‘But why are you going home with me?’ he asked in his nasal Greek accent. ‘You don’t know me. You don’t know if maybe I am going to kill you?’

            ‘Yeah, well. You probably won’t.’

            The morning was cold, clear and white. We’d left the club and walked to the Old Street roundabout. He kept asking me questions. I was taciturn, blissed-out and exhausted. Numb, no, dazed is the word. I still felt things. I stopped to kiss him again. Not really horny, but wanting to touch and taste and feel. Someone else, alive and warm. A homeless woman accosted us. I gave her a pound that had been rattling loose in the pocket of my sports shorts.

            We caught the bus to Bow. We asked each other what we’d been on. Both MDMA. We asked each other what we were doing in London. He said ‘research.’ Maybe he really is a serial killer, I thought.

Continue reading “Take care” →

I must have had one drink too many, because that morning I slept through my alarm, if you can call switching off your alarm and going back to sleep for an hour ‘sleeping through’ it. When I reawoke, I looked at the time, scrambled into the shower, microwaved a cup of coffee from Aoife’s cafetière, drank it with some of her almond milk and left, already making up an excuse in my head to explain being over an hour late.

Zesty Design was a moderately successful agency located on the second floor of a building down a leafy side street in Camden. On their website, they claimed to be ‘experienced purveyors of world-class content’, but what this really boiled down to was short ads for dishwasher tablets or sanitary pads, sometimes an internal reel for a car manufacturer or a supermarket chain, congratulating itself on how eco-friendly its practices were.

Continue reading “Performance review” →

In 2014, six months after moving to London, when she felt she was starting to get her bearings, Aoife found a queer book club online called the Orchid Tree Readers. Catering to ‘anyone LGBTQI-identifying of any gender expression’, but clearly more on the femme side judging by its members’ profile pics, it seemed as good a place as any to make friends in this new and overwhelming city.

            It was not. Aoife sensed this almost immediately upon entering the upstairs room of the small vegan café in Kentish Town. She was late and sweaty, her black hair — so carefully arranged in the office bathroom — plastered to her forehead from the oppressive Tube journey. The eight women around the table were all poised and thin and pretty, mostly white, in their mid-to-late-twenties and dressed in an oddly uniform fashion of muted denim shirts over white t-shirts, often with a little gold or silver chain running under the collar. Aoife had, for reasons now unknown to her, worn a childishly bright pink-and-yellow tie-dye tee. Which, she could tell from the group’s frowns, probably revealed the massive patches of sweat underneath.

            ‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman who’d been in the middle of an introductory spiel as she looked up at Aoife with a pitying smile. Her white t-shirt read simply: LENA DUNHAM. ‘This is booked for a meeting?’

Continue reading “Aoife and Theo” →