Extract: Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan

From the Polari Prize winning author of Bellies, Disappoint Me is a voice-driven, funny and poignant exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bougie domesticity.

It’s four a.m. and the house party hasn’t thinned. New Year’s! Everyone wants to go to a party, but nobody wants to host a party, and so a party’s a party and people will stay. At a certain stage of life, people leave house shares for smaller flats, because they can afford to live alone, or because they’re in a couple, or because their parents give them some money for a modest two- bed, though they’ll assure you they pay the mortgage themselves. In all cases, houses become less like places you live and more like homes, less like places you’re willing to trash. House parties are rare. Caspar, who lives here, is a friend from university. We were also in a writing workshop with my ex-boyfriend, Arthur, though I’ve obviously since left. Now I barely see Caspar out- side of these parties, which he continues to invite me to despite our estrangement.

I’m flirting with sobriety, which means I’ve only had two drinks and the small bump of ket that Caspar just offered me. The decision to restrict is not because I’m an alcoholic or addict. I’ve always been able to pull back, to eventually say no, to go home early. I’m restricting because drugs and alcohol make me feel bad. After Arthur broke up with me, I’d wake up with a gravitational compression that anchored me in bed. I’d be much worse the day or two after a bottle or two shared between friends. It shouldn’t have been a revelation that alcohol is a depressant, but my baseline finally dropped low enough for me to notice it.

I’m dancing with my eyes shut, because I’m dancing with Caspar and his eye contact is severe. He’s brilliant. I don’t par- ticularly like him, and so I’m saying this in an objective sense. A genuinely brilliant mind. He did a PhD in PrEPenomics, and then went on to write a book of essays on pre-millennium London club culture, which he was not present for, published by an independent press stocked only in Hackney bookshops. It sold a lot more than anyone anticipated, thanks to a well-known actor-singer-cross-stitch-artist who posted a nude selfie with Caspar’s book covering his crotch. It sold a lot more than my book of poems, obviously, because who in the world buys poetry any more? After the crotch selfie, Caspar got a US deal. And a German one. Even a Japanese one. He is glamorous in a way that will wear off for me. Time is kinder to men, even gay men. I won’t always be beautiful. I think about that a lot, now that I’m in my thirties. Now that I’m thirty. My marionette lines are a giveaway; even though I insist to myself that it’s the structure of my face, that I’ve always had them, I know they’re getting deeper. How long have my eyes been shut?

I open them. Caspar’s gone. I survey the crowd and regret it immediately. Some people should really stop taking drugs. I scratch the ketamine off the hem of my nostril and look up. Lights! A light machine shoots lasers across the room, creating an illuminated sheet overhead. Simone and Eva are next to me. Simone never sweats. She’s in a boxy blazer with matching shorts, like a child in their dad’s suit, but sexy and poised. She is my favourite person in the world. Eva, her girlfriend, is not. It’s not because I’m possessive, I just think Eva’s a little boring. She’s a fashion videographer for cool brands with asymmetrical knit- wear and expensive shoes that look like Transformers. People who do jobs like that are only ever interesting on paper. Except Simone. Simone often defends Eva’s right to be boring to me, in neat aphorisms that are conflicting but even in the strength of their presentation. Listen, Max, everyone becomes boring when you’ve spent enough time with them. Am I boring, Simone? No, but she talks about things that we never talk about. She does talk about Crocs a lot, though.

Eva places her hand on my back. I feel my own sweat against the curve of my spine.

‘I love your bag,’ she says.

It’s a vintage, black leather baguette. I don’t think she actually likes it; she just wants to endear herself to me, maybe because she knows that I know she’s boring.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I love your Crocs.’

I feel hot, and only in the unpleasant sense of the word. I wish I wasn’t wearing a silk slip. My awareness of my moist armpits is acute. I shut my eyes again. Maybe I should actually be grateful for Eva. I’ve lost many friends to heteronormativity in the last couple of years. Even queer ones. Engagements. Cardigans. Looking out at the sea while rubbing the outside of their arms.

Eyes open again, and I look towards Simone. She gurns so much. Not judging, just observing. Her teeth chatter like she’s naked in the Arctic. I’ve known that noise since we first took MD on a side street off Lan Kwai Fong sixteen years ago. Simone grabs my hand and brings her mouth to my ear, and I know what’s coming. Rattle, rattle, rattle.

‘It’s like they’re talking,’ she says. ‘What are they saying?’ I ask. ‘Help.’

We laugh. I lean away and search my handbag for gum. Eva’s palm slides over my arm.

‘I love your bag,’ Eva says, again.

‘Thank you,’ I repeat. ‘I love your Crocs.’

I know I’ve long been the perpetrator of many of these looping conversations, and my penance is to bear my own annoyance and smile. I take out the packet of gum from my bag, stacked pillows of xylitol, and pop out a couple for Simone and Eva, and then one for myself. Simone throws it into her mouth, nodding at me through droopy eyes.

Eva pulls me and Simone further into the living-room-cum- dance-floor. I look at them, and suddenly they’re bent backwards.

Who the fuck brought out a limbo stick? Am I doing limbo? I throw my spine back like it’s a normal thing to do. It’s not like they just found a stick outside. This is a stick of specific length, circumference and texture. Who brought this?

As I’m upside down, my eyes go to Carla, a Spanish woman I know through Caspar, who Simone once said looks like Pound- land Arca. Carla and I are friends, in the sense that we’re both trans and therefore vaguely supportive of each other on social media. Her sequin dress is lovely. So slinky. When I swing back up, I’m thinking of microplastics. I try to keep dancing, but purse my lips, imagining those little beads slipping from those sequins and into the sea, and into the fish we eat, and into our bodies, clogging up hormone receptors and pulping our gametes. While I’ve already met a version of this apocalypse, it’s not a fate I wish to befall everyone else. Is this what abstinence does to a person? When you can’t turn the world to mush, make every- thing dissolve and stop making sense. When the mind can’t crowd itself, where is it left to wander?

Carla comes off the decks. One of several bleached buzzcuts ascends to replace her.

‘You were so, so good,’ I say.

‘Thank you, baby,’ she says. ‘You look amazing.’ ‘I love your dress.’

‘Same,’ she says. ‘You look amazing. Let’s go upstairs.’

She grabs my hand with a violent tug, pulling me out of the room and towards the staircase. Our skin contact is feigned closeness through shared experience. We met a few years ago. All I remember from that evening is that she gave me a cigarette and told me there was a man who paid her top dollar to smoke vapes from her butt, and that she could introduce me if I wanted. I think she still sees him, even though her paintings are selling okay. The next week we went for a drink at a bar in Dalston. I was mortified by how rude she was. Some trans women serve cunt, in that they’re quite rude, because when the world shits on you it’s easy to be a little mean, but she sent a negroni back for having too thin an orange slice on the rim. No amount of pain excuses that.

We sit on a beanbag upstairs. Three men in mesh tops are on the couch to Carla’s left. One of them looks forty-five, another looks thirty, and the twink closest to Carla looks too young to be here. The forty-five-year-old squirts G from a dropper into a glass of orange Fanta.

‘This is my friend Max,’ Carla says. ‘She’s a lawyer.’ ‘That’s amazing,’ says the twink. ‘You must be so smart.’ ‘Sometimes,’ Carla answers for me.

It’s unclear to me what Carla means, even if sometimes is probably appropriate. I’m not that smart. Most lawyers aren’t. Law’s a career built on privilege and rote learning. I work four days a week as legal counsel for a tech company. They claim to have AI that can review contracts, except it can’t and it’s actually me reviewing them. I am the robot, signing off my emails to clients with its name, Owl. I spend any downtime at work label- ling contracts, teaching the incompetent AI how to read them so that one day it might replace me. Even at four days a week, I am grossly overpaid. The fifth day is supposed to be for poetry, though I’ve stopped writing.

‘I like your shoes,’ the thirty-year-old says to me. ‘Thank you.’

I bought them to celebrate getting the deal for my book of poetry. There was no advance, but it made sense to buy shoes. They’re all scuffed up now, because they’re platform brogues and the rubber soles knock against the leather when I walk. It breaks my heart.

‘Do you want some?’ the forty-five-year-old asks me, holding up the vial of G.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m okay.’

The twink racks up lines of coke for himself using a slotted spatula. My mind wanders to Arthur. Part of me thought he would be here. We exist on separate rocks in the same ecosystem. It’s what made the decision to come here mostly sober even easier, because drugs and alcohol soften my tongue and limbs and memory into gelatine, coaxing me to cradle the monster swaddled in vintage Carhartt. I only asked about jawline surgery to be supportive of your transition, Max.

Either would make me feel like I wasn’t enough, maybe because the brain searches for the reasons it wants, caught in a strange loop of self-reinforcement. I wonder why I’m here. At thirty, I still experience the pressure of seeming like I’m having fun, of doing a lot, or at least doing interesting things. It’s why having my book published was so satisfying for a while. A cold pearl of disappointment weighs on my stomach. Why am I here? The question presses itself hard on to my all- too-conscious shoulders. The party has to end, people. We can’t do this for ever. And why not? I have no answer, other than my own feelings of emptiness. Maybe I’m projecting. I look across the room. There’s a thin white woman wearing a low-rise mini- skirt and a bra made of chains, dancing completely out of time to the music on the speakers. It’s probably rude to stare. I think of how nobody, not a soul in the world, would think a woman like that is trans. It’s a far cry from what I might hope for, that people would believe you if you told them that I was or wasn’t.

‘Hold this for a second,’ Carla says. She passes me a fifty-pound note.

‘Why do you have a fifty-pound note?’ I ask. I roll it into a tube for her.

‘A man in a fedora tipped me with it at my pub job, baby,’ she says. ‘He slipped it into my panties when I brought him a sausage roll. I should’ve kicked him out, but I wanted to keep the money.’ Carla racks up two lines with an unstamped coffee shop loyalty card. They’re fat lines. Slugs. My eyes drift again to the dancing woman, and Carla gently takes the note out of my hand. I hear the wind through her nostril. She scratches her nose with a bejewelled acrylic nail, and we both look over at the dancing girl. ‘She’s trans, you know,’ Carla says. ‘I think she’s twenty-five.

She’s a model. She transitioned when she was thirteen.’

Fuck. I grab the note, and for a moment I think of snorting the slug, but hand the note back to Carla. I don’t feel better. Not even righteous.

‘Maxy wrote a book,’ Carla says to the three boys, putting her arm around me.

They nod, because nobody really cares. Nobody reads any more. Writers will soon be redundant, AI will replace us, and my decided departure from poetry will look less like failure and more like expedience.

The twink and the thirty-year-old start kissing.

‘Are you going to Dionysus?’ the forty-five-year-old asks. I shake my head.

‘I don’t go to that any more, baby,’ Carla says. ‘It’s not queer.

It’s gay.’

She’s right. Every queer night I used to go to has been colonized by muscle gays. It’s simply not for me any more. Is tonight? I look towards decepto-trans again and start to feel creeped out. It seems impossible to dance this out of rhythm for this amount of time. It’s inhuman. Carla and I leave the beanbag holding hands and walk out to the hallway. I notice her notice me looking at the dancing girl back in the room.

‘Don’t you just get jealous?’ Carla asks. ‘Of what?’ I ask.

‘Of her.’

‘No.’

‘You’re lying.’ She pushes my shoulder, but gently. ‘You’re jealous. You’re beautiful, but you’re not that beautiful. Every doll is jealous of her.’

‘I’m not jealous.’ ‘Just admit it, baby.’

‘Did you see her dancing?’ I ask, trying to tame Carla’s aggres-sion, because I feel too sober, like my walls are too high to just admit that yes, I feel a bit jealous.

‘You’re fucking jealous,’ Carla repeats. ‘I’m not fucking jealous.’

‘You’re fucking jealous,’ she says. ‘This is literally your prob- lem, Max.’

‘What is literally my problem?’

She doesn’t know me well enough to know what my prob- lems are.

‘Just admit you’re jealous,’ she says. ‘And you’ll be free.’ She grabs my wrist with cokey force.

‘I’m not jealous,’ I say, raising my voice enough to reveal that I am indeed jealous. The three men on the couch are looking at us open-mouthed through the gap in the door. Victory registers across Carla’s face. ‘By the way,’ Carla says, ‘maybe this is a bad time to tell you, but I slept with Arthur. He is not a good man.’

I want to numb my despair. I want Simone. I’d even take Eva. It’s a terrible feeling. I want to hold it together. I turn away from Carla, holding the banister to swing myself around. As I launch down the stairs I miss a step and lose my balance. I start to tumble. I hit my head. Simone screams my name.