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She’d never done it before – that was its appeal. It might not have been anything beyond that. Of course, she had an idea of how it would go. She’d pictured it enough times.

They’d eaten tacos. Their hands were covered in the salsa and the sour cream. She loved watching the other girl. Eve loved how Alexa gripped the food with her hands and lent down with her face close to the table, ignoring everyone for a moment.

She had her ideas about how it would go. She would somehow seduce. She would suggest that they lay down on the bed. She would casually take off her top. They would fight beneath the covers.

Only she’d given up those thoughts as they’d gotten to know each other well, and Alexa had become the only person in this place so far from home that she could really talk to. They fin-ished eating. They went to lie on Alexa’s bed. Eve picked up her teddy bear in its oversized top with flowers drawn on. They talked about family, about friends, about boys, about dates, about confused messages and falling for ones who were leaving.

They were going to go to a salsa class later that night and throw it all away into the music. Alexa was a good dancer. Eve liked it best when she danced alone in her room to songs she’d heard a thousand times. Alexa knew all the steps, could feel the rhythm, could capture people’s gaze as her shoulder lengths curls spun in time with her hips. Eve felt like a doll when she fol-lowed her lead, though she would try to dance it anyway, for the sake of it.

But it was too early to go now. So they lay quietly on the bed talking French, the Brazilian flag above them, the Mexican food on their lips, photographs of Peru on the walls, memories of an English home on one of their minds, and America outside.

America had been outside for months now, and Eve didn’t know how to let it in. It came close sometimes, in drunken moments walking home when someone opened up, sometimes she opened up. It never drenched her though. It never made her fall. It never felt firm and real and warm and free beneath her feet.

Eve looked at the clock beside the bed, staring sleepily over the bowl of lavender petals in front. It was late. They’d fallen asleep. They’d missed the salsa. She turned over to Alexa whose eyes had opened. They always looked small, because she was always smiling with her whole face. Eve realised what she was thinking and turned onto her back.

“You can stay.” Alexa said.Eve nodded and asked if she could borrow some clothes. She changed, casually taking her

top off.“Those red marks on your stomach – are they because you shave?” Eve folded her arm

across her stomach.“Yes, well, I pluck out the hairs. They’re really thick. They get ingrown.”Alexa said that she didn’t get hair there, but she did get it on her nipples. She said that once

a boyfriend had drawn her naked and drawn on the nipple hair. They laughed. They brushed

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prose

EVEby Rosa Lia

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PROSEtheir teeth. They turned out the light. They got into bed.

Eve awkwardly asked Alexa what she thought about girls. They both stumbled around the topic until Eve even more awkwardly asked if it would be weird if they kissed. They kissed. Then they lay on their backs, before discussing the kiss, dissecting it. Should a kiss be soft? Or was passionate better? How did their lips compare to others? Eve said she liked having her neck bit-ten, so they did that. They talked, they tried, they told each other what to do and all the while their voices maintained the same, casual, conversational tone. No short breath or whispering or supressed moans.

Eve liked the feeling of bare breasts on hers. They were comforting, beautiful perhaps. She worked her way down until she was between Alexa’s thighs and then she was out of her depth. Not with emotion, but with confusion. She knew her own body so well, only this wasn’t her body. The taste was what she’d expected, but the shapes and textures were different, the sen-sations were different. Alexa stopped her, saying she was being too rough. She tried to listen, to ask what was wanted.

Then they were kissing and it was building and Eve was gripping Alexa’s arm and she was there, the intensity breaking through her as she bit Alexa’s shoulder.

But Alexa couldn’t quite see it, wasn’t quite sure what Eve thought she’d told her. So Eve put it into words, “I came”. Alexa said congratulations. Eve felt a small frown form and tried to wipe it away. Congratulations? That seemed like something you’d write on a card, or like something that was hers alone, not shared. She tried to focus on the feel of Alexa’s skin, to listen to her moans of That’s Good. She tried to feel the fire building beneath her fingers. And for a while she could. But the sparks never caught light. They both pretended they would for a while, until Alexa pulled herself away.

“I’m tired of you.”Eve wasn’t sure she’d heard it right at first. She asked, and heard the words again. Those

were words she hadn’t heard before. Or had she? Is that what he’d meant when he’d said “I love you but that’s not enough”?

Eve rolled over and tried to sleep. She couldn’t at first, until she realised she was tired too, tired of herself like they were.

That morning she woke up and the bed was empty. Alexa came into the room fully dressed, saying in her usual enthusiastic tone that she’d spent the night on the sofa, adding casually that she’d experienced anxiety but didn’t know what about. Then she said she had to go to class and with her breezy smile intact she hugged Eve before leaving the room.

Eve sat on the bed, looking for her clothes. She’d somehow seduced. They’d lain down on the bed. She’d taken off her top. They’d been naked beneath the covers.

She put on her clothes and left. That box was ticked. She’d done it now.

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If she were to write it after, as a poem, it would probably be vague and abstract. It would probably hint towards some greater meaning. It would explain how her soul was changed. It would become a universal experience that the reader would feel was true. The lines would describe the light and the shadows and some obscure detail about the door. Maybe the hook on the door. The empty hook on the door that waits for someone to hang up their coat and stay

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for a while. Only she would play with the words a little more, changing their rhythms and their order until they weren’t saying what she meant anymore.

It never occurred to her to write.

PROSE

I never turn down a second glass of wine. I could be in a Michelin-star restaurant, my local watering hole or a 80s-themed rave. It really wouldn’t make much of a difference. That lonely glass just beckons to be refilled. When the little voice in my head cries, “Just Say No” I brush it off like a piece of fallen lint. There are moments when I must emulate Ray Milland’s dipsoma-niac in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, “Let me have my little vicious circle,” he soliloquizes. When asked if I would like another I demurely nod. If it’s the third or fourth I usually end up slurring, “Don’t mind if I do”.

In case you didn’t know, this is what health professionals regard as a “binge”. Exceeding one’s “daily unit” allowance (for men it’s 8 and for women 6) is to knock back two 175ml glasses of wine within “a short space of time” according to drinkaware.co.uk. I am not alone, 14 percent of women today exceed their normal daily limit. But what is “normal drinking” anyway? Per-haps they should designate a suitable time (morning/midnight) or place (bar/sidewalk). Self-awareness/regulation aside (although now come to think of it there’s probably an App for that) there is also the “guilt” aspect of refusal. Back in my waitressing days I was always pushing the most expensive Bordeaux or Chablis, made sweeter when they had already been at the bar drowning in Martinis. There’s good old friendly snobbery too, “oh you’re in AA now?” snorts a female friend when I finish my 125ml (puny, really) glass of Chenin Blanc. I shake my head, down it and order another. This inevitably becomes a ritualised performance. Male friends too, with their jeering “lightweight” comments and I’m never one to turn down a challenge. I still (free) associate alcohol with university life. To prove oneself it was as vital to “emancipate” yourself from your peers as it was to be enslaved by them. Graham Greene describes his first year at Oxford as one big drunken blur leaving him “with a strong head and a tough liver.” If Greene were a student today he wouldn’t have cared either way whether the cranberry juice was spiked with cheap (fake) vodka (I was a snob). If only we could turn water into wine.

To my mind, defining my “binge” as a “short period devoted to indulging in an excess of alco-hol” does not directly constitute what The Daily Mail regularly splash on their pages; larger than life photographs of underage girls toppling out of bars, mini-skirts hitched over their thighs with their vomit seeping into drains. I’ll admit I’ve been there (albeit not to those extremes; I save mine for the bathroom sink). After an evening of one-too-many there’s the inevitable (rather latent) bout of self-loathing, denial and of course, those embarrassing photographs uploaded onto Facebook. So why, on top of lived-experience and the exhaustive stream of statistics, arti-

WAYS OF ESCAPEby Jingan Young

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cles, advertisements, documentaries and reality TV we appear not to be deterred (in any sense) from the perpetual binge?

F Scott Fitzgerald, known to take a drink (or ten) once said, “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” You’re seduced, one sip and that’s it. Similarly Proust’s narrator in À La Recherche indulges in the moral and physical “ataxia” brought on by drinking copious amounts of port wine. He describes the welcome rush of intoxication and the discharge of “psychical energy”. Wading between reality and instantaneous bouts of drunk-enness he achieves artistic clarity through his hedonism, describing the sensation as “ of the moment, with no extension beyond its limits, nor any object other than not to be separated from it.” Through the suppression of nerve pathway activity he receives (divinely) an acute and heightened “awareness” of everyone and everything. Societal inhibitions are lost. High spirits, false hope and a recovery of lost youth defined by compulsive action are regained (a sort of short-term solution to writer’s block). In The Lost Weekend Milland’s failed-writer describes the profound effects of alcohol, “Suddenly…I’m one of the great ones […] Suddenly I could see the whole thing.” These somewhat “romantic” allusions in one way represent an intense aversion to an unstoppable accelerating world. Georg Simmel described modernity in 1903 as a “rigid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.” Reality through wassailing could be suspended temporarily. Our century in contrast, rapidly propelling forward-by-the-second provides yet another reason to reach for the bottle. Apart from the fear of one’s life passing by is the fear of not being able to keep up with it. As humans we yearn for repeated sensation within stabil-ity. Love, sex, food, we want it all, now, tomorrow and the day after. But we like rules too and you’ve got to play the game.

The media accounts for the increasing rates of women binge-drinkers with… the media. Stud-ies show that if we see a celebrity, cosmopolitan in one hand, a designer hipflask (the spring 2012 designer fashion shows were peddling them. No, seriously) in the other we’ll strive to emulate them. I can already see the cast of TOWIE touting them alongside their chihuahuas, fake tans and vajazzles. These are the contemporary Calamity Janes riding off into the sunset to the point of no return.

There does appear to be a new penchant for the “lady-like” drunk and alcoholism has found its own niche in Hollywood, “We surely only have to be told that we are going to see a film about an alcoholic to know that it will be a tale either of sordid decline or of inspiring redemp-tion” remarks Richard Dyer. Take film noir for example, the femme fatale may be an alkie but she’s also beautiful, complex and a rival to her male co-star, that is until she’s blackmailed or bumped off. The silver screen is littered with the bodies of the female alcoholic stereotype: Joan Crawford in Humoresque, Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. There’s also a blatant assumption that a woman’s promiscuity is explicitly linked to her drinking, that the devastating repercus-sions of “a night out”, sexual assault/rape go hand-in-hand with the abuse of alcohol. I’m not going to get too hunkered down in the specifics of feminism’s outlook here but many advocate abuse is due to the “be just like them” scenario. After acquiring liberté from our male oppres-sors the fixation to “catch up” with what we’ve lost out on backfires and with it brings a mess of mass sexualization of the younger generation, “why can’t they just shut up and vote?” I hear them growl. Cindy L Ehlers suggests that it is “quite possible that two forms of alcoholism may exist in women: one that is largely the result of environmental pressures in the middle years,

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PROSEand another […] genetically mediated.” So perhaps we really do have genetics (and gender) to blame. A recent study into alcohol dependency in women by King’s College, London suggests that apart from environmental triggers psychiatric disorders can be inherited. The gene in ques-tion? Adenylyl Cyclase Type 7. So hey, let’s all blame our mothers (and fathers).

Western society’s sure-fire solution to alcoholism is littered with words such as “booze bus”, “advisory board” and “stickers”. “Empowerment is the key”, spouts one poster on the tube. Has any of it worked? Is the cultural norm to deem sobriety as anti-social behaviour or does it con-note a corrupt culture devoid of morality? It is very much still at odds with itself and the rest of the world looks on with bemusement. Selling us the old adage, “you drink you die” merely el-evates the need for it. Another old-fashioned singular cure to addiction is religious conversion. Before his death in 1961 Carl Jung replied to Bill Wilson, one of the founders of AA in response to a patient’s struggle with alcoholism. Jung wrote, “You see, Alcohol in Latin is “spiritus” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.” His solution: religious con-version and/or spiritual awakening. One could see the potential for reform here. Round up a collective (with pamphlets) on any given night in Soho. Grab a drunk and tell them to “go find themselves.” However this form of activism may prove harmful (to you anyway). Perhaps by shifting the focus from telling “scary stories” of the potential consequences of abuse to telling us to take more responsibility when we drink and to not “blame it all on the booze” we would take more pleasure in drinking. It would no longer be a social construct, merely a congenial substance.

Over the last few months that I have remained relatively dry (and sober) a revelation has occurred. Although my close relationships have stayed the same, those with whom I have only an acquaintance with have drastically altered. With the cloud of gin no longer hovering nearby I have found we have absolutely nothing in common, “you’re so much more fun when you’re plastered” acquaintance number five spits onto a grubby wooden table in a pub in Islington. Later that night I rose to the call of duty, helped her home and put her to bed. I felt, not pity but clarity. We see things quite differently in the dreamy haze of alcohol. We fly, dance on tables, beat up our best friends, tomorrow be damned. As a young woman who wants to live I say, “Keep the Martinis dry”. As a sensible adult who wants to live I cover my glass and say, “just the one.” After all, there’s more than one way of escape.

IN ABSENTIAby George MacBeth

I’d taken him out for the day and Steven was performing, as always. Or playing up as it was in his mother’s nomenclature. To me, it just seemed an embarrassingly open request for my constant attention, his way of shipping back my glance from its nomadic travels – wanting his to be the only anchor in Daddy’s rapid succession of thoughts. Which, if I’m honest, seemed rather emotionally imperceptive even for a five year old; when a moment’s reflection could lead him to

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the conclusion that I couldn’t, I hadn’t in the past, been in one place at once, let alone two. The more often we met the more I felt nervous habits; ticks, scratches, momentary shudders encircle me until I’d become a museum of neurosis. A shell-shocked, crow-footed, combination-locked chest of anxiety. A chair-scrape in the next room could set into motion a round of arm-scratching so ferocious it let off clouds of flaked skin into the air. I’d come to dread these Saturday meal-times.

Why this undisclosed disgust towards every means of subsistence I offered him? Where had this suspicion of everything that ensures his survival come from? Is it the longing at this stage to still return – to reverse, from the mess, the oceanic confusion that met him in the hospital? Freud seemed to think so, but I’d rarely found him the best consultant on parenting.

The walk Steven’s implausibly fresh yet ancient eyes took on my face when I implored him, pleaded with him to con sume just one morsel of greenery. His utter disbelief as I nodded like a metronome between threats and bribes; promises and concessions. Let me get this straight, you want me to what - with THAT - in public? Steven had learnt all the nuances of this indignation by heart. My influence was fading; he’d begun to change. The UUUghck, his contorted grimace, the fetishist longing for sweets and crisps were all newly acquired since our last meeting. This led me to believe he was instructed in them at Play-School whilst Timmy and Martin and him were ostensibly playing with the toy fire-truck and positioning the stubby-legged plastic firemen. I can see Timmy leaning in conspiratorially to him, or beckoning, yes that’s better, Timmy beckoning my child in his doe-eyed naivety over to the corner. Steven’s gleeful bound, the illumination that being wanted casts across his features, makes me wonder why Katie didn’t intervene. At which point, like a pusher, Timmy plied him with the first hit for free, leaving it to his parents to pick up the tab for their child’s insatiable new craving. The friendship of my boy and Timmy is plainly only one of convenience. He being the kind of dross you inevitably find yourself attached to when your critical faculties are still developing. I place their shelf life at around two, maybe three, miserably wasted years of intellectual destitution, of which one and a half have already been spent, and fully expect Steven to appreciate the all-around brilliance of his older next-door neighbour Roland when he reaches year one. Now let me illustrate in Roland a child who not only meets but surpasses his parents’ expectations with his every action. Whether it be his organised charity fundraising cake sales in aid of the RSPB, or the spirited dedication with which he nightly practices the flute – taking care of course to time his practice at such hours as are not disturbing to Steven’s mother (who nonetheless inexplicably detests the kid, routinely calling him Roland the fucking Rat, which I now understood to be a projection of her underlying resentments for other people onto a surrogate hate figure.) Despite his youth the boy displays a level of academic exuberance which one can only praise, regularly holding seminars for his family on the classical world, from which I used to glean insights through the walls. If I could strain my hearing above the cacophonous din of Steven’s Mother’s-- Anyway Timmy’s dumbness is in no part helped by the persistent trail of ooze that runs from the endless reservoir of his nostrils, leaving his cheeks forever glistening with a kind of malice. His refrain on the rare occasions I’ve been sent to collect Steven from his house after one of their ‘play-dates’, is a plosive rant of ‘bye Daddy come later by later an dake dimmy in fyah truck. Nee Naw Nee Naw Fyah truch, Fyah truch, FYYYYah truch’. His father Frank, a local fireman, makes appearances even more mythical than my own, yet achieves immunity from any fault in either of the boy’s eyes by having once allowed them to take a ride in the front seat of his truck – driving the entire distance, this is the deal breaker, with the lights and

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sirens on. Fyah Truch, Fyaah Truch, the phrase threw its insidious web across our time together. Knowing that I will never be able to stray so firmly out of the boundaries of parental responsibil-ity when in loco parentis, means I’ve become resigned to losing out in the popularity stakes with my child. Steven now jostles when belted in the front seat, with a manic impatience that suggests his one trip in the fast lane has made any car journey within the speed limit unbearable. It’s a fiction to say I’m okay with it actually! Popularity seemed to be my promissory bounty from this remote kind of parenthood! And yet, as my eyes sneak from the road to glance at him, I can sense this disconnection. I wonder if I’m bragged about in the playground or not. Maybe ‘my dad’s bigger than your dad’ doesn’t even happen anymore – did it slide away with the marbles and the cane? It’s all because I resolved long ago to not play the part of the ‘overly-involved’ Dad, (a decision I now understand to be largely influenced by the constant embarrassments of my own upbringing). Who treats his child like a sheet of canvas on which to project his thwarted dreams? Who adjusts their environment, tweaking their development as in some sort of psychological model! Making them strain their fingers to reach that octave on the piano or locking the garage door until they’ve finished their keepie-uppies. Not for me, it might work for some Dads, but I thought respect and tolerance would be a sounder foundation of love in the long term than ex-cessive control or dangerous driving. Well, it turns out I was wrong. And there’s no backtracking when you’ve settled into your role, because the infernal creatures are the best bullshit detectors out there. They’ll gladly omit any information of any worth but are uncannily able to preserve humiliating details. Case in Point: when I was ‘Discussing his behaviour’ with the cute, full-hipped classroom assistant, Katie. In her low-cut blue sweater, Steven managed to giggle out, ‘why you speaking funny Daddy?’ from where he was hidden behind my leg.

In the car on the ride home, I’m given no assistance. There’s no adjustment in tone of conver-sation, no sensitivity to the fact that Daddy’s work means he’s not able to spend limitless hours watching children’s TV and therefore won’t be able to recognise character names, let alone the respective powers of bad guys, from ‘DinoTurtleSumo Kids’, without an introductory preamble. And yet out of guilt for my own ignorance of this I become a pseudo-Timmy, mouthing ‘and what does he do?’ and ‘surely not’ from behind the wheel. Every now and then there’s a fleeting pause as his stream of conversation hits a dam and he struggles to overcome a gap in vocabulary. Cracked sugar has formed a crust around his mouth, and a singular tuft stands up to attention in the bowl of his hair. It was so strange to see him clasped against the ivory upholstery of the Mercedes, his Velcro shoes swinging far above the foot-well. It always comes as a shock - that recollection of how small they are - he is - to drop instantly out of thinking in adult proportions, to once a month slip into the mentality of the table-high, and all its dangers. To see all that’s forbidden when you dart below the equator line of a room, all that’s kept out of your reach. No wonder they’re always crying! It must be like incarceration in a zoo. We slip with trained ease into the driveway of his mother’s semi-detached, lit by the gentle strobe of amber streetlight through the leaves of the old oak. The neighbourhood is silent at this hour. By now we both know the protocol. Belinda’s forgotten to put the rubbish out, again, I think, and can imagine the rotten stink in the kitchen. Steven fusses with the seat-belt’s push-release as he continues to talk away down there out of the new pleasure of being able to trap thoughts in his ever-growing range of sounds. Then sugar touches stubble, nylon rustles across leather and the little voice rises from the big chair in which it has been held like a pea in a palm.