Erotic Refugees (4 page)

Although it might take more
than one Guinness.

Chapter
5

Eoin was early for The Big
Date, and he was a crackling ball of nerves. There were forty
minutes to go until he was supposed to meet Rebecka and he was
already in town, slouching around shops and trying to keep his
hands busy so they didn't keep on sliding up his sleeve and feeling
for his watch.

This Rebecka was obviously
interested. She'd chatted enthusiastically for a week before asking
him out, so he had no reason to be nervous. That didn't matter
though, as finding reasons to be nervous was what Eoin was best
at.

He checked his watch and
decided it was probably time to head for the Old Town, and made
some frenzied calculations about how fast he should be moving and
what route he should be taking in order to make it to the pub on
time, or at least not appallingly early.

After a long and complex stroll
he reached Malone's, only four minutes early. That was fine surely,
somewhere between eager and nonchalant. He straightened his
shoulders, arranged his hair as Alice had suggested and pushed the
doors open.

He was enveloped by the warm
babble of the crowd as he slipped inside and allowed the doors to
swing closed behind him. Squeezing by a large man in a denim
jacket, he positioned himself at the end of the bar. He looked
hopefully around and saw that the few tables were all fully
occupied, and that there were no women sitting by themselves.

Oh well, he was early, so not
to worry. He ordered a Guinness and started flicking through a
newspaper, trying so hard to look relaxed that his jaw hurt.

“
Eoin?”

He spun around with a yelp of
surprise and saw that his date had managed to sneak up on him.
Brown hair framed her smiling face, a face that was a little
meatier than he had expected. But the eyes on display were bright
and all of her limbs seemed to be accounted for (or at least were
very good fakes).

So far so good then.

He decided he'd better stand
up, then thought better of it and sat back down on the barstool
again. Desperately in need of a hint about what to do next, he
stuck out his hand with a hopeful grin.

“
Eoin,” he
said.

She took his hand, looking
surprised. “Yes, I know that. Rebecka. Hej.”

He swallowed. “So you made it
then, I see. That’s nice.”

She nodded. Eoin gripped his
knee painfully with his free hand, appalled that he could say
something so inane. If he wasn’t careful he would soon find himself
going on about the merits of different kinds of content management
systems and end up boring the lady to death.

She jerked her thumb towards
the back of the bar.

“
We go downstairs, the
others are there now. The music is starting soon.”

Eoin gave a start. What had she
just said? He leaned closer, tilting an ear in her direction. “The
others? I don't really understand.”

“
My friends, you know,
for to see the band.”

Eoin hoisted a smile into
position. His Guinness arrived and he turned to the barman in
relief and extracted his wallet, glad for something to distract him
while his mind spun. Band? What band? He had obviously missed
something vital here. Was this a date at all? It sure felt like a
date, or at least like his idea of what a date should feel like.
But then why had she brought friends along? For moral support? Or
just to protect her from the suspected lunatic Irishman?

Eoin was out of his depth here.
This was a major and wholly unexpected deviation from the script.
He needed to call Alice and ask her what to do. This situation, he
was sure, would be perfectly clear to a woman but to him it was
about as transparent as your average brick wall.

However he couldn’t make any
calls now, not with his (apparent) date standing in front of him
and giving him a quizzical look complete with raised eyebrows. He
realised he simply had to go along with it until he could slip away
later to do his whole call-a-friend routine.

He picked up his pint and
followed Rebecka to the back of the bar and down the steps into the
chilly stone basement. Now that he could see her from the back he
confirmed his suspicion that she was slightly larger than expected.
Her rear end pushed out her jacket to a worrying extent, and the
small stretch of leg on display was disconcertingly chubby.

He started to wonder if the
photograph she'd posted had been current, or possibly of somebody
else entirely. Either way the full damage would be revealed soon
enough when she peeled off that jacket and placed her unexpectedly
voluminous arse on a seat of some kind. Then he'd know for
sure.

The basement was packed and in
one corner was a tiny stage where a band were tuning up their
instruments. Eoin felt a shiver of irritation. He hated music in
pubs, especially in small cosy pubs, and he realised he may have
given Rebecka the false impression while chatting to her that it
was something he enjoyed. Not a lie exactly, just a little
accidental polishing of reality.

And anyway Rebecka had
attempted to magic away at least ten kilos from her Internet
persona. In light of that, his own embellishments were only
minor.

She wriggled onto a bench by a
table where two women and a man already sat. As Eoin squeezed into
the remaining space beside her he was introduced to the others.
Monika, Lotta and Filip nodded at him with a forced politeness that
gave him the unpleasant feeling of having stumbled into somebody
else’s job interview. He felt the hard gaze of her female friends
sweep across him like some deeply critical radar.

“
Well I'm glad you made
it,” he said, turning to Rebecka. “Maybe I didn't understand you,
but I thought—”

“
So Eoin,” interrupted
Lotta, a powerful looking lady perched behind a pair of wide oval
glasses. “What do you do?”

Eoin turned to her and smiled
hopelessly. There it was, the classic Swedish “what do you do”
thrown out only thirty seconds into the conversation. It was a sure
sign the night was doomed and any attempts to rescue it would be
futile. It should be put down immediately like a lame horse, or
else quickly drowned in alcohol.

Eoin drained his Guinness to
the halfway point. “Um, well, I'm a project leader for a business
systems supplier. A small company, you probably don’t know it.”

Lotta nodded, looking less than
satisfied with that answer. Eoin's gaze flicked desperately around,
looking for an exit sign, or a fireman's pole, or a rope ladder
dangling from a helicopter, anything at all to get him away from
this place. But the only escape he could think of was beer and,
despite his resolution to not under any circumstances become too
drunk, he plugged the pint glass to his face and sucked at it like
he imagined a deep-sea diver sucked at an oxygen tube.

Luckily, before things could
deteriorate further and Lotta started to enquire about his mortgage
and what kind of oven he preferred, the band suddenly kicked off
and everybody turned around to watch them.

Eoin did his best to hide his
distaste at the blues-funk dirge on offer. Meanwhile, his so-called
date sat beside him with her thigh shoved maddeningly up against
his, close enough that her scent (white musk, Eoin reckoned)
penetrated the odour of sweat and stale beer like a thin flowery
knife.

Eoin, despite his best efforts
to remain calm, found himself becoming excited by her. He tried to
get in a few words but found them swamped by noise every time. Her
friends tossed the occasional scrap of conversation his way, but it
was clear they saw him in the same way as he saw them—as an
impediment to a good time.

After twenty excruciating
minutes, he couldn't bear it any longer. He held up his empty pint,
mumbled something incoherent and excuse-me'd his way through the
packed crowd. The stone stairs opened up before him and he mounted
the steps two at a time with immense relief.

He fumbled with his mobile,
shaking his head. This whole thing was a disaster. It felt like
meeting a woman with children, except that the children were all
critical little bastards in their thirties who followed mommy on
all of her dates just to make sure they were really boring.

He slid into an alcove by the
emergency exit and called Alice.

“
Oh you just probably
misunderstood her,” Alice said, after listening to his rapid
summary. She sounded distracted, and he could picture her doing a
couple of other things at the same time, like chopping a salad, or
ironing clothes, or retrieving a small child from the foamy depths
of a bath.

“
But I don't even think
this is a date to her!”

“
She showed up, didn't
she? How much more proof do you need that it's a date? It's not
that unusual to bring a few friends along as emotional muscle.
Strange, I admit, but not unheard of. Just go with it, Eoin, see
what happens.”

“
Go with it? If I stay at
the table another second I’ll…”

There he paused, with a
half-formed objection tingling on his tongue, because at that
moment Rebecka passed him. She was probably on her way to the bar,
and she hadn’t seen him.

“
You will what?” Alice
prompted.

“
Wait, she just walked
by. She must be going to order.” He peered around the corner and
saw her settle onto a stool at the bar, the cleft of her
slightly-larger-than-expected bosom glistening with a few drops of
musk-scented sweat.

He swallowed. Okay, sure, she
was bigger than expected, but damn it she was cute enough, and she
was actually quite funny when he chatted to her on the dating site.
Plus she seemed to know a lot about eighties music, which he loved.
Not much to base a relationship on, but there you go.

Unless of course she'd been
chatting with a Google page on the ready so she could appear to be
knowledgeable about things she actually knew nothing about. Not
entirely out of the question, as Eoin had, on several occasions,
done the same thing himself in his short dating career.

“
Yes, that's the spirit!”
Alice said. “You run along after the lady. Good luck, and make her
a nice breakfast!”

“
Well I'll let you know.”
Eoin shoved the mobile into his pocket. He peered into the old
Guinness mirror on the wall, smoothed down his shirt, pushed his
hair around and examined his teeth for foreign matter. Then he took
a deep breath and stepped around the corner, striding as casually
as he could towards the bar. Where he froze.

A man was standing beside
Rebecka. A man with an open-necked orange shirt who was grinning in
that cheeky and arrogant way used by all lads everywhere since the
original lad—the proto-lad if you will—had crawled with a swagger
from the primordial slime.

Eoin did a quick side-step, hid
behind the bar and started to fret. Okay, so maybe this guy knew
Rebecka. She'd suggested this bar so she probably was a regular and
knew lots of people here. He peered at her and quickly realised
this was rubbish. This was a pick-up attempt, pure and simple.

Worse than that, Rebecka—his
date!—was simply letting it happen and even seemed to be enjoying
it.

That was it. Whatever his
intentions on this woman, and whatever chance he may or may not
have, it had now become a matter of honour. If anybody was going to
be chatting up Rebecka, it was Eoin, and not some bright-shirt
wearing side-burned lad.

Eoin gathered himself. He
strode around the bar, squeezed between a pair of fat Englishmen
who had their faces aimed at the football, and slipped in on the
other side of Rebecka. She looked up, and her smile slid a
little.

“
Oh hi Eoin. I hope you
are enjoying it.”

Eoin kept his voice flat. “Hi
Rebecka. So is this another one of your friends? Quite a lot of
them here tonight.”

Rebecka stared at him and
blinked. The man in the orange shirt looked from Eoin to Rebecka
and back again, and decided it was now up to him to fill the sudden
space in the conversation.

“
Oh I'm sorry, is this
yer wife?”

Eoin glared at the man, annoyed
that his adversary was also Irish. His thick accent suggested he
came from the depths of the countryside, from some tiny bog town
with cow-shit all over the streets, inhabited by people who spat a
lot and said “howru” to each other.

But Irish or no Irish, Eoin was
not about to be outdone. In fact he was itching for an argument
after the mess the evening had become.

“
No, actually, she's my
date. My. Date.”

The man's face betrayed a
glimmer of concern and Eoin cheered up, sensing that he might
indeed get the upper hand. And perhaps a handful of Rebecka's
charms later on. But then Rebecka turned and slapped a hand on his
arm.

“
Your date, Eoin? So you
already own me, do you?”

Eoin was thrown off balance, as
the hand, like the rest of her, was quite a bit heavier than
expected.

“
No, sorry, I meant …
well I did chat to you for a few weeks. I put in a lot of effort,
you know.”

“
Oh, I see. So I was
effort is what you're saying? This talking to me was hard work for
you?”

Eoin felt it happening, like a
landslide heading in slow-motion for some poor ramshackle village.
He knew he was about to enter an argument engineered by a woman
with the single intention of trapping him and making a point. He
had braved these convoluted arguments on many an occasion and knew
by now there was no way he could ever win one. No, from an argument
like this there was only one way out, and that was in tiny bleeding
chunks.