Sleeping Around by Brian Thacker

Melt nightclub with two of Mariana’s leggy cousins at eleven o’clock—at which time on a Saturday night at home I’m either in bed or dozing off in front of the television.
    Melt nightclub looked very chic and hip, just like the people standing in the queue to get in. It was so chic and hip that the drink cards were credit cards and the doorman wore a three-piece suit. ‘I come here every Saturday night,’ Mariana said as we were ushered to the front of the slow-moving queue—which was handy because as well as meticulously checking IDs, they were punching everyone’s name and details into a computer.
    Two more of Mariana’s leggy cousins were waiting for us inside at one of the candlelit tables in the ground floor bar. The bar was full of so many glamorous and beautiful people that it looked like the final of Search for a Supermodel . I don’t speak Portuguese but I could tell that some of them were looking over at me and saying: ‘Who invited the ugly bloke?’ I was doing all right for an ugly bloke, though. I was surrounded by a gaggle of gorgeous girls who were all chatting rapidly to each other in Portuguese. ‘They are saying that all Brazilian men have a screw loose,’ Mariana’s Amazonian cousin Roberta told me.
    Just before midnight Nunoo turned up. Mariana spotted him in the crowd and waved him over. ‘My heart is beating so fast,’ she gushed while her cousins all shot him filthy looks. Mariana went all giggly and girly when he gave her a peck on the cheek, and when he went to the bar to get a drink she said, ‘He told me that he didn’t call me because he wanted to come here and surprise me. He’s so lovely.’
    The disco, which was upstairs, started at midnight and all the groovy and hip people headed up to dance to the groovy and hip Don’t Go Breaking My Heart by Elton John and Kiki Dee. Mariana and Roberta dragged me up to the dance floor, but when the Doobie Brothers came on I skolled my drink so that I had an excuse to go back downstairs. ‘Ask Nunoo to come up for a dance,’ Mariana yelled in my ear as I left.
    Nunoo was busy. He was busy flirting outrageously with a blonde girl at the bar and playing with her hair.
    â€˜I couldn’t find him,’ I shrugged when I got back upstairs.
    â€˜I’ll find him,’ Mariana said.
    This should be interesting.
    I stayed on the packed dance floor with Roberta who bent down and hollered into my ear, ‘It’s like dancing in a barrel of fish!’
    â€˜More like a barrel of giraffes,’ I said to her right hip.
    I told Roberta about Nunoo and the blonde and she said that we should go down to see if Mariana was all right. She was more than all right. We found Mariana and Nunoo draped on the bar with their tongues down each other’s throats.
    Fifteen minutes later I found Mariana slumped on the stairs in tears. ‘He’s left me and now he has broken my heart,’ she whimpered. ‘Why doesn’t he want me? I’m beautiful, smart and funny.’
    â€˜He doesn’t know what he’s missing out on,’ I said.
    â€˜He told me that I was perfect . . .’ Mariana sniffed as mascara trickled down her cheek, ‘. . . but not perfect enough.’
    I then reeled out all the rest of the old clichés to try and console her:
    â€˜He’s not good enough for you.’
    â€˜There’s plenty more fish in the sea.’
    â€˜You’ll find someone new, someone better.’
    â€˜He’s a fucking arsehole!’ Roberta summed it up rather more succinctly when I dragged Mariana upstairs. ‘She needs to drink and she needs to dance,’ Roberta added. When I came back with a Cosmopolitan (Mariana drank Cosmopolitans because that’s what Carrie drank on Sex and the City ), she was dancing while bawling her eyes out. I left her with Roberta and went downstairs to the bar and chatted to a fellow from