Dating

We had arranged to meet at a nice place up on Colmore Row. I was nervous. I was always nervous beforehand, however many of those things I went on.

He was waiting outside. He looked okay. Not exactly a model, not a movie star; but then neither am I, as my mother has kindly told me since I was young. He looked shorter than his photos. A little heavier too, but that’s normal. It’s the same with me, truth be told.

“Paul?”

He smiled when he saw me. A nice, natural smile, showing all his teeth.

“I’m Laura.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, formally, and held out his hand. He held himself in quite a funny way. Very straight. So straight, almost, that it looked as if he was leaning backwards. “Shall we?”

It was a Thursday night, around nine o’clock, and the place was half-full. He went up to the bar to order and came back with a glass of red for me and a coke.

“You don’t drink?”

“Sorry,” he said, smiling.

With an effort, I hid my internal despair. “Not at all,” I said aloud. “How long?”

“Never.”

“You’re not religious, are you?”

“I used to be.” He looked at me. “I hope that’s not a problem. A lot of people really hate religion.”

“I find it quite interesting, actually. I think it takes a lot of courage to be religious nowadays.”

“It can take more courage to leave it behind.” His voice sounded odd when he said it. “Sorry. This is quite a serious start, isn’t it?”

“I hate small talk,” I said. “Most people do, don’t they, but you have to go through the motions anyway.”

“You’ve been on a lot of these?”

“Haven’t you?”

He shrugged and smiled. “Another religious hang-up. It was frowned-upon.”

“Dating?”

“In the modern sense. Outside of the circle of true believers.”

“You make it sound as if you were in some kind of cult.”

He smiled again. “That’s often how it looks from the outside, I suppose.”

“What do you do?” I asked, willing to plumb the depths of small talk in order to change the subject. It was true, I did find conversations about religion interesting, but not on the first drink.

“I’m a spy,” he said. “You?”

“Recruitment, but don’t judge me. I’d much rather have your job.”

“It’s not as exciting as it sounds. Not like the movies.”

“Ah, shame,” I said. “I’ll stick to recruitment after all, then.”

He kept on looking at me over the table. He had a pleasant face, even if he wasn’t handsome. He was one of those people who always looks as if they’re smiling, even without trying to. He had dark bags under his eyes and a prematurely lined forehead, but still, he wasn’t bad to look at.

Paul bought me a second wine, then a third. It couldn’t have been a cheap place and I tried to pay for the third one, but he wouldn’t let me.

I got a little tipsy. He didn’t make any of those annoying little jokes or comments that so often plague the non-drinker, though. I was having a good time.

We came back to it when I was halfway through my third glass. “Were your parents religious?”

“Very.”

“They forced you into it?”

Dimly, I reflected that I might want to tone it down a bit, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“That’s not how it works. They don’t need to, when you grow up around it. You just become conditioned.”

“What are you? Or, what were you? Catholic? Protestant? Anglican?”

“None of the above. Technically it was something very different. Something smaller.”

“Like the Quakers, or…?”

He smiled. “More localised. Nothing official.”

“But not a cult?”

“There were no Satanic rituals.”

“Blood sacrifices?”

“Afraid not. It was just a man leading a group of people, none of whom felt as if they chimed with the usual categorisations.”

“A sect?”

“More so than a cult. It’s probably not as exciting as you seem to think.”

I leaned forward. I really was intrigued now. It was something different, at least. He wasn’t your typical date.

“Tell me,” I said, and he did. Not a huge amount of detail, very little indeed actually, but enough to get my imagination going.

“And you believed it all?”

“To start with. That’s how it works: conditioning; indoctrination. I questioned it more as I got older. Questioned him more.”

“How old?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I won’t laugh at you.”

“I don’t.”

“Have it your way.” I waved one hand at him while I picked up my wine glass with the other. I was pretty tipsy by then. “Gosh. I have so many questions. I don’t know where to start.”

“I think they’re closing soon.”

I looked around with the glass still at my lips, with difficulty, and saw that everybody else had left. I hadn’t even noticed the music being turned off. “I think you might be right.”

“Another place?”

“I have to be in at nine tomorrow. I didn’t realise it was so late.”

“Another date, then.”

I smiled, then got a hold of myself. “I’ll think about it,” I said; coyly, I thought, although the effect was marred somewhat when I went to take a drink from my wine glass and found it empty. “Ah.”

“Awkward.”

“Quiet, you.” He had a nice smile. He wasn’t so bad to look at in general, once you got used to him. “Fine. A quickfire round, then we go. Three questions, and you answer in as few words as possible. Understand?”

“I can just about get my head around it, if I concentrate really hard.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

“Depends if you’re any good at it.”

“Right, question one. What was he like, this priest? This ‘teacher’?”

“His beliefs were more… extreme than normal. He’s a good man, but dangerous.”

“He is a good man? He’s still alive?”

“Is that your second question?”

I shook my head, considering. All the other chairs had been put on the tables and the waiter was watching us from the bar. “Was there ever violence?”

“Yes.”

“That’s it?”

He laughed. “You made the rules. You should’ve asked a better question.”

The waiter was walking towards us. I nodded, held up an acknowledging hand, and smiled at him. He paused and didn’t smile back. I turned back to Paul. “How do you feel about the whole thing now?”

He seemed to be thinking, although his eyes stayed fixed on mine. They lifted upwards, briefly, then came down again. “It was an extraordinary life.”

I waited. His mouth stayed shut in that ever-present half-smile. “Come on,” I said. “That’s all you’re giving me? What does that mean? Extraordinary how? In what sense of the word?”

“Guys.” My charming smile had bought us a few moments, but the waiter had finally decided enough was very much enough. “We’re closing now.”

“Obviously,” I muttered, a little wobbly as I stood up. It dawned on me at that moment, painfully, that I hadn’t been to the toilet since we’d arrived. Instantly regretting my mean-spirited semi-quip, I flicked on the old charming smile once more. “I don’t suppose I could use your toilet quickly, before we go? It’s an emergency.”

I wished to God I hadn’t said the last part. But who knows, perhaps he’d have refused me without it. In the event, he only pulled a face and told me to be quick.

All but one of the lights had been turned off when I got back. Paul was still waiting by my chair. He helped me into my coat and we stood outside in the night afterwards. “I’m this way,” he said, pointing down the hill.

“Alas, I’m not.”

He stood there, smiling but not saying anything; waiting for me to talk. It was a dirty trick.

“This was nice,” I said, and it had been. “Let’s do it again sometime.” There’s no harm in saying it, even if you don’t mean it. In this case though, I thought that I probably did.

“It was,” he said. “And I’d like that very much.”

He kept on standing there. I came forward for a hug just as he was raising his hand to shake mine. “Oh, I’m, ah-” I babbled.

“Sorry,” he said. “A hug is much better.” He put his arms around me. He was a good hugger. That’s very important to me.

We broke apart, and I turned to go. “Bye then,” I said, gave him an awkward little wave which he thankfully returned, and went on up the hill. I had a smile on my face as I walked, and that lovely feeling in my stomach that you only really get at times like that.

—

A first date can go that way, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. Maybe neither of you follows up. Maybe you can’t get the second date organised and the momentum is all lost. Maybe you do have the second date, and it’s just different.

None of that was the case with Paul. We went out again that weekend, then again the week after. I guess I got pretty tipsy both of those times too. But the fourth time we just went for a walk out through Moseley Bog, and I didn’t drink a drop, and it was lovely. We kissed that day when he dropped me back at my flat, in the car, like we were in a rubbish American movie.

When did we become a ‘couple’? Who knows when it happens. When you stop tracking the number of dates, perhaps. When he’s been out with your friends a few times. When you can just be together, at home, for hours on end, not doing anything really, nothing special, but it still being the most fun you can have. Christmas came and went, then spring, and we were still together.

And when were the first warning signs?

As always, they’re easy to spot when you know what you’re looking for. After the fact. They were there at the very start, but how was I – poor Laura, so frequently lovelorn, who only ever wanted a nice, upstanding young man – to know?

—

His job. That was a strange one, from the beginning.

He said ‘spy’ on the first date. A safe half-funny, first-date sort of answer. I asked a couple more times, not long afterwards. I didn’t want to pester, though, if he didn’t want to talk about it. It’s only small talk, and if you can get by without discussing work, if you can talk about other things instead, then I really think you should.

What few details did he tell me? That it was something to do with his old church group, or whatever it was, even though he’d left. A little odd, but fine. That he travelled quite a bit, back and forth to London. That was true enough; I dropped him at the station a couple of times, and I saw the train tickets from New Street to Euston in the recycling at his flat. He said it was all confidential, that he couldn’t talk about it; but he played that down by saying that lots of people sign NDAs for their work, which is true I suppose.

His friends.

They were occasionally mentioned, usually in the past tense, but never seen. Sometimes we’d run into someone around the city who knew him. They could be his age, or younger, or decades older. They’d say hello to each other, call each other by name, then just carry on. He went out with my friends plenty of times; once a week or more. They liked him, and why wouldn’t they? He was a likeable person, with that smile, with his little jokes. I’d ask why it never happened the other way around, and he said he’d needed to leave all that behind.

His flat.

One bedroom, nice enough. He clearly earned a decent, livable wage, whatever it was that he did. Religious paintings, on the walls, but quite abstract. Not the sort of thing you find in your local parish church. I wasn’t totally sure they were religious, to be quite honest, but they seemed to be filled with heavenly light and that sort of thing. Some had pretty patterns with perfect symmetry. Everything was always very neat and tidy – kitchen, living room, bedroom – even when I dropped by unannounced.

His religion.

Well…

—

When did it all begin to turn? That’s an easier question to answer.

I had stayed over one night. Sure, I stayed over. His religious sensibilities didn’t seem to deter him from a little tumble in the sheets, and I was no blushing maiden. I like to sleep in late at the weekends, but I woke earlier than usual that sunny Sunday morning. He was up already when I emerged bedraggled from the bedroom, stretched out on the sofa with his laptop resting on his stomach and a weird smile on his face.

“Morning,” he said, but didn’t look over.

I walked around behind him, glanced at the screen, and stopped. It was a video of two men, one kneeling down in an orange jumpsuit and the other standing over him dressed all in black. The first one had a bag over his head. The second had a scarf thing wrapped around his face and was bringing down a long, curved sword.

I let out a little scream and looked away, covering my eyes too for good measure.

When I looked up again he was still looking at the screen. The video had finished and faded to a black screen, thankfully. I saw he had a dozen or more tabs open, all of them something to do with executions, extremism, that sort of thing.

“Err,” I said, pointedly.

Finally, he turned. “Everything okay?” he asked. He had that usual, soft smile on his face.

“What are you watching?”

“Well,” he said. “This bloke just got his head chopped off.”

“I gathered that much, thank you. Why are you watching it?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Oh, I don’t know. Because it’s a Sunday morning, and Andrew Marr’s on. What do you mean ‘Why wouldn’t I’? Why would you?”

“We all know these things happen, don’t we?”

“And?”

“It seems quite cowardly, to me, to act as if they don’t. You’ll read about it in the news, and say ‘Oh, how ghastly’, but actually seeing it for yourself is a step too far?”

“You could say that about a lot of things.”

“Yes. You could.”

His argument made sense, in a way, but I was far too shaken up to admit it.

“Fine,” was all I said. “I’m sticking the kettle on. No more execution videos before my morning coffee from now on, okay?”

“Deal.” He smiled, and turned back to his computer.

I went to the kitchen, mechanically making a milky coffee for myself and brewing a cup of tea for him. I stood there even after the drinks were ready, dressed in one of his t-shirts, considering.

He was reading something when I came back. I glanced at the screen and felt my stomach drop. I placed his tea on the low coffee table next to him anyway, and sat at the far end of the sofa, one leg crossed over the other.

I blew on my coffee, and glanced at him. I sipped a little bit, and looked over again. He caught my eye, and laughed.

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just…” I shrugged. “You can read Arabic.”

“Sure.”

I nodded. Sure, he says. I was still facing forwards, towards the blank television and away from him. “I just, you know…” I said. It was quite difficult to phrase. “I assumed you were Christian.”

“Why?”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m not a racist or anything. I know everyone says that, but in my case it’s true.”

“I believe you,” he said, smiling.

“But, you know… that’s just the way it works. You’re white. Your name is Paul, for God’s sake.”

“My parents’ choice.”

“You said they were religious.”

“Protestant. I took a different path.”

“When you met this mysterious, charismatic local leader? I’ve heard this kind of story before, you know.”

“Which is precisely why I didn’t want to volunteer too many details. I knew what you’d think.”

“Would I be wrong?”

“He wasn’t running some compound full of RPG firing ranges and bomb-making classes. We were only a few boys, taking classes in the suburbs of Birmingham.”

“What classes?”

“Studying the text. Interpretations. Analysis. Sunday school stuff.” He waved a hand. “It wasn’t about that, really.”

“And what was it ‘about’?”

He shrugged. “I’ve thought about that a lot. Especially since I lost it all. Brotherhood, I suppose. Guidance, from him, and over everything a sense of belonging.”

“Sounds almost as if you miss it now.”

“It was my choice to leave.” He paused, the half-smile slipping for a moment. “Not that I was given much of a choice.”

“Why?”

“It became a question of taking sides.” He shrugged. “I really can’t say any more. I’m sorry.”

—

You get over these things, don’t you? These little tiffs.

One of you leaves your dirty cups and dishes around the flat. One of you forgets to turn the lights or the TV off. One of you fell in with a known religious extremist who it turns out – when you research it a little in your own time – is back at large within the city having previously done a stint in prison for hate crimes. One of you wants to go to bed but the other one isn’t really tired yet. You have these little tiffs, but you move past them and carry on like before, and that’s just how a relationship works.

And so, we carried on.

I tried to behave as I had before, but it wasn’t the same. How could it be? Whether I agreed with his reasoning, whether I believed him or not, that’s a pretty sizable obstacle to try and look past on a daily basis.

He certainly behaved as he always had, but now it was all framed differently. That ever-present smile became a deceptively harmless disguise behind which to hide. The soft voice hardened, and began to intone aggressive, unintelligible chants in my mind. The brief mentions of violence on our first date conjured themselves into all sorts of gruesome scenes whenever he winced at a stubbed toe, swore at a football player on TV, grimaced at a hand burned on the wire rack of an oven. All normal enough before, the same responses as anyone and everyone might have, but now my scrambled mind lent them all sorts of meanings and inferences.

Certain subjects were suddenly out of bounds. Perhaps that happens in every relationship too, but in this case it felt a little different.

Religion was clearly still central to his life, whatever he had left behind. He had those paintings, and books too; books which I now noticed were resolutely non-denominational, being more general investigations into religious texts and artefacts, Abrahamic traditions, the deeper meanings of monotheism. Fat chance I was getting into all that with him.

I bit my tongue whenever I veered towards asking about friends, or family, or school, or anything which might even tangentially relate to his time under the so-called ‘guidance’ of this so-called ‘teacher’. We reverted instead to small talk. Then we started to watch more TV, more movies, more sport that I couldn’t have given less of a toss about – all at my instigation – to remove even the need for that. Never exactly tee total beforehand, even I started to drink more and more, whether I was with him or with my friends or just alone.

—

It went on that way for two or three months, before the night on which it all came to a head.

But Laura, you fool, you great dolt, why didn’t you leave sooner?

Alas, that’s simply not how it works. Not with me, at least. When it happens quite gradually, as it did in this case, you don’t notice the slide into unhappiness.

Somebody cheats or says something unforgivable; that’s a different story. There’s a big bang, and it’s over. Plenty of hard feelings, but at least that’s that.

In this case, even with the slightly unusual circumstances, it was a steadier slide. There were still good times. He was still pleasant. The old feelings from the rosy first few months lingered on.
Until that fateful night, of course, when it all came crashing down with a very big bang indeed.

—

I’d gotten good and drunk. Not just tipsy, not just a little buzz; flat-out and undeniably drunk. I started nice and early at my flat. I was getting psyched-up, I suppose. Perhaps, on a subconscious level, I was deliberately getting myself so trolleyed that I would trigger a showdown without the more rational part of my brain to restrain me.

“Did you get a taxi here?” Paul asked when I arrived, much later than I’d said.

“How did you know that? What are you, some kind of spy, or… something?”

“I heard a car pull up outside. Then your voice, saying goodbye to somebody, quite loudly. I managed to put it together from those two clues, somehow.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest… the refuge of the… Ah, you know.”

“Come on,” he said, guiding me to his sofa as I nearly tripped over the corner of the coffee table. “Are you all right?”

“It’s called having fun, Paul. It’s called alcohol. Just because your religion doesn’t allow it.” I pointed at him, my finger waving a little. “That was another clue, as you would call it. On our first date. Not drinking like that. Should’ve known then you were a… You know.”

He had the smile on. I had no idea if it was forced amusement or genuine bemusement. “The kettle just boiled. Do you want a tea?”

“Tea?!” I spat. “I’ve still got half a bottle of white in your fridge, haven’t I? Unless you’ve cast it out of your sacred home, that sacri- sac- sacrilegious drink of the heavens.” I pointed at him again.

“I meant heathens,” I added.

He went away. Left alone, I started feeling pretty bad. There was the spinning room, the sudden, desperate thirst for something other than alcohol; all that sort of thing. I was sprawled diagonally across the sofa when he got back. He had a glass of water, thank God, along with the wine. I took that from him first and proceeded to drain it while he put the wine on the table.

Paul sat down at the other end of the sofa. He pulled my legs onto his lap and started to stroke them.

“Better?”

“Mmm,” I hummed. I started to relax, then got angry at myself for relaxing, then got angry at him for making me relax. “Stop that!”

“Hmm?”

I batted his hands away and tried to straighten up at the same time. It wasn’t the most graceful manoeuvre of my life, but I got the job done. “Tricking me into letting you off the hook.”

“What hook might that be?”

The water and the brief lie-down had helped to straighten me out a little. I resisted the urge to reach for my wine, which would immediately have reversed my progress.

“I want the truth, Paul.”

“About what?”

“Don’t ‘about what’ me. Everything!”

“That’s a pretty big topic. Perhaps you could give me a clue.”

“Bah!” I waved my hand at him. “Okay, let’s start with something easy. Like what the hell you do all day.”

His smile finally faltered. Only a little, but it certainly slipped. “What do you mean?”

I snorted. “It’s a bloody easy question, if you ask me. I’ll start. ‘Hi, I’m Laura. I go out to work at a recruitment agency every day, in an office just off New Street’. Now it’s your turn.”

He shifted on the sofa, looking off to the side. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Why? I’m tired of dodging things you’d ‘rather not talk about’. We’ve been doing this for months now, and I’ve still got no idea who you really are.”

“Of course you know.”

“Do I?!”

“Yes. But what I do with my days… It’s complicated.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to process it, if I push my tiny brain as hard as it’ll go.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“It’s that I know how it’ll sound, and I know what you’ll hear, and I think you’ll want to end things.”

“And why would I want to do that? There must be a good reason, if you’re so worried about spilling the beans. Who is it that you meet?”

He looked back at me. His eyes burned into mine. “Why would you ask me that?”

I tried to return his stare. Eye contact has never been my strong point, but I really tried that time. Then I looked away, just for a moment. I couldn’t help myself.

“What do you mean?” I asked, and even I could hear that my voice was suddenly funny.

I reached for my wine. Very quickly he leant forward and took me by the wrist. Not hard, but I stopped anyway.

“I mean what I said.” He spoke very slowly. There was an intensity in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before. “Why would you ask me that, specifically? Not just what I do. Not just where I go, or even what my job is again. You asked me who I meet.”

“I don’t…I meant…” I began to blather. “Let go of me, would you.”

He released his grip. I picked up the wine and took a sip, hunched forward and looking off to the side.

“You followed me.”

It wasn’t a question. I kept on looking off, towards the blank television screen.

“How many times?”

“Once was all it took.”

“When?”

I shrugged, then realised he’d pulled the old switcheroo on me somehow. “Why the hell does that matter?” I said, turning back to him. “I saw what I saw. You, going into a mosque then coming out again with several people your age or younger.”

“They were just friends,” he said. “Not that I should have to defend myself.”

“Your old friends? The ones you supposedly left behind? The ones who are still part of the sect, the cult, the ‘cell’; whatever you want to call it?”

“Yes!” he said, his own voice raising. “Fine. Those friends. What of it?” The fire still burned in his eyes, more fiercely now than before. “They’re not just ‘friends’, anyway. Not like those silly girls you hang around with, all bitching about whoever isn’t there that day or complaining about their pointless jobs. These were my brothers.”

“Were or are? Sorry, but I’m a little confused about the whole timeline here.”

He paused. “Were. The community we were a part of was small, but so strong. Stronger than anything you can imagine. We loved each other, and we loved him.”

“The mysterious teacher. Do you still see him, too?”

“Yes. I have to. I have to see all of them.”

“Why?”

“Because that was the deal.”

“What deal? Who the hell are you?”

He opened his mouth, then shut it again. His face had grown quite red, and I realised that he had leant towards me and that I had leant away a little.

“Tell me, you coward.” The word made his jaw clench, but I was all fired up now and I couldn’t have cared less. “Tell me what you do. Tell me why you go to London every week. Tell me what that building is, that you go inside when you get there.”

Shock registered briefly in his face at that. Probably I shouldn’t have said it – I should have kept my cards close to my chest – but I was drunk on a dangerous and unpredictable mixture of alcohol and adrenaline.

The shock passed, and he leant forwards. He grabbed my wrist again, harder this time. “You followed me… to London?”

“Too bloody right I did!”

“You psycho. You bitch.”

I gaped, then let out a short and mirthless laugh. “You’re the bloody psycho. And you’re a coward. Tell me. Tell me what that building is. Tell me what you do there. Is that your weird little extremist headquarters? Is that where the moneymen work? Aw, you can’t tell me, can you? You’ve got your little ‘NDA’, which I presume is another pathetic excuse for lying to me.”

“I never lied,” he said, through gritted teeth. I kept trying to pull my wrist away, but he was holding on tight. I realised it was starting to hurt quite a lot, actually. “But there was never any point in telling you the truth. None of it. Because you’ve been conditioned. You’ve been warped and indoctrinated. You can only see things from one, false perspective; the perspective of the masses.”

“What a load of crap,” I said. “And would you please… let… go of me.” I tried to scratch his wrist with my free hand, but he caught that too and held it there just as hard as the first one.

“I’ll be protected, you know,” he said. “If you disappear.”

I felt the first stab of true panic. “What are you talking about, you freak?” I said, raising my voice very loud in the hope that a neighbour might hear, and beginning to struggle with all my body now.

“I’ve got powerful friends,” he continued, eyes boring into mine, arms straining at the effort to hold me in place. “Two kinds, actually. They’ll hide me. Get me to safety.”

The thought of ‘disappearing’ had both filled me with a cold dread, and led me towards an important discovery. I’ve never exactly been a super-athlete, but it turns out that – when you think you’re about to die – you actually get quite a lot stronger.

I’m happy to say I hadn’t known about that before, but now I found that – as I struggled and twisted on the sofa – I was starting to fight free of his grip. He squeezed harder to hold on, and I screamed with the pain but still managed to twist myself around so that my legs were pointing towards him. I kicked out once, straight into his stomach. It felt fantastic. He let out this grunt and his mouth opened and closed like a fish’s but he still held on, the tough bastard. I kicked out the second time right into this face, and that felt even better.

Paul shouted and let go of me, and I scrambled off the sofa, knocking my wine off the table as I went and sending the glass smashing to the floor. He stumbled up and after me, staggering to cut off my path towards the front door which I had indeed been headed for. I readjusted and aimed for the kitchen instead. He had one hand held to his bloody nose, and his left eye looked in pretty bad shape, but he could see well enough to chase after me.

I heard him coming as I reached the kitchen. I can’t tell you how fast my heart was beating, and I’m not sure I was breathing at all. I looked around desperately as he entered the room, saw the neat stacks of washing up he must have done before I’d arrived, seized a nice big saucepan from the top of one pile, and span around.

He’d gone straight for a long, sharp knife – the psycho – and was coming towards me with every intention of using it. His left eye must really have been damaged, because he didn’t seem to see the saucepan swinging up and towards him with all the force I could muster until it was already too late, and the pan was striking the side of his head with an enormously satisfying clang.

—

“So?”

“So what?”

“What was it like?!”

We were in this trying-too-hard-to-be-cool, ridiculously overpriced underground bar place near New Street. My best friend Jen looked up at me expectantly, excitedly, as she leaned over the table to sip at the straw of her cocktail.

“My boyfriend turning out to be a religious extremist and trying to murder me?”

Jen nodded quickly.

“Oh, it was great,” I said, taking a nonchalant sip of my own cocktail which lay balanced in the palm of my hand. “I’d definitely recommend it, if you ever get the chance.”

“Did you read the news stories?”

“You don’t read ‘the news’.”

“Well, I saw someone posting about it. Kathy? You know Kathy. Sarah’s friend.”

“And what did Birmingham’s finest investigative reporter ‘Kathy’ have to say about the whole thing?”

“Hmm,” Jen hummed, as she took another sip through her straw. “She said this guy Paul got… Now she didn’t say ‘brainwashed’. He was doctored? Doctrinated?”

“Indoctrinated.”

“Into some cult or something, when he was a teenager.”

“Good start.”

“But then he got caught by the police? Or MI5, or MI6 or something?”

“MI6, yeah. James Bond tracked him down personally.”

“He’d done some bad stuff here in Birmingham, apparently. But then MI6, instead of putting him in prison, they offered him a deal and he took it. He had to stay in Birmingham and keep in touch with them all.”

“Like a spy, you might say.” I thought back to our first date. Paul had been right: he hadn’t lied, the sneaky bastard.

“Right. And he had to report everything back to MI6, and go down sometimes to their secret headquarters in London to help them build this case against the Jihad supervillain guy who was running the whole thing.”

“Yep, the Jihad supervillain,” I said, nodding.

“But then, even though he was working for the government, he was also kind-of still one of the terrorists. Like, still a psycho really. And that’s why he attacked you and tried to kill you in his flat.”

Jen noisily hoovered up the remains of her cocktail through the straw.

“Your name isn’t actually mentioned, of course. Only a few of us who are close to you know, like me. But it’s really frustrating, because I know you’re super-smart obviously, but online, everyone’s like… ‘Oh my God, this crazy idiot girl!’ Like, ‘She was dating a terrorist and she didn’t know! How couldn’t you know?!’ All that sort of thing. And I’m just like… trying not to tell anyone it was you, but still saying, like… ‘Maybe she’s not as stupid as she sounds in these articles’, you know? Like, ‘Maybe it’s harder than you think to find out your boyfriend is a terrorist?’ It doesn’t mean you have a mental illness or brain damage or whatever, like everyone’s saying online. Not necessarily. It’s probably just one of those things that’s different when it actually happens to you, you know? There’s lots of stuff like that.”

I tipped up my glass and dispatched the remaining half of my cocktail in a couple of gulps. My long sleeves slipped down a little as I did, revealing the dark bruising on both wrists. Then, slowly, I placed my glass down on the table, pulled the sleeves back down, reached my hand to put it on Jen’s, and smiled at her.

“Thanks for the support, Jen.”

She smiled at me, nodded, then waved towards the bar. The handsome young waiter came over, and she smiled up at him and asked very sweetly for another round then watched him as he walked away. Finally, her gaze returned to me.

“Something catch your eye?”

Jen shrugged. “Maybe he’s got a friend,” she said, with a smile. “You’re single again now, right?”

“To be honest, Jen,” I said. “I’m probably going to take some time off from dating.”