Люси Фоли - The Guest List

Hannah takes a drink from the bottle, breathes out. ‘That must have made you feel pretty awful,’ she says. ‘Seeing that. Jeez, social media has a lot to answer for.’

‘Yeah.’ I shrug. ‘It did make me feel a bit … shit.’ In case I sound like a total stalker I don’t tell her how many times I looked at those photos, how I sat there clutching my Sainsbury’s bag and crying while I did it. ‘My mates had been saying I should have some fun,’ I say. ‘You know, like show Callum what he was missing. They kept telling me to get myself on some dating apps, but I didn’t want to do it at uni, where it was all so incestuous.’

‘What, apps like Tinder?’

I think she’s trying to show she’s down with the kids. ‘Yeah, but no one really uses Tinder any more.’

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m ancient, remember. What do I know?’ She says it a bit wistfully.

‘You’re not that old,’ I tell her.

‘Well … thanks.’ Her knee bumps against mine.

I take another swig of vodka. And remember how that night in Jules’s flat I drank some of her wine, which made me realise how all the stuff we drank at uni for £3 a glass in the local bars tasted like absolute piss. I remember how I felt quite sophisticated walking around in my pants and bra with one of her big glasses. I imagined it was my flat, that I was going to go out and find some man and bring him back here and screw him. And that would show Callum.

Obviously I didn’t actually plan to do that. I’d only had sex with one person before, with Callum. And even that had been pretty tame.

‘I set up a profile,’ I tell Hannah. ‘I decided in London it was different. In London I could go on a date and it wouldn’t be all over the whole of campus the next morning.’

‘I’m kind of impressed,’ Hannah says. ‘I’d never have been brave enough to do something like that. But weren’t you, you know … worried about safety?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not an idiot. I didn’t use my real name. Or my age.’

‘Ah,’ Hannah nods. ‘Right.’ I get the impression she’s not convinced by that and is trying very hard not to say anything else.

I put my age as twenty-six, in fact. The profile photo I put up didn’t even look like me. I ransacked Jules’s closet, did my make-up perfectly. But it was kind of the point not to look like me.

‘I called myself Bella,’ I say. ‘You know, as in Hadid?’

I tell Hannah how I sat there on the bed and scrolled through photos of all these guys until my eyes burned. ‘Most of them were rank,’ I say. ‘In the gym, like lifting up their shirts, or wearing sunglasses that they thought made them look cool.’ I almost gave up.

‘But I did match with this one guy,’ I tell Hannah. ‘He caught my eye. He was … different.’

I made the first move. So unlike me, but I was a bit pissed from Jules’s wine.

Free to meet up? I wrote.

Yes, his reply came. I’d like that, Bella. When suits you?

How about this evening?

There was a long pause. Then: You don’t hang about.

This is my only free evening for the next few weeks. I liked how that sounded. Like I had better places to be.

Fine, he messaged back. It’s a date.

‘What was he like?’ Hannah asks, her chin in her hand. She seems fascinated, watching me closely.

‘Hotter than his photo. And a bit older than me.’

‘How much older?’

‘Um … maybe fifteen years?’

‘OK.’ Is she trying not to sound shocked? ‘And what was he like? When you actually met up?’

I think back. It’s hard for me to see him as he appeared at the beginning. ‘I guess I thought he was hot. And … he seemed like more of a man. He made Callum look like a boy in comparison.’ He had broad shoulders, like he worked out a lot, and a tan. In comparison Callum was a scrawny little pretty boy. Proper men were my new thing, I decided. ‘But,’ I shrug, even though she can’t see me. ‘I don’t know. I suppose however hot he was, at first, a part of me would have preferred him to be Callum.’

Hannah nods. ‘Yeah,’ she says sympathetically. ‘I get that. When you’ve got your heart set on someone Brad Pitt could walk in and he wouldn’t be enough—’

‘Brad Pitt is really fucking old ,’ I say.

‘Um – Harry Styles?’

That almost makes me smile. ‘Yeah. Maybe. Or Timothée Chalamet.’ I always thought Callum looked a bit like him. ‘But Callum probably hadn’t thought about me for a moment, especially not while Ellie’s stupid big tits were in his face.’ I told myself I had better stop fucking thinking about him.

‘And did this guy … what was his name?’

‘Steven.’

‘Did he say anything? When you met, about you being so much younger?’

I give her a look. That sounded a bit judge-y.

‘Sorry,’ she says, with a laugh. ‘But, seriously, did he?’

‘Yeah, he did. He asked me if I was really twenty-six. But he didn’t say it in a suspicious way, more like it was, I dunno – a joke we were both in on. It didn’t really seem to matter to him, not then. And he was nice,’ I say, though it’s hard to remember that now. ‘I was having a good time. He laughed at all my jokes. He asked me loads of questions about myself.’

I cast my mind back to that night. Being in that bar with the drinks going to my head – I was drinking Negronis because I thought that would make me seem older. ‘My original plan was to get a photo,’ I say, ‘post it to my Instagram.’ Let Callum see what he was missing.

‘I’m guessing …’ Hannah looks at me, ‘a bit more than that happened?’

‘Yeah.’ I take a gulp of vodka.

There was this moment, I remember, when I thought maybe he was going to say goodbye, but he opened the door of the cab and turned to me and said: ‘Well, are you getting in?’ And in the taxi (not even an Uber, a proper black cab), how this little voice kept piping up: What are you doing? You hardly know him! But the drunk part of me, the part of me that was up for it, kept telling it to shut up.

We went back to Jules’s place, because he’d just moved house and didn’t have any proper furniture. I felt a bit bad about it, but I told myself I’d wash the sheets.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘ This is impressive. And it all belongs to you?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, feeling like I’d got a whole lot more sophisticated in his eyes.

‘And then we had sex,’ I tell Hannah. ‘I guess I wanted to do it before the booze wore off.’

‘Was it good?’ Hannah asks. She sounds excited. And then: ‘I haven’t had sex for ages. Sorry. I know that’s TMI.’

I try not to think of her and Charlie having sex. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It was a bit – y’know. A bit rough? He pushed me up against the wall, pushed my skirt up around my waist, pulled my knickers down. And he— Can I have a bit more of that?’ Hannah passes me the bottle and I take a quick slug. ‘He went down on me, even though I hadn’t had a shower. He said he preferred it like that.’

‘Right,’ Hannah says. ‘OK. Wow.’

Callum and I had never done anything very adventurous. I guess the sex I had with Steven was better than anything I’d had with Callum, even if, after he’d made me come with his mouth that first time, I weirdly felt like crying for a moment.

‘I saw him, like, quite a few times after that,’ I tell Hannah.

I feel rather than see Hannah nod, her head so close to mine that I sense the movement of the air. I find myself telling her how I liked seeing myself the way he seemed to: as someone sexy, someone adventurous. Even if sometimes I felt like I was out of my depth, not always totally comfortable with all the stuff he asked me to do in bed.