The Café Belle Epoque has a kind of festive look to it, glimmering red and gold, light spilling onto the pavement. The tables outside are crowded with people chatting and laughing and the windows are steamy with condensation from all the bodies crowded around tables inside. Round the corner, where they haven’t turned on the heat-lamps, there’s one guy on his own hunched over a laptop; somehow I just know this is him.
“Theo?” I feel like I’m on a Tinder date, if I bothered going on those anymore and it wasn’t all catfishers and arseholes.
He glances up with a scowl. Dark hair long overdue a cut and the beginnings of a beard. He looks like a pirate who’s decided to dress in ordinary clothes: a woolen sweater, frayed at the neckline, under a big jacket.
“Theo?” I ask again. “We texted, about Benjamin Daniels—I’m Jess?”
He gives a curt nod. I pull out the little metal chair opposite him. It sticks to my hand with cold.
“Mind if I smoke?” I think the question’s rhetorical, he’s already pulled out a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds. Everything about him is crumpled.
“Sure, I’ll have one thanks.” I can’t afford a smoking habit but I’m feeling jittery enough to need one—even if he didn’t actually offer.
He spends the next thirty seconds struggling to light his cigarette with a crappy lighter, muttering under his breath: “Fuck’s sake” and “Come on, you bastard.” I think I detect a slight accent as he does.
“You’re from East London?” I ask, thinking that maybe if I ingratiate myself he’ll be more willing to help. “Whereabouts?”
He raises a dark eyebrow, doesn’t answer. Finally, the lighter works and the cigarettes are lit. He draws on his like an asthmatic on an inhaler, then sits back and looks at me. He’s tall, uncomfortable-looking in the little chair: one long leg crossed over the other knee at the ankle. He’s kind of attractive, if you like your men rough around the edges. But I’m not sure I do—and I’m shocked at myself for even thinking about it, in the circumstances.
“So,” he says, narrowing his eyes through the smoke. “Ben?” Something about the way he says my brother’s name suggests there’s not that much love lost there. Maybe I’ve found the one person immune to my brother’s charm.
Before I can answer a waiter comes over, looking pissed off at having to take our order, even though it’s his job. Theo, who looks equally pissed off at having to talk to him and speaking French with a determined English accent, orders a double espresso and something called a Ricard. “Late night, on a deadline,” he tells me, a little defensively.
Mainly to warm up I ask for a chocolat chaud. Six euros. Let’s assume he’s paying. “I’ll have the other thing too,” I tell the waiter.
“Un Ricard?”
I nod. The waiter slouches off. “I don’t think we served that at the Copacabana,” I say.
“The what?”
“This bar I worked in. Until a couple of days ago, actually.”
He raises a dark eyebrow. “Sounds classy.”
“It was the absolute worst.” But the day The Pervert decided to show his disgusting little dick to me was the day I’d finally had enough. Also the day I decided I’d get the creep back for all the times he’d lingered too long behind me, breath hot and wet on the back of my neck, or “steered” me out of the way, hands on my hips, or the comments he’d made about the way I looked, the clothes I wore—all those things that weren’t quite “things” except were, making me feel a little bit less myself. Another girl might have left then and never come back. Another might have called the police. But I’m not that girl.
“Right,” Theo says—clearly he has no time for further chit-chat. “Why are you here?”
“Ben: does he work for you?”
“Nah. No one works for anyone these days, not in this line of work. It’s dog eat dog out there, every man for himself. But, yeah, sometimes I commission a review from him, a travel piece. He’s been wanting to get into investigative stuff. I guess you know that.” I shake my head. “He’s due to deliver a piece on the riots, in fact.”
“The riots?”
“Yeah.” He peers at me like he can’t believe I don’t know. “People are seriously fucked off about a hike in taxes, petrol prices. It’s got pretty nasty . . . tear gas, water cannons, the lot. It’s all over the news. Surely you’ve seen something?”