"You're being deliberately obtuse. You know very well it's a common experience."
"But not a universal one. Plenty of men aren't like that. You think Lutek is like that? That I'm like that?"
"I'm thirty-three," Bess says by way of answer, because she knows I'm right, but it's not convenient to her conviction to acknowledge that. However, redirection might just fool me. "Thirty threeand not a single man has done anything romantic out of a desire to get to know me better. If there has been anything romantic, it's been minimal and designed to get me into the sack quicker."
"Did it work?"
"Yes. And then they lose interest."
"Maybe you're just really shit at choosing men who can give you what you want."
"It's possible."
"Whatdoyou want? All I hear is what you don't want. What would the ideal behaviour of your ideal man look like?"
Bess lowers the angle of the leaner and clasps her glass over her chest with both hands. "I want to be wooed. Like in black and white Hollywood movies. Treated like I'm special and worth taking the time over. Men knew how to do romance back then."
I hold up a hand. "Okay. Please explain to me how a modern feminist, who yearns for a time when women were treated as second-class citizens and expected to be submissive home makers, is not at all hypocritical."
"BecauseI'm only aproponent of old-fashioned romantic behaviour, not old-fashioned attitudes towards women. The two can be mutually exclusive." She closes her eyes. "I want to be made to feel beautiful and that I have nothing lacking and that I deserve their interest and attention and that I am respected and that my interest in them is not presumed. That they have to prove themselves worthy." She opens her eyes. "That's what I want. I've never ever had anything remotely like that before."
I mean, it's a pretty reasonable expectation. All Bess' bullshit aside – or even with it, because despite everything, I quite like her bullshit – she does deserve that. Of course she does. She's just going about it in the wrong way.
"What would you do if a modern man expressed his admiration in a romantic and respectful way?"
"I'd eat my own eyeball because it won't happen, but if it did, I'd be very happy."
"So...you'd be less of an aggressively closed door?"
"I might remove the chain and deadbolt. I'd have to see."
I'm...not sure what to do with that information. Acknowledge it and move on, or take it and use it and risk being that moth battering itself against the glass, desperate to get to the light on the other side?
Suppressing a sigh, I turn my head away from her towards the library and the port behind it. Out to sea, the solid bank of grey clouds that was on the horizon when I made my way to Bess' post-work debrief is now perilously close to making landfall. "Looks like rain."
"Shit," says Bess and downs her second gin in one. "I have a visit to make."
Chapter four
Bess
BythetimeIget to the cemetery the sky has the thick, soupy texture of freshly mixed cement. The clouds hang ominously heavy, as if they are actually made of concrete and will lose their ability to defy gravity at any moment.
Typical.
Just when I have something good in my life to rub in the old tosser's face, my parade is literally going to get rained on.
I still manage a spring in my step, anticipating the delight at which I'll deliver my show and tell.
Basil Alexander Everett, or "Evil Everett" as the kids at my primary school dared to whisper when he was so far out of earshot, safety against being overheard was categorically guaranteed, lay in a neglected plot at the far end of the cemetery.
As an eight-year-old, naturally I preferred the much pithier "Basil the Bastard" and wasn't afraid to whisper it when the distance between my mouth and his ear was precariously close to the wrong side of the "bring back corporal punishment" debate.
Usually I take a meandering path through the old part of the graveyard, enjoying the ambience of the more decorative graves, but given I've left my umbrella at home, I make a beeline through the more recently dead.
How a sadist of his calibre was ever allowed within shouting distance of young children, let alone being given the enormous responsibility of educating them, I'll never know.
That man tried his best to crush the hopes and dreams of generations of Port Derrum children quite literally until the day he died. The entire childhood population of the town, between the ages of five and ten, got to bear witness to the indignity an eighty-four-year-old human body goes through during a heart attack, courtesy of a Monday morning assembly.
