Man Of Few Words

Chapter 58

A few drinks later, and we were still getting on great and having a laugh.

She'd just got back from the bar with the first Blue Lagoon, sipping and also spilling a little of it on her way back. But it was still pretty much full as she placed it unsteadily on the table, and I felt the now familiar hand on the shoulder. There was something less familiar this time though. Specifically, something cold, wet and smooth bumping against the end of my nose. I reflexively pulled back a little and tried to focus on it.

"Oops! Sorry," Carolyn spluttered, laughing at her failed attempt to feed me the cherry from the top of her blue lagoon. She tried again, this time holding the cherry at a clear and safe distance so that I could lean forward and pull it off the stalk with my teeth.

I smiled, laughed a little and said, "Thank you."

She made demure but not sharply focused eyes at me.

It was time to make a move. She was sitting very close, so I simply held that eye contact and reached my hand under the table and onto her knee.

As soon as I touched her, her knee jerked up hard, hitting the underside of the table with a loud bang. I rescued my half-full pint with my other hand just as it was about to tip over. Meanwhile Carolyn was too busy looking down under the table to notice the blue lagoon tumbling towards her crotch.

The knee hitting the table was the first of an almost rhythmic sequence of noises she made over the space of about 6 seconds. I've repeated the sequence so many times, often again and again during the same telling of the story. I'm sniggering to myself even as I type this. Let's hope it doesn't trigger one of my trademark coughing fits:

BANG!
Shit
What?
Oops!
AAAGH! (this was the extremely loud squeal as she felt the icy booze soak through the denim)
Shit
Fuck
What?
Bollocks
No
Sorry

Then she just started laughing hysterically, stood up and started making her way across the pub with the most ridiculously wide cowboy walk I've ever seen. I thought she was going to the toilets to clean herself up, but instead she went straight to the bar, ordered another blue lagoon and came lolloping straight back with it. She gave her chair a cursory wipe with the sleeve of her baggy cardigan then sat down.

At this point I was nowhere near done laughing. She looked like an calamitous outtake from a TV ad for sanitary towels. Or maybe nappies.

Thinking about it, I once pitched some taglines for a sanitary towel ad, or tampons, whatever. What was it now? Gimme a moment...

"It's time to start!"

I remember being pretty pleased with that. It's got that confident, active vibe with a subtle ironic nod to what it's really about, right? I don't remember if they ever used it though. Obviously it would never have been targeted at me. Lady readers, does it ring any bells?

Anyway, back to the story...

Having unleashed a hilarious catastrophe with my first real "move" of the evening, I held off from making any further attempts until a while later. Carolyn polished off her second blue lagoon pretty rapidly, presumably through fear of spilling it, and we agreed to move on to a club. Both being too drunk to make a measured decision, walk far, or organise a taxi, we quickly settled on the nearest such establishment, a sketchy meat market by the name of Paradise. We both knew it was awful, but we didn't care.

So we paid our three quid, got smudgy dark blue palm trees stamped on our wrists, and descended the sticky, slippy stairs to Paradise.

The song Sex On The Beach was just fading in as we emerged into the sweaty, smoky, gloomy atmosphere of the club proper, and Carolyn immediately started singing along and bopping her way to the bar where, inevitably, she ordered a sex on the beach for each of us.