The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  The last friend she went off with was a guy. He was about six foot five, with muscly arms, a tight T-shirt and a shaved head. He’d stopped by the bar and beckoned Olivia to the toilets by taking her hand, without having the manners to acknowledge Daniel or ask if he wanted to join in on whatever they were up to.

  As Daniel waited, longer this time than the last, he didn’t know where to look. There was no comforting screen playing a sport he could get lost in. Olivia’s fashion friends hadn’t made him feel particularly welcome. They’d just looked him up and down, seen him as something of a cute civilian, then walked on, looking for someone more interesting to talk to.

  A short woman with brown skin, cropped black hair and enormous eyes stopped next to Daniel at the bar.

  ‘Tonic water please,’ Vaani said to the bartender, before giving Daniel a suspicious sideways glance.

  ‘You’re with Olivia,’ she stated accusingly.

  ‘Sort of…’ Daniel shrugged, embarrassed at having been left alone for so long. 'Are you a friend of hers?' he asked.

  ‘Sort of.’

  Vaani let out a little laugh to herself. ‘I went to school with her.’ Her tone was curt and functional. She seemed to be the only sober person in the room and her abrasiveness was fast sobering Daniel up too.

  ‘In Italy?’ he asked excitedly.

  Vaani nodded with an air of disdain, as if she were already bored of this tedious conversation. They stood in silence and watched the barman get her drink, before Vaani turned to Daniel again.

  ‘You’ve got something on your face,’ she said, making a circle with her forefinger in front of her own.

  ‘Thanks,’ Daniel replied, wiping the corner of his mouth.

  ‘No, up there.’ She gestured to his forehead.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Daniel didn’t do anything about it other than stand tall, so he could see his reflection in the long thin mirror behind the bar.

  The writing made Daniel look like Mr Worry from the Mr Men books he loved as a boy. Two rows of simplistic black squiggles, undulating across his anxious brow.

  Fuck.

  He tried to flatten his hair.

  Where is she?

  Vaani paid the barman, picked up her tonic water and walked off with a flippant, ‘See ya,’ as Daniel waited, unable to work out what the hell he should do.

  He had sacked off his shift and now it felt like he’d been dumped. He’d probably blown his sports opportunity and if he didn’t go in the next ten minutes, he’d miss the last train home. He felt like an idiot. An imposter.

  I’ve got to go.

  But he couldn’t leave Olivia, not when she had walked into his life tonight.

  Where the fuck is she?

  Daniel looked at the fashion students dancing. He wondered if the bar would ever close. Fatboy Slim pulsated his brain and he felt a tightening in his chest. He thought about Viv Hart, how he didn’t want to sit opposite her tomorrow feeling hungover while she crunched apples loudly and asked him to rewrite his stories. Everything felt horribly familiar and repetitive and he struggled to breathe.

  I’ve blown it.

  *

  Ten minutes later Daniel decided.

  Fuck this shit.

  Aside from the South Asian girl with the massive eyes, no one else had made an effort to talk to him and he was feeling increasingly stupid, increasingly unable to breathe – ashamed of himself for being dropped, for not making an effort to talk to anyone else. He wasn’t One Of Them. Olivia was from another world, and it was obviously not one he would ever fit into. He lived at home with his mum, dad and brother. He was neither Joey nor Chandler. He was dull and English and not rich and not fashionable. Had Olivia cottoned onto this and made an escape?

  Agitated, Daniel walked over to the ladies’ toilet and knocked on the door.

  ‘Olivia!’ he banged. ‘Are you there?’ An angry-looking girl with pink hair came out of the ladies’ at the same time as Olivia and the tall guy came out of the men’s, giggling conspiratorially.

  She was drunker, higher, darker, than when she went off.

  ‘Heyyyy,’ she slurred, adjusting her slip dress.

  ‘I’m just heading home, you’ll be all right yeah?’

  ‘Dan-i-el… you’re not leaving, are you?’ Olivia looked taken aback.

  The tall guy straightened his jeans and walked across the bar and off up the stairs, three at a time.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got a shitload of stuff on. Big day tomorrow…’

  Daniel could barely look at her, he felt so sad, so insignificant. He felt for his wallet in his back pocket, untied his bomber from his waist, finished his bottle of beer, and made for the stairs.

  I have her email.

  ‘See you around yeah?’ He had to get out of there, he was desperate for air.

  His foot struck the bottom step of the creaky staircase that led up to the ground floor.

  If I even want to message her.

  ‘Hey, don’t go!’ Olivia lurched, as she reached out to grab Daniel’s arm, her hand almost swatting him as she misjudged the distance and fell onto the stairs at the heel of his Converse. She hit her forehead on the sticky bottom step, ripping one of the spaghetti straps of her now-grubby dress. Daniel stopped.

  ‘Shit, are you OK?’

  ‘So soon!’ Olivia laughed erratically, as she shielded her forehead to stem the blood, to contain the throb.

  ‘Yeah I have to go. Shall I get you a cab?’

  ‘No, no! I can walk home, it’s near here somewhere.’

  Olivia clutched her forehead and Daniel saw a thin and gloopy trail of blood oozing from her hairline to her eyebrow. He hesitated, torn by the urge to make the last train home versus the urge to scoop Olivia up.

  ‘You’re bleeding! Are you OK?’

  She looked at her fingers and smeared her hands onto her satin slip dress as she slumped.

  ‘Olivia? Olivia? Want me to walk you home?’

  She didn’t answer, but she didn’t need to. Her lids kept flickering and Daniel felt a panic rise.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she laughed, eyes rolling maniacally.

  ‘Jesus! Where’s your jacket?’

  Olivia didn’t answer.

  ‘Is it upstairs?’ Daniel looked around; Olivia was almost bent double and no one else seemed to care or notice. He propped her on the bottom step and leaned her head against the stair post.

  Where’s her mate?

  He scoured the room for any of the people they’d been sitting with upstairs – for the friend with the huge eyes, for Olivia’s jacket – but it was hard to see through the haze of beer and people. He searched the seats at the edge of the room.

  There!

  She’d flung her jacket in a corner. He picked it up and gathered Olivia from her post. The schoolfriend wasn’t down here anymore. If she wasn’t upstairs, still in the pub, he would have to find out where she lived for himself.

  *

  Daniel walked the thin and dimly lit pavement with Olivia draped around his shoulders. He’d propped her up through Old Compton Street, up Wardour and onto Brewer Street, before turning right onto Lexington.

  Lexington.

  She had told him about it in New Zealand, and made it sound like New York.

  He stemmed the blood with a paper towel from behind the bar upstairs, the staff quick to oblige, wanting her out of there as fast as possible, and she murmured and mumbled on his shoulder all along the route, her face burrowing its blood into his neck. Her ramblings reassured him that at least she was conscious. Daniel stopped in front of an arbitrary doorway.

  ‘Is this it?’ He held her chin and turned her face so she might see it. ‘Olivia! Is this your door?’

  When Daniel had thrown her biker jacket over her shoulders, he rummaged in the pockets and found a set of keys. They didn’t have a name or building number on them, but two Yale keys glimmered on an AC Milan chain, and he hoped they were the keys to her flat.

  ‘This door
– look!’

  She rolled her head and mumbled in a language that sounded neither Italian nor English.

  ‘If you can’t tell me the number, tell me the colour. What colour is your front door? Can you remember?’

  Daniel felt increasingly despairing, as he looked up the street and noticed all the doors were black. He’d never been to this street before. He didn’t know its grand doorways, looming in recesses and arches.

  ‘Lex. Ing. Ton,’ she murmured, sounding Italian now.

  ‘We’re on Lexington Street. This is it, but which is your flat?’

  None of the buildings, the little closed bistros or hidden doorways looked like they might be student digs. ‘Can you remember your door number Olivia?’

  He clutched the keys and let out a sigh of anguish. Short of trying every keyhole on the street, he needed a solution that wouldn’t get him arrested. He looked up and down the road again, edging up to the next property, but there was no one respectable around he could ask at 1.30 a.m.

  ‘Quello!’ she pointed accusingly at one shiny black door tucked away in the shadows. Struggling under the weight of Olivia’s long and lifeless limbs, Daniel fumbled with the key in the lock. He almost cried with relief when it turned and the door opened.

  ‘Here we go!’ he sighed. ‘Your flat.’

  For a fleeting second he felt like he’d won a prize until he saw the task ahead. Facing them was a flight of stripy carpeted stairs, and Olivia fell onto the third one up with a dramatic thud.

  ‘Hello?!’ Daniel called up in front of him. He didn’t believe a student and – until tonight – a barmaid could live alone in such salubrious surroundings. He flicked a brass light switch. The carpet looked expensive. An elaborate lampshade illuminated the hallway. Olivia put one cheek against the soft carpet and closed her eyes, congealed blood mopped up by her hair.

  ‘Hello?!’ Daniel called again; he didn’t want to alarm a flatmate, and couldn’t remember if Olivia lived alone.

  ‘Who there?’ she mumbled, her lids fixed shut.

  Daniel set Olivia into a restful coil and swept up the flight alone, to scout out his route for getting her up the stairs. This apartment was cooler than anything in Friends. It had high ceilings, clean lines and expensive-looking furniture. The telltale signs that a fashion student lived there were its smattering of clothes and chaos, empty takeaway boxes and bottles, overflowing ashtrays and haughty semi-naked mannequins.

  Daniel turned on the lights in every room, to check there was no one else and to get his bearings. The bathroom had elaborate tiling and a turquoise rolltop bath. The bedroom had a low futon and would have looked minimalist were it not for clothes strewn across it. The kitchen and living space at the top of the stairs had state-of-the-art tech that was clearly never used.

  Daniel dimmed the bedroom light and propped the door so he could carry Olivia in, then rushed down the stairs to check on her.

  ‘Hey, I think we need to clean up your forehead, so I can see how deep the cut is.’

  Olivia didn’t respond.

  Is she asleep?

  ‘Olivia?’

  Daniel crouched down and lifted her face with one hand, angling the cut so he could see it under the light. ‘Olivia?’

  She opened her eyes but they were gently rolling upwards, like she might be in a dream. Daniel pressed her cheek lightly and repeatedly with his other hand. ‘Olivia?’ Her eyes returned to face forward; she looked at him as if she didn’t know who he was.

  Olivia slurred something in his face, something undecipherable, and leaned in, pressing her forehead against his.

  ‘What the fuck were you taking?’ Daniel begged.

  She whispered again, something that sounded almost like a song.

  Disco 2000.

  Daniel held her cheeks and remembered it from the karaoke bar in New Zealand.

  ‘Olivia? I need to get you upstairs, to the bathroom, yes?’

  Olivia mumbled something about meeting in the year 2000.

  Daniel lifted her off the bottom step, his arms under her armpits, until they were almost the same height.

  ‘Olivia?’

  Daniel heaved her up.

  As she sang something about a fountain her heavy lids lifted and her eyes widened in alarm as she put her hand to her mouth to suppress a stream of sick.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ Daniel half shouted.

  A spurt of vomit escaped between two fingers, beyond Daniel’s shoulder as he deftly ducked and it hit the wall.

  Olivia, startled by herself, seemed to regain some awareness.

  ‘I’m so—’

  ‘Let’s get you to the bathroom.’

  Olivia retched, her stomach contracting violently, as Daniel rushed her up the stairs as quickly as he could, almost dragging her into the bathroom behind his shoulder where she slumped on the cold tiles against the toilet. There she vomited and cried and cried and vomited.

  ‘Cazzo…’ she muttered to herself between the bursts of bile and horror waking her up.

  ‘Shhhh, it’s OK, it’s OK,’ Daniel said, as he rubbed her back, although they both knew it wasn’t. The spine protruding from the top of her slip dress felt rough and jagged. ‘Shhhh, shhhh, don’t worry. Shhh…’

  She continued to retch.

  ‘I’ll get you some water.’

  ‘My hair!’ Olivia wailed. Daniel looked for a hairband to tie it with, which he found next to the sink. He had never tied hair back before, but gently pulled it and did an OK enough job considering the pressure he was under. Olivia was too drunk to feel how tightly he’d tied it, how it pinched her forehead and pulled at the cut on her hairline – alcohol had numbed the pain.

  Daniel went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and wondered if tap water was drinkable in London – he never drank the tap water at Wapping – before reasoning on that being the least of her worries. There was no bottled water in the futuristic barren fridge.

  ‘Here you go.’ Daniel sat on the edge of the turquoise bath, holding the glass out for Olivia while her stomach pumped itself. From his rolltop perch, as he rubbed her stegosaurus spine and looked around the room, waiting for her body to do what it needed to do, he noticed an assortment of empty bottles: big ones, little ones, vermouth, vodka and gin, all empty, secreted on the other side of the bath, between its clawed feet and the boxed-in plumbing at the wall.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he whispered to himself, wondering if he should phone an ambulance, wondering if there was someone he could call. He didn’t know how to contact Mimi; he imagined she would have long since packed up and left Oxford Street.

  He wondered if the boyish girl with big eyes lived nearby.

  When Olivia finally stopped retching, Daniel put a cold flannel to her forehead to clean the wound, relieved to see it wasn’t as deep as the blood would have him think. As he held her in his hands and she closed her eyes again, she looked strangely fresh-faced; she looked young. She looked like someone in need of a mother or two, and it made Daniel feel sad. She seemed to have no one.

  Olivia rested her head on his thigh while he rinsed the flannel and cleaned the residue of sick from one side of her mouth and then the other as he tilted her head, before ringing out the flannel, hanging it over the taps, and lifting her into the bedroom.

  He wanted to get the broken grime-and-blood-stained slip dress off her and into something clean, but it didn’t feel right, so he carefully lowered her onto the futon and rolled her to her side, facing the window onto the street. She looked like a bag of bones. Her hair looked darker and her swarthy skin was pale – from London or from puking, he hadn’t noticed it earlier – and he contemplated lying next to her, so he could protect her, stroke her, to make sure she was OK. The confident girl from the cafe on the Blues Point Road, with saltwater sun-kissed hair, seemed so vulnerable and incapable. So young and silly. But it felt too opportunistic. Too uncomfortable. Instead, Daniel switched off the light and returned to the bathroom to wash away the sick; to clean up.

/>   He looked in the mirror, his reflection tired and harrowed. Black kohl and the imprint of brown blood had smeared into a sweaty and indistinguishable mess across his forehead. What was left of Olivia’s email address danced, in reverse, blurred and violent like a bruise. But that didn’t matter. He had it on the piece of paper in his jacket pocket; he had it around his heart. Plus it was already committed to memory.

  Not that I know what to say to her.

  Daniel scrubbed the mess from his forehead, fastidiously cleaned up the rest of the bathroom and tipped the bleach he found under the kitchen sink into the toilet, then returned to the bedroom and closed the Roman blinds. Olivia was already asleep. Daniel propped a pillow behind and another in front of her, to keep her on her side, pulled the eiderdown up over her, and kissed the mass of hair on top of her head, before letting himself out so he could walk away, to walk through the night and get the first train out of King’s Cross.

  Twenty

  September 2017

  London

  Any news?

  Daniel sat in the empty bay where Olivia’s bed had been, looking at his phone. Mimi. Nancy. Maria. Silvia. Vaani. All of them had texted in the past two hours, messages of love, support and inquiry. An army of women who wanted so much for this operation to be a success for Olivia, for the young women who deserved to have a healthy mother, for Daniel.

  There was nothing to report.

  He looked around his curtain cage and returned to the sports pages of his newspaper. England v the West Indies. The Singapore Grand Prix. City and United at the top of the table. None of these events he had covered, or even watched, since his boss at BBC Online had asked the deputy sports editor to step up and cover Daniel ‘for a few weeks’.

  He couldn’t take any of it in, he kept re-reading sentences and still being none the wiser. So he put the paper on top of Olivia’s magazines on the table next to the gap where her bed had been and noticed someone had tidied them up.