Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

She came on after a Latina woman with a nice enough body but too old, too old. This time I watched her appreciatively and I even forgot about the Turk, more or less. She used one of those long, white, glittery things — what’s it called, a boa? Is it called a boa? Or is that just a fucking snake.

The blue light, the music. Oh you are wondrous, I thought, and the men there all agreed, and she caught a few of their eyes, and I’d say that smile was a little less than professional, wouldn’t you agree now, honey. When she headed backstage, I put my drink on the bar (empty) and tried to follow her in by another route. That didn’t really work out, but it could have been worse and I left, as they say, unmolested. That night the porno I put on depicted weird metal devices and blood (fake probably), and a sinister font. I was ashamed in the morning but it had suited my mood.

For a couple of months we met up once or twice a week, we had sex, we saw a gig in Brixton. But always when I was with her the Turk invaded my thoughts — he molested me. Whenever we drank, things turned ugly. My mind twisted up, I hissed or snapped and said brutal or double-edged things, and basically upset her, but later I always apologised in a gush of sentiment and horniness (I could never walk away — an ass like that?). One morning we slept late and she woke up and said shit, I have to get going, hang around here if you want. So I did hang around, up on the nineteenth floor (thereabouts). I did what you’d expect: sniff her underwear, scrutinise the toilet bowl, pull myself off in her bed. I was going to somehow pretend I’d gone home, then hide under the bed and wait — I wanted to see if she’d bring him back. But in the end I thought the better of it, or really I couldn’t be fucked. I let myself out, slid the key under the door like she’d said, and took two buses home. I got drunk that night and wandered late along Seven Sisters where it’s busy, hoping for I don’t know what, some kind of new horizon, a human reaction, some friendship I suppose.

When she broke up with me I sort of went off the radar for a while — I mean even to myself. I have trouble saying exactly what happened in those weeks, what I was up to. That wasn’t only down to finishing with her: it had a lot to do with mephedrone, which was still legal then. You could just walk into a head-shop and buy it. And I did, I walked right in there and bought it. It was so much better than coke — stronger buzz, more reliable, longer lasting, only a tenth the price. Coke is a status sign, you only get symbolically high, like Holy Communion.

Everything accelerated with the drug. I was all over London like a streak of red light in one of those stop-motion panoramas in music videos (the singer always moves at normal speed while everything rushes around her, she’s supposed to be special; but everyone feels special, that’s the primary con). I was living amid extreme, daily agony, blunted only by drugs and drink. The worst part was that I felt we hadn’t had enough sex. That might sound crass or shallow, but I felt it as a real loss, it really hurt . You know you’ll carry it with you till the end, that remorse — you failed to live to the full, life was for the brave and you did not make your moves.

She said I was too intense, that’s why she broke up with me, she said I came on too strong — those kinds of clichés. In other words: same stuff they always say. They can’t handle it, they say they want the high romance but really it’s just security and families. So yes I was angry. But the thing is, I wasn’t really that angry with her — or only in an indirect way. What really boiled my blood, what kept me awake at night, was not her, but. . the Turk. Still. I’d wake up at 2:49, 4:06, 5:20, and I’d know — I can’t explain how, I was just dead certain that at that very instant, over the other side of the city, he was lashing it into her, I mean searing out her insides, making her come again and again and again and again. And all the time he had that superior smirk, and he didn’t take off his clothes (grey suit and jacket). And every thrust he gave her, every shuddering orgasm he brought her to — that was really him fucking me . That’s all there is to it. Absolute injustice. I had no power whatsoever. I remember clawing my hair and my scalp, hissing and writhing around and making all these animal noises, grunts and shrieks, and moaning weird obscenities, racist invective, all kinds of random taboo stuff. It was like demonic possession. I wanted to kill him. I thought about it so much, I mean obsessively, just smashing his mouth in with a hammer and stomping his head to a mush, hacking into his face with a cleaver, the usual.

Celak was my only friend in those dark days. He didn’t drink much, and looked down on my drug-taking with Muslim smugness, or wherever he comes from. But he was mad for women, so he came out with me every night after work. I’d be fucked off my head on meow meow, with my eyes like saucers, talking too quick, too eager for any human contact or approval, and Celak would be there at my side going sure, man, sure, but really his eyes were scanning relentlessly for women, flitting from one to the next, like RoboCop, sorting out their bodies and arses, catching their glances. A machine he was like. I always dreaded him actually picking up a girl, cause then I’d be out there on my own, stranded at four a.m. with nothing to go back to, nothing to stave off the shocking grief of the comedown but a dismal box-room in a house full of strangers.

I came through that period, somehow. I mean the worst of it. The pain was still there, every day it burned. When things got a little clearer I was surprised to find I still had my job at the Mexican restaurant, despite all the sick-days and lates and ‘alienating or inappropriate behaviour’, or however they put it in those fucking letters. But then I decided to go back, just once, and see her dance. I hadn’t heard a word from her now in maybe two months. (I’d made a routine of calling her and letting it ring out, then calling her again, repeating that around twenty-five or thirty times per night.) On a Friday night I took a tube to Russell Square. I paid in and sat at a middle table, not too far from the stage.

All night I sat there. I must have seen a dozen dances — a redhead, the Latina woman, two blondes, a Chink with mad tits. When the same girls came out for a second rotation I knew she wasn’t going to appear. I waited anyway, just in case. Her or the Turk, I had to see one of them. I knocked back a barrel’s worth of whiskeys and Coke — they cost a fortune but I had to deal with the rage, though to be honest the drink only exacerbated it. I saw how the men were transfixed by the dancers — a flesh trance, a lust rapture. I imagined very vividly how the Turk had watched her just like that, except it was different cause he’d have trembled in anticipation, knowing he could have her the moment she stepped off-stage. The images bombarded me, worse than ever. I let out a long moan and bit into my knuckle. I wanted to run outside, but where to? — the hell was inside me. I gasped at the waitress for more drink, I must’ve spent a week’s wages, no exaggeration. I heard myself moan like I was dying. The fucking Turk, I gasped, loud enough for some guy to turn and look. And the awful truth of it was that what made her knees weak, what made him better than me, was his fucking money, his power, his prestige. The fucking Turk.

At some point I just wasn’t in control any more and that’s when I was shoving my way through the stage door, demanding that I be allowed to see her, getting slammed by a big black guy. She’s my boyfriend, I roared — precision was lost in the rage — she’s my boyfriend and you’re saying I can’t see her. I don’t remember the actual getting thrown out but I assume they were civilised enough — I mean no broken bones or anything. Who knows what happened with the rest of the night, but it ended with me being shaken awake by a homeless man with grimy dreadlocks who looked genuinely worried. Dawn had broken and I was down on one of those smelly grey pebble beaches on the Thames, right in the heart of the city, on the South Bank, where they have raves in the summer. It was a dull morning and my pockets had been thoroughly looted. One shoe was missing, along with the sock. I still had on my leather jacket.