AI on Razhels Method on Goth

The night began with a mascara emergency, which was hardly the sort of thing the nineteenth century had prepared us for, though the nineteenth century had prepared us for quite a lot of misery, plague, premature burial, damp crypts, doomed correspondence, consumptive poets coughing their last into embroidered handkerchiefs, and the general inconvenience of being born before antibiotics, but nothing in the collected works of the Romantics, not even the most elaborate of Lord Byron's self-regarding sighs, could have adequately described the sight of Mara crouching over a bathroom sink at eleven forty-seven on a Saturday night, one knee in a puddle, one elbow in the toilet roll, her face half blackened, her lips a furious dark red, while she attempted to persuade a cheap plastic eyelash curler to release a clump of mascara that had become entangled in its mechanism, and all the while the little fluorescent bathroom light hummed overhead, the extractor fan made a noise like a dying moth, and the housemate outside the door shouted that the taxi had arrived, that the taxi was leaving, that the taxi driver had a personal commitment to not waiting all bloody night, and Mara, with the absolute composure of a woman who had elected to become a creature of darkness and was therefore not about to be defeated by a bathroom implement manufactured for three pounds ninety-nine, replied that the taxi could go to hell, the driver could go to hell, and anyone who wanted her to appear in public before the left eye matched the right could follow them both down.

She was twenty-three, broke, and magnificent.

Not magnificent in the way the word is used by people who wish to avoid describing what they have actually seen, but magnificent in the specific, inconvenient sense that her black velvet skirt had a hole at the seam, her boots were held together with glue that smelled faintly of almonds, her silver rings had left greenish marks around two fingers, and her hair, which she had dyed with a box colour called Midnight Raven, had emerged from the process with one purple streak above the left ear and a patch of scalp that was still faintly irritated, and yet when she finally straightened, wiped the sink with a square of toilet paper, and turned towards the mirror, the whole arrangement came together with such improbable conviction that the room seemed to recede around her, the cracked tiles, the mould above the shower, the discarded shampoo bottle, the chipped enamel of the bath, everything surrendering its claim to importance before the sovereign fact of her face.

She looked like the last woman alive at the end of the world, and she was furious that the eyeliner had smudged.

This was Goth, at least in one of its many local and disputed jurisdictions, not a philosophy so much as a way of arranging one's face against the universe, a personal treaty with the night, a solemn little pact between the self and the blackness beyond the streetlights, which did not require anyone to believe in vampires, or ghosts, or the literal existence of a supernatural realm, although belief in any of these things was perfectly acceptable provided one could discuss them without sounding like an idiot, and certainly did not require one to be unhappy, despite the persistent suspicion of the outside world that anyone who wore black from head to toe must be either depressed, dangerous, sexually unavailable, or planning something involving a graveyard and a shovel.

Mara was, in fact, planning to drink three pints of cider, dance until her feet hurt, and persuade a girl called Eleanor to kiss her behind the club.

The graveyard was an optional extra.

By midnight, the club had become a damp, heaving cathedral of bass and shadow, its low ceiling sweating condensation, its black-painted walls decorated with pictures of crumbling churches, antique dolls, dead flowers, and one particularly alarming portrait of a child whose eyes appeared to follow you towards the toilets, where the taps dripped steadily into a basin ringed with limescale, and the hand dryer roared like an aeroplane taking off, and someone had written NO FUTURE in lipstick above the mirror, only for somebody else to add EXCEPT TOMORROW'S HANGOVER beneath it, and the whole room smelled of patchouli, warm beer, wet leather, cigarette smoke clinging to coats, hairspray, damp wool, and the sour, sweet, bodily fug of a hundred people dancing in a space designed for about forty.

The DJ was playing something with a drum machine like a malfunctioning industrial press and a voice that sounded as though it had been recorded in a crypt by a man who had recently received some extremely disappointing news about his mortgage.

Everybody knew the words.

Nobody agreed on what they meant.

A boy with white foundation caked into the creases beside his nose was explaining to a girl in a torn lace blouse that the band had been much better before their third album, and she was nodding gravely while trying to remove a piece of glitter from her contact lens, and behind them a woman in a long black coat was holding court about the moral bankruptcy of commercialised alternative culture, while wearing a pair of boots that had cost more than Mara's monthly food budget, and beside the bar a man whose face was painted in the likeness of a skull had just discovered that he had left his wallet at home, which had reduced his apocalyptic demeanour to a series of increasingly desperate requests for someone to lend him four pounds.

The darkness, it transpired, did not exempt anyone from arithmetic.

There were black roses, silver crosses, velvet chokers, plastic bats, antique lockets, steel toe caps, fishnet stockings, chipped nail varnish, torn tights, wet cigarette papers, cheap wine, expensive perfume, leather straps, lace cuffs, a broken necklace, a packet of paracetamol, somebody's missing earring, the little white tab from a beer can, a safety pin, a paper wristband, a dead moth on the windowsill, and one solitary pink balloon that had somehow become trapped beneath the ceiling and remained there, slowly deflating, an absurd little organ of pastel cheerfulness among all the funereal finery.

Nobody removed it.

Perhaps it had achieved sanctuary.

Mara found Eleanor near the back, standing beneath a speaker with her eyes closed, her head tilted slightly to one side, her short black hair falling across her cheek, her mouth moving faintly with the music, and there was something in the set of her shoulders, in the way she held herself apart from the crowd while remaining entirely within it, that made Mara stop for a moment, not because Eleanor was beautiful in any conventional sense, although she was, but because she seemed to be listening to something nobody else could hear, some hidden, humming current beneath the bass, beneath the chatter, beneath the clumsy machinery of the evening, and when she opened her eyes and saw Mara, she smiled, and the smile was small, almost private, and Mara felt her stomach do a peculiar little flump, which was a humiliatingly childish sensation for someone who had spent so much time cultivating the appearance of a person who had seen everything and been impressed by nothing.

She approached with what she hoped was a suitable degree of nonchalance.

Eleanor looked at her face.

"Your eyeliner's gone."

"I know."

"Your left eye looks like a haunted badger."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Then Eleanor reached into her bag, produced a small black pencil, and repaired the damage with the steady hand of a surgeon performing an emergency procedure in a field hospital, leaning close enough that Mara could smell the faint sweetness of her shampoo, the warm cotton of her collar, and the last trace of whatever she'd been drinking, and when she finished she stepped back, considered her work, and said, "There. Now you look properly doomed."

Mara fell in love with her for approximately four seconds.

Then the music changed, and Eleanor grabbed her hand, and they were dancing, which meant that they were mostly jumping about in a hot room while trying not to elbow strangers in the face, and Mara's left boot began to come apart at the sole, and Eleanor's necklace caught on the lace of Mara's sleeve, and they had to stop in the middle of the dance floor to disentangle themselves, and a man in a long black coat shouted that they were ruining the atmosphere, and Eleanor told him that if the atmosphere was so delicate it could be ruined by two women with a broken boot and a snagged necklace, perhaps it deserved to die.

Mara laughed so hard she nearly fell over.

This was another of the Goth virtues, though nobody had put it on a badge: the ability to take the whole business seriously without taking oneself entirely seriously, to adore the grave and the grotesque, the mournful melody and the theatrical gesture, while recognising that the human body remains an irredeemably comic contraption, forever sweating through its clothes, getting food caught between its teeth, producing mysterious smells, requiring sleep at inconvenient times, and occasionally making a noise during a solemn moment that sounds exactly like a duck being strangled.

The body is not obliged to respect the aesthetic.

Neither is the weather.

At half past two, the rain arrived, not the fine, cinematic mist that drifts through a Gothic novel and settles tastefully upon the shoulders of a tragic heroine, but a thick, determined Welsh downpour that flattened Mara's hair against her scalp, turned the pavement into a shining black river, and sent water running down the back of her neck until she made a noise of such concentrated disgust that Eleanor began laughing before she had even worked out what had happened, and there they stood beneath the awning of a closed betting shop, black clothes plastered to their bodies, mascara dissolving, boots squeaking, the last bus already gone, their phones both showing low battery, and the nearest taxi rank several streets away.

"We could walk," Eleanor said.

"In this?"

"It's only rain."

"It's liquid death."

"You're very dramatic."

"I'm a Goth."

"You're a wet Goth."

Mara considered this insult, found it unanswerable, and followed Eleanor into the rain.

They walked beneath the sodium streetlights, past the shuttered shops and the overflowing bins, past a kebab shop where two men were arguing about whether a particular footballer was overrated, past a bus shelter whose glass had been scratched with the words LOVE IS A LIE, beneath which somebody had written SO IS YOUR HAIRCUT, and past a church whose stone saints watched them with the patient, weather-beaten expressions of people who had seen considerably worse things than two young women in ruined makeup trying to get home.

The rain made everything shine.

The black tarmac, the silver railings, the puddles in the road, the wet leaves gathered in the gutter, the slick shoulders of their coats, the glimmer of Eleanor's rings as she moved her hands while talking, even the rubbish bag split open beside a lamppost, its contents scattered in the water like the remains of some failed offering to an obscure and deeply unpleasant deity, all of it caught the light, reflected it, fractured it, sent it sliding down the street in long, trembling streaks, and Mara, who had spent much of her life searching for a darkness that would make the world feel more honest, suddenly found herself delighted by the brightness of the wet pavement.

She did not mention this.

There were limits.

Instead, she asked Eleanor why she liked Goth music.

Eleanor thought about it for a while.

"Because it sounds like something beautiful trying to survive something terrible," she said.

Then she slipped on a wet leaf, grabbed Mara's arm, and swore with such startling fluency that the sentence would have impressed a seasoned dockworker.

Mara laughed again, and this time Eleanor laughed too, and they stood in the rain holding each other upright, their boots in the gutter, their hair dripping into their eyes, the whole magnificent, miserable world carrying on around them without the slightest interest in what either of them believed about beauty, death, or the persistence of the soul.

That was the moment Mara understood something, though she would not have been able to explain it until much later, and perhaps would never have wanted to explain it at all: the darkness was not the opposite of life, and it was not an escape from life, and it did not require the world to become a tomb before anything beautiful could happen, because here was Eleanor, wet and swearing and laughing, her mascara running in two crooked lines down her cheeks, her hand gripping Mara's sleeve, her face alive with amusement, and here was Mara herself, cold, hungry, soaked through, her boot falling apart, her stomach aching from laughter, and neither of them had ever felt more entirely present.

The beautiful thing was not that the night had hidden the world.

It was that the night had changed the way they saw it.

They reached Eleanor's flat at four in the morning, where the hallway smelled of damp carpet and somebody's abandoned takeaway, where the stairs creaked in three different places, where a spider had constructed an elaborate web in the corner above the fire extinguisher, and where Eleanor discovered that she had lost her keys somewhere between the church and the kebab shop.

For several seconds neither of them spoke.

Then Eleanor sat down on the stairs.

Mara sat beside her.

The silence settled around them, thick and tired and faintly ridiculous, while the rain ticked against the narrow window and a pipe knocked somewhere inside the wall, and the spider, presumably indifferent to their difficulties, continued its nocturnal business above them.

"We could break in," Mara said.

"Into my own flat?"

"Symbolically."

"How would we do that?"

"With a brick."

"We don't have a brick."

"Then the symbolism is against us."

Eleanor put her head on Mara's shoulder.

They stayed there until the sky began to pale, two exhausted creatures in black clothes, sitting on a stairwell with wet socks and cold hands, surrounded by chipped paint and the smell of old carpets, while the night slowly loosened its hold on the town and the first birds began their irritating little morning negotiations with the dawn.

At six, the landlord came downstairs to put out the bins.

He found them asleep against the wall.

He looked at their makeup, their torn clothes, their ruined boots, their tangled hair, and the small puddle that had gathered beneath them on the carpet.

"Bloody hell," he said.

Eleanor opened one eye.

"Good morning," she replied, with the solemn courtesy of a duchess receiving an ambassador.

The landlord shook his head and went outside.

Mara woke enough to begin laughing.

And somewhere above them, behind a locked door, the spider was still making its web, drawing one fine black thread after another through the empty air, building its small, intricate architecture against the light.