Younger People Don’t Get Hangovers

Just turning seventeen, I met my mother and her friends in The Suisse.

Mum didn’t live with us so she was far more lenient regarding r-rated videos when we were children or drink as teenagers. She was also experiencing a revitalisation, hanging and living with people ten years her junior.

They were hosting a party in the house, but first it was line-dancing down The Suisse.
As she and the ladies hitched thumbs in their belt loops, her male buddies revelled in the idea of getting me drunk.
They insisted I keep my hands out of my pockets for the rounds, the unsaid condition being I had to match them, drink for drink.

Mum came over for a moment to check this lot weren’t plying me with drink were they? “Ah, he’s alright, will ya leave him be!” and she sidled off back to the country beats.
It wasn’t long before my eyes peered out from behind my hot, constantly grinning face at a bunch of idiotic, equally grinning, equally drunk faces as my own.

I held my own and kept from staggering each time I carefully left the bar stool for the toilet. “Yeah, fine”, I answered Big Jon in there, “just fine”.

We stepped out and the air hit. It usually does, and with that breath of air comes the heady feeling. The level of drunkenness becomes conscious. I got a bit excited by it. Fairly full on, but still capable, I was still sound on my feet.
The smell of bread hit me too. Fucking bread, I wondered. I was told that that would be the guinness. It was the first night I’d drunk more than a single pint. Must have had six with the boys. The yeast in the guinness is what that smell was.
Haven’t really had it since.

The wildness of the party was in opposite proportion to the size of the house. It was a small enough house.
The party was pretty wild.
Barbeque chicken out the back didn’t last long and what was left was used in a game. The idea was to fuck a leg or breast in through the upstairs toilet window and hopefully land it on whoever was on the seat.
The curry didn’t last long either. Before even a few people were served a portion a joint had been flicked and stubbed out in it.

Mum’s housemate’s sister showed up. I’d met Deborah before. Reckoned she was fairly attractive. A year older than me. And she was probably out of my league. The rest didn’t think so, including her sister, maybe even she didn’t reckon so, but I was already beyond it by the time she got there.
On the bacardi, she was fairly far gone within an hour herself, and the two of us, having begun sat against the kitchen wall, ended sliding down, side by side, only our heads perpendicular to the floor, mumbling together, cooing almost about nothing anyone knew could make any sense. Mmmusic and fffuckin’ yeah y’know?

As Deborah disappeared off to bed I was roused a little – enough to stand and wearily tread over the threshold to the back. There were faces swimming and swaying dramatically before me. There was the barbeque and chicken bits laying about every place; sauce soaked flesh hanging from the bone coated with particles off of the pebble dash back wall.
Half bottles and half cans and half glasses of beer strewn about everywhere. And I didn’t feel so good.
Damro, my mother’s unsuited partner at the time, noted my greening visage immediately.
He escorted my stumble up the back garden path, down to an unfinished wall. I bent over to sway unevenly over the open brick. He patted my back. And rubbed and patted and soothed. And in this soothing voice he spoke of imagine chips and burgers and lashings of Indian curry and sardines and that did it.
I heaved chicken bits and coleslaw in vomit sauce into the brick. It splattered noisily into the conrete hole as my ass let out a loud bastard of a fart. Damro cackled gleefully. “That’s it man, let it all out!”

I straightened up, wiped my gob and finally, cleansing clear air swept into my lungs. That felt better. After a back slap or two and an “Alright now? Feel better?” “Yeah…”, Damro took me by the shoulder and I strolled a lot straighter but timidly enough back to the house and in to bed alone.

Mum checked on me. I’d be fine. And I’d be fine tomorrow; younger people don’t get hangovers I claimed.
Next morning, I passed by her, pale as death into the bathroom to douse my head in cold water. She called after that she didn’t think younger people got hangovers. I told her to shut up and get me some headache pills.

She hasn’t let me live it down since.