Here So Far Away(15)

He nodded. “Are you really nineteen?”

“I’m really twenty.”

“I guess I’ve hit that age where everyone born after 1969 looks like a kid to me.”

“Please. You’re barely old enough to be my babysitter.”

“Not barely. You know, we’ve . . .” He swirled his finger around his mouth. “But I don’t know your name.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be sorry. Scared the shit out of me, but . . .” I was sinking in my chair as though I could hide behind my pint. “Anyway.”

He fiddled with the broken end of a dart that was lying under the edge of the ashtray.

“George,” I said.

“Short for Georgia, Georgina?”

“It’s my middle name. Frances George.”

My father had been so sure I was going to be a boy that he didn’t allow my mother to talk about girls’ names and wasn’t prepared to change course after I was born sans le schlong. He let Mum tuck a girl’s name in front of it, but no one called me Frances.

Mick grinned.

“Shut up. Frances isn’t so bad.”

“I know. That’s my name. Probably spelled differently.”

“Your name is Francis? Your mother named you Francis.”

“Yeah—she did.”

“I thought everyone was calling you Mick.”

“Short for McAdams.” He nudged my elbow with his. “Did you ever tell that guy he was a lousy kisser?”

“Uh-uh.”

“It’s none of my business, but you should know that guys don’t start getting better until—well, until they’re old enough to be with women who are old enough to tell them that they need to do it better.”

The beer was soothing my nerves. Or maybe it was how our arms touched as we leaned in to hear each other and his breath fell on my cheek when he talked, how his shin grazed mine whenever his leg got jiggly under the table. “In case you’re worried, you’re more than fine,” I said. “Although you do like a run-on sentence.”

“You’re fine too. And a bit young for me.”

“Live a little, Francis.”

I pulled out my cigarette pack. He took it from me and lit two, passing one of them back. The cigarette was slightly moist from his mouth.

“Lived a lot, Frances,” he said. “Trying to rein it in now.”

We talked until the light flickered for last call. About how I couldn’t play the guitar after two years of trying to teach myself because I couldn’t get past the F or B-minor chords. Old-school country music composers that I’d never heard of but now wanted to listen to. How the colors of the sky at sunset—lilac, amber, coral, sometimes scarlet—reflected in the still waters of Lake Victoria in Kenya, a place I knew nothing about and now wanted to visit. About why I preferred to be called George and he preferred to be called Francis but ended up being called Mick wherever he went, and how “George and Francis” sounded like storybook characters who would get lost in Manhattan in one book and go on a safari in another. About how we’d both marry Tom Petty, given the chance, but would settle for Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip. Somehow I managed three good jokes and didn’t let on that the reason I’d never gone anywhere and done anything was because I wasn’t old enough to be in the room where we were sitting.

“One more?” he said, the lights flickering again.

“I think I’ve had enough.”

“You couldn’t be a cheaper drunk.”

I’d been nursing a warm pint for an hour.

A wide arse encased in tight, acid-washed jeans pressed against the edge of our table as one of the rougher-looking lady dart players made out with a guy who may or may not have been my toothless friend. It was hard to tell from that angle and with her entire head in his mouth. “Sorry,” she said over her shoulder to us as they shoved off, obviously going home together.

“I live with an old man, the owner of that pig,” Francis said to me. “Puts a damper on my social life.”

He was telling me this, I understood, to explain why he couldn’t invite me back to his place. What could I say? Not that I lived at home, that’s for sure. That I lived with someone too? He might think I meant a guy.

“I should go,” I said. “It’s late.”

I was feeling awfully wobbly, given how long I’d made that last pint last and was supposed to be driving home, and I wondered whether it would be better or worse when I stood, but I couldn’t bring myself to be the first one to push back my chair, to move out of the halo of warmth around us. Francis didn’t get up either, just tossed the broken dart piece into the ashtray.

“Yo, Micky! Half-Pint!” Bobby yelled from across the room. “You want to go stand on the bottom of the sea?”

The incoming bay tide can overtake a man on a galloping horse, my mother says. I always picture a rogue wave rearing up and snatching anyone in its path, dragging them back into the sea, which is not how it goes. Point is, the water level rises fast.

“What’s fast?” Francis asked.

“In total, say, six hours?”

He laughed.

“No, but they’re the highest tides in the world! Every year someone needs to get rescued. People think they’re okay because they seem to have all this time, and then they’re cut off from the places where they can get back up to higher ground.”