The Last Enchantments Read Online Free PDF

hanging loose in the corner of his mouth, his glasses slipping down. “Nice to meet you, though.”
    I went back and played a last game of pool with Anil and Tom while Jem closed up. When I had finished my beer Tom said, with a look of resignation, “To bed for you?”
    I said no, that I felt energized and awake, and immediately he brightened. “The Turtle?”
    “Why not,” I said. “Anil?”
    “This is a nightclub?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Then I am coming. We must invite our new friend, too,” he said and went straight up to the girl with her textbook. To Anil’s genuine surprise she declined his invitation. Tom gave her a hesitant, unacknowledged wave good-bye, and we left.
    As we passed the Cottages I asked them if we could stop so that I could send an e-mail. Really I wanted to check, though. There was still no word from Alison. Fuck her, then, I thought, and ran back outside to meet up with my housemates.
    *   *   *
    The Turtle didn’t look like much from the outside: a stairwell leading down to a basement; a few loud girls troubling the alley upstairs, smoking and arguing. There were two mountainous bouncers checking ID under a dim yellow streetlight. As far as I could tell they wore nothing but leather. They squeaked when they moved.
    Tom was enthusiastic. “I haven’t been here since I was fifteen, but I loved it. Ungodly hot, of course, because it’s underground. They play great music, lots of eighties songs.”
    “And hip-hop,” said Anil.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “None?” Tom shook his head, and Anil said, “That does not meet my definition of clubbing, friends.”
    Tom laughed. “A thousand pardons.”
    “They let you in when you were fifteen?” I asked.
    “My sister found me a driving license.”
    We made it past the leather twins and downstairs. At the front bar there were seven girls in short skirts, with a line of twenty-one shots in front of them. Tom went and took the menu from the end of the bar and said something to one of the girls.
    “Orielgasms,” he reported when he returned. “Vodka and Midori.”
    It turned out there was a shot named after every college, not just Oriel; Fleet’s was called the Golden Fleets, a rare literary allusion on that list, and it was made of Goldschläger and apple vodka. ( The nectar of Hades! reported the menu excitedly.) We ordered three of them right away, of course. I drank two, because Anil didn’t want his.
    Even sober Anil was confident about his appeal to women. Several times when I was speaking he would hold up a single finger, turn to a passing girl, and stare at her intensely. “Sowing seeds,” he would say after the girl had gone. Then there was his catchphrase, dashed liberally into his lectures about hip-hop and the elites of Mumbai: “Haters gonna hate.” It wasn’t clear that he perceived with any great depth of comprehension what the phrase actually meant, since he said it with a complete lack of contextual discrimination—he got it right occasionally, more often not. There was joy (“Have you ever been to London? I love that place! Haters gonna hate!”), there was disappointment (“I can’t believe that girl wouldn’t give me her number. Haters gonna hate.”), and there was occasionally even philosophy. (“We all get old some day, you know? Haters gonna hate.”)
    The more we talked with Anil the more Tom and I seemed like old friends. He and I drank more than I usually would have, shots first, then a round of Vodka Red Bulls, then some more shots (house vodka only cost a quid, probably because it was literally toxic), then a round of Snakebites, then another round of shots, and pretty soon the world was blurry, and I kept ordering drinks, with a feeling of obscure revenge against Alison, and Anil seemed like the funniest man alive.
    The Turtle was made up of seven or eight rooms that together formed a long, narrow, zigzagging corridor. (“No truth to the rumor that this was actually Hitler’s bunker,” said