It's Got To Be Perfect

by Claire Allan

  “Hi Annie,

  I hope you don’t find this email too weird, or too stalkerish. I can assure you I’m not a weird ankle fetishist – although the fact that I have told you that I am not an ankle festishist will probably convince you that I am a bit unhinged.

  But I’m not. I just wanted to check how you were and since I had your business card with your email on it, I thought it would be slightly less freaky to email you rather than phone you.

  Which brings me to my next point. I figure emails are quite easily ignored and I thought I would give you the opportunity to ignore this if you felt you had to or wanted to. I promise that if I don’t get a response from this I will take the hint, destroy all contact details and never annoy your head again, but I figured if I did not at least send this I could be doing both me and you a great disservice.

  Anyway, I’m rambling and not getting to the point. I’m well aware of the fact I’m most likely making an unholy eejit of myself, but here is the deal.

  I’m in your neck of the woods next week for a conference. You can check the details if you like. I’ve attached a very fancy flier. And I wondered if I could take you out for dinner?

  Now, I fully appreciate that what I am going to say next may indeed make me look as if I was lying to you when I mentioned the not-being-a-mad-stalker thing. But I saw you in Dublin, at the coffee shop, two days after we met. You were hiding behind a magazine and I guess you didn’t see me (or maybe you were ignoring me?).

  I wanted to come over and say hello, but something stopped me. Maybe I just got the impression from talking to you that the absolute last thing you needed in your life was some weird Dublin gobshite coming over and chatting you up while you were trying to read your novel.

  Not that I would have been chatting you up. Well, not exactly.

  I’m a believer in fate. I know that sounds more than a little wanky but I believe there was a reason you gave me your business card when we met that day.

  I kicked myself for not talking to you the second day because I really did enjoy talking with you when we met. I figure if I can get that level of conversation out of you when you are in pain with a busted ankle, we could really have some craic when you aren’t in pain.

  So if you want to, then please let me know, and if you don’t, well, I won’t take it personally. Well, not that personally anyway.

  Hoping I haven’t freaked you out entirely,

  Owen”

  Okay, so it wasn’t going to pay my mortgage. But he liked me. That was perhaps a very smug way to think – but it was nice to have someone like me. It was especially nice to have someone who had never slept with me, nor thought I could further their career, like me. I liked that he believed in fate even though I had seen him at the coffee shop that day and I had hid from him. I liked that he had sent me an email – and not bombarded me with phone calls or sent me edible knickers. I liked his sense of humour. I liked that he made me smile. I liked that there was no pressure to reply – that it was all in my hands. I liked that he liked me and that he had taken the time to actually think out a message, write it and send it. It was very romantic. I imagined, if we had lived in times gone by, he would have sat at a bureau and penned me a letter with pen and ink and posted it off, waited days for my response in a very Mr Darcy kind of a way. I liked that and the way it made me feel. I liked him. And I thought it was entirely possible that I would indeed allow him to take me out for dinner when he visited Derry. What I liked most of all though was that for ten minutes he distracted me from worrying about work, and the email from Bob which had yet to materialise in my inbox.

  I lifted the phone to call Fionn – and not just to ask if Bob had come out of his office yet or given her any indication to my fate.

  “He emailed,” I breathed excitedly into the phone.

  “Bob?” she asked, tension in her voice.

  “No. Owen.”

  “Who the fuck is Owen?”

  “The ankle guy!”

  “The ankle guy?”

  “The guy who saved me when I was almost run down by a Dublin taxi for the love of God!”

  I could almost hear the penny drop.

  “Oooooh,” she said, a note of delight in her voice, “He emailed?”

  “He very much did!”

  “And?”

  “He’s coming to Derry next week. He wants to take me to dinner.”

  “Whatever you do,” Fionn said, “please do not take him to Manna. That would just be tempting fate.”

  31

  Bob didn’t email or call. Five o’clock came and went and my phone remained silent. Fionn was able to tell me he hadn’t left his office at all. He hadn’t so much as uttered a business cliché all day. He didn’t even make a weird fingers-as-guns gesture as he left. If Fionn didn’t know any better she would have sworn something was wrong.

  I joked that he was probably pining after me and she had given a half-hearted laugh in reply and had then turned the conversation back to Owen and his email.

  “Have you replied?”

  “Not yet. I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure about what exactly?” she said incredulously. “He seems lovely.”

  “How can you say that? You know nothing about him!”

  “I know he saved your life! The days of knights in shining armour are kind of gone, you know. Most men would have let that damn taxi hit you and then taken a picture on their phone to sell it to the papers.”

  “Oh, my Fionn, when did you become so cynical? I thought you were well-loved-up at the moment?”

  “Well, I am, but I’m willing to accept Alex is one of the last good ones. I wouldn’t want to be out there now . . .” She paused briefly, realising what she had said and then apologised. “I didn’t mean that, not the way it sounded anyway.”

  “It’s okay, Bridezilla,” I soothed. “You’re allowed to be smug. Speaking of which – how are things with the Wicked Witch?”

  “Rebecca? Fine actually. No major tantrums. I’ve actually told Alex he can invite her to the wedding if he wants.”

  I gasped – the vision of Rebecca screaming “It Shoulda Been Me” at the top of her lungs in the church jumping into my head.

  “Do you think that is wise?” I said.

  “I not only think it is wise, I think it is exceptionally magnanimous of me. It has earned me major brownie points. And just think how excited Emma will be to have her mammy there.”

  “But what if she makes a scene?” I couldn’t help but think this had disaster-in-waiting written all over it.

  “I told you, she’s a changed woman. She even recommended a hairdresser to me the other day and I checked her out and she’s not a madwoman who would dye my hair purple and make me look like I had a bird’s nest growing out of my head.”

  “Just be careful,” I warned. “Leopards don’t change their spots. Not that easily anyway.”

  “And I thought I was supposed to be the cynical one?” she said, a smile in her voice, before hanging up.

  I looked at my watch and realised that Darcy would be home by now so I decided to call her – just to check she was doing okay and not lying in a lovelorn slump on the sofa sobbing into a hankie.

  The phone rang a couple of times and Darcy answered, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Are you okay, sis?” I asked.

  She sighed. A deep sigh. The kind of sigh that made me want to get into my battered car and forget my absolute terror at the very thought of driving on the M50 and go and see her right there and right then. Let’s face it, I didn’t have much else to be getting on with.

  “Grand,” she said. No more, no less.

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” she said, no more, no less.

  “You don’t sound okay?”

  “Well, I am. Well, I’m as okay as can be. No, no. I’m fine. Honest. A bit tired. A bit emotional. A bit left on the shelf, but we shall overcome. You don’t come from Derry without having a bit of fighting spirit about you.”

>   “Good woman,” I said, my heart not really believing she was in fighting mood.

  “And you?” she asked. “Any goss?”

  It was then I had to tell her I was suspended, and waiting for an email, and recovering from receiving another email from Owen.

  “Well, cling on to the good,” she said. “Agree to meet Owen. He sounds nice. And the rest of the shite – worry about it another day.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “I’m always right. Don’t walk away from chances like this, Annie. I know you’ve had a tough time with men lately and maybe you aren’t in the right headspace for it, but chances like these don’t come along often. Owen sounds like a gentleman. Let him prove to you that he is – and if he can’t do that and turns out to be a twat, then at least you will know and you won’t have to spend the rest of your life wondering if he was the one who got away.”

  “Fair play to you, still believing in romance.”

  “What else have I to believe in?” she asked, and I thought I heard her voice break a little.

  “It will get easier,” I offered.

  “I hope so,” She replied. “I just miss him, Annie. I miss the silly things – like how he would have a cup of tea waiting for me when I got up in the morning, or how he would run me a bath if he was in from work before me. I miss how he kissed my forehead. I miss his Dublin accent – which I know is weird because there are Dublin accents all around me. I miss us. I miss being a part of us – a couple. Darcy and Gerry. Gerry and Darcy. I just miss it.”

  “I know,” I said. It was all I could offer and it seemed hopelessly inadequate. “I can come down again? I’ve nothing else on.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “We’ve been through this already. I have to get on with my life and you have to get on with yours. Lovely and all as it would be, I need to learn to be okay with missing him.”

  “Okay, honey, if you’re sure.”

  “I’m not sure at all, but I’m trying to be.”

  “Darcy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  We said our goodbyes, then I switched on my laptop and opened my email folder. Clicking the reply button, I typed a message out to Owen saying that I would take up his offer of dinner and that I was looking forward to it. I did, however, as recommended, tell him I would book the restaurant. I would opt for somewhere as far away from Manna as possible.

  Bob emailed the next day. He thanked me for my work on Haven. He said he would take into consideration my remarks and that he would be back to me as soon as he could. There was no indication whatsoever as to how long “as soon as he could” would actually be.

  Owen replied the following day. I liked that he hadn’t jumped to reply to my email – even if it had made me like a cat on a hot tin roof the entire day. My flat had never been so clean. I had never walked so far. I had become the queen of distraction therapy – spending time on the phone to Fionn debating whether or not he would reply at all, and time on the phone to Darcy just to make sure she was still coping, which she was. Just.

  Part of me, especially now that I knew Bob wouldn’t be emailing any time soon, still wanted to trek down there to be with her. But I knew she would kill me if I did and, no matter how bad life seemed right then and there at that moment, I didn’t want to die. Not with the prospect of a nice date with a nice man who liked me in the offing.

  When Owen replied he said he was delighted to hear from me. He said his schedule was pretty packed but if I wanted to choose a restaurant I could, because he knew feck all about Derry. He did say he would have asked me to eat with him in his hotel but he didn’t want to come across as a mad stalker. He knew he was skating on thin ice as far as that was concerned anyway, he said.

  I replied back (after an hour) to say I would book somewhere and I looked forward to it. It felt decadently romantic to be conducting our wooing over email. Regardless of what Fionn had to say on the matter, I knew I was not being a “big fat coward” by not just picking up the phone and calling him. I was thinking of self-preservation and nothing else. If I could type my replies into an email there was less chance of me saying the wrong thing – and Lord knows I had said a lot of the wrong thing lately.

  Cabin fever set in on Thursday evening – despite my long walks to distract myself from the endless waiting for email inboxes to kick in. So Fionn invited me over to her house where I would help her stick stamps onto the wedding invites and plan her hen night in greater detail.

  She wanted to ask Rebecca along which, as you can imagine, I didn’t think was a good idea. But as the days passed my darling friend seemed to be morphing into more of a Bridezilla than I’d thought possible. She was even rethinking the pink shoes – worried they weren’t wedding-y or designer-y enough. I told her to quit her paranoia and to admire them for the work of art they were. She gave me a death stare that prompted me to spend an hour and a half online scouting the finest of wedding foot-apparel before meeting her that night. (I had the time, and it was a good distraction technique – plus it was one which allowed me to be on the computer at the same time, so therefore in close proximity to my email. Result.)

  I arrived at her house with a print-out of ten different shoes – all of various levels of pain-inducing prettiness. I also came armed with a list of the best restaurants in town which weren’t Manna and a list of limos for hire for her big night on the tiles.

  I also brought two tubes of Pringles which she turned her nose up at because the wedding-dress diet was on in earnest and there was, in her own words, no effing way she was going to waddle down the aisle. I wanted to take her and make her look in a mirror and realise that even if she put on three stone between now and the Big Day there would still not be a hope in hell of her ever waddling anyway. How I longed for her little waist and slim thighs – the ability to wear a short skirt bare-legged without the risk of chafing. I don’t think Fionn had ever chafed in her life. The cow.

  As we sat down at the kitchen table, Emma came dancing in – her perfect pink tutu bouncing up and down as she pranced towards us.

  “Hi, Auntie Annie,” she smiled her gorgeous gap-tooth smile.

  “Hey, Ems.”

  “Are you planning Fionn’s big party? She said she is going to have a party just for me and her but I can’t go to the big night out because there’ll be wine and I’m not allowed wine. Fionn says it’s cos only big girls are allowed wine, but I’m a big girl, am’nt I?”

  “Course you are, princess,” I said, just momentarily wondering what it would be like to see Emma just a wee bit drunk on wine. There was a reason no one let me loose on their children. Not that I would actually get her drunk, mind. I wasn’t that bad. I would just be tempted. For the craic. And, yes, I knew that made me a bad person and that I was probably going to hell for it.

  “I’m gonna be a flowergirl,” Emma declared proudly. “I have a beautiful dress. It’s the prettiest dress in the whole world.”

  It would have been churlish for me to tell her that in fact, no, it was not the prettiest dress in the whole world and that mine was. It might have made her cry and it started to dawn on me that I was perhaps the most horrible person in the entire world. Not only had I already plotted to get a five-year-old drunk, I was now thinking of making her cry. I bit my tongue. Maybe my spinster-of-the-parish fate was a good thing. I wouldn’t make a good mother. I would probably emotionally or physically scar them and that would be a Very Bad Thing.

  “I’m sure you’ll be gorgeous,” I said with a smile.

  “My mammy says I will even be more gorgeous than Fionn,” she whispered at me, with a wicked grin that made her look just like her mammy.

  “I’m sure you will both be just as gorgeous as each other,” I said, deciding to keep that nugget of information from Fionn.

  Emma was clearly not amused. She huffed, blowing the soft curls off her forehead, and went over to her dolls across the room.

  It was just as
well. I might have had to pull a scary face at her or tell her that not only would she not be as nice as Fionn, she wouldn’t even hold a candle to me. Once again I sensed this would be a Very Bad Thing and another step on my road to hell. No, it was very wise indeed that no man in this world felt the need to marry me, let alone impregnate me.

  Fionn walked back into the room, carrying a couple of mugs of tea. “Sorry I’ve nothing stronger, it’s a work night.”

  I grimaced.

  Fionn bit her lip. “Sorry. Was that disgustingly insensitive?”

  “Not disgustingly insensitive, but verging on it,” I said with a wry smile. “Well, I have lots to do tomorrow as well. I’ve to phone more people about Haven – even though I might not have a job any more – and then I have to watch Loose Women and clean the grouting in my bathroom. After that I have to shave my legs.”

  “And email Mr Lover Man Owen,” she said with a wink.

  “Who’s Mr Lovermanowen?” the bat-eared child in the corner piped up. “What’s a loverman?”

  “It’s a grown-up thing, pet,” Fionn said.

  “Ah, like ‘afternoon nookie’,” Emma chimed, replaying the conversation from several weeks ago.

  “Does that child never forget?” I choked.