Snake boy

My frenetic life-style continues. I didn’t bother going to bed at all last night.

Unreal in the early hours, Rowan, Pete, ‘spiky’ Stu and I fooling around in the kitchen, Pete being his usual irrepressible, ludicrous self, saying he wanted to marry Rowan. Gradually I saw her fascination grow: she never took her eyes off him and kept saying he was “evil” and calling him a “snake boy.” We started to really take the piss but she couldn’t see it and instead tried to hide behind me, saying “Stop him, Paul, he's a tempter.” She was transfixed.

Pete, Rowan and I ended up in her room. I could see a great internal battle going on within her as she took off her jewelry and sat next to him, trembling, running her fingers through his hair and squeezing his arm, one red-stockinged knee visible beneath her bunched-up skirt. It was so obvious and so open. “I want you to go but I don’t want you to” she kept repeating and Pete looked at me in disbelief. He was torn too, I could tell. Eventually, with great willpower, he left and Rowan and I talked for half-an-hour.  “I'm so grateful to you for your moral exemplitude” she said. “Girls romanticise it but underneath they want it just as much as boys.” I’m sure – certain in fact – that in the same situation I’d have been a hypocrite and just gone ahead and—but who knows?

I left and went into the kitchen where Pete was still mind blown by the night’s events. We went to LifeLine and talked to the girlfriend of an ex-Hells Angel who told us about initiation ceremonies and murder by sulphuric acid and showed us her wounds where her boyfriend cuts her. . . . Too much, on top of everything else.

Back at Wollstonecraft we played table footie and talked as dawn broke, alive to the rush of rain. I stayed awake just long enough to see Rowan up once more and to drink a breakfast cup of coffee before crashing out at nine.

I'm really fucking myself over. It's 2.30 p.m. now and I’ve been awake half-an-hour. . . .

A kind of shocked convalescent mood permeates the hard grey days, everyone dying on their feet before reviving by nightfall to spend hours boozing or smoking dope, finally succumbing to fatigue in the small hours. Barry spewed up down the wall in the bog last night. “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.” Ha Ha Ha.