table book. Callum picked it up and laid it across both our laps.
He leant back and started flicking through the pages. They were exquisite travel photos – reindeer in the snow around a Swedish lake, an old man washing himself on some steps in Delhi, a volcano in Indonesia belching out great clouds of orange smoke.
‘I want to go here,’ he said, pointing at a photo of a chalky landscape, a salt flat in Ethiopia.
‘Go on then. And then… let’s go here,’ I replied, turning the page. It was Venice.
‘Venice? Have you ever been?’ He turned to look at me.
‘No.’ Was now a good moment to touch his arm? I quite wanted to touch his arm.
‘Then I will take you.’
‘Ha!’ I laughed nervously and clapped my hand on his forearm.
We carried on turning the pages and laughing for a while, discussing where we wanted to go until the photos were becoming quite blurry. I wasn’t really concentrating anyway, because Callum had moved his leg underneath the book so it was touching mine. I glanced across at him. How tall was he? Hard to tell sitting down.
‘Right, team,’ said Bill, sometime later from across the room, draining his coffee cup. ‘I think it might be home time. Sorry to end the party but I’ve got to go into the office tomorrow.’
Callum closed the book and moved his leg, stretching out on the sofa and yawning. ‘Fun sponge.’
‘I know, mate, but some of us can’t just drink for a living. We’ve got real jobs.’
‘Talk to me when I’m in Peshawar.’ He stood up and clapped Bill on the back in a man hug. ‘Good to see you after so long, mate. Thanks for dinner.’ He was the same height as Bill, I noted. Sort of six foot-ish. A good height. The size I always wanted a man to be so I didn’t feel like a giraffe in bed next to him. That thing about everybody being the same size lying down is rubbish.
Around us, everyone else was saying goodbye to one another. ‘Thanks, love,’ I said, hugging Bill. ‘Don’t work too hard tomorrow.’
‘Welcome,’ he said back, into my shoulder. ‘And I won’t. I should be around on Sunday if you are? Cinema or something? Is Lex back?’
‘Yup, she gets back tomorrow so said I’d see her for lunch on Sunday. Wanna join?’
‘Maybe, speak tomorrow?’
I nodded and Bill turned to say goodbye to Lou behind us.
‘Where you heading back to?’ Callum asked as we stood by the open front door. I was squinting at my phone, trying to find Uber.
‘Shepherd’s Bush.’
‘Perfect. As you’re not cycling I will escort you home.’
‘Why, where are you?’
‘Nearby,’ he replied. ‘What’s your postcode?’
This never happened. Sightings of the Loch Ness Monster were more common than me going home with anyone. I frowned as I tried to remember what state my bikini line was in. I probably shouldn’t sleep with him; I had an awful feeling it looked like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said, looking at my face.
‘Nothing, all good,’ I replied quickly. Also, I knew I hadn’t shaved my legs for weeks. Or months, maybe. So, a few minutes later, in the back of the Uber, I reached down and tried to surreptitiously stick two fingers underneath the ankle of my jeans to check how bristly my legs were. They felt like a scouring brush.
‘What you doing?’ asked Callum, looking at me quizzically.
‘Just an itch.’ I sat back in the taxi.
‘You’re not coming in,’ I said, in my sternest voice, when the car pulled up outside my flat.
‘’Course I am. I need to make sure you get in safely,’ he replied, opening his door and getting out.
So, as alarmed as I was about my ape-like levels of hairiness, I let him in, whereupon he immediately started looking through my kitchen cupboards. I kicked off my shoes and sat at the kitchen table, watching him, still hiccupping.
‘Shhhhhh, my flatmate’s asleep,’ I said to his back, as he inspected the labels of five or six half-empty bottles he’d discovered in one cupboard.
‘This’ll do.’ It was a bottle of cheap vodka, the sort that turns you blind. ‘Where are your glasses?’
I pointed at a cupboard above his head.
‘I can’t drink all that,’ I said, as he handed me a glass.
‘Yes you can, just knock it back.’ He swallowed his in one and looked at me expectantly.
I lifted my glass, nearly gagged at the vapours, then opened my mouth and took three slugs.
‘Good work.’ He took the glass back as I shivered and put it down on the table. ‘I mean, why do the Russians like this so much? It’s disgusting, swallowing it makes me—’
He interrupted me by cupping my face with his hands and kissing me. His tongue tasted of vodka.
‘Which one’s your room?’
I pointed at a door, and he took my hand, pulled me off the kitchen table and into my room, where I froze. There were two embarrassing things I needed to hide: my slightly shrivelled, browning earplugs on the bedside table, and my ancient bunny rabbit, a childhood comforter, which was lying between the pillows, his glass eyes glaring at me with an accusatory air.
I reached for both, opened my knicker drawer and stuffed them in there. I felt briefly guilty about my rabbit and then thought, You are about to have sex for the first time in five hundred months, Polly, now is not the time to be sentimental about your stuffed toy.
Callum sat down at the end of the bed and started unlacing his shoes.
‘Hang on, I’m just going to do something.’ I picked up a box of matches on the bedside table and lit a candle next to it.
And here is a list of the things that happened next, which illustrates why I should never, ever be allowed to even think about having sex with anyone.
Having lit the candle, I sat next to Callum and he started unbuttoning my shirt. But then I panicked about him doing this while I was sitting because of the fat rolls on my stomach, so I lay down instead, pulling him back onto the bed. He then undid the rest of my shirt buttons and there were a few undignified moments where I flailed around like a beached seal trying to get my arms out of it.
The tussle of the bra strap. Callum reached for it, clearly wanting to be one of those nimble-fingered men who just have to blink at a bra strap – any bra strap – for it to ping free. ‘I’ve nearly got it,’ he said, after several seconds of fiddling while I arched my back.
Getting my knickers off. This required me to waggle my legs in the air like an
