Lunch with this dreadful woman Agnes at the Made In Brazil. I had eaten so much pork, I had begun to feel like a pig. And my head was throbbing from the beer. That, and her incessant repetitive voice.
“Neck ya” she says. “Neck ya.” It sounded like that anyway . Greek, I thought, as she babbled on and on, or maybe she was reverting to a primitive form of Scots. Glaswegian. I couldn’t tell. I definitely wasn’t getting the signals: whatever it didn’t sound like an invitation to further intimacy. Thank God for that, I told myself.
But then I could have been wrong, I thought. Beyond knowing by now, half of me was ready for violence, half of me expecting to be kissed. How many beers had there been? I had lost count. That and the repeated visits out front for her to smoke another cigarette, and with it the chance for her to wave the smoking tip and shout more foul comments and abuse at the stall holders and passers by on the street. Time and again I had had to put my arm around her and take her back inside.
Be on your guard, I told myself. Be on your guard. But my defences were down and my mind was clouded over. I didn’t do drinking any more, I told myself. I certainly didn’t do drinking this much beer. Ever. And never ever at lunch time.
“Get this down you,” she says. She was holding out another bottle. There was a cut wedge of lime in its neck.
I hesitated. “Well,” she says. “Go on. It wont bite you. Go on.”
Strange, but that was exactly what I was thinking. Bite. Alcohol. Narcotic. Strong poison. Definitely enough to send a man down. Blind, or kill him. Or turn him wild. The thing was, I was becoming more and more attracted to the idea.
These days you wouldn’t call Agnes a fair-locked goddess. Once maybe long ago, she would have been a handful then, but her hair had paled and thinned, and she had long since lost that original grace, and the extraordinary lustre and gloss she had once had. She smelt bad too now, a mix of cigarettes, stale wine laced with spirit, beer and old perfume.
Come on, I kept telling myself over and over, there was only one word to describe her – dreadful. Dreadful. And yet.
I took the bottle from her, and peered down its neck. It was too dark to see anything. I noticed my hand was trembling. It was a fine tremor. I wondered if she had also seen, I asked myself, the pulse, pulse erection I was getting.
“Go on,” she repeats. I raised the bottle to my lips. Her voice went on and on, repelling without repelling, attracting without attracting. There was no way of reasoning any more. Golden garlic or the lily leek!
This moly stuff, I dimly recalled as I gave a loud belch and tasted the pungent flavour of raw onion in my mouth. Thank God for that.