Arthur turns to more fully face me, nearly sending red wine across the cream fabric couch. He looks ready to apologise, but I wave him off. He seems to understand that this means, ‘Don’t worry, it’s Bee’s.’
‘You get it!’ he says. ‘I have a lot of weirdly specific gripes about song lyrics.’
‘That’s not weird; that’s just good sense. I have an irrational hatred of songs that reference being a songwithinthe song.’ Faintly, I can hear a rhythmic thudding. Might be imagining it.
‘What about poor grammar in song lyrics?’ he asks, and I think he’s speaking louder than before.
‘Hate it. Any time ‘The Way I Are’ comes on somewhere, I get physically ill.’
‘It’s not Shakespeare,’ he replies, solemn in the full seriousness of our discussion.
‘Although Shakespeare did invent a whole bunch of words…’
‘Doesn’t mean I have to like it.’
We stick in this safe conversation for a while longer. Or rather I subject him to my Ted Talk about how ‘As Long As You Love Me’ and ‘Blank Space’ are fundamentally the same song. ‘He doesn’t care who she is or where she’s from? He only cares about her as long as she loves him—that’s his only requirement? She could literally be any woman, completely interchangeable. In other words: he’s got a blank space.’
‘I don’t think that’s what the song means, Gertie…’
Another bottle cracked. The pours more generous. I get my own glass this time. The laughter louder. The language a little sloppier. The bottle is half empty now.Spice Worldis his favourite movie: ‘It’s the greatest piece of absurdist art of the twentieth century. I willdieon this hill.’ I want to go to Albania: ‘I wonder if it’s because I’ve just been hit with a huge amount of targeted Instagram advertising about it. I just really want to know what it is about me that screams Albania to the algorithm, you know?’ Art tries to turn the conversation to sports and I swiftly turn him all the way back around. We find common ground withThe Last of Us, since gaming basically is a sport. It certainly gets my heart rate up to the unhealthy zone…just like a run. The playlist has long since run out, and the wine is nearly there too, but it goes unnoticed. Only when Arthur’s phone, now settled between us on the couch, lights up with a notification does either of us realise that more than two hours have passed since his one-hour deadline.
‘Shit. It’s getting late,’ he says. He drains the last of his wine.‘Safe to say I am discharged from chaperoning duties for the evening.’ He groans slightly as he pushes himself to standing. I follow him around as he gathers his things, and I realise it looks silly, his little drunken shadow. But I don’t really know what to do with myself. What are we now? Our frenemish acquaintanceship has drowned in a vat of wine and bad hot takes, but the look of revulsion he turned on me at that football party is the cockroach that will survive Armageddon. I don’t know how to act in this no man’s land.
At the door, I can’t help myself, and I blurt, ‘Why did you come tonight?’ Why can’t I just act normally and say thank you?
His eyes are glassy and a little unfocused. His phone pings in his hand. The Uber is here. He sighs and admits, ‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to say no when Bianca asked you. I guess I just didn’t want you to be lonely.’ The driver is calling him now. Can’t he see the light on and the door open? He is right there! ‘Thanks for tonight,’ he says. Then he leaves.
Leaves me holding the bomb he just dropped.
The moon is mocking me. Stupid moon. Sitting square in the middle of my skylight. Yes, I know it’s two-thirty. Yes, I am in fact acutely aware of this because I’m checking my phone every five minutes, hoping that I’ve miraculously fallen asleep and three hours have passed. When I realise I haven’t, I doomscroll. The moon stares back at me, unblinking. Blinding me with light, not allowing me to hide from its judgment. Get stuffed, moon.
You wouldn’t be able to say no.
I didn’t want you to be lonely.
I knew.
I turn over onto my stomach. What does he know, anyway? We have met all of three times. Most of that time has been spent ignoring me or making snide remarks at me. Yes, okay, we turned a corner over a bottle of wine or two, commiserating together over our inappropriate horny friends. Yes, okay, we covered a decent amount of (patchy and random) conversational ground this evening. But that doesn’t mean we know each other. Like, yes, I know his favourite colour (bronze, because he picked it as a child to be edgy and different and kind of feels stuck with it now), but I don’t know his last name. I should probably suss that out next time…No! There will not be a next time. But he didn’t even know any of that when he decided to play the fourth wheel. He certainly didn’t know about my Grade 5 camp performance of the10 Things I Hate About Youmonologue. The pity alone after that story would surely last at least three more outings with Bee and Billy. (I can call him Billy in my mind, where there is no one to tell me off.)
I’m getting off topic—sleeplessness does that to a person.
His absolute fucking audacity.
We don’t know each other.
I knew you wouldn’t be able to say no.
But he knows that fundamental thing about me. Is it fundamental? Most people wouldn’t say no to their friends, would they? It is a reasonable assumption that if my friend asked me to be present that I would be.
It feels fundamental.
But it’s all getting so jumbled in my head. He has so manyeyes. Disgusted eyes. Kind eyes. Indifferent eyes. Intrigued eyes. But they aren’t the eyes he ended the night with. Those were pitying eyes. He knew I wouldn’t say no, and he pitied me.
I don’t think I’ve ever been an object of pity before. Would I know, though? If people pitied me wouldn’t they do it behind my back in a classy way?
No. No, I’m catastrophising like that shitty therapist once said I’m prone to do before I freaked out and never saw them again. It’s because it’s so late and the evening was so weird. I know better than to stay up late thinking about life and other shit. I have conjured brain tumours for myself late at night. I have comprehensively mapped out very real doomsday scenarios. Not like zombie apocalypse orThe Day After Tomorrow, but like what I would do when society collapses. (Probably die quite quickly is the answer. I don’t have any survival skills. I can’t even make a fire, so winningSurvivoris out.) He made some completely innocuous comment, pushed out of him by wine, no doubt, and I have wasted several hours of my valuable life turning each word over in my head.
I should just message him to find out what he meant.
