Fragment 5

“Maybe we should go and see how Robert’s doing?” Michael didn’t mean that; he was just testing the water, trying to gage Smudge’s reaction.
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Fuck yeah! Look!” Smudge isn’t listening. She’s in the corner of the room with her back to Michael, messing with something that he can’t make out.

Michael moves closer to Smudge. She spins round and opens both of her hands out. They’re glowing. Tiny intricate hairline threads, a thousand or something – all different sparkling colours, are shooting up and down from her palms. It looks electricity but more fun. Thousands of tiny showers of buzzing light.

“Can you see that?!?”
“I think so yeah …” Michael can see crazy lights in Smudge’s hands, sure, probably totally different to what she’s seeing, but he can see them. He looks at her eyes, and sees his version of the lights trickling around. Fucking … perfect … he thinks. It feels like they’re sharing something. Probably best not to mention Robert again …

“Hey – what did you say about Robert?”
Shit – did she here that? Did she hear what I … thought?
“Uhh, what?” suddenly Michael’s comfort zone feels a little shaken.
“Just before I showed you the lights – you said something about Robert.”
“Oh yeah,” course she didn’t hear what I was thinking – stop being paranoid. “Uhh … I just said …” he doesn’t want to say it again but he does anyway: “Should we go see how Robert’s doing?”

Smudge looks at Michael and thinks. Michael stares at her eyes, wishes that he could work out what’s going through her head at this exact moment. He can still see traces of the light in her pupils.

“Yeah! Let’s see how he’s doing,” Smudge jumps up. Sometimes it feels like her energy is just fucking endless. She grabs Michael’s hand and pulls him up drags him out the door. His body language can’t help but look totally unenthusiastic.

They go down the hallway and back into the room where they all started off, where they took the drugs. It’s empty but the stereo is still on full blast playing fuzzy noisy sounds to itself. Smudge scans the room.

Instantly distracted, Smudge kneels down in front of the stereo and presses stop on the music. The sudden silence sends a chill through the room. She starts rifling through a pile of CDs on the floor, tossing albums aside, singing tiny only just audible songs to herself as she tries to choose something to listen to. Michael stands awkwardly staring at her as she grabs each new CD, considers it for a mini second and then chucks it to the floor. He looks at her legs. He feels fucked and powerless. Weird mixture of horniness and … despair?

Michael: “So where do you think Robert is?”
Smudge: “Oh yeah … must be in the bathroom. We can check in a bit. He’s probably just chilling out for a minute or something.”