Jeremy Clarke
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If the town council ran a competition, with a trophy awarded every year to the person who takes the most illegal drugs, Luke would be awarded it in perpetuity. The last time I saw him, he was trying to negotiate his way into a reggae night at the local bistro and the bouncer wasn’t letting him in because, apart from anything else, his trousers kept falling down. He lives in a van. He doesn’t work. He’s permanently out to lunch. The local women players can’t get enough of him.
I say stop for a ‘chat’. I was on the receiving end, rather, of an inarticulate and incoherent account of a visit to Bristol, from where, he said, he’d just returned. The account was inarticulate and incoherent mainly because he was still clearly under the influence of goodness knows what cocktail of drugs. But in any case, words just could not describe the Aladdin’s Cave of good-quality drugs and beautiful women eager to have sex with him that Bristol had turned out to be.
Luke described his experiences there partly in disconnected sentences and partly in vehement mime. The women in Bristol were gorgeous and weren’t wearing much. Apparently they were all dripping. They came up to him, he said, these dripping women, completely off their faces on mud and coke, and snogged his face off. Sometimes there’d be two of them trying to snog his face off at once. Taking the woman’s role, he demonstrated the violence and the crazy tongue play of the snogging technique of your average Bristol woman. A short, sturdy, elderly woman pushing a wicker shopping basket on wheels looked at him askance as she negotiated her passage around him.
One of these half-naked, dripping women came up to him, and she had white powder on her thigh, and she pulled his head down and made him lick it off. (Again, the demonstration: him bending and frantically lapping; her pressing his head down and writhing in obscene ecstasy.) Bristol women are all like that — outrageous. Words could not describe them. But his mental image of these eager, dripping Bristol women was that vivid, he could conjure them up for me, right there in the high street, like a ghostly slide show. He stared pleadingly and tragically into my eyes. Why was life so unfair? Why had life not prepared him for the women of Bristol? Naively, I looked at the place in the air where his vision had come to life for him. But I saw only the wonderful selection of cakes on display in the window of the tea shop opposite.
So where should I go in Bristol to meet these amazing dripping women, I said, taking out my pocket Spectator diary and retractable pencil. Or do I just get off at the central bus station, I said, and there they all are, gyrating furiously? You’re the photographer, he said cryptically, stepping back and miming taking my picture.
He had an appointment to keep so he gave me a hug of solidarity and then I continued on up the street and he continued on down. Near the top, outside the museum, I met Tom coming down. I’ve just seen Luke, I said, and I told him about what Luke had told me about his Bristol visit. He hasn’t been to Bristol, said Tom. He hasn’t been anywhere near Bristol. He’s been up all night taking drugs in my living room, and he’s flipped and imagined it all. We heard the same story this morning. Dripping women, I said? Dripping women, said Tom. ‘It’s come to that, then?’ I said, horrified. ‘Yep,’ said Tom. ‘He’s finally lost it,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Tom. ‘So it’s not funny any more, then, is it?’ I said. Tom laughed at my seriousness. ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far,’ he said.
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