and I wake up to see he has covered the whole bedroom in cling film and has a very sharp knife and I only just manage to escape before he starts carving me up into pieces to fry up and eat for breakfast each morning.
I actually won’t wake up from the Rohypnol and so will get carved up and nobody will ever find me and my mum will be really upset and won’t know I’m dead – she’ll just think I’m being selfish and have skipped the country for a laugh.
He won’t show up after all, and I’ll have write to the newspaper to shout at him. (NB if I do that, I will do it very calmly and sensibly, in the manner of that nineteen-year-old on The Lust Villa who got dumped and gave a very rousing speech about loyalty, and not like when Sharon Osbourne stormed off The X Factor that time, ripping off her fake eyelashes and screaming at everyone uncontrollably.)
In the other column, she wrote: ‘Things That Could Go Right If I Meet The Guy From Missed Connections’. Underneath it she wrote:
I could meet the love of my life.
21
Daniel
Daniel paced up and down outside the bar, mentally talking himself through what was about to happen. Come on, he told himself. This is no big deal. It’s just a date.
He forced himself to breathe in and out through his nose, doing the ‘victorious breath’ his mum had learnt at the one yoga class she’d ever done, twenty-five years ago. It was a loud and deliberate noise, like trying to steam up a mirror but with the mouth closed. The one and only thing she’d learned that day was that if you can control your breath, you can control anything. It had been the soundtrack to his teenage years, that saying, even though a nasty flatulence incident had meant she’d never done yoga again. (‘It was your dad’s braised bloody cabbage that did it – I made the loudest chuffing noise as I went into a forward fold! I can control my breath, Daniel – but I dare anybody to retain full sphincter control after his buttered bok choy!’) For every knee scrape and heartache and exam stress, it always came back to: If you can control your breath, you can control anything. Breathe, Daniel.
Daniel laughed to himself at the thought that he could control any of what was about to happen, causing two men walking by to look up in alarm and scurry past him with their eyebrows raised, as if extreme romantic nervousness was catching.
I mean, potentially this is the last first date you’ll go on in your whole life, he thought to himself, and the last first kiss you’ll ever have. Not that a first kiss is a given, but, you know, if everything goes well. Which it will, as long as you’re not too over-eager. Like you are now, being fifteen minutes early, and giving yourself a pep talk instead of going in, getting a seat at the bar, and ordering a drink so she finds you already doing something instead of waiting to pounce like the title character in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Daniel remembered his breathing. His dad would tell him to get a drink in him to calm down. He tried to reason with himself.
Go in. You’ll be fine. Eat a Tic Tac and breathe deep. If you can control your breath – your breathing and being minty fresh – you can control anything. Go on.
Daniel took two big gulps of the summer air, July now giving way to August, London thick with syrupy heat, and pushed through the door of the bar. It was already half full with office workers out with their colleagues, what with Thursday being the new Friday. He caught sight of himself in the mirror as he grabbed a seat, and had his first kind thought about himself all afternoon. You look all right, he told himself, with his undone dress shirt rolled up to his sleeves, the way the fabric fell across his shoulders. He’d lost weight since his dad had died – probably he wasn’t eating enough. It was hard to keep track of food when the world was ending. But Daniel’s jaw looked sharp in his reflection and he thought for a minute how he seemed a bit rock ’n’ roll. Grief and hope looked good on him. It was a small, silly comfort.
The barman made eye contact to let Daniel know he’d be