Page 21 of The Lucky Escape

I dropped my jaw in faux-shock that he couldn’t remember the name of it. ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!’ I giggled. ‘How can you not know the name ofCharlie and the Chocolate Factory?’

‘I’m an old man now,’ he said, shrugging. ‘The names of shows escape me. I can still remember every lyric to every song inAladdinthough.’

We’d been reliving old memories and filling in the gaps of each other’s blanks for two hours and three drinks’ worth of time.

‘That’s good going,’ I said, and then, changing the subject slightly: ‘It’s sad, really. But I’ve not done any theatre since Yak Yak. I suppose I left the summer before I did my GCSE year and then once I’d finished school I figured I was too old for that sort of stuff.’ I drained my glass, totally lost in the back-and-forth between us. ‘What did you do then?’ I asked. ‘After school?’

‘Inter-railed Europe, got my heart broken by a French girl, wrote some bad songs about it,’ he admitted, his face making it very clear that he knew how to laugh at his eighteen-year-old self.

‘That sounds suspiciously similar to the plot ofBefore Sunrise,’ I countered.

‘Are you calling me a cliché?’

‘That depends,’ I teased. ‘Did you grow out your facial hairinto a patchy moustache and spend the next four years wearing a smelly old vintage leather jacket that you’d tell anyone who’d listen you got when you travelled Europe?’

‘Wow, were you my twenty-something stalker?’

‘You have to say it in the voice, too. You can’t just say, “Oh! I got it when I travelled Europe!” you have to be all gruff and mysterious.’ I dropped my pitch by a few tones and grumbled, ‘“I got it when I travelled Europe.” As if you were sent to the Battle of the Somme, not drinking 50p beer in the Czech Republic.’

‘Okay, okay,’ he said, holding up his hands in surrender. ‘Get out of my head now please. I cannot withstand this character assassination, for I am but a humble, sensitive insurance salesman now. And anyway – who were you after you left school? Ms Goody-Goody?’

‘That’s too easy,’ I retorted. ‘Because I’ve already told you I was. And that I still am.’

‘I’m not buying it,’ he declared. ‘There’s gotta be a wild one in there waiting to get out.’

He held my eye as he said it, provoking me. The sun hit him in a way that lit him up, making him golden and youthful. His wide frame occupied a pleasing width of the booth, and it had been hard not to notice how big his hands were. I could barely hold my pint glass with one hand when it was full, despite my limbs being like Stretch Armstrong, but his hands – he could have wrapped his palm around a whole barrel.

‘Changing the subject …’ I said, refusing to get drawn in. I didn’t even want to flirt for sport.

‘Humour me!’ he insisted, getting up for another round. I was going to protest before I realized I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep drinking, and to keep talking. It was exactlyhow I had hoped it would be. It was exactly what I’d been craving. Being with him was an escape.

The afternoon bled into early evening, and the conversation took a turn with it. Somehow we were trying to distinguish the difference between sex and intimacy.

‘I have a vested interest inintimacy,’ Patrick explained. I had no idea how we ended up there. We’d talked about everything and anything and nothing and the world. And we were tipsy by now, too. ‘Because it involves showing your true self to each other.’

I shook my head, but I was grinning. ‘A vested interest in intimacy? That sounds suspiciously like another way to say, “my hobby is getting people to sleep with me”, pal.’

Patrick feigned outrage. ‘Well, well, well – that’s incredibly presumptive.’ He took a swing from his pint glass. ‘It’s good to know where your thoughts lie, Annie Wiig.’

I raised my glass to him in a mock cheers. ‘I just call ’em as I see ’em.’ I’d grown sillier and sillier as we’d talked. He made it easy to be that way.

‘On a scale of one to ten, how good are you at admitting when you’re wrong?’

‘Couldn’t tell you.’ I smiled. ‘It’s never happened.’

He set his drink down and leaned back. ‘Real talk,’ he declared. ‘I honestly think sex and intimacy are two totally different things. You can have sex without being truly intimate, and you can feel closer to somebody than anyone else in the world without having touched one another.’

I narrowed my eyes, trying to get a hold on how serious he was.

‘Go on,’ I said, lending him enough rope to hang himself.

‘Intimacy isn’t champagne and candles and foot rubs. Itcan be part of it – but it’s not all of it.’ He continued. ‘Modern life – all the “having to be at places at certain times, the bills, the responsibilities”, we’re over-burdened. We complicate things and make ourselves busy, and we think that gives life meaning.’

I thought about all the times I worked late, or Alexander worked late, or the weekends we sat in the same room but on our laptops, eventually ordering a takeaway and leaving the dishes for the cleaner.

‘On top of all that,’ he continued, ‘we all live apart from our families, often apart from our oldest friends, too, and we put all this responsibility on our relationship to fulfil what we need financially, emotionally, not to mention the sex. We ask a lot of our romantic partners, and I wonder at what cost.’

A waiter appeared at our table, order pad in hand and drinks tray under her arm. We’d been in the pub so long that they’d switched from afternoon bar bites and empty tables to full-blown restaurant-style menus and table service. I was glad he hadn’t said he had somewhere to be. He hadn’t even looked at his watch.

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