once five hit

The group of near-feral businessmen urinated into their briefcases for Friday was upon them. Once five hit the beast was freed. They gathered around the reception area and laid their opened briefcases on the floor at their feet, then urinated into them with some ceremony, the nutty stench of their luminescent and highly caffeinated piss gripping to the atmosphere. The reception team cheered as the briefcases filled close to spilling, and the intense red faces of the concentrating businessmen morphed with weekend ecstasy into masks aflame. The mood was carnival in nature.

Within the hour they would be standing in shirtsleeves in glass-fronted Wetherspoons, Slug and Lettuces, All Bar Ones, something similar, drinking tall pints of continental lager, swearing tenderly into the ears of bombed women – tan tits worked into paint-tight frocks – who they’d finger in the smoking area before 9pm dreaming of violence, the smell still on their hands when they ate kebabs later competing over jalapeños, spit their gunk in the shape of victory onto the toes of their loafers.

Hungover next day they’d reminisce over testosterone breakfasts, 3000, 4000, fucking 10,000 calories!, until they puked homogenous sludge rendered lurid and bilious from the night’s sauce beneath the railway bridge and later purchase new briefcases ever more extravagant than the last, slaves to their own disposable incomes. By evening it’d be white shirts, designer jeans, trimmed sideburns and aftershave, slapping backs like great sides of meat in complete revelry, a handful of burped phrases signalling their reproductive readiness to scores of white wine girls who’d themselves be tearfully soiling memorials by last orders, perfect hair flecked handsomely with foam hunks of sick, underwear stuck out of dress bottoms like prolapse. It was a national phenomenon alright.