When I was 15, I lied to everybody except for my mother.

“I’m going on a date,” I told her.

“Have fun,” she said, without looking away from the talk show rerun she was
watching. The beautiful guest, an actress, I think, was demonstrating what
she could fit in the gap between her two front teeth—dollar bills, cherry
stems, a paperclip and so on.

“He’s 26,” I added.

She looked up. “Use protection.”

I was late to the station where we were supposed to meet but he still
wasn’t there, so I walked in circles looking through the slatted doors of
the closed-up tailors and the Pret until he showed. He looked different in
real life. Younger, which was a relief. I’d told him I was 18.

He was holding a glass of white wine, which was swept towards me in an
expansive hug; he said that he’d been waiting for me at a pub a few minutes
away. I told him with immense confidence that the year before my
grandmother had traipsed out of a restaurant still holding her port glass,
and this had been taken as the first sign of a brewing senility. I loved to
be precocious.

“Do you want some?” he said. I nodded. I felt confident, I felt like silver
string in the wind. We set off for somewhere. “Oh,” a moment later, “I
wasn’t expecting you to finish it.” He sounded genuinely irritated; I
hadn’t tasted it, just swallowed. It was something like the second or third
glass of wine I’d ever had in my life.

I don’t remember which station was our designated meeting place, or really
what part of London we were in, but he took me around crescents and
crescents of the white terraced houses that suggest Belgravia. It was late,
and black like water out. The walk wasn’t designed to take us anywhere,
just to impress that he knew how to stroll about walled gardens like these.

My palms felt slippery, but he took my hand and would not drop it. The
night before he had stayed up until the morning with his ex-girlfriend,
just sitting and talking. She’d found out that day that she had brain
cancer, he told me softly.

“That was really good of you,” I said. “Is she going to die?”

I had a deep, teenage conviction that this had not actually happened to
him; or that it had happened months ago, and he’d reframed it as ‘last
night’ so that he could slip it into the conversation. Not to be outdone, I
waited until it was appropriate, and then told him a story about a friend
of mine who had gone to America to sell her eggs. She’d been paid $8,000, I
told him, and she didn’t want to have sold her eggs for money, but she
wanted something from the whole thing, just something. So she spent almost
the whole $8,000 on a designer handbag (“an Italian designer handbag,” I
specified, achingly 15) and whenever people compliment her on it, she says
“thank you, it’s my egg bag.” This had not happened to a real friend of
mine, but it was, I thought, a pretty self-contained little anecdote I’d
turned over in my head long enough that it felt like it might have.

We stopped so that he could make up a cigarette. I’d never seen rolling
tobacco before, and had a genuinely hard time acting blasé about it. He
bent his gaze to the kit laid surgically across his lap and for the first
time I felt that I could look properly at his face without being seen. He
was not attractive, not at all; I’d known this from his profile picture but
it was still a disappointment. But I watched the witchy cigarette paper
flickering in the shadow of the stucco-front trophy houses and felt good,
felt adult.

Throughout the strange, lamplit, residential tour I’d been kind of twitchy
but once restaurants and bars started coming into view again the sense of
danger mostly elapsed. A woman in a long red coat was turning over the
insides of her bag in the middle of the street. It seemed so obvious to me
then that she should have been wearing a long red coat. She came up to
us—well, to him—and asked if he had a lighter. A moment later, her husband
turned the corner.

They were called Teresa and Henry, were Dutch or Dutch-adjacent, were I
don’t remember how old. At the time, they seemed to be my parents’ age;
looking back, they could have been anything from 30 to 50-something.

“Is there anywhere around here good to eat?” asked Henry.

“The best Italian food in London is just around the corner. In fact,” —this
delivered easily, looping an arm gently round my shoulder, “why don’t you
walk with us?”

The fourth and fifth glasses of wine I’d ever had in my life I had at that
little Italian place. It was getting horribly to my head. I put my hand
over the mouth of my glass at one point, which I’d seen in a film and
thought very pretty, but he removed my hand affably and topped me up. The
conversation was lovely. “Prawns,” he said, with a muddling, alcoholic
closeness, “are served with their heads on because it’s more thrilling.” He
told stories with a confidence massively disproportionate to how attractive
he was; he described a childhood full of “Bashers and Tads’ (Sebastians and
Thaddeuses). Charmingly, he recounted my egg bag story to Teresa and Henry;
we told them that we’d been dating for five months, and kept falling in and
out of holes in the narrative of how we’d met. Henry seemed particularly
shrewd. But lovely, lovely talk tripping over the close warm air.

And when the bill arrived, Teresa put her hand over the silver. “We’ll get
this.”

I didn’t have a bank account yet, but I had a 20 pound note screwed up in a
densely patterned coin purse and I began to object; but he smiled just as
easily as he’d invited her and said, “Thanks.” It’d worked out so perfectly
that if Teresa hadn’t been the one to approach us I would’ve suspected him
of orchestrating the whole thing.

The wine slid, made the air roll. He took my hand again and tried to spin
me on the street after Henry and Teresa had gone, and I told him that I
thought I should be getting home pretty soon. The taste of old apples was
in my teeth.

“Let’s just walk for a bit,” he said, smiling irregular. I shrugged
happily, feeling older than 15; feeling 18 and a half even.

We stopped by a convenience store so that he could buy beer. I told him
that my younger sister had taken my ID so that she could go clubbing; he
went in alone. Outside I watched the cloud-cover split open and reform. The
beautiful actress who had fit cherry stems in between her teeth later let
the gap close up. It made the news.

Years and years after the night that I was standing outside this
convenience store waiting for beer to be bought, I read an article about a
woman who dreamt every night for a decade that her teeth fell out. One day,
in real life, they all fell out at once. Scientists looking at her x-rays
found out that the nerves going from her brain to her teeth were supersized
from overuse. I can’t remember if they thought it was her teeth that had
been sending warning signs to her brain or her brain sending command
signals down to her teeth.

I watched the cloud-cover, and I looked across the road at the display
window of a shop that sold Persian carpets during the daytime, and the guy
bringing all the fruit in for the night from the wooden crates outside the
convenience store had to move around me twice before I realised I was in
the way .

We walked and drank. His beer was almost finished by the time we came to
sit by the river; I had the sense to leave most of mine. I remember having
to work to keep slightly out of step—I thought that being in sync was
kitschy.

“So,” he said, almost as soon as we’d sat down, leaning back from the
bench. He was broad. The visible machineries of his body, the hands and the
neck and the jaw, were all big and constantly working in a way that was
completely distinct from the adults I knew, the teachers and parents. “What
do you think?”

It didn’t matter that I didn’t know what he meant, because he was leaning
in before I could possibly have answered. I moved my head back. He came
inexorably closer. I was laughing, I remember, awkward and ungracious and
shrinking backwards until I literally caricatured recoil. He was smiling,
too.

“Come on,” he said.

I shook my head, but I was still laughing and he was still moving forward.
Before he came any closer, I jammed the mouth of my beer bottle rather
ineffectually into his ribcage. He looked down disbelievingly at where it
sloshed faintly at his Moncler. I held my breath. “Little psycho,” he said,
and ruffled my hair.

He walked me back to the station. This didn’t feel like an egg bag story, I
thought. It was not a discrete unit, easily tellable. I wasn’t sure about
the ending and every precocious cell in my body felt slightly tired. But he
kept the conversation spilling happily along:

“My ex used to air dry her hair walking along Battersea Bridge and when she
came back it had always picked up the smell of sewage.”

“Is this the ex who—”

“—The brain cancer ex, yes”;

And there were the swans on the river.

(I was almost on the escalator before I heard him call my name; I almost
didn’t turn around. The poor dear stupid thing was sticking his head over
the wings of the ticket barrier for me to come back and give him his kiss.)