CUBA I am twelve years old, I have a bag of Kola Kubes in my hot liitle hand and a can of Heineken in the other. I have never drunk beer before, so my friend and I swig the stuff down with the sweets, trying to disguise the taste... Valerie, the f(r)iend is a hard case and smokes. It took a lot of brass neck and trying to have a fag without throwing up in my school desk to be her best mate. She has a boyfriend who she says is 18 , wants to marry her and works . The last bit is what I could never believe. Val and me, what are we doing? What the hell are we doing in the haunted house? When we came in we looked for blood on the walls, where some mad husband bashed his wife's head in for smiling at another man on a saturday night. or so they say... OK, it's a small town, so we have small town murders. It was a friend of a friend's aunt, oh about twenty year's ago...everyone has the graphic retelling of the murder off to a fine art, becoming more lurid in each version; it's just the story around it that breaks down . OK, it's a small town, so we have small town murders...the house has achieved a kind of glamour ..blood and guts mix well with smoking and sex ; and is the haunt of shagging teens, hash smokers, and merrydown drinkers (ah, the days before alcopops). Getting your knickers down for the first time must be that ever so slightly more exciting in a dingy room with walls spattered with what could either be very basic graffiti or the supposed blood stains.The hallway is papered with red flock , Hammer horror meets the Taj Mahal Takeaway. Valerie and I stroke the wall paper, strangely three dimensional under our fingers, like a fungus, or a living colour.In the half light of the evening it seems to be pulsing. She lights a B&H, gives me one which I pretend to smoke, tasking drags off it like a hummingbird , trying not to taste it. Smoking, like wearing too much kohl (currently electric blue under my brown eyes) is something I have to do to fit in. I hate the way it lingers , an acrid mist as thick as my Crystal Tips (or in my wishful thinking, Kate Bush ) hair, making it smell as though I've washed it in nicotine. Tonight, my hair is crimped then backcombed; and I flatter myself that I look a bit new wave/ a bit Biba., though probably the look is more Pan's people meets the mad woman in the attic (Lena Lovitch?) I'm wearing a pair of stretch, indigo jeans and a fuchsia sequinned boob tube. My body then swelled and curved in different places...I have a healthily brown, slightly puppyfat body; and no tits.. My boob tube has trouble staying put. Valerie watches me as I put makeup on in my little cracked hand mirror in the half light: "its almost half seven , we should be going; quick down the last of this lager." I screw up my face , lick my lips for the strawberry lip gloss taste to mask the warm, flat Heineken. Valerie presses the 'on' button on her tinny, tiny tape recorder " let's have a practice first, one last go before the disco ok?" The music's playing, loud yet brittle like a far away transistor radio in high summer; we start to dance, doing our routine, though can hardly move in my mum's high heels.... "one , two, three, four...CUBA!..." and we're dancing, ready for the youth club d.i.s.c.o, at half dusk in a haunted house at the ned of the seventies; having the times of our lives.