I Will Survive

Wendy Muzlanova

It was the late seventies and I had just moved to a new town. My new friends from school told me about a disco on the other side of the town. It was to be held at the Community Centre that night. My side of town didn't have a strange and exotic building called a Community Centre. I suppose that the residents there were considered too rich to need one. I was up for going.

That afternoon, I bought a new shoulder-bag for the occasion. It was made of some plastic material and cheap, but I liked it. My previous bag had been given back to me covered with fag burns. I had lent it to my chain-smoking friend who was a very nervous anorexic.

My lips were slicked and full, sulky cherry gloss. They could have inspired dreams of fellatio. My eyes were dark. My lashes, brittle sooty spiders in a state of rigor mortis. Thick slap make-up rendered me pale as a wraith; my hair was back-combed and tortured into shape. Earlier that evening I had spluttered toxic hairspray breaths in my bedroom. I was a one-woman assault upon the ozone layer. I was tight skirts, nylons and PVC. I was young, unknowing and unsuspecting.

Brand new friends, unfamiliar town, we ventured forth, owning the world. Teenage discos, promises of rampant, hormonal fumblings, gropings and so-sweet, so-sweet kisses. The music was always ****, but it didn't matter a bit. We slugged down Woodpecker cider and British wine - Concorde, a cheap-but-not-very-cheerful fizzy gut-rot. In preparation for the night, we had amassed coppers and small silver in our eager, counting, little hands and the tallest of us (always me) had been appointed the delegate of our group to the off-licence. This shop had the reputation of being the strictest of them all, but there I stood, all 15 years of me. The sales assistant looked at me.

'Do you mind if I ask your age?'

'Of course not. I'm 23'

'Oh, sorry. It's just that we have to ask' 'It's quite all right,' I say, laughing gently and generously. 'This sort of thing happens all the time. I know that I look young for my age. I quite understand.' The assistant is reassured and serves me. Back in those days, we were never asked for ID. I take the treasure in coins from my new bag and pay the man.

Tanked-up little teenage terrors we were. In the disco-thumping strobe-lit chaos, we danced our perfect and precise steps, aware of being scrutinized a little too closely by the natives of this foreign scheme. Gloria Gaynor was wailing her triumphant survival. I still hate that ******* song to this day. And when it came to the line, 'You're not welcome any more', a wee crew-cut toerag of a lassie was bang in front of me, mouthing the same words. I guessed it was time to leave.

We headed down to the motorway, cars buzzing us little drunkards across the lanes, hooting outrage. I phoned my ever-sacrificing and sacrificed parents for a lift home, a getaway car. We waited, musing upon how unsuccessful the evening had been. The toerag and her large gang of mates were all at once in front of us. My friends were strictly surplus to requirements in this confrontation. It was me she had her eye upon.

'You were trying to get off with my boyfriend,' she accused.

I don't remember my defence.

My mouth was tasting tarmac and were those horses' hooves trampling my head? I curled as small, as small as could be and felt my spine, my kidneys battered as I tried in vain to cover my head. Instinct, I suppose. The thunderous noise lasted and lasted until the teeny thugs were pulled off by some Good Samaritan punters from a nearby bar. They rushed off into the night in a hail of obscenities and none-too-friendly gestures.

Dizzy, dazed and weaving, I waltzed concussed and drunken between the speeding motorway vehicles to my father's car at the other side of the road. I witnessed the reflected horror of my face upon his face. My mother looked the same and was much too stricken to speak. I felt confused by their reactions. I saw my battered eyes and cheek in the little mirror over the car's dashboard. I saw blood running down my face. Earlier that year I had read Stephen King's 'Carrie' and I looked just the same as the girl on the front cover of the paperback. I noticed more blood on my new bag and I realised that I was a crime scene.

I was a casualty, so to Casualty we went. The Good Doctor opined to his simpering bulldog of a nurse, 'Well, it's all part of the fun of a Saturday night, isn't it?'