#110

#110 couldn’t stand me when she first met me. Me with my green hair and, no, not an entourage, but I knew everybody and I was confident and something about that just grated. At this point, I think it’s important to refer you back to the early years, when I was all insecure and quiet and awkward. The fact that I had somehow come out the other side of this and was apparently ‘cool’ in the eyes of many is something I never quite managed to take for granted. I am still amazed by how these things changed, and would like to write something profound about it, but I don’t know how.

Happily, I was oblivious to #110’s disapproval. And it was purely by chance that we became friends almost a year after our first encounter. I recognised her at a student club and said hi, and it turned out she was moving two doors down from me; this was back when we were both at uni, and I was living in the Montague Street flat with #28 and #61. (“I don’t know if I can continue living in the same street as this wallpaper,” said #110 when she saw our hallway.)

As previously mentioned, we had very little in common, just drinking and good food and writing porn. Oh, and the Eurovision Song Contest. She tended to get off with a frankly dubious cast of characters in frankly horrible clubs. Once, she went back to a barracks for a threesome with two soldiers, and ran out of people to brag about it to, so she phoned her mum. She came round and was absolutely lovely to me when #78 finished with me and I was in bits.

I can’t remember when we first kissed, so I’ve just decided to list her as #110 for the sake of it. In the first couple of years of our friendship, kissing me seemed to serve a dual purpose: an attempt to get rid of sleazy men (this predictably failed miserably), and, paradoxically, an attempt to attract sleazy men (this worked well).

Eventually, she spent a year in Australia, where she discovered she was a lesbian. Suddenly we had a whole lot more to talk about! She came back to Edinburgh and cried about her ex-girlfriend and we caught up on all the getting drunk we’d missed out on. One night, we were drinking in Planet Out and she was lamenting the state of her love life. “Do you think we’d ever shag?” she asked. We looked at each other for a moment. Then we did the mutual lunge and made out like whoa. But we both knew it wasn’t actually going to go anywhere. Also it was maybe the night she subsequently slept on the doorstep of a pet shop. No, wait, that was the night I had really bad sex with #178. Okay. Patience.

#110 hates working in hospitality, but turned out to be good at being a bar manager, especially at dragging insubordinate patrons out by the hair, and being condescending towards yahs. #110 is not very good with politics: her reaction tends to be “Is that something else to be angry about? Must check with Nine.” #110 should put together a zine but still hasn’t managed to do this despite all my pep talks. #110 has an amazing gift for doing accents. #110 has a very scathing, hilarious sense of humour and has no patience for fools. But do not be taken in: she is secretly kind.

~ by Nine on 28 March 2009.