‘You’re a writer?’ Robin said, with one arm slung round the velvet banquette, in a way that meant it was sort of slung round me.
‘Hah! No. Who told you that?’
‘Your advice to me sounded like one writer to another …?’
I glowed. This was one of the best things I’d ever heard.
‘… That said, you’re a bit too healthy for it. You don’t have the black coffee and fags face. You look like you leave the house and get fresh air.’
I knew I was being hit upon, but my blood alcohol level and the bass-line in a Prince song were in harmony, and I was happy to be flattered.
‘I’m a waitress.’
‘Ah! That’s cute.’ (There it was, that tone. Clem was right.)
I’d nearly said: I’d like to be a writer but I knew the next question would be, what have you written? and the answer is a big old nothing, bar a diary that I was once quite proud of, so I didn’t.
‘I have a research question, you can help me with my act,’ Robin said. ‘What’s it like being beautiful?’
Over his shoulder, I could see Rav making a ‘gun to temple and firing’ gesture.
Maybe in other circumstances I’d have groaned, but it felt like Robin was being refreshing and surprising. And you know, it’s never the worst thing to hear.
‘I’m not beautiful.’
I resisted the urge to fuss at my hair, but held my stomach in.
‘You clearly are.’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘So what it’s like being beautiful, is thinking you’re not beautiful?’
I laughed. ‘Erm. If you insist.’
‘That’s a let-down. I’d thought it’d be like being a Disney heroine where you can make the pots and pans clean themselves and the broom dance.’
Rav leaned over minutes later and whispered: ‘I bet you can make his broom dance, if you follow.’
I laughed and realised I was interested in someone for the first time in ages.
I did something that night I never do: as Robin reappeared and slid back in next to me, refilling my glass: I thought, I’m having you. I’m taking you home.
After whispered I like you / I like you toos and kissing by the taxi rank we ended up having very mediocre intercourse in a room at The Mercure, as Robin couldn’t even be bothered to travel back to his flat. My big first-night-sex adventure ended with me bouncing around on top of a very drunk, semi-comatose comedian who kept groaning: ‘Talk dirty to me, Georgina the waitress, talk dirty! Be filthy and nasty!’
Nasty?
I shouted: ‘Shag me, you curly-haired blowhard!’
Rav is still musing Robin’s shortcomings.
‘You know, I didn’t spend enough time around Robin to diagnose the Dark Triad, but I wouldn’t be surprised.’
‘That sounds like a hip-hop group.’
‘Narcissism, manipulation, lack of empathy,’ Rav says, counting them off on his fingers, then grabbing for the open bag of Walkers. ‘The people who can reel you in and spit you out, without a second’s guilt.’
Rav is a counsellor. You’d never peg the skinny Asian lad with the Morrissey quiff and the discreetly peacocky clothing as such. He is coolly analytical and unsentimental and probably the ideal person to have around if you get yourself involved with a technicolour fountain of dysfunction like Robin. Though there’s now been enough alcohol-fuelled deconstruction I think we might’ve turned your run-of-the-mill selfish arse into a Shakespearean villain.
Jo chews the inside of her lip.
‘I thought Robin was very idio … idio …’
‘Idiotic?’ Clem says.
‘No … like, idi …’
‘Idi Amin?’ Rav says.
‘No, a word for individual that isn’t individual!’
‘Idiosyncratic?’ I say.
‘Yes! I didn’t like how rude he was to you though.’
I frown. ‘I honestly thought it was teasing.’
I prize my capacity to take a joke. It’s painful to think my friends were cringing for me, and that I don’t know where the line should be.
Clem purses her mouth.
‘And whenever you gave an opinion about anything, Robin was straight in there with “maybe the people who disagree have a point” or “maybe you were too touchy”. I spotted it right away as a psycho ex used to do it to me. Constant undermining. They don’t want you to trust yourself on anything.’
Oh, God. She’s right. At first I was bowled over by Robin’s iconoclastic take on my life – yet the solution, now I think about it, was always that I should fix my attitude and stop being such a princess. Wow, I’ve chosen a smart cookie and a challenge here, I congratulated myself, look at how he’ll just come right out and say it. Not: why is this bloke never on my side?
I gave Robin so much leeway because I thought he was ‘Other’ – an emissary from a cleverer, more rarefied and liberal world than that of Georgina the Waitress. Anything I disliked was down to having not caught up with the latest trend yet, not being an artist with an artist’s temperament. I realise, as per the Lou conversation, he was always subtly reinforcing the idea I was two steps behind.
‘He’s this loaded posh boy and his idea of showing you a good time was you trekking out to the flat his parents bought him to get high and listen to his drivel,’ Clem says. ‘Did he ever take you anywhere?’
Ah. No. Again, I told myself that was a sign of how gloriously unmaterialistic he was – not short of funds but uninterested in spendy dinners, showing off, roostering round town, trying to bedazzle me with his wealth. He wanted to talk about cerebral things. (Himself and his work.)
I’m sucking down wine fast and writing myself an internal memo about how an athletic ability to find the positive – the sort that’s drilled into girls especially: be grateful, smile! – isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes you should ask yourself why you’re having to.
And I’m reflecting on other signals I successfully blocked out. The first time I properly introduced Robin to the gang was Clem’s thirtieth. I’d thought Clem spent the whole night on the other side of the room to circulate, that Rav got lordly drunk due to the units in a pitcher of Dark and Stormy and that Jo was quiet due to pre-menstrual issues. Meanwhile, a visibly bored Robin said he ‘wasn’t good in crowds’.
I grimace into my glass:
‘I hope you don’t think I dated a tosser because he’d been on television once or twice.’
‘Oh, no,’ Rav says, ‘We think you dated a tosser as you thought he was something out of the ordinary, am I right? Which, y’know. He was …’
Jo adds: ‘It’s not as if the rest of us are doing any better.’
I wasn’t going to say it but it’s not usually me who brings a cuckoo into the nest. My few boyfriends in my twenties have been albeit-unthrilling, unsuited-to-me, but nice enough guys.
Meanwhile Rav’s carousel of internet dates end up being hard to distinguish from his therapy list – ‘Only I can’t charge for my time’ – Jo is long-term hung up on the charismatic neighbourhood rotter, Shagger Phil, and Clem believes romantic love is a concept designed