For a woman of her age, Sally maintains a spirited social life. She has, since her return to Dublin, been part of a group of five that she met at work. Though she is the eldest in the group by twenty years, Sally thinks she does a good job of keeping up with the others. You will find her out gallivanting four nights a month, cackling up into the cold air, staggering down footpaths in wobbly heels.
Tonight they are in McBertie’s. Sally and Lauren are in the smoking area, a square, red-lit room that, mirrored on three sides, feels larger than it is. Below the mirror is a long and raised red seat, made out of the same material as diner booths. There are high tables and high chairs which always seem to have one short leg. The choking ashtrays are rarely emptied.
Sally’s phone has just vibrated on the table. There is a message from Hugo:
Hey Sally. I won’t be coming out tonight. I’m very tired and I have things to do tomorrow. Sorry.
Sally puts her phone back on the table, feeling first a familiar, anti-climactic kind of relief. She lifts her glass without realising that it’s empty, save for the lime wedge that lands on her lip. She needs a drink but first she lights a cigarette. In the mirror’s reflection she observes Lauren, then herself, then Lauren again. She notices less the differences of age – her thinness of hair, her lines and sags – and more the differences of expression. There is an obvious calmness, a composure, settled on Lauren’s face. An arrogance, even, in the way her eyes inspect the surrounding tables, the way she giggles down into her phone.
‘He’s not coming out,’ Sally says.
‘Who?’
‘Hugo.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Sal,’ Lauren says, taking longer than she should to discard her amusement at whatever was on her phone, and to adopt a more suitable mood.
Sally says it’s fine, that it doesn’t matter, which is the appropriate response – brushing it off. It is the response Sally’s friends would be expecting, and would know how to react to. However, the difficulty that Sally experiences in emitting this reaction surprises her. She begins to curse herself for letting her hopes get carried away.
With Lauren now rubbing Sally’s knee, and – however belatedly – fulfilling the role of compassionate friend, Sally says, ‘Honestly, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it,’ before pulling her leg out from under Lauren’s hand.
This seems to convince Lauren that things are indeed fine, and that she can now perk up. She says, ‘Guess we won’t be able to test your theory till Friday.’
‘What theory?’
‘Weren’t you saying earlier that you thought Hugo might be gay?’
Their staff Christmas party is on Friday. They all work in a care home in Donnybrook; Hugo is the new chef. Sally didn’t actually invite Hugo tonight. She had a smoke with him yesterday morning and he asked her if she had any plans for the weekend. She mentioned McBertie’s, forgetting that Hugo only lived around the corner from Ranelagh. He said he might drop by and Sally didn’t know what to say other than okay. He seems to Sally a bit clueless like that, like he doesn’t really know how things work. The others aren’t too keen on him. He gave out to Áine one day for taking oranges from the walk-in fridge. ‘French prick,’ Áine had said. They haven’t spent as much time with him as Sally has, though. She likes that he’s big and doesn’t talk too much, like he has nothing to prove. And she likes his accent. Mostly, though, she likes that because the others don’t like him, they don’t talk to him about her. He knows only what Sally has revealed to him about herself.
Earlier tonight, Sally was saying that she thought Hugo might be gay. She said she saw him leaving work one day with a man about his age. Also, he didn’t have any kids. The others told Sally that she was imagining things, and in fairness, she probably thought she was too. But since she has started going for smoke breaks with Hugo, her friends have become convinced that she has a thing for him. She needs some way of keeping them off her back.
The dancefloor in McBertie’s is cleverly positioned. It runs alongside the main bar, allowing customers to lean across mid-step and place their orders. As the nights grow old, the floor gets sticky from spilled drink. By closing time it feels like a piece of it is glued to one’s heel.
Sally and Lauren buy vodka 7ups and join the others in the middle of the dancefloor. Fairytale of New York plays; then Feliz Navidad. It is always easiest for Sally to dance when Neil is around. He sneaks up behind strangers, making faces over their shoulders, pretending to hit on the men. It is immature, but it means that all eyes are on him; the rest of them can just dance and laugh. When Neil isn’t around, Sally feels like a hostage on the dancefloor, brought there as an offering to whichever decent-looking older men are around.
Sure enough, when Neil runs off to the bathroom (followed by Áine, which means they’re gone to do coke), Diego gently pushes Sally in the direction of a man with a white beard. The man is alone, dancing with his back hunched and elbows out, in a kind of circle around nothing. When Sally accidentally makes eye contact with the man, he seems to read her look as an invitation to approach. Sally takes Lauren’s hand and turns her back to the man, and for a moment feels him lingering a few feet behind her. Diego then approaches the man and speaks into his ear in a manner that seems apologetic. Sally tells Lauren that she’s going for a smoke.
Sally likes to sneak off for a smoke or two by herself on nights out. She likes to think that maybe her friends are missing her, or that they are at least wondering where she is. She really likes her friends, and she knows that they like her too for the way she has always come across to them. She is their cool older friend who still needs her nights out on the town. And why risk showing them something else, something they might not like as much? That’s why, or at least that’s part of the reason why she has to keep wearing these low-cut tops and short skirts that she’s always having to pull down while she walks around. The first time she went out with this group she was fresh off her divorce and she kissed three different men in a pub on Merchant’s Quay. Then the second night she kissed two men and left the pub with one of them. She told Lauren and Áine the next day that the man couldn’t get it up – they had a great laugh about it. The truth is that she had wished the man well and taken a taxi home by herself. Since then her image has stuck. A version of herself that Sally is both comfortable and uncomfortable with. It requires quite a bit of deception, but it also keeps her friends at a distance she likes – close enough.
McBertie’s tends to fill up at 2am when all the other pubs in Ranelagh close. Sally and Lauren are, by this stage, usually chatting to some men in suits; sometimes Lauren will even be sitting on one of their laps. Sally doesn’t mind these interactions. There’s no pressure because the men are young and they are only really there for Lauren. And Sally usually gets a free drink out of it anyway. At some point Lauren will stand up and tell the men how nice it has been to meet them, but that she has a boyfriend. Then the men might look on while Lauren dances; they might even come over to chat to her again. That’s when Sally and one of the others will step in and tell them that Lauren has a boyfriend, and that they now need to leave her alone. Sally always enjoys this last part.
Sally spots Diego at the bar. She leaves Lauren and the man with the Donegal accent that Lauren has been chatting to. She buys herself a vodka 7up, and Diego a gin and tonic.
‘That woman is some flirt,’ Sally says.
‘Who?’
‘Who do you think?’
Diego says nothing. He is looking away from Sally, towards the dancefloor. She shouldn’t expect his full attention. It is getting to that time of night when a very compelling horniness tends to kidnap him. A time when the night’s overall successfulness is under consideration – depending on whether he gets any.
‘Lauren,’ Sally says, louder than she intended.
‘Oh,’ Diego says. ‘She’s just having fun, no?’
‘I know, I know… but sometimes you know–’
‘What? I can’t hear you.’
‘Sometimes I feel bad for her boyfriend!’
Diego stops his inspection of the dancefloor, looks at Sally and raises his eyebrows. It is a look that opens up a little hole of regret in her stomach, one that suggests that she is crossing the line. When Diego returns his stare to the dancefloor, Sally wants to explain herself. She wants to say that she didn’t mean anything by it, that she is just a bit drunk.
When, a minute later, Diego asks Sally whether she thinks the man in the orange shirt with the blond highlights is gay, she is relieved, and her insides seem to knit themselves back into normal order. ‘Good chance,’ she says, ‘You should go for it!’ Diego then takes Sally’s hand, strides onto the dancefloor and approaches the man. Moments later the two men are sharing Diego’s drink and shouting into each other’s ears. Sally goes for a smoke.
She stands in the far corner of the smoking area, beside the kitchen’s fire exit. There is a couple Sally’s age next to her who she thinks are either married or just friends, because no parts of their bodies are touching. A group of lads are speaking loudly about something that someone named Johnno has done. A man sitting on his own looks at Sally and Sally looks away and takes out her phone.
Without feeling like she decides to, Sally opens Whatsapp and re-reads Hugo’s message. ‘Fuck,’ she says to herself, loud enough that someone could have noticed, but no one had. She hasn’t messaged Hugo back. She then writes:
Hey Hugo! Not a problem. I’ll catch you some other time. What have you on tomorrow?
She then deletes the question at the end and looks over the message to make sure there aren’t any typos. She wonders if it’s a bit late to be messaging and locks her phone. Then she unlocks it and sends the message. She lights a cigarette and scrolls through her Facebook feed.
Sally lives in a bungalow in Harold’s Cross with her son, Eoghan, and his girlfriend, Jenny. The place is painted a shade of off-white, and is connected on both sides to bungalows painted slightly different shades of off-white. The back garden is a less than a dozen square feet of concrete; the front garden is a public footpath. They have been here for three years. Sally sleeps in the small bedroom.
Lauren and Áine come back to Sally’s for a nightcap. Neil, who is dating and living with Áine, had been dancing with a stranger just before the pub closed. Áine told him he could go fuck himself, that she was going to sleep at Sally’s tonight. She actually said this before asking Sally if it would be alright, not that Sally would have said no. She always likes to have her friends over after a night out because it takes her even longer than usual to get to sleep. She ends up replaying the night’s interactions and awkward moments in her mind, which gets her thinking about other things too.
The three women are sitting on the couch, their legs hidden beneath a large blue blanket. They are swiping through Tinder on Sally’s phone. Lauren and Áine created the account a few months ago and started messaging some men for a laugh. One night they arranged a date with a man from Kildare after Sally had said that he had nice hair. Sally cancelled the date the next morning, explaining to the man that her friends had taken her phone. ‘Some friends,’ the man had messaged back. She let on to the girls though that she had gone on the date when they asked her about it. Sally said that he was an awful bore and that she couldn’t get away soon enough.
‘Him?’ Lauren asks.
‘Would you go away out of that… he could be my da,’ Sally says.
Swipe. ‘What about him? He’s alright,’ Áine says.
‘No, looks short. Had enough of short men in my life.’
Lauren and Áine mumble in agreement. Sally likes bringing up her ex-husband around her friends. They either shake their heads or call him a bastard, like trained dogs. And even if they don’t know the full story as to why Aidan Keogh is a bastard – all they know about is the affair – it is nice to have their support.
Sally sits up on the couch when she hears the jingling of keys at the front door. She has spent the afternoon watching TV in her dressing gown, coughing up her lungs, and deciding that she will quit the smokes in the new year. She is yet to shower, though she keeps telling herself she will in a few minutes, when the painkillers kick in and her headache eases. Her eyes are tired but she doesn’t want to close them. She won’t sleep tonight if she does.
Eoghan walks into the sitting room eating a chicken fillet roll from the deli, a can of coke bulging out of his trouser pocket. He has inherited his father’s propensity for putting on weight around the gut, and Sally feels like she should tell him that his jumper has become too tight. She doesn’t say anything, however, just watches him sit down onto the chair opposite her. He says ‘hi’ chewily; there is a blob of mayonnaise at the corner of his mouth.
‘How was work?’ Sally says.
Eoghan says fine, but busy. He works as a salesman in an electronics shop in the city centre.
‘There was some smell of smoke in here this morning, Ma,’ he says.
Eoghan doesn’t like when Sally smokes inside. She thought she could get away with having a couple, it being so close to Christmas. He also doesn’t like when Sally invites her friends over in the early hours of the morning, though he doesn’t mention this as often as he used to.
‘Sorry, love,’ Sally says.
Eoghan finishes his roll and mercifully cleans the spot of mayo off his face. He crumples up the deli paper before cracking open the coke can.
‘I was talking to Dad,’ Eoghan says. ‘I told him that myself and Jenny wouldn’t be down till Christmas Day because we’re seeing her folks on Christmas Eve.’
Sally nods, says nothing.
‘And he was annoyed because apparently he wants some help with the cooking.’
Sally weakly mumbles a sound like an ‘oh’ of surprise. She then shrugs as though her ex-husband’s annoyance were a topic she knew nothing about. It has become a safe and reliable modus operandi to say as little as possible about Eoghan’s father when he brings him up. She wonders sometimes though what Aidan says to their son about her. Eoghan continues:
‘But sure he has Freda to help him anyway like.’
Sally slowly rolls her eyes, raises her eyebrows, and presents her son with a quick and knowing smile. It is an act, a performance of contempt, but one her son accepts without query. Sally knows that Freda is the figure, the symbol at whom Eoghan can fling his frustrations about Sally and Aidan’s divorce. And from what little knowledge he possesses about it all, it would make sense to him for Sally to dislike her too.
‘You know what your daddy is like,’ is all that Sally says. Then they talk about something else.
Sally met Aidan Keogh in a pub on Usher’s Quay in 1987 – she was nineteen. That first night he called Sally ‘girl’ enough times that she was sure that he had forgotten her name. He was two inches shorter than her, slim-built, with a small head and hands. He wore a grey three-piece and a musky perfume that made Sally want to lean in towards his neck. Whenever they entered or exited a place, he made a big show of letting Sally go first. He said it was only his second time in Dublin, that he needed to be ‘shown around a bit’. He said that he was up from Cavan for business, that he had just come into a lot of land because of his father’s death. He paid for their drinks out of a fist-sized bundle of notes that he kept in his breast pocket.
At that time Sally was working in the office of a furniture warehouse in East Wall, run by her uncle Séamus. Uncle Séamus was actually a cousin of some sort, and had also, since the death of Sally’s father when she was eight, been the most consistent male influence on her life. She looked after the paperwork and answered the phones, working out of a tiny desk in an alcove at the back of Séamus’ office, next to an old dot matrix printer that made a horrific scratching sound from one end of the day to the other. She had been there for three years and wanted a change, even if her mother warned against it – ‘Thanks be to God that you have the job… Sure couldn’t you be doing a lot worse’.
Sally spent four evenings with Aidan Keogh that August week. Down the quays, up Grafton Street, in around Temple Bar, her arm hooked around his, walking with a weightlessness she had never felt before. It was the looks from those they walked past that she enjoyed most. The disinterested glances from other couples, the stares from lone men whose interest seemed to linger even longer now that she clung to the arm of another. In the eyes of these strangers she could see how unremarkable they were, how commonplace. It felt like cheating, almost too easy, that she, that they, could bestow upon each other this status of ordinariness. That they could be left alone and secure in their cosy little item of two.
She had never been with man. Aidan had a room booked in a hotel for the week and each night he asked Sally if she would like to come up for one last drink. Each night, fearful of exposing her inexperience, Sally said no. And though each time she declined it felt like her latest refusal would be the one to drive him away, Sally now understands that her saying no had the opposite effect. That this was what really interested Aidan about her.
Before leaving Dublin he invited her to Cavan for a weekend. Three weeks later she left her job in the warehouse and moved to Fairtown, Co. Cavan. Her mother told her she had lost it, told the family that she was a ‘lost cause’. A year later she was Sally Keogh, and a year after that, Eoghan was born. In 2001, after Eoghan started secondary school, Sally got a job in the nursing home in Castlemanor. With Eoghan out of the house more, she had been looking for something to do. Caring suited her well. She liked being the person looking after another person, the accompaniment to the life of a subject that wasn’t her. She worked at Castlemanor for nine years, until Aidan had his affair and Sally moved back to Dublin with her son.
Monday, 8.45am. Sally enters the staff room and switches on the kettle. She takes a teaspoon from the press before noticing that her red mug is missing. The growing hiss of the kettle is soon accompanied by a whistle – low then quickly high – coming from outside. Hugo is standing in the smoking area. He is pointing at Sally’s steaming mug on the bench beside him.
‘Thanks,’ Sally says, as Hugo looks away. She realises that he can’t hear her through the window.
The smoking area comprises of a small shelter, with a bench wide enough for four. The plastic of the protective screen attracts sun in summer, and rebounds the rain with loud thrashes all year round. There are two narrow pockets for cigarette butts that are almost full.
‘Thanks a mil,’ Sally says when she is outside.
Hugo mumbles something that sounds a bit like no problem. He is standing, holding his phone in one hand, coffee mug and cigarette in the other. There is dark hair on the tops of his hands; his fingers are thick. He sets down his mug as Sally sits onto the bench. He reaches into his back pocket and passes Sally a lighter.
‘I don’t know how the fuck you smoke when I’m not here,’ he says.
Sally laughs. She has a lighter in her pocket and another one in her bag. She knows it’s childish, but she’s able to look past this enough to keep going with it.
She asks him about his weekend and he says it was nothing special. Sally then starts talking about Saturday, saying it was great fun and that he would have enjoyed it. Hugo nods along while she reveals what an awful hangover she had yesterday, but when Sally gets the feeling that he’s not really listening to her – he keeps looking at his phone – she cuts herself short by saying, ‘but yeah, it was good fun.’
They say nothing for a few moments. Then Sally says, as jokingly as she can, ‘You’re not going to bail on me again for the party are you?’
Hugo smiles, which makes Sally laugh, louder than she wanted to.
‘Fuck no… I’ll be there,’ he says.
It is Hugo’s gruffness that Sally’s friends don’t like, something that doesn’t bother her as much. He once told Sally a while back that he learned his English in kitchens; that this is why he curses so much.
Hugo sits down on the bench, and Sally, without thinking, scoots over to the right a little, away from him. She then realises that she has done this and scoots back to the left to where she was before.
‘Look,’ Hugo says, holding out his phone. ‘My sister’s kid.’
Sally smiles as she is shown the picture of a pig-tailed girl standing proudly beside a sandcastle, but it is a smile that she has to force onto her face. They have spoken about Hugo’s niece at least three times before. Sally knows that her name is Maria, and that she will be seven in March. So why does he now refer to her as ‘my sister’s kid’?
Sally leaves Hugo at 9am and spends the rest of the morning in the office, organising the residents’ medications. She has a hard time focusing on the task, pausing and staring at nothing in particular, before realising that she has stopped and telling herself to get back to work. It feels like there is a half-dome coating of fuzz around her brain, pushing like a weak current her thoughts toward a single, recurring subject – Hugo.
At lunch Sally sits at a table with four of the residents. Maura O’Connell is telling everyone about her trip to Sandymount Strand. Sally’s phone vibrates just as Maura starts laughing about the two Yorkshire Terriers that were fighting. There’s a message from Hugo:
Coffee in 10? I need a fucking break.
Haha sure!!
Sally suddenly finds it much easier to listen to Maura’s story. She laughs along and repeats the details to a couple of the deafer residents. She makes tea for everyone before heading to the staff room.
The morning Aidan Keogh came into the kitchen and confessed to the affair, Sally learned little that she did not already know. The steam of frying rashers and the low rays of sun combined to create a kind of mist. Sally witnessed her husband’s revelation through a cloud.
He spoke in hesitations, pausing for cheek-puffs and head-shakes, as if there were higher powers at play that had tricked him into adultery. She watched him closely, trying to deduce from his face and voice the necessary signs of remorse, not for her forgiveness – her forgiveness was off the table – but to confirm that she would get custody of Eoghan, uncontested. She said nothing as he spoke, remained silent when he finished. She thought it prudent to let on that she knew nothing, to let him squirm, at least for the time being. Silence would accomplish that, and would save her from expending energy that she did not have. The will to scream and shout at her husband had long departed her, was best buried.
What Sally hadn’t known before that morning was that the woman’s name was Freda; that she was a receptionist at the Kilmore hotel, where they had stayed for two nights the previous autumn. Freda was before then a faceless, nameless heroine, absorbing the significant brunt of Sally’s husband’s urges.
Aidan Keogh liked to dominate. He only liked to dominate. He liked saying the things that he was going to do before doing them, and saying things that he and Sally both know he wasn’t going to do, but that he liked to pretend he might. Most of all he liked seeing real terror in a woman’s eyes. It wasn’t pleasant at the beginning, but it got much worse. It is the faces he made during the act that Sally sees now when she think of him: the veiny forehead; the manic concentration; the drool frothing at the edges of his mouth.
It is the night of the Christmas party. Sally is in her bathroom, applying make-up and sipping at a gin and tonic. It takes her an hour to get ready, though that may be longer today because of the time she spends shaving in the shower. She enjoys getting ready as much as she enjoys going out. She likes seeing her face take on a sharper, more angular appearance as she puts on eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara; the way the new darknesses lend power to her expression. It is, Sally thinks, the face of a woman who is out to enjoy herself, a face of agency and strength. It is only when she leaves her house and is surrounded by people that this confidence leaves her, replaced by the old feelings. Sometimes she wishes that the ‘out’ portion of the night didn’t have to happen, that she could stay here, safe, frozen for a moment within her hopeful convictions.
Sally smokes a cigarette in a laneway across the road from Kiely’s. The night is still and she can hear music and laughter from inside the pub each time someone opens the door. Her exhalations are broken up, as if she were freezing, though it is not that cold. It is 10pm; she’s an hour late. Both Hugo and Lauren have texted her, asking her where she is.
Sally enters the pub and immediately spots Hugo. He is leaning against the bar, wearing a red Christmas jumper. The place is crammed, a cacophony of clinking glasses, chatter and Christmas tunes. Sally, needing the loo and not feeling at all ready for her first interaction with Hugo, walks quickly toward the back of the pub. She is stopped, first by Diego, then Lauren. By the time she has said her hellos and Happy Christmas’, and noted that everyone is quite drunk, she is really bursting.
Hugo is still at the bar when Sally comes out of the bathroom. She sits at the end of the long table that the company has reserved, sipping the vodka 7up that Lauren has bought her.
When Hugo eventually comes over, he says, ‘Where the fuck were you?’
Sally stands up and Hugo collects her into a one-handed hug. She says, ‘did you miss me?’ to which Hugo fails to answer. A drop of his lager falls onto her hand.
Tonight is Sally’s sixth Christmas party in this job. A pattern has emerged whereby everyone sits together in Kiely’s in relative civility, catching up and picking at the finger food. Then the bosses go somewhere (no one knows where), before everyone else goes to McBertie’s.
Tonight, around half-past midnight people start asking each other if they are staying out. Sally asks Hugo, who has been roaming from bar to table to smoking area for hours now, never without a pint in hand.
‘Of course I’m fucking coming.’
Later on, outside Kiely’s, Lauren, Áine, Diego and Neil run towards a taxi, giggling as they hop inside. Sally knows what they’re doing. Lauren waves with a big smile from the front seat. Then she rolls down the window.
‘Make sure she gets there, Hugo!’
Sally and Hugo wave and watch the taxi’s red lights disappear around the corner. For a moment the street is empty of cars. A cold breeze blows and Sally crosses her arms. Farther up the road some women are laughing. Apart from that they are alone.
Hugo is standing on the edge of the road, as if he thought that by doing so a taxi were more likely to come. ‘Here we go,’ he says a minute later, but the taxi drives past his outstretched arm. There are people in the backseat.
‘Fuck,’ Hugo says, rubbing the back of his head. He seems embarrassed to have failed at his one job. Sally wants to say something to make it better.
‘I don’t know why they leave the lights on when they have people inside.’
‘Yeah.’
A taxi drives out of one of the side roads and pulls in beside them. They climb inside and say ‘McBertie’s please,’ to the driver at the same time.
‘No bother.’
While Hugo then talks to the driver about the weather, the football, and what part of France Hugo is from – ‘never heard of it’ – Sally notices herself wishing that the driver would slow down. It feels like something should happen right now, though she does not know what. Hugo, in the other backseat, feels very far away. As if even by reaching her arm across she would not be able to touch him. Sally starts counting down the roads and turns to McBertie’s, silently cursing herself for not doing something, anything, other than just sit there. She offers to pay but Hugo beats her to it. ‘Thanks,’ she says, as they walk inside.
The feeling that she has missed some chance grows over the next hour. Hugo is dragged away by Neil and the rest of the kitchen staff, who are doing shots at the bar. Sally is with Lauren and Áine – dancing, smoking, dancing, smoking.
Now they are all dancing together. Eight of them, thrusting strange, inebriated shapes, singing along to Wham! and Kylie Minogue. Sally is next to Hugo, looking for his eyes before looking away as soon as she finds them. Her friends around her feel like an audience they do not need. There is a distance between her and Hugo that is growing, excruciatingly, with each minute of missed opportunity.
It comes as a shock when Hugo puts his hand on the small of her back, even more of a shock when he kisses her. His lips are big and a bit wet, though he does not overuse his tongue. His hands’ movements upon her back are erratic, squeezy then hesitant, starved yet out of practice.
Lodged in the blindness of kissing, Sally cannot see who cheers, nor who whistles, nor who pinches her side. When she pulls away, noticing for the first time the white powder on the rim of Hugo’s nostril, she is winked at by Lauren, then given a knowing nod by Áine. That they believe the night’s hurdles to have been overcome saddens Sally. She knows this is her doing, but she would like them, at this moment, much closer. When, a few minutes later, Hugo invites Sally back to his place, she is ready to leave. Dancing amongst her friends, she has started to feel utterly alone.
The extent of Hugo’s intoxication becomes clear to Sally when they get outside. He knocks into her as they walk, zig-zagging across her path and back, each time apologising. When Sally slips her fingers into his, the gesture is more practical than romantic, and succeeds in straightening out his strides.
Hugo pauses at the door to his place and taps his pockets. For a moment it looks like he is without keys, before he finds them. He lives on the ground floor of a large, red-brick house on Marlborough Road. In the living room is a couch, TV, coffee table, armchair. There are clothes on a drying rack in the centre of the room. Sally notices the white and blue briefs but little else.
For a moment Sally does nothing other than watch Hugo remove his coat and turn on the lights. She then looks down at the brown mat and wonders what to do next. She begins to long for McBertie’s and her friends, even for the air outside. Guiding home his erroneous steps, Sally had had some control, a purpose of some kind. Now she is in his place, his space. The air in the apartment is quiet with expectation.
‘Want a drink?’ Hugo says.
‘Uhm… no thanks. Had enough I think.’
‘Yeah, me too.’
‘Can I use the bathroom though please?’
The bathroom is small and white, with the odour of a towel left unwashed too long. Sally has a hard time focusing on her reflection in the mirror, and an even harder time re-applying her lipstick. She is drunk. Drunker than she had thought while walking here. Drunk enough that the importance of the next few minutes does not quite reach her conscious state. She knows what is happening, but cannot assign to it the value that her sober self would. This makes her chuckle for some reason. She decides that she will have another drink after all.
Hugo is not in the living room when Sally comes out. The door to the bedroom is now ajar, a yellowish light coming through the gap. Sally pushes open the door and sees Hugo curled up on the bed, clothes and shoes still on. She likes how long his back looks, the way his hand is cupped across his chest. A worry about how much of tonight Hugo will remember, and if he will have any regrets, strikes Sally like a slap in the face. She has no real intention of waking him, though for a moment all she wants is for the night to continue in some way. She removes Hugo’s shoes and puts a blanket over him, purposely brushing his face as she does. When that does not stir him, Sally gives up, starts getting ready for bed herself. As she removes her earrings, the truth of what has happened tonight, the truth of her disappointment, settles in Sally’s mind. And with it comes a tired, drunken, ready-for-bed kind of ecstasy that she has not felt before. She climbs in beside Hugo, her back to his, and falls straight to sleep.