Short Story Compilation - by Paul Evans.

“I think I’ll go for the… yes, that’s right. I’ll definitely have the… “
“Excuse me, Sir, but you don’t sound very definite to me. No. 23, you’re pointing to, isn’t it?”
“And the Egg Foo Young. I can say that bit.”
“Take a seat.”
Marky sat down on the most sumptuous seat he’d ever experienced this side of a restaurant. He felt relaxed, as if he’d eaten the food.
“Can I get you another side dish to take away?” he thought she said (it was a long way from the counter to the seat).
“You?” he tried. There was a long silence, during which Marky thought he must’ve got away with it (but he might’ve got a ‘yes’ if only he hadn’t phrased the ‘you’ as a question, been a bit more assertive sort of thing. Yes, he assessed. Women like Assertive).
He was staring at the girl now, who pulled off the elastic band that kept her shoulder-length dark brown hair at a safe distance from his prawn crackers. “That new Jackie Chan movie’s showing at the Astoria tonight,” he mumbled.

Marky couldn’t remember any of the film because now she was leading him by the wrist up a municipal staircase and practically forcing him through the front door. He wanted to change his mind about her offer of coffee but he couldn’t fight back. It was nearly rape.
“No 23?”
“I’m… not… sure…”
“No 23 is the full body massage with optional chicken grease. And sliced prawn crackers… “

Marky couldn’t remember anything, actually.
He was going to ask the girl out, just to see what her smile was like. Well, that would’ve been his line. He’d planned it (always a bad thing) then bottled it when she’d said “Egg Foo Young” so sternly that her dark brown hair had appeared to take on a forbidden ginger hue. Or was that the lighting? Perhaps she was older than his original early-twenties estimate. Not quite so Egg Foo Young after all. Anyway, in the space of two seconds she’d gone from pretty take-away owner’s daughter to Anne Robinson’s love child. And once the adrenalin, the anticipation and his perceived rejection had kicked in he’d actually fallen asleep – in public. That’s it; he could remember the real story, now. An easy task, sorting the reality from the dream, but only once you’re awake. But at that moment – the Egg Foo Young moment –His workaday tiredness that had inspired the take-away in the first place had conspired with The Seat to make him drift off into a sleep-fantasy about the girl having a younger self who was single and had her own flat - albeit a municipal one with a rickety staircase.
He’d been with married women before, thank you very much. And although a semi-detached house was much easier to make a sharp exit from he’d go for the single girl and the staircase every time.

She came over to wake him up with his bag. “One number Twenty Three and an Egg Foo Young.”
 “Velly comfowtable seat,” he said embarrassingly, mimicking her oriental-ness, failing miserably to capture the essence of it. (Marky couldn’t help that; once he’d been to Fort William for a week and come back talking Scottish).   
“We like our customers to relax here,” said the girl. “We’re the total opposite of Southern Fried McBurger Queen,” she smiled. “We prepare our food slow-lee. We won’t - make - you - sit - on - a - spike.”
Marky swore her voice had dropped an octave once she’s slowed down. Maybe she’d drop her pants?
“And how do you like to relax?” he asked, cheesily.
“I know it’s a cliché. But I like film. And martial arts. That new Jackie Chan movie opens tomorrow at the UCI.”
Marky swallowed hard, trying to digest his déjà vu.
In the dream, the film had been the same but the venue was the now-demolished Astoria – older era, younger girl.
Dreams, he knew, know no sense of time. Ah, the Astoria – those were the days. Seats even bigger than The Seat. And surround sound  - a novelty back then. Oh, and yes: the last girlfriend he’d taken to a movie had been, well, when movies weren’t called movies. She was a married girl. Married to him.

The credits rolled in the real, present-day, workaday UCI.
Marky tried to jump up.
As a middle-aged man, his bones had stiffened during the movie. All of them. Ah, at least something was still working. He assured Kanoosha that the reason he’d sat down again was that he’d been forced to by the huge, awkward teenager who was leading his tiny girlfriend through the aisle and knocking him back down again. Nonsense, Kanoosha had said. She was tiny-ish too and even though she was yelling at the hulk in Chinese he had turned around and now he was leading his pale, sculptured trophy back to his seat and out the other side.
“Gotta call the shots in life,” Kannosha was telling him now in her very best American film-speak. “I usually get what I want. Anyway, those kids aren’t the most annoying thing about tonight.”
“You mean that interference? Dialogue from the neighbouring screen?”
“Yeah, Marky. During the quiet bits.”
This was good; they’d found something in common to complain about. Kannosha may be half his age but she was halfway to hankering back to his Astoria days.
“And those crisp packets,” she said. Even better, thought Marky; this is Marky and Kanoosha against the rest of the world.

He tried to hide his breathlessness as she led him up the clinical, municipal staircase towards her flat. “What did you think of the leading lady?” Kanoosha quizzed. “Very promising,” he said simply, conserving some energy for the rest of the climb (and for what he hoped would follow).
“Anyway, it wasn’t a real Jackie Chan picture,” he puffed.
“No, Marky. Not as such. It was more like a Steve Coogan film with Jackie Chan doing all the choreography in return for a huge cameo appearance and a token bit of fighting. Even the Great Master’s not so Kung-Fu young as he used to be.”
“Don’t look at me when you say that!”
“So the leading lady? You haven’t told me what you think.”
The actress was unknown to him, but very beautiful; a kind of tall, fair, fathomable negative to Kanoosha’s small, colourful, inscrutable positive.
 “Yes, she was very promising,” he said again, without vocalising his comparison.
He’d been polite about paying, too. But Kanoosha had refused at the first hurdle – at the box office – and later, too, when she’d insisted on paying for the ice cream. And when he’d quizzed her on this she had come over all defensive and let slip that she’d recently inherited the take-away after the sudden death of her father. “He’s as big in Beijing as Branson is in a Balloon,” her weird sense of humour had informed.       

The flat gave Marky an impression of enforced cleanliness and awkward uniformity. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on it but the décor simply wasn’t up to the job of reflecting Kanoosha’s complex, multi-layered persona.
“It’s minimalist,” she tried to explain.
“I’m not falling for that one,” Marky said flatly. Then, aware that he’d sounded abrupt, he decided to come straight out with it. “Are all the rooms in this building like this?”
“They’re practically clones. But I try to have as little to do with the other guinea pi… I mean, students, as I can.”
Marky noticed for the first time that Kanoosha seemed vulnerable. 
She went to get them some Lapsang and his eyes settled on a rather odd photograph in which Kanoosha was sitting upright in a metal bed - like a corpse that had been ‘posed’ by a pathologist’s assistant, he imagined, though he’d never go near one.
Marky got up from his sumptuous seat - the only friendly piece of furniture in the whole place. Yeah, that was it; the seat was like The Seat. It had been ‘borrowed’ from the take-away, surely?
He wandered around the flat, his curiosity failing to halt his snooping, even when he could hear the kettle with its whistle that was saying ‘time’s up’. Kanoosha appeared from the kitchenette and caught him emerging from the other side of an alcove.
“Stay out of there!”
 “What’s this, Kanoosha?”
“You’re scaring me, Marky.”
Kanoosha knew he’d found several more photographs in which she’d assumed a similar pose to the original one, only in different tops. She saw Marky’s eyes alternating between the photos and the large metal bed in the room. She knew he’d made the connection.
“Okay, we’re all students here. Only we’re not the ones doing the studying.
Round the corner - that’s his ‘office’. Every flat has one – its own little nerve-centre for individual human experiments. And that’s him.”
Kanoosha was waggling her finger at the distant figure in a white coat whose appearance in the main photo - the one she kept in the ‘private’ area of her flat - seemed like a momentary security lapse, if not a huge military mistake.
“There’s nothing sinister in this,” Kanoosha reassured, unconvincingly. “So far, it’s paid for my English lessons. But now I can speak. And now Papa has died I can afford to get out!”   
His eyes were focussing now on a 1950’s course book on the bedside table.
He hoped her bedroom sensibilities weren’t as quaint.
She saw he’d noticed the book and grabbed it quickly, snatching it from his eyes. When it nearly knocked over the lamp on her bedside table she threw herself backwards onto the duvet in a ‘what the heck’ fashion, curling her bare legs seductively around her.
“Your first lesson,” she teased, pretending to quote from Chapter One. “Never visit the female flesh until you’ve visited her mind.”
“And what’s on your mind?”
“Flesh! Number Twenty-three is definitely not vegetarian.”
Marky remembered his dream in the take-away when the unpronounceable dish had morphed into a massage. Well, he was about to enjoy the experience for real now, only (he hoped) without the chicken grease.
Marky allowed himself to become indulged in all of Kanoosha’s comprehensive courses and before long the bed had become a mixture of unorthodox food, strange colonial-not-colloquial Fifties literature and oddly incompatible underwear. “Present from my last boyfriend,” she muttered defensively when Marky cringed at the personalised message on the crotch.

The next thing he said to her was “Christ, what time is it?”
He was staring at her digital clock but had become no wiser once he’d managed to find his glasses.
Another twenty minutes passed and it was becoming clear that Kanoosha wasn’t about to wake up and translate those Chinese characters anytime soon.
Fumbling neurotically with his mobile he called the speaking clock.
“Not too late for work, then,” he whispered to himself. It was only half-seven, but Marky still couldn’t relax. His anxiety needed another outlet.
“What about those experiments?” he snapped. “Am I an experiment, too?”
“You want breakfast?” she said calmly, her satisfied look at odds with his aggression. “Number twenty-three?”
“You know I can’t pronounce that one. What does it mean anyway?”
“Oh, that dish. It’s ‘Empire Steak’. That’s a very lucky dish. Lucky old Marky, I’d say. You see I’ve just given up half my bed. And now I’m giving you half my… ”
“Empire?”
“That’s right. You’ve just become the co-owner of my newly-inherited take-away. Congratulations, Marky. You’ve passed the experiment with flying colours.”