The Girl You Left Behind

drunk herself halfway to oblivion to go
     through with it and then wept afterwards, huge, snotty sobs of grief and guilt and
     self-disgust. The man – she can’t even remember his name – had barely been able to
     contain his relief when she had said she was going home. Even now when she thinks about
     it she feels cold shame.
    ‘Nothing in four years? And
     you’re … what? Thirty? What is this, some kind of sexual suttee? What
     are you doing, Worthing? Saving yourself for Mr Dead Husband in the
     hereafter?’
    ‘I’m Halston. Liv Halston.
     And … I just … haven’t met anyone I wanted to …’
     Liv decides to change the direction of this conversation. ‘Okay, how about you?
     Some nice self-harming Emo in the wings?’ Defensiveness has made her spiky.
    Mo’s fingers creep towards her
     cigarettes and retreat again.
    ‘I do okay.’
    Liv waits.
    ‘I have an arrangement.’
    ‘An arrangement?’
    ‘With Ranic, the wine waiter. Every
     couple of weeks we hook up for a technically proficient but ultimately soulless
     coupling. He was pretty rubbish when we started but he’s getting the hang of
     it.’ She eats another stray piece of cheese. ‘Still watches too much porn,
     though. You can tell.’
    ‘Nobody serious?’
    ‘My parents stopped talking about
     grandchildren some time around the turn of the century.’
    ‘Oh, God. That reminds me: I promised
     I’d ring my dad.’ Liv has a sudden thought. She stands and reaches for her
     bag. ‘Hey, how about I nip down to the shop and get a bottle of wine?’ This
     is going to be fine, she tells herself. We’ll talk about parents and people I
     don’t remember, and college, and Mo’s jobs, and I’ll steer her away
     from the whole sex thing, and before I know it tomorrow will be here and my house will
     feel normal and today’s date will be a whole year away again.
    Mo pushes her chair back from the table.
     ‘Not for me,’ she says, scooping up her plate. ‘I’ve got to get
     changed and shoot.’
    ‘Shoot?’
    ‘Work.’
    Liv’s hand is on her purse. ‘But
     – you said you’d just finished.’
    ‘My day shift. Now I start my evening
     shift. Well, in about twenty minutes.’ She pulls her hair up and clips it into
     place. ‘You okay to wash up? And all right if I take that key again?’
    The brief sense of wellbeing that had
     arrived with the meal evaporates, like the popping of a soap bubble. She sits at the
     half-cleared table, listening to Mo’s tuneless humming, the sound of her washing
     and scrubbing her teeth in the spare-room bathroom, the soft closing of the bedroom
     door.
    She calls up the stairs. ‘Do you think
     they need anyone else tonight? I mean – I could help out. Maybe. I’m sure I could
     do waitressing.’
    There is no reply.
    ‘I did work in a bar once.’
    ‘Me too. It made me want to stab
     people in the eye. Even more so than waiting tables.’
    Mo is back in the hallway, dressed in a
     black shirt and bomber jacket, an apron under her arm. ‘See you later,
     dude,’ she calls. ‘Unless I get lucky with Ranic, obvs.’
    She is gone, downstairs, drawn back into the
     world of living. And as the echo of her voice dies away, the stillness of the Glass
     House becomes a solid, weighty thing and Liv realizes, with a growing sense of panic,
     that her house, her haven, is preparing to betray her.
    She knows that she cannot spend this evening
     here alone.

14
    These are the places it is not a good idea
     to drink alone if you’re female.
Bazookas: this used to be the White Horse, a
     quiet pub on the corner opposite the coffee shop, stuffed with sagging plush velvet
     benches and the occasional horse brass, its sign half obscured by age-related paint
     loss. Now it is a neon-clad titty bar, where businessmen go late, and taut-faced
     girls with too much makeup leave in platform shoes some time in the small hours,
     smoking furiously and moaning about their tips.
Dino’s: the local wine bar, packed throughout
     the nineties, has reinvented itself as a spit-and-sawdust eatery for yummy mummies
     in the daylight hours. After eight o’clock in the evening it now runs
     occasional speed-dating sessions. The rest of the time, apart from Fridays, its
     floor-to-ceiling windows reveal it to be conspicuously and painfully empty.
Any of the older pubs in the backstreets beyond the
     river, which draw small groups of resentful locals, men who smoke roll-ups with
     dead-eyed pit bulls and