I told him of course it wasn't Earl Grey. I'd had to go to enormous trouble to get my hands on it, since I was no longer seeing Dirk and Lemmy, who had previously supplied me with everything I'd ever needed. On the way back from the shops the day before, turning into Hampshire Place, I'd spotted two stunted figures in red anoraks kicking their heels on the louvred installation at the end of the street.
I did some quick mental arithmetic. I had just enough cash left. I shuffled level with the Ashoo Boys, lugging my shopping like a bag lady. They were engrossed in a Gameboy, the smaller one stabbing buttons like a 100 wpm typist.
'Hi, there,' I said.
They looked up. Two pairs of eyes widened.
I turned on my sunniest smile. 'Remember me?'
They continued to stare at me big-eyed while the untended Gameboy bleeped itself silly.
'You're shittin me,' said the older one.
'No listen…' I said.
But before I could say another word, they were off, like a couple of miniature Linford Christies on their way to Olympic Gold. In seconds, they were halfway down the road. Only once did one of them pause long enough to glance back, but whatever he saw made him turn and run even faster.
I forced a smile, in case anyone was watching — those crazy kids — and hauled my bags the remaining two hundred yards to number nine. But I was baffled, and slightly hurt. Did I look like a plain-clothes policewoman? I was brooding on it when I ran into Marsha in the hallway and told her what had happened.
'You want grass? No problem,' she said. 'I can get you some.'
And she did, and that was that, except I refused to dwell on the detail that had really been bugging me. The way those Ashoo Boys had run, you would have thought they'd mistaken me for a member of the narcotics squad. But what I didn't want to admit was that they hadn't been looking at me at all.
They'd been looking at something over my shoulder.
'Got any skins?'
For a minute, I thought Graham was talking about prophylactics. I had those all right; I'd stowed a packet of three beneath my pillow, just in case.
'Cigarette papers,' he prompted.
'I forgot,' I confessed. 'But the garage up the road should still be open.'
'We can do without,' said Graham. He placed one of my glossy magazines on his lap as a worktop, extracted a single Marlboro Light from his packet and, with the end of a match, extracted the tobacco and blended it with a pinch of grass before poking it back into the hollow tube and sealing it with a twist, like a tiny white sausage.
'Pink Floyd, floor cushions, Mary Jane,' he said, lighting the joint and sucking the smoke into his lungs. 'I feel like I'm caught in a time-warp.'
We sucked at one sausage after another. My ears started to pick out things in the music they'd never heard before. I waited for Graham to make a move, but he seemed happy to waffle on about his days as a neo-hippy, when he'd worn granny vests and flares and listened to A Saucerful of Secrets while everyone else in the class was into speed and safety pins and shredded T-shirts. Graham always had mistimed his enthusiasms. Even the feminism had surfaced many years after fashionable men had moved on to a more laddish outlook.
But it was time to move into Phase Two of my master-plan. I was terrified of rejection — so the trick would be for me to persuade Graham to come up with the idea to sleep with me all by himself. I'd made a compilation tape of all the pop music I could find which I thought might get the message across — Let's Spend the Night Together, Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You, Ring My Bell, Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me and Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine. But all Graham did was tap out an irrelevant rhythm on his knee, occasionally join in with a chorus and, every so often, exclaim, 'Bugger me, haven't heard this one for years.'
I began to feel the black dog of depression nipping at my heels. Why would any man — even Graham — want to bother with me, with my spectacles and mousy hair and stubborn saddle-bags of cellulite? Especially if my Hackney roots were showing, as I was sure they were. Perhaps I was just a pathetic social climber with ideas above my station.
Then I realized I was being paranoid. It wasn't me, it was the drug. Wherever Marsha got her dope from, it was a lot stronger than the stuff I was used to smoking with Dirk and Lemmy. I instructed myself to calm down, announced to Graham I was going to the bathroom, and got unsteadily to my feet.
The walk across the room seemed endless. Wisps of smoke hung unmoving in the air like broken cobwebs. Damn those spiders, I thought. I hadn't even reached the bathroom, but already I could feel the tickle of tiny legs scampering across my hypersensitive flesh.
Once inside, I locked the door, emptied my bladder and tried desperately to remember what Plan B had been. Or was it Plan C? Surely it couldn't have been something as simple as spritzing myself thoroughly with Chanel № 5 and imposing my will on Graham by sheer force of personal fragrance? I couldn't see him falling for that, somehow, but I spritzed myself anyway, even if it did make me smell of baby powder. Maybe I could appeal to his paternal instincts.
Then, in the absence of anything more constructive to do, I took off my spectacles and polished the lenses, squinted into the cracked mirror to examine my face, plucked a few eyebrows, and carefully retouched my lipstick.
At some point, above the rattle of the extractor fan, I thought I heard Graham knocking on the door and calling, 'Are you all right in there?', though I was certain only a few minutes had passed since I'd left him. I checked my watch, but as I couldn't remember what time it had been in the first place, the fact that the hands had now slipped past midnight was less than meaningful.
I stared hard into the mirror, trying to hypnotize myself into feeling like five feet six inches of unalloyed sex-bomb. How could Graham resist me? My eyes stared hack at me sceptical and unblinking, so dark with dilated pupil there was not even a hint of the insipid blue I disliked so much. For a while, I amused myself by transferring my weight from one foot to the other, so that the crack in the mirror dissected my face at a wide variety of different angles. In rapid succession, I was the Elephant Man, someone with a learning disability, the Mona Lisa with toothache, a leering serial killer, Sybil the schizoid woman, and a grinning pirate visage divided by a cutlass slash as deep and oozy as the Mariana Trench, down in the nethermost abysses of the Pacific Ocean, where there was neither a current, nor a ripple to disturb water that had endured, unmoving, for many thousands of years. It was the deepest, darkest, coldest place on earth. And the most silent.
Except for one sound, a repetitive tap tap tap tippety tap which echoed eerily through the darkness.
The sound of typing.
My spectacles fell off the side of the basin and landed on the floor with a clatter, yanking me back into the real world. The sound wasn't typing at all — it was a gentle rapping on the door, barely audible over the extractor fan, which was still rattling away overhead. How had I ever thought myself hemmed in by silence? That bathroom was as noisy as a percussionists' convention.
'Be right out,' I called.
I felt as though I'd dragged myself up from a dream. How long had I been swimming around in the Mariana Trench? I had a guest outside, waiting for what had probably seemed like hours. It would serve me right if he'd given up and gone home.
I put my spectacles back on and glanced at the mirror one last time. Nothing I could do would disguise the way I looked. My eyes were back to their usual shallow blue, nothing like the deep dark ocean. In a burst of bravado, I took the glasses off again and left them on the shelf over the bath. I looked better in soft-focus. A lot better.