One Night Stand (2 page)

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Authors: Julie Cohen

BOOK: One Night Stand
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For Dave and Nathaniel, with thanks for
‘Mummy’s Mucky Book Hour’.
 
Acknowledgements
 
As always, thanks to Anna Lucia, Brigid Coady, and Kathy Love for phone calls, chocolate and spa-going. You’re always right, you know. Thanks to my agent, Teresa Chris, and my editor, Catherine Cobain, for being charming while making me work harder. Although some of the features of Reading mentioned in this book do exist, I have taken liberties with geography and detail. All people, ducks and general dinginess are products of my own imagination.
 
One Night
 
1
 
Another Saturday night down the Mouse and Duck. Jerry, the landlord, was swearing in the kitchen. Paul and Philip were nearing the end of their pints and arguing about football in the preliminary step to arguing about whose turn it was to get the next round. Gets Drunk, Gets Horny, Gets Angry Man was steadily making his way through his fourth pint and was making the lip and eye movements that signified that he was having an imaginary conversation with himself. Maud and Martha were eyeing up the karaoke machine through their haze of smoke. And I’d spilled half a pint of Stella over my shoes when I was serving the group of students who were starting to get loud over in the corner.
 
I made sure that nobody was watching me, and topped up my orange juice with vodka from the House Special optic.
 
Jerry exploded from the kitchen, swearing at the top of his lungs about frozen peas. I raised an eyebrow at him, a reminder of the conversation we’d had last week when I’d informed him that if he wanted to start getting a higher class of punter in the pub he should stop coming out with torrents of filth at the least opportunity.
 
‘Did you order any blimmin peas, Eleanor?’ He corrected himself, running a tattooed hand over his buzz-cut scalp.
 
‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t ordered anything since I got the healthy-option chips and you said you wouldn’t trust me any more.’
 
‘But
peas
,’ Jerry protested. He caught the glance of the student who had innocently ordered fish and chips. ‘Just a minute,’ he called across, and disappeared into the kitchen again.
 
I thought about what my agent had said to me on the phone that afternoon about my latest erotic comedy novel:
It lacks the whiff of reality, darling.
 
How would my agent in his London office like this whiff of reality? Stella-soaked shoes, fag smoke, and no blimmin peas?
 
I took a swig of my drink, grimaced at the taste of vodka, and filled it up to the top from the optic again. It tasted even worse now, but it was starting to make my knees feel unaccustomedly weak.
 
Hugh stood up from his seat in a secluded corner and I stashed my drink underneath the bar out of sight. He’d put on a designer shirt for a Saturday night, and he’d done something to his hair that made it stick up in a more orderly way than usual. It was much more effort than the Mouse and Duck required; he was probably going on somewhere else.
 
When he got to the bar Hugh handed me his glass and I put it under the lager tap. ‘She’ll have cider and black,’ he said, jerking his head slightly to indicate the blonde girl taking up a sliver of the bench he’d left behind. I’d never seen her before, but that was hardly surprising.
 
‘I don’t believe you’re going to sleep with someone who drinks cider and blackcurrant,’ I said.
 
‘I like girls with sweet tooths.’
 
What he meant was that girls with sweet tooths liked him, but I didn’t bother to correct him.
 
‘How old is she? Seventeen?’
 
‘Twenty-two. She’s got a job somewhere.’
 
‘Somewhere. You’re really smooth. Do you know her name?’
 
‘Harriet.’ He said it confidently, and then glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Yes, definitely Harriet.’
 
I restrained myself from gulping more of my drink. Hugh had a nose like a bloodhound. It probably came from sniffing out all that firm young female flesh. Instead, I turned away from him and poured blackcurrant into a pint glass.
 
‘Better make sure you get her name right,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to be crying out the wrong name in passion.’
 
‘That happened to me once.’
 
‘I’m surprised it was only the once.’ I flipped the lager tap off over Hugh’s drink and began to fill the blonde’s glass with cider.
 
‘No, not me - I’ve never done it,’ Hugh said. He was leaning on the bar, enjoying the conversation more than I was. ‘It happened to me. The woman yelled out “Joe!” ’
 
‘You sure she wasn’t saying “ho”?’
 
‘It was definitely “Joe”.’
 
‘And what did you do?’
 
‘I carried on. It was at a point where it was difficult to stop.’
 
‘That’s your problem, Hugh. You’re such a damn romantic.’
 
I put his blonde’s purple drink on the bar next to his pint of lager, then thought,
screw it,
and retrieved my drink from under the bar. Hugh’s eyes narrowed as I took a sip.
 
‘What are you drinking?’
 
‘Orange juice.’
 
‘No you’re not, you’re acting weird. What are you really drinking?’
 
Bloodhound nose. This was probably how he always showed up at my house whenever I cooked a meal or uncorked a bottle of wine.
 
I shrugged. ‘It’s a screwdriver.’ Which consisted of considerably more screw than driver . . . or was that more driver than screw? I giggled.
 
He frowned. ‘You don’t usually drink at work. Are you okay?’
 
‘It’s Saturday night, Hugh. Lighten up.’
 
‘Have you had bad news about the book?’ he asked in a lower tone, so the rest of the pub couldn’t hear.
 
He knew me too damn well. ‘Of course not,’ I beamed. ‘After sixteen books I should know what I’m doing.’
 
‘What about Horny/Angry? He hasn’t been bothering you, has he?’ Hugh gazed down the bar at Gets Drunk, Gets Horny, Gets Angry Man. He had a name, I thought it was Norman - at least he responded to Norman when he was drunk. But Horny/Angry fit him much better and it was easier to remember.
 
‘Nothing is wrong, Hugh. Everything is exactly the same as it always is. Nothing ever changes around here. I just fancied a drink, that’s all.’
 
He looked at me, then back at Horny/Angry, who was still in his own little world, for now. ‘I didn’t think you liked vodka.’
 
‘I love it.’
 
Hugh leaned his chin on his fist. ‘I’ll stick around here if you want me to.’
 
‘I’m just having a drink.’
 
Hugh has this way of staring at you and assessing you. His brown eyes go all intense. I’d seen him use this technique on many women and for some reason it made them melt.
 
Not me, though. ‘Your blonde is waiting,’ I said.
 
He raised his eyebrows, shrugged in capitulation, and took the drinks back to his table. It took all of ten seconds before the blonde had her hand on his knee and they were laughing at something together.
 
I refilled Paul and Philip’s pints. ‘How’d Reading do today?’ I asked.
 
Paul launched into a play-by-play description of the day’s football match. I didn’t know the first thing about football, but years behind the bar in a pub had taught me how to look interested when in reality I was completely mystified.
 
‘Wow,’ I said, when I judged he’d finished.
 
He sipped his beer, thirsty after his sporting commentary. ‘You haven’t a clue about what I just told you, have you?’
 
‘Of course I do.’
 
‘Who won?’
 
‘Reading,’ I guessed, because he looked quite cheerful.
 
‘And what was the score?’
 
That was a stumper. ‘Um.’
 
‘I told you thirty seconds ago.’
 
‘It all sort of blurs together,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
 
Paul shook his head and took the drinks over to the table he habitually shared with Philip. Jerry came out with the student’s fish and chips, conspicuously light on the peas and heavy on the chips.
 
I poured myself another screwdriver. Martha and Maud got up and began to sing an Engelbert Humperdinck song. Horny/Angry beckoned me over and spent five minutes telling me an incoherent joke so he could stare at my tits through my T-shirt.
 
‘This is the whiff of reality,’ I told the vodka optic, as if it were the craggy face of my agent. Nobody could hear me over Martha and Maud. ‘The one person who’s interested in my body only notices me when he’s had five pints, and he’ll be picking a fight with another punter in the next half an hour, which he’ll lose because he’s sixty-eight and a chronic alcoholic. And you wonder why my book sucks?’
 
I downed my drink, and poured another. I wished that something would happen.
 
2
 
I didn’t see him come in. The Mouse and Duck had two doors, one either side of the bar, and if I’d seen him come in I would have noticed which door he entered, which would tell me which direction he was coming from. But the pub was unusually busy.
 
Vodka transformed the karaoke singing and the shouted conversations and the bleeps of the pinball machine into a jumble of sound. I concentrated so as not to spill the creamy head from an over-full pint of Guinness, and spilt it anyway.
 
‘Sorry,’ I muttered to the customer, one of the students, but he was drunk enough not to care. He missed my hand when he gave me his money and the pound coins fell into the frothy Guinness pool. I threw a bar towel over the whole mess and went away. Jerry wasn’t serving; he was talking with Paul and Philip and drinking his own brandy.
 
I sloshed wine in a glass for one of the women who’d just finished singing karaoke and when I turned around from the till, there he was.
 
In retrospect it should have been a cymbal-crashing strobe-lit moment. In actual fact, I didn’t register him, much, except as another person to serve. I leaned on the bar in front of him, more heavily than I normally would have done, and smiled, more widely than I normally would have done.
 
‘What can I get you?’ I asked.
 
He looked at me steadily, then took his time turning his head and surveying the pub. ‘This place is a dump,’ he said.
 
His words were so exactly what I’d been thinking that I laughed aloud and plonked both my elbows on the bar, making myself comfortable. ‘You’re not wrong.’
 
He was in his late twenties or early thirties and had short dark hair and a bit of a moustache and goatee. He smiled, and his teeth were perfectly straight.
 
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ he asked.
 
Now that was something new. Even Horny/Angry at his horniest never bought me a drink. ‘Thanks, I’ll have a vodka and orange,’ I said. ‘Yourself?’
 
‘Sounds good.’
 
I helped us to the premium vodka instead of the House Special and topped both of our drinks with the coloured bendy straws that were Jerry’s concession to the world of cocktails. He paid me with a twenty and lifted his glass to me in a toast.
 
‘To dumpy pubs,’ I said, and took a gulp. The alcohol was starting to taste very good, and it warmed my body all the way from my lips to the bottom of my stomach.
 
‘To meeting new people in dumpy pubs,’ he said, and it was completely cheesy, but I smiled at the line.
 
‘Another couple of pints, Eleanor,’ Jerry called, and I turned away from the stranger to pour Stella. I felt his eyes on me as I walked behind the bar. Again, cheesy. But his gaze felt like a light touch on my shoulders, my hips, my behind. The hairs on the back of my neck stirred as if he were breathing on me.
 
When I glanced up, he hadn’t looked away. He gave me half a private smile and sipped his drink.
 
Warmth grew in my belly. This wasn’t Horny/Angry leering at my tits and arse. This guy was young, good-looking, well-dressed and, as far as I could tell, more or less sober.

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