The Marriott incident (Part 2)

My friend Dave’s other speciality was using his friends as some kind of glorified dating agency. Whenever anyone had a female friend to visit in term time, Dave pounced. It became depressingly predictable and was a great way of rubbing it in that all of us were virtually incapable of pulling a muscle.

He went through the attractive (and less attractive) female acquaintances of friends in much the same way that haemophilia went through the royal families of Europe in the nineteenth century. At first, when he lured Steve’s 15 year old sister into his room and had his fun with her we didn’t realise it was a trend in the making. Then Nick’s busty friend Heather - who he’d fancied for years – fell under his spell (many years later she would still sigh whenever his name was mentioned and ask Nick to give him her number).

Nobody was safe. There was nothing wilful or manipulative about it, it just happened. The next day, in a good light, he could almost sound apologetic. Especially the morning after he pulled my friend Hannah who I’d always had a soft spot for. He had to be particularly apologetic that time – to her, along the lines of “I’m so sorry, that has never happened to me before.” I even forgave him for copping off with my ex a couple of weeks after we split up, though the fact that he took two years to get round to telling me helped. You just couldn’t be cross with him. He was like a cross between the Tasmanian Devil and Ron Jeremy and it wasn’t worth being put out just because your lady friends had done exactly that.

Dave only went too far once, and that was the time he slept with Eric’s precious little sister.

The warning signs were all there. There had always been a spark, and they’d messed around and flirted whenever she visited, but Eric’s sister was clearly off limits. The blissful vision of Swiss Family Eric gathered round the old joanna at Yuletide had no space in it for plebs like Dave. Especially because they would have taken a dim view of him trying to perform Set You Free by N-Trance as a Christmas carol.

So in a massive cover-up we kept the whole thing a secret from him. After all, we had no way of knowing how he’d react but from the way Eric had talked about his family before none of us wanted to incur the wrath of the Norwegian mafia. Presumably they came to your house and made you an offer you couldn’t listen to without lapsing into a tedium-induced coma.

Thank goodness Dave, uncharacteristically, was far too much of a gentleman to tell us whether Eric’s sister also “moaned when the fingers came to town.”

Some time later, the three of us went to a house party in Bristol. We were all single, all on the prowl and the signs were good. Apparently this party was going to be chock full of women of a feminine persuasion in all shapes and sizes. I was especially interested, as going by the law of averages I reckoned there might even have been one desperate enough to let me touch her boobs.

However, arriving at the party, it soon became apparent that some very heavy liberties had been taken with the truth. The party was crawling with men, many of whom were in fact literally crawling. There was – and we conducted an extensive search before coming reluctantly to this conclusion – only one woman. Not only that, but she had white dreadlocks and looked an awful lot like a goat. Not only that, but she had a baby. Even I wasn’t that desperate.

Nor, probably, was she.

We had been duped. The only consolation was that there was virtually nobody there to challenge my status as the bronze medallist in the alpha male competition. But it wasn’t enough. There was nothing for it but to smoke an awful lot of dope, leave the house and get as pissed as a little beetle. So that’s precisely what we did.

We wandered through a few pubs in the city without finding any suitable victims for our tried and tested Three Stooges routine. The plan normally was that we found and targeted a group of unaccompanied women. Dave would get the most attractive one, Eric would get the next most attractive one and I would get the other one. The one with the personality.

Regrettably, what usually happened was that Dave did indeed snog the most attractive one, Dave turned down the next most attractive one who eventually got off with Eric and the one with the personality would take one look at me and decided she would rather do something more enjoyable, like head back to her room and engage in a quiet spot of self-mutilation.

The evening was bearing up very unpromisingly, and that’s the point where in our increasingly desperate quest for a suitable venue we stumbled upon the Marriott looming invitingly out of the darkness.

If the hotel staff were disconcerted to find a bunch of lads reeking of cannabis shambling into their bar, plonking themselves down in the comfy chairs and ordering several pints of lager they had the class not to betray it. The people attending the black tie event in the adjacent function room, on the other hand, were less impressed. They looked at us in much the same way that Stella McCartney might regard a foie gras and veal sandwich, or the way I look at a smear of butter in a jar of Branston pickle.

(I actually felt queasy just typing that. It’s a real bugbear of mine.)

Several pints further on, Eric tottered drunkenly off to the bathroom. And suddenly, mind fogged by a considerable amount of fermented cheap liquid filth, I had a very evil idea.

“Dave, shall I go in there and tell Eric about that time you fucked his sister?”

Dave chuckled. He didn’t think I meant it.

“Yeah, if you want to.”

The problem is, I did mean it. And I can move pretty fast when I want to. I was at the bathroom door before Dave could tell me he was joking, and I disappeared beyond view. The next thing Dave knew, Eric and I were returning to the table. I was grinning malevolently like Kerry Katona in a crack den. And Eric? He was an ashen-faced broken man. There was no arguing, no violence, nothing. The fight had gone out of him completely. He went up to the bar without speaking and returned with some chasers, and we all had to act like it hadn’t happened. It was clear that Eric was drinking to forget. Initially I thought he was just drinking to forget that Dave had defiled his precious sister in the nakedest way possible, but during the rest of our bender in the Marriott I started to think he might be drinking to forget his own name.

By bedtime I am pretty certain he had succeeded.

The next morning found the three of us sleeping uncomfortably on the floor in a pretty unpleasant room. If the clock radio hadn’t started playing Boyzone I don’t think we would ever have had an incentive to get up at all. Dave and I awoke, badly scathed by the previous night’s exploits but relieved to still be alive. My head was clanging in a way which made the tiniest of movements feel like unspeakable agony. Gradually we threw our clothes on, but Eric remained prostrate. For some time we thought he might be dead.

None of us spoke about the previous night’s confession. I even managed to deceive myself into thinking that maybe he’d forgotten, or it hadn’t really happened, assisted I must say by the fact that I couldn’t specifically remember what I had said to paint the picture of his sister impaled on Dave’s porky plunger. With hindsight I would be amazed if it had been more delicate than “Eric, Dave slept with your sister that time she came to visit”, but it could easily have involved even more industrial language than that.

Eventually Eric managed to tremble his way gingerly into his clothes and we left to head back to the station. He was in a bad way, even by his fragile standards.

”Eric, on a scale of one to ten how bad would you say this hangover is?” I asked him.

“Nine.” came the very terse reply.

“Jesus, that’s bad. Are you sure?”

No reply came. With perfect timing, almost without breaking his stride, Eric turned his head to one side and projectile vomited against the side of a building considerably older and more attractive than the Marriott at great velocity.

Ah, the nineties.

Over ten years on, Eric is less a friend, more a running joke and fast disappearing fixture on my Christmas card list. Dave and I, on the other hand, are still the best of friends, even though we are apparently now properly grown up. He’s a devoted dad now and we meet up regularly and spend happy days gradually regressing to the age of about 21 down the pub (until he gets tired and needs to turn in, usually around half-ten). We even go on holiday together without our respective other halves. And a couple of weeks back, as I was packing my bags to head to Bristol and he was holidaying in Norfolk with his family, he sent me this.


I guess it must have subliminally jogged my memory.