individualist, a white-whiskered super villain, and no one’s going to take his liberty, or his bollocks.)
My phone pings with a text message from Susie. It’s not been sent to myself and Justin, only to me, which is intriguing. This suggests deep-dive Girl Talk, and there’s very little Girl Talk between us that Justin isn’t privy to. He asked Susie to copy him out of her graphic account of her Mirena coil removal, but that’s about it.
MAN DOWN. I have opinions on tonight’s atrocity, much to discuss. Speak soon. xx
Maybe it’s because we’re the cursed bridesmaids. I am not looking forward to remembering that dismaying fact when I wake up with a shitty head. Is it possible to decline being a bridesmaid to one of your best friend’s brides, without mortally offending them? Could I fake an injury? There’s no way Hester would let someone with an orthopaedic support boot hop down the aisle, spoiling the vision. Even as I think it, I remember that I’d have been to the fittings by then and be wasting their money. Sigh.
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