When drinking was cheaper, Saturday nights meant a mad sea of people crammed into every inch of every major street. Even before midnight you had to wade through tight white shirts and short dresses, past boiling rooms of pumping music and tequila, over hills of broken bottles and cigarette ends.
Fancy dress was a big part of survival. In the constant swirling mass you had to stand out from the crowd. Pirates met robbers met superheroes outside kebab vans. I sometimes wish that the whole world was like that all of the time.
My friend Gurinder loved a costume, from a full banana outfit to a giant jar of honey, orange plastic forming those sweet innards.
Our theme that weekend had been ‘Dress to impress’ Gurinder insisted she would not let us down. I had been round her house to pick some DVD, and ink drawn sketches covered the walls, triangles in circles running up the side of the paper. Everything smelt of iron.
We all interpreted the brief in different ways. I rented a tuxedo, and Mark constructed a cardboard speedboard with straps like dungarees. But Gurinder stayed silent.
Our meeting point was a spot where the boiling roads mixed together. Our outfits caused eyerolls and swear words from those after a quiet pint.
We heard the shouting first. The clacking of a thousand heels on tarmac, and the roar of dozens of humans pushed through a space meant for a horse and carriages three hundred years before.
Gurinder was impossible to miss. She sat astride a lizard so large that the rooftops were below her eyeline. A tongue the length of two front door rolled out over takeway wrappers and discarded handbags. Her steed had enough strength in its legs to crush the windscreen of a taxi.
By now the streets belonged to ourselves. For the first time post Friday the black of the tarmac glistened under the streetlights.
We did not have time to enjoy the calm. Now the crowds had vanished, Gurinder’s pleas that she could not control it were far too apparent.
Line: The clacking of a thousand heels on tarmac, and the roar of dozens of humans pushed through a space meant for a horse and carriages three hundred years before.
