As Justin says, a conscience weighs too much.
I’d reply to Susie, but her message sounds very much like she’s about to go to sleep, so I’ll leave it for when we’re nursing our sore heads tomorrow.
Even though I know this isn’t observing safety protocols when female and out late inebriated, in the dark, I turn my music on to the last thing I played. Kylie’s ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ pounds in my ears, which feels like Kylie knows what’s what.
La la la, lah la la lah
It interacts with the alcohol in my bloodstream and makes me feel defiant, and I have an idea.
La la la, lah la la lah
A probably really bad, and yet suddenly irresistible, idea.
I pull my phone out and scroll to WhatsApp, until I find his name, Zack. Susie calls him Baby Yoda. (Susie always whispers ‘The Child! He should be with his own people’ whenever he and I finish chatting, and I shush her.)
Zack works in a neighbourhood bar nearby, the kind of place no bigger than a galley kitchen, festooned with fairy lights and ironic art. Pretend Warhols of Ena Sharples in her hairnet, surrounded by illuminated plastic chilli peppers, that kind of thing. Flamingo umbrella-holder stands. The place that you always end up in for the very ill-advised fifth and sixth drinks on an unplanned session.
Zack’s got a man bun, a taut stomach, and the level of circulation where he’s in a t-shirt with rolled-up sleeves, year round.
Whenever we are in, he’s always pulling up a chair, twirling it back to front, and ‘explaining’ our cocktails to us. Insisting I sip a bit while he talks me through the vital acidic effect of the lemon zest on my olfactory experience. I never have the heart to say, ‘Zack, I’ve had a litre of cheap gin already, it could be wheel cleaner to be honest.’
After he finally left us to drink them last time, Susie whispered: ‘Please have sex with him before I have to get another Ted Talk on the invention of the Tom Collins, I can’t fucking take it.’
I laughed this off – me? Him? – but as we left last time, Zack said, with the insouciance of being male and twenty-four and having a taut stomach: ‘Hey, Eva. Give me your number and I’ll let you know when we have that hazelnut liqueur in I was telling you about.’
I’m not a hook-ups person, usually. Well, ever, apart from a Canadian guy who looked like a Mountie who I met on a training weekend when I was twenty-three. Straight afterwards he made a joke about zipping me into a North Face holdall on his floor, which I started to realise wasn’t a joke, and left. It was as if God knew I was acting out of character and decided to prank me.
I know this is weak, but, I’m thirty-four, and on the horizon I can see ‘not being blatantly hit on by twenty-something barmen any more’. Like the Next sale on Boxing Day, I am suddenly interested in grabbing something that doesn’t suit me and I will soon regret, just because I can.
I need validation tonight. I want to do something that says I’m still desirable. That I’m out here on the cool-single-with-options frontier, getting up to spontaneous things. Not still hoping.
A voice says: you are doing this to tell Ed, to make him jealous. You are doing something just so you can tell him about it and make him feel something back, and I silence the voice. I don’t want to be that person and it can’t be allowed to be true, and if I don’t think it, it isn’t true.
Hi! I don’t know if you’re working tonight but wondered if you fancied a drink after your shift finishes? E x
God almighty, Eve, you’re swimming in drink already and it’s midnight. Go home and have a strong coffee and two paracetamol and realise you’re an idiot.
The reply is near immediate, so my fate is written.
Yeah! I am just finishing up actually. Want to hang here? Master mixologist at your service
I’m right outside my house and it’d be a lot easier to hang here, but cynically, I’d quite like this to take place off premises, so I don’t have to wake up with Zack and kick him out tomorrow. Not a one-night stand, a half-night stand. Eesh. The feminist in me always reacts badly to my mum saying: ‘Honestly, women are the new men!’ but I’m slightly ashamed of my brute calculations.
Zack is impressed by himself, and I’m going to pretend to be impressed by him too for as long as I need to get what I want from the deal. Then we’ll be done. That’s manipulation, surely. The fact I know he’s not remotely interesting to me for anything more is exactly why he’s so right for this. I mean, maybe he feels exactly the same way. But it’s not like I’m going to check.
I hear Susie in my head: Eve, offering a man a no-strings hook-up is not exploiting him, fucks sake. This is your whole problem, imagining you’re emotionally responsible for some random dude who’s into bouldering and brewing his own kombucha and posts stuff on Facebook like ‘The new Tame Impala is a vibe.’
I can imagine replying: ‘It’s ambitious to call that my whole problem,’ and Susie snorting: ‘Yes, true.’
On my way!
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 long-ish 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-coloured 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 she’s 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, fucks sake.’
I compromised with Roger Piecrust Harris, which sounds like a comedian who was exposed as a paedophile in the 1970s.
I’m carried on fumes to the door of the bar, but seeing it mostly in darkness, and realising 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.