Page 31 of The App Trap
I put on my ‘sick’ voice and phoned work. My acting skills were impeccable in this area. No questions were asked, and even after I put the phone down, I was still method acting, walking around hunched over and pretending to heave. It was always a natural instinct to stay in character for at least a minute or so after the phone call, just in case they called back. I truly considered myself the De Niro of the sickie.
I had never turned up at someone’s house for sex before actually meeting them.
As you can imagine, I was very excited about this prospect, but I was more concerned about having to travel to Finsbury Park. It was a place in North London where I had a mildly terrifying experience once involving a knife-wielding kebab thief. Still, Art had agreed to meet me at the station. Safety in numbers and all that.
I left the flat at about 10:30, aiming to land in FP by midday.
On the way to the ‘date’, some questions started whizzing around in my brain:
What if I don’t fancy him?
What if he’s a bit unstable?
What if he’s a lot unstable?
Do I still go through with this and have sex with him?
Am I obligated to?
Do we have a drink and a chat first?
Is there any point doing anything else except having sex, when that’s what we are both clearly here for?
Or… are we here purely because he wants to beat me up and steal my money… then make me the subject of a top-ten true-crime documentary on Netflix?
Pfff… nah! As far as I was concerned, sex pretty muchhadto happen. I was going to drop a Google Maps pin to Finn anyway.
I then posed a less selfish question:
What if this guy doesn’t fancy me?
As I approached Finsbury Park, I pulled myself together and actually got excited about the possibility of having some potentially decent stranger sex. After all, this was what I had set out to do with my day, despite for some reason suddenly being petrified.
I alighted from the tube train with a combination of jelly legs and dry mouth. I made my way outside the station and nobody was there to meet me. Phew.
I had a brief little moment of euphoria thinking to myself that he may have blown me out. I certainly wasn’t going to chase him up and text him. If he didn’t turn up, I could just write the morning off, go home and fumble through the menu of every streaming service known to man for a few hours.
Then, in the distance, I spied what I could only describe as a ‘Jon_BonPony’. Good Lord, he was not what I was looking for in a sexual partner at all. The first reason being that I could actually smell him well before he approached me. It was the same smell as when you leave your washing in the machine for, well, a month. He also seemed to be twenty years older than his profile pic and appeared to have way fewer teeth than advertised. He looked like Worzel Gummidge at the end of an all-night rave.
I was undoubtedly disappointed. Visibly so, there was no way of hiding it. My face fell so far that I very nearly smashed my jaw on the pavement.
I metaphorically scooped the bottom half of my face from the concrete and smiled as politely as possible. Hewent in for a kiss on the cheek, not getting the message that a handshake would suffice. I’d already decided that I’d be happier keeping this relationship strictly professional.
He was what could only be described as an ‘ultra-geezer’. He was such a geezer in fact, that I could barely understand anything he was saying. This was mostly due to his voice being no less than three octaves lower than mine. Plus, there was the fact that all his words rolled into one. A whole paragraph of speech sounded like a single syllable. Along with his smoker’s cough, he sounded like a cross between a clapped-out Ford Fiesta trying to start on a winter’s morning and a didgeridoo.
I’d like to have made small talk to cover my awkwardness, but I couldn’t even do that because I couldn’t understand a word coming out of his mouth. All I could offer was the odd burst of fake laughter, which I could only hope wasn’t improperly placed.
I followed him into a nearby independent off-licence so that he could buy some rolling tobacco.
I was truly trapped. I somehow felt myself having to go along with this, though. It was like one of those dreams where you can’t scream, although I wasn’t waking up from this one anytime soon, due to politeness.
So, I proceeded to do a walk of shame back to his flat. It was a new experience. I’d never actually done a walk of shametosomeone’s house before, apre-walk of shame, if you will. All the way, I was trying to think of any possible way I could get out of this, but there was simply nothing I could do.
Even though I found this person deeply unattractive in every single way possible, I still didn’t want to seem rude.
I simply had to see this extraordinary meeting through. The walk back to his place took about thirty-five minutes in the end. The journeywas made longer than it should have been because of all the pit stops at various off-licences so that Art could purchase bottles of luminous energy drinks to sup enroute.
Eventually, we arrived back at his house, which to my surprise was an utterly charming-looking town house. He charmingly jettisoned an empty bottle into his own front garden. Litterbug.
