I was at a party in someone’s flat, part of a tall Victorian terrace, indistinguishable from a hundred others, with a dirty brown front door and crumbling windowsills, somewhere in West London, with just a bit of gravel and a low wall and a badly- lit pavement lying between it and the main road. The flat was up three flights of stairs. It was a bit grotty, with threadbare carpets and dodgy paintwork, and a dead spider plant on a shelf by the door with piles of bent fag ends squashed into what must once have passed as compost. Every time I went into the kitchen to look for another drink it felt like my shoes were sticking to the floor. Beer spurting in all directions when people pulled the tabs on shaken-up cans didn’t help, not to mention the cheap wine dripping as it was poured, inexpertly, into plastic glasses, and the odd dropped sausage roll trodden greasily into the lino. Still, nobody seemed to notice, or care, except me.
To be honest, I wasn’t really sure whose flat it was, or even whose party it was. Back then, once the pub closed, it didn’t take much to get me to follow whoever I happened to be with to wherever they happened to be going. Anything was better than going back to my mum’s, now that Trevor was there. That particular Saturday night, though, I wasn’t really in the mood for partying. I’d only been there an hour or so, and the bloke I thought I was with had clearly had other ideas and moved on to a rather over-loud redhead with a low-cut top and eyelashes long enough to swat a fly. Not that I minded. He was hardly the love of my life. Still, his defection had left me worrying about how I was going to get home. Whether I’d missed the last bus, how far it was to walk, and how safe. Whether I could afford a taxi.
I was picking my way down the last of the narrow litter-strewn staircases, holding my bag in one hand and clutching the rickety banisters with the other, heading for the front door, when Dan Campbell walked in. Only, I didn’t know who he was then. Just some random stranger, letting himself in, not even seeing I was there.
He had his head down, dripping rain from a long grey mac. He was fumbling a set of keys out of the lock and back into his pocket, and carrying a soggy carrier bag, bottles chinking together inside it as he stopped to stamp his shoes on the doormat. I peered out past him, through the open door, into the darkness, split only by the glow of passing traffic, still heavy despite the time of night, wipers thrashing, headlights on, hazy at the edges. Rain. Lots of it. It hadn’t been raining when I’d arrived and it wasn’t something I’d bargained for when I’d dressed to go out. Taxi it was, then, if I didn’t want to ruin my new heels, or my hair. I’d just have to raid Mum’s secret tin when I got home if it turned out I didn’t have enough for the fare. Not that it was much of a secret when I knew exactly where she hid it. But Trevor didn’t know, and that was what mattered.
I reached the bottom step and hesitated, waiting for this drenched man to finish wiping the water from his glasses and the mud from his shoes and notice me, move aside, leave my exit clear, but the door slammed behind him, shutting out the rumble of the traffic, enclosing us in that small space, with just the thump of the music above us, oozing its way through several layers of ceilings and floors.
And then he lifted his face and looked at me, a bit startled, and I looked right back at him, a lot less so, and you know how, sometimes, you just feel it? A connection, an understanding, something in the eyes that says, ‘Stay. Stay and talk to me. It’s much too early to leave. Come and re-join the party. You know you want to.’ Actually, he may have said it for real, not just through his eyes. I can’t be sure now. Whether he was already a bit drunk, or I was. It’s a long time ago, and the combination of time and lager tends to tamper with the finer details, shroud them all in a woozy kind of fog that may or may not have been entirely unpleasant, or unwelcome.
But, for whatever reason, or possibly for no obvious reason at all, I picked up my bag from where I’d been resting it on the table in the communal hallway, the one with all the junk mail on it, and I followed him back up the stairs to the party. Even though he was clearly too young, too short, too streaky, not my type at all. Even though all those things ran instantly through my head and were just as instantly dismissed, I still followed him up those stairs. I still did as he asked, and stayed.
And it wasn’t until the next morning, when I woke up in a different flat, with a pounding headache, wearing an unfamiliar man-sized t-shirt and no knickers, and watched him pull back the curtains and hand me a cup of tea and a broken custard cream, that I finally found out his name.
‘Hi, Kate. Just in case you don’t remember, I’m Dan,’ he said, sitting down at the end of the bed. ‘Dan Campbell. And if you want a couple of aspirin with that, just say. I’m sure I have some somewhere.’
I shook my head. A nip to the toilet and a quick escape into the fresh air were all I really needed right then. And answers to the sort of awkward questions I suddenly felt totally unable to ask. How exactly had I got here? In this bed? His bed? And did I …? Did we …?
I sat up, pulling the rumpled sheets and a mound of blankets up with me, careful not to let the t-shirt ride up and reveal anything it shouldn’t, and drank my tea. It was way too milky and could have done with more sugar, and the biscuit was bordering on being stale, but I was feeling self-conscious enough just being there without complaining about the catering.
‘I’ll leave you to get up when you’re ready.’ He stood up and tossed a dressing gown onto the bed. ‘Here, use this if you like. Bathroom’s just through there. And I’ve got eggs, if you’re interested.’ He took the empty cup from my hands. ‘And more tea. Plenty more tea. Anyway, I’ll be in the kitchen. Pop in, please, even if it’s only to say goodbye.’
He closed the door behind him and I lay back and just let myself breathe. Well, he was a gentleman, I’d give him that. Protecting my modesty, not trying to peek, or cop a feel or anything. I looked around the bedroom. It was small, quite dark and old-fashioned in décor, with a high ceiling and one of those big round paper light shades hanging right above my head. The walls were lined with shelves, piled high with records, paperbacks, magazines, all chucked in any old how. I was dying to see what they were, to work out what his taste was in music, what sort of stuff he read. I even had a strange urge to start tidying them for him, setting the books upright, shuffling things into some kind of order, but I didn’t want him to come back in and catch me being nosey, interfering. It was none of my business what possessions he had, or how he chose to store them. It wasn’t as if I had any plans to see him again, after all.
In the bathroom, I sat for a while, draining my bladder dry, waiting for the throbbing in my head to subside. I ran the taps in the sink for ages, but the water stayed alarmingly cold. I splashed it about as briefly as I could get away with, over my face and hands, under my armpits, then slipped back into the clothes I’d worn the night before. I’d found them all heaped up on a chair next to the bed, knickers on top, as if I’d removed them last. Or he had.
My mouth still tasted of alcohol, or the stale remains of it, at least. I picked up a rolled-up tube of toothpaste with the lid missing, squeezed a drop onto my finger and ran it backwards and forwards over my teeth, and did the best I could to sort out my tangled hair, short of actually washing it.
There was a waste bin under the sink. The most likely place to find evidence, if there was any. I bent down to pick it up. There wasn’t a lot in it. A used razor, a cardboard tube from the middle of a toilet roll, a lump of dried-up chewing gum, but no sign of an empty Durex wrapper, which worried me. A lot. Either we hadn’t, or we had done it without taking any precautions. Oh, my God. Doing it with a man I’d only just met would have been bad enough, but not being careful was unthinkable. I took a deep breath and opened the door. It was time I found my way to the kitchen.
‘Before you ask …’ he said, as soon as I walked in, as if he was some kind of mind-reader. ‘No, we didn’t. Not that I wouldn’t have liked to. But you were pretty drunk, and I’m not that sort of a bloke. Okay? It was late and you had no obvious way of getting home, and I couldn’t let you even think of doing it alone anyway, in your state, so I offered you a bed. My bed. Apologies that I didn’t change the sheets, but I’d had a few drinks myself, and the sofa was calling …’
I nodded with relief and sat down at the small formica-covered table. ‘Well, I’m glad we’ve cleared that