A Night, Out by Jessica Nilsson 

It wasn’t until he was on the bus that his hangover started to kick in. Until then he hadn’t had time to feel anything – he hadn’t set his alarm (couldn’t even remember getting into bed in fact), and when his eyes had snapped open suddenly and he’d seen the time, adrenaline had taken over.  He was up, dressed and running for the departing bus before the panic subsided and the nausea thundered in.

Later, when he met the boys for their usual Friday Few, he’d make them laugh telling them about it:  how he’d almost gagged, the perfume of the woman beside him making him dry retch;  how he’d fallen – actually fallen! – into the aisle when the bus had lurched suddenly to one side, and an old dear had had to help him up;  how she’d offered him a polo mint “for your breath, pet”.  They all roared their approval, but at the time he hadn’t felt like laughing, not when he heard the boys in their school uniforms snigger, and the little kid in the pushchair beside him had pointed and shouted “Why him smelly man?” Everyone had sniggered then, and he had pressed his face against the cold window, streaks of red shame against his wan cheeks – but not before seeing the look on the kid’s mother’s face, coloured with embarrassment and disgust. He hadn’t told the lads that bit. Instead he talked about the MILF, and how if he hadn’t been about to puke his ring up he might have asked for her number. They roared again, called for more drinks, toasted the fearless warrior, back on the battleground so soon after near defeat!

He’d caught Donal looking at him then, saw in his eyes across the table the memory of what he himself had tried to not think about all day: the urgency of their kissing, the pulsating strobe lights distorting his beautiful, beautiful face, the condensation on the wall wet on his back, the slick of his hair under his own curious clumsy hands.

He had flung himself off the bus two stops early, lurching out of the middle doors without looking, nearly colliding with a bicycle courier.  The asshole had shouted in his face, bits of spit landing on his cheek, before taking his lycra-clad self off.  They laughed at this too, jeered at the cyclists among them.  The encounter had startled him however, shocked him momentarily out of his nausea, before mooring him solidly back in it.  

By the time he got to the office, he knew he wasn’t going to make it in.  There was a moment – almost a full minute, he’d later recount – where he thought he was going to hurl then and there, all over the marble steps.  A minute when he had stood without moving, staring at the dot over the i of brash oversized company name, willing his stomach to calm, the thudding in his ears to subside.  In and out he breathed as if through a straw, in and out, his body frozen, a furious mantra in his brain:  Not here, not now.  Then his body took over, carrying him quickly away from the entrance,  a not-quite run,  urgent but not panicked, don’t draw attention to yourself.  In the alley between the office and Starbucks, beside the side entrance to the post room, he doubled over and heaved.  His eyes teared with the visceral violence of it, his brain tickled with the shame, the viscous fluid burned his throat and splattered on the toe of his Next brogues.     

He didn’t mention the tears, or the shame.  How he had bought a bottle of water in Starbucks and used it to try to wash away the mess he’d made on the street. The long afternoon foetal-positioned in bed, sleep jarred with flashes of strobe lights, the unexpected rough of stubble on his chin, soft hands on his bare back. Shame and longing.

He held his pint aloft, nodded solemnly to his oldest friends, this band of brothers who had known him since junior school, and, to their cheers, sank it in one go. He didn’t look across the table again.

Jessica Nilsson

Image: Pints of beer with frothy heads on a wooden tabletop. pixabay.com