through the queue and back out into the bar. The only thing she could think, the only clear thought in her head at this moment, was that she must not see Luca – and he would be coming out of that bathroom door any minute.
She forced herself through the crowd, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her mouth sour and gritty, her face wet with what were certainly tears, even though she wasn’t consciously aware that she was crying.
It seemed that the pub was even more crowded now, that all these people were here, between her and the front door, specifically to block her from leaving this place.
‘Lou!’ She heard Gretchen’s voice calling above the racket. ‘Lou! Stop!’
But she wasn’t stopping, she had to keep going. It became clear that the only way to get through this mass of bodies was to throw herself at it. And so she did. She flung herself into the wall of sweaty people waiting at the bar. And bounced off, in a wave of indignant shouts and spilled drinks.
‘Lou!’ She turned and saw Gretchen, who was looking at her with wide eyes and mouthing, ‘What the fuck?’
And then, just behind her friend, she saw Luca. Standing by the toilet door, he was reaching for the cigarette behind his ear and coolly looking around.
Lou dropped to the floor. It was the only thing she could think to do in that moment: to hide. Heads were turning, looking down now, at the tear-streaked woman with long wild hair trying to crouch in the middle of a crowd.
I want to disappear, Lou thought. I want to vanish. How do I do that?
There were legs all around her, like trees in a forest – if trees uniformly dressed in black skinny jeans. Still squatting, Lou began to waddle towards the bar, where the crowd was thickest.
But far from making her invisible, her duck-walk was attracting attention. ‘What are you doing down there?’ and ‘What the fuck is your problem?’ people were asking as they shuffled out of the way.