The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  Daniel feigned interest but all he cared about was Olivia. He wouldn’t leave her side for anything tonight.

  ‘Olivia, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to meet you,’ Jim said formally, taking her hands in his and looking her in the eye. They were the same height.

  ‘Good to meet you too, er…’

  ‘Jim.’

  ‘Good detective work Jim,’ Olivia said. ‘Or should I say Inspector Montalbano…’ Daniel and Jim looked puzzled.

  ‘Well quite!’ said Jim. ‘Now please – please – give this man your email address, before the night is out.’

  Olivia’s eyebrows knitted together. Daniel blushed.

  Jim kissed her on each cheek, then Daniel too.

  ‘MESSINA!’ Jim shouted to the low ceiling, as he walked out, as if he were chanting hallelujah to the heavens. Daniel was saved from having to make an explanation by the band.

  ‘We’re just gonna take a short break,’ Nate said into his microphone. ‘We’ll be back with some more beastly tunes in about… fifteen!’

  Mimi removed her bass and propped it on its stand, before the band dispersed to the bar to chat to friends, followers and groupies.

  ‘WHOOOOOP!’ Olivia cheered and hollered as Mimi approached.

  ‘You’re here! I put your name down but thought it was optimistic.’

  They hugged.

  ‘You’re on fire!’ Olivia answered, as she slipped on her flat shoe and one leg gave a little.

  ‘Oops, watch it there!’ Mimi cautioned. She looked at the stranger propping her friend up and back at Olivia with concern, awaiting an explanation.

  ‘Oh, this is Daniel. Daniel, this is Mimi.’

  They smiled a hello at each other, then Mimi turned back to Olivia.

  ‘How come you made it?’

  ‘You’re on fire – I was fired,’ Olivia said with a smirk.

  ‘Oh Livvi!’ Mimi lamented.

  ‘Fuck it. It was a heap of shit job in a heap of shit pub, I was only in it for the free booze.’

  Mimi had a look of concern in her bright eyes, but turned to Daniel, as if she were seeking help.

  ‘How did you two meet?’

  ‘New Zealand,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Australia,’ Olivia chimed.

  Mimi looked between the two of them.

  ‘Well, both…’ Olivia shrugged.

  ‘Wow, small world,’ Mimi said, seemingly relieved that they had actually met before and Daniel wasn’t one of Olivia’s waifs or strays she liked to pick up.

  ‘Nice to meet you. You’re excellent – I love your sound,’ Daniel said awkwardly. He wished Jim hadn’t left. Jim was better at this. ‘Would you like a drink?’ Daniel offered.

  ‘No I’m cool thanks, and I have water on stage. Thanks though…’

  Olivia shrugged and noticed the drink Jim had barely touched and picked it up. Mimi made her excuses.

  ‘I’m just going to say hi to our promoter, be right back.’ Mimi weaved through the crowd and Olivia felt the vodka coursing through her veins. She put her hand on Daniel’s shoulder and appraised his face.

  ‘Soooo, how’s newspapers going?’

  She remembered.

  ‘Great!’ Daniel lied.

  I’m fucked.

  ‘How’s Central Saint Martins?’

  Daniel thought of his recce down Charing Cross Road, how he had walked past The Spice Of Life, The Cambridge and The Porcupine, wondering if that’s where the fashion students hung out and drank, not knowing that Olivia often did.

  ‘It’s shit.’

  Olivia didn’t lie.

  Daniel was taken aback.

  ‘I only just scraped the year. Again. My tutors are impossible. The people on my course are mostly horrid and I don’t have supermodel friends to walk in my graduation show next year.’ She said it all with a laugh that belied the severity of how much she hated it. The sadness she felt. If Mimi wasn’t living in Brixton, if she didn’t have her best friend from school to hang out with, or a familiar face in Vaani in the corridors, she would have sacked college off a year ago and gone back to Milan. Olivia was dreading Mimi going on tour to Japan, even for a few weeks, but she didn’t say that out loud.

  ‘Oh man! I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I went to a graduate show this afternoon, before my shift…’ She put her hand to her brow and closed her eyes, as if she were trying to steady herself now. ‘It was amazing. So adventurous and original. I’m way off doing that kind of thing.’

  ‘Yeah but you have a whole year to get to that surely?’

  ‘I dunno,’ Olivia shrugged as she tied her hair into a bun on top of her head. ‘I live in this amazing city but I have so very little inspiration, I hate to admit it. I’m not enjoying it.’

  Olivia’s brow creased and Daniel wanted to smooth his thumb along it. To kiss it better and tell her that he was sure she was amazing.

  ‘Oh. That sucks. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a real “pea-souper”…’ mockney Olivia said, although Daniel was pretty sure she’d got this one wrong.

  They went quiet as he watched her secure her hair artfully with a drinks straw, and Daniel pondered that if she, this goddess, felt like a fish out of water at fashion school, how much of a dork he would feel like there.

  He looked around the hazy room, feeling self-conscious that he wasn’t wearing a Breton top like Kurt Cobain, a crushed velvet suit like Jarvis Cocker or a Harrington jacket like Damon Albarn. He didn’t rock the football-casual sensibility of a Fred Perry shirt, an achingly hip parka, Adidas Sambas or a glam-rock leather jacket. Daniel wore an inoffensive chambray shirt, black jeans and grey and pink Converse. The men all around him were carved in their tribes. The women too. Apart from Olivia. She seemed to be the leader of her own. No one else looked like her in her cream slip dress and metallic gladiator sandals, holding together her pub-stained feet.

  The sandals.

  Daniel remembered seeing them, close to his nose on the podium in the nightclub, in a place called King’s Cross on the other side of the world. She wasn’t wearing her ankle chain tonight.

  Daniel’s Pimm’s, cider and beer were making him feel braver.

  ‘Your birthday. You were going home for your twenty-first. How was it? I thought about you a lot. How you were getting on… without your dad.’

  Olivia looked surprised.

  ‘I told you about my dad?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Mimi, Nate, Tommy and Nik took to the stage again to cheers and whoops from the crowd, which had filled up since the first half, and struck up another catchy tune.

  ‘Well… I got home and we had a small party – my mothers and me.’ Olivia read from Daniel’s face that she had told him about them too. ‘We went to church. Lit some candles. But it was shit. I missed my dad. I still do.’

  ‘I bet you do,’ Daniel said, as Olivia held his gaze and tried not to cry. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Daniel had a kindness Olivia hadn’t seen in the faces of friends she had made in London. If she told them her dad died, they would cock their heads to one side, squeeze her arm, pout their bottom lip, and change the subject. Only Mimi and Vaani genuinely seemed to care. And Daniel.

  ‘I’m lost without him,’ she confessed, as she bit her lip.

  Daniel gently shook his head.

  Olivia couldn’t speak. Instead she flung her arms around Daniel’s neck, pressing her body against his. He was taken aback, unsure what to do, but he wrapped his arms around her waist, squeezed her tight and rubbed her back, surprising them both.

  Olivia pulled back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Daniel apologised.

  Olivia waved as if to say it’s nothing.

  ‘You know you say sorry a lot, Daniel. Even for an English person.’

  ‘I’m—’

  ‘Shh!’

  As Daniel gave his temple an awkward rub, Olivia felt her sharp shoulders drop a little. ‘Another drink?’ she asked, her pupils glassy.

>   ‘I’ll get them,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Cool. Although after this set I gotta go to an end-of-term party on Frith Street, kind of celebrating the shows.’

  Daniel’s heart sank.

  ‘You’ll come with me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m only going if I’m fucked first.’

  Daniel looked taken aback.

  ‘You know, loaded?’

  ‘Oh right. Yeah, I’ll get us a drink then.’

  *

  ‘So do you work at The Sun with your friend now?’ Olivia asked, as they dodged the night buses along Oxford Street, knocking into each other as they huddled in. The June evening had taken a chilly turn, Olivia hugged her ribs under her leather biker jacket; Daniel’s flimsy burgundy bomber only just did the trick.

  ‘I’m still at my local paper – the one I was about to start on when we met…’

  Daniel didn’t want to sell himself short this time. It wasn’t just potholes and gates that sounded like Chewbacca. But he hated it, he couldn’t lie about that.

  ‘Up near Cambridge.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Olivia said, as a black cab driver beeped at her for stepping out onto Wardour Street. She gestured at the driver and swore in Italian under her breath. ‘Of course,’ she said, regaining her composure. But clearly she couldn’t really remember.

  ‘I do night shifts at The Sun though, not with Jim. He’s showbiz, I’m sport.’ Daniel had a feeling he wouldn’t be doing another sport shift any time soon. ‘Until the daytime, when I’m back at the local paper.’

  ‘It’s down here,’ Olivia said, as they walked south, zig-zagging Soho’s streets, past pizzerias, jazz clubs and sex shops.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ Daniel admitted, feeling an unexpected liberation from being honest. Olivia looped her arm into Daniel’s.

  ‘Oh. Why would you do anything you couldn’t stand?’ she asked, as if it were perfectly obvious; forgetting that she was living a misery she didn’t admit to.

  ‘It’s a job, I suppose. A good grounding.’

  ‘But why do you hate it so much?’

  Daniel looked up at Soho’s lights as a drizzle started to fall, illuminating them a little, and pondered.

  ‘It’s not the boring stories…’ Daniel found their sedate tone reassuring. Elmworth wasn’t the type of place where handbag snatches or stabbings took place. ‘It’s my editor, the boss.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your boss?’

  ‘She’s exhausting. Makes staff feel like nothing is good enough until you start to believe nothing is good enough. Then when you have a glimmer of what actually is good enough, you realise it’s all just a mind game. It’s all very tiring.’

  ‘Sounds like a porca puttana.’

  ‘Well, that sounds like a pizza to me, so I think that’s too good for her.’

  Olivia hit Daniel playfully on the chest with her free hand.

  ‘Fucking pig whore!’

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s more like it. Although it sounds sexier in Italian.’

  ‘Everything is sexier in Italian,’ Olivia said as she nudged her arm into Daniel’s with more force than she realised. He steadied himself on the pavement.

  ‘Speaking of porca…’ Olivia raised her index finger and pointed at a dumpling bar they were approaching on Old Compton Street. ‘If I don’t eat soon I’m going to be sick.’

  Daniel didn’t object, and followed Olivia up a small step into the dumpling bar, where she placed an order with a middle-aged woman with glasses.

  As they waited for their pork buns and chicken gyoza, Olivia resumed the conversation; trying to give Daniel a strategy.

  ‘You need to get out. Change your job. See if your night job can become your day job if you like that one more.’

  ‘I think I might have blown that option.’

  ‘So look for something else. Get another job. Another newspaper.’

  ‘Easier said than done…’

  ‘Why?’

  Daniel didn’t have the sense of entitlement that Olivia’s International School education had afforded her. But then he couldn’t think of a ‘why not’? And he really didn’t want to be living at home anymore. He hoped she wouldn’t ask about that and he’d have to pretend he was living in a very cool flatshare like Joey and Chandler in Friends and not with his parents.

  ‘I suppose I’ve done two years on the Echo, I do need to get out.’

  ‘The guest is a fish who smells after three days.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It’s time to move on.’

  ‘Yeah I suppose so.’

  Olivia looked at her chunky gold watch and laughed.

  ‘Shit, we’d better get to the party. Is our order ready?’ she asked the woman behind the counter.

  ‘Just here Miss,’ she said, handing over two small boxes of steaming hot dumplings.

  *

  In the tatty bar on Frith Street, Olivia and Daniel sat side-by-side on a well-worn green banquette at a table full of students. Everyone looked totally different to the person they were sitting next to, but they were all uniformly fashionable.

  Olivia had introduced Daniel to those whose names she could remember – there was Dev, with brown skin, a tweed suit, and the luscious long locks of a Miss World contestant; Edie, the girl on Vaani’s course, whose red lipstick made her teeth look yellow; and Cate, who wore a vest and tutu and whose hair was cropped in a white-blonde pixie cut. Others smoked and conversed so intently they hadn’t looked up to say hi. None of them seemed interested in talking to Daniel and Olivia as they sat in pockets of twos and threes around two pushed-together tables, locked in conversation, punctuated by sudden urges to go to the loo in the basement bar. A steady stream of young women and men clomped up and down the rickety wooden staircase, nodding to each other as they passed. Everyone seemed to know each other, but Daniel observed the salutations were all superficial and fleeting.

  He didn’t care. He was next to Olivia.

  ‘Ecuador’ came on the bar’s speakers and Olivia began to sway.

  The rudimentary synth piano started to pulse through Daniel’s soaring heart. Was this really happening? Had he really bumped into Olivia by chance?

  ‘When’s your birthday Daniel?’ she asked, arms in the air in celebratory mode. Her eyes were demanding, she slurred her words. Olivia’s flirtation was now more imperious, harder to read, more… London.

  ‘The 1st of March.’

  Olivia looked disappointed. She loved other people’s birthdays; the 1st of March was too far from June to get excited about.

  ‘How old are you? I can’t remember.’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  Olivia raised a flat dark eyebrow into a question mark, as if Daniel weren’t telling the truth, and he wasn’t sure why. He had always pretty much looked his age.

  ‘How did you spend your last birthday?’ he asked, preferring not to talk about himself. Olivia couldn’t remember how she spent her last birthday, so she too shifted the focus.

  ‘You’ll have to come out for my next one, next month,’ she said, her hand on his thigh. He didn’t remind her that he knew when her birthday was.

  ‘I’d really like that.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Can I give you my email address?’ Daniel suggested.

  ‘No, I’ll never message you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m rubbish with the tecnologia. You take mine. That was your friend’s command… wasn’t it?’

  Daniel rubbed his chin and smiled bashfully.

  ‘I’ll get you a pen.’

  Daniel looked around. He hadn’t brought his backpack out tonight; he used the office stationery at News International if he were meeting Jim in the pub first; he worried about bags and pickpockets in London pubs.

  ‘Oh it’s OK, I’ll use this…’ Olivia took a stumpy kohl eyeliner out of the small cash purse in her jacket pocket and started to write on the grease-tinged napkin from their bao buns. ‘My Hotmail
is shit,’ she mumbled. ‘I’ll give you my college one…’

  Daniel watched her write a long Central Saint Martins email address, letters formed beautifully, in a foreigner’s hand.

  Olivia Messina.

  ‘Here you go.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He studied the long email address, committing it to memory, before folding the napkin and zipping it in the pocket of his bomber jacket, which he had taken off and tied around his waist. Olivia shuffled in closer, put her palm on Daniel’s sternum and opened a button on his denim shirt. She pressed the eyeliner against his chest, writing her email address again among the smattering of hair in an arch over his left nipple.

  ‘And there.’

  Olivia’s writing looked like a tattoo around Daniel’s heart.

  ‘Oh and here, just to be sure…’

  Olivia edged up onto Daniel and straddled his lap, pushing his hair upwards as she wrote her email address on two rows across his forehead. The kohl was getting blunt now, the end rough and sharp as it retreated into its pencil crater. Her script started to scratch a little but he didn’t object. He was happy to be so close to her. He put a hand on each of her thighs as he looked up at her.

  Olivia’s dilated, glassy pupils fixed on Daniel’s forehead as she used her free palm to lean on him as if she were carving into a tablet. Her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth towards the mole at the end of her lip. Daniel looked at that mole. He wanted to kiss it, as he had in the middle of the train station in Dunedin at the end of the best night of his life. But he didn’t have the courage to make the leap. She was still so far away, even when she was up in his face.

  None of the other fashion students around the table, nor those emerging up the stairs from the basement bar, looked up at Olivia straddling Daniel; no one batted an eyelid.

  ‘You’re a bit sweaty, it will probably smudge,’ she said. ‘But there you go, three places. On paper, your heart and your head.’

  *

  As the end-of-term party went on and the intimate conversations became more raucous, Olivia led Daniel by the hand downstairs to the basement bar where people had started to dance. It was also conveniently nearer the toilet, and Olivia’s trips to it were increasing in frequency. As they stood at the bar, her sharp shoulder almost level with his, Olivia started to become repetitive. She kept trying to counsel Daniel through his woes, but as her slurs elongated, he wondered if she were running away from hers. But she did seem to be enjoying the party she had dreaded, and kept going off to the loo with friends as they passed.