Twenty Something Read Online Free

this diversion to try and leap over the cord and walk in without paying. About six paces in, a Neanderthal hand descended on his shoulder.
    â€˜And what do you think you’re doing?’
    â€˜Er, I don’t know.’
    â€˜You’re a dickhead, aren’t you?’
    â€˜Er, yes.’
    â€˜Say it.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Tell me that you’re a dickhead.’
    â€˜Er, I’m a dickhead. I think I’ll go home now.’
    â€˜No, you won’t. You’re coming in, and you’re paying double.’
    At which point the brute of a bouncer marched Flatmate Fred up to the vapid Sloane behind the counter and forced him to hand over
£
3 instead of
£
1.50. All of which shenanigans meant that it took us twenty minutes to get from queue to girls, instead of five.
    Unfortunately, the path from queue to girls rarely runs smooth and we had no joy on the dance floor. By 2am we were all alone in an exhausted, sweaty, blokes-only circle, loving angels instead. We decided to head back to my place.
    â€˜Drive on, Sam, and don’t keep the horses,’ yelled Buddy with fire (and four bottles of champagne) in his belly.
    â€˜Buddy Oh, never mind.’
    The taxi dropped us several streets away, as Flatmate Fred was too drunk to remember whether we lived in a place, a street or a mews.
    On the short walk home we passed a beautiful winter-flowering cherry tree in one of the private residents’ gardens near our flat. The only sensible thing seemed to be to take it back with us. We were five drunk guys who hadn’t scored. If we couldn’t get a trophy pull, we could at least take a beer trophy home with us.
    â€˜Can’t we just snap off a branch?’ said Jasper.
    â€˜Bollocks to that,’ I said, flushed with the scent of victory. ‘We’re taking the whole thing.’
    Flatmate Fred was dispatched inside and came back with a saw. Feeling a bit like Hugh Grant (minus Julia Roberts, but plus metal blade) I climbed into the garden with the weapon of choice and did the dirty work on the trunk. Fifty panting minutes later we were sitting triumphantly in our kitchen with a sixty-kilo, two-metre mass of foliage. Buddy laid his weary head down in its soft leaves and passed out.
Saturday 15th January
    â€˜There’s fucking stolen property in our goddamn fucking kitchen,’ Flatmate Fred croaks as he walks into my room at ten the next morning.
    â€˜Huh?’ The footballing buffalo are back in my head.
    â€˜There’s a dense mass of fucking foliage in our motherfucking flat and I want to know how the fuck it got there.’
    I feel like I’m in a Tarantino film. Next Flatmate Fred will be calling in Mr Big to help us get rid of the ‘body’ without trace.
    I tell Flatmate Fred that it got there because he couldn’t remember where we lived, caught sight of a
Prunus subhirtella
(aka winter-flowing cherry) on the walk home and then dashed inside to get a saw to help cut it down. He denies everything.
    We go through to the kitchen to examine the damage and find Buddy surfacing from his soily slumbers. We take a photo so that we can frame him if things get nasty.
    â€˜Oh, hey, you guys,’ he drawls, a flower lodged behind his left ear. ‘I’ve just realised why the doorman didn’t buy my line about maximising shareholder value. Mad Barry’s isn’t publicly listed; it’s a limited company. I’m such a jerk.’
    Buddy is indeed a jerk, but if I were compiling the top ten reasons as to why he is a jerk (which I might just do at work on Monday), his ignorance of Mad Barry’s’ corporate governance structure wouldn’t feature highly.
    By the time hangover TV drew to a close at 3pm, everyone had decided that the tree theft was someone else’s fault. Buddy claimed exoneration on some obscure point of international law as he had used the tree as a pillow. Flatmate Fred, whose memory loss had