The Fire Baby

She got closer, collecting the glasses, close enough to see the tail of a tattooed dragon that curled around his collar bone before plunging back beneath the white cotton top. And the face. A face she’d seen a thousand times and never, the face of a comic book hero, her very own Action Man. Blond cropped hair, and pale fingers with spotless nails. She wondered then what he might do. And there was another question: how could he be interested in her? How could someone so beautiful, so clean, so perfect, be interested in her?

She should have known when he made the call, on his mobile, walking away from the bar, cupping his hand to smother the words. He winked then, something which normally made her laugh at men. But she just beamed, stupidly, knowing already that something wasn’t right, but not caring now she sensed that his body could be hers.

She washed the glasses, served the locals, and pretended to laugh at their jokes, but watched him at the end of the bar. She hated the Pine Tree, she told him that. Hated it, but needed it to pay the university bills, for the clubs, and the clothes, and the holiday to Spain with the girls in her house.

‘University?’ he’d said, smiling.

‘Yeah. East London. It’s great’ she said, shouting to herself to shut up.

‘The heat,’ he’d said, his smile confined to his red lips. ‘You want a drink?’

She’d taken for a vodka and tonic and left the drink on the bar beside him as she worked, returning, sipping, feeling lots of things which should have made her run. She’d been confused then, getting the change wrong a couple of times with the locals. And she dropped a glass: ‘sack the juggler,’ they’d all laughed. She felt her legs buckle but thought it was the vodka and the heat of the night.

He licked his lips and she sipped another drink and heard her laughter, overloud, in between the CD tracks. She sang too and the locals laughed again, eyeing the stranger at the bar. She never really drank much, even in the clubs, which is why she didn’t taste it, didn’t catch the metallic edge which laced the vodka.

She asked Mike, the landlord, to lock up and do the ashtrays. He was a friend of her dad’s from way back when they were together in the army in the Far East. But he’d been upstairs all night with his feet up in front of the telly. So he hadn’t seen, hadn’t sensed, as he surely would have, her disorientation.