Free Black Widow by Chris Brookmyre Page A

hell I thought I was doing. As I cooked and ate, showered and dressed, those glimpses of myself – out having a good time, laughing in easy company – were narrowing, like a constructed future collapsing under the weight of its own implausibility. It was as though the closer time brought me to the reality, the less I could believe in the dream.
    I was only going to make a fool of myself, I chided. In fact, I was making a fool of myself already merely by getting dressed and putting on some make-up.
    Then I resolved to get a grip. Going out of a Friday evening was not making a fool of myself. Was this how far I had fallen, that I could only perceive myself within a certain context: that of work, endeavour, seriousness and impending lonely middle age?
    Nonetheless, I had to pull back six or seven times from ringing his mobile to cancel.
    I distracted myself for a while by catching up with my friend Emily on Facebook. We traded some messages, and she told me how things were going with her job and her husband. They were both lecturers at Durham. I replied with some chat about life in the highlands and at the IRI, but I failed to mention that I was going out with a man tonight. I didn’t want to invite curiosity or innuendo. It wasn’t a date, I kept reassuring myself. Why?
    Going on Facebook therefore failed to take my mind off the evening ahead, and inevitably I ended up googling him. He showed up on Facebook and on the Cobalt company site. There wasn’t much to be gleaned other than what he had already told me: he was a gamer and a tech geek.
    That was when it struck me that he might be googling me too.
    So there I was, standing outside the Ironworks, pulling back from ringing to ask where he had got to. I don’t know why: he was late, and it was nothing to call and ask what was keeping him. This felt different, though: like phoning up would seem needy or naggy.
    I didn’t merely feel conspicuously stood up, though: I felt conspicuously out of place, like everybody could see I didn’t belong. As a result, I was ridiculously relieved and reassured whenever I saw someone plausibly my age or older going into the club.
    Ten minutes ticked into twelve. Six minutes, in my estimation, is the basic margin of error allowing for a three-minute discrepancy either side of the right time on two people’s watches. To that I could add bus, train or traffic delays, falling beneath a minimum that was worth sending a text. Though maybe he had sent a text and my phone hadn’t received it. That sometimes happened when I hadn’t restarted it in a while. Or maybe he had got my number wrong, transposed two of the digits.
    I was actually thinking all this shit.
    As the time approached fifteen minutes I began to wonder whether it was an elaborate revenge set-up, and that even now he was live-streaming the image of me standing there to a bunch of fellow hospital IT spods. Then I saw him.
    Isn’t it amazing how turning up late can transform people? How they become a more welcome sight than you remember, or than had they pitched up when they were supposed to? When finally Peter came into view, hurrying along the street in a light jog, I was so relieved to see him that all of my internal doubts as to the wisdom of being here were instantly dispelled.
    He was dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt under a leatherette jacket. Somehow he looked smarter than when he had been wearing a collar and tie; or if not smarter, definitely better dressed. He looked right.
    I was in jeans too, but I bet he hadn’t gone through several changes in and out of them in preference over various trousers that seemed too starchy, too formal, too work-like or too dressy for what I estimated to be appropriate to the venue and the occasion. I had gone through as many changes of top too, with the issue of what looked good proving only a secondary consideration. The principal areas of internal wrangling were the thornier questions of who