Just Last Night(9)

Stripy Roger wakes up on the sofa and shouts “MWOWH?” as I leave again. Which is a legitimate question.

“Enough judging from you, Piecrust,” I say, using his birth name as a good luck charm. The old lady who gave him to the rescue charity would only let me adopt him if I promised to keep his name as Piecrust.

“You don’t actually have to do it, though,” Susie said, as she drove me home with a squirming cat basket. “How’s she going to know different, when she sees his name in The Times marriage announcements?”

“She had the feel of a mystical hag who could curse me if I don’t.”

“Well, she’s cursed him alright. Piecrust, fuck’s sake.”

I compromised with Roger Piecrust Harris, which sounds like a comedian who was exposed as a pedophile in the 1970s.

I’m carried on fumes to the door of the bar, but seeing it mostly in darkness, and realizing my friends are asleep—or celebrating engagements, but either way, in bed—by now, brings my folly home to me. My appetite for sexual buccaneering has disappeared. I queued for the ride and now I don’t want to get on.

I tentatively rap my knuckles on the heavy wooden door and there’s the noise of keys being jangled on the other side. We’ll be locked in together. It occurs to me this date is not hugely safe either. I don’t know Zack, it’s the middle of the night, and no one knows I’m here. Given none of my friends are likely to see any message until tomorrow, it’d help with the investigation more than save me.

“Hi there, Eva,” Zack says. “Welcome to my humble hacienda!”

Oh God.

“Hello,” I say. “Woah, it looks different in the dark.” Creepy. What I mean is creepy. And it’s silent.

I step inside and try not to flinch when he locks the door again behind me, though I’m vaguely reassured when he leaves the bunch of keys hanging in the lock.

“Yeah, I’ll chuck a few more lamps on, hang on. You don’t want to make the place look too open in case you get the drunks banging on your door or the motherfucking popo doing you for an illegal lock-in.”

I laugh, without being sure that “motherfucking popo” was meant to be funny.

He throws the place into better light and I relax slightly.

“Sit up there and I’ll mix you one of your lavender martinis,” Zack gestures at the bar stools, opposite the backlit bar, with its Banksy print of two policemen kissing. “If that’s what you’re feeling?” he says, and I nod vigorously. I’m not feeling it, I’ve recovered the few degrees I needed to realize: (1) the last fucking thing I need is a martini, and (2) the last thing I want is fucking, but it’s too late now.

It isn’t too late as such, I know that. I am clothed, enfranchised, and technically able to leave.

I hate the fact I feel obliged to do anything because I was stupid enough to initiate this. Thinking I’m now committed to some sort of sexual encounter is everything I would hotly and passionately argue against, if it was a hypothetical, and especially if it was someone else. It’s one of those unpleasant moments in life you confront the fact your beliefs in theory and behavior in practice can be two entirely different things.

Now Zack is theatrically slapping fresh lavender heads between his hands, clapping to “release their perfume,” and threading them onto cocktail sticks with lemon slices, and the complexity of the drink alone feels a debt to pay. I thought once he wasn’t working, he’d flip the lids on beers.

“Want music on?” he says.

“Sure.”

“Name an album.”

“What, any album?”

“Yeah.”

“Uhm . . .” Ugh, a coolness test, and I don’t want the cringe of anything overtly seductive. “Fleetwood Mac? Tusk?”

Zack leans toward the door, talks as if to a pot plant on the bar.

“Alexa, play Fleetwood Mac, Tusk.”

“Is this your place?” I say, as it starts, struck by Zack’s freedom to entertain on the premises.

“No, the owner Ted is in Lanzarote. He lives there part of the year. The cold part. I run it for him when he’s away. He’s like an uncle to me.”

Zack spins a coaster into position in front of me and sets the martini on top of it.

“Thank you!”

“What’s your deal, then, Little Miss Nightmare Before Christmas?”

“Nightmare before . . . ?”

“The Tim Burton film, like a cartoon? You look like the girl in it. Big eyes and the white raggedy dress. Kinda spooky.”

“She’s called the Corpse Bride, isn’t she?” I say, with a smile as I sip.

“Her name’s Sally.”

“Ah. My deal . . . ?”

“Got a husband, boyfriend? Girlfriend? Significant Other plus Side Dude?”

“I’d not be here if I did have one?” I blurt, baffled. I then realize how explicit this is in regards to my purpose, even though it’s not really my fault he asked such a direct question. I waffle: “. . . In closed-up bars in the middle of the night. Drinking drinks with herbs in them.”

“Hey, I’m not here to judge,” Zack says, hands up.

He’s managed to make me feel like Shirley Valentine cracking on to a Greek waiter, needing a holiday from herself. I feel patronized. Would he have asked a woman of his own age these things, I wonder? Maybe, yes—I have a suspicion that Zack has the gift of annoying people when he isn’t intending to annoy.