‘Yes, I think I’d like to see the fireflies and have you as my friend,’ she says softly.
Izzy Azalea and Rita Ora’s ‘Black Widow’ is playing. There are people brushing past us; I can smell their perfume and cologne. They serve as a backdrop for her. Someone calls my name, but I don’t turn to look. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
She bends her head and shakes it, and her beautiful hair moves like a silky curtain around her face. ‘No, I’m with … friends. I have to go back to our table.’
I take my phone out of my pocket. ‘What’s your phone number?’
She lifts her head and tells it to me and I key her number into my phone. Not taking my eyes off her, I press the call button. A bird starts chirping from inside her bag.
‘Now you have my number too,’ I tell her.
‘Yes, now I have your number,’ she says slowly.
The moment is strange, surreal even. Full of undercurrents and deeper meanings, it doesn’t belong in the middle of a club relentlessly dedicated to the pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh. All the clever words and witty remarks have deserted me. I don’t want to let her go.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I ignore it. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ I say.
She nods slowly. ‘Yeah, maybe you will.’
For some odd reason her voice is sad. As if this promise has been made before and never kept, even though I cannot even imagine a scenario where a man takes her number and does not call. She is impossibly intriguing. I resist the temptation to reassure her that I will call.
‘Well, then. Nice to have met you,’ she says and, turning, begins to walk away.
‘Snow,’ I call.
She turns around, one charcoal eyebrow raised.
‘I will call you,’ I promise. It has never happened to me before. I have never cared to reassure anybody that I will call. If I felt like calling the next day, I called. If I didn’t, well … c’est la fucking vie.
One side of her mouth lifts, and then she turns away and carries on in her path, again an incorruptible fairy tale creature. When she disappears from my sight I can’t stop smiling. I take a triumphant sip of my drink before tilting my body slightly so I have a view of her table.
And that moment is like that video of John Newman’s track, ‘Love Me Again’. Do you know it? Where a boy and a girl meet in a dreary club. They escape from her wannabe gangster boyfriend and run out of the back doors. Hand in hand, full of hope and excitement, thinking they have outrun the bad guys, they get out of a narrow alleyway and dash straight into an oncoming vehicle. The video ends abruptly on a black screen.
I guess you are supposed to infer that they die.
Snow’s table is Lenny the Gent’s table.
The fairy tale takes an unexpected and unwelcome turn. Lenny ‘the Gent’ is not the wannabe variety but a real gangster. What they used to call a mobster. They call him the Gent b
ecause he is always so fucking polite. He would say ‘please’ or ‘do you mind’ before he hacked off your face. The Gent is surrounded by beautiful, giggling women vying for his attention, but he gazes at Snow’s approach with the kind of hunger that makes me sick to my stomach.
Fucking hell. Straight into an oncoming vehicle!
Snow is Lenny’s woman.
When she reaches his table, he stretches out his hand. For a second she hesitates then she opens her bag and gives him her phone. He pockets it, and taking another phone out of his pocket gives that to her. She puts it into her bag and sits down beside him, and he places his hand on her thigh.
I try to make out her expression, but her face is as smooth as a statue. Like a man in a daze I start walking toward her. My mind is blank. Fortunately, I collide with a waitress.
‘Sorry. It was my fault,’ she apologizes.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I tell her, my hypnotic trance broken.
I stop where I am standing and look at Snow. She is staring vacantly into her drink, her numb face the perfect frame for her empty eyes. The emptiness is total. I recognize its significance instantly. Her frozen body and expression are an instinct to survive. She has locked herself away in a place where she cannot be corrupted by the baseness and degradation around her.
A nearly naked woman is writhing her flesh close to Lenny the Gent’s face, but, like mine, his eyes are glued on Snow.
There is only one way this thing is going to end. Badly. But I don’t care. I have always gone where angels fear to tread. The blood expands in the veins of my forearms.