Vodka melts the lot. Halfway into a second bottle the glass of it starts to feel spongy, like the liquid and the glass are dissolving into each other. Lights spill much softer across the ceiling. Marble floors become plastic or vice versa. Friendship wells up and gets raucous as it should do. There’s little wilder in the human mind than vodka-ed love for another person. It’s a magnificent exaggerator – turns slaps into murder, quick bus-stop kisses into love, new friends into brothers. Vodka brings such a depth to shallow emotion.
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Mikhail rests back into the plastic picnic chair and feels the back of it buckle a little. It makes him sit forward quickly and rest his forearm on the table. As he moves forward he looks at his shirt sleeve, realises it’s a little creased, and doesn’t care. His head’s slipping into the bottle now and all is pretty good. He can still feel the new Russian crop sitting on his head though. How sharp it is to have little hair and a bristle-skin border lining around your ears. It almost feels like a cap he can lift off – let the brain get some air.
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Fucking idiot – speak.
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‘Pyotr – I always swear more when I’m with you. You bring out the worst in me you do.’
‘Ha! Talking about you now are we?’
‘Not really – it’s true though – all kinds of fucks and cunts come out of me when were talking.’
‘I don’t mind it. Barely notice it. Carry on.’
‘No – I mean I like it, but I notice it in me. You make me care less about stuff.’
‘So, we are fucking talking about you?’
‘Well, okay – if you’d talk about where you’re sticking your dick nowadays, we’d be talking about you, wouldn’t we?’
‘Later Mikhail. A few hundred grams later.’
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He’s shaking the bottle as he says it and Mikhail gets smacked from the blur of it. He settles back in the chair again, bending the back of it once more. It seems a precarious position to be sitting in, but he already can’t handle the waggling bottle in front of him. He squints the booze out him with pursed lips, tightens his nose and snorts some bar air up to his eyeballs. That’s better.
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‘Come on then you fucker! Get it poured and you can tell me. It’s all I want to hear about.’
‘Okay, let’s get into it.’
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The stopkas are brimmed in seconds flat. They swig it down, it feels thicker now and at an odd, glutinous temperature.
‘Fuck me backwards Mikhail. That might be enough.’
‘Let’s hear it then – who’re you fucking?’
‘It’s a guy.’
‘Ha! Back into that deal for this one, eh? You mad, filthy bastard – tell me more.’
‘You know how it is. I’m the giver every time.’
‘So whose the lucky prince this time then?’
‘It’s a foreign guy – old fuckster. From Australia and he’s forty seven.’
‘Jesus! So, what’s it like?’
‘What’s what like?’
‘Fucking a foreign dude in the shitter! An old foreign dude!’
‘It’s like always. You know me. I fuck him and fuck him in the arse until it doesn’t matter. I could fuck him today, tomorrow and next week – why not? Because one of these next weeks I won’t be breathing, so I may as well fuck him in the arse – who gives a shit if I don’t like it? Liking it doesn’t come into it. I feel his innards pushed and shoved and it puts a great pile thunder in my cock! I feel like I’m made of a millions pulses – sticking my rock-hard electric to him! And, every fucking time, without fail – I shoot my fucking load up his old, skinny fucking cunt of an arse!’
Both their eyes are fired. Pyotr wipes a string of saliva from his chin. Lets out a bullish sigh.
‘So, there you have it Mikhail. And, I am ill also. We need to talk about that too.’
Mikhail’s eyes applaud shyly.
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