The Beaver Moon party

Colleen just re-did her user info and my job description remains secure. I am a watcher; a watcher watches. Or, in my specific case, hangs on to the digital camera when all about her are losing sobriety.

But one must begin from the beginning, as they say, and for me the beginning is the point where I actually left the house yesterday morning, slightly on a high, and used the call for interview as my excuse for being several hours late. The day stretched out until every hour felt like three, and at the end of the afternoon, when it was Sarah’s turn to provide the food for Biology, I was giggly and entirely not focused on anything biologically related and more fixated on yelling at Fidan. She yelled back. I seem to remember we were bickering about Keane and marshmallows and her constantly writing on my notes and my constant filching of her pencils and really, looking back, neither of our finest hours.

So when school finished, I went home uncomfortably aware I had only about forty-five minutes to take a shower, grab all my stuff, wrap Clare’s present and make a CD for Hannah. One may wonder why I didn’t do any of that in advance. But I only bought Clare’s present that morning, and the CD burner was only recently resurrected, so with much flailing about and yelling at inanimate objects, I got nearly everything done and ran out of the house.

The one thing I forgot to do was to look up the name of the full moon. Clare planned the party on a full moon intentionally, and we assumed it was the Hunter’s Moon, especially as I had done some research on it earlier. I have now discovered we were wrong. The full moon in question was the Beaver Moon, hence this entry’s subject.

Anyway. I had a fairly uneventful journey, re-reading Playing The Moldovans At Tennis, and arrived at Conway Park bang on time for what may have been the first time in my life. Clare and Colleen were there, and we ambled up to the bus station to wait for Hannah, who was late. We waited, idly discussing not very much, when it got to a certain point where ringing her seemed like a good idea. Clare did. While she was on the phone, she got a message from Hannah: “You should lock your car. Someone dangerous might get in!”

We got the hint. When we got back to Conway Park and Ron, Hannah was perched in the back seat looking entirely pleased with herself. “It wasn’t locked!”

Well, apparently not. This ascertained, Clare looked slightly aggrieved, and we all piled in and drove to Asda. Have I mentioned lately that Clare drives like a maniac? It’s great. What is also great is the fact both she and Hannah are eighteen, and have ID that proves they are, and Clare has a ten percent employee discount card. Which is all my roundabout way of saying we went to Asda to buy alcohol. Despite my fairly derogatory comments, I am rather fond of Ron, as I believe most people are. It may be battered and somewhat decrepit-looking, but it gets us places. Hannah, however, got positively frantic when she couldn’t find a seatbelt. Clare was offended, but Colleen reminded her that when we have an accident, Hannah will go flying forward and brain Colleen herself. Which wouldn’t be good. Clare said something approximating, “When we have an accident?”

In the end, we bought a bottle of vodka, another of Smirnoff Ice, some Malibu and some mixers so we didn’t look like alcoholics. Colleen was having a Pringles phase, so we got those too. Hannah was providing the chocolate. All of this duly purchased, we went back to Clare’s to be met with her sister and mother just going out the door and Mozart looking soulful. I said later that he always looks soulful. Never smiles. Just looks as though he’s neglected and miserable and the world is such a hard, hard, place. Clare concurred.

To begin with, there were just four of us, because Emily and Enid were both working, but we couldn’t resist beginning with birthday presents. Firstly, Hannah gave Clare the CD she’d made. Hannah and I had spent many hours on the phone discussing what to put on it, for as I said, it didn’t matter if she had all the songs already, the point was the CD should be the essence of Clare, for lack of a better way to put it. So Hannah suggested the theme should be paranoia, insomnia, and Death (lovely, but Clare is lovely), and she duly put Suicide is Painless and Snow Patrol’s How To Be Dead and Sweet Transvestite and lots of others on it. Not quite eighteen tracks, but almost.

And the other presents. Hannah got her Placebo’s Once More With Feeling. The present I bought in so much of a hurry that morning was books. It’s tradition, as I’ve got Clare books every birthday since she was eight. This year it was Head Over Heels In The Dales and Queer Facts, a book of gay and lesbian trivia. It was pink and printed on pink paper, and when I saw it in Pritchard’s I couldn’t resist. It proved a talking point for the rest of the evening, as we learnt that homosexuality is punishable by death in Somalia and the first play with gay themes performed on Broadway was The Captive in 1926 and that lesbianism has never been a crime in Britain, as the one time a bill was put through the Lords rejected it on the grounds it would give them ideas. We also learned that Willow Rosenberg and Tara Maclay were the longest-lived gay couple on mainstream television. Yay.

Colleen got Clare a pretty, pretty silver ring. It wasn’t really a birthday present, and Hannah and I were content to be the peanut gallery for a few moments.

Then we moved on to Hannah’s birthday presents, because this was a joint birthday party. The only person who knows what we got her is Am-Chau, because she was there when we bought it. It was at Collectormania, and I remember how happy we were when we found it, realised we could afford it, and bought it while all the while congratulating ourselves on how much she’d love it. And in the interests of not being cryptic, it was a signed picture of Alyson Hannigan as Willow, with frame. There was a smiley face as part of the signature. Hannah took one look, got very quiet while I was thinking, oh, crap, did we get this wrong, and then she went rather red and said, “I love you guys…”
The picture was left propped up against the table, so we could all look at it on occasion. And I gave Hannah the CD I had burnt, sans tracklist because I had no time, and we worked our way through it and talked and giggled and wrote down tracks. Thanks to the lovely, lovely apestaartje, I had Giles singing Freebird in The Yoko Factor as the first track. The next one:

“What’s this?”

“Goodbye to you, by Michelle Branch.”

“It’s the song Willow and Tara break up to.”

“Oh, lovely.”

And so on and so forth. Clare and Colleen popped out for more vodka, leaving me and Hannah to occupy ourselves. When they got back, ended up watching The Wish. It’s a season three Buffy episode that Hannah had never seen, for some reason, and it’s one of my undying favourites, so we watched it while explaining it to Clare: “Anya? As in I-hate-bunnies Anya?”

Sadly, yes. The best thing in the episode is vamp!Willow, at least in my humble opinion. For a character who only appeared twice, she’s beyond perfect. Gorgeous and sadistic and quite, quite insane. Perfect. I’ve always wanted to write Wishverse fic, but that’s by the bye.

Emily arrived soon after, and she had to stay sober to pick Enid up, but she got into the swing of it quickly enough. She had been forbidden on pain of death to drive to Conway Park alone, so Hannah and I volunteered to go, leaving Clare and Colleen behind.

[Earlier, Colleen had said conversationally, “She’s going to throw you and Hannah out of the car on the Lever Causeway.”

“What? Why?”

“So you can just get on with it already!”]

I ignored the sudden lapse into Yiddish syntax and mentally filed away the threat. Enid seemed pleased to see us and when we got back, Hannah got out the champagne that had been provided on the occasion of its being an eighteenth birthday party. Clare smashed a glass and was thus deemed Not Sober. When we were all equipped with glasses, a toast was proposed by each. The conservatory (which is new, and Clare never told us about it!) was filled with lit tealights, and the atmosphere was unreal, sort of; dreamlike is the word, as we were all snuggled with each other by then, Clare with Colleen, me with Hannah, Enid on top of Emily (it looked incredibly uncomfortable). I think we ended up sleepily reminiscing about all the other parties, the other forays into drunkenness, the weird coincidences that led us here. As I have said often, The Colleen Show is too weird not to be true. If it were fictional, it wouldn’t be believable.

Later on, Enid was somewhere with the digital camera, Hannah had gone off to the loo, and I was lying on the couch staring at the ceiling and resting my feet on Mozart, who didn’t mind I think, when Colleen asked, apropos of nothing, “Did you snog her yet?”

“Define ‘snogged’,” I said sleepily. “What makes you think so?”

“You’re being so cute tonight.”

“We’re always cute.”

“Cuter than usual,” she persisted, with an arm around a sleeping Clare. “Did you?” Sleeping With Ghosts was playing in the background and the candles were burning down. Even Mozart was asleep, and I didn’t move my feet as not to disturb him. Hannah came in a few minutes later and took a picture of me with my head upside down.

I think by that point Colleen was very drunk and so was Enid. Hannah and I weren’t that bad. When we went out – yes, we went on a walk at two thirty in the morning, this makes sense how? – it dawned on me I hadn’t seen Emily so giggly since the first convention we’d went to. I remembered I’d only known Colleen for maybe twenty-four hours at that point, and yet she helped me get Emily dragged down the corridor and somewhat sober before her dad saw her!

That was three years ago. I am amazed, sometimes, at how far we’ve come.

In the morning – actually, four hours later – Colleen, Hannah and Enid left, all working or face-painting at the church (I didn’t ask about that). I got up to say goodbye to them, and when Clare got back from dropping them off, she and I somehow ended up sat at the kitchen table with a jigsaw, chatting quietly about everything in general. She dropped me off at Conway Park later and I went home, texting Hannah at intervals. Once I got here, I wrote essays very slowly and watched Angel.

I like full moons, I’ve decided. Things happen beneath them.