Chapter 5 #2
In under a minute, this date was all over the place, and I was stressed out already with these ridiculous thoughts spinning around in my head like a pair of red socks in a whitewash.
On top of that, I was wondering how he felt about his little tumble.
Was he worried about it? Was he wondering whether I was still thinking about it?
I mean of course I was. Of course he was.
It must have been awful for him. Everyone hates falling over. I couldn’t begin to imagine the embarrassment of stacking it at the very beginning of a date––the crucial opening moment. I felt for him and his foot-long winkle pickers, I really did.
“Fancy sitting over by the fire? I’m a bit chilly,” said Rob, settling down after his eventful entrance, unravelling a somewhat musty-smelling scarf and handing it to me.
I was still sweating profusely, so was really against the idea of moving somewhere warmer. I still had my little puffer jacket on to hide the damp patches soaked into my heat-absorbing cotton shower-curtain shirt. Moving towards a fire would not be something that would improve this situation .
From some primary observations about Rob’s somewhat odd demeanour, I had deduced that this was a man whose company I would not enjoy a great deal.
First off, I’d noticed an initialled sovereign ring and a gold necklace with the word ‘Cunt’ hanging from it, which I thought was a very strange self-promotion strategy.
Also, I noticed that he had not smiled once since our acquaintance, which I found somewhat unsettling.
On top of all this, sweat was now beginning to drip from my nose, turning it into a kind of fleshy stalactite.
Then ‘The Thing’ emerged.
‘The Thing’ was what would categorically put me off of a potential love interest to the point of no return. In this case, it was his decision to tell me about his recent short spell at His Majesty’s service within the first five minutes of our union.
“How. Um… sorry… what?” I spluttered.
I composed myself enough to formulate my enquiry correctly.
“Why-oh-why were you in prison exactly?”
“Tried a pair of shoes on in Shoe Express and legged it out the store,” he said, blowing an accidental bubble of snot out of his nostril as he chuckled.
“It wasn’t that pair, was it?” I quipped, chuckling and tilting my head towards the winkle pickers.
Without missing a beat and more annoyingly not acknowledging my little off-the-cuff remark, he proceeded to tell me that he had also converted to Islam during his seven-day stretch.
“Carry on,” I said, resting my chin on my open palm, making myself comfortable.
I gestured to him to keep talking, now wishing that I’d brought some gourmet ‘poshcorn’ from the bar .
As the story progressed, it turned out he’d heard that the Halal food was of a better quality than the standard gen-pop grub, so he changed his religion in order to scam some of it. The problem was that his first day as a Muslim collided with the first day of Ramadan.
He did the weird snot chuckle thing again as he relayed the story, so I made the executive decision to lie about having to get up early for a round of minigolf with my absolutely fictional niece.
“Shall we go, then?” I said, sharply.
“Yeah, let’s bounce,” he agreed, thankfully without protest.
Nice.
As I went to leave the pub, striding a few metres ahead of him, he gathered his satchel and phone and picked his musty scarf up from the floor where I’d subconsciously discarded it. Oops.
“Oi, wait for us outside, will ya? I’m just gonna use the bog,” he shouted across the pub with all the charm of a gremlin that had been fed after midnight.
Wincing, I nodded, then walked outside, and the first thing I did was let out a big old fart that had been building up during the duration of this whole sorry ordeal.
But to my horror, Rob appeared from behind me at the exact moment the terrible essence crept through the lining of my jeans and polluted the airspace between us.
“All done,” he said, ignoring the stench.
I tried to subtly fan the air directly around my derriere to disperse the fragrance that I had prematurely launched.
“I need to get the bus home now. You coming with us or what? I live in a bit of a sketchy area and I don't wanna get mugged again on the walk home,” he said.
Oh, well now I felt sorry for him, plus I didn’t really fancy a midnight stroll through the Cronx on my own, so we caught a night bus where I paid for both of us on two separate contactless cards, due to Rob’s walking onto the bus without paying or looking back.
After a pointlessly short bus journey, we walked through as sketchy an area as Rob had described.
I intermittently struck unintentionally comedic karate poses that I had learned during my younger days, every time a moving shadow of a bush startled me.
Rob didn’t notice, though, mainly because I had decided to walk behind him for protection.
We arrived at Rob’s flat and just as I was about to spark up my Uber app, he went in for The Kiss. I was alarmed. Shocked. Slightly distressed.
I felt like I had somehow now entered into a binding contract. It was a god-awful kiss, as well, like kissing a sloppy pizza that had been delivered by a driver enjoying his last day at work.
The Kiss ended and I now had an overwhelming urge to get out of there as quickly as I could.
“So yeah… give me a call when you're free?” I said politely, thinking that would be the end of this affair. ‘Give me a call when you’re free’ was of course a polite ‘please go away forever’ line.
It had an unspoken fuck-off ability about it that was universally understood by all. At least, I thought it was.
“I ain’t got no phone credit ‘til the end of the month, mate. You’ll ‘ave ta call me, bruv,” he said.
“Oh, that’s fine. I will do that. So, um… see ya, then,” I said, now a lot more terrified of him after hearing him utter the word ‘bruv’.
“Unless you wanna come in for a fumble? ”
After looking at my wrist for absolutely no reason (I didn’t even wear a watch) and weighing up whether I’d rather go into Rob’s flat to whatever fate awaited me in there or face the terrifying crew of hoodlums we passed on the way here––I made my choice.