Flux

I spent the day in New Lycroft searching out contracts for sub-letting. No success. I did actually buy a contract but discovered on the train platform that it was the wrong kind, so I was an hour late to my prearranged rendezvous with Pete at Crown Racing on Old Priory Road. He was inside paying the rent when I got there; we got everything sorted out and wandered back through Westdorgan Park in the sweltering heat.

We dropped in on an American Studies end of year party in the bar of the Millikin Arts Centre; Pete and I cased up the adjacent gallery while the drinking and genteel chatting burbled on downstairs until Guy arrived and we walked across to the Town and Gown.

The French-windows were open so people could sit out on the grass and we sat there drinking and watching Brenda, our forty-something but still glamorous and (desperately) fashionable school-secretary flirting with, then openly groping, being groped by and finally snogging, several bronzed student-types. We couldn’t believe our eyes.

Pete scored speed from some bloke in the Millikin Centre toilets and we sat snorting it in his battered Renault in the car park while all around us people enjoyed the fine evening. The melodrama of the situation appealed to me. Afterwards we retired to Wollstonecraft and thence to Westway Loop Bar where I talked with Shelley and Carl Cotton (down again to do the RCP stall with Barry). I found him unexpectedly easy to talk to.

Guy, Pete and I ended up catching the tail-end of a party in Wilberforce where Pete and I spent the night chatting to a girl called Doreen who, in eight months, I’d never once seen around campus. We left her asleep sitting up in bed and tracked down Guy over at Fabian’s where he was wrapped up in a conversation that had been going on for hours—the usual speed-inspired fluxes of enthusiasm and awareness of spontaneous joy, knife-edges of excitement, tingling and pulsing down through my legs.