Katie had started the day with a cold fanny and ended it just after midnight standing outside an empty Goth bar she hadn’t been into, feeling strangely disappointed. A pretty average Saturday.

It was raining and so she couldn’t wear her new baby blue platform sandals for fear of splashes. Instead she’d changed her top four times and ended up in a mish-mash outfit that involved inappropriate underwear and a jacket pocket filled with dead tram tickets. The stay-ups weren’t doing their job. They weren’t sticky enough around the thighs and gave her a sense of dis-ease. This falling-down feeling combined with the string briefs under a knee-length skirt left her vulnerable and faintly nervous on a blustery day.

“Feeling fresh under there?” asked Rob, as they walked along the bridge back towards town, the wind whipping menacingly around the hem of her skirt. “Frankly, yes”, she’d answered, smoothing the skirt down back and front.

Walking up the open-step staircase in the museum had been an unexpected adventure for a couple of nicely turned-out women passing below. The gasp of horror had alerted Katie to her public underwear predicament – as if the chill factor hadn’t been enough. After that she just hadn’t felt safe and insisted on taking the lift to each new floor. At lunch she’d covered her knees with her jacket so she didn’t have to stay alert to the inching of her hemline up her thighs, or slack-kneed sitting, legs akimbo. Rob and Toby had thought it funny. So had she until one of the nicely turned-out ladies had come over all queasy and asked for a glass of water and a chair by an open window. Lucky for the rain or she’d have ridden her bike across town and been tailed to the Stedelijk by a peddling pack of pock-marked boys, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Katie had gone straight home on the tram and changed her underwear as soon as she got in. This second choice involved sensible yellow cotton knickers beneath a pair of sturdy tights. Less aerated, more secure.

By the time Mark arrived at 10pm, she’d forgotten all about cold breezy bits. Instead, she was preoccupied with the idea of going to a Goth bar in the ‘hood.

“But why?” she asked. “We are so not going to like it. We are going to feel stupid, hate everyone and want to leave after three minutes. We are going to find it very hard to be nice to people who find faux feelings of suicidal angst an appropriate topic of discussion.”

This was true and not to be argued with.

“Ralf is meeting his friends there”, Mark said, “and as we both live three streets away I thought we could go see what they are like. We don’t have to stay and we don’t have to back-comb our hair.”

“Or wear black eyeliner.”

“Or black nail polish.”

“Do I have to change?” she questioned, considering her blue ensemble. “It’s not exactly Goth-y. I’m gonna stick out like a sore thumb. Atleast you have dark colours on.”

“Lets face it”, Mark said, starting to lose his own nerve, “we are going to stick out no matter what we wear ‘cos we’re going to be standing in a corner sweating into our vodkas from nervous tension.”

Ralf is Mark’s new guy. He is Polish and tall and skinny and not sociable and ‘in’ rather than ‘out’ and a friend to Goths and therefore – so far – nothing like anyone she’d expect Mark to go for. But Katie hadn’t met him yet so she couldn’t be sure.

The thought of walking into a place called Legendz (with a zed) took her back to the gawky discomfort of teenage years when feeling out of place was a way of life and new places or people left her crippled with shyness, awkward and lumpen. These wafts of a bygone anguish hit Mark at the same time and they cackled together at the idiocy of it all. At the age of 35.

“Fuck it, lets go. We can pretend we were just passing. Stand, look, leave.”

It took them over an hour to leave her flat. They dallied, first because of the rain; then ‘just one more cigarette’; after that it was ‘we’ll finish this bottle of wine then leave’. But then she had to show him her new shoes. And he suddenly decided he couldn’t go out without a shower first. By the time they were approaching the Goth bar, it was almost midnight. Giggling like school kids all the way, by the time they got to the side street where Legendz was, they had already peaked too soon. Now things seemed ominous and not so funny. Now they actually had to go in.

Katie held back, hoping the bar was shut. Mark sauntered cautiously up to the door and looked in. “He isn’t there”, he said, sounding glum; “weird.”

“Are you sure?” she called from the street corner, not prepared to go closer unless it was absolutely necessary.

“There are exactly two people in the room. It’s dead in there.”

Oh. What had been an escapade now slipped into ‘all dressed up and nowhere to go’. Instead of being able to sneer and giggle, they were stood up on a street corner. Mark wanted a snog; Katie wanted to be judgemental. They both wanted vodka.

Mark's mobile chirped into action. “He’s two minutes away.” They entertained themselves with impressions of each other surreptitiously entering a Goth bar: slow self-conscious lope; check for onlookers; sharp right turn and over the threshold, under the cover of darkness. After ten minutes the variations on a theme had been exhausted and they’d moved on to dirty phrases in bad Polish accents.

“Where are you? We’re here, on the corner. We’d have seen you if you’d walked in”, Mark said into the mobile. Pause. Extended pause. “Okay”, he said finishing the call.

“And...” asked Katie.

“Wrong Legendz. Apparently there is more than one. Oh my god, a Goth bar chain.”

The thought of this was appalling. And Mark had started seeing someone who was currently in one, celebrating a friend’s birthday. Did this guy have no idea just how wrong that was? A Goth bar in the ‘hood was one thing. Schlepping across town at midnight to another was something else again.

“You’re on your own. Hope you get out without having to dye your hair black.”

Mark was plainly weighing up a desire for boy-on-boy action against having to walk into a Goth bar alone that was the other side of town. For a moment there it was touch and go. Eventually, with some reservations, physical contact won out. They parted outside her flat after he’d cajoled her bike keys from her and pumped up the back wheel.

“I am expecting details tomorrow”, Katie called to his departing back. “Lots of them. Take photographic evidence and don’t forget what music they played. And a souvenir - bring me a lock of Goth hair.” She walked up the stairs smiling. It was never particularly dull.