“Drinking Dead Brazilians” by Lia Mulcahy

Here I am in glorious technicolour, standing in the lights that strobe and chase across my skin like flies on a carcass. There is a floor-length mirror, streaky with handprints and faceprints and lipstick stains, the ghost-tokens of dozens of lovers gone by. The dancefloor writhes. The dancers admire themselves and each other in the dark reflections, serpentine limbs wrapping around waists, heads tilting back in rapturous ecstasy as teeth scrape across skin. A girl adjusts her mesh top so it slips a little lower, the gentle slope of her shoulder rising from the fabric like Venus from the waves. She sees me watching her in the mirror and she winks.

I turn away. I regret it immediately, but it’s too late. When I make Orpheus’s mistake and look back, she’s disappeared. Eurydice has probably gone to throw up.

The bassline throbs like an infected wound. My mouth tastes of tequila, of foreign lipstick, of necrosis, and I buy a cocktail to mask the latter. The bartender tells me it is called a Dead Brazilian, made with milk and mango, and that I will curse it in the morning. The bartender does not know that I will not see the morning, and I do not care to explain, because he seems to be having a good night. Besides, time is limited. The clock is ticking in my ears and even the war pulse of the music cannot drown it out.

I weave through the crowd purposefully, my fingers clutched around the glass stem.

“You’re holding onto that like a lifeline, love,” shouts a man, moustached, maybe a decade older. “Try to relax a little, have fun!”

His partner looks at me with more understanding. “First night here?”

First and last, and the thought almost undoes me. I manage to nod, and the man smiles knowingly, shoves a shot into my hand, the rim crusted with salt that sparkles like wedding rings.

“For courage,” he says. “But don’t forget water.”

I can’t answer because I’m swept along by the crowd, virgin-tight, my arms pinned to my side like a fleshy corset. Another man tries to grab for me, less friendly, but I let myself be carried along by the wave of neon bodies, bobbing gently in the direction of the toilets. Anchored in the queue for the girls’ bathroom, the air smells like vomit and cheap perfume and shit and deodorant, a vibrant cocktail of artificial florals and human excretions. I look at the packs of brightly coloured young women and realise that I am very, very alone.

Perhaps I have made a mistake. Perhaps this night is more cruelty than kindness, nothing but another pointless act of violence against myself.

“Are you okay?” says a voice, and my heart leaps. It’s a beautiful voice. If all the loveliest angels in God’s choir were allowed to chainsmoke, they would sound like this voice. As soon as that thought rises sluggishly to the forefront of my mind, like an air bubble bursting in a delirious swamp, I realise I am drunker than I thought.

“Now that you’re here,” I say, entirely genuinely, and the voice laughs from somewhere above me, presumably the heavens. The owner of the angel voice is the girl who winked at me earlier, my Eurydice. Up close, she is an exceedingly tall woman, made taller by her fuck-off platform boots and her hair, which surrounds her head like a thundercloud halo. She wears a little black lace choker and a toothy smile. I almost forget to breathe.

“Do you want to dance?” she asks, and I have never wanted anything so badly in my life. I have not danced before, not like this, and for a moment I fear that I will be corpse-stiff and sepulchrally awkward; but she leads me away from the bathroom and towards the dancefloor, and we move together like liquid, beautiful and fluid. She fits in the incredulous circle of my arms as perfectly as a key in a lock, opening something long closed. When she laughs at my wonder, her teeth are very white, until the lights change and then they’re feral-red, blood-red, and then the lights change again and she kisses me.

It is my first real kiss. I had another – a lukewarm date, a nice boy walking me back to my door, feeling so suffocated by the weight of an old, old narrative that I didn’t pull away when he leaned in – but that memory is from a different dimension, from a different girl entirely. That memory is from a girl who becomes a wife who lives to seventy and cooks her husband dinner every evening and has three grandchildren. I am not her. I cut that chord earlier tonight, for my sins.

It’s a really good fucking kiss.

I pull away from my partner’s lips and shout to be heard.

“What time is it? I don’t have long.”

“Catching the last bus?” she says, a knowing glint in her inkpool eyes, like it’s an in-joke we’re sharing.

The alcohol and the burning desire to tell her everything muzzles me. I open my mouth and close it again, and can’t even enjoy how she tracks the movement. How can I explain?

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I try, tugging her in the direction of the smoking area. Thin columns of smoke rise into the air around us, beckoning like plaintive fingers in the wind. Hot ash lands on my knucklebone and a girl gasps, kisses my hand in apology, and dusts it off. I find a corner that we fit in perfectly, a cushioned niche in the wall that reminds me perversely of the ones in churches, and we seek sanctuary there.

Pressed skin-to-skin, the girl with the angel voice watches me like I’m a particularly interesting puzzle. “Why?”

She has such kind eyes, I think to myself as I fold into her embrace. I could tell anything to someone with eyes like that.

“I killed myself earlier tonight,” I say. “It was mostly by accident, I think. I went too deep. My hands were wet and my vision was blurry and it just – slipped.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’m sorry, honey.”

“Me too,” I tell her collarbone, “But that’s not important right now. I asked for a night. Just one night. Where I could live properly.”

“Who did you ask?”

The question – the memory it invokes – shakes me like a localised earthquake. I remember that I’d been staring up at the unforgiving bathroom lights, trying not to look at the mess I’d made of myself, when there was a knock at the door. I’d thought it could have been my father, and my last act as a living thing was a vindictive one; through numb lips, I said; “Come in.”

I had wanted him to see what he’d done. I wanted him to see that I had remained lovingly, unwaveringly obedient to him – that when he had screamed, spittle-slicked, that’d he’d have no unnatural queers in his family, no girl-fags, no dykes, that I had listened and reflected and acted accordingly.

It was not my father who came through that door.

“Who do you think?” I say, and despite all the sweetness I’d drank tonight, my voice is bitter, bitter and dead.

Death had been gentle. They’d let me grasp at their slender bonefingers, the texture oddly reminiscent of carved rosary beads. They’d kicked the razor aside, they’d listened to my meandering, oxygen-deprived plea, and they’d grinned the whole time.

“I made a deal with Death,” I tell the girl, who listens serenely. “I told them I’d never really gotten the chance to live at all, and they agreed with me. And then I asked for a night here–”

And I’d blinked, and the bouncer was standing right where Death had been, and I’d been ushered through the doors, into a throbbing, gyrating hive of activity and laughter and music. I’d wasted a half hour flinching at the glints in my peripheral vision, before my brain accepted that the shiny red at my wrists was only the gleam of faux-ruby bracelets.

“You only asked for a night?” says the girl with the angel voice.

I nod. She clicks her tongue at me, a little ruefully. “You don’t want much, do you, honey? I tried to bargain much harder than that.”

I start to agree, and then stop, confused; then it’s her turn to grab hold of me and drag me back inside, where the sticky heat fills my mouth and nose like rich perfume and the music is loud enough to make my teeth ache in my gums. I follow her helplessly, a balloon towed by an excited child, and then she takes me in her arms and orders me a drink.

It’s another Dead Brazilian. I sip it numbly as she tugs her choker down, and her neck smiles at me, red and wide, glistening wet in a way that is both horribly familiar and obscene. Like a gut punch, I realise what my shiny new bracelets have been covering.

“I asked for twenty years,” said the girl with the angel voice, and the gash at her throat flexes grotesquely as she speaks. “My brothers weren’t too happy when I told them I was a girl. They took it very hard. Not as hard as I had to take it. When Death came to the river that my brothers had left me in, I told them I’d been made to live twenty years as a boy, and now I wanted what was mine by birthright. Twenty years as a girl.”

“How long have you been here?”

She thinks. “Thirty-something years. Felt like a heartbeat.”

All around us, bodies twist and turn like the appendages of some wild, tortured beast, throbbing and pulsing to the same rhythm. Look at them too fast, and they’re terrifying. The lights catch on bruised eyes I mistook for smeared eyeliner, on lips that should have been painted with gloss rather than wet blood. Then reality fades back into the safe confines of this glorious shared dream, and all I can see is the joy writ in the creases of their faces, the wild abandon that they move with. For a second I think I spot Death in the crowd, perennially grinning at me, and then they’re swept away in the crush.

“It doesn’t matter what you ask for, honey,” she tells me confidentially. “We get what we’re owed here.”

“Then how long do we have?” I ask her.

She wraps a warm hand around my waist, her choker back in place. I sway into her, my drink drained to sticky dregs and abandoned on the bar. A new song starts up, and the crowd roars in triumphant approval, a din more wild and bestial than I thought human throats could produce.

“It’s only over when the dancing stops,” says the dead girl, her teeth flashing red. “We’ve still got the night left.”