11th January, Soho - Medtech & La Fiesta

It’s 2 in the morning. I’m sitting in a bar called Freedom, and the clientele is predominantly gay. I’d followed Glen, Seb and Bella off the tube at Leicester Square because they’d invited me to join them, and I needed the bathroom after one too many cocktails. Headphones in, noise cancelling, mind you, and sat in a daze playing a mobile game called Block Blaster – these three errant partygoers had rushed onto the train in a flurry. I wish I could tell you about their conversation, but all I could work out was it involved nightclubs. I could hear it despite my headphones. The girl, Bella, was very pretty. Glen, whose name reminded me of the whisky Glen Fiddich, looked like Rupert Grint. Now that I think about it, Bella could be a Hermione. Seb, well, even without glasses, you might as well have called him the chosen one. His parents owned a medtech company and were paying for them to live in luxury flats in Battersea, with a sauna, rooftop pool, and hot tubs included. Glen and Seb were doctors. Both 28. Bella was 23. Bella was dating Seb; Glen was his friend from university, and they’d studied medicine together. To no one’s surprise, they were both specialising in medical technology.

I think Seb and Glen are in the bathroom doing drugs right now.

Bella wants to be a writer.

Chrys, who we had come to Freedom to meet up with, was the gay man she’d met a few weeks ago with Seb. He knew everyone in Soho. He was head of communications for a large tonic water company. I believe he was mistaking my interest in tonic water and the gins I could drink it with for interest in him.  

We took a group photo to commemorate this random meeting. I told them I was 23. Suddenly, I was living in the future, working in the city, desperate to escape. I’d abandoned my job two years earlier after a brain cancer diagnosis turned my life upside down. I talked about my time bartending in Greece and how Freddie and I had spent more time serving ourselves than any customer. Then, the miracle occurred months later, and the doctors confessed a mistake had been made. At six months, they’d told me it was Multiple Sclerosis. Six months after that, they finally realised I was fine. Well, fine is a stretch. I don’t have brain cancer or MS, just white matter lesions from childhood accidents and birth trauma.

The only lie I told was my age. No one takes you seriously at 20. Centuries ago, I’d have killed a man and started a family. Nowadays, drinking is beyond me in some countries. Not cancer, though. I’ve been what my mother kindly termed “a paranoid health nut” since—a hypochondriac, as my late therapist preferred. Anxiety understands me like no girl ever has. It was a very self-reflective moment to have to sit down and think about what I have achieved with my life so far and what I wanted to achieve in the next six months before my world came crashing down completely.

I wanted to write a book. Travel the world. Find the love of my life, no matter how selfish it felt.

It’s been eight months since I was cleared, and the only thing I’ve achieved so far is to leave the country less than I did before the diagnosis.

I think that’s why I’m following them into this nightclub, the bar shut down, because I have a compulsive need to live. To experience life while I still can.

Sometimes, I lie in bed till morning, not quite awake, not quite asleep – imagining what I’d do if I lost a leg or an arm or the MS came back, and I was forced into a wheelchair. That’s why I started volunteering with the disabled. Perspective.

A moral dilemma, perhaps. I do genuinely enjoy charity work, but the little voice in my head likes to remind me it took a pretty random act of God.

There you have it. My nasty, guilty little secret is that helping others makes me feel better about myself.

But I digress. As I’ve confessed this to you, Seb has lunged at Bella. Not to harm her, of course. He’s protective. Worried that in this VIP booth, she’s easy prey for the men who want to take advantage of her almost naïve openness to conversation with strangers. I sensed it back on the tube.  

They confuse me but seem good together. Age gaps seem irrelevant when you’ve both left university. The stages of life come and go, but a working life tends to be the longest, and where the generations come together and can finally empathise.

Look at me go, making pretentious thoughts at a nightclub. Unfortunately, this is actually what I do. I should dance more. I haven’t drunk enough. I’ve never really drunk enough. Did you know? We peak at just shy of two drinks. I learnt that from a Mitchell & Webb sketch.

They have a sketch in which they dress up as German soldiers and have a seemingly harmless conversation, but they suddenly have to question whether they’re the bad guys. That’s how I feel sometimes. Not like a fascist, of course, but like an imposter, a bad guy who hasn’t had the self-awareness to realise it.  

I should rewatch it when I get home. They’re very funny.

Chrys insists on going onward to the next club. I must take a moment to question why anyone would choose a y in their name instead of the simple Chris. Surely, it causes issues, such as when sending letters or filing tax returns. I’ve spent a lot of money tonight, date included, but I’ve started the night and can’t back out. Not now.

We’re in Vauxhall now. The club is called Fire. Well, that’s what they’re claiming. I know it better as a student club, Lightbox. I’d come here for my first week in London. It was the second night club during freshers week.

Inside now, and it’s dead. Lots of men, most of whom don’t go out much.

Wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, a group of freshers had come here nearly a year and a half ago. Two months before my first diagnosis. I was kicked out of the line for being too drunk. They may have been right because, in response, I circled around to the other side, skipping the long queue and walking through the VIP entrance. No one questioned me, confidently displaying my cheap student ticket.

What might have passed for Mexican adjacent music was blaring. In the bathrooms, they were selling overpriced glow sticks. They probably sold drugs, too. I remember thinking you’d have to be an idiot to spend £50 in cash on glowsticks. Instead, I stumbled over to the bar for another drink. Well, actually, from what I can recall, I stumbled through six or seven rooms first, finding myself in a veritable labyrinth. By the time I found it, my friends had made it in.

And that is how I found myself at the back of the dance floor, a few steps from the bar, sobering up enough to make it worth drinking more. And here I am again over a year later. Bella tells me how impressed Seb’s friends were that she wrangled him into a relationship. He has commitment issues. Lovely. I hope they last, I’m rooting for them. Her trampstamp is interesting. I asked if she could show me some of her writing; maybe we could exchange. I wonder what she’d think if I had her read this. I wonder what she writes about?

It was Victoria this time last year. We hadn’t been talking about writing at the time. We never talked much during the two weeks I knew her. Considering our first meeting, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’d still been standing, sobering, disassociating. Eye contact with this girl. Hazel green eyes. Small, rounded - a button nose, weird that it stuck in my mind. Dark hair. And then she jumped at me. Her legs wrapped around my waist, my arms around her. Her friend, Maria, had done the same to a guy from accommodation. They fell backwards, people around them catching them, but kept kissing. I must have subconsciously prepared because my legs were further apart, and my core tensed when she reached me. Not that I was thinking about that. Was I? This stunning girl, I mean, the kind of girl I would put a picture of in a locket and go to war for, was kissing me, ME – and I was debating the pros and cons of going back to the gym for my spinal health. Tragic. That it lasted two weeks is astounding. Pre-hypochondriac me was immature and foolish and insisted on dying his hair blonder. But he did have a complete lack of fear for life that some women found attractive, even despite his godawful fashion choices. He chipped a tooth at a pool party, took another ten shots to dull the pain, and got back in the pool. I’d have taken the shots and philosophised on how inevitable it was that I’d injured myself.

8 o’clock, the sun has already risen. I have a black tie ball tonight. We exchange numbers, and I head for the tube again. Eight hours later, a lifetime of sorts, and I’m taking the Victoria line home. Alone, I’d taken an Uber back last time in case the veritable goddess who had mistakenly taken a liking to me changed her mind on a bus or tube.

I got off at Warren Street this time. I was starving. Desperate for a McDonald’s after a night of clubbing. A ritual of sorts.

There are very few times I’ve considered myself apoplectically furious since I’d addressed my childhood anger issues.         

To realise it was now well into the morning and that McDonald's was no longer serving burgers unleashed something in me. The idea that McDonald's, MCDONALDS wouldn’t sell me a triple cheeseburger for £2.99 after my long night. With great fervour and an even greater glare, I stomped back to my flat.

“BREAKFAST MENUS BE DAMNED”

Sitting in my room, munching on garlic bread from Waitrose, I let out a muffled scream. I need to be awake in a few hours. A glass of water and a shot of Glen Fiddich, in honour of Glen, who had passed out at some point.

Lying in bed, in a familiar state of not quite consciousness, I still don’t know why Victoria decided to lose her virginity to me. A stranger at a club. Why not someone she loved? Or at least cared for. If I could go back in time, that’s what I’d strive to do. Not some pointless one-night stand.

She promised she’d tell me why eventually.

She never did.