The Naked Drinking Club by Rhona Cameron

with me into my rucksack and heading downtown to the flat in William Street. Greg had offered me the smallest room, next to Jim’s; it was barely big enough for the single bed and small chest of drawers, but it was fine, especially as I didn’t know if I’d be stopping long, and cheap. He and Anaya had the room next to the office, in the basement directly underneath me. The Danish were in a room with a pair of single beds, two rooms down to my left, next to the bathroom. There were two other spare rooms with two bunk beds each. Scotty lived at home with his mother in another suburb. So for now it was just the six of us, and I wanted it to stay that way.
    ‘So, you settling in OK, Kerry?’ Anaya asked, with her head tilted to one side. I was very good at reading other people’s gestures, and from where I was sitting Anaya’s was very obvious. She liked me. And the overuse of my name was also a dead giveaway.
    ‘Yeah, it’s fine, thanks, it’s good.’ The Danish, Greg and Scotty faded into the background for now. ‘How long you lived there, Anaya?’ I thought I’d start to use her name more; my drink was kicking in slightly and loosening me up.
    ‘Mmm, let me see, about maybe a year.’ She put out her cigarette, while still holding my gaze. I looked for signs of anything I could interpret in everything she did.
    ‘Not long then, uh?’
    ‘No, not long.’ She laughed a little, confusing me as to what amused her. Perhaps she was laughing at my dumb questions, which would get better and longer the more I drank.
    ‘Well, I hope you will like it with us.’ She smiled warmly for once. ‘I’m sure we will all have some real fun.’ She finished off her drink and checked the time on her watch. I looked down into my glass, giggling slightly at her use of the word ‘fun’ in her drawn-out, flat Germanic accent.
    ‘Would you like another drink, Anaya?’ I hoped she would stay and see me looser and more entertaining, but she declined and left, saying very little except a goodnight to us all with an open-hand circular gesture, to which I stupidly did the same back. After I watched her leave, I thought about walking back to the flat with her, but decided against it this time. After all, there there would be plenty of other nights, and besides, I didn’t want to go to bed yet.
    The old guy playing pool, who’d bought Jim and me a drink the first night I came here, caught my eye again. He was chalking a cue when he winked at me; I winked back, which made him laugh. He took his dollar off the edge of the table and gestured for me to join him. I went over and picked up the other cue.
    ‘All right?’ I asked.
    ‘Yeah, kiddo, all right. Drink?’
    ‘Go on, then.’
    He clicked his fingers at the barmaid who opened two bottles of VB, a local lager I was starting to enjoy. He didn’t pay – which meant he kept a tab, which meant he drank there all the time, which I liked. He set up the balls in the triangle, spinning the black before breaking. We kept silent for a while. His hair was greying and he had a moustache. He was clean in his appearance and I would have put him in his mid-fifties.
    ‘So,’ he said, after potting a stripe.
    ‘So looks like I’m on coloureds, then?’
    He smiled. He liked me. He was attractive for an older man, in a Sean Connery in
The Man Who Would Be King
way. Just below the neckline of his T-shirt I could see the top of a tattoo.
    ‘So you with the art company lot, then, are you?’ He smoked constantly and spoke through squinting eyes from the cigarette smoke permanently coming out of his mouth. It was hard to make out his accent at first. It was all mixed up, transatlantic, maybe Canadian or Anglo-American, but as I heard more, I figured he was originally Scottish.
    ‘My name’s Kerry, and yeah, I’ve started selling for them.’
    ‘Have you now?’ He was playing around with me, and I knew enough to know that most of what he found amusing was down to his evident drunkenness.