Blue Collar Read Free Page A

willing
     to take a girl to a twenty-four-hour bar when she wants to be taken to a twenty-four-hour bar, there’s no shortage of blokes
     who will.
    And so this was probably the reason I found myself waking up in the bed of a knee-knockingly attractive girl, whose name I
     didn’t know and whose life was a complete mystery to me, a dozen or so years later.
    All I knew about her in fact was that she slept in lilac sheets and didn’t have anything near my grandmother’s patience.

2 What’s in a name?
    W e both drifted off to sleep again after our headache tablets got to work. Even me, in spite of all the questions and excitement
     that naturally come from finding a beautiful blonde in bed with you on a Saturday morning instead of your work boots and half
     a kebab.
    I finally came around again at about ten, when I sensed someone moving about at the foot of the bed, and found I was no longer
     cheek-to-cheek with a mysterious blonde.
    She’d already made it into some grungy jogging bottoms, vest and T-shirt before I knew what was going on and looked apologetic
     about getting dressed.
    ‘Just my running gear,’ she explained sheepishly. I waited for her to demonstrate by running straight out of the house, but
     instead she asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee.
    ‘Do you have tea?’ I asked, not being one for coffee.
    ‘Er, yeah. Darjeeling? Earl Grey? English Breakfast?’
    ‘Have you got any Tetley’s?’
    The girl thought for a moment and told me the nearest thing she had was English breakfast tea.
    ‘Will that do?’ she asked.
    Failing a trip to the shops it was going to have to, so I told her to go easy on the milk and heavy on the sugar, but she
     disappeared off to the kitchen before I could tell her how many chocolate biscuits I wanted on the saucer.
    Sensing a little awkwardness on her part, I took the opportunity to search for my clothes and pulled on everything I could
     find, though my socks had a five-hour headstart on me and were nowhere to be seen.
    The girl returned with two cups and caught me pulling on my shoes.
    ‘Oh, er, here, I… did you still want your tea before you go or do you have to go now?’ she asked, stumping me with that one.
     I hated difficult questions.
    Now obviously – obviously – I wanted to stay, discover her name, get to know her, take her for dinner, dance with her through
     the night and spend the rest of my days doing everything I could to make her happy, but that wasn’t really the question, was
     it? The real question was, did I want tea before I went?
    I tried reading between the lines and working out what she meant but I’m hopeless at this sort of thing. I always have been.
    What did she mean? Did she mean, ‘Here, you can drink this tea if you like but then you have to go’? Or was she trying to
     say, ‘I’ve made you some tea as agreed, but to be honest I’d prefer it if you just went now to save us any further embarrassment’?
    I slowed my shoelace-tying down to a snail’s pace to buy myself precious seconds to pick apart each word and ended up having
     to flip a coin in my head. It came down tails, but that didn’t matter as I’d forgotten to pick a side and ended up reaching
     for a cup.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said, then took one look at the lukewarm milky piss she’d brought me and kicked myself for not legging it when
     I had the chance.
    We sat next to each other on the bed and sipped our drinks against a backtrack of hanging silence. There were so many questions
     I wanted to ask, such as her name, who she was, what she did, how we’d met, how we’d ended up back here, what had happened
     once we’d got back and had she seen my socks, but ironically, she was the last person on earth I could ask these things. I
     mean, can you imagine it? All night long we’d been making sweet tender love and promising our hearts to one another then,
     mission accomplished, a few hours of kip and I was drinking her tea and asking her, ‘Er, sorry, who are you