A Brand New Me

by Shari Low

  As if summoned by a psychic force, she took that moment to burst through the door, barefoot, wearing a pink turban and a floor-length lilac kaftan with daisies around the hem. She left a trail of damp footprints on the wooden floor as she crossed the room. She was a formidable sight–my boss, my mentor, the woman who valued me as part of her inner circle of support. I felt a moment of regret for all the times I’d ever moaned about her (when she wasn’t within psychic distance, of course). How could I have been so judgemental? The woman was an ultra-successful businesswoman and a household name who was under a wealth of pressure. It was absolutely understandable that sometimes she got a little frazzled and thoughtless. And abrasive. Rude. Curt. Self-obsessed. It was time for me to suck it up and show her a little compassion and understanding. And think nice thoughts. Nice thoughts.

  ‘Leni, glad I caught you here,’ she announced. Incredible! I was going to get a motivational, congratulatory chat from her too. Today must be National Team Building Day.

  ‘I’ve just had a meeting with the accountant…’

  A pay rise! I was getting a pay rise too. Happy days! Maybe it was time for me to fully commit to my role in Team Zara. Or Team Delta. Or Team…

  ‘And he tells me that you claimed fifty-four pounds for dinner with an applicant who had already received the one-hundred-pound fee for the date.’

  The left jab took me completely by surprise and I was temporarily winded. What had happened to the pep-talk? The pay rise?

  ‘Yes, but he didn’t pay and…’

  ‘Leni, I don’t make money so that you can throw it away. I’ll let it go on this occasion, but if I come across any more blatant abuse of the expenses system it’ll be docked from your wages. Am I clear?’

  Conn had the decency to avoid eye contact and ponder the floor.

  ‘Crystal,’ I replied dryly, feeling a mushrooming cloud of dislike as I regarded the head honcho of Team Obnoxious Bitch.

  Nice thoughts had just completely escaped me.

  EMAIL

  To: Leni Lomond

  From: Jon Belmont

  Subject: Thinking About You, Star Lady

  Hey there, Leni,

  D’you want the good news or the bad? Okay, first the bad news–I missed the first ten minutes of trading this morning because I was laughing so much at your email . I’m beginning to think you should get danger money for that job. And the cheek of that bloke–I can’t believe he didn’t even thank you for saving his life!!!! Anyway, since you amused me so much I’m prepared to forgive you for costing me the thousands of pounds in commission that I lost because I missed a run on software shares.

  The good news is I’m going to let you make it up to me. I think the least you can do is ply me with food and alcohol as soon as possible . Kidding! I actually was thinking of just you, me and my awesome cooking skills. I’m serious! I want to make you dinner and then perhaps just get to know each other over a nice wine and the kind of upmarket, high-art entertainment that we both love: the complete box set of CSI Las Vegas, series seven.

  And that’s not all. Yes, there will also be a large box of Maltesers and a multi-pack of Worcester Sauce crisps. Have you swooned yet?

  I can’t wait to see you again, Leni, so when will you be free of all the very inconvenient work commitments? By my reckoning you’ve still got five dates to go. HURRY UP AND GET THEM OVER WITH before I lose my good-natured patience, my shirt and my job…LOL!!

  Have a great day, my little comic one,

  Jxxx

  24

  The Cancer Date

  Gregory, 26, Cancer. Chosen from the pile this time with help from Zara, who’d cast her eyes over the four choices I was deliberating between and declared that she felt a ‘mystic glow’ the minute she’d clapped eyes on his picture. Personally, I think it was just the way she was sitting. Or maybe a spot of indigestion. Because I could quite categorically say that I’d yet to put my finger on anything either mystical or glowing about Gregory. In fact, since the moment he’d ambled up to me outside the Parliamentary Arms, he’d been a bit, well, subdued. Attentive. Yes. Polite. Yes. Monosyllabic. Yes.

  Perhaps I was getting jaded and blasé (sweating palms, jelly knees, churning stomach, and two panic attacks requiring the intervention of breathing techniques and a brown paper bag–yep, I was practically casual and carefree), but I actually found it quite refreshing that he didn’t waste time with convoluted introductions and instead merely grunted ‘Leni?’, then nodded in the direction of the bar. He opened the door and the noise of the crowd immediately ruled out an in-depth conversation about the merits of recycling plastic bags or the state of global warming. It was an awesome sight–a heaving mass of predominantly male beings, young and old, big and small, with so many shaved heads that it felt like a Right Said Fred tribute night. Gregory, on the other hand, was in possession of all his follicles. Back in the Nineties he’d have been a poster boy for Britpop, with his tall, lanky frame, shoulder-length brown scruffy hair, jeans and a black parka jacket, set off by a perfectly crafted jaw-line and green eyes the colour of a traffic light. He was Liam Gallagher’s better-looking little brother, his insouciant demeanour as intriguing as it was subdued.

  We fought our way through the throng of blokes that stood between us and the bar, all chanting ‘Who Are Ye?’ in the direction of the far right-hand corner, where, I assumed, there was either a TV screen or a newcomer cowering in fear. For a split second I wished I’d worn heels so that I could see over the heaving mass, before deciding that my Ugg boots, jeans and my old shabby-not-chic battered black suede jacket had been the perfect choice–nothing uncomfortable, nothing restricting and nothing that I’d cry over if it got damaged or stolen, unless of course I was attached to it at the time.

  ‘Drink?’ he asked when we finally got to the bar.

  I ignored the fact that my head was wedged a little too uncomfortably near the armpit of a bald bloke with a stomach so distended he appeared to be hiding an Oompa Loompa underneath his blue T-shirt.

  I didn’t need Zara’s psychic powers to deduce that a glass of perfectly chilled Sauvignon Blanc might be a bit of a stretch.

  ‘A bottle of beer, any kind,’ I hollered over the din.

  While he shouted it up, I eased myself away from the gent next to me, confident that he wasn’t a product tester for a manufacturer of antiperspirants, and worked my way over to the only twelve-inch-square section of unoccupied floor space, conveniently located outside the ladies toilets. After twenty minutes, Gregory managed to join me, two bottles of beer in each hand.

  ‘Why is it so busy?’ I asked. Well, not so much asked as shrieked at the top of my voice–and even then he had to bend down and position his ear six inches from my mouth to hear me.

  ‘Chelsea,’ he replied, with what I was beginning to realise was his customary elaboration, just as the natives burst into song with a beautifully synchronised classical version of, ‘Ashley Cole Is a Knob, doo-da, doo-da’. Hang on–these were Chelsea supporters, and from what I’d learned from the pages of Heat, he was in their team. Oh my God, they were the sporting equivalent of tribes who eat their own.

  ‘Are we going to the game?’ I shouted,

  Gregory replied with a loud, verbose, highly detailed nod.

  Okay, I got it. It was amazing what you could surmise when spending time with a man of few words. Gregory was comfortable among the bedlam of a sporting environment–that signalled strength of character and calm under pressure. Chelsea were playing tonight, this was their home turf and that’s why a pub in a normally conservative London borough was packed on a Wednesday night. Gregory obviously wasn’t the type to pretend to be something he wasn’t, thus bringing me into the bosom of his comfort zone. And Ashley Cole was a knob.

  Yep, that pretty much summed up the night so far.

  Conversation was impossible, so we stood in a strangely comfortable silence for ten minutes, punctuated only by occasional synchronised self-conscious smiles. ‘Time to go,’ Gregory ann
ounced, when I had barely finished my first bottle of beer. Actually, he didn’t so much announce it as gesticulate to me over the thundering version of that well-known pop classic, ‘Arsenal, Arsenal, bunch of dicks’.

  I held up my full bottle and adopted a questioning expression. He mimed back a potential solution, and that’s how I ended up leaving a London hostelry with a bottle of Budweiser down the front of my trousers. Quite exciting, really–not the bottle-down-the-trousers thing, but the whole atmosphere and anticipation. I was going to my first ever football match. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a night of luxurious pampering and ostentatious surroundings, but at least it was different. For once I wasn’t worrying about what I was wearing or what to say. It made an utterly refreshing change just to be mildly fretting about inconsequential, frivolous things like getting trampled to death by a horde of boozed-up skinheads. I just hoped that the trauma of the visit to the morgue to identify my body didn’t put Stu into a stress-induced coma from which he’d never recover.

  However, premonitions of a suffocating death aside, the whole experience was giving me a bit of an adrenalin rush. We were carried down the street by the chanting caravan of blue, white and bald, with Gregory protectively holding my elbow the whole way. In the queue at the turnstiles, he finally found his voice. ‘I hope it’s okay that we’re coming here, only they said the date should be my idea of a perfect night, and this is, erm, mine.’ Aw, bless, he was bashful. He’d obviously borrowed ‘embarrassed and awkward’ from me for the night.

  ‘No, no, it’s fine, really. I’m actually quite looking forward to it.’

  An elbow appeared from nowhere and I was saved from injury by lightning reflexes and a loud ‘Oi!’ A middle-aged bloke in a blue tracksuit was suitably chastised. ‘Sorry, love, didn’t see you there.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ Gregory asked with genuine concern. He was definitely a long shot for ‘Speaker of the Year’, but he had a calming presence that was quite endearing in a ‘monastic, vow of silence’ way.

  ‘I’m fine, really.’ We were about twenty feet from the front of the queue now, so I passed the next few minutes with what I’d come to realise was the essential date preamble.

  ‘So what made you apply for this then?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘You didn’t send an application in?’

  ‘No.’

  Cancel all of the above claims that his lack of communications skills was a bonus–this was like drawing blood out of a large parka-clad boulder.

  ‘But I saw your application letter–it was handwritten with a photo.’

  ‘My mother,’ he shrugged.

  Ah. Obviously Zara must have picked up on his mum’s mystic glow.

  ‘Your mother sent in the form?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Because she wanted to set you up on a date?’

  Another nod. Shit, it would be half-time before I had a clue as to what was going on. And that was when he performed the most unexpected act of the night so far: he constructed a joined-up sentence.

  ‘And also because she wanted to meet Zara. She thinks she might be able to contact my nan. She died a few months ago. Heart attack in Ladbrokes during the 3.15 from Aintree.’

  I decided against exacerbating the pain of the memory by asking if her horse had won.

  ‘So are you even single?’

  He gave another long-winded explanation by nodding. Twice this time.

  The sharing of our souls was halted by our arrival at the metal gate, where Gregory pulled out two season tickets and handed one to me with the comment ‘My nan’s’, then flashed his at a sensor on the wall before pushing through the turnstile. I followed his lead, straight into a long corridor of concrete. I said a silent prayer of thanks that I wasn’t claustrophobic or wearing five-inch heels as we worked our way up several flights of stairs, along another corridor, down a concourse hosting a menagerie of concessions selling food, drinks and merchandise, up another flight of stairs, then out into the main body of the stadium. I wasn’t sure what was making the biggest roar–the thousands of hyped-up supporters or my hamstrings, which had just been subjected to the most exercise they’d had since I’d come fourth in the hundred-metres hurdles in third-year PE.

  As we clambered along a long row of blue, seat after seat banged up as its occupant stood to let us pass. It was a bad time to decide that I should probably have nipped to the loo before coming this far.

  Gregory stopped first, giving a nod to the people on either side of the two vacant seats. He let me clamber past him, and that’s when I realised that, to my surprise, the occupant directly next to me was a very large woman in her mid-fifties, her platinum hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, her eyes rimmed with black eye-liner, lips frosted pink, in a skin-tight Chelsea shirt with ‘MRS LAMPARD’ printed across both front and back.

  I gave her an apologetic shrug–with absolutely no idea what I was apologising for, but I was mildly intimidated and just wanted to pre-empt any possible reason for her to take the hump with me.

  ‘Rooney, yer a wanker, Rooney, yer a wanker…’ sang the crowd, alerting me to the fact that the Manchester United team had just come onto the pitch. What was protocol in these situations? Should you sing along? And was it essential to support the same team as those around me? Only I’d had a bit of a crush on Cristiano Ronaldo for years, and I didn’t think I’d be able to stem the cheers if he scored and exposed any part of his anatomy during his celebratory dance.

  ‘All right love?’ asked scary woman beside me.

  ‘F…fine. Thanks.’

  Any attempt to swap life stories and become firm friends was nipped in the bud by the frail elderly gent on the other side of her screaming, ‘Giggsy, ya big fucking poof,’ in the general direction of the pitch.

  Marilyn Monroe’s calorifically-challenged granny gave him a swift jab to the ribs. ‘Less of the fucking swearing, you old tosser, we’ve got a new young lady sitting next to us.’

  I took that to be me, and felt truly appreciated and honoured, especially when she shot me a beaming smile. Her missing teeth didn’t matter in the least.

  Throughout the whole exchange, Gregory sat facing forward, watching the action on the pitch. The roars reached crescendo level when the ref blew the whistle and Ronaldo took off with the ball, dribbled past three men, and made it to within twenty feet of the opposition’s goal, only to get tackled by a big bloke with black hair and go down like he’d been shot.

  ‘Penalty!’ I screeched. It was out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. Twenty thousand heads swivelled to stare at me. Or maybe it just felt like that, but everyone in the row in front, behind and either side–including large scary lady–was definitely perusing me with contempt in their eyes.

  ‘Sorry, shouldn’t have done that,’ I whispered to Gregory, who, to his credit, had casually ignored my faux pas. ‘Don’t worry ’bout it,’ he shrugged.

  ‘But I think I might have just shortened my life expectancy. The woman beside me doesn’t look chuffed.’

  ‘She’s all right.’

  ‘Gregory, she has LOVE and HATE tattooed on her knuckles.’

  ‘She’s harmless.’

  ‘How do you know?’ My stage whisper was developing tones of panic.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Are you sure? Because I reckon if I start running now, she’ll never catch me.’

  ‘Everything okay there, love?’ came the voice from the other side of me, and it was just as friendly as before.

  Slowly, hesitantly, I turned to see scary lady smiling at me again. Phew. Reprieve. If I kept my mouth shut for the next ninety minutes I just might make it out alive.

  ‘So what’s your name then?’ she asked me.

  Oh God, she wanted to chat. It was 8 p.m. on a Wednesday night, I was in a football stadium with sixty thousand vocal, adrenalin-fuelled footie fans, sitting next to a toothless, tattooed woman who wanted to befriend me. Welcome to Planet Crazy, my name is Leni and I’ll be your tour
operator for the day.

  ‘Le—Leni,’ I stuttered.

  ‘And where are you from?’

  Did she mean my address? Or just in general? Maybe she lived in the same area and would want to get together for yoga classes and flower arranging. Finally, and not a moment too soon, my man of few words decided to intervene. He leaned forward, craned his neck around me and shot off one of his longest sentences yet–a forthright rebuke at Marilyn Monroe’s granny.

  ‘Look, Mum, will you just be quiet and watch the game please?’

  25

  Women Are from Venus

  ‘You are jesting!’ Stu spluttered.

  ‘If only I was. More steam please.’

  He levered himself up from his prone position on the top layer of wooden slats and stood up, his perfectly formed torso glistening in the heat. I could definitely see why Verity was attracted to my chum–those toast-rack abs–and although his shoulders were broad, he only needed the tiniest towel to wrap around his narrow hips. He was man by Armani. I, on the other hand, was woman by Matalan, one who was surreptitiously rearranging the bikini bottoms that were currently giving me a wedgie.

  Stu took the ladle out of the bucket and splashed a huge dollop of water on the hot coals. ‘So then what happened?’

  ‘We went back to the Parliamentary Arms, drank lager and sang on the karaoke until closing time. His Grandpa Jack did the best “King of the Road” I’ve ever heard, and his mother’s version of “The Shoop Shoop Song” brought the house down. I haven’t laughed so much since Trish split her leather trousers when she bent down in front of Cherie Blair at the Great Morning TV! Christmas party.’

  ‘God, I wish I’d been there–at the karaoke, not at Trish’s arse-flashing. Actually, I don’t–the Parliamentary Arms sounds like the perfect breeding ground for botulism, the common cold and Dutch elm disease.’

  ‘The last one only affects trees,’ I retorted with an involuntary eye roll.

  ‘My student, I’ve taught you well,’ he laughed.