The following is an excerpt from I Make My Own Fun by Hannah Beer. She is a writer from North West England, currently living in London, and writes the newsletter Emotional Speculation.
I Make My Own Fun is about an A-List movie star named Marina who is secretly the worst. Things spiral out of control when she meets a bartender who isn’t interested in her and then Marina begins to make desperate overtures. It is now available from Anasi International.
The bar I’ve directed Mike to is a bit of a trade secret. Hidden behind an unassuming door down a back street in Marylebone, it’s usually half-empty, frequented only by those rare few who know it exists— people like me, who want to drink somewhere they won’t be stared at by ordinary people or spotted by errant paparazzi. Tonight, most of those people are at my premiere, so I expect it to be even quieter than usual. For a moment I wonder if I’ve made a mistake revealing this place to a person like Mike, but something about him— the cheap clothes in his photographs, his appreciation of the great outdoors— tells me that he doesn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse, culturally speaking. And it’s not like he’ll be in a rush to come back here after tonight.
I have my driver drop me off at the back entrance so I can slip through the service door. Most of my security team went through the front and have already stationed themselves strategically at
different tables around the bar. I’m wearing layers and layers of red tulle that swish as I walk, but the music obscures the sound, so I can slide into a dark corner booth unnoticed. I sit at the centre of the table, tulle spread out over the rest of the leather seats, and do a quick scan of the room. As expected, it’s largely empty: the few clusters of vaguely recognizable Brits dotted around the room are the only other people here, except for a pink-haired girl and her colleague behind the bar.
It takes some time to find my target, given his entirely forgettable aura, but when my eyes land on him I feel a rush of adrenaline. He looks even sadder than I’d expected, wearing a fraying polyester jumper over a shirt whose crumpled collar is slightly discoloured with sweat. He has scraped his thinning hair back over his scalp to reveal a forehead so shiny even the dim candlelight is bouncing off it. Best of all, he’s laid some red roses, still wrapped in supermarket cellophane, on the table in front of him. I look at the clock on my phone: 10:10 p.m. He’ll be starting to get nervous now. Ten minutes is a reasonable amount of time to be late, he’ll be thinking. She’ll probably walk through the door any minute. Sure enough, when the door opens two minutes later his head springs up expectantly, snapping into action like a marionette. It is, obviously, not Jules— it’s just Clive, my head of security. He always comes in last. Mike looks back down at his hands in a bid to ignore the pink embarrassment creeping up his neck.
Over the next twenty minutes I watch from my corner as he orders a beer, takes his phone out of his pocket and replaces it countless times, either just to check the time or to type something. I know when it’s a message to Jules because I can feel the vibration coming from the clutch bag which is sitting neatly on my lap. At some point someone brings me a perfectly cold martini— Clive must’ve ordered one for me when he arrived. I sip on it slowly and deliberately as Mike experiences the whole spectrum of human emotion. This is why people go to the movies, I think, and I can’t help but smile. There’s nothing like the thrill of seeing true vulnerability laid bare.
Finally, after one last look at his phone, Mike gets up to leave, a full forty-five minutes after I arrived. A valiant effort! Gold star for participation. He glances furtively around the room on his walk of shame towards the door, his shoulders somehow even more rounded than when he arrived. He’s so downtrodden he doesn’t even look twice at me. I notice that he’s left half a beer, stagnating, on the table: the bubbles are rising more and more slowly towards the surface, satisfyingly useless. Poor Jules, I think for a second. There’s a string of men around the world that have been stood up by ‘Jules,’ enough sad faces to fill an arena. The unwitting cast of my own private reality show.
Now that he’s gone, my attention wanders to the pink-haired girl working behind the bar. I’ve never seen her here before: I’d remember if I had. She’s got a great face— not beautiful, exactly, but interesting: strong jaw, round cheeks. The strands of her shocking pink hair that have sprung loose from her bun frame it well. It’s nice to watch her. There’s something so delicious about the way she’s moving around the space: swift, exact, fluid. She makes cleaning glasses and printing receipts look like ballet. It’s rare to see someone so effortlessly competent.
My martini glass has developed a thick, smudgy film of condensation, which I take as my cue to walk over to the bar and order another directly from her. At this point the crowd has thinned out enough that when I walk across the room, people are aware of my presence. Her included: I can feel her looking at me and pretending not to. The pretending-not-to-notice-me thing got old years ago: not least because it’s literally impossible not to notice me thanks to the six house-shaped, armed men that tend to follow behind me like a bridal train on nights like this.
As I move, I can feel Clive’s watery eyes following me warily across the room from his position in the doorway, always on high alert. Sweet, simple Clive. He’d take a bullet for me, if he had to— but I suppose it is in his employment contract.
I take my seat at the bar opposite where she’s standing, which involves folding the tulle of my gown in on itself several times in order to get near enough. Up close, I can see that that interesting face of hers is perfectly irregular and highlighted by a gentle, almost post-coital sheen of sweat. I think back to the conversation with Henry and Jules on the plane over here, and how long it’s been since I took advantage of our arrangement. I bite my lip, flash her a smile.
‘Can I have another martini?’ I say, leaning across the bar so she has no choice but to admit she knows I’m there. ‘Gin, olive,’ I add.
She looks at me, almost resignedly, but there’s a glint in her eye.
‘Dirty?’ she asks.
‘Of course,’ I reply, with the smallest hint of a wink.
‘Did you really just wink when you said that?’ she asks, but the corner of her mouth turns upwards. Bullseye. I’m ’80s Harrison Ford in a Gucci gown. I’m unstoppable.
‘I did. Did it work?’ I reply, although I know how this goes. She won’t answer me. Instead, she’ll roll her eyes, smile at me and start making my drink.
She takes a beat, and then, like clockwork, she rolls her eyes and smiles at me, and starts making my drink. Hook, line, sinker.
‘I’m Marina,’ I say, leaning back.
‘Hi, Marina,’ the girl replies, ‘I’m Anna’— she hands me my drink— ‘and I’m busy.’
This I find charming and, I’ll admit it, a little surprising. Imagine being busy doing something so uninspiring! I smirk at her.
‘Okay, Anna.’ I take a sip of my martini. ‘Well, when you’ve finished being busy, I’ll be here, and I’d like to get to know you.’ And then I retreat to my corner, and I wait.
She takes her time. I’ve turned my phone off and don’t look at my watch so that I can keep watching her, so I can’t tell how long it’s been exactly, but I’ve had Clive order me another, worse, drink from her slack-jawed colleague and the lights have come up by the time she finishes wiping down the bar. I watch her talk to the colleague, who steals a few last excited looks in my direction before slouching off through the kitchen, and then Anna pours herself a vodka and comes my way.
‘Hi again,’ she says. Her earlier bravado has dropped. She’s decided she’s going to reveal something of herself to me, I can tell. We’re the only two people left in the bar, except my security,
who by now have basically blended into the furniture anyway.
I love this bit, when I get to really see how someone ticks. What can I say: I’m a people person.
‘Hi, Anna,’ I say, and I watch her eyes light up when her name comes out of my mouth. You should always call people by their names. It makes them feel special.
‘You know, I have an aunt called Anna,’ I continue. This is a lie, but I’m putting her at ease. Letting her feel like we have some common ground.
‘It’s a pretty popular name,’ she replies, and I smile.
‘Do you know who I am?’ I say then.
‘Doesn’t everyone?’ she replies, and there’s an electric playfulness to her tone. She looks towards my men by the door. ‘And even if I didn’t, your girl gang over there kind of give it away. You’re not a very subtle group.’
‘Well, if you know who I am, why did you keep me waiting so long?’ ‘I told you— I was busy. And I don’t really care who you are, anyway.’ She fixes me with an expression that’s trying to be defiant, but there’s so obviously a smile underneath. It makes me laugh, this insistent coolness, which is a thrill. I don’t usually find other people funny.
‘If you don’t care who I am, then why are you talking to me?’
‘Oh, you know. For the story,’ she says, smirking. Ah, I think. So this is how she’s playing it. In this moment I know I’m going to sleep with her, and that everything that happens between now and then is foreplay. I raise my eyebrows at her.
‘You know I could sue you for that.’
‘I’m sure you could. It would probably ruin me, financially speaking.’
‘And personally?’
A pause. Her mouth twists into a smirk again. ‘Eh, I think I’d get over it.’
‘Well, I guess you’d better keep all this to yourself anyway.’
‘All what?’
I smile at her. It’s a brilliant smile. It’s actually award-winning: I won a Teen Choice Award for it in 2019. It involves turning the corners of my mouth up just a fraction and letting my eyes do the talking. On this occasion, they’re making it clear to her that I’m mentally undressing her.
‘Why don’t you come and sit next to me?’
As I knew she would, she gets up and slides her body next to mine in the booth.
‘So,’ I say, when I can feel the stiff fabric of her shirt against my bare arm, still glossy from the premiere, ‘you obviously know all about me already. What is there to learn about you?’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Whatever you think is worth me knowing.’
She pauses. ‘You know, you didn’t answer my question just now. What am I supposed to be keeping to myself?’
‘That’s true, I didn’t. Okay, we’ll play a game. You tell me something interesting, and I’ll give you something to keep secret. How does that sound?’
One thing you learn from making cinema is that most of sex happens before the actual sex. A man looks at a woman’s mouth and scans, slowly, up to her eyes. A woman bites her lip and presses her tongue against her two front teeth. Someone runs their fingers, delicately, up someone else’s thigh. Those moments are the best part of it, really. Those moments when you know you’ve got someone.
Anna presses her thigh against mine. ‘Okay,’ she says. She puts her glass to her lips. ‘Let’s play.’
Magic.