I might not have looked quite a million dollars but I was good for at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight of them.

As usual, I agonized about wearing my high, black, snakeskin, ankle-strap shoes in case they made me too tall.

‘Ah, go on,’ said Brigit. ‘What’s the point in buying them if you never wear them?’

And off we went, me teetering slightly in the unfamiliar heels, to the Llama Lounge.

The Llama Lounge was a sixties-style reproduction cocktail bar: mad halogen lamps and peculiar metal chairs and general space-age jiggery-pokery. Very, very stylish.

Brigit gingerly sat on an inflated, transparent, plastic sofa. ‘I’m not sure this thing can hold my weight,’ she said anxiously.

‘No!’ I tried to sit beside her but she was having none of it. ‘Between the two of us we’re bound to burst it,’ she explained.

‘Oh, cripes,’ she said, when she was finally installed.

‘What?’

‘This thing is see-through and you know the way everything spreads when you sit down? Everyone behind me will think I’ve fifty-inch hips.

‘Go round and see, will you?’ she said in a low, desperate voice. ‘Don’t make it look like you’re checking, just be casual.’

Feeling foolish, I circled the sofa.

‘You’re OK,’ I said when I returned, then took my place on a silver bucket chair that had my bum almost on the floor and my knees several inches higher. It reminded me unpleasantly of having a smear test.

‘I’m so sawry,’ interrupted a gentle, nasal voice. ‘Can I just ask you…?’

From my prone position, I looked up at a groovy youth. Seventeen at the most. Too young.

‘Is that, like, something, you know… mystical, that you just did?’

‘What did I just do?’

‘The encircling of your seating place.’ He was ridiculously pretty. I was really glad he wasn’t a girl, there was enough competition.

‘Oh, the encircling?’ I felt a bout of devilment upon me. ‘It was indeed. An ancient Irish…’

‘Chinese!’ Brigit said at the same time.

‘It has been observed in both the Chinese and Hibernian cultures,’ I said smoothly. ‘It brings…’

‘Good luck?’ Girlie-boy interrupted eagerly.

‘The very thing.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re more than welcome.’

‘You’d think he could have bought us a drink,’ said Brigit bitterly.

We watched him go back to his group of equally youthful friends and enthusiastically explain something to them. He drew several circles on the table with his finger. Then, he paused, looked anxious and drew them in the opposite direction. A worried look appeared on his face and he stood up and made a move towards us again.

‘Clockwise,’ I called to him.

He beamed and sat back down and went on explaining.

After a few minutes we saw all five of them get up and walk, in reverential single file, around their chairs. When they got back to where they started from they shook hands and hugged each other emotionally.

A few minutes later a girl from another table came and asked them something. Girlie-boy spoke to them and pointed at Brigit and me a lot and drew a few more circles in the air. Shortly after that, the girl went back to her friends and then they all got up and walked around their seats. More hugging and kissing. Then someone went over to their table… And so it went on. It was like watching a very slow Mexican wave.

It was hot. We sat on our uncomfortable chairs and sipped our elaborate drinks. Great frosting and adorning with food went on with the drinks at the Llama Lounge. And you couldn’t look within a six-foot radius of a barman without having an ultra-stylish little dish of pistachio nuts pressed on you.

I began to normal out and not just because of the half bottle of tequila I’d imbibed since lunchtime.

Brigit and I felt better than we had in days. Our morale had lifted slightly because someone was being nice to us, even if it was only ourselves.

Then Brigit decreed that it was my turn to get a go on the see-through seat. Which was all very well, in a back-of-bare-thighs-sweating-against-the-vinyl kind of way.

Until it was time for me to get up to go to the loo.

Because I couldn’t.

‘I can’t get up,’ I said in alarm. ‘I’m stuck to this fecking couch.’

‘Of course you’re not,’ Brigit said. ‘Just push yourself forward and out you come.’

But I couldn’t get my hands to grip the sweaty plastic. And my thighs were stuck fast to it.

‘Jesus Christ,’ muttered Brigit, as she stood up and grabbed me by the arm. ‘Is it too much to ask to come out for a quiet drink and…’

She heaved, but still I couldn’t budge.

Brigit bent her knees and crouched like someone doing a tug-of-war and gave another huge pull.

Painfully, a layer of skin being left behind – it was a shame that I’d recently wasted fifty dollars having my legs waxed when this would have done just as well – I began to separate from the sofa. With a great, slow sucking noise that had everyone in the place looking up from their drinks in astonishment, Brigit managed to peel me off.

And just as I popped out, with a final slurp that sent Brigit flying, who did I come face to face with, only Luke bloody Costello.

He arched an eyebrow in a way that managed to ooze contempt, and said ‘Hi Rachel,’ in knowing, humiliating tones.

Then he smiled, with a glint in his eye that frightened me.

34

‘Take off your dress,’ Luke said softly.

Badly startled, I flicked a lightning-quick look at him to see if I was hearing things. We were standing in my kitchen, me at the sink, Luke leaning with his back against the opposite counter, his arms folded. Allegedly about to have a cup of coffee.

Instead, unless I was having audio hallucinations, he had just told me to take my dress off.

I blurted, ‘What did you say?’

And he gave a slow, lazy, sexy smile that scared me.

‘You heard,’ he said.

Luke Costello has just told me to take my dress off, I thought, panic and outrage jostling for supremacy. The fecking nerve of him. But what will I do?

The obvious thing was to just tell him to leave my apartment. Instead I croaked ‘But we haven’t even been introduced,’ in an attempt to laugh my way out of it.