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Without quite knowing
how it happened Hannah and Alain eventually found themselves in
another bar, each holding an alcopop which neither had any memory
of buying. The taxi that had been called for Hannah had been instantly
forgotten about.
"Fucking hell"
said Hannah, looking at the bottle in her hand. "Why am I drinking
this shit?"
"Because you're
drunk" reasoned Alain.
"Oh" said
Hannah, as if this hadn't occurred to her. "How drunk am I?"
"Drunker than
me."
"Bullshit!
You're way drunker."
"How d'you
figure?"
"'Cause if
you weren't completely gone you wouldn't be having such a girly
drink."
"You neither."
"Shit!"
Hannah scanned around
the bar; several times, to try and remember what she was seeing.
Suddenly she stopped (her brain felt like it was sloshing about
in a bath inside her skull). She cleared her throat. "Would
you say" she began, and turned to Alain: "that I was so
drunk that I couldn't remember anything in the morning?"
"I'd say that
was a very distinct possibil . . . I'd say yes."
"Cool."
Hannah turned back to where she'd been looking before. "Brilliant,
fucking brilliant" she said loudly (thinking she was muttering
to herself).
"What is it?"
asked Alain.
"See that red-head
girl holding hands with the guy over there? Well I bumped into her,
you might say, a few days ago - and she wasn't holding hands with
some bloke then, I can tell you." Alain couldn't quite make
himself respond verbally so he just nodded. Hannah waited for the
man to go to the toilet, then turned to Alain, grinning in her teeth-baring
manner. "I'm gonna go cause a scandal."
Alain leaned back
in his seat and watched Hannah zig-zag awkwardly across the dancefloor.
She steadied herself against the bar and tapped the woman on the
shoulder.
The woman turned.
Hannah asked her something. The woman looked at her in surprise.
Suddenly Hannah was dragging her out onto the dancefloor, with the
woman protesting half-heartedly the whole way. Alain grinned to
himself in a slightly sleazy-drunk way, and took a swig of the mysterious
alcopop.
On the dancefloor, the woman slowly but surely stopped protesting.
As the song progressed she paid more and more attention to Hannah,
until eventually she was looking at nothing else. (The woman's partner,
now coming back from the toilet, drunkenly assumed that she had
gone to the toilet herself when he couldn't find her, and went to
the bar with his back to the dancefloor to place an order.)
Suddenly the song
stopped and Hannah stopped as well, and the woman just as suddenly
grasped Hannah by her shoulders and kissed her haphazardly. This
seemed to sober Hannah up a little, and she did a double-take; she
extracted herself from the woman's lips and hurried back to Alain.
"What's up?"
asked Alain, puzzled and with a slightly sleazy smile on his face.
"Wrong girl,
wrong girl" exclaimed Hannah. "We're outta here. Come
on! The last thing I need's another fucking groupie."
She dragged Alain out of the bar while the woman, confused, tried
to explain to her oblivious partner why she didn't want the drink
he was offering her.
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