Inessa grabs the front of her plunging red top, palming her hard-looking breasts. ‘Not when I can buy my way into the game, too,’ she says, her red-lipped grin matching her clothing. She reaches over and grabs her drink, draining it, then stands up again, pulling down her skirt and eyeing the men around her like prey. ‘In a bit.’
In her peripheral vision, Anika clocks a guy in a silky V-neck jumper from which a dense forest of hair is protruding. He’s watching her closely and the moment she notices him lean over to his friend, no doubt to tell the guy he’s going to make amove towards her, she unfolds her legs, gets up and settles her handbag onto her shoulder. It might be time to call it a night. Feeling bad about abandoning Wendy, she settles for heading towards the loo while scanning the crowd for her friend. She finally locates Wendy near the bar, sipping suggestively on a thin bamboo cocktail straw and batting her eyelashes up at a guy who even at a glance doesn’t seem a great prospect. Anika debates again whether to just leave, even though there’s still at least half an hour before Jazzy Joyce is due to take to the decks.
‘Aniiiika!’ Wendy exclaims, reaching out and pulling her hand to yank her over so that they’re hip to hip. Anika can tell her friend is tipping towards the messy end of drunk.
‘Hey, babe.’
‘This is Thomas,’ Wendy says, taking the opportunity to reach over her free hand and pat Thomas’s ample pectoral muscle. ‘He works in finance.’
‘Wow,’ Anika says witheringly.
‘Ah, nice,’ he says, looking at Anika as though Wendy has just shown him a fancy new watch or some other consumable object. ‘I spotted this one over at your table earlier, too.’
Anika’s jaw grips.
‘She’s hard to miss, isn’t she?’ Wendy says, oblivious, slipping her hand around Anika’s waist to gather her in even closer. ‘And, like, you seriously have no idea. She’s basically the strongest woman I know.’ Anika would ordinarily have forced a smile as Wendy presses in so they’re cheek to cheek, but now she holds her face neutrally as she stares back at Thomas’s lecherous expression, and he eventually looks away.
‘Babe, should we think about wrapping things up here?’ Anika says as Wendy’s head comes to rest for a moment on her shoulder, like the weight of it is too much. When she lifts it again and bats her wide eyes at Anika, they’re bloodshot around the pale grey of her irises.
‘I wanted to see if Tommy here wanted to give me his number …’ Wendy says, nowhere near as quietly as she probably thinks, and Anika glances over at the finance whizz. His eagerness seems to have waned. He’s already surveying other women nearby. A hot flame of irritation burns in the centre of Anika’s chest.
‘Why don’t we go and freshen our lipstick,’ Anika says, the music pounding loudly around them. She obviously wasn’t specific enough in the diary last night about how things were going to go today. First bumping into Eloise, and now this? Maybe there are just too many annoying circumstances to mitigate. But just then the DJ segues from a brief interlude of Fela Kuti into an old J Hus tune that, had the clientele been different, would have had everyone ‘aayyying’ and sashaying to the dancefloor. Without qualm, Anika begins to sway her hips, grabbing Wendy’s hand and dragging her in that direction. Her friend’s movements are hampered by the alcohol making her limbs sluggish, but Wendy still shimmies gamely, laughing as she lifts her arms into the air like a manic pixie dream girl. Anika laughs too, augmenting her friend’s movements with more on-beat dance moves, a surge of love exchanging between them. When the woman behind the decks moves into a pounding bootleg remix of aBlack is King-era Beyoncé cut, it has Anika losing her mind at the energy of the music surrounding her. Despite only a handful of others on the small dancefloor, she unashamedly begins bigger, more intricate movements of her hips, stomping her feet, closing her eyes and clapping euphorically, uninterested in anything but enjoying the sensation of rhythm, the utter joy of it.
Worth it.If even for that brief point in time.
But eventually Wendy points sloppily in the direction of the toilets and Anika realises she’s kind of desperate herself. She navigates Wendy into the ladies’, where her friend batters thedoor of a stall until it opens, a tall blonde eyeing them both angrily. They burst into laughter as they both enter the recently vacated enclosure, giggling as Anika wrestles her playsuit off her shoulders and adopts a comically wide-legged squat over the toilet bowl to keep her clothes off the ground and her arse off the seat.
‘My turn,’ Wendy says as Anika wipes and flushes. She doesn’t bother with the hover, sitting down hard on the toilet seat and sighing as a torrent of champagne-laced urine exits her bladder. ‘I’m really glad you came out tonight, darling,’ she says, pausing with a wad of toilet roll wound around her fingers to look up at Anika. ‘Like, this is music you’re into and stuff, isn’t it? Maybe you could meet a guy or whatever – there’s loads of fit guys here …’
Anika finishes buttoning her outfit, stifling a sigh. ‘I think I’ve had my fill for tonight.’ Looking down at Wendy, she wonders if the gulf between them has widened beyond salvage. Perhaps nostalgia is all they really have now. The sigh escapes freely this time. Maybe the diary could pull them closer again? Anika feels bad about not just trying to sort their friendship out herself.But the diaryisme doing it – controlling my life …
Wendy wipes herself, chuckling nonchalantly as she looks at Anika. ‘It’s so strange seeing your hair like that,’ she says, her words dragging drunkenly. ‘Like, it was in the braids and now this pink Afro. I mean, I get it coz of wanting a change and stuff after everything that happened.’ She stands, pulling her tight trousers up. ‘And, to be fair, I was always like, whydoesNeeky straighten her hair?’ Anika purses her lips. It had been at least a year since her last relaxer. ‘I always thought, if I could have it all big and bouncy and curly, I would—’
Anika reaches around her friend and plunges the flush emphatically. There’s a sensation she’d usually keep deep in the pit of her stomach beginning to push up high and tight in herchest. ‘Mmhmm.’ She turns to open the stall door and heads out to wash her hands among the preening women redoing their makeup over the sinks. Nothing Wendy was saying was even cruelly intended or that big of a deal, obviously, but she still feels exoticised in the eyes of someone who should be close enough to see Anika pulsing with individual humanity. Now more than ever.
She and Wendy head back to their table to discover Rosie practically mounting a floppy-haired Chelsea type, and Inessa and Emily deep in conversation in between downing shots. They slam their glasses down next to four that already crowd the small, lacquered surface of the table. Anika feels no real obligation to anyone other than Wendy, who is pouring more champagne into one of the sticky, abandoned flutes.
‘Let me see your phone, babe,’ Anika says, and Wendy hands it over. Waving it in front of her friend’s face to unlock it, Anika switches the battery to power-save mode. ‘OK, I’m going to head, yeah? Make sure you text me when you get in. Call a cab and don’t go home with any of these lot, right?’ She gestures at the increasingly sweaty male clientele. It seems futile to try to get confirmation from her, but Anika is itching to leave now, even as guilt tries to force her to stay. The others will be with Wendy, too, and the alienation Anika’s feeling is getting too much to ignore. Not even seeing Jazzy Joyce setting up in the DJ booth is enough to convince her to stay. What would be the point if they’d all just stand around instead of doing what the music demanded? Music that ordinarily would make her feel free would just end up making Anika feel even more constrained. ‘Love you,’ she says to Wendy, pecking her friend’s cheek. It’s true, but Anika feels sad saying it all the same, like it’s a punctuation mark of sorts.
Without the cloaking effect of Wendy and her friends, Anika feels more acutely visible with each step as she strides upthe stairs to exit the club. As she steps outside and starts flipping between taxi apps on her phone, she hears a loud voice remonstrating with the door staff and turns towards it.
‘Do you think I’m stupid? How’s it one price for that lot and another for me? And how is it thattheysail in and when the queue reaches me, the club is suddenly full?’ The tall Black woman flips her long auburn wig over her shoulder and folds her arms, awaiting an answer from the bouncer. They’re eye to eye, her long legs carrying her almost to his height. The bristle of his buzz cut is really his only advantage.
‘The club is full,’ he tells her monotonously, before looking around her to assess the next group of potential entrants.
‘I pre-booked. The other promoter fucking asked me to come down. I’m meeting friends in there,’ the woman says. The man touches her arm to pull her aside, and she yanks it away, her eyes suddenly darting towards Anika, who feels the movement with a visceral, simultaneous jolt into her past.
‘Listen, move aside—’ the doorman says.
‘Why should she?’ Anika hears herself interject loudly. ‘It’s full, yeah? So nobody else is getting in yet?’ She walks up to the barrier that ropes the queue off from the street. The spontaneity of her intervention surprises her even as she continues to speak. ‘Although, hmm –I’vejust walked out of this dump, so the quota for Black women is freed up.’ She looks over at the tall woman, who assesses Anika with a mixture of respect and irritation. With a sideways glance to the queue behind her, Anika scoffs softly at three unnaturally tawny women whose chemically plumped lips shine with gloss. ‘The fucking irony,’ she mutters.
‘Oi!’ One of them protests. But in the eyes of another of the women, Anika catches a wounded, complex look that sends a sharp needle of regret shooting through her.
I claimed each space I inhabited as my own, no matter what …
She’s relieved as her cab pulls up. The feeling is still duellingwithin her as she’s driven away, and her head swims for a moment. She’s stronger now, more able to intervene and stand her ground.
That’s a good thing – isn’t it … ?
