It's Got To Be Perfect

by Claire Allan

  And it was.

  If the Taliban made evening gowns they would look like this one. In fact, the only things Pearse had left out of his choice of attire for me were the actual sackcloth and ashes. Or perhaps a giant scarlet A for Adulteress emblazoned across the front. There was a minimal amount of flesh on show – my hands and neck area were just about free. The rest of me was swathed in yards of heavy black material which neither flattered me nor made me feel remotely comfortable. In fact, as I hobbled down the stairs of my house to the awaiting car, I could already feel myself break into a sticky sweat.

  I had done my best – my hair was teased to perfection, piled high on my head in a funky up-do. I had accessorized as best I could with a chunky silver necklace and some gorgeous silver heels – but none of my efforts took away from the fact I looked as if I should be in the backstage crew of the local pantomime.

  Perhaps Pearse was hoping I would fade into the background – just be there to hand drinks around and smile when necessary. But if he had wanted me to be invisible, he could have just uninvited me. I was only going out of a sense of loyalty and, if I admit it, guilt. I could just as easily have stayed at home and contemplated my date with Chewy – or washed my hair – or something equally exciting.

  However, I felt so completely conspicuous – so totally awkward and uncomfortable in this get-up – that there was no way I was going to be able to fade into the scenery. My blazing red cheeks from the growing heat of the synthetic fibres would be enough to make sure I stuck out like a sore thumb.

  I wriggled my way into the taxi and tried to take the sheen off my face with some pressed powder. A lot of pressed powder.

  I arrived at Manna looking and feeling like one of the restaurant’s signature dishes – cooked to perfection and emitting a fine aroma. Pearse was waiting for me at the door – a fake smile plastered on his face for his assembled guests to see.

  “Annie,” he said cheerily, “you look good.”

  I grimaced at him before forcing a smile onto my face and kissing him on the cheek. His skin felt cold, just like his entire demeanour.

  “Let’s go in,” he said, gripping my hand in his and leading me through the throngs of the great and the good, smiling as he went.

  He listened intently as partners were introduced. Occasionally he nodded in my direction but he didn’t introduce me. He didn’t tell people I ever had been, or was ever likely to be, anything to him.

  The thing is, it then dawned on me, that during these types of soirées in the past – and not just when we had broken up because I had slept with someone else – he never introduced me as anyone important. Occasionally I got: “This is Annie. She works for NorthStar.” But I never got: “This is Annie, she is my girlfriend” or “Meet my other half, Annie.” Or “Have you met my lovely partner, Annie?”

  No, I was Annie. Just Annie. Who worked for NorthStar. There was never any hint that I meant anything more to him than someone with good contacts with the local media and the ability to write a good press release.

  That night was to be no different – except I was to feel as physically uncomfortable as I did emotionally. And all of it – every last second of it – was down to Pearse.

  So I trudged about in my designer sackcloth and ashes with my smile never fading while inside all I could think of was that I wanted to be home and as far away from this lie as possible.

  I didn’t talk to Fionn about the night with Pearse. I didn’t tell her that it had all gone on too long until he finally said I could go home at around twelve thirty. He didn’t call me a taxi. I made my own way home, stripping off the horrendous dress as soon as I was inside the door and bundling it into a bin bag. I would return it to Pearse as soon as possible. Perhaps he could get some use out of it with his next trophy missus.

  In fact, I buried the whole sorry affair in the back of my mind and carried on as normal.

  I went to work and had a laugh with Fionn. She continued to find pictures of increasingly hairy men – some of which frankly disturbed me – and email them at semi-regular intervals. We had our usual Fake Smoke Breaks – except now with the thought of the dress of her dreams firmly in her mind, Fionn was actually considering taking a real smoke break or ten to curb her appetite. She had given up smoking three years before, but she still missed it. Desperately. I saw that faraway look of longing while we huddled in the smoking shelter outside work and her nostrils caught the faint sniff of a smoking butt smouldering in the overstuffed ashtray.

  “Yes, I know it’s bad for me,” she said, “but I’m thinking, you know, as a short-term thing, it could stop me munching on Maltesers of an afternoon and that dress could look really spectacular on me.”

  “The dress already looks spectacular on you,” I reassured her, but I don’t think that’s what she wanted to hear. I think she wanted me to say it was perfectly okay to give into a three-year-old craving that was refusing to die but, seeing as I was on a self-imposed wine ban and narky with it, she was looking for support for nasty habits in the wrong place.

  “But it could look really spectacular,” she said, gazing forlornly at a colleague trying to light a Silk Cut despite the wind howling round his lighter.

  “But you would stink of fags and that’s never a good thing for a bride,” I challenged. “I mean, you want to be sexy and floral and beautiful – not yellow-toothed and smelling like you just fell out of an ashtray.”

  My mind flashed back to the staleness of my flat after my night of passion with the Hairy-Backed One and I tried to remember whether or not his teeth were stained yellow and whether or not he predominantly smelled of smoke. Nope – musky. He had a musky, masculine scent. A shiver of excitement shot through me. It was a nice smell.

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said, thankfully not noticing the flush of colour rising through my face and turning my cheeks pink with the memory of a very musky man making me scream out in pleasure (or perhaps that was a reaction to the carpet-like burns?).

  “Of course I’m right. I’m always right, sometimes . . .” I said, turning her physically away from the waft of smoke making its way towards her. “Maybe we should cut back on these fake breaks if you want to resist temptation.”

  “Very funny. Very funny indeed,” she laughed. “And spend all day, with no reprieve, looking at Bawb and trying to figure out if he is actually half-human, half-robot? No. No, I’ll not smoke. Promise. But don’t take away the fake breaks. I need the fake breaks.”

  She looked kind of desperate and I felt sorry for her. She was showing a little extra strain lately. You would think that with a big wedding to plan she would be on Cloud Nine but she seemed distracted. As we walked back to the office – already having set a time for our next FSB – I vowed I would have a chat with her about it later and make sure she was fine.

  Ideally we would have had that chat over a glass of wine, but I was determined not to break my self-imposed ban until my date with Chewbacca. Instead I vowed to see if she wanted a coffee after work and we could take it from there. I also wanted to ask her whether she thought it was worth my while shaving my legs before my big date on Friday night. It wasn’t so much that I wanted her approval should I choose to jump into the sack with the Hairy One again – more I wanted to gauge whether or not he would even notice, considering how hirsute he was himself. To be honest, it could be a very nice plus point to any possible relationship – the ability to forget about the necessity of always being baby-bottom smooth in the leg (or other) department.

  I sent her a cheeky email – having found a remarkably gory picture of a man with the longest ear-hair on record – and made sure to tell her that, as far as I could remember, this was one area in which Chewie was at least groomed – and then mentioned the coffee.

  I watched her face for a reaction and she did smile and then typed back.

  “Sorry. Can’t tonight. Going to see Rebecca to continue the Honeymoongate discussions and then Emma is coming back to ours for yet another riveting Disney DVD.
I’m plumping for Enchanted as at least in that the wee girl’s mammy has had the good grace to feck off for good.”

  It had been easy – too easy, I suppose – for me to be so caught up in my relationship issues and complete breakdown of my coveted Life Plan that I had forgotten all about Rebecca and her unhelpfulness regarding the wedding and honeymoon. I knew Fionn adored Emma but surely she was entitled to a week of bonking and romance without the fear of an inquisitive five-year-old popping her head around the corner at any stage to ask a host of awkward and embarrassing questions?

  I typed back: “Well, I’m here to talk about it when you want to. And if you don’t think talking will do any good, I’m more than willing to help you plot a devious and evil plan to sort out the whole situation.”

  I did think, briefly, before I hit the Send button. I wondered, should Rebecca mysteriously fall off the earth the week before the wedding, would my emails be checked and possibly used in evidence against me? But I decided to live dangerously anyway. Anyone who knew me knew I didn’t have an evil bone in my body – apart from maybe Pearse who was probably around now convincing himself I was the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Fionn replied with a simple thanks and I decided it was best to leave it for then. She would open up when she was ready to and not a moment before – and, besides, it wasn’t really any of my business.

  Apart from my secret envy of the Fionn-Alex relationship, I also found the looming marriage hard to accept for another reason. Alex was essentially marrying the closest thing I had to a soul mate. He was the most important person in her life now – when I suppose I liked to think that once upon a time I was. In a non-lesbian way of course. I didn’t have secret Fionn fantasies – it was just hard to accept that she was closer to someone else (a smelly boy of all people!) than she was to me. That thought alone reconfirmed to me that my previous relationship must have been ultimately flawed – because I never felt closer to Pearse than to Fionn. If I’m honest there were days when I felt more intrinsically linked to Bob and all his god-awful gobshitedness than I did to Pearse.

  No, I had to step back and, for the moment anyway, leave this dilemma to Fionn and Alex to work out for themselves. And besides – I had bigger fish to fry. I had to actually try and sell some ads this month and I had to decide what to wear for my big date – including whether or not to consider sexy undies. I cringed when I thought of the combo I was wearing the last time I had met with Chewbacca. They were at least black and matching – but owed more to the power of lycra and soft cotton than lace and sex appeal. They were built for comfort not for speed. Then again I hadn’t been planning on showing them to anyone. And much as I liked to look semi-decent on a day-to-day basis, I was not one of those ladies who trussed herself up in sexy undies for an ordinary day at work. It would have made me feel really sluttish and neither Fionn nor I were sure that Bob didn’t have some Super Sense or X-ray vision (after all, he was the man who could silently glide through a room) which would enable him to tell and then make some sleazy remark. His ordinary remarks were sleazy enough without giving him food for thought.

  As if to prove a point, he appeared beside me just as I clicked onto a sexy undies website and I had to click as fast as my mouse would allow me before he had the chance to say something entirely inappropriate.

  “Interesting,” he said with a raised eyebrow.

  “Love, Sex and Magic are thinking of stocking some of this stuff,” I bluffed and he looked me up and down before smiling again.

  “Yes, yes, good idea,” he said. “But avoid the red lace. It’s a little too slutty.”

  He walked off smiling and I decided I needed another fake break to get the mental image of Bob ogling me in a red lace basque out of my head.

  8

  It was hard to get through Friday without thinking about the big date. Not least because I still hadn’t figured out how to explain the fact that I didn’t know Chewie’s real name. It would be interesting, to say the least, to try and get through the evening without making a complete eejit of myself.

  I had decided in the end to avoid any overtly sexy underwear, although I had nipped in to Marks and Spencer in my lunch break and bought something new and just a little lacy. I had also shaved my legs, just in case. In a fit of madness I had coated myself in fake tan on the Thursday evening and tried to sleep amid the fug of sickly sweet fumes rising from my body. Thankfully, the effort of almost gassing myself with a mixture of coconut and chemicals paid off, and by Friday morning I had a healthy glow about me.

  It didn’t stop Bob singing the song about the Oompa Loompas from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as I walked into work that morning but I silenced him with a withering look and a chocolate doughnut. He was a very lucky man not to have said doughnut rammed down his throat at the speed of light – and I think he knew it. He backed off pretty soon after and stayed in his office – which was a blessed relief.

  It left me free to distract myself from my forthcoming date with booking ads and talking to clients and only very occasionally emailing Fionn – who still seemed to be in a bit of a fug. We had agreed to go shoe-shopping the following day to find the perfect shoes to go with her perfect dress but she didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about it any more.

  She hadn’t told me exactly what had happened with Rebecca on Wednesday night when they met to discuss the honeymoon plans but I knew that it had not been good and that she was seriously contemplating my offer to put in place a vengeful plan of attack against her partner’s ex.

  The thing that galled her most, I think, was that Rebecca had seemed perfectly sane and lovely up to the point that Fionn and Alex announced their engagement. In fact, Fionn used to say how she just couldn’t believe that they all got along so amiably – especially when a young child was involved.

  We would talk about it the next day though – whether Fionn wanted to or not. I made myself that promise.

  In the meantime I would focus on my first date in a very long time. I felt a mixture of what can only be described as sheer terror and utter excitement. It felt thrilling – the thought of meeting someone new, experiencing those first flushes of lust again. And who knows what might come of it.

  Sure it hadn’t been in my Life Plan – which was still languishing under the chest of drawers in my room – but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be a good thing. In fact, even though I wasn’t sure if this particular man was the good thing I was looking for, I was increasingly confident that I was doing the right thing.

  And, it was Friday, my week-long walk in the desert abstaining from alcohol was officially over, and I fully intended to enjoy a glass of two of crisp white wine while I got ready at home. I wasn’t sure which I was looking forward to more – the drink or the date. And yes, I know that makes me sound like an awful lush but sometimes a girl just needs a drink – and when she is contemplating a new relationship at thirty-two is one of those times.

  I managed to leave work a little early – in enough time to allow myself a long soak in the bath with the aforementioned glass of wine. I took time to dress in a gorgeous black wraparound dress (no hint of Taliban-style cover-up necessary), with killer heels that would no doubt make me want to beg for an early death should I have to walk further than from the taxi to the restaurant. I slipped on some stockings too – which made me feel very naughty indeed. I just could not countenance putting on a pair of normal tights – regardless of what would or wouldn’t happen as the evening progressed – ordinary tights made me feel like a frumpy fifty-something-year-old with neither the desire for nor probability of any kind of action any time soon. I wore ordinary tights a lot in the latter stages of my relationship with Pearse.

  For the Hairy One I even straightened my own hair – slapping on a dozen different hair-care products to promote shine, minimise frizz, hold some volume and keep my hair looking fresh as a daisy amid whatever might happen.

  My make-up was applied with precision – there was no mere slathering on of foundation and
quickly dabbing at blemishes with a stubby concealer. I used Touche Éclat, loose powder, mascara and an eyeliner. This was a full-on assault on my face and, even if I say so myself, I was quite impressed with the end result when I looked in the mirror. I looked half-decent. Even a wee bit sexy. And as I spritzed some Thierry Mugler Alien on my neck, and down my cleavage, I felt a wee bit sexy.

  The taxi arrived magically on time and I managed to make it down the stairs to the ground floor without killing myself (having long ago learned the lesson that you don’t put the killer heels on until you have descended from your top-floor flat).

  It did feel kind of weird driving on past Manna and not dropping in for a complementary glass of fizz and some stuffed mushrooms. But it also felt deliciously wicked to think that on that evening at least I might be getting my stuffing elsewhere.

  We had agreed to meet at Karma – a modern, sleek lounge bar and restaurant on the banks of the Foyle which served the nicest tapas in town.

  The barman gave me a strange look when I walked in, alone. He was used to seeing me on the arm of Pearse – on some of our many expeditions to check out the competition. I swear I actually saw a look of relief pass over his face when he realised that no one was following me in the door. It wasn’t that they had anything to fear from Manna but the presence of Pearse Campbell in any restaurant in town sent people into a bit of a flap. As well as being the head honcho at Manna, he also fancied himself as a celebrity chef and had even been on Ready Steady Cook a couple of times. He was ridiculously proud of what he could whip together from just a sweet potato, cheap cut of meat and tin of olives. He wouldn’t serve anything like it in his restaurant, of course, but that didn’t stop him being proud.