We never use real names. That is the first rule and it is the only rule that has ever actually held.
This week he is Mayfair Suit. Last week he was Wrong Uber. The week before that he was Toothbrush Man, which was less of a nickname and more of a warning label. Sophie clocked the pattern on Sunday while we were still in last night’s makeup and eating toast over the sink. She said I need a hobby that is not collecting aliases. Rude. Accurate.
I told her it is a hobby. It is just not a respectable one.
How it started
It started because Mia has a mouth on her and no sense of occasion. We were in the kitchen after a wedding afterparty, still in heels, and she said his first name out loud like we were in a police interview. Sophie froze with the kettle in her hand. I froze with a cigarette I was not supposed to be smoking indoors. The problem was not morals. The problem was that Sophie follows half of London on Instagram and the name was not rare enough.
So we started coding them.
Wrong Uber was first. He got in the car after me on a Friday in Shoreditch, talked like he had invented conversation, and then spent twenty minutes trying to change the destination to his. I got out at a Tesco and walked the last bit. Mia named him before I had even taken my coat off. The name stuck because it was funny and because it was true and because once a name sticks in that chat it is carved in stone.
Mayfair Suit arrived last Thursday. Private members thing. Jacket that cost more than my monthly share of the rent. He asked what I did and I said I write, which is technically correct if you squint. He told me about a fund I did not ask about. I let him buy the second drink because I was already writing the caption in my head. We did not exchange surnames. We exchanged enough.
By the time I got home Mia had already opened the chat.
new one?
I typed Mayfair Suit and put my phone face down. That is how you know it is serious. Not the man. The filing system.
The archive, if you can call it that
Sophie says we have a problem. Sophie works in PR and thinks problems should have strategies. Mia thinks problems should have wine. I think problems should have better lighting.
The list is longer than I pretend it is. There is Cloakroom Queue. There is Bermondsey Sunrise. There is Photographer, who was not even a photographer, he just had a camera on a strap and that was enough for Mia. There is Plus One, who turned up at a birthday with a girl I vaguely know from a different party, which is the most London sentence I have written all year.
We do not keep photos in the chat. That would be evidence. We keep descriptions. Height if it mattered. Whether he talked about his job before he asked my name. Whether he left before the kettle boiled. Whether he asked to come back. Most of them do not get a second entry. That is not a flex. It is just what happens when you treat Saturday like research.
Look, I know how it sounds. I can hear myself. Collecting men like they are limited edition lip glosses. Sophie heard it too. She said it while putting concealer on in the bathroom mirror, which is rich coming from someone who once dated a man for three months because he had a good table at a restaurant she liked.
I told her the names are not trophies. They are privacy. If I use his real name I am one screenshot away from becoming a cautionary tale in someone else’s group chat. This way he is a character. Characters cannot sue you. Characters cannot turn up at your local and make it weird. Characters live in a blue bubble between me, Sophie and Mia, and that is the only place they are allowed to be fully real.
Mayfair Suit, specifically
He texted the next day. Of course he did. They always text the next day if the night went even slightly their way. I had given him a number I actually pick up, which I only do when I am curious or bored or both.
The message was fine. That is the problem with men like him. Fine is their whole personality. Drinks this week? I left it on read for long enough to feel like I still had the upper hand, then I replied maybe and went to put more mascara on even though I was not going anywhere.
I told the chat.
Sophie: do not.
Mia: do.
Me: I have not decided.
That was a lie. I had decided the second he said maybe we should go somewhere quieter, which is a sentence that has never once meant somewhere quieter. It means a different postcode and a different version of the same night.
I am not going to pretend I am above it. I like attention. I like the version of myself that exists at 1am when the music is too loud to hear the sensible thought. I like coming home and turning it into sentences. That is the job, even if nobody commissioned it.
Sophie says I use the chat so I do not have to use their names in my own head. She said it like she had landed on something profound. Maybe she had. I still put Mayfair Suit in the notes app under a heading called possible piece, which tells you everything about my priorities.
The near miss
Last month I nearly blew the whole system.
We were in the living room. Mia had a boy over, the quiet one from her office who thinks he is in a relationship because he has been allowed to leave a charger here. I was telling a story about Toothbrush Man and I used the wrong name. Not his real name. An old alias. Sophie’s eyes went very wide. Mia kicked me under the table so hard I spilled wine on the rug we said we would replace in January.
The quiet one asked who we were talking about.
A friend, I said.
Of a friend, Sophie said, at the same time.
It was sloppy. We were lucky he is the sort of man who accepts a bad answer if it means the conversation moves on. After he left Sophie did the speech. The one about being careful. The one about how I want to be known but I do not want to be known like that. I nodded. I meant it for about eleven minutes. Then I went to a thing in Soho and met someone we have since filed as Stolen Espresso Cup.
The system works until it does not. Then we invent a new name and carry on.
What Sophie actually meant
When she said I need a hobby that is not collecting aliases, she was not talking about knitting. She was talking about the gap. The one I fill with nights out and new faces and the little spark of being the person who has a story on a Sunday morning when everyone else has a hangover and a blank phone.
I know that gap. I have known it since I was a teenager at my parents’ parties, hovering with a drink I should not have had, waiting to be interesting. Fame is the clean word for it. Being somebody is the honest one. If I am nobody, then all of this is just mess. If I am somebody, the mess is content.
That is the part I do not say in the chat. Mia would make it a joke. Sophie would make it a concern. I would have to sit with it, and I am better at sitting with a man than I am at sitting with that.
Anyway. Mayfair Suit is still on read on my side now. I might reply tomorrow. I might not. If I do, he will not know he already has a name and a category and a small panel of judges in Parsons Green who have never seen his face properly and still feel entitled to a verdict.
If I do not, he will become a one-line entry. That is fine too. The archive can take it.
The rules, written down for once
No real names. No screenshots of his messages unless the punchline needs them, and even then we crop. No adding him on Instagram from the flat WiFi like amateurs. If he turns up in the same room as one of us later, we do the face. The polite one. The I think we have met but I could not possibly say where face.
If he ever gets a second nickname, that means he lasted. Very few do. Lasting is not the point. The point is that Sunday still has a shape. Toast. Tribunal. Sophie pretending she is above it while asking for the physical description again. Mia naming him before I have finished the sentence. Me, in the middle, acting like I am embarrassed when I am actually just glad the story has an audience.
I keep saying I will stop when it stops being funny. It has not stopped being funny. That should probably worry me more than it does.
Mayfair Suit. Wrong Uber. Toothbrush Man. There will be another one by Friday if the week stays this boring. I already have a slot in my head for him. I just do not have the name yet.
Sophie can call it a pattern. I call it filing. Someone has to keep the records. It might as well be the girl who was going to write it down anyway.
