Sophie Heawood - The Hungover Games

I m in a bar with a man whom well call Dom. I met him on a dating app, which well call Linger. This app serves to bring together people who might want to fall in love, or have sex, or simply message each other intermittently over several days before becoming incandescent with rage and then fatally resigned to the time it is taking for the other person to reply. Dom replied, though, and when I asked what he was up to he said something about not being sure if he currently had profound existential ennui or just a hangover, and I thought, yeah, youll do.

Dom looked nice in the photos too, but mainly because I had scrolled through 268 other men before getting to Dom, and unlike the 268, Dom wasnt standing in front of a large shiny motorbike, parachuting from a light aircraft, or inexplicably befriending a Bengal tiger with a glazed expression. Dom was unaccompanied by conspicuous consumption, airborne vehicles or ferocious animalsnot that these are things I am opposed to, its just that, when used in profile pictures, they tend to indicate the presence of a wanker.

He had scruffy hair and the slightly serious face of someone who was far too young for me, but then how would he know that, when my profile said that I was twenty-eight, which had started as a joke but now become true in its own way. I had set this profile up from my new life, in which I thought it was too embarrassing to be doing this, so I made it look like as if my old life was still going strong, as if nothing had changed.

And now its closing time in the bar and Dom wants to come back to mine. Which is a bit awkward, but damn it, maybe itll be okay, I think. I ask about where he lives, and he reminds me that its a few miles away and didnt I already say that this place was my local? And I say, well, all right. So I take him back to the house and tell him he has to be super quiet on the stairs because theres someone asleep in that room, and someone else asleep in that room, and heres my bedroom, shhhh. We stumble onto my bed together and Im already starting to sober up, just as hes starting to be incoherently loving, pawing, lost, and I wonder about the idea that alcohol makes men violent because it seems to turn all the ones I meet into water. Its me who turns into noise, shouting over the top of myself because I want to stay in the present moment for ever, because these present moments are the only times Im ever sure of anything. But Im sobering up now. Im coming down from that righteous certainty, and the present moment is in danger of turning into the past. I start to wonder if I can go through with this.

So I do what you always do when the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak: I shut my eyes and think about Jesus when he threw over the moneylenders tables in the temple, in that passage of the Bible that I read so many times when I was of an impressionable age and getting interested in boys, and in Jesus as the king of boys. I think of that angry and righteous young man in sandals, the son of God taking no bullshit in his fathers house, and I channel his rage until theres something there, tingling, pushing me on, making all of this worth it, just for tonight. I was never sure if the rage of Jesus attracted me because I wanted to love him or because I wanted to be him.

And then somehow I get there, and there are noises, and it is Dom, not Jesus, who is murmuring the word baby, testing it out in his mouth. How it hangs there in the air. And Im tired and I dont want to pay my dues by taking him there in return, because this was never really about him anyway. At which point my bedroom door opens and I hear the soft footsteps before I see the small figure. And the small figure turns towards me, opens its mouth and says, Mummy?