Marcia Road / 2015

Before that house party, I’d never sat down to dinner with my four Marcia Road housemates or even watched TV with them. Six months of house-mating had gone by and we’d successfully avoided making even the lightest of commitments to each other. In our five-bed house share off the Old Kent Road in south London, we didn't have a cleaning rota, we didn’t pool tea bags or cleaning products, we’d never even shared a takeaway pizza.

But the morning after that house party, two of my housemates were lying on my bedroom floor and two were in my bed. We’d retired there after the party ended and chatted until, one by one, we fell asleep.

I’d woken up with feet in my face, they were my housemate Dee’s. They were covered in crusted magnolia emulsion paint she’d trodden in last night. Behind her one of the boy’s heads was poking out from under a pillow he was using to block out the light. The air was heavy with a smell only five steamingly vodka-drunk humans could make.  

There we were lying there lifeless, limbs draped over duvets, blankets and clothing that had been desperately pulled round our bodies to keep warm, smudges of dried paint everywhere. 

Since the moment I moved in one Tuesday evening after work, our shared home had been chaotic. A messy merging of five peoples’ lives under one roof. And that first and last house party was a level of chaos that only that kind of disordered household could create.

Each of us had our own guest list. Our hallway filled up with scuffed Vans (Timothe’s friends’), Doc Martens (my friends’), shiny boots and heeled shoes (Dee’s friends’). Among them were crates of cider, blue bags filled with Red Stripe and then bottles of posh Prosecco and vanilla vodka. Five different versions of house parties about to unfold in one house. It quickly became unruly.

Realising we were all going to be leaving our rented house in the same month had had the unexpected effect of bringing us closer together. Not because we were sad about it. It wasn’t the sort of house where any of us felt the need to sit the other housemates down and break the news. We’d each given our notice directly to the landlord before informing one another during brief kitchen chats or with short texts that started ‘just to let you know.’ Then suddenly, we had something in common: we really didn’t care about the house, we wanted to make the most of our last month there and we were in agreement that a party was the best way to do that. 

The party started at 9pm. The doorbell rang non stop announcing the arrival of our friends who bundled in through the doorway, clinking bottles of booze in-hand and carrying an endless stream of cheap perfume through the hallway. 

In the kitchen, punch was being carefully ladled into paper cups, cold beers picked out of a bucket filled with ice. People chatting, smiling and sipping through straws. 

The night progressed, the music got louder. There were drinking games, shots, spirits poured freely and carelessly. Cigarette smoke overlaid the smell of cheap perfume. Chats became shouts. Giggles became howls. Our bodies, our minds, our conversations became clumsy and blurry. 

We’d started with a game of vodka Jenga. Dee had spent an hour that afternoon using a Sharpie to mark each brick with a drinking challenge or a dare. At first there were only eight of us and we sat round on the scuffed IKEA sofas plucking a wooden brick and pulling faces when the sting of vodka hit the back of our throats. 

By the time there were twenty people in our kitchen, the Jenga tower had been abandoned, bricks scattered on the floor alongside crushed cans and discarded, soggy paper straws. 

We were moving on to bigger, better games. Dee’s friends were bouncing on the sofas. The smokers were camping out on our front door step, letting the music from Timothe’s massive speaker play out into the street. Then someone spotted the tins of emulsion paint our landlord had stacked in the corner of our kitchen. 

I knew Timothe, my French housemate, was a big partier. I knew it but I'd never seen it. He'd tell me he was off to the Bussey Building in Peckham and disappear for days. We’d cross in the hallway some mornings, me on my way to work, him returning filthy and speechless. 

I was on the other side of the kitchen when one of his friends took an interest in the paint tins. I stared from across the room, watching with curiosity as he opened the first tin of paint. He stuck his whole hand in, lifted it out dripping in gloopy paint and wiped it across Timothe’s chest.  I'd seen many things at other peoples’ house parties. Someone puking in the corner was familiar background noise. I was used to seeing drugs, flashes of flesh, risque dares, ‘public displays of affection’ that edged closer to porn. But I had never seen anyone paint someone else. 

The first stripe on Timothe’s chest started something and it escalated fast. It was on his friend’s hand and then Timothe’s chest, then on my friend’s arm, someone else’s cheek, the fridge, the floor. Our feet, our trainers, our legs, everything we touched and everyone we looked at. 

Attempts were made to mop it up with toilet roll and kitchen roll but then the guy holding the roll became more interested in wrapping his friend up like an Egyptian mummy, face and all.

To escape the paint on the floor, three of my friends were sitting cross-legged on top of the kitchen table, deep in conversation.

Dee’s friends were still bouncing on the sofas, pleading with someone to switch off their techno tunes and put on their old school R&B playlist instead.

At some point between the mummifying, sofa-bouncing and the strange circle time happening metres above the ground, someone carried an open tin of emulsion out into our small courtyard garden and we all followed. I stood there in a drunken haze, vodka in hand, alongside my four Marcia Road housemates directing our mad friends, who had never met until that night, as they used their bare hands to graffiti our garden fence. 

There we all were, five twenty-somethings with nothing in common but a grotty house share off the Old Kent Road we didn’t care for and where, when we moved out a week later, we left a mural in magnolia. 

Hello! Thank you for reading ADDRESSING

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