Not So Peachy

It never ceases to amaze me who the subconscious comes dragging, half-drowned and coughing, from the depths at three in the morning. People I haven’t thought about in decades suddenly come shambling back into my life like waterlogged ghosts in cheap aftershave, carrying unfinished business and the stale emotional residue of another lifetime. Faces I’d long ago archived in whatever damp filing cabinet the brain reserves for humiliations, ex-lovers, and socially unforgivable haircuts. And yet there they are again. Fully formed. Waiting in the wings. As if they’ve spent the last twenty years chain-smoking in the dark behind a theatre curtain, patiently awaiting their cue to ruin my sleep. Last night, it was Peachy. Even typing his name now feels ridiculous. Peachy. A name less befitting a grown man and more a bisexual cockatiel with crippling cocaine debt. Not his real name, obviously. No one emerges from the womb called Peachy unless their parents were either high, negligent, or attending a drum circle during the birth. But that’s all we ever knew him as. Peachy. Like some grubby little glam-rock cryptid that wandered into our lives one summer and rearranged the furniture before disappearing with the ashtrays. And when I say our lives, I mean mine and Kylie’s. Though it eventually became less of a friendship and more of a strange erotic custody battle over a man who looked like he moisturised with cigarette smoke and poor impulse control. I knew him first. Which matters. Or at least, dream-me insists it matters. There’s something embarrassingly primal about wanting historical ownership over a person. Like planting a tiny emotional flag in them and whispering: Mine. Even though, truthfully, I can barely remember how he arrived in my orbit to begin with. We were eighteen. He was older. At that age, “older” could mean twenty-four and still carry the mystical gravitas of an ancient woodland wizard who sells hash from a leather satchel. He seemed impossibly sophisticated to us then. Well spoken. Beautifully dressed. Soft curly hair like a Renaissance angel who’d recently developed a manageable ketamine habit. And gloriously camp. Not in an obvious theatrical way. More… slippery. Unplaceable. Like even he hadn’t fully decided what he wanted or who he wanted it from. There was always something performative about him. Something curated. Like he viewed life as one long audition tape and the rest of us were merely supporting cast members praying for a callback. But Peachy had a gift. Not beauty. Not charisma. Not even confidence, really. He simply knew how to look at people as though they’d briefly become the most fascinating thing in the room. And when you’re eighteen — awkward, half-formed, desperate to matter — that kind of attention feels dangerously close to love. That was his real talent. Attention. Laser-focused attention. Weaponised attention. I remember sitting in his car once while Madonna blasted through the speakers so loudly the dashboard rattled like loose teeth. He turned to me suddenly and said: “You’ve got Madonna’s nose.” I laughed. Because what else do you do with a sentence like that? But secretly, it landed somewhere deep. No one had ever complimented my nose before. If anything, I considered it slightly beakish. Aggressively present. A nose that enters rooms a full thirty seconds ahead of me. Nothing tragic. Just… prominent. The sort of nose you spend adolescence subconsciously apologising for. And yet Peachy looked at it like it belonged beneath soft-focus lighting and a wind machine. That’s the dangerous thing about people like him. They find the bruise. Then press it gently enough that you mistake the pain for healing. I introduced him to Kylie during the hottest day of that entire summer. The kind of heat that turns everyone vaguely delirious and sexually irresponsible. She was standing on the balcony clutching a glass of rosé, sweating profusely from the nose. And not attractively either. Not in a “I’m glowing, darling!” way. This was a full sweat-a-thon. Full droplets. Fat little beads of perspiration plinking directly into her wine like some grotesque indoor fountain feature. Then she saw him. And there it was. That look. Every woman recognises it instantly. The sudden widening of the eyes that says: Oh Christ. That man looks dangerously shagable. Her entire face lit up. And Peachy — traitorous little goblin that he was — lit up too. Suddenly I wasn’t Madonna anymore. I was wallpaper. Expensive wallpaper perhaps. Textured. Slightly avant-garde. But wallpaper nonetheless. And honestly? That stung more than I’d ever admit at the time. Because it wasn’t even about romance. Not really. It was about being chosen. There’s a difference. Anyway, to cut a very long and hormonally catastrophic story short, Kylie slept with him. In my bed. Which remains, to this day, one of the most acoustically traumatic experiences of my adult life. There are noises you never fully recover from. I lay awake listening to Kylie howl through the bedroom wall like a woman being exorcised by orgasms while I stared at the ceiling wondering how quickly bleach could dissolve memory. And the worst part? I still wanted him to choose me. Pathetic, really. Not sexually. Not even romantically. I just wanted to remain significant to him. His Madonna. His strange little muse with the interesting nose. Which, somehow, feels even more embarrassing. But Peachy collected affection the way magpies collect foil. Shiny thing. New thing. Next thing. Before long, his attention drifted towards Kylie’s friend Harry — who Kylie also happened to be half in love with — because apparently we were all participating in some emotionally violent roundabout where nobody exits alive. Her heart shattered. Mine quietly calcified. And shortly after the incident involving Peachy, a gram of cocaine, and him explosively shitting his beloved Superman underwear behind a Texaco garage, I finally saw him clearly. Nothing punctures mystique faster than hearing a grown man sobbing behind a petrol station while clutching underpants filled with… chemically-induced regret. “My pants…” he whimpered. “My beautiful fucking pants…” And just like that, the illusion collapsed. Because there’s only so much erotic power a person can retain once you’ve watched them mourn their own diarrhoea. After that, life carried us away naturally. As life does. People dissolve. You stop thinking about them. Until your subconscious decides otherwise. So when I see him again in the dream, sitting across from me in a restaurant, I’m genuinely startled. He still has the curls. But time has beaten him senseless. He looks like a disgruntled geography teacher who sells ketamine outside regional music festivals. The curls remain somehow. But everything else has collapsed around him. His teeth are now rotten gravestones hanging on by spite alone. His skin looks weathered and sagged, like he’s been left in direct sunlight for twenty consecutive years. His once immaculate clothes are stained and threadbare. And yet somehow… against all logic… the gravitational pull remains. Kylie is there too. Still performing. Still desperate to win. She’s showering him with gifts now, piling them onto the restaurant table with the frantic energy of someone trying to bribe herself out of a hostage situation. “Vintage,” she says brightly, handing him a pair of thigh-high boots. Peachy turns them over carefully. The leather is cracked to oblivion. The heels look medically unsafe. “They were my mum’s in the seventies.” “They look it,” he mutters. At this point it looks less like romantic gift-giving and more like she’s panic-looted the contents of a condemned bungalow on her way to dinner. Peachy barely reacts. The gift pile between them sits like evidence in a police raid. Sesame Street baby-gros. Toothpicks. Washing detergent. Marigolds. A novelty nutcracker. Meanwhile his attention has already drifted towards the waiter across the room. Young. Handsome. Smiling. Peachy watching him with the tired hunger of a man forever searching for the next person to reflect himself back beautifully. “Don’t you like them?” Kylie asks finally, voice cracking slightly. Peachy stares at the mountain of random tat. “It’s crap, Kylie,” he says flatly. “It’s literally just a pile of crap.” The words hit her like a slap. And suddenly she looks eighteen again. Not old-Kylie. Not dream-Kylie. Just a young girl trying desperately to be enough for someone fundamentally incapable of receiving love properly. And I feel this awful stab of tenderness for her then. Because haven’t we all done it? Offered absurd little pieces of ourselves to people who were already halfway out the door? Hoping they’d finally choose us if we just became useful enough. Funny enough. Sexy enough. Special enough. I reach beneath the table. “I got you something too,” I say. I hand Peachy a gift wrapped in newspaper. He opens it slowly. And his entire ruined face lights up. A pristine pair of Superman underwear. Clean. Bright. Untouched by catastrophe. “Oh,” he breathes. Then — horrifyingly — he lifts them to his nose and inhales deeply. “Just what I wanted.” Those rotten teeth again. That awful smile. And suddenly the dream stops being funny. Because sitting there watching this ageing little narcissist sniff underpants in a dying restaurant while two women silently compete for scraps of validation, I realise something almost painfully obvious: None of us ever actually wanted Peachy. Not really. We wanted what he reflected back at us. Special. Desired. Chosen. Seen. He was never the prize. Just the mirror. And mirrors are dangerous things. You spend too long begging to be reflected in the right light and eventually you forget to ask whether the mirror itself is cracked… …or whether you’ve started confusing reflection for love.