They were squeezed into the corner of the Three Crowns on Stoke Newington Church Street, which was so busy that all the windows were steamed up and there was a constant loud hum of voices.
“I think you just need to let your hair down a bit. You seem so worried about everything, all the time.” Clara bit on her lip, scanning the room. “I know,” she said, her face lighting up. “Wine and shots here, then we move on.”
“Uh-oh... To...?”
“The lesbian bar around the corner, which does... karaoke.” Clara raised her eyebrows and Daisy laughed. She had no desire to do karaoke, but she was also quite keen on the idea of Clara being around other lesbians in case she met one she liked more than her fake internet girlfriend.
“Fine.”
“What? I thought that would be a way harder sell. Really?”
“Yes. You’ve caught me at a weak moment.”
“Babe,” Clara said, reaching across the sofa to rest her hand on Daisy’s arm. “No offence, but that is your default status at the moment.”
“I knoooow,” Daisy said, fed up.
“I know you said you’d done therapy in the past, but is it worth considering it again? I think it would be super helpful, given you don’t seem to have any idea what’s bothering you and yet everything seems to be. Leishaswearsby it. She reckons good therapy can change your life.”
Good therapy.That was Zack, wasn’t it? So good that she wanted to keep him in her life, forever. Daisy bit at her thumb. “Good idea. Right. Shots, you said?”
Two hours later the two of them squeezed through the doors of the hidden lesbian pub in Stoke Newington, sitting up a side street beyond a kebab shop and a mini market that sold everything from batteries and balloons to clothes pegs and Snickers bars, which is what they stopped in for briefly to “soak up the booze.”
The pub was only one room inside with a bar running along the right-hand side and it was absolutely heaving. Someone was just inside the door on the microphone, giving Madonna a solid half effort about life being a mystery. Within seconds, as she reached the chorus, the whole bar burst into song.
Clara turned to Daisy and grinned. “It is absolutely impossible not to let your hair down here.”
They pushed past groups of people talking and laughing, dancing and singing. Daisy could feel an energy rise in her chest that was so different to the energy she’d been used to recently. This one was more positive. Excitement, as opposed to fear.
Daisy ordered another wine while Clara, in what Daisy felt was quite a ridiculous decision, switched to a pint of lager. They picked up the karaoke folder sitting by the card machine, and went through the songs as though they didn’t already know what they were singing before they walked in.
“All Saints?” Clara said.
“Obviously.”
She wrote it down and took it over to the woman running the karaoke while Daisy looked on. She saw how Clara interacted with her, talking and laughing. The DJ put a hand on Clara’s arm, pushing her hair away from her face with the other; all sure signs she was interested. Daisy wondered how Clara could ever give up a real human connection like that for someone she’d never met. It didn’t make any sense to her. She was in love with someone she’d never touched. Clara didn’t know what her girlfriend smelled of or whether her skin was soft. Shehadn’t felt that stopping of her heart when their eyes met as they glanced across a room at each other. Hadn’t felt the weight of Leisha’s body as she climbed into bed next to her, or seen their toothbrushes side by side at the sink. What then, had she experienced, that made her so sure? That would, she could see now as Clara turned away from the DJ and back toward her, make her so easily turn down a potential connection with someone she’d met in real life?
“I promised Leisha I’d send her a selfie if I convinced you to come here,” she said, pulling her phone out of her back pocket and holding it in the air.
“What? When? I thought youjustthought of it when we were in the pub?”
Clara looked at Daisy, whose mouth had fallen open in shock and burst out laughing. Glancing at her phone, she started to laugh even harder at the photo she’d just taken, which had caught that exact moment of Daisy’s horror.
Her own phone lit up with a message from Zack.
Back soon? x
“Okay, next up we’ve got Daisy and Clara. Daisy and Clara?”
Clara whooped and a few of the women turned to them in horror, unsure how they’d managed to bag the next spot when there was a queue of people who’d clearly been waiting for ages. Daisy knew how. It was the Clara effect.
Both of them were handed a microphone as the familiar first beats of “Never Ever” filled the air. Clara took the rap at the beginning, helped out by the DJ and most of the room, and then Daisy reluctantly took up the first verse. By the time they reached the chorus, the whole pub was screaming the words so loud that it didn’t really matter who was on the microphones or what they sounded like. At the bridge, Daisy stared at thewords in front of her, wondering if she’d ever properly taken in the song before. It was about someone so lost and confused. So helpless. It washer. Things hadn’t been making sense for a while, but that was compounded when Tom met Zack that morning. Everything felt slightly off, and she wasn’t sure why, and the more she tried to avoid thinking about it, the worse she started to feel. She’d been lying to everyone and the weight of that was too much. It wasn’t who she was as a person.
As the lyrics in front of her spoke about searching within your own soul, Daisy blinked, the words starting to spin, circling in her head. She looked across at her best friend, giving it her all, curly hair bouncing back and forth as she sung with all her might into the microphone, and she reached out and pulled Clara toward her.
“He was my therapist,” she shouted directly into Clara’s ear.
She frowned. “What? Who was?”
