Eddie from Tesco has been blowing my texts up – I’ve been a bit cold on replying this week, and he doesn’t seem to be coping well. I tell him we’re still fine for Friday, for the third time. I even finally tell him I’ll be fine to go to lunch with him beforehand – he’s been pushing that all week. Still, I’m distinctly aware of a buzzing in my pocket for minutes after I get back from the toilets. Flo sips her pint, and Michael glares at me above his. Flo ordered me a red wine; it waits for me on the table.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Your phone is going off loads,’ he says. ‘The vibration is so loud.’ I shrug. Flo laughs.
‘Popular! She’s a popular girl! Woman. Irina has a boyfriend now, you know?’ says Flo. No I don’t, it sits on my tongue, like he’s here, like he’ll hear. Michael looks sceptical.
‘Does she?’
‘It’s great! Works in a Tesco. I pointed him out to her.’
‘He’s starts teaching soon. We’ve seen each other, like, twice, it’s not—’ I shrug. ‘It’s fine. I’m out with him on Friday.’
I think Flo is trying to bait me. She knows how I feel about boyfriends, girlfriends. She’s seen me seize up, sever ties, snarl and snap, time and time again over those words. I’ve called her bluff. She purses her lips.
‘I’m just… Toilet,’ she says. ‘I’ll just be a second.’
‘You just went,’ says Michael. She ignores him. Michael sighs. I look at my texts.
Eddie from Tesco is intermittently trying to hammer out details for Friday, while apologising for bothering me and asking if everything is okay. I’m about to reply with something irritating and non-committal when Michael pipes up. The two of us have an unspoken rule – if Flo isn’t in the room, and we don’t have to, we just don’t speak to each other. More his rule than mine, I think. He might hate me, but I’m completely indifferent to him. I sip my wine and fold an arm under my cleavage.
‘Boyfriend,’ he says. ‘Does that mean you’re finally going to leave her the fuck alone?’
‘What do you mean?’ I say. He takes a deep breath.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Don’t think I do.’
‘You’re like a cold that won’t go away, you know that?’ He says. ‘She gets better for a bit, and she’s normal, and then she’ll start spending time with you again, and she…’ He trails off, staring at me, staring at my chest.
‘Are you looking at my tits?’
‘Yes, yes I am, because they are always out, aren’t they?’ he snaps. ‘Fuck off, am I looking at your tits – like you put that top on by accident. Fuck off.’ I lean over and stick my fingers in his pint, I flick beer in his face. ‘You’re fucking pathetic,’ he says. ‘You know why she’s like this with you?’ He’s hissing now, spitting on me. ‘She feels sorry for you. She knows she’s all you have. And that’s why she can’t… untangle herself from you, because she’s not a horrible person. She’s not like you.’
‘If I told her to leave you and move in with me, we both know she’d drop you like a bag of hot sick. So.’ I shrug. ‘Whatever helps you sleep at night.’
Flo comes back. She’s bought me another wine even though I’ve barely touched the one I have. As she’s putting it down, she slops some of it into Michael’s lap. She apologises to me, not him.
I pick my outfit for lunch with Eddie from Tesco quite quickly. I put on a dress – I have four of the same one in different colours, this body-con thing from American Apparel, which fits like a glove. I put on half a stone, once, about a year ago, and the dresses went from understated-sexy to sausage casing. That was a lesson learned: gluten truly is the devil.
I have it in red, black, white and blue. Red seems a bit much for lunch, and I don’t know why I bought the blue in the first place because it clashes with my hair. I just go for the black and stick a denim jacket and a pair of flat-forms on with it. I take one step out of the house and realise the jacket was a fuck-up, and it ends up jammed in my backpack. I cover myself head to toe in sun cream on the bus; I can feel my skin cooking, wrinkles erupting, cancer cells multiplying. I should have worn a sunhat.
I get a frantic stream of texts from Flo. Something about a huge argument with Michael, and the logistics of leaving him if he owns the house. I let her dangle, still annoyed that she sprung him on me the other night.
I find Eddie from Tesco sitting at Grey’s Monument, bouncing his leg, fiddling with his phone, headphones on. His clothes look strange. Like, they’re new, and they fit him. Just plain jeans, and a grey T-shirt, but definitely new. I announce my arrival by coming up behind him and pulling his headphones off the top of his head. He shits himself, which I laugh at, and then fumbles his words.
‘New outfit?’ I ask.
‘Oh? This? No,’ he says. I tell him his label is hanging out, and he tucks it back into his collar. All Saints. So he’s getting bougie with his Tesco money, apparently. ‘Okay, it is new. I mean. Just. All my clothes are shit, I just… I dunno, I don’t want you to feel like you’re out with a fifteen-year-old boy.’ I tell him that’s a very specific concern, and he explains that upon asking his brother （the most fashionable man he knows） for advice, he was informed he dresses like an incel. His brother told him to just buy something plain, that fits, because there was nothing worse than some dorky, short-arse bloke trying to be fashionable for the first time in his life and ending up looking like he’d fallen on the Topman sale rack. ‘Er… Is it okay?’ He squirms. ‘I mean, you look lovely, like… really nice. Like. What are you doing with me?’
‘You look… fine,’ I say. He does. Absolutely fine. ‘Bit basic, maybe.’ I shrug. ‘You’d probably have looked a bit of a twat if you turned up in a leopard-print shirt or something, so…’
‘I totally agree,’ he says. ‘The table is booked for half past, so we should probably get a shuffle on,’ he says. He stands, and I’m still looming over him.
‘Booked? Shit,’ I say. ‘I thought we’d just be like… going to a cafe or something. I don’t know.’
‘Err…’ He looks sheepish all of a sudden. ‘I mean, I’ve not booked us into a posh one or anything, just… semi-posh?’
‘Semi-posh.’
‘Yeah.’
I tell him it had better not be too far away. ‘It’s fine for you being out in this heat; you tan. You’re always tan. You look like you’ve just been on holiday or something,’ I say. He laughs.
‘Are you joking?’
‘What?’
‘I’m mixed race, Irina? Had you not twigged? My last name is Arabic, it’s proper obviously foreign?’
It’s cute that he thinks I care what his last name is.
We walk to the semi-posh restaurant – a nice French place down by the train station, where the waiter is extremely enthusiastic and explains how French-style tapas works, and offers us the wine list. Eddie from Tesco asks the waiter to bring his recommended bottle of red, in what would have been a baller move if he hadn’t been sweating and stuttering the whole time.