James shuffled the pack and gave one card to each of four strangers. His face gave nothing away. A cunning smile. He was Madame Delphine de Girardin entertaining Victor Hugo. Cards face down. One by one we turned them over. Julian. Four of diamonds. “Mummy’s favourite.” Olivia. Six of spades. “Vixen.” Shannon. Five of hearts. “Daddy’s princess.” I turned my card. Ace of diamonds. A sigh. “Shameless boy.” This was fun, I thought.
The soul of a good time. But something changed. I’m not a social person anymore, but everybody wants me to be. They talk shit all night. I want to say, “Please go away, I prefer my own company now.”
The script didn’t work. We looked at it for hours… days even… until somebody said… “Ditch the Peter Pan shit, because everybody knows the Peter Pan shit already… focus on Michael, and only Michael, a handsome son of a bitch who Peter Pan would have fucked anyway.”
Six years. Remember the first time? Ignorant shit of a boy. I was the best, but to be fair, you did eventually realise that. Six years flirting. Six years wasted. All because you married that horse of a girl who never liked me. It ended badly. Tears tonight because you’re scared. I sympathised and looked incredibly sad. All the right moves. But really, my heart sang from the rooftops. My skinny petit pois…. ha ha!
“ I heard Earth, Wind and Fire singing ‘Ba-dee-ya’ on the radio, and I thought, oh no, this is another step towards autumn.” – a woman on the bus referring to the song September.
“There in the shade, like a cool drink waiting, he sat with slow fire in his eyes, just waiting.” – Johnny Hartman singing A Slow Hot Wind.
“He comes from an old Dorset family that made grandfather clocks and had a swan’s head as their emblem.” – a posh woman boasting about the man who her daughter is marrying.
“Hey, is there anywhere to play pickleball around here?” – a student in Starbucks.
“I can hear monks chanting.” – Charlie laid in bed in the middle of the night.
“The drawback is that you always get corn dust up your bum.” – a farmer on the radio.
“Come and look at this rock, it’s shaped like your willy!” – a young girl shouting to her older brother.
Matchstick Man stretched and showed his slender stomach. Lean, flat and toned. It was for my benefit, and he knew that I would be distracted by the neat wave of wispy hair that headed south of his Calvin Klein waistband. But he still claimed to be straight, and when I suggested otherwise, he simply laughed.
The tall handsome guy, maybe in his twenties, looked fine from a distance. When he came over, I found that he’d had lots of botox and talked about Donald Trump in a squeaky voice.
An older man chatted me up, and said that I had a lovely smile. But I wasn’t in the mood, and played hard to get, and so I made an effort not to smile anymore. He called me an arrogant prick and left me alone.
A group of guys stood next to me. One of them, who appeared to be wearing aluminium foil, thought he was the patron saint for confused gays. He pontificated that he knew more than anybody else and his friends agreed with him. I wanted to make a noise like a sheep but somebody beat me to it.
Two guys told a friend that when they got together they were both tops, and so they tossed a coin to decide who would be the bottom.
Somebody behind me said something like, “Oh, poor love, poor heart, I played with your pain, I trampled on you with indifference!” – or words to that effect. I hoped that they were quoting from something, and this wasn’t part of their normal conversation, but somebody said, “I agree.”
The Angel grabbed me from behind and gave me a hug which I thought was sweet. He sat beside me and gave me a tour of his body tattoos. The last time I saw him, he insisted I speak to his grandmother on his mobile phone. It was an awkward conversation with somebody I didn’t know. She told me that he was ‘ a little shit’ because he forgets to take his ADHD medication and then he’s like a rabbit. My interpretation of a rabbit had been different to hers. Later… he ate pizza with his eyes closed and looked so tired that he may have drifted off at any moment.
A night of drunken defiance, the air outside warm and sticky, carrying the sour breath of alcohol from the open doors. My head feels heavy, my stomach lined with white rum, and the thought of going home to curl up with a Jacques Tati biography feels more attractive than another drink. Still, I order another one – habit, not desire.
Ben messages to see if I’m out, and I can feel the eagerness in his words, the barely disguised hunger. Last week we sat in a corner booth until five in the morning, the world narrowing to the scrape of glasses and the whisper of confidences. But I put him off tonight. Familiarity is dangerous.
I once fell for him and, in a moment of reckless honesty, suggested we sleep together. He brushed it off with a laugh, not knowing that I never give anyone a second chance.
“It is a sign that you are growing old,” said the old man, his voice soft with resignation. “Each year, the boys seem to get better. As if someone laced the ordinary—Big Macs, frozen pizzas, vending machine snacks—with something secret and sublime that improves a man’s sperm. A quiet alchemy that sharpens jawlines, brightens eyes, perfects the symmetry of youth. It’s not just beauty—it is evolution disguised as convenience. And I watch them pass, these boys, like living advertisements for a future I won’t inhabit. It makes me sad. And jealous. Not of their youth, but of the ease with which they wear it.”
I have the urge to write something shocking and disgraceful, but Baron Corvo appeared in my sleep and warned me that it might not be the best thing to do. “After all, I died a nobody, and now I am famous, not for my talent, but for being depraved.”
Baron Corvo (aka Frederick William Rolfe) (1860-1913)
He was once a boy who listened to punk rock. Sex Pistols. The Clash. The Damned. That was almost fifty years ago. Back then, if he’d rolled back half a century from the seventies, then he would have landed in the 1930s with a big war to come. Benny Goodman. Glenn Miller. Duke Ellington. The music was as far removed as he could ever have imagined. It brings us to now. The kids of 2025. Billie Eilish. Drake. Taylor Swift. His punk rock is as strange to them as the 1930s were to him.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 