to it being her weekend to open up Rococo’s for Saturday business, and so tainting her Friday night with the prospect of an early morning. But Lali was at her most vivacious.
Crammed into a corner of the packed pub, they were all sitting on top of each other. Lali was buying drinks for everyone, kissing Vic across the table, or squeezing his arse as she passed behind him to the ladies, while he stood talking football at the bar with some burly, tattooed stranger. He indulged the moment. There was still so much to be enjoyed, so much newness and excitement to them. That night in Marlowe’s he just wanted to enjoy Lali as she was – infectiously energetic, sultry, drunk.
But he refused to sing. He was adamant. He couldn’t.
‘You’ve got to do this,’ she insisted. They were at the bar, away from the others, and she was leaning all her weight against him. She puckered up, pleading mock-submissively. ‘Please, Vic? It’ll be fun. Don’t be an asshole!’
‘Seriously, I can’t sing,’ he told her, again.
‘Don’t be a fucking grouch, Vic! It’s karaoke – nobody can sing. Come on, we’ll find you a good old Irish rebel song. No need to sing them, you just growl ‘em,’ she said.
‘In all seriousness, now, you don’t want me to sing,’ he warned her.
‘I’ll make it worth your while,’ she said, tugging his lower lip with her teeth as she broke away.
‘Elaborate.’
‘Vic, there’s a lot more to come, believe me.’
When they went back to the table Lali put her drink down and strutted up to the raised platform. She said a few words and the karaoke man handed her the mike. It crackled as she switched it on. ‘This one’s for my man, Vic.’ Fiddle and drum came barreling out of the speakers, and Lali, bow-legged and elbows out, rocking on the pins of her majestic heels in simulation of the choppy sea, did her finest sea-beaten sailor impression, while growling out lyrics in the worst Irish accent he’d ever heard – The Irish Rover. When she’d finished, she took a bow to lively applause from their table.
She held Vic’s regard as she crossed the floor, until her attention was caught by two men. One of two brave suitors had said something to her over his shoulder. It caused her to stop and turn back.
Without the grip of Lali’s gaze, an undistorted vision actualized. Existing momentarily outside himself, he saw what the cold-eyed observer would see; all eyes had followed Lali from the stage across the floor, and all eyes now watched, apprehensively, to see what happened to the brave. The power of her, the draw, was demonstrable. It was evident in the nervousness she set off in other people. Her stupefying beauty, as every eye in the room looked on, cried out across the room, commoving and stifling simultaneously.
They circled her then; somehow, with just the two of them they circled her. They were drawn in close about her as she spoke. He couldn’t see her face but he could imagine it as he watched the two men gaping back at her and jostling for her attention; clinking glasses, throwing fraternal arms around each other, trying to reach out to her with searching touches. Whatever she finally said to them, it caused feigned offence. They raised their palms to her and leaned back with contorted expressions, and everyone breathed easy. As she ambled back to the table, unaware of the ripples of relief flowing, like a wedding train, back through the room behind her, Vic felt exhilarated by his closeness to her. Once back at the table, she promptly sent out the call for a round of shots.
They stumbled into her flat around three in the morning, made toasted cheese sandwiches and did what all couples at that stage of knowing each other do.
When Vic awoke in the morning, his throat was raspy. He leaned over her and whispered in her ear. Obviously suffering, she remained entombed under the duvet. He left the flat for the local mini-market.
He hoped that by the time he got back she’d have come round and they’d pick up where they left off the night before. But when he returned, the latch was on the door. He rang the bell. He called in the letterbox. It was all he could do just to get her out of bed and let him back into the flat.
Finally, she staggered to the door with the duvet wrapped around her, pulled up over her head so that only a few unkempt strands of tangled hair could be seen, as they drooped down over one of her eyes and across her nose. She turned the key, undid the latch, and let him in.
‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘you’re back.’
‘That’s nice,’ he replied.
She turned and went for the sofa, where she lay out. ‘I thought you were gone,’ she said, turning on the TV.
‘I told you where I was going. To get us breakfast. I got some bacon and eggs. I’ll make breakfast.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I meant for the both of us. I’ll make breakfast for the both of us.’
‘Not for me.’
The offhandedness unsettled him but he made her coffee anyway.
‘I told you – I don’t want anything!’ was her irascible response. He placed it down on a coaster on the floor beside the sofa. In the kitchenette, he fried breakfast for himself and took it to the living area on a plate. After hovering around the sofa, thinking she might lift her feet and make room for him, and being disappointed, he took a seat in the only other proper chair in the flat. It was a battered old chair in the corner of the room, with no view of the TV.
‘Is there anything on?’ He waited. ‘No?’
‘Oh,’ she said, surprised he was talking to her. ‘No. Nothing.’
‘Jesus, I’m fairly wrecked today. Heavy old night, last night.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Heavy night, I said. A lazy day ahead I’d imagine. I wouldn’t be fit for much else.’
She said nothing.
With his appetite lost, he gave up and took the breakfast to the kitchen and dumped the plate, unrinsed and including the food, into the sink. He told her he was going home for a shower and a change of clothes.
‘Oh, right.’
‘Have you any plans for later? For tonight?’ he asked, with saintly reserve, making one last attempt to wrest some sense from the confounding experience that was the night before and the morning after; a single happening, yet completely discrepant.
‘No.’
She was impregnable in her quilted cocoon.
He went home wondering what he’d done wrong. She’d just flipped. They had dropped off to sleep, spooned air-tightly together, with his hand lightly caressing her upper-thigh. No worse than light snoring had passed between them, but when he awoke she’d transmogrified; alien, dislocated.
For a moment he did what all men do when they’ve just slept with a woman who fails to express sufficient gratitude – he wondered had he been no good. Did she lie there awake after he’d fallen asleep, wanting more? Disappointed? Unsatisfied? Or had her head been turned by the two men at Marlowe’s? Had she grown tired of him already?
Several days passed
