All stories

Digby Jones, ruler of the dance floor at Seven Oaks, and owner of the finest French press coffee pot collection this side of the river Avon, was putting the moves on Little Orphan Annie. Disco was his thing, and old Jonesy, despite the tubbing waistline could still Saturday Night Fever it in a way that belied his nearly forty summers.

Little Orphan Annie, so smooth and sexy in her skin-tight leathers wasn’t in his league, but once he shredded her with the Lawnmower, she was his all night. Normally that meant the midnight closing time, but then she leant in, bit his right earlobe and whispered that she’d quite like to go back to his place and sit on him, if that was okay.

They were in the taxi home before Digby’s eyes uncrossed and he was able to say, ‘Sure.’

It was liberating. None of those awkward moments on the stairs, instead it was mad charge into messy bedroom where clothes were jettisoned in the manner of a man on fire.

Digby Jones gazed at her body, taut as a whippet, and smooth as a hairless Sphynx cat, and he gulped, adjusted his trousers and then said, ‘Eerm, Annie. How…uh…old are you?’

She moved forward, foal like, and gazed up at him with those big green eyes, and said, ‘Well, sir, I’m old enough for what you have in mind, don’t you worry.’

‘Righto,’ said Digby Jones, and followed her into bed. It was, despite the bony angles and the disconcerting sight of her boy’s chest trampolining above his sweaty body, pleasurable in all the right ways, and for the both of them too. Digby Jones filed that away in the part of his brain marked Inexplicable, but try and remember what you did for next time.

A rare moment of tender feeling rose inside him as he looked down at her little head sleepily resting upon his chest. ‘Say, Annie. Is it true, the orphan thing?’

Her sleepy voice said, ‘Hmmm?’ and then she added, much more brightly, ‘Oh yes, that’s all true.’

‘Gosh,’ said Digby Jones. ‘What happened? If that’s not too, uh, painful for-‘

Annie giggled. ‘No, silly, of course not.’ She shrugged her thing shoulders against him. ‘My parents were howwible to me, so mean. They’re weren’t nice at all.’

Digby Jones didn’t know what to say. He was beginning to feel a little creeped out by the baby talk. It had sparked something inside him at the disco, but now here, the pair of them naked in his bed. Not good.

Annie wriggled herself against him and swung herself around to sit facing him with her legs crossed. It was a pose Digby Jones remembered from his own childhood time, sitting cross legged in school assemblies. Oh God.

Annie leaned forward and took one of his big hands in both of hers.

‘But you’ll always be nice to be me, won’t you Dig?’ Her eyes were so big and so round, and so full of imagined future hurt. Digby Jones looked into those beautiful eyes and saw something looking back at him. Annie’s voice was no longer childlike, and she said to him, ‘Because I’d hate to lose you the same way I lost Mummy and Daddy.’

The boy, and he was a boy, had taken to ‘accidentally’ brushing her forearm as he gesticulated, which he did a lot of. He was talking about, well, he was talking about something but she wasn’t listening. All she could think about was how his fringe looked like it had been cut using a ruler and if he was aware of how it looked. Lying about her age on the dating app had seemed like such a good idea when it meant she could replace the endless bald men holding fish with, well, something else.

He’d suggested the bar. She’d expected comfortable seats and cold wine, maybe with a piano in the background, what she’d arrived at was, as best as she could tell, a tiny disco. Nobody was dancing yet, but with the music loud enough to prevent any functional conversation she assumed it was only a matter of time. She yawned and sucked on her cocktail, which seemed to be made entirely of sugar and neon, and wished it was a French press coffee.

Somewhere in the activity he’d stopped talking and left the table, she couldn’t say exactly when. Moments later he reappeared through a vape cloud and placed three fresh drinks on the table. A new bottle of blue fizz for him and a short glass of what appeared to be cough medicine floating in Tizer for each of them.

‘Jagerbomb,’ he said. ‘To keep you awake’.

She picked hers up and sipped at it, it tasted like Lynx Africa, just as everything had since he’d hugged her on arrival. He laughed and downed his in one before raising his eyes to suggest she do the same. Against her better judgement, she obeyed, and for the first time in ten years she felt a sudden urge to vomit for a reason that wasn’t morning sickness. Her throat became lined so thickly with what she could only assume was alcoholic glue that she feared her daughter was about to become an orphan.

The boy resumed talking.

Behind him, a woman sat alone at the next table. At least, she thought it was a woman, it’s always harder to tell with girls. The woman was drinking what appeared to be a coffee in a martini glass and smiling back. They exchanged glances and she felt as though the woman understood her whole situation, but maybe that was just how all the sugar made it feel.

‘Anyway, I gotta whizz,’ the boy’s smooth words hung in the air as he disappeared into the darkness. The white of his ankles, where his socks should have been, flashed in the lights like the reflectors on her toddler’s trike pedals.

She looked back to the woman, but the woman was gone.

‘If we leave now, we can be somewhere the drinks don’t taste of chemicals before he gets back,’ came the sudden whisper in her ear. It was accompanied by the first aroma of the night that hadn’t stung her nostrils.

She looked over to the toilet doors in the distance, took one last glance at her DayGlo drink, stood, turned, and took the hand of the stranger with the soft voice and the refreshing smell.

Perhaps it wasn’t her age she should have changed on the profile, she thought.