Page 94 of One Summer

‘He’s not wrong,’ I say.

‘Meet you at 7 p.m.?’ Caleb says.

‘I’ll be there.’

Seventy-Eight

Whiskey

It was Caleb’s idea and his choice of place. I’m here at 6.58 p.m., because being late is apparently impossible for me. By 7.17 p.m., he’s still not here.

I pick up my bag, about to leave, having eaten three different flavours of ice cream because Lenny – AKA Halloon – has a business to run and I’m not going to sit at a table and sip a Coke, when I see Caleb coming towards me, lurching from side to side.

There’s no glancing away now, he stares at me through half-open eyes, and I see straight away that he’s drunk.

He looks as if he’s about to bump into the booth. Exhaling dramatically, I get up and push him towards one of the red plastic benches. He nearly falls clean off, but I manage to shunt him into the middle of it.

He blows me a kiss.

‘I bumped into Joshua at the Merry Maid. He insisted we shoot a few whiskeys.’

‘You’ve been drinking with Joshua?’ I say, frankly amazed at this development, since I had the distinct impression that they didn’t even like each other.

‘Yeah, he suddenly decided he needed to be my best friend.’

‘Why?’

Is this some sort of macho thing?

‘Oh, and he says to tell you that he didn’t mean to call you “tortoise”. That was an accident.’

Why would Joshua bring that up with Caleb?’

‘Yeah, I can totally see how easily an accident like that could happen; I call people tortoises all the time.’

‘It was an autocorrect fail. He was trying to call you “gorgeous”.’

‘Oh,’ I say. This has genuinely never occurred to me.

‘And he said to tell you that when he saw you in those white shorts the other day, and texted “great hams” he meant “great gams”.’

That had also puzzled me, but I hadn’t enquired further. Perhaps my bemused silence is the reason Joshua hasn’t asked me out yet.

‘The man needs reading glasses,’ he says, slurring. ‘But he won’t wear them.’

‘So, you and Joshua are drinking buddies now?’ I say.

‘I only had a few drinks. I’m sober,’ Caleb says. ‘Icily, icily sober.’

‘Give me a break,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘You’re pissed as a fart.’

‘I’m not,’ he says, resting his forehead on the table, as if that’s a normal thing to do to prove sobriety.

I can see two members of staff looking over at us and saying something about Caleb, probably wondering how long it’ll be before they have to haul him out of here.

My main thought is that I really hope he doesn’t puke.

He closes his eyes and mumbles, ‘I’ll take a vanilla, thanks.’

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