Huddleston Road. John Toomey

back against the bar, arms folded, cigarette between her fingers – cocked and wavering about her chin, as if poised to take another drag. A glass of wine in her other hand was tucked in beneath her elbow. He sighed and, in uncertainty, looked behind him to make sure she wasn’t looking at somebody else. But there was nobody. The bar was emptying as people began to choose between clubs and night-buses.

      With a fleetness of foot that only men so flippantly spurned can know, he turned to take his coat from the stool. But as he turned back around Lali was standing beside him, a pint in one hand, which she placed down beside his empty glass, and her own drink and cigarette in her other. She sat down on the vacated stool, kicked her right leg over her left knee, and said, ‘Sit down. Have a drink. On me.’ He looked at her in unimpressed disbelief. Somebody from the crowd of people she had been with was mouthing something at her. ‘Relax,’ she shouted over. ‘I’ll buy you another.’ He was still standing, still not quite gone. ‘Oh, sit down. Come on,’ she said. ‘Did I scare you that much?’

      ‘No thanks,’ he replied. He started to go, fixing his coat.

      She stood up quickly and took hold of his arm and turned him towards her. She seemed taller than he remembered. ‘Come on, James’ friend, have a drink with me. One drink.’ There was something kinder in her voice and it was unexpected. She asked for his name – the bare-faced cheek.

      With the drinks knocked back and the bar closing, he accepted her invitation back to a party in her flat. The party raged on into the small hours. It was five, or later, before Lali directed him to her bedroom, pushing and shifting him by the hips, from behind, through the made up beds, and the empty cans and bottles, and the leaden bodies of the collapsed, that were strewn across the floor.

      The bedroom was lit by a tiny lamp in the corner of her room. With the door closed behind them, she backed him to the edge of the bed, and gently but forcefully tipped him over. She hovered over him. Precariously. Pouting suggestively. She nuzzled her knee between his legs as he lay on the bed looking up at her. She leaned down, still looking into his eyes, and unbuckled his belt and undid the first two buttons of his jeans. Her black hair fell down over his hips. Then she stood up, as if drunkenly forgetting her routine, and began unbuttoning her top. She tossed it to the corner of the room and stood there above him in her bra, his partially unbuttoned trousers left like a job half done. Then she undid her own, let them slide down her thighs and drop onto her ankles, bunching up around her soaring heels, before stepping out of them and kicking them to one side. She stood for a moment, in her underwear and shoes, swaying drunkenly above him in the amber lamplight. It was something other-worldly – the abandon of those hours preserved in that image of her, that iconic pose. He was in a haze. Her body, burnt umber against her brilliant white underwear, and the anticipation, imprinted itself on his psyche, and remained there through all the years and discolouring experiences that followed. She lowered herself again, undid the last buttons, and slid his trousers and underwear off in one go. Her long hair rained down black on his midriff, once again, crashing from a height onto his alabaster thighs, lucently pale next to her cheek, and cascading over his hips, as he undid his shirt, wriggled free of it, and flung it at the foot of the bed.

      A firm and repetitive slapping of his cheek brought him round.

      ‘Time to get up.’

      ‘Seriously?’

      ‘Yeah. I’m already late.’

      Awake then, Vic surprised himself with his capacity for small talk. He felt altered, physically, by having slept with her. He was conscious of how his breath now filled the depth of his lungs. Conscious of standing taller, and of speaking less dementedly. It was as if he had stolen back what she had taken from him.

      She was on her way to work, she said, and advised him that it would be better if he left the flat before her flatmate got up. She didn’t explain any further and was oblivious to Vic’s renewed self-possession. She herded him from the bedroom with a steady flow of prompts: ‘Here’s your trousers . . . Here’s your shirt . . . Shoe’s over there . . . Are we good to go? . . . Station’s at the top of the road . . . ’

      There was further urgency in her manner as she picked up his coat from the arm of the sofa and handed it to him, brushing her hair as they walked to the door. He tried a little more small talk but she didn’t have the time. He leaned in and kissed her and she let their lips meet, flatly, and then withdrew, before offering the kind of smile you might get from an elderly aunt; disingenuous, intangibly dismissive. The illusion of self-possession that he’d enjoyed only moments before, corrected itself.

      Within ten minutes he was standing alone at Deptford Station, feeling strangely stunned. It was cold and he was sleep-deprived, and still a little drunk. The first stage of the journey, on an empty train to London Bridge, was undignified enough, but the twenty minute bus journey to Camberwell was torturous. It seemed to creep from stop to stop and take five minutes at each one, offloading and boarding no more than a handful of passengers. Riding on the shuddering swagger of the bus’s vibration, he slipped between peaceful half-dreams and lewd remembrances.

      Then he missed his stop. He woke up at Denmark Hill and cursed every yard back to Camberwell Green. Once home, he fell asleep with the Saturday sports on his chest and a half-eaten bacon sandwich by the side of the bed. He slept well into the afternoon. Sometime in early evening, completely disorientated by the fractured day, he came back to life. Awake and thinking more lucidly, he began to consider Lali, to remember events and apply meaning.

      When James phoned, Vic divulged everything. Boastfully. ‘I’m glad you’ve got the gloating out of your system. Now, what about this evening?’ James asked.

      ‘I think I’ll stay in.’

      ‘Bad idea. Terrible fucking idea, mate.’

      ‘Why? Watch Match of the Day, have a beer, maybe. Enjoy my Sunday.’

      ‘Oh no, Vic. This is all wrong.’

      ‘I got all my work done last night. What more could I realistically gain from the weekend?’

      ‘A clear mind, that’s what. You stay in and you’re fucked. At best you’ll have a miserable week ahead, wishing and wondering.’

      ‘I don’t see that. I’d just like to have a quiet night.’

      ‘No, no, no. If you stay in you’re going to end up replaying last night in your head. It’s all going to start looking fantastic as you sit in alone with nothing but football and shit beer. You’ve lost all perspective, mate. You need to come out and get rejected by a handful of girls and go home with a fat one. You need to demystify last night. She skewed everything by waking you before you’d even had the chance to have a hangover.’

      ‘I’m staying in.’

      ‘Never let the memory of last night’s tramp prevent you from nailing tonight’s. You know who said that?’

      ‘Robert Frost?’

      ‘No. A man with no worries, Vic. A man who knows the limits of men. Me. I said it.’

      ‘Goodnight, James.’

      James had read the situation accurately enough, although his prediction that Vic would be near collapse by midweek was over-blown. Lali did occupy his thoughts, and more so as the week progressed. He tried, at length, to recall her face. In obsessive detail – from the isotropic flawlessness of her nose and cheeks to the dark iris of her eyes, to the pores of her peachy chin and the hairline nick of scar tissue on the curve of her jaw.

      Even travelling to work, on public transport, when the form, smell and sound of an attractive woman would appear in his field of vision, he could objectively appreciate her attractiveness, only for Lali to intrude. The objective beauty of a stranger on a train became suddenly wooden when placed in the context of Lali’s animated exaltation. Her beauty transcended any kind of dispassion and had already begun to inhabit a space in his soul that was both real and aspirational.

      His conversations with James in the week that followed were like archaeological digs, careful and slow, without any obvious yield. He learned that she owned and