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do not care. I shook my head. The two of them should have had antlers on. But no, I thought, that’s not why Sean was doing it. He did not think of me like that. Daniel though, maybe he did. I was not sure what I thought about this.
    “Sorry love,” Daniel said when I sat back down at the table. “Didn’t realise that he was a friend of yours.” He said it as if it was a question.
    “He is,” I said. “But it would not matter even if he was not.”
    “Mmm,” he said, and he looked over at Sean again, as if he were weighing him up. “Bit old to be working in a place like this, isn’t he? Usually your spotty sixteen year olds. Something wrong with him? Bit simple or something?”
    “I work in a place like this, Daniel. Tell me, am I simple?”
    “Obviously I didn’t mean you, things are a bit different with you, what with your uh, status and that. Speaking of which, Corgan’s got me playing messenger boy.” He reached inside his coat, pulled out a small, folded piece of paper. “From the man himself.” He slid it across the table.
    I unfolded it. There was an address, and a time: the next day, at eleven in the morning. That was all.
    “Kav?” I said.
    Daniel shook his head. “He’s fine.”
    He got to his feet, stretching out his arms. You’re like a cat, I thought. You act as if you know no-one in the world is watching you. But you know that everyone is. And you want to be stroked.
    “Got to run,” he said. “Much as I’d love to stay and talk.”
    I held up the note. “So what is this? You cannot not tell me, it is not fair.”
    He grinned. Looked over to make sure that Sean was watching, and blew me a kiss. “I dunno for sure. But I think it’s pay day. Ta ta, sweetheart.”
    Sean watched him go, looked at me, and then cleaned the coffee machine as if his life depended on it. I thought about all of the things I could say to him, and then I was cross because I thought, why should I have to say anything?
    Later in the shift, I kept an eye out for Asif, who delivered the pizzas. When I heard a screech of tyres outside, I knew that he was back. Asif lived a life of speed, roaring from delivery to delivery and back to the restaurant again, where he would burst in through the door, whirl around making jokes and eyeing up any pretty customers and gathering up pizzas when Peter gave him a look that said you’ve been here too long.
    Today he came up to the counter so fast that his trainers screeched on the tiles of the floor when he stopped.
    “You all right?” he said. I liked Asif. He always found time to ask, and more than this, despite all his rush, he always listened for an answer.
    “Been worse,” I said. “You?”
    “Hot date when I finish here tonight. Said she’d wait up for me.”
    “Don’t tell me you have picked up another customer?” I said. “Lust over the Hot Inferno. Peter won’t like that.”
    “He wouldn’t,” Asif grinned, and then he winked at me. “If he knew. Anyway, it was the Hawaiian.”
    I shook my head. “When are you going to find the right woman, settle down, Asif?”
    He frowned, thinking. “Settle down? Plenty of time for that. Maybe when I’m fifty or something, dunno. Find a nice girl, put me feet up, rest on me laurels. Anyway, you’re not one to talk. When you going to get hooked up with someone, Anna? You know, you get on so well with—”
    I knew where Asif was going, so I threw up a roadblock.
    “This hot date of yours, you know where she lives?”
    Another grin. “‘Course. I’m not going to forget where someone like her lives, am I?”
    “Cool,” I said. “So when you finish tonight, will you lend me your A-Z? Just for tomorrow morning, I need it. I’ll have it back to you tomorrow night for the start of shift.”
    “Yeah, no problem, no problem. Hardly use it, I’ve got the knowledge, know this place better than most cabbies.”
    At the end of the shift he dropped the book of maps off for me, and then leant over the