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