Bitter Sweet

by Robert Young

It is the approach of my birthday and plans are afoot. Sally has made allusions to a lovely evening out, very romantic, very exciting and the pointed reference she makes to ’unwrapping presents’ may be clumsy but it has me emit a sound that can only be described as a guffaw, if indeed such a term is still in any kind of usage. A guffaw.

  The chaps are also very much looking forward to an old fashioned boys-night, which will doubtless involve little more planning than the clear intention to drink very heavily for a prolonged period and in more than one place.

  You've spotted the problem of course. Two plans into one night don't go. There is one way and one way only that I can choose to go here but I am, even on the cusp of my 28th birthday, still childishly afraid of telling my friends that I will be going out with a girl instead of them. The fear of what amounts to no more than being teased a little bit, has me in its pathetic thrall right up until the moment when Sally calls to tell me that she she's had her shift changed on her at short notice due to some sporting event or other and will now need to rearrange for the preceding night. She is full of apologies and promises of making it up to me and I, filthy dirty little man that I am, feign disappointment and conceal my relief and let her tell me how guilty she is about it all without attempting to assuage that guilt at all. It's hardly the worst of my sins though, let’s face it.

  We arrange for the night before my birthday instead, which is better than the night after when I will be, no doubt, apocalyptically hung over.

  So there we are, sipping a glass of cold Cava that Sally has brought over for us to drink before we go out to what she knows to be one of my favourite restaurants, but which she does not know, and need not know, is also the restaurant that Mel took me to last year, because I made her. Look, I realise that at no point am I winning your respect or admiration, but that's not the point really.

  The Cava is cold and dry and I think is maybe going to her head because of what she does next. She presents me with a gift-wrapped package and has me open it as she watches me over the top of her champagne flute.

  Inside the box, nestled amid soft crepe, is a very sheer, thin, black item that might be a negligee or a chemise or some such other term of which I have no working knowledge. Her eyes flash and she grins at me.

  ’I'm not sure this is going to fit me darling,’ I say and she laughs, empties her glass and lifts it gently from the box.

  ’Best see if it fits me then,’ she says and I'm glad she leaves the room at that point because I'm pretty sure that I actually blushed. Not that I'm especially prudish, I'm sure you've figured that part out. But simply the prospect that she is about to put it on for me, before we have even ventured out for the romantic dinner and that the likelihood that the mental image of how she will look will simply do no justice to the actual image.

  So I'm slightly perturbed by the ringing of the doorbell and when I check the intercom to the front door am dismayed to discover that it is Sonny and that he insists that he needs to see me, if only for a moment.

  Sally is in the bathroom changing and I call through the door to her that Sonny is popping his head in but will be gone in no more than thirty seconds, by door or by window if need be.

  When he bounces up the stairs he's puppy-dog excited but furtive and slightly odd in his behaviour, signs I largely miss what with the circumstances and all, and as he chatters about not being able to make the birthday night out until later in the evening and having a few things to do I'm barely listening to him and am gazing past his shoulder at the movement of light and shadows in the bathroom doorframe that promise a whole world of indulgence and wonders, a world that Sonny is denying me entry to.

  From the living room my phone brrrrrrrr’s on the table top where I left it as a text arrives. Sonny turns to look in that direction and I take it as a chance to break the conversation in the fervent hope that he will leave and I won't be forced into having to actually chase or throw him out the nearest exit point.

  I snatch up the handset and am further knocked off balance as I see that the text is from Mel, the first since our break up, and though it is at the end of the message I spot first that it includes not just a smiley face emoticon, but the one with the winking and the p for a tongue. Like this ;-p

  Dear Lord.

  The tone is very gently flirtatious, wishes me a happy birthday for tomorrow and makes reference to my birthday the previous year. This unlocks a flood of thoughts and emotions; guilt that I'm going to the same restaurant but with a different girl, guilt that I have let Sally know that it is a favourite but none of the history that resides there for me. I recall the markedly better state of my relationship with Mel and precisely how that manifested itself later on that evening in my bed. This one here in fact, in the room that Sonny seems to have disappeared into when I come back out if the living room.

  He emerges from the bedroom and mutters something unclear as he hooks a thumb over his shoulder but at the point at which the question forms on my lips about repeating what he said, I think better of it because I have kept Sally waiting past the thirty second mark, in that, and I'm a little wobbly from Mel’s text.

  As I see him to the door he says ’See you tomorrow’ and then he winks at me.

  Winks.

  By this point frankly I'm suffering from sensory overload and there is precisely too much information coming at me for me to process. To be honest, I had my plate full with Sally giving me that look, and skipping off to put on that negligee/chemise/skimpy item. Everything else is more than I'm equipped for and certainly more than I could be reasonably expected to cope with.

  I head back into the flat and my focus returns to exactly the thing that you know it will be on, and I am absolutely correct in my assumption that the mental image of her wearing it was wholly inadequate, as am I, I fear, over the course of the next few all-too-brief minutes.

  Still. At least we won't be late for dinner. Every cloud has a silver lining, and a faint sense of anticlimax.

  As we leave the flat and head for the bus stop, Sally brandishes a book at me, snatched from my bedside table.

  ’I'm borrowing this. You finished it right?’ I nod and wave her out and then follow her down the steps to the street, paying no attention to the book going into her bag and all of it to her jeans.

  As we approach the bus stop I see Sonny emerge from the pub across the road and head to the same bus stop, giving me an excellent opportunity for some awkward conversation and to fret about both the fact that I've not really let their two paths cross, she being what she is, and he being what he is, and that Sonny might have a clue about what has just taken place in the embarrassingly short space of time since he left my flat. In the time it has taken him to conduct a brief, illicit transaction, I have, in a certain sense, done so too. Only one of them was illegal but I'm by far the more ashamed and I don't even know if he knows.

  Stilted introductions made the conversation drifts swiftly into silence and Sally fishes her phone from her bag and begins tapping at the screen. Sonny watches her remove and then replace the book in her hunt for the handset and then looks slowly up at me.

  ’You get it?’ he asks quietly.

  I frown back because it does not sound like a prying question in its tone and delivery and neither am I convinced that even Sonny would ask me so directly whether I had just had sex with the woman in question standing so very close.

  ’I left you something. For tomorrow.’

  It is not that which does it but rather the nod to her handbag, to the book that he watched so carefully in and out of her bag. The penny begins its slow descent.

  You'll have got there quicker than I did I imagine, but in case you're not quite sure what's just elapsed over the course of the last twenty to thirty minutes it is something like this.

  Sonny, my drug dealer friend, has popped round to drop me off ’something for tomorrow’, which is to be an old fashioned boys night out of excess and debauchery. He slipped briefly in and out of my bedroom, whence the
book he was so intently regarding just a moment ago had been sitting on the bedside table. This same book now lies inside the handbag of my girlfriend who is, as we established so much earlier on, a police officer, employed by Her Majesty’s Government to uphold the laws of the land.

  Now recall that I mentioned Sonny’s one and only example of perfect timing being that first time I met him. What occurs next is a decent demonstration of the other side of that unfortunately weighted coin where anarchic trouble and misfortune and poor decisions seem to attend him at every turn.

  A police patrol car sidles up to the kerb and we find ourselves, the three of us, the subject of a stop and search.

  Chapter 12