Mixed up, muddled up, shook up world

Metropolitan Police Service

Incident Report #45627-LSOHO Filed: 09 September 2025 Officer: D.C. R. Davies Division: Westminster CID Location: [REDACTED] Club, Old Compton Street, Soho Time: Approx. 23:15–03:40 Classification: Public Disturbance / Possible Misunderstanding / NFA

Reporting Individual:

Name: Withheld by request Sex: Male Age: 22 Occupation: Unemployed (recent university graduate) Residence: Temporary hostel (location redacted) Background: Arrived in London one week prior. No criminal record. No known mental health history on file. Cooperative but agitated.

Summary of Statement (Verbatim Extract):

Let me just say upfront, before you judge or interpret or misread what happened that night, that I wasn’t looking for anything. I had just moved to London the week before, the whole Big Adventure thing, the post-undergrad self-exile across the Atlantic meant to find myself, a phrase that at the time didn’t sound nearly as much like something from a refrigerator magnet as it does now. I had a backpack, a dead Nokia phone, and a vague notion that I should go where the poets went. Which, in practice, landed me in Soho. London’s Soho. Not Manhattan’s. Which makes a difference, believe me.

The club was the kind of club where the music seems permanently five decibels too high and the lighting tries so hard to simulate intimacy that it achieves its exact opposite. Everything glowed with that cheap, neon-pink honesty that only places selling overpriced drinks and underpriced dignity can really manage.

You know the type.

I was standing by the bar, sipping this thing they said was champagne but which tasted almost exactly — uncannily — like cherry cola. And I don’t mean “reminiscent of” or “with notes of,” but exactly like one of those syrupy off-brand sodas you buy when you’re too broke to afford Coca-Cola and too proud to drink water. I even remember thinking, with a kind of involuntary mental phonetics: C–O–L–A. Cola. I had this running mental loop of brandname logos every time I sipped.

And then the room shifted, just a hair. Like the lighting blinked twice and decided to stay darker. She didn’t so much walk as glide, hips like a metronome, heels tapping out some private beat only she could hear.

She stopped in front of me, eye shadow green as a Pacific rainforest.

“Dance?” she said.

Voice like espresso — dark, low, bitter around the edges. Not what you’d expect out of that kind of face. Not what you’d expect, period. A deep, velvet-dark kind of tone that didn’t match her otherwise hyperfeminine frame — think red top, leather mini, a blonde wig with bangs cut so sharply they looked algorithmically perfect. I asked her name, already bracing for something wild or European or ridiculously beautiful. Instead, what came out was:

“Lola. El-oh-el-aye Lola.”

I should’ve walked out. I danced.

We moved like smoke over a smouldering Pacific rainforest. Close. Too close. Her arms around me were stronger than you’d expect. Too strong. When she squeezed, I heard something crack in my back. No metaphor. My spine objected, audibly. Still, I didn’t pull away. Couldn’t.

And then she smiled. And I — I still don’t know why — smiled back.

So we danced. Champagne and neon and all-night music and bodies like frictionless particles. At one point she sat me on her knee, like something out of a satirical Christmas card. And she said — and I remember every syllable — “Dear boy, won’t you come home with me?”

Officer, I hesitated.

I wasn’t completely green. I knew something didn’t quite fit. There was a gender dissonance, or maybe not even that — maybe just an aura of incongruity, like when a song you love is played a half-step too high and your ear can’t decide whether it’s wrong or genius. She walked like a woman. She talked like a man. Not in any exaggerated way, just ... plainly. Honestly, which is rarer than people admit.

So what did I do?

I pushed her away. I walked to the door. I fell. Literally. To the floor. Like some cheap theatre farce. And then, like the tragicomic virgin I was, I got down on my knees. Whether in confusion, reverence, or just the gravity of the moment pulling me downward, I couldn’t say.

She looked at me. I looked at her.

And that was the beginning. Or maybe the ending of something I hadn’t known had begun.

There’s a postscript here. A sort of moral, except it’s not moral at all, just an acknowledgment:

This world — this shook up, mixed up, muddled up mess of categories and binaries and signage and bathrooms and pronouns and power — is only ever truly coherent in brief moments. And in that moment, there was Lola. Fixed. Anchoring. Pure.

I left home a week before that night. I had never kissed anyone before, not really, not in a way that rearranged the furniture inside my head. And Lola — God bless her — smiled, took my hand, and said:

“Dear boy, I’m gonna make you a man.”

Now I’m not the world’s most masculine man. Never was. But I know what I am. And I’m glad I’m a man. And so is Lola.

I’m not filing a complaint, you understand. I just needed to tell someone. Thanks for hearing me out with such patience and understanding. You seem so familiar.

Officer Notes:

• Reporting individual was not intoxicated to a level that impaired coherence.

• No physical injuries observed, aside from minor bruising on knees consistent with reported fall.

• No indication of assault or coercion.

• No corroborating witnesses willing to give formal statements; however, two bystanders at the scene later confirmed “a strange scene involving a guy on his knees in front of a woman dressed like a dominatrix.”

Subject of Interest: “Lola”

• No surname provided.

• No known records matching physical description and alias conclusively.

• Club staff describe “Lola” as a regular, known for “bold fashion,” “mystique,” and being “generally respected” within the venue.

• No known complaints or incidents linked to her prior.

Disposition:

• No further action.

• Individual advised to return home and “sleep it off.”

• Incident noted due to unusual psychological tone of report, though no laws were broken.

Additional Notes (Unofficial):

This isn’t the first time a case like this has come across the desk — confused young man, older mysterious woman, blurry lines, questions of identity, power dynamics, gender. It’s Soho. You see everything eventually.

Some leave confused. Some leave changed.

As for Lola — whoever she is — she remains, for now,  just another ghost in the London fog. Listen carefully and you just might hear the chink of ice in her tumbler.

Case closed.

Now where did I put that simply divine tank top?