Little Black Everything

by Alex Coleman

  “Oops,” Holly muttered. “Forgot to ask. How’s that going?”

  Aisling gave her a look. “Yeah, cheers. I could be spending my fifth night tied to an altar in his secret lair for all the attention you’ve paid.”

  “What’s this all about?” James asked.

  Aisling told him all about Kieran, making an extra-special effort (it seemed to Holly) not to sound conceited and irrational. Orla only paid attention up to the point where the word “stalker” was mentioned; thereafter, she re-engaged John in their private tête-à-tête. James, on the other hand, listened carefully. His eyes grew ever wider as the story progressed and when she came to the revelation about her desk-drawer discovery, seemed to take over the top half of his face.

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s not good.”

  She shook her head. “Nope. Tell you the truth, James, I’ve been a bit upset about it.”

  “So what’s the latest?” Holly asked.

  “Nothing’s happened since,” Aisling said. Somehow, she managed to deliver this piece of non-news as if it was the climax of a spooky story.

  Holly drained her drink. “Grand, so.”

  Aisling shook her head and gave James a sad little glance as if to say, You see what I have to put up with.

  “I’d hardly call it ‘grand’,” he said. “This sounds serious to me. You’ve told your boss, I presume, Aisling?”

  Her head drooped. “No. I don’t know, I just . . . I suppose I’m kind of embarrassed. I’m afraid of sounding paranoid.”

  Holly waited to see if she would add anything else. Double entendres? Wife doesn’t understand him? She didn’t.

  “That’s understandable,” James said. “But still. You can’t let him get away with that sort of carry-on.”

  Holly looked around for someone to order more drinks from but there was no one. “I’m going to the bar,” she announced. “Same again all round?”

  Aisling and James nodded. Holly practically had to wave her arms about to get Orla and John’s attention. They seemed to have made a lot of progress very quickly. Both wore dopey grins as they agreed that, yes indeed, fresh drinks would be a fine thing. It seemed that on this score at least, the night was going to be a success. While she was waiting to be served at the bar, Holly took stock. It was beginning to dawn on her that she’d spent too much time concentrating on being pleasant – a task at which she had almost entirely failed, in any case – and nothing like enough on actual flirting. It was time to buckle down and get to it. Now, flirting – how did that go again? She bit her lip and frowned. She’d read countless magazine articles on the subject over the years, of course, but because she’d always thought that they were written by morons for morons, she’d never really paid much attention. Physical contact was an obvious one, but that wasn’t going to happen. She’d trailed behind as they’d taken their seats and, despite her frantic jostling, had wound up on the opposite side of the table to James. There was no way she could casually brush his wrist, say, without first getting to her feet and reaching across like a drowning victim going for a rope. She’d had as much physical contact as she was going to get in the theatre, she feared, and that hadn’t amounted to much (once or twice, while rubbing her forehead in an attempt to ease the tension, she had poked him in the arm with her elbow). Eye contact was another good bet, but that was not without its problems either. She’d been trying to maintain same all night and had discovered that it wasn’t easy. James was the eye-contact type to begin with. Any attempt to match him eyeball for eyeball soon began to feel less like a sexy dalliance than a staring contest. Get touchy-feely, make eye contact . . . There was a third big one, she was sure of it, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

  She glanced back at the table – and froze. The sensation that swept over her (from the ground up, it seemed) was both confusing and disturbing. She felt a deep conviction that something was wrong, but it was not immediately obvious what it was. Her eyelids slowly closed and opened, closed and opened. There was nothing unusual about the scene. It was just as she’d left it. Orla and John. James and Aisling. And then it hit her. They looked like two couples. She could put it no other way. It was more a gut feeling than a coherent thought. Was it the way they were sitting? The angle of their heads? The gestures they were using? Their expressions? She couldn’t put her finger on it. But she couldn’t help but see a two-word phrase flashing in her head: Double Date. Over her shoulder, a barman gruffly asked if she was just standing there for the hell of it or did she want a drink or what. She turned and gave him the order in a slow monotone, dimly aware that in any other circumstances she would be eviscerating him for his rudeness. She took a deep breath and leaned against the bar for support. What was going on here? Why did she feel so upset? So what if James and Aisling looked like a couple? Big deal. They weren’t. And then her conscious mind reached the conclusion that her subconscious had apparently already embraced. They looked like a couple because, just like Orla and John, they were on their way to being one. She risked another glance at the table. As if on cue, James said something and shook his head in disbelief. Aisling threw her head back and laughed, then rocked forward again. As she did so, she grabbed his forearm, patted it once, twice, three times – Stop it, you’re killing me – and then withdrew her hand. Holly’s knees wobbled. The barman returned with the drinks. She paid him and made a triangle of the glasses between her hands. The walk back seemed to take several minutes. James jumped up from his seat as she approached and took the drinks from her. She went back to the bar to get the other two and her change.

  “Cheer up,” the barman said as he slapped the coins into a beer puddle by her outstretched hand. “It might never happen.”

  This snapped her out of her funk. “Get yourself some deodorant,” she said as she made a big deal of picking up the money. “You smell like a chimp’s crotch.”

  She turned on her heels and went back to the table.

  “I’ve been doing my damsel-in-distress bit,” Aisling informed Holly as she gave Orla and John their drinks (they barely looked up).

  “Is that right?” Holly said. As if things weren’t bad enough already, she misjudged the height of her seat; it was more of a falling-down than a sitting-down.

  “Yeah. About Kieran. James is up for bumping into him in a dark alley somewhere. He’s such a sweetheart.”

  Holly raised an eyebrow at him. “Really? I’m surprised. I didn’t have you down as the physical type.”

  He frowned, or at least pretended to. “I never said anything about a dark alley, to be fair. I just said that someone should have a word with this guy. Actually, now that I think about it, I didn’t even say it should be me.”

  Aisling reacted to this as if was some devastating Wildean quip. She roared with laughter and although she didn’t go for a forearm pat this time, she did shake her head and say, “James, James, James, you’re gas.”

  Say their name as often as possible, Holly fumed to herself. That was the third one. Get touchy-feely, make eye contact and say their name as often as possible. She didn’t want to look directly at Aisling, but she was sorely tempted to tell her that she’d forgotten to add her trademark hair-flip. And this “sweetheart” business . . . She’d called him that during their phone conversation the other day too. The one in which she’d asked Holly if there was anything on the horizon between herself and James; the one in which Holly had said no – she wasn’t interested.

  “Are you all right, Holly?” James asked. “You look a bit miserable.”

  “But then again, don’t I always?” she said with a little exhalation that even she recognised as sickeningly self-pitying.

  “No. Of course you don’t. Did something happen at the bar?”

  She leaped at this unexpected opportunity. “Yeah. Well, sort of. Barman was a bit of a cretin, that’s all.”

  For half a second, she allowed herself to hope that James might offer to “have a word” with him too. He didn’t.

  “Holly has the w
orst luck with cretins,” Aisling said. “Service industry cretins, especially. She made a waiter quit on the spot once. Made him cry too.”

  “That’s a total exaggeration,” Holly said.

  The incident in question had taken place a few years previously. They’d been out for a cheap and cheerful Friday-night pizza, just the two of them. Their waiter cocked up both starters and both mains, then began rolling his eyes and mumbling obscenities when they politely pointed out the mistakes. The final straw came with the bill. It seemed suspiciously heavy and, upon closer inspection, turned out to include the sum of thirty-odd euros for a bottle of sparkling water. Holly’s recollection was that Aisling had been just as angry as she was and hence just as responsible for the waiter’s sudden, tearful, furious and tremendously loud exit. Not that either of them was fully to blame, really. An apologetic manager had come over to explain that the guy had recently broken up with his girlfriend and had been showing up to work either late or drunk for a week. If he hadn’t walked out, there was little doubt that he would shortly have been escorted out. The way Holly remembered it, she and Aisling had felt bad about their role in the end of his waiting career and had asked the manager to give the guy another chance if he ever showed up again. In the version of events that Aisling presented to James, however, the waiter had “been under a bit of stress”, admittedly, but regardless of his mental state could not possibly have been expected to survive the “torrent of abuse” that Holly – acting alone, apparently – had heaped upon him.

  When it became clear that she was getting turned over, Holly decided not to interrupt. She would keep her powder dry and issue a firm rebuttal when it was all over. But as the story dragged on, she decided that she couldn’t be bothered. What was the point? What good would it do her in the long run? When Aisling decided to give a man a shot at the title, there was only ever one outcome. So it was already too late. In fairness to him, James didn’t seem to think of it as a story about Holly at all. He was more interested in the poor waiter and his tragic romance. It was a response that just half an hour previously would have had Holly swooning. Now it made her feel even worse. She looked to her right and saw that Orla and John both had their phones out. They were swapping numbers. She looked back at Aisling and James. They were leaning towards each other now, gazes locked. A sense of panic swept over her. What was she supposed to do, just sit there and watch them edging ever closer together, pausing occasionally to give her a dirty look or, worse, a moment or two of pity attention? Four’s company, she thought, five’s a crowd.

  “Listen,” she said, so loudly that all four of them jerked their heads in her direction. “I’m getting a splitting headache. I think I’ll just put myself in a taxi and head on home.”

  There was some perfunctory interrogation. Was she sure? This was very sudden. Would she be all right on her own? Had she any tablets in her bag? Then the questions just stopped coming. Before she had time to second-guess her hasty decision, she was waving goodbye over her shoulder.

  Chapter 14

  Holly spent a good portion of Sunday morning in a bath that she saturated with every oil and salt in her possession. Her intention was to create a sense of luxury and bliss, to give herself a pampering of such profound opulence that it alone would lift her mood. In reality, her only achievement was to render the air so sickly sweet that it was all but unbreathable. She had to open the window, in fact, to stave off suffocation, which meant subjecting the parts of her that were resting above the waterline to a stiff breeze. It’s never like this in the ads, she thought as she lay there, choking and shivering.

  Lunch was no great success either. She splashed out on a “Luxury Gourmet Salad” from a tremendously expensive deli down the road and was greatly excited to find out what was so different about it. Not a single thing, it turned out, unless you counted the exotic dressing, which tasted like vinegar cut with Fairy Liquid and came in a long pink sachet that bore a passing resemblance to an unrolled condom.

  There was an old western on BBC2 in the afternoon and she watched a bit of that, marvelling in an absent sort of way that audiences were once willing to believe in cowboys with dazzling white teeth and crisp yellow neckerchiefs. Somewhere towards tea-time, she dragged herself into the kitchen and slurped her way through a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. It had only just gone seven thirty when she first started to seriously contemplate going to bed. She felt silly for doing so and forced herself to sit through yet another documentary about sharks. Shortly after it ended, she received a text message from Aisling. It read “Success!”. Holly’s first reaction was to drop her arm limply by her side and wait to be swept away by some sort of breakdown. But then she realised that the message almost certainly related to Orla and John. Aisling was not in the habit of advertising her “hook-ups”, as she called them, and even if she was, it seemed unlikely that she would describe the event as a “success”. Successes were for people who had been working hard at something and were relieved that it had all come good. Aisling never had to work at hook-ups. As Holly was painfully aware, they just seemed to happen. She stared at her phone for a while (as if that would provide some mystical insight), then decided that she might as well put herself out of her misery. There was no way she could face ringing Aisling – You and James? Well, I never! Good for you – so she called Orla instead.

  As conversations went, it was a little one-sided. Orla was sorry not to have made enquiries herself at some point during the day – Holly had almost forgotten about her headache claim – but she hadn’t had the chance: John had only just left. She tried to say this casually, as if she had yet to decide if she was pleased about it, but her voice gave her away. Holly asked for particulars. Orla provided them, slowly at first but with ever-increasing gusto. Before long, she dropped the pretence entirely and allowed herself free license to froth and foam about John’s many qualities. He was such a sensitive soul. He was an old-school gent. He did a mean Bertie Ahern. He made a lovely cup of tea. He knew a lot about history. He knew a lot about computers. He knew an awful lot about The Beatles. They hadn’t gone “the whole hog”, as she insisted on putting it, but they had slept in the same bed and had done a significant amount of “kissing and cuddling”. The details just kept on coming. Holly felt like someone who’d asked for a sip of water only to be swept away down the street by a water cannon.

  “So,” she said at what seemed like an appropriate juncture, “what about Aisling? Did she get home safely?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” Orla replied. “She was still there when we left. Her and James. They seemed pretty drunk, the pair of them.”

  Holly’s foot started to tap. “Is that right?”

  “Yeah. She was worse than he was . . . Oh God, no!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Orla, what –”

  “I think I made a joke about a dry martini, shaken not stirred.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Don’t worry about it. He probably didn’t even notice, he’s that used to it.”

  “You always notice when people –”

  “So what? We’re . . . different. Apparently.”

  This was not a topic that Holly was keen to explore. She steered the conversation back to John, to Orla’s barely concealed delight. When the phone call finally ended – it took a while – she went straight to bed and pulled the duvet right over her head.

  The following week was a deeply frustrating one. Holly cornered James at the first opportunity on Monday, but all he talked about was John. The two of them had met in town the previous day for a coffee and a bit of post-match analysis. According to James, John was a changed man; he actually looked different. Even if his relationship with Orla went nowhere in the long run, it had already been worth it. The very fact that there was at least one woman on the planet who found him attractive had transformed him, literally overnight. It was a marvel. Holly reported that Orla was similarly impressed with life
and the two of them congratulated each other again on the great thing they had done for their friends. James asked about Holly’s headache then and she told him it had cleared up quickly enough. Thereafter, the conversation simply ran into a wall. Holly bounced up and down on her toes, trying desperately not to just grab him the shoulders and screech, “Did you go home with Aisling?” She was relieved when Eleanor Duffy joined them and started small-talking (even if Eleanor did keep catching her eye while raising her eyebrow a fraction in James’s direction). Eventually, Holly had to leave for class. She didn’t see James for the rest of the day. Tuesday and Wednesday were no improvement. She didn’t get so much as five seconds on her own with him and, worse, was twice asked how they were “getting on” by Eleanor. Thursday was marginally better, in as far as she had James all to herself for three minutes in the corridor outside the art room. But no clues were dropped. There was no longer any doubt in her mind; she’d made a huge mistake in leaving the pub early. Staying put could well have turned out to be a horribly painful experience, but at least she would have known for sure. Anything would have been an improvement on the terrible limbo she found herself in now.

  The week’s final window of opportunity opened right at the last moment. Holly saw James getting into car when she emerged from the front door at the end of the day and jogged across the tarmac towards him, hoping that there were no students still hanging around who might see her and draw the correct conclusion. She couldn’t help but hear Malachy Murphy’s voice in her head as she went along: “You’ll never guess what I saw on Friday, lads – Ho Ho Christmas running after 007 like a bitch in heat!”

  James started to reverse out of his parking space as she approached, so she slowed down into what she hoped would look like a casual dawdle when he spotted it in his rear-view mirror. To her relief, he didn’t drive off with a wave when he saw her coming but rather stopped and wound down his window.