Just Last Night(10)

“Have you got a girlfriend?” I say, hoping my intonation makes it clear I don’t care. Although . . . if he says he has, that’s an easy out for me. Zack tilts his head in a contemplative way.

“Nah. It’s complicated, but nah.”

It’s complicated means “I’m messing someone around and I think the fact makes me interesting,” Susie always says.

“Aren’t you drinking?” I ask, as I realize Zack is now rinsing the cocktail shaker under a tap rather than sorting anything else.

“I’ve got an Asahi on the go.” He points to a beer bottle on the counter.

He dries his hands, walks around, and takes up position on the stool next to me.

“Enjoying it?” he says of the martini.

“Yeah, incredible,” I say, politely, having some more, really wanting to take the fruit salad out of it so it’s more accessible, but not wanting to hurt his feelings.

We chat about music festivals, and hipster restaurants, and some local hoodlums who’ve taken to drag racing on the main road.

I notice, once again, that company that’s not the right fit for you is so much lonelier than being happily alone. I’ve had no existential moments while sharing pizzas with Stripy Roger.

And Zack’s curiosity about me, it seems, began and ended with my partnership arrangements.

When I open my mouth to say something about myself, after a long monologue about the benefits of his possibly moving to Australia—delivered in a slightly weary, rehearsed way as if he’s tired of having to explain his life choices to eager fangirls—Zack interrupts. “. . . I’m staying in the flat upstairs. I’m kinda hoping you enjoy that drink so much that you drink it quickly, so you can come up there with me.”

He’s trying to give me come-hither, hooded eyes.

Clunk. There it is. I knock most of the rest of the martini down in one, and wonder if I’m realistically going to make it to work at all tomorrow.

What can I say to Zack? “Having become two degrees soberer and twenty minutes more aware of your personality, I’m going home”? Yes, I could and should say at least some of this, but I won’t. I ponder how many mistakes in life are born of a simple fear of being rude.

“Show me the way,” I say.

I feel about as enthused saying that as “Let’s Get Brexit Done.”

Zack slides down off his stool with a smirk and gestures for me to follow him up a narrow flight of poky, creaking stairs, through a door behind the bar. The décor budget clearly went on the kitsch joint below: the sitting room he leads me up into smells of microwaved food and sadness, and there are sports socks and pants on a plastic drying rack. A coffee table holds a clutter of vaping equipment, remote controls, and empty Nando’s PERi-PERi sauce bottles with candles wedged in them, a version of trattorias and their repurposed wicker wine holders.

Zack points at a puffy pale gray pleather recliner in front of the television.

“Can we do it on there?” he whispers. “I feel weird in Ted’s bed. His wife died a year ago.”

“Why are we whispering?” I say. “Is she listening?”

“Possibly,” Zack says.

“. . . What?”

“She died in that bed,” Zack says, pointing at a room next door, eyes widening. “Freaks me out. I feel Linda’s ghost hovering over me. She died of a heart attack and I get this pain in my chest, like she’s sitting on me. Trying to give me one.”

“A heart attack, I hope you mean?”

“Yeah.”

This is so grimly tragicomic and he’s so earnest that I have to make an effort not to laugh.

“You know it could be psychosomatic?” I say. “You think of her, and then you feel her sitting on you?”

“I didn’t fancy her! She was, like, sixty! Ugh.”

“No . . . I . . . OK.”

I’m going to copulate with someone who sincerely believes in ghosts, and doesn’t understand the word “psychosomatic.”

“Other times, I’ve heard her walking about in here,” Zack continues, on a Lore of Linda roll now, hands on hips, casting a suspicious look around the room.

“How do you know it’s her?” I say. “This is quite an old building. Could be any number of dead people?”

“Because she had these shoes that made her sound like a clippy-cloppy goat. Heels. Brrr.” Zack shudders.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I say.

“I do. It’s only science,” Zack says.

“I’m fairly sure, whatever else it is, it’s not science.”

“It is. Principle of physics, a form of energy cannot be destroyed, it can only change form, right?”

“. . . Riiight?”

“So when someone dies, where does their energy go? Into another form. Ghosts.”

“Well, no, if you’re buried and decompose into the earth you’re worm food. That’s the transfer of energy. Into the soil.”

“Worm food energy.”

“Yes.”

“What’s cremation then? What does that energy become?”

“Fire?”

“Woah . . .” Zack pauses. “I still think there’s spirit energy. That has to go somewhere.”