It didn’t take her friends long to notice Eugene. It rarely took any woman long to notice Eugene. The effect was instant, like kindling under flame and Frank smiled at their sudden animation, the volley of glances that flew past him to where Euge stood, oblivious and drunk, with Jimmy. For the next hour, Frank played his records, keeping one eye on the girl, the other on the ebb and flow of the pub. The usual Friday-night mess of east-end geezers with their shit coke and their mean-eyed women drinking cheap cocktails, and he wondered what she was doing there, what it meant. After a while he spotted his friends amongst the dancers, Jimmy pogo-ing out of time to the music, bellowing happily at the brunette’s chest. Eugene chatting up the redhead, his eyes gleaming with either lust or booze. Frank wondered what had taken them so long.
And there she was, his girl. Stood slightly apart, a half-smile on her lips. And when suddenly she looked up and turned her eyes on him again he knew with a shock of certainty that he would hold that image of her, in the smoky flashing gloom of the Mermaid, glass half raised, the sudden, full, frank, petrol-blue gaze of her eyes on his. He knew he would look back on that image one day many years from now as the night he first saw the girl whose name he didn’t yet know.
‘How’s it going old son?’ It was two a.m., the Mermaid almost empty. Frank knelt on the floor packing up his records. He looked up to see Jimmy’s flushed face peering down at him.
‘Those birds are coming back with us,’ he grinned. ‘That dark-haired one’s a right laugh. Eugene’s tucking into the ginge already, lucky bastard. Think you might be stuck with their mate though is the only thing. She don’t say fuck all, but as you know,’ he winked, ‘that usually means they go like a frog in a sock.’
Frank nodded, but continued kneeling for a moment, staring needlessly into his record bag, the realization that he was seconds away from talking to her freezing him to the spot. Finally he hauled his gear onto his shoulder and then reached down again to pick up his headphones. When he straightened, she was standing in front of him.
She smiled. ‘I’m Kate,’ she said. ‘Do you want some help with that?’
The driver who took them home to south-east London turned the volume up on his radio, trying to drown his passengers out with LBC. Kate and Frank sat alone in the back seat of the people carrier, a silent audience to their friends in front who were noisily making their way through a hefty spliff and a bottle of whisky blagged from the bar.
And there they were, as simple as that. He could feel the soft weight of her leg against his, the heat of her shoulder on his arm. She continued to stare straight ahead, the same half-smile fluttering across her mouth, the air between them taut with possibility. Desperately he searched his mind for a topic of conversation but it remained blank. The silence lengthened. Panic shifted queasily in his gut. He was never normally like this with girls. Bit by bit that brief, sweet moment when their eyes had met in the bar receded. Why could he think of absolutely nothing to say?
She shifted her weight slightly and now her thigh burned through his jeans. His gaze fell to her hands, folded in her lap. The cab stopped at a light and he looked out at the black and yellow street, fighting the impulse to open the door and throw himself under the wheels of the nearest night bus – anything but this. The light turned green. The car growled and lurched. Come on, Frank: say something. She continued to stare ahead, her eyes revealing nothing. Anything, say anything. Frank pushed his hands beneath his knees and wondered when it was exactly that he’d turned into such a prick.
The cab sped on across Waterloo Bridge. He cleared his throat as if to speak and she turned to him expectantly, while the words died instantly in his throat. The air between them thickened, the world seemed to hold its breath in anticipation. But the silence lengthened, the tension withered and at last she looked away. With a sinking heart he watched her gaze out at the floodlit buildings of the South Bank, the fuzzy, neon reflections strewn across the black river like the trails of fireworks. Soon they would be there and his chance would have passed. He was an idiot.
The car approached the Elephant. In no time they were in Deptford.
Too late. Too late.
He called to the driver to stop. Clambered awkwardly through the car, treading on the foot of the redhead who was sprawled across Eugene’s lap, and almost falling onto the brunette, her hand on Jimmy’s thigh. ‘I’ll see you later, yeah?’ he said. He had bottled it and he couldn’t bear to look at her now.
‘What you doing?’ protested Jimmy. ‘Come back to mine!’
Eugene nodded through a cloud of smoke. ‘You gotta come back, man. Come and party.’
‘I’m just dropping my records off,’ he lied soothingly. ‘I’ll come round after.’ He got out of the car, tried to think of how to say goodbye to her, could only manage a brief smile, disappointment clutching at his throat. Fuck it. It was only after he’d unloaded his bags and the car had sped away that he turned and saw her standing beneath the fuzzy orange glow of a street lamp.
‘I thought I might keep you company,’ she said, her voice quiet, precise.
She had the most vivid face he’d ever seen, he thought. No make-up but full, red lips, a patch of pink high on each cheek, her eyes dark blue, speckled black. Dense and quick, like water running over rocks.
‘Are we going in, then?’ Amused, expectant.
‘Oh,’ said Frank. ‘Yeah. Sorry. It’s this one.’
He unlocked his front door and realized by the smell that he’d forgotten to take the bins out again. She followed him along the dark, cramped hallway to the lounge. The overhead bulb had gone, and he crashed around for a few seconds trying to locate the lamp.
He cringed when the light eventually revealed the chaos of his lounge. He hadn’t done anything to the house since moving in three years ago apart from install a large sound system. There was a smell of damp, and leaky gas fire. A green, flowered carpet cringed beneath purple wallpaper. The furniture was sparse, had seen better days. But the worse thing, he decided, the very worse thing was that everything – every inch of space: the floor, the table, the sofa, the shelves – was covered in piles of records. Twelve-inch and seven-inch black, shiny orbs, naked or half-dressed in white paper sleeves or peeping out from colourful, cardboard covers. It was like a bizarre kind of record shop that had recently been burgled, he realised. He looked over at Kate, who stood surveying the room from the door.
‘Interesting … décor,’ she said, a smile like a bird’s wing brushing her lips.
‘Yeah,’ said Frank. ‘Sorry. Bit of a dump. It was my Aunt Joanie’s. I inherited it from her a few years back and I never got round to, er –’ He rubbed his face and glancing at her, fell silent.
‘You’ve done wonders with the place,’ she laughed, and watched as he began picking up records from the floor and the sofa, making space for her to sit.
‘You like music.’
He smiled. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘I like music.’ What was he going to do with her now, now that she was here?
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, after a short silence. ‘About your aunt. Were you close?’
Frank shrugged, nodded. ‘I suppose we were.’ He continued to shift piles of records from one space to the next.
‘Come and sit down.’ She’d taken her jacket off, and he could see the goose pimples on her thin arms. He could not remember when he had last felt so nervous. And what was it about her voice? It was incredible, he thought, like music. When she stopped talking it was as if that final word hung in the air afterwards like the last note of a song, his ears stretching after it in the silence that followed.
They stared at each other for a moment. ‘Coffee,’