Someone would say, ‘So you know Adam through this place?’
And I’d explain about the D&D games.
Then they’d say, ‘I only know Adam through Tansy really, but…’ or, ‘I’ve known Adam for years – we used to share a house, and…’ or, ‘I don’t know how well you know Adam, but…’
And then all of them, every single one, went on to say more or less the same thing. Did I know that Adam had made a fortune mining Bitcoin and sold his position right at the top of the market? Did I know Adam had a first-class degree from Cambridge? Did I know Adam had been the lead developer on the first ever ride-hailing app in Iran? Had Adam met my cat, because Adam loved cats – in fact he loved all animals. Wasn’t it amazing of Adam to have organised this surprise for Tansy and Josh – but it was just typical of him, really because he was such a good friend and an all-round fantastic person. Adam might seem cold at first but really he was the most loyal, funny, wonderful guy you could ever hope to meet, didn’t I agree?
It was like I’d accidentally wandered into a convention organised by some culty pyramid scheme, only the product everyone was trying to promote was Adam.
At first I thought it was weird, because usually what strangers wanted to talk to me about when they found out I was a pub cook was food: what their favourite restaurants were and whether I’d been to them (generally I hadn’t), what my best secret recipe was (as if I’d tell them, if I had one, because then it wouldn’t be a secret any more) and why I hadn’t mentioned being a vegan in the first five seconds of us talking, because that’s what vegans do, right?
Then I started thinking it was sweet, really, that Adam had so many friends who thought he was wonderful, and it made me question how I hadn’t known this, and why I’d assumed that he was some kind of hermit, spending every night alone in his flat drawing treasure maps for our D&D game, and I began to wonder if I had underestimated him.
And then I thought, Hold on, are they trying to tell me something? Me specifically? Are they trying to get me to like Adam? Not as a friend – I was totally open to that, of course – but as… well, more than a friend? And if so, did it mean that Adam had said something to one of them, or more than one of them, about wanting to be more than a friend to me?
While I was circulating, being introduced to one person after another, having my glass of prosecco filled up over and over, being brought a plate of food by Robbie, who asked if I was sure I didn’t want to sit down after being on my feet all day, like I was his nan or something, I noticed that Adam stayed in one place, by the bar, in the spot where Fat Don usually sat. (He’d turned up as usual in the morning, claiming to have forgotten the pub was closed for a private function, and stood mournfully outside the door like a cat waiting to be let in.) Adam didn’t have to circulate; people were coming up to him, chatting to him, probably thanking him for the party. He was almost as much the centre of attention as Tansy and Josh were.
And I noticed another thing. Whenever anyone came over to chat to Adam, they glanced around the room and their eyes found me. And once I’d noticed it, I couldn’t un-notice it – all those curious glances in my direction, those little smiles and nods. I felt like I was being assessed – in a perfectly nice way, but assessed all the same.
It was getting late now; Robbie had stopped bringing out plates of food and the speed with which Alice was opening bottles of prosecco had slowed down a bit. But no one was showing any signs of leaving just yet. Adam leaned over the bar and said something to Alice, and she smiled, then dimmed the lights a bit, and someone turned the music up.
The Ginger Cat wasn’t really a pub designed for dancing. There were tables and chairs in the way, and we’d signed a pledge to be considerate of our neighbours and not play loud music. But it was loud enough to bring couples and groups to their feet, awkward and shuffling at first, then more enthusiastic as they started to get into it, carried away by the Arctic Monkeys singing about how they bet we looked good on the dance floor.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to put my glass down and join in. I just did it. My feet, tired from being in the kitchen all day and clumsy in my trainers, seemed to have a will of their own. I pulled the curly telephone-wire tie out of my hair and let it loose down my back, not caring that it probably smelled of frying and was almost certainly frizzing like a bastard.
I watched Tansy and Josh together, a golden couple, tall and tanned and happy to be home among their friends. I saw Alice, looking less tired than she had for ages, laughing and wiping the top of the bar in time to the music. I saw Joe push open the door, raise his eyebrows in surprise, then burst into a huge grin and go over to give Alice a hug and a kiss, and it didn’t even hurt any more, seeing them together.
But then I stopped noticing anything else, because Adam came over to me and started to dance.
I was so used to seeing him still, only his hands and his eyes moving, that for a second he seemed like a stranger. He wasn’t stooped over any more, the way he often seemed to be, as if he didn’t know what to do with his long legs and arms and his shoulders that were so broad and lean he looked like he’d left the coat hanger in his shirt.
He didn’t look like that now. He was moving quickly, fluidly, confidently. I realised I’d never seen him smile so much – his teeth were bright white against his beard and his blue eyes were sparkling. I felt an answering smile spread over my face as I moved towards him.
Let me be clear about this: I’m a crap dancer. Compared to Adam, I had none of the moves. But I didn’t actually care – I was having fun, just being in my body the way I was in the gym, enjoying the feeling of being strong and happy and alive. The track changed and I paused, expecting him to move away, but he didn’t and so I didn’t either. We just carried on, grinning at each other like loons and throwing shapes, on and on through that song and the next and the ones after that. He wasn’t taking himself seriously and nor was I (which was just as well, because I’d have looked like someone about to be kicked off Strictly Come Dancing if I’d tried), and I cracked up completely when at one point he dropped down to the floor and did a full-on worm.
We carried on until Alice turned the music down, saying apologetically that it was eleven thirty and we didn’t want to upset the neighbours, and Adam threw one final floss and stopped dancing.
People started to leave after that, drifting off into the night in little clusters to go into town to a club or back to someone’s house to carry on drinking there, or just home to bed. Alice was moving around the bar, clearing up for the night as she always did, but I noticed that she was almost rocking on her feet with tiredness.
‘Go home,’ I said to her. ‘Freddie and I will clear up. It’s fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’ll help,’ Adam said. ‘I kind of feel like this is my mess too, and I should own it.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Alice said. ‘You’re a paying customer.’
‘Doesn’t mean I’m not part of the team,’ Adam argued.
‘You… Okay. That’s really kind. Thank you.’
Alice gathered up her things and moved towards the door, hesitating there for a second and looking protectively around at her pub. But then she broke into a huge yawn that just about split her face in half, and reluctantly pushed open the door and headed for home.
I’d have expected Adam to get in the way, ask annoying questions about what he was meant to do and where things were supposed to go, or just sit down and watch Freddie and me while we worked. But he didn’t. He moved around the room methodically, piling glasses up on the bar, bussing plates through to the kitchen, bagging up cans and bottles ready for the recycling.
‘Aren’t you full of surprises?’ I said. ‘You’re an ace Dungeon Master, a fab dancer and you can tidy a pub like you’ve been doing it for years.’
‘Tidying’s not exactly rocket science, is it?’ Adam asked, his hands full of glasses that he was holding between his fingers by their stems.
‘You probably do rocket
science as well.’
‘That’s not exactly complex either, to be honest. It’s just mechanical engineering with a bit of extra calculus. Not like cooking – that’s hard.’
I heard the back door open and close and the rattle and smash as Freddie heaved the huge bags of bottles into the recycling bin. Then he stuck his head back into the bar and said he’d head off, if I didn’t mind, because the last train was in five minutes and he’d be stuck on a night bus for ages otherwise.
‘But aren’t you…’ I began. As far as I knew, Freddie lived about ten minutes’ walk away. But who knew – maybe he’d moved and not said anything. Maybe he was staying at a girlfriend’s place or something. It was none of my business and the work was almost done, anyway, so I said goodnight and he hurried out of the door, leaving Adam and me alone.
I stacked the dishwasher and restored everything to order in the kitchen, while Adam wiped the tables and bar top. Frazzle perched on the chaise longue, supervising and getting scratches behind the ears whenever Adam passed him. As we worked, we chatted, having to raise our voices to be heard through the propped-open kitchen door. At last, we were done, the dishwasher humming, the lights dim, Frazzle’s eyes closing and his head sinking down onto his paws – the whole pub settled down for the night.
‘Thanks, Adam. You’ve been a massive help.’
‘It’s been a pleasure.’
‘How about a final drink?’
Adam put the bottle of cleaning fluid away in its cupboard and dropped the cloths in the bag ready for the laundry.
‘Seems a shame, after we’ve got the place all sorted.’
I hesitated for just a second, then said, ‘You could come up to my flat?’
Adam didn’t reply straight away, and I filled the silence by saying, ‘You know, it was really funny, all your mates kept coming up to me tonight and telling me how great you are. You’ve got quite the fan club going there. Either that, or there was some hidden agenda going on. Or not so hidden, haha.’
And then, all at once, everything changed. The friendly intimacy that had been there while we’d worked together was gone. The electric hint of… something, that had been there while we were dancing, was extinguished so totally I knew I must have imagined it. Adam was just Adam again, his shoulders slightly hunched under his jumper, his face expressionless, apart from a flush of bright red spreading upwards from his collar.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I should go.’
Twenty-Eight
You had your chance and you blew it, Aquarius. Better luck next time.
‘So that was it,’ I said. ‘He said goodnight and he’d see me at the next D&D game, and fucked off.’
‘That’s so weird!’ Dani sat up on the weights bench, wiping her face with her towel. ‘To just leave? To say no to an offer of a drink in your flat? When there’d been all that chemistry between you two.’
‘I guess I must just have imagined it. Maybe he was a bit more pissed than I realised, and while we were cleaning up and stuff he sobered up.’
‘But what about all his mates bigging him up to you?’
‘Maybe they weren’t. Maybe they’re just nice people and they like Adam and they talk about him like that to anyone who’ll listen.’
‘Hmmm.’ Dani moved off the bench and I took her place. ‘It doesn’t sound that way to me. It sounds like it was the biggest wingman – wingwoman, whatever – operation ever. And it worked, didn’t it?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They made you fancy him.’
I didn’t say anything for a bit, because I was moving the weight up and down, to my chest and then up as far as my arms could reach, then back again. It felt a lot heavier than usual.
‘They didn’t make me fancy him,’ I said, once I’d finished.
‘No? Then how come you…?’
‘Adam did that,’ I said. ‘He made me fancy him. But there’s no point thinking about it, because clearly he’s not interested.’
‘Not necessarily. Maybe he’s just shy. Some blokes get that way around a woman they like. They’re fine until crunch time and then suddenly they get all awkward.’
We swapped places again.
‘He wasn’t acting shy though. Not at all. Pulling his MC Hammer moves on the dance floor.’
‘That’s different. If dancing’s something he’s good at, then he could just crack on and let you admire him. It’s like you – you cooked up a storm, right? And I bet he admired that. But you didn’t feel shy doing it, did you?’
‘Of course not. Adam wasn’t even there when I was cooking. And I wasn’t there when he was eating. So it’s not the same at all. But anyway, I’m over it now. It was just a one-off thing, heat of the moment, had a few drinks, and I thought something might be going to happen. But it didn’t, and I’m cool with that.’
Dani raised her eyebrows. ‘Course you are.’
I pushed the weight up and lowered it again, then tried to raise it back up, but my arms were having none of it. I felt them start to tremble and wobble and the bar got all unbalanced, threatening to drop back down onto my chest. But Dani was there to lift it and replace it safely back on the rack.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’
I sat up, and suddenly my eyes were burning not just with sweat but with tears, too. I thought of everything I’d been through since that spring morning when I’d woken up, suddenly and inexplicably free of the yearning for Joe that I’d carried with me for so many years it had long since felt more like a labour than like love. I’d tried. I really, really had. I’d put myself out there. I’d dated lots. I’d had sex with a near-stranger. I’d had a relationship and given it my best shot and ended it when it wasn’t working, like grown-ups are meant to do.
And at the end of all that, there should have been a reward for me. Some sort of prize, like the way Mike high-fived me when I did a perfect press-up, or the time a table at the Ginger Cat asked for the chef to come out into the bar so they could tell me personally how great their meal was, or even the imaginary treasure we were hoping to find in the D&D game.
But there had been nothing. Only my friendship with Adam, which I’d fleetingly thought might become something else. Until it hadn’t.
‘Hey.’ Dani slipped her arm round my shoulder. ‘It’s only a bench-press.’
I choked out a half-laugh. ‘It’s not that. It’s me. No one is ever going to love me and it’s all my fault.’
‘Wait, what? Zoë, you know that isn’t true.’
I let out a sound that I’m sure hadn’t ever been heard in the gym before, not even the time Fabian tried to deadlift double his body weight and pulled a hamstring.
‘It is.’ I’d buried my face in my towel, so I was pretty sure Dani couldn’t hear my words, but she kept on stroking my heaving, sweating back anyway.
‘Shhh.’ Dani helped me to my feet. ‘Come on, we mustn’t hog the equipment if we’re not using it or Mike will tell us off.’
She guided me to a corner of the gym, behind the racks where the plates were stacked neatly in order of weight, sat me down on the rubber mat and passed me my water bottle and a wad of blue paper towel.
I couldn’t say anything for a while. I didn’t know where the tears had come from or why they’d picked this moment to come, but I found I couldn’t stop them. My shoulders heaved with sobs and my nose and eyes streamed, and Dani sat there patiently, rubbing my shoulder and shushing me, while I cried on and on.
But you can’t cry forever, even when it feels like you’re going to, and eventually I felt the sobs easing in my aching throat, and I looked up and blew my nose.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m such a dick.’
‘You’re not,’ Dani said gently. ‘But you can tell me what’s wrong, if you like.’
‘I feel like I’ve wasted all this time. I’ve dated all these men that were wrong for me, and when I met Jude I thought he was right, and I did everything I possibly could to make it work, and then I realised he was wrong too.’
/>
‘That’s good though, right? I mean, at least you realised and kicked him to the kerb before you got in too deep.’
Dani had told me a while back that work had sent her on a customer relations course, and that one of the things they’d been taught was active listening. That was what she was doing now, I reckoned – not really knowing what I was so upset about but trying to encourage me to keep talking until I told her.
‘The thing is, I told Adam I was done with dating. I told him I’m cool with being single and dying alone surrounded by cats. And clearly he’s taken that on board, even if he was interested in me in the first place.’
‘So talk to him! Tell him you’ve changed your mind. How hard can it be?’
‘I wish I could. But the app – I have this app on my phone that sends me horoscopes every day – it’s been getting really weird lately. Really dark. And the other day it said that some choices can’t be unmade and you’ve got to accept the consequences, and I know that’s true but it just made me feel really shitty. And today it told me I had my chance and I blew it, and I think it’s right.’
‘Ah, Zoë! Cop on! You can’t let some stupid app dictate how you feel. Good grief! Delete it and move on. What app is it anyway?’
I told her and her mouth opened in astonishment. ‘But that’s—’
Then we heard a voice above us.
‘What are you two doing, coffee-housing behind the weights rack? Don’t you know there are pubs for this sort of thing?’
We got to our feet hastily, like school kids caught smoking behind the bike sheds, even though we knew Mike was joking.
‘Have you seen this on Twitter, Dani? Your ex is trending all over the place. Load of stuff about some astrology app he started, and how he was paying writers in the Philippines to write content for it, not expert astrologers from NASA like he claimed. And he was using Chinese click farms to inflate the reviews on the app store.’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘It’s a whole different world out there.’
Thank You, Next: A perfect, uplifting and funny romantic comedy Page 24
