Blue Collar Read Free Page B

again?’ No, not
     tempting.
    I plumped for keeping my mouth shut, scouring the room for anything that would spark a memory and crawling along carefully
     with both feelers stretched way out in front of me.
    ‘So, how do you feel?’ I asked after a while. ‘A bit better?’
    ‘No, not really. I feel just awful,’ she replied.
    ‘Hangover or self-loathing?’ would’ve been the obvious follow-up question had we been either aliens, Americans or drugged
     up to the eyeballs on truth serum.
    ‘Yeah, I’m not feeling too clever myself,’ I settled for volunteering. ‘What happened to the others?’ I eventually asked,
     figuring I was on safeish territory with that one as I’d been out with Jason and girls generally didn’t go out on a Friday
     night on their own unless they were lonely beyond desperation or undercover WPCs trying to catch serial killers.
    ‘Don’t you remember?’ came the question I’d been dreading, a lot earlier than expected.
    ‘Er, yeah, no, it’s fine. No, no, of course I remember,’ I babbled, before asking. ‘Why, what happened?’
    The girl let that one go and filled in a few of the blanks for me. Me and Jason had apparently drunk ourselves into newborn
     wobbly antelopes off the back of my winnings (though she omitted to say where we’d been drinking or who we’d been drinking
     with) and a cab had come along and taken Jason away without me even noticing.
    ‘Don’t you remember, you kept buying him drinks and asking me where he was for ages after he’d gone?’
    I played that one out in my head but none of it looked like anything I’d seen before.
    ‘Oh yeah, that’s right,’ I replied so unconvincingly that I could’ve probably got a job on EastEnders had the casting director been sat on the bed with us.
    ‘You also kept on calling me Jo all night. Do you remember that?’ she then said.
    ‘Oh… bollocks. Sorry about that.’ I frowned, Jo being the name of my last girlfriend. How embarrassing, though it did narrow
     the field down slightly as far as my new blonde friend’s name went.
    ‘That’s all right. I was probably just as plastered as you by the end of the night,’ she said with a slight shrug. ‘I always
     get smashed on champagne,’ she confessed.
    I rarely did myself and remembered why the moment I stuck a hand into my pocket and pulled out nothing but the cotton lining
     and my bus fare home.
    ‘Oh, are you going, then?’ she asked when she saw me examining a handful of coins and fluff. I hadn’t intended to, but I could
     almost see the bottom of my cup and all of a sudden the girl seemed even more distant than ever.
    Only a few minutes earlier we’d been cuddled up in bed all nice and snug but suddenly there were clothes and clear daylight
     between us and we could barely look each other in the eye. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. This wasn’t what was supposed
     to happen at all. When I’d first woken up next to her it was like all my birthdays had come at once, or at least that the
     tooth fairy had finally delivered, but before I’d had a chance to spark up a big fat self-congratulatory cigar, the opportunity
     was suddenly sliding away from me and I didn’t have a clue how to slow it down.
    One thing was alarmingly clear, however. I was thirty seconds away from finding myself out on the street and once I was out
     there, I was out there for keeps. This girl, her bedroom and my socks would be gone for ever.
    But then, wasn’t that going to happen anyway? I mean, just look at her. Oh, you can’t, can you, it’s a book? Well, then allow
     me; she was as pretty a girl as any I’d ever known and she had a lovely quiet sort of way about her that made me want to bundle
     her up in cotton wool and reassure her that everything was going to be all right, although her demeanour could just as well
     have been down to the fact that there was some strange bloke in her bed who’d seen her arse and her bamboo mobile. She was
     athletic,