Stumbling from the cool of the air-conditioned hotel foyer into the steamy white heat of the night does nothing to sober him up. It makes him feel panicky and claustrophobic. A sweat that feels like pure alcohol blooms quickly on his skin, dampening his spine and the small of his back. How can it be so hot at three in the morning? And where is she? Where is she? He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy- wavy, in double-vision through the glass windows of the hotel. And then he sees a car indicate to pull over and his heart rate starts to slow. She’s here.
At last. Thank God. This terrible night is coming to an end. He squints to bring it into focus, to search the driver’s seat for the reassuring gleam of her white-blonde hair, but it’s not there. The window winds down and he recoils slightly.
‘What?’ he says to the dark-haired woman behind the wheel. ‘What are you doing here? Where’s my wife?’
‘It’s OK,’ says the woman. ‘She sent me. She’d had too much to drink.
She asked me to bring you home. Come on. In you get.’
He looks behind him for the girl, sees her leaving the hotel and walking quickly away in the opposite direction, her handbag clutched tight against her side.
‘I’ve got water. I’ve got coffee. Come on. You’ll be home in no time.’
The dog on her lap growls at him softly as he slides into the passenger seat.
‘I thought you’d left?’ he says, fumbling behind himself to find the seatbelt. ‘I thought you’d gone away?’
The woman smiles at him as she unscrews the lid from a plastic bottle of water and passes it to him.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I had. But she needed me. So. Anyway. Drink that.
Drink it all down.’
He puts the bottle to his dry, dry mouth, and gulps it back. Then he closes his eyes and waits to be home.
