Cloudy with a Chance of Love

by Fiona Collins

‘I won’t be a minute. I’m in a frazz, as usual.’

  I was in Sam’s kitchen. The contents of her bag appeared to be scattered across her kitchen table: tissues, lipsticks, purse, nail file, powder compact, make-up brushes and something that looked like one of those Fitbit heart monitors. In the middle was an opened bottle of fizzy pink plonk with a huge half-full wine glass next to it. She took a large swig.

  ‘I know you’re driving, but do you want a sneaky half a glass?’

  ‘Oh god, no thanks, Sam. There’s no way I’m drinking after last night.’

  ‘Sure? Cup of tea?’

  ‘I don’t think we have time, do we?’

  Sam wasn’t ready and I’d been five minutes late as it was.

  ‘Probably not,’ she said, rifling through a drawer and pulling out random five pound notes to stuff in her purse. ‘Here,’ she said, picking up and thrusting the glass in my hand. ‘Go on, have a quick sip. It’ll calm your nerves.’

  ‘I’m not nervous.’ Dread might be a better word. But I took a large sip anyway.

  ‘Hair of the dog. Never hurts.’ Sam grabbed a sheer black t-shirt from the side and threw it over her balcony bra and impossibly sculpted abs.

  ‘You look amazing,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sam, attempting to see her reflection in the door of the microwave. ‘You don’t think the sheerness is a bit much? I’m trying to distract from my face.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your face?’

  ‘Nothing a large syringe of Botox and a week in the Bahamas wouldn’t cure.’

  ‘Honestly, Sam, you look fabulous.’ For all her zealous calorie-counting and burpees and Power Yoga DVDs, my dear friend had her insecurities, like the rest of us.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, sounding unconvinced. ‘And look at you!’ she continued. ‘You’ll be beating them off with a stick!’

  I looked down at my black pencil skirt and black suede courts. I’d tried to make an effort tonight despite my mixed feelings about the evening. I’d put on my slinkiest cream blouse (with diamante buttons) and my most flattering skirt, and had taken ages with my make-up. My usual three-minute pre-work slap on probably wouldn’t cut it tonight – I’d used all the players in my make-up arsenal, including a new brow pencil I was experimenting with. I was risking a slightly grumpy-looking Scouse Brow but I think it had worked okay. Sam hadn’t said anything, anyway.

  ‘You don’t think I look a bit mumsy?’

  ‘Not at all, you look classic.’

  ‘Thanks, Sam, you say all the right things.’

  I have to be a careful dresser. I have a lot to contain. There’s that phrase, isn’t there, about pouring curves into clothes; in my case, it’s more like stuffing them in, but I can hold up okay, with the right scaffolding (i.e. Spanx) and the right style of clothes. I never wear trousers, for example, they make me look like a traffic warden. I tried to lose weight once, but it didn’t really work; my face went all gaunt and I looked weird so I decided to keep my curves. Jeff always said he liked them – he said he loved my sizeable bottom – but obviously he didn’t, not that much. He now prefers to get a handle on the skinny witch that is Gabby. My curves were too much for him, that’s all I can conclude. A better man would have appreciated them forever.

  So I’d donned the scaffolding and clothes I hoped suited me. Before I’d left the house at half eight, I’d checked myself from all angles and given myself a once-over with the de-fluffing roller, then I’d thrown on my beige faux-fur coat and tottered out of the house with an enforced wiggle. This pencil skirt was on the tight side, but was a trusted favourite. I hoped Sam was right and that I looked classic and not an old fright.

  ‘Are you nearly ready?’ I asked Sam.

  ‘Nearly,’ she said. ‘I’ve just got to do my nails. Are you excited about tonight, Daryl?’

  ‘Excited? No. Looking forward to it in a weird, kind of warped-curiosity way? Yes.’

  She sat down, grabbed a fuchsia nail polish from a drawer she pulled out behind her, and started painting her nails.

  ‘Are you scared to put yourself out there, because of what happened with Jeff?’

  ‘Mmm, let me see,’ I said. I pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. ‘I loved a man, thought he loved me, gave him a daughter, was married to him for umpteen years despite him being a bit of an arse, then he ran off with my best friend. Of course I’m scared. You know I am!’

  ‘You’ll be okay, Daryl, honestly. I’ll be there. How does it feel without your wedding ring?’

  I looked down at my left hand and twiddled the space where my ring used to be.

  ‘Honestly? Half fabulous, half really, really sad. But I’m glad it’s gone.’

  ‘If you feel sad with it missing you can always get some big old costume jewellery for the other fingers.’

  ‘Hmm… there’s not looking mumsy, then there’s crazy lady!’

  ‘Ha, nothing wrong with a little bit of crazy!’

  ‘You’d know!’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she grinned. ‘You really will be fine, you know. And if you’re not, I’m here to catch you.’

  ‘Well, thank you. Don’t do it yet, though – your nails aren’t dry.’

  I finally got her out of her kitchen fifteen minutes later, but she was now faffing with her hair at the hall mirror. I tried to steer her towards the front door with both hands on her shoulders.

  ‘Come on,’ I pleaded with her as she reached for the Elnett the seventeenth time. ‘Put that down. We’ve done all we can. And it’s going to have to be very speed-y dating if we turn up half an hour late!’

  Chapter Five

  There were an awful lot of people wearing an awful lot of outlandish clothes for an event that wasn’t supposed to be fancy dress.

  Sam had insisted it wasn’t. I’d had a sudden thought about it in the car – was tonight themed, were there to be any crazy costumes involved? – but she’d assured me, no, there was no dressing up tonight. It was just normal speed dating, she’d said, reading from a flyer all about it, followed by a disco. It was over-forties, she admitted, which was actually quite a relief. Sam and I both were, obviously, and to be honest I was glad the place wasn’t going to be full of terrible toy boys where we would feel pressure to look and act young. I didn’t want to try and be down with the kids and have to pretend I knew all about Tweeting and Snapchat or whatever. I couldn’t be doing with all that. Over forty was fine.

  As soon as we walked into the packed gastro pub with the massive windows and the shiny oak floor, I turned to Sam and shook my head at her.

  ‘Sam!’

  ‘Oops.’ She put three fingers to her lips and giggled. So did I.

  There before us, some chatting away animatedly, some standing around looking nervous, were dozens of people clearly in full fancy dress. Unless of course Ringo Starr and Katy Perry (dressed in the leopard-print bikini from her Roar video) had fancied a spot of speed dating in South West London tonight. I spotted a Bublé, a Madonna (the pointy bra years), a Britney Spears (sexy flight attendant guise), two Michael Jacksons, a portly Buddy Holly and a Lady Gaga who, quite frankly, could have made a bit more of an effort – she was in a red leotard and a pair of flip-flops, and was wearing three packs of bacon round her neck, on a string. In one corner, a kaleidoscope of eighties band members and musicians had gravitated towards each other like the kindred spirits they were. Look, it’s Sting! Blimey, there’s Boy George with a beer belly! Hold onto your shuttlecocks; is that George Michael, in an ill-fitting wig and some tennis shorts? It looked like a microcosm of the Band Aid studio; somewhere amongst them, Bono would be lurking, looking earnest.

  ‘For god’s sake!’ I exclaimed. ‘Show me that flyer!’

  Sam fished it back out of her bag. I scanned it quickly, and there, across the bottom, in hot pink letters it said, Fancy dress. Theme: Music Icons through the Decades.

  ‘I didn’t read down that far,’ Sam protested.

  I looked down at my plain pencil skirt and
my silky blouse. I suppose, if pushed, I could say I’d come as someone from an eighties band… I tried to remember what those two girls off The Human League had looked like – Susanne and Thingy. I could say I’d come as one of them, the blonde one, and that yes, she’d obviously put on quite a bit of weight since the good old days of working as a waitress in a cocktail bar and gyrating behind Phil Oakey… Was she an icon though? Not especially. At least Sam had on leather leggings and that sheer black t-shirt; she could pretend she’d come as a dressed-down Cher. Or a really tall Cheryl Cole.

  Failing that, we could both look really, really dull and like we hadn’t got the memo.

  ‘Fabulous,’ I said. ‘Just brilliant.’ And we looked at each other and burst into giggles. Never mind,’ I added. ‘At least everyone looks over forty.’

  They did. There were no spring chickens amongst this little lot. Lady Gaga’s bottom was a little too creased to really carry off that leotard – bless her – had she not heard of sarongs? One of the Michael Jacksons looked like he’d risk a broken hip if he attempted a moonwalk, and the motley crew in the Eighties Corner were sporting an awful lot of wrinkles above all those ruffles, plus a crop of bristly, Old Romantic grey beards.

  ‘Yep, all over forty, as promised,’ Sam said. ‘Take a good look round, Daryl. Any one of them could be your Mr Right.’

  ‘I doubt it!’ I said, still giggling. ‘Look at them! I’ve seen more fit men down at the bingo hall.’

  ‘Not that you’ve ever been…’

  ‘Not that I’ve ever been. And check out that Justin Timberlake over there! He’s no Trouser Snake, is he? I don’t think he’s going to be rocking anyone’s body tonight.’

  ‘No, he’ll be rocking his own, in a chair.’ That sounded a bit rude so we both laughed.

  One man looked amazing, I did concede – he was the full Adam Ant complete with white lines on his cheeks and a red swashbuckling belt, but due to his leering stance and roving, slightly protruding eyes, I doubted he was much of a dandy highwayman, more a randy postman. He wouldn’t be much cop, I was sure of it, and I didn’t hold much hope for any of them, to be honest; all the men here were bound to be deadbeats who were either desperate or secretly married. I was ninety-nine percent sure I wouldn’t be leaving this room with a date.

  We queued to register. I was standing behind a girl dressed as Amy Winehouse, her hair back-combed to hair heaven and brushing against the lower reaches of an antique chandelier; my mum would be saying, ‘you’ll have someone’s eye out with that’. I felt a right twit that I wasn’t dressed up. I was already feeling uncomfortable as it was and wished I was drinking tonight. What the hell was I doing here? I’d never been to this sort of thing before; I’d never been on any kind of dating scene – I hadn’t had to. There had always been Jeff. I’d met him when I was twenty and he’d shown my brother round his first house (Jeff was an estate agent. That’s how he and Gabby conducted their affair, at lunchtimes, in furnished show homes and double beds under feature walls) and had been with him since. Prior to Jeff, I’d met boyfriends here and there – usually in clubs, like everyone else. I’d never had to do online dating, speed dating, singles’ nights, murder mystery nights which were really cop-off junkets, none of it. I really wasn’t sure it was an arena I wanted to enter. I was taking my life in my hands and I’d probably trip over spectacularly and drop it. Right down Gaga’s bacon-y cleavage, probably.

  I re-swivelled the waistband of my skirt – this skirt always twizzled round – and tried to hold my stomach in, to no avail. Sam was often suggesting fitness DVDs to me; she was currently extolling the virtues of some American woman called Kimberley Lake-Payne and her ‘amazing’ 60 Day T&A Blast DVD, as well as Cardio Power, Storm-Ripped Body Pump and Tummy Shrink Showdown. Did I want to borrow any of them? I always declined. Maybe one day I would stop eating so much chocolate and start shaking my sizeable booty in Lycra, on some kind of fitness drive, but I liked to eat. I enjoyed not counting calories or working out.

  ‘Last time I came to one of these I burnt six hundred calories on the dancefloor,’ pronounced Sam. ‘I was wearing my Fitbit, inside my bra.’

  ‘You’ve been to speed dating before? You never said.’

  ‘No, well, it wasn’t a huge success. It was when I first split with Graham.’

  ‘Did you meet anyone?’

  ‘Sadly, yes, a bloke I dated for two months. Jacob – he was really nice, at first. Except it turned out he still lived with his mum and– worse – that he was Chief Swords Person in medieval re-enactment thingies in Richmond Park, every Sunday. The mum situation I could have lived with – if you excuse the pun – but it was the muddy bayonet in the backpack which was the deal-breaker.’

  ‘I bet it was!’ I said. ‘You could have told us. It would have given us hours of fun.’

  Sam shrugged. ‘It wasn’t my finest hour. I’m hoping for better tonight.’

  ‘So, what happens after we register?’ I said, twizzling my waistband again. ‘Do we get name badges? I don’t want a hole pricked in this blouse.’

  ‘No, we don’t want any pricks!’ laughed Sam, and the girl in front of us turned round and smiled wryly.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ she said.

  It didn’t exactly restore any confidence. I had a sudden desire to go home and put my jammies on. Sam must have read my thoughts.

  ‘Come on, it’ll be fine. There are some nice men out there, there has to be! Sometimes they’re right under your nose.’

  I caught the eye of the other Michael Jackson – complete with red leather Thriller jacket, white socks and black slip-on shoes – and he gave me a wrinkly wink. I really wasn’t sure about that.

  After we’d registered, and I’d got four whacking great holes in my blouse courtesy of the girl on the desk who might want to invest in some reading glasses, we stood among the expectant crowd waiting to be told what to do. Sam ran through the list of questions she had for prospective suitors, written in the Notes section of her phone. They included: ‘What do you like doing at the weekends?’; ‘What is your view on the healing power of crystals?’; ‘Do you know how to operate a washing machine?’ and ‘Have you ever, or will you ever, own a status dog?’

  ‘What on earth is a status dog?’ I asked.

  ‘A scary dog. You know, like a bulldog or something. The ones men walk down the street with, in order to look hard. It would be a deal-breaker. I don’t like dogs much as it is.’

  I laughed. ‘Right. Okay.’

  ‘You have to break down your criteria,’ said Sam. ‘I know you think I’m away with the fairies half the time, but I can also be completely practical when it comes to men.’

  ‘I know you can,’ I said. Sam had been known to come up with pie charts detailing her compatibility with the men she was dating.

  What were my criteria? I wondered. I hadn’t had to think about them for a long time – Jeff and I had just stumbled into going out and then getting serious, having a baby and getting married. I don’t remember ever trying to match him up with a list of criteria. What qualities would I absolutely have to have in a man? Deal-breakers? Once again, I came up with four things: nice, kind, good sense of humour, won’t ever cheat. It wasn’t really much to ask for, was it?

  Finally, after the crowd of icons (and me and Sam) had got increasingly noisy and restless and keen to just get on with the bloody thing (or was that just me?), a man in a bright yellow jacket and slicked back hair, looking like something out of a holiday camp and introducing himself as Nigel Smith-Fortescue, took to the mike on the tiny stage at the end of the bar.

  ‘Welcome everyone,’ he boomed. ‘You all look amaaaaazing! Well done, people!’ Oh god, he was one of those. Sam was already grinning and silently offering him a rude, derogatory signal, with her left hand, behind her bag.

  ‘Stop it!’ I whispered.

  ‘Well…’ she said. He was awful, already. He was doing that thing where you point your finger and doff it at people in turn, with an annoying
look on your face.

  ‘You people may have read in our natty little flyer that here at Icons Speed Date we like to shake things up a bit, make things a bit more interesting.’ He laughed very loudly, as though appreciating an invisible joke. Here we go, I thought. What on earth was it going to be? Group-chanting? Line dancing? Twister? ‘We have three rounds,’ he continued. ‘Three innovative, super trendy, date-tastic rounds.’

  ‘Hurray!’ shouted out the clearly already-pissed Buddy Holly, his glasses steamed up. Everyone laughed and Nigel Smith-Fortescue gave an over-charming smile.

  ‘Thank you, my friend. Thank you.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The first round – that’s Round One, people! – which you’ll adore, I know you will, is non-verbal communication. Vis a vis: miming.’ Sam nudged me. She did a Marcel Marceau box-making mime thing. I rolled my eyes. Miming! Oh gawd. If I’d wanted to not speak to anyone I could have just stayed at home.

  Nigel warmed to his theme. ‘You’re not allowed to taaaalk to anyone, you must communicate only by gestures, gesticulation, the power of miiiiiime.’

  A lot of the men looked quite cocky, and were very obviously looking the women up and down. They were imagining what gesticulations they could muster to impress the ladies, no doubt. I wasn’t hopeful I’d be impressed by anyone as I looked from one disappointing, often overly made-up face to another.

  ‘The second round – that’s Round Two, people! – is the round we call The Eyes Have It. Do you like that? The Eyes Have It? I thought that one up, didn’t I Isobel?’ A lady in the wings, in the Madonna ‘Like a Virgin’ get-up of short, white wedding dress and long white lacy gloves, gave him the ‘A-OK’ sign, with her gloved hand. ‘You have to stare across the table into each other’s eyes for two minutes. Really look into each other’s soouuuls. We reckon it will sort the birds from the bees, the wheat from the chaff.’ He looked so delighted with himself. Isobel was laughing in the wings, her teeth catching the light. She must be his significant other, I thought. Rather her than me.

  So far, the whole thing sounded excruciating. I never would have agreed to come if I’d known this sort of thing was on the agenda. I had never mimed in my life – why would I have needed to? – and I hadn’t looked into anyone’s eyes for years. Jeff and I had long left behind the eye-locking during sex thing; in fact, we had long left behind the whole sex thing, full stop. I’d been blind and stupid, really. Really stupid. We weren’t doing it – I thought – because we were busy and a bit lazy and doesn’t it all drop off after forty anyway (not that, the libido thing…) and it was now all about closeness and cuddles (not that I got many of those) and doing the crossword together and stuff… when in actual fact Jeff was doing my best friend.