Saturday night we rocked up to Favela Chic, me and Em and Marc and Kris, we rocked up to the bouncer with the dreads and we were on the list. I was in gold shoes and Marc had said, before we left the house, “What am I going to wear? What am I going to wear?” but I think he might have been wearing the same pair of jeans he’d had on when the clothing question came up.

We got a pitcher of caipirinhas at the bar and Kris took testing sips – “Still strong,” she’d say, time and time again – till her glass was empty. Already at eight in the evening, the music was very good and too loud and we stood around shouting at each other while the bartenders danced and spun their bottles in front of the giant disco ball. They’d hung chandeliers from a high-up ceiling, dusty chandeliers and crepe paper trailing down like primary-school jellyfish and upside-down lampshades and pastel-coloured bath sponges and plastic stars and hula hoops. The T-shirted and dinner-jacketed deejay behind his turntables was Don Johnson in disguise and Marc said, “You know, he is naked from the waist down.”



We were standing to the side by the sign that said “No Tequila” when Seung Yun came in, and we might have shouted “Surprise!” but the music was playing way too loudly for her to know it. We smiled surprise in our eyes, then, and sang Happy Birthday as best we could, and there were hugs all around and the pitchers of caipirinhas kept coming, and crushed ice and limes never felt so good.

Dinner at the big table saw us squished one against another – me and Marc and Kris and Em, and Seung Yun still delighted, and Diana from Princeton, and Rumi in shimmering red on chocolate skin, and Nick, who lives down the street from me, and Etan, who invited us to his gallery opening, and still others too far away to talk to, the girl with the black eyes, and this guy Fred, and a ballet dancer in a white lace shirt – we squished together on long wooden benches while the room packed and swayed and shimmyed behind us. There were girls with their hands in the air and girls who jiggled their hips and girls with their hair in their eyes. There were Japanese girls in furry boots and dark-skinned boys in newsboy caps and blond, straight-haired girls – they are everywhere, these girls – blond, straight-haired girls in tunics and leggings who elbow you in the back.



Past midnight the 243 up Kingsland Road passes the young people in all their wide-belted skinny-jeaned mussy-haired glory, and the huddle passing the lighter outside Jaguar Shoes. I have never been that girl, you know, never really thought about being, with the thick cat’s-eye streaks of eyeliner and the patent-leather ankle boots and waiting behind wine-coloured rope to get in; but there is something electric about being in the thick of it on a late-summer Saturday night.