“Here, listen” she said, passing me the phone and dragging on her cigarette, and swaying there in the doorway in her tiny red dress which was more like a kid’s sock with the toes cut off, or maybe even a belt. I liked the way she looked in that dress and I kept watching her as I put the phone to my ear and started listening to the message.
The voice that spoke was a girl’s and it sounded breathy and excited and, the longer I listened, nervous. There was a sound of cars passing in the background and girls laughing and making confused but enthusiastic conversation, and the voice announced that it belonged to someone called, I think, Vira – not Vera with an “e”, for it had an “i” sound, like “viral”. That sounded like the name of someone sophisticated, maybe even menacing, yet based on the voice I imagined Vira to be well-intentioned and even naïve, the soul as yet relatively unmarked; she spoke sweetly yet with that certain assumed toughness of contemporary children-in-adult-bodies, with the staccato sharp directness of abbreviated ungrammatical text speak allowing for no nuance. I imagined her standing on the street and laughing and smiling with her equally nubile friends, their breasts artificially inflated by the consumption of hormone-saturated chicken, everything hanging out everywhere with casual deliberateness, typing into their phones, and this dream pleased me but at the same time left me feeling empty and soiled. Young women were an alien species to me really, but her name combined with everything else led me to speculate that Vira was part of some kind of scene, or maybe was a minor celebrity somewhere or perhaps just in her own head.
And Vira was saying “hey honey, well I know it’s been ages and I haven’t heard from you but it’s understandable, it’s totally okay and I just wanted to say that…I’ve been thinking about you and I hope you’re happy, hope you’re smiling and taking care of you. And, you know… I’m sorry about everything but…” and here she exhaled a little, “call me sometime babe, if you ever think of it, if you ever think of me, I’d love to hear your voice again…and” she trailed off before recovering, “well, you do whatever you need to do hun, but…remember that I love ya…take care.”
And while I was listening to the message I watched her watching me and she raised her eyebrows and pulled the right corner of her flame-painted mouth up as if to say, “fucked up or what? She was searching me for a reaction that would betray my thoughts about all this while I continued to diligently do as she asked, and at this time I became aware of my own face, that perhaps I should have been squinting or something, but I wasn’t because what she didn’t know was that I was less interested in the message than in her, in the look of her swaying in the doorway in that pathetically tiny dress, making love to that cigarette.
I gave the phone back to her and she was saying: “it’s got me screwed. What do you think? I mean by the sound of her, even though I don’t know her, she certainly knows me,” and I agreed with this while she kept moving around to the shitty cover-band that was floating in from the bar, I could almost see her knickers and I couldn’t help wondering what colour they were and whether they smelled sweet like she did, or of something more oblique and complex. She went on, “It’s funny, I got that message and it was way early in the morning and I was hungover and alone and my head was all screwed up after Johnny ditched me at the station, I felt, you know…desolate and at that moment I really wanted to call her back, I mean she sounded like someone who really cared about me, more than anyone else has lately, but she didn’t leave her number. Well, why would she, I mean, obviously she thinks I have it, hahahaha.’
I had my theories about Vira, so to make her happy I said “I think you hooked up with this girl one night when you were under the influence and you misled her that it was the beginning of some serious love affair, but in addition, maybe she’s a bit unstable, she’s young after all, she could have all sort of ideas in her head, but anyway, I think she’s been holding on all this time trying to decide whether to call you or not…she thinks so highly of you that she believes she did something wrong, to make you run away…so finally she got the courage to do it one night out drinking with friends, and you, you don’t even remember her or have any idea who she is…I mean that’s tragic really. The poor girl. Now you won’t call her back and she is going to be devastated. I mean that’s just really sad…the mismatch of her hopes with the reality…” I said this in a mock-serious tone and I was stern with her as a father would be, as someone who knew or cared what it was all about, and I was silently thinking how it was funny that I lived in this world where I had to employ mock-seriousness to say what I really felt without sounding like a total loser. She laughed and called me an arsehole, which I was and am but not for the reasons she believed, then she said, twirling her bleached hair through her chipped fingernails, “buy me a Mojito.”
I followed her inside thinking she was the kind of girl I liked, but I could see the future already, I was just some old guy who pretended to be in advertising when in reality I drove a bus to perpetuate my existence while I wrote apparently unmarketable short play scripts, all of that so she would stand in a doorway with me and show me her body in that dress and I didn’t even care, and she would make me fall in love with her and then I would be that girl on the phone, I would be calling her in the middle of the night making a fool of myself and she wouldn’t even know who I was or remember my name, having deleted my number and my existence from her life months ago.
Yeah, I might buy her a drink, but tonight once again I would be going home to jerk off alone.