Pretty Young Things

When Sophia met Naja

I first met Naja in the staffroom of the pub we both worked in. The Fiddler's Elbow had advertised for someone to handle the ticket booth for when the usually grotty indie pub transformed to 'Club Gloom', an even grottier student night.

I applied for the job after returning to North London from three months away, interrailing around Europe. Two months into the trip, the most beautiful man I had ever set my eyes on, let alone fucked, had broken up with me. Interrailing had been his idea. Michael had grown up mixed-race, or 'coloured' as he frequently corrected me, in South Africa. His mother, a Dutch woman had married his father, a self professed 'big man'. She had died when Michael was thirteen. Before her tragically premature death, she had promised to take Joseph on a trip to the Netherlands for his 18th birthday, stopping frequently in neighbouring countries: Belgium, Germany and the edges of Luxembourg. Michael was now 22, studying for his master's in London. He hadn't been to his motherland yet. But then he met me, I was 19 and absolutely besotted, so I guess that was close enough.

What we both failed to consider was if the experience of two visibly non-white kids, he with a halo of tight curls and me with my black blanket-like hair that fell to my bum and a complexion that often had me mistaken for being Romany (a group of people that existed at the fringes of every country we visited) would be a pleasant one. A part of me would like to say that being faced with this racial dynamic, a force way beyond our control or understanding, was what led to the ultimate breakdown of the relationship. But the fight we had in the ruined bar in Budapest where we were granted entry and the group of South Asian boys behind us were not, sadly had little to do with it.

The reality was that Michael was beautiful and that offered an intoxicating aura of protection. Even a mean looking, leather jacketed, bald guy with tattoos on his skull couldn't peer into Michael's green-blue eyes and come up without spluttering for lungs full of air. It had been fun at first to be associated with him but the glee I felt when men and women realised that he had chosen me, a barely 5ft, gap-toothed, not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman Bangladeshi (the lowest rung on the sexy ethnics ladder), had started to lose its appeal. Michael, like most ethereally beautiful creatures, was boring.

I know, I know. Isn't that what all non-mesmerising people say to make themselves feel better, as if being smart or funny was the flip side of a beauty coin we had tossed and come out as winners? But in the same way I couldn't resist my toes curling and getting wet instantly when I saw Michael's gorgeous body, I also couldn't deny that other than fucking, Michael and I rarely enjoyed spending time together.

So when Michael broke up with me for the umpteenth time that summer (as well as being boring, he was bafflingly insecure), instead of begging him to take me back, a routine that often led to eyes-rolling-to-the-back-of-my-skull good make up sex which often left me feeling dead inside, I left the ruin bar, packed my bag and joined the British Oxbridge kids from the hostel on their route back to the UK. It was lonely and I struggled to understand the crazy rich kids whose version of interrailing included a ridiculously expensive gastronomy weekend in Southern Italy and a ski-trip in Switzerland I noped out of.

I could have returned home and spent the last few weeks of summer with my parents, a decision so terrifying that maxing out my overdraft and developing a difficult to shake and bankruptable love of burrata and primitivo felt like the only option.

So when I accepted the offer to work at The Fiddler's Elbow, with a start date of 'right fucking now' from a very coked up Bar Manager named Charlie (yup), I was already well acquainted with my destructive desire for beautiful things. When Naja walked in though, I was like a moth to a naked flame. She was even more beautiful than Michael, a fact that would have worried me if she hadn't been a woman. Oh how naive I was.