Cherry Coloured - Alex Turner

8. Diamonds Into Snow

Ridding Alex from her mind was easier than Maeve had originally anticipated. After a week she'd dismissed him completely and at two weeks, was already back on with her normal life; as normal as it could be when spending a Thursday afternoon buying cocaine was a priority.

It was a terrible habit and she knew that, she just didn't care. Over the years, Maeve had convinced herself she couldn't do her job unless she'd snorted a line or two. It had become a dependency to get her on stage. She knew she would stop too, had it not been so easy to get her hands on. Her flat mate had hooked her up with a dealer and since then, she'd never go empty without it.

  The snow just made life easier. Washed away her worries and gave her something to ignite what little interesting fuses remained in her life.

  She'd taken the bus to Angus's place and was now waiting at his closest bus stop for her way home. The sky was just as grumpy as she was, saving her first hit of the good stuff for that night. Everything, from the houses across the road, to the pavement, to the cars driving past, looked blue and grey. Devoid of colour. Miserable.

God I hate this place, Maeve thought to herself and pulled her phone from her pocket. Still another twenty minutes until her bus was due. Her eyes met the overcast sky and pondered whether or not the dark grey lumps were going to piss down on her before she could get home.

  As fate would have it, the melancholy sky only cried once Maeve had stepped off the bus and was walking her way home. You've got to be fucking kidding me, she sighed and pulled her jacket up over her head. The rain seeped into every corner of her body and melted her clothes into darker versions of themselves. Normally a ten minute walk home was nothing but in what seemed to be a goddamn thunderstorm, it was like facing the wrath of Mother Nature.

Soaking wet and appropriately annoyed, Maeve couldn't have been less in the mood to go out that night than she currently was. Her clothes stuck to her like plastic wrap and her hair was tangled into one clump that she was somehow supposed to brush out into something elegant within the next few hours. If swamp creatures were real, she sure as hell felt like one.

As was annual with her workplace, a dinner was being held for she and all her coworkers at the Ritz; which was a glimmering, overpriced hotel with overpriced restaurants and ridiculously high standards that her work would try and mould her to fit for one night. Supposedly a treat or a celebratory night off, instead it was just a time where Blake got everyone who worked at the club to dress like a thousand pounds and pretend they had any respect for each other. Not to mention the dinner they'd buy from a rotating selection of restaurants would cost a fortune that they'd all have taken out of their following pay.

Maeve absolutely hated the yearly work dinner. She believed it was a night for false expensive personas and compliments through gritted teeth that built up a facade for Blake to pretend he gave a damn about any of them. Regardless, each year, she still made the effort to attend.

Everyone had pushed her to dress in red. Just as they had the year before and the year before that. It felt corny to Maeve, childish almost. She'd worn red the year prior and felt like a walking tube of Chanel lipstick and swore never to do it again. Instead, she pulled on a delicate, silk white slip dress that tumbled over her body up to her shins. It was borrowed from a friend and was a little loose on the chest.

She fiddled for a good fifteen minutes with the back of her dress, struggling to tie the thin, crisscrossed straps into a bow by the small of her back without having the front of the dress completely fold and expose her entire chest.

"Come on you little bitch," she muttered, using her bathroom mirror for help.

Eventually tying the dress into place, she fixed her hair and double, triple checked herself in the mirror. It wasn't unusual to be underwhelmed. Sighing to herself, Maeve grabbed her purse and took out that small bag of snow she'd purchased that day and scooped a small serving with the nail of her pinkie finger. Lifting it to her nostril, she inhaled the awful substance and pinched her nose as it made its way down her throat with the flavour of toxic waste and numbness.