The Old Blue Last
It was during my AS-mocks that I met a famous rockstar. Not a great famous rockstar by any stretch, but a famous rockstar all the same. Let’s call him Billy. Billy Moral. It happened like this.
It was 1am on a Wednesday and all I wanted was another double-vodka-diet-coke, but the barmaid was serving everyone except me. I mounted the footrail and leaned further forward. My forearms were sticky and I could smell the scalp of the guy next to me. I stared again at Faris and Peaches kissing in the corner. The guy on the door had stamped my hand with some sort of crest, which I knew I had to scrub off before school tomorrow.
Someone yanked my hair. ‘Hurry up.’ It was Alice, my partner-in-crime. We’d done the thing where both our mums thought we were staying at the other one’s house.
‘They’re here. Billy’s just finding somewhere safe to put the bike’, she said. Billy had a vintage Triumph. Last time he’d brought it out, someone worked out it was his and pissed all over the seat.
In the bathroom, Alice and I admired ourselves. We always matched, in black tights and balding fur coats. We passed conjunctivitis back and forth with eyeliner pencils. We backcombed our hair, formed accidental dreadlocks, reeked of cigarettes and Agent Provocateur Eau de Parfum.
Alice met Billy two weeks ago. Everyone else pretended not to know who he was, but she told him his last album, Landings, was really shit, and that seemed to turn him on for some reason.
‘What’s his friend called again?’ I asked.
‘He’s called Harry. Don’t worry you’ll really like him. He lives on a canal boat! He does comedy I think. Let’s go. Be cool.’
