Home > Thank You, Next

Thank You, Next
Author: Sophie Ranald

 


One

 

 

It was a Friday afternoon and I was sitting in a South London pub, sipping my rioja, waiting for a date with a spy.

As you do.

Of course, I couldn’t be sure he was a spy. It’s not like his Tinder profile said, ‘My name’s Smith. Brett Smith. Licensed to ghost.’ But all the evidence pointed to it. Brett’s profile was bland to the point of invisibility: a photo of him in a nondescript suit outside a pillared, official-looking building; another of him in a white T-shirt and camo pants against a background that looked like desert, so could have been Afghanistan or somewhere; a third showing him lying in bed, leaning back on a thin pillow, a blank wall behind him that could have been anywhere.

But Brett himself wasn’t bland at all. He was downright hot, in fact, with a chiselled jaw, bright blue eyes and a cleft in his chin. I could just imagine him in a dinner jacket, ordering a dry martini with a beautiful woman in a sparkly dress on his arm. If I did the mental equivalent of squinting, I could even make that woman be me.

When I’d asked him what he did for work, he’d just said he worked for the government, but it was ‘all a bit hush-hush’, and he was abroad right now, so our date would have to wait until he was, as he put it, ‘back in circulation’. When I asked where he was, he’d joked, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’

And even after that, when I’d had a text – from a different number this time; he’d explained that his phone had been stolen, but I assumed he’d been using a burner – to say he was in London now and we could make a time to meet up, it had proved surprisingly tricky to arrange. He’d suggested breakfast, but since a key part of my own job was cooking breakfast in the pub where I worked, that had been almost impossible. The same went for lunch. And so here I was, at five in the afternoon, waiting for Brett to turn up at a bar in Vauxhall that was right in the shadow of the MI6 headquarters.

If he was trying not to let on that he was an intelligence agent, I thought, he hadn’t done a particularly good job of it. But what did I know?

Anyway, a date was a date and I hadn’t been on one for a while, so I’d made sure I had my A game on.

My mate Dani had persuaded me to go and have my eyelashes tinted and lifted, which she’d assured me was a low-maintenance option, perfect for someone like me who could rarely be arsed with make-up, but which I thought made me look permanently surprised.

I’d bought a new, puff-sleeved black top for the occasion – well, it was off eBay, and I’d got all caught up in a bidding war with another buyer and paid well over the odds for what was only Topshop, after all, even if it was organic cotton. But it was new to me, and that counted, right?

I’d been to the salon down the road from the pub where I worked and had my nails done. I’d had an argument with the manicurist when she’d wanted to put acrylic extensions on and I’d had to explain that I’d only chop one off by accident and it would end up in someone’s bean burger, so we’d settled on a sparkly gel polish instead.

Sipping my drink, I wondered what it would be like to be in a relationship with a spy. He’d be away for long periods, presumably, off doing mysterious things in dangerous places. When our friends asked about his work, he’d say something vague about it being admin, and if he ever got transferred to Moscow or Washington or wherever we’d have to pretend it was because he was exceptionally good at negotiating photocopier contracts.

Maybe his boss – who I imagined being like Judi Dench in the Bond films – would take a shine to me. Initially, she’d say, ‘Of course Zoë is wonderful, so supportive and discreet,’ but then she’d spot my potential and I’d train as a secret agent too, and have actual stiletto blades concealed in my stiletto heels and a tiny camera hidden in my lipstick. I’d have to flirt with men high up in foreign governments and charm information out of them, but it would never go further than that, because I was so madly in love with Brett.

Steady on, Zoë, I told myself, taking another gulp of wine. You haven’t even met the guy yet. And what would happen to Frazzle if you were off in Moscow gathering intelligence?

This was true, of course. I was just waiting for a Tinder date. I was just an ordinary twenty-seven-year-old, chronically single, with a job and a cat and an appearance that was, given I was smallish and slimmish with lots of curly red hair, like a woman in a pre-Raphaelite painting on a good day and one of those troll dolls on a bad one.

I’d been dating, on and off, for the past six months, and Mr Right hadn’t turned up. There was no reason to believe that Brett would be him, but I’d realised by now that I began every date with the same heady sense of expectation, the same wild imaginings of how my life might change if this one turned out to be The One.

And, if I was brutally honest with myself, this date had a certain feeling of being the last roll of the dice. It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried. I’d tweaked my online profile over and over again. I’d composed witty message after witty message. I’d put different filters on my pictures. I’d sat in bars like this one, expectant and hopeful, only to be disappointed or let down or ghosted.

And speaking of which, where exactly was Brett?

I looked at my phone, shifting uncomfortably on the bar stool, which had a rail near the bottom that my legs weren’t quite long enough to reach. The two women at the table next to mine glanced at me, glanced away again, and whispered to each other.

Yes, I am waiting for a date, I wanted to snap at them. No, he hasn’t turned up yet. Anything else you’d like to know? But I didn’t say anything, because there was a text from Brett on my phone saying he was running ten minutes late – actually, what it said was, Runign 01 mins l8 soz, but my translation skills were just about adequate for that. Maybe spies weren’t allowed to use predictive text, or he was used to sending WhatsApps in code.

We’d been due to meet at five, and it was eleven minutes past. Right on cue, I saw him through the window, hurrying down the street. There was the chiselled jaw, the smudge of designer stubble, the muscular shoulders under his grey T-shirt. I felt a little fizz of excitement.

He wasn’t older than he’d said, or shorter, which I knew by online dating standards meant I’d pretty much hit the jackpot already. But there was something strange about the way he approached the bar. He didn’t walk in a straight line. He did a kind of wide parabola from one side of the pavement to the other, and back again. Maybe it’s a spy thing, I thought, confused. Maybe it’s how you check you’re not being followed.

He reached the door, put his hand on the handle and pulled, even though the sign said push. Then he peered at it, confused, pulled again and finally pushed, so hard that he almost fell into the room. The women at the next table giggled. Clutching the door handle to steady himself, Brett looked around the bar. I raised a hand in a half-wave.

‘Zoë!’ his voice rang out above the hum of conversation, not the James Bond-ish voice I’d been expecting, but a normal London accent, or maybe Essex. ‘There she is!’

He let go of the door and hurried towards my table, knocking into a couple of others on the way and sending a bar stool flying and a small dog darting for cover under its owner’s legs.

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