Page 58 of The Late Bloomer’s Playlist

Bill Withers

AIN’T NO SUNSHINE

I came tumbling into the hallway of the apartment and shook rain onto the walls. The day had started bright enough but, like every day since Sheila, it had slowly become overcast, and the clouds had eventually brought rain. The irony wasn’t lost on me, and I thought it was the kind of tosh that might wind up in David’s book at some point – because yes, apparently, he was still writing it. When he was writing it remained another matter. Though it hadn’t escaped my attention that in the past three days – bringing it to a total of five that Sheila had been ignoring my calls for – David hadn’t had a single night out. So unless he was dating in the daytime, he’d seemingly forgone the luxury of breaking hearts for a week. He was either so heartbroken by the failed and fleeting dalliance with Eudora or he really was worried that he might find me hanging from a chandelier if he left me alone for too long. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t altogether unpleasant to hear him rattling around in the kitchen when I got home from another desperately quiet day in the shop. There was music playing – Bill Withers, if my ears didn’t deceive me – and there was the clank and clatter of… something, being made.

I slipped free of my coat and hung it by the door, dropped my umbrella in the stand and trod, feeling a squelch of socks against shoes every step of the way, to the kitchen.

‘I have spent all day looking at cocktail recipes.’

The boom of David’s voice made me wonder whether he had in fact spent all day sampling cocktail recipes. That was only the first of the assaults on the senses, the second being the absolute bomb site that my kitchen was. There were, at a glance, no fewer than four cocktail shakers dotted around the room, complete with various spirits, mixers and stray slices of fruit.

‘Is that a pomegranate?’

‘A recipe called for it,’ David said with a flick of the hand that he seemed to think would explain everything. He was gesturing with a martini glass that definitely did not contain a martini. ‘Look, I know you’ve been down and out, and I know I said I had a plan, so today I pulled up my socks and thought, David, what is your plan?’

‘Oh God…’ I dropped into the nearest seat.

‘And I thought to myself, what does Patti need in this plan?’

‘Oh God…’

‘And then I thought!’ He snapped his fingers and gestured to the wild mess that was our kitchen. ‘First and foremost, Patti needs to have fun again. Then Patti needs a plan to win back Sheila. Then–’

‘How many cocktails have you had so far today?’

He glanced around as though tallying up empty glasses. ‘I’ve dabbled.’

‘Okay, how many cocktails have you dabbled with so far today?’

‘Thirteen, but look here.’ He passed me the glass he’d been holding that contained a brilliant, bright green liquid that looked like something scraped from the earth around Chernobyl. ‘I call this one, The David.’

I grabbed the glass from him, mostly to stop him from drinking it himself. ‘What’s in it?’

‘Bit of this, bit of that.’

After I’d taken my first sip, a slow burn moved down my throat and left me coughing.

‘Did you know we had absinthe at the back of the booze cupboard?’

I tried to clear the nagging tickle before I answered but still the response came out strained. ‘Yes, I hid it from you two Christmases ago.’

‘Oh. Well, I found it.’

‘I can taste that.’ I set the drink down. ‘I assume it’s in The David?’

‘Oh, The David is such a mixture of things,’ he answered in a whimsical tone that had a touch of the theatre about it. Without my noticing, he’d managed to wrangle himself another glass of alcohol from somewhere, too: this one was bright orange. ‘So this is part one of the plan.’

‘Drinking?’

‘Mm.’ He sipped. ‘We drink and we lose our inhibitions.’

‘Which is a good thing?’ I stood to get myself a glass of water, which is about the time I noticed the many empty glasses that were stashed in the sink already. Dabbling, my backside…

‘It is! I’m glad you agree. We drink and we relax, and we stop worrying that things are a bad idea.’

‘I don’t feel like that’s a good idea.’

‘But of course it is, because– Patti, you know that’s water, don’t you?’