Page 11 of The App Trap
Nice.
As I went to leave the pub, striding a few metres ahead of him, he gathered his satchel and phone and picked his musty scarf up from the floor where I’d subconsciously discarded it. Oops.
“Oi, wait for us outside, will ya? I’m just gonna use the bog,” he shouted across the pub with all the charm of a gremlin that had been fed after midnight.
Wincing, I nodded, then walked outside, and the first thing I did was let out a big old fart that had been building up during the duration of this whole sorry ordeal.
But to my horror, Rob appeared from behind me at the exact moment the terrible essence crept through the lining of my jeans and polluted the airspace between us.
“All done,” he said, ignoring the stench.
I tried to subtly fan the air directly around my derriere to disperse the fragrance that I had prematurely launched.
“I need to get the bus home now. You coming with us or what? I live in a bit of a sketchy area and I don't wanna get mugged again on the walk home,” he said.
Oh, well now I felt sorry for him, plus I didn’t really fancy a midnight stroll through the Cronx on my own, sowe caught a night bus where I paid for both of us on two separate contactless cards, due to Rob’s walking onto the bus without paying or looking back.
After a pointlessly short bus journey, we walked through as sketchy an area as Rob had described. I intermittently struck unintentionally comedic karate poses that I had learned during my younger days, every time a moving shadow of a bush startled me. Rob didn’t notice, though, mainly because I had decided to walk behind him for protection.
We arrived at Rob’s flat and just as I was about to spark up my Uber app, he went in for The Kiss. I was alarmed. Shocked. Slightly distressed.
I felt like I had somehow now entered into a binding contract. It was a god-awful kiss, as well, like kissing a sloppy pizza that had been delivered by a driver enjoying his last day at work.
The Kiss ended and I now had an overwhelming urge to get out of there as quickly as I could.
“So yeah… give me a call when you're free?” I said politely, thinking that would be the end of this affair. ‘Give me a call when you’re free’ was of course a polite ‘please go away forever’ line. It had an unspoken fuck-off ability about it that was universally understood by all. At least, I thought it was.
“I ain’t got no phone credit ‘til the end of the month, mate. You’ll ‘ave ta call me, bruv,” he said.
“Oh, that’s fine. I will do that. So, um… see ya, then,” I said, now a lot more terrified of him after hearing him utter the word ‘bruv’.
“Unless you wanna come in for a fumble?”
After looking at my wrist for absolutely no reason (I didn’t even wear a watch) and weighing up whether I’d rather go into Rob’s flat to whatever fate awaited me in there or face the terrifying crew of hoodlums we passed on the way here––I made my choice.
Chapter
Six
Ispent the next morning trying to replace my stolen smartphone as I realised that, now, I couldn't live without one of the little buggers. Damn. I borrowed Finn’s phone to cancel all of my cards the night after my run in with the Cronx Massive, so that was at least one headache dealt with. I had to write off my Tastecard, not to mention my beloved coffee points—one latte off from a free one as well. Oh well, that was my desertion tax.
“So anyway, what happened last night?” asked Finn.
He dribbled out shards of cornflake shrapnel as I relayed a blow-by-blow account of my first lukewarm online encounter.
“Right, so when’s your next one?” Finn shovelled heaped spoonful after heaped spoonful of dry cornflakes into his mouth. He hated milk, by the way.
“Dunno. I can’t seem to entice anyone out, even though I’m chatting to about twenty fellas at the moment. I keep forgetting what I’m saying to them as well. I genuinely think I need some kind of filing system.”
“Where’s Mum this morning?” as he asked that,Finn spun his laptop around to showcase a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that he had created specifically to keep track of people that he was chatting to on dating apps.
“Taking a delivery at the shop. The Dutchman’s delivering a load of stuff for her.”
“Yeah, and the rest. Dirty bastard,” grumbled Finn.
“She fancies him. What’s the problem?”
“His wife.”
