Chapter 4
4
I run into my house for a minute, to brush my teeth, change my pants and touch up my make-up. I thought this was a convenient little confidence booster, until I saw my lopsidedly hammered, sweaty face by actual lighting. In the background, the dressing gown I should be climbing into right now is slung over the shower rail. My silent house is full of reproach.
I’ve worn my midnight-black hair longish and straight my whole life, but assessing myself pitilessly, pushing it back behind my ears, I fret it’s getting too harsh. That I’m drain-circling “crone.” As I paint on more liquid eyeliner, I think, is this why you see some old ladies who are gaudy parodies of their younger selves? They refused to disembark from their style, thirty years prior. Failed to heed the signs it was time to lay down the crow-colored dye and poppy-pink blush.
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.
“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.”
This is pretty bad foreplay, it has to be said, and my worm energy is seriously on the wane.
I look at the recliner and wonder if Zack always brings women he meets in the bar up here to this seat. I’m grateful for the fact he starts some enthusiastic kissing so I can stop thinking.
I push him down on the cushions and straddle him, a knee on either side of his legs, while he does some unpromisingly aggressive tit-squeezing, as if he’s assessing the freshness of fruit at a market. As if he’s Jamie Oliver with a couple of pomegranates at a souk in Fez. He’ll give them a sniff in a second.
I had forgotten how stressful sex with a new person is, the pressure to perform being a really sexy person who is naturally good at sex, a part-time erotica master. The stupid hair-tossing stuff and the arching of your back. As if there’s a panel watching you beyond a one-way mirror, appraising your performance and holding up paddle boards with their scores. It’s kind of inimical to enjoying yourself.
Sex is inherently ridiculous. You get better at it once you accept that . Really don’t want to be thinking of Ed quotes right now. What if... I imagine Zack is...
“Oh shit. I should’ve said,” Zack says, looking suddenly worried, catching his breath, his large, hot hands clamped on my seventy-denier-clad thighs.
“It’s OK,” I say, smiling, moving my hair over one shoulder in a hopefully alluring way. “I have condoms.”
Hah, do you seriously think I’d leave that to you, and/or chance.
“No,” he says. “I don’t do hair.”
“You don’t do what?” I’d thought that move looked pretty good.
“Hair,” he says, and nods toward my black Lycra crotch, the hosiery stretched as taut as a trampoline.
“... Hair down there?”
“Yeah,” Zack says. “Do you wax?”
... What? On earth ? A pre-nup for pubes. Oh God, I feel ancient. I suddenly feel like there isn’t ten years between us, but generations. I have time traveled. I’m trying to shag my grandson.
“No?”
“Oh. Sorry, I shoulda said!” Zack says, conversationally, like he’s explaining he meant to give me the shortcut directions to the supermarket. “I usually do say up front, on Tinder, but you know. You got in touch tonight. And I was like, yeah, she’s hot.”
Zack pauses for my reaction. I gather I’m meant to think this is a major silver lining to this cloud. The silver lining, Zack, is how little I wanted to have sex with you anyway.
“Only now I’ve thought, I didn’t say about the hair thing. Yeah sorry, like, no hair for me. I can’t do it.”
“What, like... physically couldn’t get it up?”
“Uh. Yeah? I guess. My friend who is into the... you know... Stepmom Porn likes it. But not for me.”
“ Stepmom Porn?! ”
Zack’s eyes widen, conveying: wow, you really are antiquated, huh (and proving my point).
“ Jesus. Stepmoms. That’s one for his therapist.”
Zack may not be the sharpest but he’s caught the edge to my attitude easily enough. He eases me off his lap and as I stand up he says: “It’s nothing against you, OK, horses for courses. You do you.”
“Yeah, looks like I’ll have to, huh.”
This is lost on Zack, who blinks.
“But you’re... sex is sex. Wouldn’t you make do and get on with it?” I say. “Where’s your Blitz spirit?”
My need to solve this riddle is fighting my need to not sound like I am desperate for him to get on with it, because I absolutely don’t want anything from him but answers.
Zack shrugs.
“It is what it is. I’m grossed out by a bush. Like, some guys like blondes. Some guys like... guys.”
“What would happen if you’d forgot to say and then saw pubes?” I say. “Would you scream, as if I had the Ratatouille rat in my pants?”
“To be honest, Eva, uh, I feel like you’re shaming me.”
“You’re the one who called a screeching halt to sex based on my body, so I don’t think you’re one to talk about shaming.”
A pause.
“Do you have hair?” I say.
Zack shakes his head, elastic band slipping from his man bun as he does, and he reties it.
“No, man, I have it all off. Clean as a whistle. Butthole too.”
He looks proud, as if this is a great personal achievement. As if he could list Whiskerless Anus under “What makes you right for this role” on a CV.
There’s not many moments in my life I’ve managed to assert myself. Susie still talks in awe of the time I got scolded for my cheese scones and told my domestic science teacher she was a complicit instrument of patriarchal control, like Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Mrs. McNab called me a “smart arse” and I said, Well, I am smart and I have an arse so I’ll take it . Ten days of detention, ten whole days.
I feel a similar rush of revolutionary fervor coming on at this rejection by Zack.
“... And what’s women’s hair, dirty?”
“Yeah, I mean, it’s hygiene, I guess. Also the look.”
“How mental is it to say you don’t like the way women naturally look?”
“Look, I get why you’re disappointed, now you’re turned on and all,” Zack says. “If you’re that upset I could... I dunno. Play with your boobs or something.”
Oh God. As the horror of this deepens so its anecdotal value sharply increases, like two different colored lines on a chart diverging.
“I’m not disappointed, I’m not turned on, and I really don’t want pity boob play. I only think it’s grim to want women to look pre-pubescent.”
“Loads of girls my age have Hollywoods,” Zack says. “It’s a thing. It’s different for you guys, I guess?”
Gotcha.
“Which ‘guys’ are those?”
Zack’s eyes flick from side to side as I can see he knows he messed up, saying that, and doesn’t want to irritate me further. The angry cavewoman stepmom on the premises. “People your age?”
“What age is that?”
“I don’t know! Thirty? I knew you weren’t my age ’cause your friend had a Credit Suisse Gold card. No need to go crazy bitch on me, OK?”
I laugh, and sigh. Bloody Susie and her affluence.
I came here tonight to proudly assert the fact I could do meaningless wild banging with a near-stranger.
In this dank flat, looking at someone who’s seen too much porn, a callow lad who looks damp to the touch, I fully face into the futility. I was trying to diminish the pain of not having who I wanted, by having disappointing intercourse with someone’s immature younger brother.
Oh, Eve. All this, staked on that moment in a few weeks’ time when Susie, raucous-drunk, says, We can’t go back to that bar, can we, Evelyn? and I involuntarily lock eyes with Ed as he involuntarily locks eyes with me, and I see something like pain or conflict. As if those moments are going to add up to something.
Fact check: Ed’s getting married, and you could’ve gone home, cried into a cushion, and allowed yourself to feel despair.
The things we do to avoid difficult things are often worse than the difficult thing.
“I’m not going crazy, I’m just going. I hope Linda sits on you. It’s more contact with a woman than you deserve though,” I say, with a smile.
I grab my bag, swoop up my coat, and gallop back down the stairs. Well, Susie , I think, as I pick my way through the uninhabited chairs and tables, Tusk still trickling out from hidden speakers. You’re going to love this. I know she’s going to say I’ve got one that looks like I’m riding Gnasher, the dog from Dennis the Menace , into battle.
“Eva!” Zack says, appearing in the rectangle of light in the opening of the stairway, as I turn the key and yank the bar door open. “Can you pay for your drink, please?”
I whip back around.
“You can’t be serious?”
Zack looks genuinely bewildered that I’m objecting.
“Yeah. It’s five pounds?” He steps forward, picks up a menu on the bar, and flaps it at me, by way of proof.
In shock, and because I’ve never skipped a bill in my life, I rummage in my purse for a note.
It’s such a dispiriting moment of defeat to end on that as I slap it down, I say, to make it clear I’m not the one who should be embarrassed here:
“By the way, why didn’t you check I was alright with bald balls?”
“What?”
“You wanted to know the deal in advance. What if I recoiled?”
“You coulda asked. I’ve never known a girl ask for nut fuzz though, hahaha.”
“I bet you’ve never known a girl ask for anything in terms of personal grooming, maybe think on that.”
“Shhhhh!” Zack’s eyes fly wide open. He puts a finger to his lips and jabs an index finger at the ceiling above. “ Linda ,” he mouths.
I strain to listen... I can hear a soft tapping noise.
I need a decisive exit.
“Alexa, play ‘Looking for Linda’ by Hue and Cry, VERY LOUD,” I say, before slamming out.