Early on in year 8, one of my friends from primary school had a birthday party.
It was significant in a couple of ways. The first was that it was probably the last children's party I ever went to. By the end of year 8 people were smoking and drinking and buying weed and all that so having a party (organised by parents no less) seemed a bit embarrassing and childish.
The second way in which it was significant was that it was the last time I really socialised with my primary school friends. I’d gone to a different school from them, a school in which there wasn’t really a ready-made social clique for a white, middle-class boy to fit into. So by year 9 I was getting into dancehall and UK funky, feigning a cockney accent, wearing track suit bottoms and becoming friends with people at my school, so naturally I drifted away from my middle-calss primary school friends.
i was reminded of this party the other day and it stirred all sorts glorious emotions in me. i was the king of the world at that party. for starters there were some girls there who didn’t go to our primary school and the primary school girls were being all unkind to them. i swooped in and kept making sure they were included and felt good and all that (the boy's mum told my mum how much of a good boy i’d been afterwards). so i'd engratiated myself with one group of girls as it was.
but another of the girls at the party was this blonde american from my primary school. she’d been the one all the boys fancied at primary school and had developed some boobs since i last saw her. incredulously she spent the entire evening with me and laughed non-stop at everything i said (i was a bit of an outcast for the first couple of years of secondary school, and was initially rather starved of female attention).
the party started at a laser tag place and i remember making her laugh with a riff about the word “maybe” being very non-commital and meaningless (possibly it’d been something she kept saying and i was teasing her a bit). back at the boy's house they had a chocolate fountain and she spilled some melted chocolate on her shirt meaning she had to take the shirt off, revealing the tank top she was wearing underneath (it drove me crazy that night and i still have thing for tank tops). at the end of the party she made me give her a hug and it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
the next day (after all us boys had a sleepover) i felt awful. really, really in pain. i needed that girl. genuinely heartbroken i wasn’t spending every waking moment with her. in true emotional agony. like coming back from narnia and a removal company had taken away the wardrobe.
she’d mentioned that she liked the cinnamon swirl from milly’s cookies and i did have a plan to take her out and buy one for her (and she’d be all blown over that i remembered it), but organising a date would have meant getting my mum to phone her mum and that was too embarrassing, so i never did it. that night was left a fleeting utopia.
that party will forever be sketched in my memory. it was so, so, so magical. so special. all the enchanted splendour of childhood combined with teenage enthralment. it was transitional; the emotional potency of seeing the world through a boy's eyes, but with the untameable libidinal desires of a man.
the piano on this sounds like that.