The Pink and the Grey by Anthony Camber

the Union.” He looked at me with the barest hint of a smile. “Had your editor appeared, then simply I would not have appeared. Had you not… embarrassed yourself, my intention was eventually to move across the gallery to speak with you.”
    I frowned. “That’s a very strange way to ask someone out on a date. A smile and a hello usually does the trick, and frankly with me both of those are optional. I’m not exactly picky. Why didn’t you just sit right beside me in the gallery? Would’ve saved me a hell of a lot of face.”
    “I wanted to see what you would do.”
    “What I did was bollocks it all up. Was that good? Did I pass?”
    He grasped his glass and spun it slowly on the table. “Not exactly. You were rather slapdash. Hasty. Reckless.”
    “That’s me. Those three words and more. You should hear what Geoff calls me.”
    “But I think you will do,” he said, sucking on the straw.

    We spent the next couple of mojitos on nothing more than smalltalk. It was mostly me doing the talking. I didn’t get his surname, his home town, his college if he was at college, his job if he had a job, or anything. The notebook still in my bag was empty to the brim with facts about Seb.
    I couldn’t decide whether he was quiet because I wasn’t — and the more mojito’d I became, the quieter I wasn’t — or because he was just one of those types. That was the more likely, I figured. I reckoned he was the sort of guy who’d be the first to spot flames curling out of an upstairs window over the road but the last to say anything. Not in a malicious way — he’d be quietly heroic and emerge smoke-damaged and coughing with a baby and a puppy, and then vanish into the night hand-in-hand with a fireman. But me, I’d be setting records clattering down the fire escape and into the nearest pub, going look at the size of his hose and forgetting I was a reporter.
    So I told him all about myself, of course, about growing up in Dublin, about my father’s vanishing act, my journey of unrelenting self-discovery that somehow led to a season ticket to Humbug, all the usual sort of bollocks. He probably knew it all already. He probably had a manila folder somewhere with all my movements for the previous six months — and worse, the guys I’d slept with. There weren’t that many: I was pretty much Captain Bravado.
    The evening grew late, tipping toward midnight, and the massed ranks of drinkers began to disperse or be dispersed slowly to their pits or wherever came next. The wind gradually left our sails and for the first time I felt the chill of the night, despite the lamps.
    We went back inside the bar to finish off our drinks. It was still too loud for any kind of decent conversation and, more to the point, anything other than the grossest of flirting. And several mojitos in I’d given up on discovering Seb’s mysterious story: other things were on my mind. When he suggested a walk, I couldn’t agree fast enough.
    “Where are we going?” I asked him.
    “I live by the river.”
    “Cool,” I said, though that didn’t narrow it down much. I didn’t care.
    As we left the bar we had to jump out of the way of some kind of octopus woman, all arms, storming out. I didn’t recognise her. She looked like Helena Bonham-Carter in a kind of a Grim Reaper make-over. She swept along the alley ahead of us, people leaping out of her way in case she snuffed them out with a touch. I think I heard her say the name Spencer — that was the baldy drunk with the beercuffs. I had to laugh.
    Some part of my journo brain was still awake as we walked. The cogs turned silently, analysing the route. We walked south along the Roman road, the city’s spine. Most likely that cut out the posh colleges — the ones with all the cash and the river views. That still left dozens of others, though, and he might have been a student living out of college anywhere in town. If he was a student at all.
    “May I ask you a question?” Seb began.
    “Is it