Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience. DISCLAIMER: Do not read if below the age of majority in your area. Do not read if completely deranged, mentally impaired, or completely unacquainted with the English language. If the latter, do not give me feedback, because I hate trying to puzzle through Latin. Otherwise, please do. LAD'S NIGHT OUT I picked up the tray and carried it back to the table, where the lads were comfortably arranged. The conversation, if you could call it that, was still in progress. We were currently proving a well-known fact of university life all over again; you can assemble a roomful of bright young minds with high ideals all neatly polished and ready for airing, and one of three things will happen. If the students are all female, the talk will start off serious and gradually, under the influence of cheap booze, slide into the murky cesspools of gossip, or so I am led to believe. If you have a mixed-gender gathering, the talk will start off serious and then, perhaps two speakers in to the discussion, one of the blokes will make a comment, probably about copulation, and most likely unrelated to what has gone before. The talk will then drop straight into the throes of double-entendre and innuendo, and the group will begin to splinter. Couples will form, generally also through the friendly, welcoming medium of alcohol, and knots of like-minded people will gather. The room will begin to deteriorate rapidly under the assault of cheap alcohol, loud music, and assorted bodily fluids. Or, as we had, there can be a fully male gathering, which basically means laddish behaviour from the off, becoming ever more deleterious as alcohol is apparently absorbed through the skin (no way can any human drink that fast, after all)... The party was in Rich's honour, Rich having recently broken up, rather, messily, a long-term relationship the rest of us had doomed to failure some time ago. We thus had to celebrate his new-found freedom. "...so I told her," he was saying, "'Look, it's not you, it's me. I can't fucking stand you.'" I snorted as I passed the pints out. "I told you that one, Rich." "Yeah, but only as a joke," Rich said. "I actually used it." I considered. "OK, fair enough. How did she react to that, then?" "I survived," he said. "Still working on how." I grinned. "Take us through it one step at a time, and we'll see if we can help." "Oh, God..." he said, mugging. "It's a bit hazy, you know?" "Fine," I said, and I turned to Owen. "So how's life?" Rich, I could tell from the corner of my eye, was none too pleased at the diversion of this conversation from him, but tough shit. "Oh, not too bad," Owen said thoughtfully. "Dad's having a bit of trouble with the tractor, but..." "Bugger the tractor," Rich said, interrupting. "Look-" But he didn't get any further. Tim interrupted with a "Can you do that?" "Do what?" I said, puzzled. "Bugger tractors," he said promptly. Sensing a DDR (daft drunken ramble) imminent, it's course steered for the moment by Tim, I seized my chance. Adopting a faux-knowledgeable expression and voice, I nodded informatively and launched into it. "Oh, yeah," I said. "But only if you get its consent first." A general round of sniggering, I took this as my cue to continue. "You know, the police are going apeshit at the moment over a bunch of date-raped tractors. People keep slipping them Rohypnol in the petrol." A larger volley of laughs. I would have run further, but I ran out of things to say. The imagined buggery of tractors wasn't as fertile a subject as our last DDR, which had involved all of us and had created an entirely new outlook on the Book of Revelations, with the Teletubbies taking the role of the Four Horsemen, Pokemon as demons and assorted other hellspawn, and Mr Blobby in the role of the Antichrist. Tim picked it up, though, and the run began again. I laughed along with the rest and returned most of my attention to my pint. Rich quickly got into the spirit of things and lost his sullen expression, chipping in with new ideas himself. On second thought, we could have another Revelations on our hands here... *** Every good party needs some entertainment, and as Jack was in charge of arranging the ents for this evening we knew it was going to be something special. I'd have rented a vid of something - Plan 9 From Outer Space or something similarly awful and amusing; Owen generally gets a bouncy castle set up, which is great for intervals between large-scale consumption of alcohol, Rich, Dave, Craig, or Tim might hire a shit mobile DJ to play us cheesy but still enjoyable music, Jonesy would try mixing himself, which starts as a great mix and ends up hilarious, and Pete generally hires a stripper, but Jack is unpredictable. Jack really is - always has been, always will be - the wild card of the team. We play rugby; the rest of the team, being chiefly backs and of the less interesting ilk of forward, are not the people you want to organise lad's entertainment. So it generally falls to one of our lot to pick the fun. This time, when I asked Jack what he'd laid on for us, he grinned and said, "A squad of hookers," and left us to think about it. Three possibilities here; he was lying in his typical outrageous way, he had got fifteen burly forwards together, or he'd actually laid on fifteen prostitutes. With Jack, the last was always an option; I mean, we speak here of the man who thought a really cool pub quiz team name would be Busta Hymen and the Penetrators and persuaded the rest of us to use it. All that remained, really, was to settle back and await developments. I bought another pint and returned my attention to the conversation, which currently consisted of an in-depth discussion about the various STDs to be picked up by cock-exhaust pipe intercourse, Joss declining Latin words - a strange habit he's developed for relaxing while drunk - and Pete and Jonesy were inventing the verb 'to twaddle' and carefully declining *that*. This makes for a hard-to-follow confab, especially while you're wondering about exactly what Jack has lined up for you. And, really, with the lead-in he gave us... well, you couldn't *not* wonder. Not when it's Jack spinning you the line. Brilliant family, Jack comes from; scholarship boy, though I'm given to understand his parents could afford it. He just thought it'd be fun to try the scholarship exams. His brother went through Oxford and currently finds employment as a psychiatrist, though I suspect he spends most of his time taking the piss out of his... patients, I suppose you'd call them... gently, in ways they won't understand. The man's grasp of words is incredible; his speed of thought lightning, his mind not so much dirty as spray-painted excrement brown. We get on well with him. I always forget what it is his father does, but it pays well and leaves him free to relax at home with the benefits of his work for much of the week; some kind of high-paid highbrow lightly witty columnist, I think. His mother... is retired, I seem to recall, but wrote a self-help book years ago that's still in print and does very well by it. His sister is a doctor down in Oxford, who's currently courting a lawyer. Jack's no intellectual slouch himself, and to cap it all his is the sort of family who, when they say 'whatever you do, as long as you're happy we're happy for you' and *mean* it. Jack's family is the cause of some envy; Jack himself already made no small amount of money when an American company bought a piece of software he wrote and distributed around the web; it's quality has since plummeted. It would be hard not to hate such a man, if he wasn't always ready to back you up in a scrum and so... well, he and the rest of his family are also almost nauseatingly likeable. Someone got all the best genes. But while they're brilliant, as I've said, they could be viewed as ever so slightly twisted. Their humour is particularly twisted. And you never quite know what Jack'll do next, though it was kinda hard to buy the idea of him hiring a troupe of hookers, of either the rugby position or sexual variety. It's also just about believable. *** All things considered, I was no more than reasonably surprised when the doors of the function room (oh, yeah; Joss' family owns a pub, so we generally nick the big party room for these dos) opened to admit fifteen scantily-clad and remarkably attractive young blondes, all of whom, I noticed fairly quickly (I'm being honest here; no way would I have noticed immediately, not with fifteen impressive pairs of breasts being flaunted in my direction) had a small blue rose tattoo on the left side of their neck. I didn't think much of this - I'm not a man who keeps up with pimps, whores and street sigils, thanks in no small part to Becca - until Jack tapped me on the shoulder, pointed the feature out on the nearest - who had her face buried in my crotch and was trying to unzip my jeans with her teeth, which I would imagine to be a difficult process at the best of times and isn't helped by someone poking you in your tat - and said, "That's the secret, Marcus my friend. That's how you get cheap, efficient girls." I didn't follow, and said so. I followed up with, "I need a drink." "No problem," Jack said, grinning expansively. "Ah... oh, which one is this... Holly?" The last word being delivered in a somewhat thoughtful manner, the rest in a tone of amused, and possibly feigned, generosity. She looked up immediately, almost forgetting to release her hold on the zipper in the process. I caught my breath as denim tightened around my crotch for perhaps a second before releasing. "Yes, sir?" she asked, her voice timorous, eager to please. "Get Marcus here a pint of Guinness, would you?" he asked, then smiled. "Extra cool," he clarified. I got the feeling that the request wasn't really a request, was in fact an order the weight of which I couldn't understand. "Yes, sir," she gulped. "Of course." And like that, her intense desire to get into my trousers seemingly vanished from her mind, she bounded up and into the bar proper for my pint. "Thanks," I said when she returned. "How much do I-" "You don't owe her anything," Jack interrupted smoothly. "It's her pleasure... Right, Holly?" "Of course, sir," she said, as a prelude to burying her face once more in my groin. "Whoa whoa whoa," I said, trying to fit this all together. "If that's right, then ultimately it comes out of what you paid them. I can't do that to a mate," I said, trying to fish my wallet out of my trouser pocket while my trousers were pressed firmly by female attentions into a well-fitting leather chair, not an easy technique to master, particularly when comfortably pissed and yearning to be horizontal. With or without said female attentions. He waved his hand nonchalantly. "Nah... you're thinking I paid them, now. That wouldn't do, would it?" "Huh?" I was even further lost now. "You... you mean we each have to pay ours at the end of the night?" Another handwave. "Would I do such a thing to my friends? No... these are on my brother, in a manner of speaking." "Unpleasant mental image," I replied, cheerfully if bemused. "Also rather crushing. Your cheapskate-of-the-year brother paid for these?" "No," he said, looking amused in that smug way which would make you clock him if it was anyone but Jack. "Actually, they paid him. Sort of." I was getting annoyed with all these qualifications, but I was also clearly about ten steps behind Jack. Equally clearly, he was enjoying this. Bastard. "They paid your brother to get the opportunity to... ahhhh..." I broke the sentence off. Holly was being distracting in that skilful way she has. I let myself rise to the occasion and forced my mind back to the conversation, irritating as that was. "They paid your brother to get the opportunity to give us all blow jobs?" I asked, my voice aiming for mystification but probably failing due to Holly's ministrations. "Look, man, my ego is as inflated as the next man's, but that's too roundabout a way of approaching me for me to buy that." He grinned in answer. "Well... they didn't specifically pay for you, or indeed sex." "OK," I said, finally annoyed enough to ask for help. "Start at the beginning and just... explain." "OK, you know my brother runs a tattoo place?" "Jack, your brother is a psychiatrist." "No, he *was* a psychiatrist. Now he runs a tattoo place." "As you do," I said, sarcastically. "As you do," he replied placidly. "I'm sure I told you... Anyway, they wanted to get tatted out, so my brother obliged. But he hit them with general anaesthetic first." "I'm sure that's not typical." "It's not. Look, who's telling this story?" "Sorry." "You've interrupted twice already," he said, sounding annoyed. "Where was I? Oh, yeah... Well, when they came to they found out they hadn't got the design they'd wanted. It wasn't in the place they wanted, and they certainly didn't want the ink he used." I sensed we had reached the heart of the matter. "The ink." "The ink," he agreed, still sounding remarkably cogent considering his alcohol intake. That thought reminded me, and I picked up my own pint. I got it to my lips just as Holly finished down below. It's always annoyed me when I've spilled my drink, especially when it spills down me. It was probably worse for Holly in this case, though; her head protected my trousers from a swift dunking in alcohol - though this meant my immersion lacked that pleasing symmetry. "It's a combination of various psychotropic and hallucinogenic drugs that produce a docile and obedient state in a subject when introduced into their blood chemistry," he said, somehow not tripping over any of the long words. I'd like to point out that Jack definitely was as drunk as I was. "All combined with the finest tat dyes available, for colour and taste." I considered. The earlier drunken ramble made this acceptable as an idea, really. "Fair do's," I said. I inspected the now-sodden blue rose tattoo on Holly's neck - Holly not being willing to raise her head without written instructions in triplicate, by the looks of things - and said, thoughtfully, "He's got a good hand for tats, really." "He has, yeah," Jack agreed cheerfully. "But you appear to have lost your pint. Holly, would you fetch Marcus another?"