I was at a bit of a loose end on Sunday afternoon, so rang Esther. There was a man on her settee in a dressing gown.
"I don't have much trouble with women. I mean, look at me." He reckons he's best mates with Midge Ure and is three degrees of separation from the Pope. The only time he sounded vaguely honest was when he tells me that he is, or was, or coulda been, an art dealer, which at least had a bit of detail that was just about plausible.
Some casualty of a bloke turns up. Dark glasses, taciturn, wouldn't sit down. I was wary of him at first, but he struck too ridiculous a figure to be threatening for long. Esther confided in a stage whisper that he's a coke dealer. "So fucking what? That's no recommendation to me. We could rob him them," I didn't say.
Esther gets a phone call. "It's The Girls. They'll steal all the booze. Looby, quick," and I had to help her put most of the wine, port and vodka into her wardrobe. Tammy and Hayley, thirtysomething maybe, arrive. I am squeezed onto the settee between them. They are involvingly honest, interesting, fit. I'm an open book to them, as they are to me.
I'm now at four degrees of separation from The Pope. Midge Ure's Best Mate keeps referring to me in the third person. "He's alright. I like him," accompanied by this thumbing gesture towards me. "Yeah, cheers, likewise," and I mean it, but I'm more interested in The Girls. Conversationally, honest.
This odd social mix was working well, until an argument boiled up between Casualty Coke Dealer, Midge Ure's Best Mate, and Esther. Esther kept turning the television volume up and down, (none of us were watching it), to the degree to which she was included in the conversation. They got to the shouting stage, at which any person of even modest refinement must leave.
There was a convulted exiting process. The Girls left, singly. I stuck around for a bit hoping things would improve, but the antagonists in this uninteresting in-group argument wouldn't let it alone.
I started wandering home, and found Hayley and Tammy at the bus stop. Tammy was upset because Midge Ure's Best Mate was supposed to be her boyfriend. He hadn't paid her the slightest attention all night, and she was trying to find the resolve never to get in touch with him again.
We stabbed at the bus timetable, a normally reliable method of summoning cheap transport home which failed this once. At some point earlier in the evening it had been decided that me and Hayley were sleeping together. I would tell you more but I can only remember the moment, not its adjacent context. I got us a taxi back to Tammy's and we headed to the pretty, and prettily-named suburb of Totterdown. It's the one you see on postcards of Bristol. Most people have painted their houses in different pastel colours.
Tammy's flat is more like an art gallery or an installation. Gothic, Catholic, mesmerisingly dark and serious, sensual. A tabby and a black cat prowling around added to the surreal atmosphere. Hayley showed me an artwork Tammy had done, a hyperrealist set of paintings of flattened insects, capturing that angular way spiders' bodies cramp into underfoot. Tammy opened a bottle of wine. Poor old Esther was right to be suspicious: Tammy said she'd stolen it from her flat.
Hayley and I took our clothes off and lay down under a sleeping bag on the settee. Not wishing to assume anything, we started top to toe, but she said "you can come up here if you like." It's been a long time since I've had semi-successful settee sex.
Next morning we swapped numbers and we all walked to the bus stop before I waved them off. Feeling as high as a kite, and revelling in my coating of unwashed-off sex smell, I sat in a harbourside pub, dying to tell someone about it.