A Brand New Me

by Shari Low

  Trish, resplendent in a lime-green crepe shift dress teamed with purple platforms (not the obvious choice yet the end result was stunning), was moping now. ‘I bloody hate being last to hear things. That’s it, I’m divorcing Grey and coming back to singledom to join you two sad bastards. I might never have sex again but at least the gossip is better.’

  A passing waitress plopped a large bowl of kettle chips in the middle of our table. Trish picked it straight back up and returned it, much to the waitress’s surprise.

  ‘Sorry, but the food fascist is here tonight,’ she explained, gesturing to Stu. ‘Apparently if we consume food in a public place we’ll be dead within the hour and that would be really bad for business.’

  The waitress backed away slowly, holding the chips out in front of her like they were unstable plutonium.

  ‘You’ll thank me one day,’ Stu grinned, nudging her jovially at the same time.

  ‘I already thank you,’ Trish replied dryly. ‘If it wasn’t for your neurotic bloody witterings my arse would be two inches bigger.’

  A crowd of city blokes in pinstriped suits, wallets bulging in their chest pockets, strutted in, and immediately the volume level in the bar rose about six decibels as they shouted for champagne and roared with arrogant, attention-seeking laughter every few seconds.

  ‘Shit, should have brought the Uzi,’ Trish muttered.

  Were they the type of men that Jon worked with? No wonder he always found time to email when all he had for company were a bunch of loud, obnoxious blokes who had made it their life’s mission to stoke their own egos by acting like spoiled, immature twats. Another week or so and I’d be able to ask him. I had the date tonight (Virgo), another one tomorrow night (Sagittarius), and finally Dirty Dancing with Stu next Saturday night. And then…ta da! Mission accomplished. Goodbye dates, hasta la vista uncomfortable silences and first-night indignities, farewell worry and stress, hello the start of my new life. And maybe more…I had absolutely no idea if there was anything there with Jon other than the seedlings of a great friendship, but his emails made me laugh and it was so refreshing to have someone who was genuinely interested in me and what I did. Two or three times a day now, my inbox would ping with a note from him, and even though recent events had convinced me that I fancied jumping into a new relationship about as much as I fancied herpes, at least it was a starting point to moving on from Ben. For the second time. My stomach flipped and my throat tightened. No! I wouldn’t let him do this to me again. I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t.

  ‘Oh crap, she’s crying again.’ Trish, still in mutter mode, pulled a tissue out of her bag and thrust it towards me. ‘I told you not to think about him!’

  ‘I know, I can’t help it. He just comes into my head and my tear ducts go into meltdown.’

  I blew my nose so noisily that even the pinstripes turned to stare.

  ‘I’ll be fine, honestly. It’s just…it’s just all been too crazy lately. I just need to get these bloody dates out of the way, file the reports, and then do ten years in therapy to erase the memories.’

  ‘So who’s tonight’s lucky candidate then?’ Trish asked, changing the subject from my desperate emotional state to the inevitably desperate night ahead.

  ‘Kurt, with a “K,” twenty-five, Virgo, comes from Brighton, now living in Camden, listed his occupation as DJ and Media Student, sounded cool but keen on the phone, no idea where we’re going.’

  ‘Personal alarm and pepper spray?’ Stu asked.

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Mobile phone fully charged?’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Promise to stay in public crowded places at all times?’

  ‘Absolutely. And I’ve also notified the police, Interpol and MI5. Oh, and the coastguard, just on the off-chance that he drives me a hundred miles to the nearest beach and we get into difficulty in deep waters.’

  Stu deftly stuck his fingers in my Cosmopolitan and flicked it in my face.

  ‘Don’t you dare smudge my make-up,’ I laughed, ‘or I’m grassing you to Millie.’

  We’d had the office to ourselves all afternoon because Conn was at a meeting to discuss a potential endorsement deal and Zara was out, presumably doing that thing that ended up with her dress in her knickers. I had no idea what was actually going on with her and Stephen Knight, but I was eternally grateful to him because both her attendance in the office and her crazy quota had dropped significantly. This week I hadn’t had any Third World rebirthing rituals, New Age scream therapies or a single live animal in the office.

  In the quiet bliss of their absence, I’d spent the whole afternoon sitting with Millie at reception, passing the time by letting her do my hair and make-up, and the results were a lot less scary than I’d envisaged–even skin tone, pale lips and eyes on the slightly less exaggerated side of Amy Winehouse. Millie had also provided my top for the evening: a crushed silk grey shirt that was a perfect match to my skinny jeans and black boots. For once I looked like a well-groomed, successful woman of the world…Which meant that it was probably time for me to break a heel, fall in a puddle or contract a sudden bout of food poisoning that would result in my expunging the contents of my stomach in a public place.

  Trish interrupted my musings with a sudden conversion to the power of prayer.

  ‘God, if you’re up there, please make this guy her date,’ she whispered.

  I spun around, more than a little terrified, to see who she was referring to. Kurt (with a K), in a white T-shirt and an old pair of Levis. Sorry, that’s what he’d been wearing in his application photo. This Kurt (with a K) had been shopping in the loud and startling corner of the fashion hypermarket. Where to start? The velvet trousers in a deep shade of navy were just about passable in a dimly lit room, but his shirt? It was definitely making a statement–one that said ‘I’m auditioning for the job of bingo caller in a holiday park’.

  Stu let out a low, deep whistle. ‘Who knew? Lamé is alive and well and living on that bloke’s back.’

  Nooooooooooooo, it couldn’t be. This had to be Kurt with a K’s evil twin, Damien with a D.

  ‘Leni? Has to be! Gorgeous, babe, gorgeous!’

  ‘Will you tell him or should I just deck him and leave a note pinned to his shirt to explain?’ Trish asked, completely ignoring the hand that had been thrust in front of her.

  ‘I’m Leni,’ I interjected, shooting Trish a filthy look. Why did dates keep confusing me with my pals? Was it some kind of wishful thinking? There was no denying that Trish was beautiful in a ‘Bond movie female baddie, I’ll crack your nuts with my teeth’ kind of way, but for goodness’ sake, I was wearing eyebrow pencil, hairspray, and that stuff that stung like crazy when it plumped up the lips to a bombshell pout. Did all that count for nothing?

  Kurt spun around to face me without skipping a beat. ‘Of course you are. Gorgeous, babe, gorgeous!’

  I had a horrible feeling that Ashton Kutcher and a camera crew were involved in this. It had to be a set-up. Men like this didn’t happen in real life. Kurt was only in his twenties, but he had the cheesy voice, the wardrobe and the lines of a middle-aged game-show host.

  As he shook my hand a wave of aftershave pinged my tear ducts. Out of his eye-line, Trish clenched her hands around her throat, crossed her eyes and pretended that she was being choked to death. I shot her another evil glare.

  I climbed down from the bar stool, trying to ignore the gobsmacked stares of the three suited women in the corner, the gang of obnoxious stockbrokers, the bar staff, assorted other customers and my two best friends, one soon to be deceased if she didn’t stop mocking me in public.

  ‘So,’ I asked him, unconsciously slipping into the singsong voice of a children’s television presenter, as I often did when I was nervous. ‘Where are we off to then?’

  ‘Babe, I’m going to show you a night you’ll never forget,’ he promised, also in an altered voice, only his was the one that you’d normally hear announcing to a housewife from Macclesfield that she’d won
a brand new microwave on a prime-time phone-in show. He held out his hand towards mine. ‘I promise you, Leni, I am going to float your boat!’

  ‘Just as well she put the coastguard on stand-by,’ Trish hissed to Stu.

  We were about ten feet away, moving in the direction of the door, when Trish called me back. ‘’Scuse me a second,’ I said apologetically, before returning to the table, where Trish was frantically rummaging in her bag. Triumphantly, she pulled out a pair of huge Cavalli sunglasses, then grabbed the lapel of my shirt and pulled me close to her. ‘Here, take these,’ she whispered.

  ‘Why? Why would I need those when it’s night-time?’

  ‘Because after a few hours of staring at that shirt, your retinas might never recover.’

  I stomped off, embarrassed and strangely defensive on behalf of Kurt. The shirt wasn’t that bad. We had to (quite literally) look on the bright side–if aliens landed in West London tonight we’d be able to use Kurt’s shirt to deflect the beams from their laser guns.

  I held my head up high, took Kurt’s arm again and strutted out. We were in the next street before the noise of the laughter behind us subsided…

  Just in time for the demented wailing to start.

  29

  The Virgo Date

  Who invented karaoke? Whoever it was, I hope his wife left him (yes, it’s a man–if a woman had invented it she would have made it conditional that middle-aged men couldn’t sing ‘My Way’ after consuming over fifteen units of alcohol), his kids disowned him, and he was left old, sad and broken–close to how I was feeling, and I’d only been there for a few minutes.

  Actually, strictly speaking this wasn’t karaoke in the traditional sense–i.e. the kind that was sung in pubs by hen parties and that could, in the wrong hands (Chelsea supporters called Glenda), put senior citizens in traction. Kurt with a K had actually brought me to an open mike night for budding stars in a West End club. Right now, two Goths were on stage singing a very disturbing version of ‘Tainted Love’, complete with a mock stabbing action and fake blood.

  ‘There you go, poppet,’ Kurt smarmed, as he put a drink and a packet of Quavers in front of me. I was having serious doubts about Kurt. If I added the clothes, the cheese and the hugely disturbing voice to his behaviour in the twenty minutes or so since I’d met him, he was channelling a holiday tour rep on speed.

  First of all, he’d burst into a rousing rendition of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ just after we’d left Trish and Stu in the bar. Then he’d bombarded me with jokes until I’d glazed over, slipped off the pavement and wandered perilously close to passing cars in the hope that one of them would rescue me with a sudden and painless death.

  Outside in the queue he’d entertained me with a tap dance and then he’d welcomed everyone we’d met so far in here like they were a long-lost sibling. The bizarre thing was that they were just as effusive towards him. It was like some kind of weird voyage to the Land of Exaggerated Greetings. Or musical theatre. That was it! In revenge for my recent outburst, Zara had obviously used her psychic powers to transport me to the modern equivalent of Calamity Jane, and as long as everyone just kept singing, slapping their thighs and heartily shaking each other’s hands we’d be absolutely fine.

  ‘Peckish?’ Kurt asked after I’d polished off the crisps, more a result of nervous comfort eating than hunger. If Stu could have seen me he would have had a stroke, but I figured that the longer my hands were busy going in and out of a crisp packet, the less likely it was that Kurt would pull me up onto a table while belting out a selection of hits from Doris Day’s back catalogue.

  To add to the confusion, Kurt–crazed grin and Latin American Dance Champion wardrobe aside–was actually really good-looking. He wasn’t exceptionally tall or ridiculously small: about the same height as me in my heels, so about five foot ten. His subtly highlighted short blond hair was swept back in the style of Brad Pitt in the Ocean’s movies, and he had a perfectly chiselled jaw-line. Yes, he was a slightly disconcerting shade of Jordan (the glamour model, not the country), but his body was lean without being skinny, his face was smooth and his teeth perfectly straight and blinging white. He was the type of clean-cut preppy bloke who always popped up in adverts for catalogue chains and caffeinated sports drinks.

  I glanced around, the casual act of checking out the ambience of the environment concealing my true agenda of pinpointing the emergency exits in case a rapid escape was called for. The room was reminiscent of an old American jazz club, but on a much larger scale. The walls were coated with ribbed, copper-coloured wallpaper, the carpet was the deepest shade of brown and, over in the corner, the bartenders all wore white shirts with waistcoats and bow ties. There were about fifty small round tables dotted throughout the main floor area, each one with a small gold lamp in the middle and two vintage wooden chairs on either side. The crowd (perhaps a slight exaggeration there) was a strange mixture of elderly couples who were obviously just there to be entertained (entry fee plus chicken in a basket for a fiver), and solo drinkers who, judging by their pained, anxious expressions, were planning on exercising their talents and seizing their heady moment of adulation in the spotlight. Directly in front of us was a stage, perhaps twenty foot by ten, on which an artist that might or might not have been a woman by birth, personally dressed for the evening by Shirley Bassey’s stylist and flicking her/his waist-length curls for effect at the end of every line, was giving a thundering performance of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’.

  After a few minutes of incredulous viewing, I pushed my chin back up to its original place and decided to initiate interaction with my partner for the night.

  ‘Do…do you come here often?’ I’d love to say that it was Kurt who’d blurted that one out, but to my eternal horror it came from me. I blame the glare from the lamé shirt. It was obviously sending signals directly from my brain to my mouth, bypassing ‘interesting conversation’ and ‘chat-up-line taboos’.

  To be fair, Kurt didn’t comment on my pitiful slip into naffness, but then, this was the man who winked at me every time he caught my eye.

  ‘Yeah, all the time,’ he replied.

  A voice from the stage interrupted our in-depth conversation about the meaning of life, and we turned to see a suited gent that Kurt had been chatting to at the bar.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘it gives me great pleasure to present a favourite here at Star Spotters, Mr Kurt Cabana!’

  Cabana????? I was sure it had said Kurt Cobb on his application letter. Just like that, the night took yet another step up the unbelievable ladder. And well done me on my obviously superior judgement in weeding out the wannabes and publicity-seekers! The only way this guy would seem shy and retiring would be if he was sandwiched between Paris Hilton and Kanye West.

  Kurt took the stage to riotous applause from the twenty or so people that constituted his audience. He slipped a CD into a stereo system situated at the side of the stage and then wandered over to the centre as the music started. In the space of a few bars of ‘Mack the Knife’, he was transformed from borderline strange to Robbie Williams in his ‘swing’ phase. He was actually very, very good, and if I’m not wrong, two middle-aged women at a corner table threw something onto the stage. I said a silent prayer that if it was intimate underwear it was either new or had gone through a boil wash.

  When the song finished, Cabana (with a C) demonstrated his versatility by slipping effortlessly into the next track, a sultry, perfectly pitched rendition of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Sexy Back’. With dancing.

  Another few minutes and I just might be forced to take departure from my knickers myself. He was fantastic: hitting every note, working the stage, pulling in the audience and finishing to thundering applause.

  Bloody hell, he was actually really talented. If I were Louis Walsh on The X-Factor, I’d burst into a random ten seconds of compulsive blinking and then announce that he had ‘the whole package’.

  Kurt jumped off the stage, face flushed, gri
n like a pumpkin, and made his way back over to me. At the risk of sounding like a demented groupie, I was suddenly looking at him in a whole new light. Maybe the night wasn’t quite so doomed after all.

  ‘You were fantastic,’ I enthused. ‘Really great.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ His eyes glistened with excitement.

  ‘Absolutely!’

  ‘Thanks,’ he replied, satisfied that he’d impressed my knickers off. Metaphorically speaking.

  Okay, so we were on a roll now; we’d finally clicked, broken the ice and…Pause. Long pause. Then a bit longer. I kept my teeth clenched firmly shut. I’d already done the ‘do you come here often’ line, so it was his turn to soar in the conversation stakes. Eventually, he took the hint.

  ‘Listen, I hope you don’t think it’s weird, but I brought you a headshot. Just in case you need it for…you know, anything.’

  I didn’t know.

  ‘Anything? Like…?’

  I left that one hanging, hoping that he’d pick it up and run with it. Eventually he caught up.

  ‘Like the book…you know, publicity shots and stuff.’

  On a positive note, he’d dropped the game-show voice. On a negative note, I’d just received verbal confirmation as to what the whole bizarre performance so far had been about.

  To Kurt, this wasn’t a date, it was an audition. Yes, date number two with Matt, the lead singer in the band (complete with girlfriend) had been my first official encounter with a wannabe, and I’d just chalked up my second. But while Matt had been ruthlessly calculating, I suspected that Kurt’s determination to impress was born more out of desperation to succeed. I could hardly bear to look him straight in the blinding blue contact lenses as I broke the news.

  ‘Listen, Kurt, I think we might be at cross purposes here. I won’t need a headshot. I hope you don’t mind, but you seem like a lovely guy so I’m going to be completely straight with you: being on this date will lead to absolutely no other work in the entertainment industry. Nor will it bring fame, as the case studies in the book will be completely anonymous. I have absolutely no sway in the world of showbiz, so basically tonight will not further your career in any way whatsoever. I’m really sorry.’