Alejo de Focking Eurotrash

Alejo de Focking Eurotrash

Copyright 1996–2015 Stephen Douglas

Published by Stephen Douglas

Smashwords Edition License Notes

All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. This is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 9781311807359

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One – Georgetown Soir

Chapter Two – Happy Days

Chapter Three – Homes

Chapter Four – Rustication

Chapter Five – Okefenokee

Chapter Six – Play Close for Eurotrash

Chapter Seven – Envoi

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

My last chance as a crappy business journalist began and ended with my assignment to the oil-rich jungle state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. I was heading there to report on the prospects of revolution and its possible impact on investment in the oil industry. So seeing Alejo de Tolejdes’s name on an Internet list of Mexico’s most prominent oil executives filled me with a number of feelings. Nostalgia, certainly. Pain, yes. Even after ten years, I held Alejo responsible for messing up what I considered to be one of my great unfinished love affairs. Yet… Alejo might actually be a good contact to have in Chiapas; he might help me to make a success of what my boss had said would be my last bite of the banana unless I got a scoop. Thinking about Alejo led inevitably to thoughts about Lucy, my girlfriend at the time I had first known him. In fact, sitting there with Alejo’s still blasé, rich and arrogant face smirking back at me from my office computer screen, I felt completely odd. While I was considering whether or not to email him: so much of what had happened ten years previously, in all of its tragic enormity, span back into my awareness, with an intensity quite as arresting as it was unexpected.

Chapter One – Georgetown Soir

It was already the end of February. Lucy and I had been in Washington for six months. Spring Break’s sudden emergence so soon after Christmas and so long before April had surprised us. The Friday afternoon it began, Lucy and I had taken a rare trip together downtown to the Mall. We walked hand in hand by the Capitol in a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, went on in sunlight into the war gardens, drank coffee and talked for an hour.

What I wish to remember most of that day is the sun’s dazzle – and our delight wandering off along the Reflecting Pool’s fringe, and Lucy’s sigh and gentle caress of the back of my neck as we kissed. But after we’d returned home to Georgetown, our classmate Sylvie Macdonald arrived at our house with a plan. It was jungle night at The Fifth Column. We could be part of her glamorous-sounding friend Alejo’s party. We had to come out this time, she had reasoned fatefully… It was, after all, my last night. She’d be back at nine, she said, to pick us up. And Lucy brightened up like she’d received a present.

The next morning, I was returning home to Ireland for my cousin’s wedding. I hadn’t intended to go – I’d decided I wanted to avoid seeing my once wild cousin Sorcha marry her passive-aggressive beau and his bright corporate future. Besides, Lucy and I had planned to spend the week of Sorcha’s wedding exploring the Blue Ridge Mountains. But Sorcha had called me up a couple weeks beforehand and insisted. I think it was probably because of all of our shared history. It really seemed to matter to her that I was there. In the end, really, I couldn’t refuse.

I would have been happy not to go out at all that Friday evening. Despite our lovely afternoon together, there was still a residue of ill feeling between Lucy and me. The term paper – Revenge Now – I’d just handed in, was, I had thought, brilliant. Lucy, though normally my greatest champion, had said it made her gag with disgust and she wouldn't be surprised if they kicked me out or arrested me if I submitted it. It was too late to rewrite it, so, basically, I had handed it in, unchanged, this morning. My paranoia about the paper, now, was growing.

Around nine, Sylv returned with a few wraps of what we took to be coke. I was a changed man!

You’d better not stay away for too long, Sylvie teased me as she cained the first line. She passed the DVD case and rolled a $20 bill over to Lucy, adding as she did so, You’re not Lucy’s only admirer in DC, you know.

Perhaps, I replied. But I am the only one who truly loves her for her mind. I passed over Lucy’s back with the palm of my hand while she bent over for her line. She let it rest there a moment or two. Soon afterwards, climbing into her black Range Rover, I asked Sylvie when she was dropping.

I dunno. Guess when we get there?

I might now.

You’re a monster Jamie.

I haven’t had an E in ages, I whined.

Go on, then.

Best wait, I reconsidered. Don’t want to come up in the queue.

Stress not, Meister Jamie. We are on the guest list.

So I dropped. Sylvie started the engine and launched some tunes from the quadriplegic stereo (as I had christened it). Sylvie had recently introduced us to Georgetown Eurotrash’s dealer of choice. Brett lived about half-a-mile away. He did green, coke, x, trips, whatever. We drove there directly through the alleys running behind the houses in which most Georgetown students lived. Sylvie raced into his house and re-emerged with three whole grams.

At the doors of The Fifth Column, Sylvie confidently announced we were on the guest list.

Once inside, I remembered something the coke accentuated: I wasn’t really used to being out in such situations with Lucy. Being there sort of made me feel ... I don’t know ... as different from her, as perhaps I, in fact, was. In the classroom, we were equals – aristocrats of the mind and all that. In a posh club, she seemed at home among the beautiful people. Whereas I… I felt something lacking. We bumped into Sylvie’s boyfriend, our fellow classmate Tom. Sensing perhaps I’d appreciate it, after hellos, Tom suggested we peel off from the women for a bit. We arranged to meet the girls upstairs in a while.

***

Let’s find our own level, Tom suggested, guiding me towards a crowd-free space by the mezzanine balcony. Leaning over it, our eyes scanned the heaving crowd on the dance floor below.

Music blinked, beeped and screamed from neat speakers suspended amongst the light rigs. Camouflage netting hung from the ceiling. Lasers sliced up the room into slow, immediate, motive, psychedelic segments.

Alejo’s such an ass, Tom said of our host. He still believes he can win anyone he wants. Tom showed me an SMS he’d received earlier that day from Alejo: ‘Tonite jungle party at 5th Bring Sylvie Were have a table with champagne and vodka from nine Wear your jungle suit’. I mean; I don’t have a fucking jungle suit. Who has? And anyways, leave my fucking girlfriend out of it. He only wants me here otherwise Sylv wouldn’t’a come. I’m only here cos if I wasn’t he’d be more over her than he already is.

Still… free champagne, I tried, only half -joking.

That’s just it. Then he owns you. And your girlfriend.

We were both looking down at the same exquisitely cool girl. Light hair, tied up in a cone, a black sweatband, like an Alice band, dividing her hair from her forehead. Dimpled left cheek. Black scarf loosely arranged around her neck. I saw Tom smiling the same as me as we took her all in. The exquisitely cool girl slowly made her way through the crowds up the stairs in our direction.

Looking forward to going home? Tom interrupted my contemplation of her features.

Lucy was definitely fitter, but that sullen, small mouth… God. Wait. She wasn’t wearing shoes, just puffy white socks, her loose Indian trousers tucked into them. I’ll miss Lu. But yes. Yes, I am. In a way, I said finally.

Seems a bit ready, you going back? Sylvie was, like, ‘Lucy’s so pissed at Jamie for throwing over their plans for Spring Break’.

Fock, I exclaimed. She was pretty cool about it with me. She really said that? Shite.

I’m cool with Sylv going to Jamaica with the Eurotrash crew, Tom replied. Sans Alejo, though… See, I’m even talking like Eurotrash now.

I’d warmed to Tom’s wit and self-awareness in the very first class where we’d met. In Georgetown, argot Lucy-from-London and I-from-Dublin were clearly á priori Eurotrash. Only apparent uncouthness could dislodge Europeans at Georgetown from being so categorised. Sylvie qualified because, although from Manhattan, her aristocratic German mother and casual New York manner identified her as a vrai cosmopolitan. Tom, from Connecticut, and prep school educated, was as high-class an American as you would ever meet, but his appearance and outlook was all-American. He was closer to a jock, than to Eurotrash.

Why don’t you go to Jamaica, if Alejo’s not going? I asked. The exquisitely cool girl was closing in on us now. She was definitely Eurotrash. Any Georgetown kid could spot that, from a thousand paces.

Alejo’s always after something but at least he’s alive, Tom replied. A week with the other Eurotrash… I’d die of ennui. Tom made quote marks as he said ennui. I knew where he was coming from. Eurotrash, he continued, they think all you need for a party is a ride in a private jet to get there. Speaking of Alejo, we should definitely get back to the women, he said, already moving off. Was he trying to avoid the exquisitely cool girl, I wondered to myself? She was coming right towards us.

I was feeling the first rush from the E as it was about to erupt, tingling through my body. Not even the bad vibes from what Tom had just told me about Lu could dispel the feeling of chemical joy growing over me. You go, man. I’ll be up in a sec, I replied.

***

Upstairs, so I would later read in Lucy’s diary, Lucy and Sylvie had been settling in – seated on a leather sofa before a table littered with champagne glasses, heavy crystal ashtrays, packs of cocktail cigarettes and bottles of European mineral water. Condensation dripped from filled champagne buckets within easy reach. A sign on the table warned it was reserved. Alejo, whose table it was, flopped down with proprietorial familiarity beside Lucy. He leaned towards her, glancing down between her legs, as he poured Cristal into the glass in front of her.

Thanks, Lucy said. No gratitude in her tone.

So Lucy, Alejo began. I never see you. Why is that?

We are not in the same class, I suppose.

That’s true, Alejo oozed. You’re in a class of your own, Lucy. I love your name Lucy. He sort of seeped out Lucy’s name. It’s so typically, well, London, is your name Lucy. I love London, Lucy. Alejo offered Lucy a cocktail cigarette. She refused with a slight shake of her head. He lit his. Lucy retrieved hers from her bag.

I did not mean that. I meant ‘I am doing environment studies’ and you are not, she said crisply.

I’m in business, Alejo replied.