Beautiful at midnight. Tragic at 4am. Someone’s cousin DJ’d, the wine was warm, and I snogged a man whose name I still cannot spell. Classic, really.
I keep writing that sentence in my notes app like it might turn into something clever. It hasn’t. It’s just what happened. And because I am constitutionally unable to leave a bad decision alone once it has lighting, here we are.
I was not meant to be in SE15
Look. I live in Parsons Green. I have a Tesco Metro I could crawl to in heels. I do not, as a rule, cross the river on a Saturday unless someone has promised me something obscene or free. Mia promised both, which should have been my first clue.
She said it was “just a roof.” She said Forza first, maybe Bussey if the queue wasn’t grim, maybe Frank’s if it was still pretending to be summer. Late September in London is a liar. It looks like you can wear a dress. Then the wind comes up off the brick and you remember why your mother owns a coat.
Sophie did the sensible thing and stayed in with a face mask and a spreadsheet. I did the other thing. I redid my lipstick in the hallway mirror, twice, because the first pass looked like I was trying too hard and the second pass looked like I wasn’t trying at all. There is a version of me that knows when to stop. She was not available.
We got the Overground. I still cannot tell you which stop is which without looking at my phone like a tourist. I keep meaning to learn it properly and then I don’t. Peckham Rye spat us out into that particular Saturday smell. Fried chicken, perfume, a bit of rain that hadn’t committed.
Midnight is a very good liar
I will give the roof this. At midnight it was stupidly pretty.
London does that thing where the ugly bits go gold and you forget you are standing on top of a building that used to be something practical. The Shard sitting there like it pays rent. Trains sliding about underneath. People in good jackets pretending they are not cold. I took a photo I will never post because the girl in the background has a better bag than me and I have some pride left. Not a lot. Some.
Mia found a table that was not a table. It was a ledge with ambition. We got drinks that were trying to be spritzes and then we got wine because the spritzes were £13 and I am many things but I am not paying thirteen pounds to taste like a garden centre.
The wine was already warm. That should have been the sign. Warm wine on a roof in Peckham is the universe tapping you on the shoulder. I ignored it. I am very good at ignoring things that are trying to help me.
There was a boy near the speaker who kept looking over like he had rehearsed it. Dark hair, decent shoulders, the sort of face that works under string lights and falls apart in a Tesco. I clocked him. He clocked me. Mia made the noise she makes when she thinks she is being subtle. She is never subtle.
Someone’s cousin had a USB
This is the part where the night stopped being a bar and started being a situation.
Mia’s friend from Goldsmiths knew a boy whose cousin “did music.” That sentence has never once ended well and yet every woman I know keeps walking towards it. We left the proper roof, the one with a till and a licence, and we went to the other roof. Somebody’s flat. Somebody’s access code. A fire escape that felt illegal in a sexy way until you remembered your tights cost twenty eight pounds.
The cousin had a speaker and a lot of confidence. I will not name the genre because I do not want the comments. It was loud and it was proud of itself. People were dancing like they had paid for a club and not a concrete slab with a view of someone else’s satellite dish.
I reapplied in my phone camera. The lighting was criminal. I looked like I had been invented at 11pm and slightly abandoned by 1. Which is, to be fair, accurate.
Warm wine in a mug this time. Not even a glass. A mug with a chip in it and a slogan about kindness. I drank it anyway. I am not proud. I am consistent.
The snog I cannot file
His name was something with too many letters.
I asked twice. He said it once into my ear and once into the music and both times it came out like a password I failed. I nodded like I had it. I did not have it. I still do not have it. I have tried spelling it four different ways in my notes and each one looks like a different man.
He was funny enough. That is the dangerous category. Not charming. Not disastrous. Funny enough that you stop doing the maths. We talked about nothing. How Peckham used to be one thing and now it is another. How nobody actually lives where they say they live. How his mate was “on the decks next” which was a lie, the cousin was not sharing.
Then we were against the wall that was not meant for leaning, and I kissed him because the alternative was standing there being perceived, and I would rather be doing something than being looked at doing nothing. That is not a philosophy. It is a habit.
He was a good kisser in the way men are good kissers when they know they have about twelve minutes before the song changes and the moment dies. Hands on my waist like he had seen it in a film. A bit of stubble. Warm mouth, cold air. I can still feel the contrast if I think about it, which I am trying not to, except I am writing this so that plan has already failed.
Mia wolf-whistled. I will be killing her slowly.
Four in the morning is a different borough
Midnight Peckham is a postcard. Four in the morning Peckham is a group chat you should have left.
The wine was warmer. The cousin had run out of good songs and started playing the ones he wrote. Always a mistake. Someone’s vape ran out. Someone else was crying in a stairwell about a boy in Clapham who had not texted, which felt on the nose even for us.
The nameless man asked if I wanted to go back to his. His was in New Cross. I have been to New Cross. I have been to New Cross at 4am. I am not a coward. I am just not a fool twice in one night, and I had already used up my fool allowance on the roof.
I said I had an early thing. I did not have an early thing. I had a flatmate who would ask questions and a mascara situation that needed daylight and a sink.
The last Overground felt personal. That particular hum. People who had also made decisions. A girl asleep on her own shoulder. A boy eating chips like they were an apology. I sat there with my coat pulled tight and my mouth still slightly swollen and thought, not for the first time, that I collect nights the way other people collect ceramics. Some of them are nice. Most of them chip.
Uber wanted forty something back to Parsons Green. I laughed at my phone. The phone did not laugh back. I got the train and walked the last bit in shoes that had been a good idea at 8pm.
What I told the kitchen
Sophie was awake. Of course she was. She has a sixth sense for when I have been unwise. She was eating yoghurt in the dark like a Victorian ghost with a skincare routine.
“How was Peckham?”
I told her it was beautiful. Then I told her it was tragic. Then I told her about the cousin and the mug and the man whose name I cannot spell. She did that face. The one that is half judgement, half entertainment. I would do the same if it was her. It never is her. That is why we work.
Mia came in an hour later with a stolen event wristband on her arm and no memory of how it got there. We made tea. We sat on the counter. We reconstructed the night in the wrong order, which is how you know it was a proper one.
I keep thinking about the view. That is the annoying part. The snog will fade. The name was already gone. But the city from up there, all lit and indifferent, that sticks. London looks better when you are slightly ruined. I wish that was not true. It is true.
Would I do it again? Stupid question. I already said yes to next Saturday before I had taken my makeup off. Not Peckham, maybe. Or Peckham. I have no discipline and a very good lipstick and a fear of being the girl who stayed in and had nothing to tell.
Anyway. If you are going south of the river after midnight, take a coat. Take cash. Take a friend who will wolf-whistle and then hold your hair back metaphorically. Learn his name before you lean in. Or don’t. Some stories are better when they stay a bit misspelt.
I am going to look in the mirror now. Not because I need to. Because that is what I do when a night is over and I am not quite ready to admit it.