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.