Not wanting to disappoint his flatmate when he had made such a rare and poignant gesture, Freddie took another nervous sip and waited for the sensation to become pleasurable. It was easier to hide his revulsion this time, but the taste was just as potent and strange.
Freddie winced as the fruity-vinegar tang travelled through him, then put the tumbler back down on the counter. There would have been a time, not even that long ago, when the thought of his mouth being potentially contaminated with weird new bacteria would have been enough to send him into a spiral of self-hate and despair. He would have been desperately looking up diseases, checking his temperature every half hour, brushing his teeth until his gums bled and his tongue was stripped and raw. The thoughts would have been insistent, loud and inescapable. And they were there, Freddie realised, creeping around his head and flaring like faraway fireworks, but he could ignore them.
‘You won’t mind if I don’t finish it?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Damien replied, but Freddie noted the subtle inflection of disappointment.
‘Really? Because I’m grateful and everything, I really appreciate the gesture, I just . . . I don’t know if it’s for me.’
‘I won’t be upset, Freddie.’
‘You sure?’
‘All the more for me,’ Damien sighed quietly, turning away to finish his home-brewed kombucha in peace.
Reluctant to stay in the flat when he knew Damien was going to be around, Freddie decided that it would be just as easy to mope outdoors as it would inside. Besides which, he had a week until his parents’ big anniversary party, and he needed to get them a present.
Freddie hated present-buying. The last one he bought, Lacey’s cuddly dinosaur, hadn’t exactly gone well. There were just too many options, and no accurate way to predict whether someone was going to like it or not. Plus, there were other unknowable factors, like duplicating something the gift-receiver already had, or getting them something that would conjure up bad memories. He always wanted his gift to be meaningful, special, a token of himself that he could hand to the other person, but the pressure of that only brought added anxiety.
He found himself on Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon. It was not a pleasant experience. His walking pace seemed to be completely at odds with the pace of everyone else around him; sometimes too slow, sometimes too fast, and sometimes groups of people walked in a way that blocked up chunks of the pavement, meaning he’d have to clumsily zigzag around them. There was none of the order of commuters early on a weekday morning, all on a mission to get to where they needed to be at a reasonable, brisk pace. This was chaos.
Finally, Freddie managed to divert himself into a department store, gleaming and clean, and set himself the task of discovering the perfect gift. He stared at the store directory for so long that an assistant in a badly fitting blazer asked if he needed help.
‘Gifts?’ he’d asked back, awkwardly.
The assistant, not dropping their perfect customer service smile, replied, ‘Everything here could feasibly be a gift.’
I know, Freddie thought.
He shrugged at the assistant before extricating himself, letting a nearby escalator take him to another floor, hoping that the perfect gift would jump out at him. Just like he had hoped the perfect message to send to Kate would creep into his brain unannounced too. Freddie wondered if he expected too much from his brain, if his brain wasn’t on his side after all.
He wandered through menswear, and found himself in a section devoted to lingerie, which just made him think of Kate. Hurrying out, one floor up and in the children’s department, he wondered if he was too old to buy himself a Lego kit, before he came to the lighting department. Freddie was immediately drawn to one fixture in particular, a set of panels affixed to a wall that was programmed to run through a sequence of colours, like a rainbow. As he stood before it, he felt himself washed with reds, then oranges and yellow, and as he closed his eyes the darkness became infused with greens, and then blues and violets. He remembered the alleyway. How happy Kate had looked smiling in the colours.
Before he had a chance to think it through, Freddie whipped out his phone and took a video, just a few seconds of footage as the light panels ran through their sequence. Then he sent it to her.
He hated himself once he had done it. Hated that he hadn’t even bothered attaching words. Worried that it was too abstract and she wouldn’t get it. What if she didn’t remember? As he shoved it in his pocket, he felt it vibrate in response. Kate had messaged back. He was too nervous to bring it out again, scared that she might hate him, that she had replied with abuse or, somehow worse, baffled question marks. He kept walking through the lighting department, pretending that he was interested in filaments and desk lights and shrugging off attendants who came to help him.
On the escalator heading up to the next floor, he finally dared himself to see what she had written.
Where are you? Followed by a smiley face and a rainbow emoji. Freddie’s heart fluttered with relief.
He replied with the name of the department store.
I’m not far from there right now. Want to meet?
Freddie didn’t know what he wanted, didn’t know what Kate really wanted either, so he replied: Sure.
They met in the café at the top of the department store, which had windows that looked out over the roofs of Oxford Street and Mayfair beyond. Freddie couldn’t remember being this nervous meeting someone. He was more nervous than when he went on his date with Mia. Here, right now, he felt like he had no control, had no idea what Kate might be thinking or feeling. Was she angry at him for not contacting her? Had she been lying when she said she had enjoyed their night together? He had no protocols for this situation. No script.
‘Hey,’ she said as she sat down. She looked pretty. The weather was starting to get warmer, and she was wearing a dress under her coat.
‘Hey,’ he mumbled in reply.
Neither spoke for a long moment. Freddie played with his coffee cup, moving it around in its saucer, seeing how much he could do without making it cause a sound. Kate was feeding sugar into hers and stirring vigorously. First one sachet, then one more, and then another. He got the sense that she was just as nervous as him, but had no idea how to solve it.
‘Sorry I didn’t get in touch after,’ she said finally.
‘No, I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you,’ he replied, startled. ‘I should have reached out, thanked you, or said something.’
‘Yeah, maybe. But I could have done too.’
‘I was nervous,’ Freddie admitted. ‘I didn’t know what to say.’
‘I didn’t either.’
‘You’re not regretting it?’
‘No!’ Kate blurted, almost too loud. ‘No, God, no. I’m really not regretting it. Please don’t think I am. I told you after, I liked it. It was good.’
‘I thought it was good too.’
‘Did you really? Because afterwards, you seemed . . . I don’t know, distant? I worried that I had put too much pressure on you.’
‘You didn’t. It was fine. It was the right amount of pressure.’
‘That’s good.’
Silence again. Kate poured another sachet of sugar into her coffee.
‘So why are you here?’ she asked eventually.