Free Erotic Refugees by Paddy Kelly Page A

stage. Not important now. Does make it hard to get a round in,
though.” He sighed and stood up. “Fine, I'll go bloody well fix
it.”
    Andy and Eoin exchanged a few
words about where they both lived, and how long they'd been in
Sweden. Then they sat in silence for a while. Eoin, not a fan of
conversational silences, pulled out his phone. He felt Andy glaring
at him.
    “ Sorry,” he said. “I'm
just checking some … stuff.”
    “ Oh yeah?” Andy leaned
closer. “What stuff?”
    Eoin looked up, feeling a bit
embarrassed, just as Rob plonked a pint in front of him and sat
back down. He'd heard Andy's question. “Tell him, Eoin,” he said.
Eoin didn't, so Rob jumped in and did it for him.
    “ Dating site. He checks
it every ten minutes. Thinks I don't notice.”
    “ Not every ten minutes,”
Eoin said. “I'm just waiting for a reply, that's all.”
    “ Oh really?” Andy said.
“So what's your system?”
    Eoin didn't know how to answer
that one. “Um, I … mail them?”
    Andy gave his head an emphatic
shake. “No, no. You must have a system. How else you gonna get any
action? It's dog eat moose out there.”
    The waitress passed by their
table again. She ignored their three empty glasses and moved to the
table behind them where she started clearing up.
    “ Look, it's been going
fine,” Eoin said. “I’ve only been on Diamond Date a month though.
It's a bit hard to know what to write. Or how to long to wait
before asking them out. So, yeah, I suppose it's not really my
thing.”
    Andy smiled. “Right then,
listen up Eoin. I got this whole dating thing down. I recommend a
three-pronged approach.” He extracted three chilli nuts from his
bowl. “So this is me, my regular profile.” He placed one nut on the
table. “Now with this one I only write in English, and I only reply
if they write back to me in English. And over here”—a second nut
went down—“I have another profile. Still me, photo and all, but I
only write and reply from here in Swedish. Oddly enough the ladies
I mail from here will often switch directly to English once they
discover I'm from the US, even though I write in Swedish to them.
And on we go, me writing Swedish and them writing English back.
Like sixty percent of the time that happens.”
    “ What, you're keeping
count?” Rob said. “Fillin' out a spreadsheet?”
    “ Actually yeah. I'm a
statistician, that's what I do. Numbers are power.”
    Eoin was paying rapt attention.
These were useful, if slightly mad, tips. “Don't they ever discover
you have several profiles?”
    “ Oh yeah, sure they do,
and they hate that. I never hide it, or lie about it, but it gets
to them, it really does. Around a quarter of them get so annoyed
that they break contact with me entirely. I guess they feel I'm
cheating on them somehow. Of course, none of them know about the
third profile.”
    Another chilli nut went on the
table. Andy folded a beer mat so that it could stand and placed
this tiny screen in front of the nut. “Now with this little beauty
I can gauge the true heart of the ladies. This profile is a
fictional character, with a fake background and a photo of an old
college friend of mine. With this ghost profile I can spy on the
ladies without revealing who I am, or I can send this character to
try and pick up ladies I am already dating on my real profile.”
    “ Why bother?” Rob said.
“Won't they see it’s you when ye meet them?”
    “ I don't meet them on
this profile, do I? I just try and get them to meet me, to gauge
how honest they are. And if they're interested enough in the real
me to stop trawling for other men—well, then all's well and
good!”
    Rob lit a cigarette and slid
the pack along the table. Eoin and Andy shook their heads. “Listen
lads, this is all great, male bonding and everything. But let’s get
some work done, before we're too pissed to think straight.”
    “ Sure,” Andy said and
devoured the three profile nuts. “Let's hear this ground-shaker