Free Brand New Friend by Mike Gayle

nerve and abandoned his mission. He straightened the chair and, cigarette in hand, began the long walk to the man with the book. The closer Rob got to him the more detail he noticed: he was quite good-looking, with heavy eyebrows and a light scattering of faded freckles across the bridge of his nose. He had dark brown hair, and a slightly Mediterranean complexion. Right now, however, none of those details mattered to Rob: what mattered was that he didn’t lose his nerve before he did what he had to do.
    ‘Sorry to bother you, mate,’ he said, on reaching the book guy’s table. ‘I was just wondering if I could have a light?’ He waved his unlit cigarette in the air apologetically for emphasis.
    ‘’Fraid not, mate,’ said the book guy, in an immediately recognisable Manchester accent. ‘I had to get one off those guys over there.’ He pointed to the Spaniards. ‘But you can bum a light off this, if you like,’ he said, offering Rob his cigarette.
    With a big smile Rob took it, held the lit end to his own and dragged deeply. The book guy then returned to his novel and Rob berated himself: Come on, idiot! Say something! Anything! Don’t just stand there staring like you’re in love with him.
    The only topics that sprang to mind in the seconds available were:

1.  
The weather.
2.  
Why smoking is bad for you.
3.  
The real reason why he hadn’t got a light of his own.

    Rob didn’t use them. Instead, once the tip of his cigarette was glowing, he said a very blokey ‘Cheers, mate, nice one’, and handed back the book guy’s cigarette. He then returned to his table, plugged his iPod’s headphones into his ears and pressed play. And although he stayed in the bar for a further half-hour finishing his pint and doodling on his notepad while he worked his way through an iPod playlist he had earlier entitled ‘How Gay Is This?’, he didn’t attempt to speak to anyone else.
    When Ashley arrived home around five, laden with carrier-bags from her afternoon’s shopping, the first thing she asked was ‘How was the film?’ Without blinking an eyelid, Rob just shrugged and said it was so boring he’d fallen asleep. He felt bad about lying to Ashley, he really did, but the last thing he wanted was for her to think she was living with a man so desperate for male company that he hung around city-centre bars trying to make new friends.
    Even if it was true.

Birthday
    BlueBar on Chorlton’s Wilbraham Road, just a bit down from Safeway, wasn’t the sort of place Rob would normally have chosen to celebrate his birthday, but as he had now been in Manchester for a full six months he had no choice. In London he would have gone to one of the many old-men’s pubs that he and his friends frequented, like their regular haunt the Queen’s Head, with its desperately cheap beer promotions, or failing that, the Nag’s Head in Balham, where Woodsy had once bought a TV for a tenner from a man hawking electrical goods from the back of a white mini-van, or the Bell and Basin in Clapham, which, when it came to licensing laws, was a law unto itself. They had certain characteristics in common that spoke volumes about the kind of people Rob’s friends were: the absence of a jukebox (so that they could talk without yelling), a lack of interior design (because how a pub looked didn’t matter to them) and no women under five foot five with all their own teeth (because no matter how much pleasure there was to be gained from observing attractive women, even they needed the odd night off).
    But while Rob preferred pubs such as the Queen’s Head, he didn’t mind BlueBar. And as Ashley and her friends practically lived there he didn’t have much choice. Whenever he went in with her there was always a good crowd of people there. People like Rob. Young men and women in their late twenties and early thirties with larger-than-average record collections, interesting haircuts and an attitude to fashion that said, ‘I haven’t given up