Her Name was Lola
Part 5By Steve Finbow
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Click here to read from Part 1
On the sixth of January, the day Lola was due back, he had walked over Hampstead Heath and hadn’t thought about her at all. Not much. Before he went to bed, he turned on his mobile after charging it and the phone rang and the 901 service informed him he had a message. He dialed the number and heard her voice, loud, excited, slightly drunk maybe.
‘Steve, it’s Lola. I’m back in town and I miss you. We could hook up tonight if you’re not busy. Or tomorrow. Whenever. I really want to see you. Miss you lots. Call me. If I don’t talk to you tonight – sweet dreams.’
‘Who was that?’ his wife said.
‘Oh, just one of those prize lines.’
‘Sounded American.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Well, they’re international.’
‘Why didn’t you just hang up?’
‘I’m writing something about them. I wanted to hear it through.’
‘Let me listen.’
‘I’ve deleted it.’
He deleted it. In bed, he thought of what he and Lola would do tomorrow.
He texted her first thing and she replied. They arranged to meet that night at The Ordnance in St John’s Wood. He hadn’t been there before. Surprisingly. They met and he bought her dinner. He wasn’t hungry. She’d made him a bookmark as a Christmas present. She explained she was living in student accommodation and her boyfriend was staying with her until he found a flat and when he did she would be moving in but they could still meet and it would probably be in Camden so it wasn’t too far away but for the time being would he mind coming over to this area and he’d said no, that it was fine, of course. For the rest of the evening she talked about her trip to France. Her mother had flown to Paris to stay with her over the holiday period and then she’d gone with her boyfriend to his family home and she had skied and they had gone wine tasting. He told her of his illness and she’d said she wished she’d been there for him and he told her the story of the man in the hospital with ACAB tattooed on the knuckles of his left hand and asked her to guess what it stood for and she said she couldn’t and he said that he didn’t know either until a nurse asked the man and the man had said, ‘I did that when I was sixteen. All Coppers Are Bastards.’ At 9pm, she said she was tired and so he walked her home and she asked if he wanted to come up and he said no and they parted and it felt unsatisfactory.
On the walk home across Primrose Hill, he decided again that he wouldn’t see her. It was too much. He would call her tomorrow and say he was glad they’d met and he’d had fun but he wasn’t getting any writing done and he hoped she’d understand and he was sure she would be successful and he would look for her name. He called her the next morning and arranged to see her the following evening.
They talked about the production she was in – Sarah Kane’s Crave. There was only one performance, her boyfriend was working that night, she really wanted someone there, and so he agreed.
He saw her about once a week for the next three weeks. On the afternoon of the production, he had lunch with his agent and drank too much. He’d walked back from Soho to Camden and was tired and was thinking of a way to get out of going but felt he couldn’t and arrived five minutes before the start of the play. He stood in a room upstairs from the basement theatre and felt awkward. The majority of the audience was made up of friends of the cast and other students and he felt old and out of place. The theatre space was small and minimally designed. The cast, in situ, faced the audience in the middle of the space. He was seated opposite her, she was facing another actor. He closed his eyes as the play began. The voices, disembodied, flew around the room like scared bats. He thought she was much better than the others. She swapped seats, sat behind him. He opened his eyes and looked around the room. Some of the girls were very pretty and he tried to spot the one she said she had a crush on. He decided the girl to his right was the one. She was dark, petite, and quite beautiful, and he forgot the play, imagined a threesome, and was embarrassed to find he had an erection and hoped the play wouldn’t end soon. When his erection subsided, he hoped the play would end soon and it did and he waited in the foyer for her and when she came she kissed him on the cheek and took his arm in front of the other actors and they went to The Spread and he praised her acting and he meant it.
He slept in the next morning and spent the day reading TC Boyle’s Collected Short Stories. He went out for dinner that night and was bored and restless. He wanted to be with Lola.
They met the following Thursday at the New Inn and she had her usual chicken pad Thai and he had a Thai beef salad. She asked him if he would go with her to Bounders, a karaoke club in Paddington. He said he really didn’t fancy it. It was not his thing. She persisted. He resisted. She pleaded. He gave in. They took a taxi. The bar was beneath a hotel. At first, he thought it was a gay bar – men in their thirties mostly bearded, and some Asian guys mostly not. But the men were not gay; they were just there to sing. They took a seat at the front under a screen. There was a menu of songs. Lola sang Fever. Lola sang Cry Me A River. Lola sang I Love Rock N’ Roll. Lola sang Crazy. She had a wonderful voice. He was told this many times by the audience and the bar staff. The Asian men sang Frank Sinatra and Elvis songs, their voices almost exact copies, but he felt they didn’t understand the words, merely the form, and thought that, like fake Rolexes and Gucci handbags, the songs were merely a simulation of the original and they were cheap and they were gaudy. They got quite drunk and Lola sang Fever again and she sang it up close to him and he wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her neck and smell her hair but he didn’t because he couldn’t. It was raining when they left and they took a cab and he dropped her off and kissed her and she said ‘Sweet dreams,’ and in the morning he couldn’t remember getting home.
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Click here for Steve Finbow's bio and a list of works published.
© 2005 Me Three
