The Driftwood Society Club

I’m in the car with Amy. Of all the people. My arch nemesis. A woman who genuinely hates my guts — would wear them as a belt if the sizing worked. And yet, she sits beside me, pleasantly animated, tapping the steering wheel with her Wolverine claws of doom. It’s like we’re friends who survived something traumatic together — chatting, smiling, playing early-2000s club classics on a CD player that clicks between tracks like it’s chewing on old bones. It’s the same CD wallet she used to keep when she first learned to drive. Back when we used to bum rides off her. Back when we were young, dumb, reckless and free. We’re heading somewhere coastal. Somewhere I once stayed on a school residential. The name is gone — not forgotten, just swallowed. My memory does that now. Petty. Arbitrary. Unreliable at best. When we arrive, neither of us knows where to go, so we do what drifters do: We keep drifting. Straight onto the beach. A sign looms up, confident, incorrect: CAR PARK. “This doesn’t look right,” I say, carefully, as if my words might shatter something fragile. We get out anyway. Amy — as always, tragically-over confident in inappropriate footwear — immediately starts sinking. Her skyscraper heels disappear into the sand. She wobbles, rights herself, wobbles again. It’s magnificent. I press my lips together, determined not to laugh, which of course makes it worse. A snort escapes. I pretend it’s a cough. It isn’t. I enjoy this class clown act more than I should. Ahead of us: a ticket booth. A real one. With a man inside. No screens. No instructions. Just a human being with skin that looks moments away from serving us disappointment on a chipped plate. “Can we pay for a ticket?” Amy asks. The man sighs deeply, rubs his bulbous belly — slow, deliberate — then says, “You can. But it’ll cost you an organ.” I laugh. It feels proportionate. “Your choice which,” he adds, sliding a hacksaw across the counter. Amy turns to me, thoughtful. “You could lose a kidney. They’re not vital.” “I’m not losing anything today,” I say, shaking my head like I’m trying to dislodge the idea before it roots. So we abandon the car where it is — half-beached, half-forgotten — and wander into a nearby structure boasting, proudly: THE NARROWEST BUILDING IN THE WORLD. Guinness Book and everything. They weren’t wrong. Inside, it’s like claustrophobia having claustrophobia. The walls graze my arms. I can barely breathe. Somehow, impossibly, there are apartments here. Front doors line a corridor so thin it feels like I'm trapped in a vice. We knock. The door swings open. A man stands there wearing a silk red thong. Nothing else. He takes one look at us — solemn, as if this is entirely normal — and slams the door shut. We knock on the next door. Same man. Same thong. Same outcome. By the third, we’re in fits of giggles. It feels ritualistic. Rehearsed. Like we’ve wandered into a kink-themed Groundhog Day. He opens it again. This time, he’s dressed. Shirt buttoned right up to the neck. Knitted vest. Beige chinos. Socks and sandals. Pure, unapologetically geek. Sheldon Cooper vibes, minus the superhuman brain — or, arguably, any brain at all. “How can I help?” he asks, pleasantly, as though silk-thong-gate was just an imagined event — a collective hallucination we should all be mature enough to move past. “We just need someone to show us around,” Amy says. “We don’t know where we’re going.” “Give me a moment.” he says, then disappears — only to emerge from a completely different door seconds later. “Let me be your guide.” He grabs my hand and shoves it down his trousers. “I’m not hard,” he announces proudly. I wrench my hand free. “Yeah,” I say. “I can feel that.” “Sorry,” he backpeddles. “I just think it’s important that we build an intimate rapport from the get-go. It strengthens the bond.” This is the moment I decide to call him Pervy Pete. I don't know if that’s his name — I never ask — but after trouser-gate, it feels earned. Pervy Pete gives us the tour. Depressing doesn’t cover it. The seaside town is the epitome of drab. Buckets and spades flap outside shops that look embarrassed to still exist. Inflatable dolphins sag in windows like the fun leaked out decades ago. Arcade bulbs flicker — some dead, some dying, some stubbornly refusing to accept that death is imminent. Even the seagulls look malnourished. No chips. No hope. No fight left in them. The place is a ghost town. Not a single soul in sight. “As you can see,” Pervy pete says, gesturing grandly, “the nightlife’s banging.” There’s no irony. He truly believes this. Which somehow makes it worse. He jabs his finger towards what can only be described as a relic of what might have once been a nightclub in a previous life. THE DRIFTWOOD SOCIETY CLUB “If you want a cracking night out,” he says, waggling his eyebrows. “this is the place.” Right then, the sign creaks. Groans. The DRIFT section snaps clean off and plummets towards us. We jump back just in time as it smashes into the pavement, exploding into dust and splinters. What’s left swings gently above the door. WOOD. Pervy Pete lifts an eyebrow. “You like a bit of wood, don’t you, Amanda?” We follow him to a nearby “house party” — a generous term. You could equally call it a gathering of awkwardly placed bodies who just happen to be breathing the same air. Souls without connection. A waiting room with music. Outside, burgers are stacked in a blackened, leaning tower. “There’s plenty of meat to go round,” says Pervy Pete, bracing himself for a pervy punch. “And I’m not just talking about my meat.” “I’m vegan,” Amy lies, with impressive confidence. I escape through a slit in the fence. It’s a tight squeeze. I’m thankful I didn’t eat any of those charred burgers — tempting though they briefly were, in a ‘how bad could it be’ way. Across the street, a garage yawns open. Inside: a hospital bed. An old woman on a ventilator. Her skin translucent. Her breath borrowed. She looks familiar — not recognisable, just a feeling I’ve walked these walls in another life. Abbey stands beside her. Ex-postie. One of the smart ones. Someone who left before the place finished swallowing her whole. “She’s dying,” Abbey says calmly, holding her mother’s hand. It’s paper-thin. Already fading into the sheets beneath her. I think of my own mum. The thought of losing her is too painful to bear. So I bury it — bury it deep — with the others that learned to stay quiet, to fold themselves into the corners of the world, to vanish politely. Back on the street, people from the party ask if I’m going to The Driftwood Society Club. I shrug. What else is there? Inside, it’s less nightclub, more home of the recently deceased. An old man in the corner — shaped like a shell-less tortoise — calls bingo numbers but forgets them halfway through. The music limps along beside him, like a chewed up mix tape from the 80’s that’s given up trying. Charlotte appears. I’m elated for a second — then I realise we’re wearing the exact same outfit: green cord trousers, red jumpers. Garish. Bright. Aggressively festive. “Errr… nice jumper,” Charlotte says. “Nice trousers,” I laugh. She doesn’t laugh with me. She looks horrified. Like she wants the floor to open up and take her entire personality with it. Then someone approaches with two rings on a silk cushion. “A marriage proposal,” they say, the way someone offers mints. The rings are monstrous. Heavy. Sovereign. One has a knight on a horse. The other is worse — chunkier, more confident, already assuming it’s a heartfelt yes-yes-yes! Of course it’s him — Pervy Pete. He smiles from across the room, mid-Dungeon & Dragons. Hopeful. Deluded. Dangerous. I storm over. “I’m married,” I say, returning the rings. Something in him collapses inwards — neat and silent. An emotional blow so heavy it lands somewhere behind the ribs. “Right,” he says. “Course you are.” A pause. “Lucky bastard.” I leave WOOD and step into the night. The seagulls' hungry screams haunt the sky, but the air feels strangely peaceful. Like a place that’s finished asking questions. Down the road, a coach lies on its side. Police tape flutters lazily, already bored of the drama. Glass everywhere. The kind of stillness that follows something loud — and final. Something floats along the shoreline — a sleeve, a seam, a colour I recognise before I want to. Garish green. Bright red. Fabric remembering the shape of me. My trousers follow. Then the jumper. Then my shoes. They don’t rush. They don’t sink. They simply move the way tired things do, nudged forwards, then taken back again. Practising letting go. Fragments. Evidence. What remains when the body has already made its decision. It lands slowly — not like shock, not like grief — but like truth easing its weight down. We didn’t arrive here. We never did. We stopped somewhere else. Together. And this is what followed. I walk further along the promenade, the sea breathing beside me, steady and indifferent. The lights behind me dim, one by one, until there’s nothing left that needs my attention — nothing left asking me to perform. That’s when I see her. The woman from before. Only now she is upright. Whole. No wires. No waiting. No borrowed air. She doesn’t beckon. She doesn’t explain. She just smiles — small, certain — and nods. “You made it.”