A Brand New Me

by Shari Low

  On the plus side: a clean white shirt, nice hands with trim nails, no obvious tattoos, and his slightly long black hair was attractive in a greying, unkempt kind of way.

  On the down side (and yes, my ovaries were recoiling at the very sight of it): facial hair.

  Facial hair. In the words of the modern-day philosopher and woman of words, Paris Hilton: ‘Eeeeeeeew.’

  And it wasn’t the George Michael stubble, the Colin Farrell/Miami Vice moustache or the Musketeer goatee, it was the full ‘pass my slippers, where’s my pipe’ beard.

  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck crawl up in some kind of bizarre hirsute protest against the fuzz on his face. And forgive me for getting ahead of myself, but all I could think was, ‘I’d rather eat contaminated cashews for a month than snog that.’

  I know it’s not rational and there are some perfectly nice men with beards–Noel Edmonds, Captain Birdseye and all the blokes in ZZ Top–but like gents with halitosis, body odour or any fetish involving pain or theft of undergarments, they’re not for me. It was probably the consequence of a decadent night in my early teenage years when one of the boys in our gang smuggled an old Seventies porn movie into my house when my parents were out and the twelve teenagers packed into my lounge were given an introduction to the vagaries of oral sex when a bloke with a huge beard visited the parts of a buxom-blonde housewife that non-bearded gentlemen couldn’t reach. In fact, maybe it was just the dim lighting, but Craig the Therapist bore a highly disturbing resemblance to that porn plumber with the incredibly energetic wrench. I shuddered.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  I snapped out of the memory of my teenage antics (that had cost me two months of pocket money and my tickets for a Blur concert when my parents had returned home unexpectedly early). ‘Er, sure, I’ll have a glass of white wine please–house wine’s fine.’

  He smiled, then headed off to the bar. Right, time to re-evaluate the situation. Lack of punctuality aside, he seemed genuine enough, and as a relationship counsellor he was bound to be interesting. And by focusing on something as superfluous as facial hair I was being downright shallow and superficial.

  As I watched him weave through the masses en route to the bar, I chided myself for such immature thoughts and did some serious soul-searching.

  Wasn’t I a better person than this?

  Wasn’t I capable of looking past the superficial and appreciating a person’s mind and soul?

  Wasn’t it time I grew up and stopped making petty judgements?

  And if I commando-crawled towards the door, would I make it to freedom before he got back?

  13

  The Outer Cosmos

  Sadly not.

  Three hours later, the city/bohemian crowd had been replaced by groups of women on post-aerobic-class treats and groups of blokes on the pull. We’d moved through to the restaurant side of the establishment and I was happily tucking into my retro prawn cocktail while Craig filled me in on yet another one of his cases. Apparently, as long as no names were mentioned, he was free to discuss his clients at length and in detail. Infinite detail. Minute. It occurred to me that he was being overbearing, indiscreet and self-absorbed, but frankly I didn’t mind, figuring that at least it avoided the risk of those first-date awkward pauses. And besides, in an hour or so I could leave, fill in my report, claim my bonus, tick another sign on my zodiac milestone and all would be well…just as long as in the meantime my bosoms didn’t actually drop off with boredom and land in my retro fish dish.

  I was debating whether or not to tell him he had oatcake crumbs in his undergrowth, when he suddenly changed tack.

  ‘…And so that’s why I decided to apply when I saw Zara spouting that ridiculous nonsense on the morning show.’

  What? What had he just said? Focusing on the crumbs had made me completely tune out.

  ‘So what I’d like to know is, what are these ridiculous techniques that she has allegedly discovered, and is there any logical merit to them whatsoever?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  There was a change in his body language and his demeanour appeared to shift slightly from ‘pompous’ to ‘testy’. Or maybe it was the other way around. I’d given up halfway through Body Language for Beginners after realising somewhere around page seventy-five that the fact my body was horizontal and falling asleep meant I was bored rigid.

  ‘I want some insight into exactly what ludicrous nonsense she is planning to write about. You have to understand, Leni, that it’s the professionals in this field, my colleagues and me, who have to pick up the pieces of the failed relationships.’

  ‘So let me get this straight. You applied for this because you thought you’d get insider information on Zara’s book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I don’t know anything about it.’

  He did a whole scoffing laugh thing that dislodged several small organisms from his beard. ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that you just go along on these meetings knowing nothing about them or the project they’re linked to?’

  ‘Er…yep.’

  He looked at me with the kind of sad, disappointed expression you might give a puppy that had peed on the floor. I had a sneaking suspicion that if we hadn’t already ordered dinner he’d be out of his chair and heading for the door.

  ‘That’s very trusting of you, Leni. Are you always so accommodating? I’ve been rambling on all night, so let’s talk about you for a moment.’

  ‘No, no, really, that’s fine,’ I reassured him. ‘To be honest, I’m not that interesting,’ I joked, then speared another prawn and switched back to ‘good listener’ mode.

  He was silent for a moment, one long, glorious moment, before the bombshell hit.

  ‘Have you always covered up your insecurities and self-esteem issues with self-deprecation?’

  Pardon? He’d known me for three hours, I’d barely said a word, and yet now he was suddenly Dr Phil?

  ‘Er, no,’ I blustered jokingly. ‘I really am this thick-skinned and difficult to offend.’

  He sat back, oatcakes still dangling from each corner of his mouth, and regarded me with an intense stare.

  ‘Now we both know that isn’t true, is it? Tell me, what kind of relationship do you have with your father?’

  God help us. All I wanted to do was get past my coq au vin and my arctic roll, then get home in time for Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, and instead I suddenly felt like the number-one suspect in Taggart.

  I shrugged off the question with the briefest answer I could come up with, other than, ‘bugger off, you’re a twat.’

  ‘It was and still is fine. He’s a nice man.’

  ‘Mmmmmm,’ said Dr Freud. ‘And since then? Married? Long-term relationships?’

  Okay, now he was getting really annoying. I could almost bear it before when I could just listen while focusing on the distraction of delicious food, but now I was being robbed of that by his demands that I actually participate in the evening. Well, if I was going to have to share then I might as well get the benefit of some free professional opinions.

  ‘One serious relationship, two years, his name was Ben,’ I said, incredulous that even after all this time the very thought of Ben caused an almost physical pain in the pit of my stomach. ‘But he was married.’

  ‘Ah, the attraction to the unobtainable, often another sign of low self-esteem,’ interjected Freud just a little too smugly.

  ‘No, I didn’t know he was married,’ I objected.

  ‘Come on, of course you did–there’s always awareness on some level. You didn’t think to question the absences and the refusal to commit?’

  Urgh. He thought he had all the answers, and I was beginning to lose the longing for the coq au vin.

  ‘He was in the army. The marines, actually. I thought I was being loyal and devoted by waiting for him and tolerating the lack of time together. Turns out I was just being a sap.’ />
  Appetite officially gone. And to my utter horror and eternal mortification, I realised that I was welling up.

  ‘Tell me about your time together.’

  That’s it! How dare he pry into my life? I stood up, threw my napkin on the table and stormed out.

  Or at least, that’s what I planned to do. But somehow it came out as…

  ‘Well, we met on a train, actually. I was going to Portsmouth for a plumbing conference, and he was on his way back to barracks after an R&R. I never normally speak to anyone on public transport–you know, too many weirdos, nutters, and that’s just my pals…’

  My attempt to use an immature joke to lighten the mood and divert attention from the one episode in my life that had left permanent scar tissue on my heart went completely ignored, so I succumbed to Dr Freud and gave him chapter and heart-bloody-breaking verse.

  I’d almost become a Daily Mail statistic that day. I’d been sitting in a sparsely occupied carriage, brooding over the injustice that all the management team had been booked into first class, when in walked the ultimate cliché: baseball cap, zipped sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over the cap, and trousers that belonged on a sporting competitor as opposed to a teenage misfit with a glue-sniffing ring around his mouth.

  He’d been walking past my seat when I’d suddenly felt something sharp pressed against my side, swiftly followed by his stinking breath on my face as he’d bent down to whisper in my ear.

  ‘Give me your bag before I slice you.’

  I froze. Had he really said…?

  ‘Give me your fucking bag now!’ he’d hissed.

  My eyes darted frantically around the carriage, but everyone was doing that British thing where they avoided eye contact at all costs, so no one had registered my situation. And besides, I hardly thought that two old ladies who’d been discussing their arthritis for the last forty-five miles would be proficient in disarming ASBO Andy.

  The pressure on my side increased and catapulted me into action. I’d groped around with my free hand for my bag, when all of a sudden my attacker had moved slightly to the left and began to repeatedly bang his head off the table separating me from the empty seats opposite. It had taken me a few moments to realise that this action was being helped along by the huge hand that was grasping the back of El Thuggo’s neck. The ensuing action was so dramatic that even the old ladies ceased ruminating over their ailments. One reached into her bag, and the next thing we knew, the kind of sound you would expect to hear signalling an incoming nuclear missile ripped through the cabin.

  Seconds later, we’d pulled in at a station and the train had been held up for one hour while the station police apprehended the youth, searched the carriage and took statements from all involved. Although all of this Crimewatch-type behaviour had only taken place after the long arm of the law had spent twenty minutes trying to switch off Ethelia Pancridge’s personal panic alarm. In the end, they’d gone for the technical approach and thrown it out of the window, allowing it to be crushed by the 5.45 p.m. to King’s Cross coming the other way.

  It was only when the commotion had died down that I’d realised the intervening hand and forearm belonged to Captain Benjamin Mathers, Second Corps, Royal Marines. Ben was the kind of cartoon soldier that kids draw in battle scenes: six foot two inches tall, almost as wide across the shoulders, angling down past the visibly taught stomach to narrow hips. His light brown hair was shorn into a crew-cut, his skin was weathered to a deep shade of oak, and a flat row of white teeth sat above a sharp, square jaw-line. If I had to choose a physical specimen to protect our nation against hostile armies, terrorists and scumbag teenagers looking for glue money, it would be him. If I had to choose a perfect physical specimen with whom to engage in activities pertaining to the stimulation of the reproductive system, well, that would be him too. He was stunning. Beautiful. And much as love at first sight is an over-used cliché that is generally a gross exaggeration of reality, I have to say that my experience with Ben was the exception.

  ‘Actually, I think it’s more likely that a combination of the trauma of the incident and gratitude at being helped, manifested itself in powerful feelings of attraction,’ interjected my date, now renamed ‘Craig, the really annoying therapist’.

  It suddenly crossed my mind to wonder whether I’d get a custodial sentence if I overcame my aversion to confrontation and forced the pepper shaker to make swift and repeated contact with the back of Craig’s head.

  I took a deep breath and carried on with the next instalment. I told him how we’d swapped contact details and addresses as we’d left the train, starting a correspondence that would become closer and more intimate as the months went on. Occasionally, he’d even managed to call from his posting in Afghanistan, and it was during one of those calls, late on a Thursday night, that the doorbell had rung. Large and potentially dangerous kitchen implement in hand, I’d tentatively opened the door, only to see him standing there clutching his mobile phone to his ear. He was everything I wasn’t: strong, brave, spontaneous and adventurous. Oh, and married.

  ‘I say again, don’t you think that on some level you knew all along that he was married?’ piped up my newly recruited relationship guru–the one I still wanted to batter to death with the pepper shaker.

  I mean, give me strength! Of course I didn’t know he was bloody married. I’d found that out two years later, when I’d decided to surprise him by showing up outside his barracks on the day he returned from the Middle East, just in time to see him exiting the compound with a little girl who looked around five years old holding one hand, and a tall blonde with a pneumatic chest holding the other. And the worst part was that he’d seen me. He’d noticed me standing there, and there was a brief, momentary flicker of shock before his eyes went dead. He’d looked right through me as they all headed towards the car park, jumped into a Jeep and drove off, leaving me standing there like the pathetic, sad imbecile that I was.

  I paused, realising that there was a crushing pain in my chest, tears coursing down my cheeks and snot dripping into the remnants of the prawn cocktail. The waiter was also hovering nearby, clutching two main meals but obviously terrified to approach the table while I was in such obvious meltdown.

  And Craig? His pretentious, professional demeanour was now slightly clouded by that look of blind panic that most men are genetically predisposed to when faced with an emotional woman in a public place.

  But, like Daniel’s cathartic experience on the previous date, the dams had been opened and now Niagara was pouring through. Or at least dripping into my dinner.

  I carried on with the saga (yes, it was a tad self-indulgent, but then he’d rambled pretty much solo for the first half of the evening), telling Craig how there had been one phone call after that. Just one. When the phone had started to ring just after midnight a couple of nights later, I had known it was him. Stu had been staying over with me, and we’d just finished an epic run of Pretty Woman, Top Gun and My Best Friend’s Wedding, while working our way through a Mexican village of Doritos and a valley of French plonk.

  ‘Answer it,’ he’d prompted.

  ‘I can’t,’ I’d whispered, Dorito in mouth, paralysed with fear.

  ‘You have to, Leni–you need closure.’

  Aaaaaargh! Shaking, I picked up the phone and whispered, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Leni, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Are. You. Married?’ My voice was a low, tight staccato, caused by my windpipe constricting to the approximate diameter of a pencil lead.

  ‘Leni, I…’

  ‘Are. You. Married?’ I’d repeated.

  There was a silence, followed by a long sigh and finally a choked ‘Yes’.

  I’d hung up and Stu had held me tight for hours then put me to bed–but only, of course, after he’d removed all potentially dangerous objects from my room, then checked all my vital signs to reassure himself that I wasn’t going to suffer a stress-induced stroke in the night.

  The waiter got fed up of hovering a
nd deftly removed our starter plates, replacing them with the main courses. My dried-up coq au vin looked as sad as I felt.

  ‘And since then?’ Craig asked, obviously a glutton for punishment.

  ‘Nothing. Just flings.’ I took a large slug of my wine as I realised that this had been the first time I’d told the ‘Ben’ story to anyone other than Trish or Stu. ‘Short-term relationships with nice men who were never going to break my heart. And before you say it, yes, I realise that I choose to do that for a reason.’

  Deciding that I sounded batty enough, I decided to omit that this was when the self-help obsession had started. Moving On–Overcoming Heartbreak and Repairing Your Soul had been the guide that went on to spawn a four-shelf collection on my bookcase.

  Craig silently chewed on his undoubtedly rubberised chicken and mushroom pie for a couple of awkward minutes, before saying, ‘Have you ever considered that perhaps it wasn’t you who chose to have short-term, meaningless flings? Perhaps it was the men you were seeing who chose to keep it on that level?’

  Okay, stop talking. Let’s move on. I’d had a fifteen-minute, uncharacteristic revelatory outburst accompanied by deeply embarrassing tears and snot, but he was a relationship counsellor, so surely if anyone was going to be sympathetic and understanding it was him. And besides, he had asked me to tell him about it; it wasn’t like I’d just volunteered the information on a whim.

  However, I was ready to stop now. To move on to sunnier themes and superficial small talk. But…but I had to know what he was on about…

  ‘I’m sorry; I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Leni, I think you need to accept some truths.’

  I nodded, figuring that after using his napkin to blow my nose after my meltdown, the least I could do was indulge him.

  ‘In my opinion, the “short-term flings” that you refer to were probably kept within those boundaries not by you but by the men you were seeing. You see, that’s often the consequence of dating someone who is, in essence, a habitual co-dependent with an inclination towards self-absorption and over-emotional reactions. In my professional opinion, I’d say that, despite your protests, you were attracted to Ben because on some level you knew that he was, if I may make an assumption and use colloquial terminology, out of your league…’