will get it.’ Pip winked at Fen and wandered off in search of champagne.
‘Dingle-dangles?’ Fen murmured to herself.
There is no more free champagne. Pip decides, though, that champagne is what Cat must drink. Not because Cat loves the stuff, but because Pip won’t have her mix her drinks; she’s mixed up enough as it is. If it’s champagne that’s giving her joy, champagne she shall have. To the bar she goes.
And that’s when she comes across Zac.
She takes her place along the counter right next to him. Their elbows touch. But it is only when the barman allows her to queue-jump that she’s aware of him. Zac stares at her, irritated. Pip glowers back. Then she quickly looks away.
Fuck! It’s my stalker.
It is indeed. And he’s pissed off. He’s been brandishing a twenty-pound note in the direction of the barman for ages without success.
‘What’s a guy gotta do to get a drink round here? Sport a cleavage?’ he grumbles with a touch of wit that the noise of the bar renders inaudible.
Grumpy sod, Pip thinks. ‘Sorry,’ she says, establishing eye contact, ‘you were here first.’
‘Whatever,’ he says brusquely, ‘go ahead.’
He doesn’t recognize me. He hasn’t a clue who I am.
Pip can’t order and pay quickly enough and she weaves and shimmies her way back to Cat who is chatting amiably to Fen and Matt. A side of her wants to go, wants to avoid confrontation, doesn’t want Zac to suddenly recognize her, to approach, let alone converse. A side of her, however, newly unleashed thanks in no small part to Caleb, wants to play, wants to rile Zac and surprise him. A side to her is amused that he doesn’t recognize her and a side to her is slightly irked. So she stays, with half an eye on Fen, half an ear for Cat who is now drunkenly verbose, and half a mind to search Zac out and perform a magic trick on him.
Luck puts Zac directly in her path a short while later when she returns to the bar for yet more champagne for Cat. This time Pip smiles directly at him and he smiles back. That pretty girl who audaciously pushed in at the bar, he observes. The one who looks vaguely familiar.
At the heaving bar Pip waits an indecently short while to be served.
I haven’t a clue how I can feel insulted by him in Holloway, offended by him at the hospital, disconcerted by him on Hampstead Heath – and yet now rather taken with him in Soho.
Especially as you have Caleb keen and he comes with no added complications of children and stalking tendencies.
‘Champagne, please.’
Ask yourself which bloke your sisters would deem the more suitable.
‘Two glasses, thanks.’
I’m not telling Cat and Fen a thing – much less asking them anything of the sort.
When Pip turns from the bar, drinks in hand, she tries to catch Zac’s eye but he appears to look straight through her. She feels oddly rejected. Rejecting her feelings, however, she returns to the other side of the club where Cat is actually allowing herself to be chatted up by one of Matt’s mates and barely senses her sister’s return. Fen, meanwhile, has her lips a centimetre from Matt’s and she plants the first of many birthday kisses. Pip averts her gaze and busies herself tracing the rim of the wineglass. It feels as though her work is done. She feels like a spare part. She feels she is no longer needed. She wonders if she could just slip away.
‘Look, I know this sounds corny – and I swear it really isn’t my style – but maybe I could buy you a drink?’
Stalker Bloke!
She hadn’t seen him approach. She hadn’t expected him to. She’s unprepared. It’s not a state she is familiar with or one that she likes.
Shit.
For God’s sake, why not just say ‘yes’, Pip, with a ‘please’. Flicker your eyelashes and have a flirt. He’s only offering to buy you a drink and you don’t currently have one, Cat having just swiped it. Nor do you have anyone to talk to. This might pass the time. This might be amusing.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Pip all but cautions, ‘I’m here with my sisters.’
‘Well, I’ll get them drinks, too, if they’d like?’ he suggests. ‘Or is it more that you need their seal of approval?’ He’s ingenuous but momentarily, Pip wonders whether he’s mocking. Then, however, she observes that his face is open and his eyes are soft and he’s tilting his head in an acquiescent way. He shrugs: ‘I don’t have sisters,’ he explains, ‘I wouldn’t know.’ He redeems himself with that.
He still doesn’t recognize me. I don’t know whether to be offended or entertained.
He’s tired, Pip. A little pissed, too. And the bar is atmospherically lit or downright dim. And you look pretty different out of slap and motley.
‘Look,’ says Zac, ‘can I buy you a drink, or shall I just dig a hole right here and dive headfirst into it?’ He’s never before resorted to chatting women up in bars but he’s elicited a laugh from the girl and he rather feels he’s done quite well. Friendly without being smarmy, witty not corny, self-deprecating not self-satisfied.
‘Sure,’ says Pip, ‘why not.’ Her sisters are occupied. Their glasses are full. They won’t need her for the time being.
‘What’ll you have?’
Pip licks her lips and appears to think about it, her index finger raised for emphasis. ‘May I have,’ she ponders and pauses and then regards him with direct eye contact and a lascivious twitch of her mouth, ‘may I have orangey-lemony-blackcurranty squash?’ Zac stares at her because, what with the pervasive chatter, the ambient music playing a little too loudly and the good few beers in his system already, combined with the trippy dingle-dangle lighting, he thinks Pip has asked for a cocktail he hasn’t heard of but that he probably should know. ‘Orangey-lemony-blackcurranty squash.’ she repeats.
‘Right,’ he says, trying to remember the precise order.
Pip repeats her request, once more, in Dr Pippity’s voice. And she raises her eyebrow and gives him a sly grin. And it is then that the penny drops.
‘Bloody Jesus bloody Christ,’ he murmurs. Pip can’t hear him but she can certainly lip-read. ‘Clowngirl?’ Zac exclaims. ‘Dr Whatsit or Merry Thingy?’
‘Pip McCabe,’ Pip says cordially, extending her hand most demurely, slightly concerned that he looks just a little alarmed.
‘Crikey,’ he says, and is immediately concerned that his vocabulary and the fact that he’s ruffling his hair excessively is all a bit too Hugh Grant.
I won’t say ‘I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on’, then.
‘What’s a nice clown like you doing in a circus like this?’ Zac asks instead.
There’s a pause but fortunately Pip
