by Neal Doran
A look passed between Rob and Hannah.
‘Well, we enjoy the ten to twelve weeks before that,’ said Hannah, with a teasing glint. ‘Y’know, where we sit around and dissect every passing exchange, glance and email for signs of a come-on. It’s romantic and sweet watching you building for your run-up.’
‘Seriously,’ Rob chipped in, ‘and I’d tell you when you’re being a boring arsehole because I love you, but I enjoy picking apart the significance of some hot barista saying “morning” to every other customer that comes into the coffee shop, but saying “good morning” to you. It’s the little details in life…’
‘There’s a lot that goes on in the nuance,’ I agreed.
‘You gotta love the nuance,’ confirmed Rob.
For a moment, in the nostalgia of past failure, I actually started feeling better. But then the phrase ‘you look smashing’ roared back to the front of my brain, knocking my battered spirit off its feet again. I also remembered that I now have to get my coffee on the way to work from a greasy spoon that uses instant coffee and a suspiciously stained kettle, because I’m too ashamed to go back into the Costa after I turned up that morning with a bunch of flowers.
‘No, I’m done. I quit,’ I announced. ‘I’m giving up on women. I’ve had enough. I can’t do it so I’m not going to try. I’ll become a spinster. Some people have no ear for music; some people aren’t natural athletes. Some — down to some inborn absence of hand-eye coordination — can’t do things that come fairly naturally to everyone else, like riding a bike or driving a car. I’m clearly naturally deficient in the pheromones that make men attractive to women, so I’m just going to accept it, and move on.’
‘But, sport, you can’t do any of those other things either. What are you leaving yourself with?’ asked Rob.
I gave a small shrug. The idea of the romantic loner was fermenting in my head. Me in a big house, listening to Radio 4 all the time and arguing with an ethereal John Humphrys. Lots of couple friends coming over for elaborately prepared dinner parties. The neighbours admiring the slightly mysterious figure next door:
‘Never married, you say?’
‘Some say his fiancée died saving a child from a terrorist atrocity…’
‘You don’t think he’s actually, you know…?’
‘No, he just likes to look smart, and throws legendary Eurovision parties.’
‘OK, I’m not having this,’ Rob said, cutting in on my daydreaming. ‘Bollocks to this quitting talk. You’re a decent bloke, you’re kind and you care about people. Any day now your female peers are going to wake up and realise they need to stop chasing bastards, and find the kind of guy that’s going to get up to do three a.m. nappy changes and supply foot rubs on demand. And you’re going to be in your element. We know you’re a great guy, and it’s about time the rest of the world caught up. And frankly, if you do pursue a life of solitude it’s just going to mean you spend even more time at ours, which will get old very quickly.’
‘He’s got a point, you know,’ agreed Hannah, ‘not about being at ours — you’re more welcome than he is half the time — but it does sound a little drastic. And there are millions of women who’d be lucky to have you.’
‘And we’re going to find you one,’ Rob said with a finger click. ‘We’re taking control of your entire romantic life.’
‘Ooh!’ said Hannah, rapidly embracing the idea. ‘We could do that, couldn’t we?’
‘Absolutely, dollface. All decision-making taken out of your hands. All choices made by us.’
‘Oh! Oh! Oh! We can practise you doing chat-up lines and tell you what you have to wear!’
‘We handle the details. You just show up and be yourself.’
‘Yes! You’d have to come back and tell us absolutely everything!’
‘Like he doesn’t already. We’ll get you loads of dates. H’s address book must be loaded with single girls we can easily set you up with for starters.’
‘Oh.’ Hannah slammed on the brakes. ‘Well, I’m not sure how many of them are really on the lookout at the moment, or not already loved-up. But, anyway, we probably don’t want to just take the easy option, now, do we?’
To that point, my spirits had been rising again. I gave Hannah a look.
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be great!’ she continued, recovering her enthusiasm. ‘We can be Team Dan, and have a secret handshake and special T-shirts.’
The two of them started talking about how they could orchestrate a campaign that, from what I could gather, would turn me into one of London’s most eligible bachelors. And make them rich from having tumbled upon the next big reality TV transformation show.
‘I dunno, guys. I’m… I just said I’d had enough of the humiliation that goes with putting yourself out there on a limb only to be judged wanting by the opposite sex, and your plan is get out there and be humiliated more? But with you two at home taking notes to work up into a full report on the subject?’
‘That’s not it at all,’ said Hannah, giving my hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘It’s really hard to find someone, and we know it’s tough out there — Christ, you should try it as a woman — but we’d be right there to support you. Nobody’s being humiliated, here.’
‘Unless we do decide to send you out to try it as a woman. That might be quite humiliating,’ added Rob.
‘I do have the best legs at this table, though,’ I pointed out.
‘I know. Bastard,’ replied Hannah with eyes narrowed to slits. With a wink she gave me a gentle kick under the table.
‘Really, sport, it’ll be cool. It’s like a big dare. But look at the qualities that make you great. You worry about other people’s feelings, and all that nice stuff. But that’s what stopping you getting in there with women, and where the arseholes and wankers have an edge on you. And everybody is an arsehole or a wanker, so you’re coming in last. Who else do you think would’ve bottled shagging a pneumatic hottie because they were worried about a case of misrepresentation?’
‘Don’t listen to him for moral advice,’ warned Hannah. ‘He’d amputate his right leg and claim to be a bomb-disposal expert to get in your position. But I would say this. You’ve been trying the same thing for years and years, and seem surprised every time it’s proved to not work. We’re just going to help you try some things that are different. What we’re doing is putting you through dating boot camp.’
They really were beginning to think of this as a TV show.
At the first sign of actually having fun, a disapproving waiter descended upon us like a soot cloud. He asked in a barely perceptible French accent — and using only marginally more polite language — if there was anything else we wanted, or would we hop it and stop spoiling the carefully designed corporate ambience of doom? We ordered lattes all round, and pulled faces behind his back.
Taking advantage of the lull in conversation, Rob grabbed his fags and headed outside for a quick smoke before his coffee.
Hannah and I sat silently for a while. It wasn’t that we didn’t have anything to say to each other — we could talk on the phone and email happily about night-out plans or just general nonsense — it was just that when we’d all been hanging out together and there was a sudden absence of Rob, the atmosphere changed. I didn’t know quite how to describe it but the mood was calmer, somehow warmer.
‘Are you all right, really?’ Hannah asked as our glasses of coffee arrived.
‘Myeh.’ I shrugged.
‘You did the right thing, you know.’
‘Hn. Eventually…I let it slide for too long. Thought she might have been into me ‘cos of my sparkling badinage and her good old-fashioned New Year’s Eve drunkenness. But I guess she was thinking of a consolation bunk-up for a sweet old near-widower.’
‘Sounds to me like you were doing all right before the “fiancée” came up.’
‘Maybe. But there’s been enough times when I’ve been the lovely guy at the party who goes off to get the cute girl’s coat so she can go home with
the cocky bastard who’s drunk all the decent booze and puked in the houseplants.’
‘Cor, I remember those guys.’
‘And then you married one.’
She smiled affectionately, with the slightest hint of a blush, as we remembered the first time the three of us met — a student party in Manchester. And I’d met Hannah first.
Then she got her sympathetic-advice face back on.
‘You know, we’ve watched you trying to get back out there these last few years, and I just wanted to say — there’s being nice, and there’s being a doormat. There’s waiting for signs and hints, and there’s clutching at straws with totally the wrong women. I say that only because I want you to meet someone who’ll see the absolute doll that we’ve known for all these years. And I think you should try this idea of Rob’s. Worst comes to the worst, it could be fun and something to think back on in your lonely bachelor old age.’
‘Just spoken to Angus,’ said the returning Rob with a consoling hand on my shoulder. ‘As we expected there’s no hope of a second chance with the jailbait. But I did get a bit more on that guy who’ll be reaping the benefits of dating a twenty-one-year-old now determined to prove her breasts aren’t nauseating. That fancy job of his in marketing? He dresses up as a giant ape and hands out flyers for restaurants. More gorilla than guerrilla advertising really. Still, I hear it’s a nice little business and he even owns his own monkey suit. How were you ever going to compete with that?’ he asked, ruffling my hair, and giving me a wink.
‘Is this what I can expect from dating boot camp?’ I replied. ‘Some kind of “knock ‘em down to build ‘em up” exercise? Because I’m down to my constituent parts already. You might want to think about moving on to the good stuff if you want me to sign up.’
‘Oh, you’re signed up, buddy-boy. We’re going home to formulate our plan to turn you into a dating GOD.’
‘Say what you like, I haven’t agreed to anything yet. You can’t make me do anything.’
They looked at each other with another secret smile, and together turned to look at me.
Chapter Two
Bollocks72.
No.
Bumflaps69.
No.
‘Morning, Dan, how are you? Good Christmas?’
‘Not too bad, John. Quiet. You?’
‘Yeah, quiet. See ya later.’
Studmuffin7.
No.
It was the Wednesday morning after the New Year bank holiday and I was back to work. I was not really ready for this.
After leaving Rob and Hannah, I’d stayed up way too late watching old Ally McBeal and Dawson’s Creek box sets. I wouldn’t say it was a guilty secret that I watched these sappy old shows as part of a post-hangover ritual, but it wasn’t something I bragged about. It raised too many eyebrows and questions. It was a bit like vegetarianism, I figured: accepted — almost expected — of women, but when a guy showed an interest he was viewed with considerable suspicion. But it wasn’t as if I had a long bath, shaved my legs, and snuggled up to watch them with a big box of Hotel Chocolat truffles. Although now by even mentioning that stuff I’d created the image of me in a kimono with a towel turbaned on my head crying about Billy dying, hadn’t I?
But anyway, moving on. I was grudgingly accepting the return to the real world — a world I’d happily forgotten about since Christmas Eve. Unfortunately the forgetting had included all memory of my log-in password. My brain, still resenting its second hangover in two days, was being uncooperative as I tried to dredge up whatever combination of naughty words and numbers I’d come up with this month.
Boobies22.
No.
One last chance before I was locked out of the system and would have to go to IT support. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the person in charge of our computer stuff was a stereotypical IT nerd, brimming with sarcasm and distaste for anyone that found themselves in his power. But no, I’d have to call Janice the office manager, the Jill-of-all-trades in charge of virtually everything. Janice who was as beautiful as she was unhinged. And she was pretty unhinged.
I still remember the first day I started here, over two and a half years ago. She stood behind me in a blue summer dress and, smelling slightly of apricots, kept bending forward and leaning gently on my shoulder as she showed me the workings of the file management system. Sometimes her summery blonde hair tickled my neck. It was the kind of delicate incidental physical proximity that makes a man imagine so much more. It was disturbingly reminiscent of imagining myself in love with the new Cypriot girl working at my local barber’s, just because she always brushed against me softly while using the razor on the back of my neck.
That situation caused me to make a fool of myself by suggesting dinner to her after my fourth haircut in less than a month, thereby condemning me for ever after to using the expensive and not quite as good salon two doors down.
Sigh.
Anyway. Janice had followed up the lesson with a quiet gossipy chat about my predecessor, which I interpreted as a manifesto about her power in the office.
Turned out the guy whose job I now had was ‘disappeared’ one day with only mutterings about some form of inappropriate online behaviour emerging from management. I learned he’d been seeing Janice for a while, but dumped her to go back to his ex, with whom he’d had a baby. I was invited to agree with her that this was shocking and atrocious behaviour on his part. It was shortly after this that a ‘routine’ review of the Internet history for his computer had discovered a cache of smut. Janice said it had to be him that was looking at Lonely Farmers Go Wild, as no one else would have had the passwords to get on his computer — excepting herself, of course. She darkly suggested that after he’d got back with his ex finding filthy pictures of slutty-acting old cows was to be expected. A moment had passed when it looked as if she was reliving some moment of righteous vengeance, before she brightly offered to show me where the stationery cupboard was, and invited me to the pub after work to meet some of the other guys.
No, I thought, staring blankly at my monitor, best to try not to disturb her first thing, on the first day back after a long break. Janice was not a person to disturb after a holiday.
I sat and closed my eyes and let my fingers hover over the keyboard, hoping some kind of muscle memory would kick in and my hands would fly over the right keys. ‘Bigwilly90’ suggested itself, and I sat there pondering pressing the return.
‘Back in zis shithole, eh, Danny?’
Delphine Montagne, the new business analyst, shimmered towards my desk, and I blessed again the atrociously sexist employment policies of our creepy boss, which saw the office full of unspectacular-looking men, and decidedly above-average-looking women. Delphine was twenty-seven and gorgeous, she had a lean runner’s body that meant she could wear the kind of archly fashionable high-street clothes always seen in the Metro, and bobbed Hollywood-red hair that must have cost a lot of money to get looking that natural. Her default facial expression was a frown that said she’d discovered the meaning of life, and wasn’t too happy about it. But catch her with the right joke and you could get a girlish laugh out of her that left nearby men grinning like simpletons, and women rolling their eyes. Add to that she was French, and you basically had a combination that knocked me flat on my back, waiting for my tummy to be tickled.
‘Did you get my text?’ she asked.
‘Text? No. Everything OK?’
‘It was New Year’s Eve, just wishing you a happy new year. And also to say zat Alex was being a shit again.’
‘Really? That’s terrible. Sorry I didn’t get it — you know how it is with New Year’s Eve texts…’ I now vaguely remembered having received a message, but I think it was at a point on that long dark night of the soul when I was trying to get some feeling back in my feet after walking through London for two hours in the freezing cold, and trying to work out who was more drunk and morose, me or the cab driver.
‘So aside from New Year’s did you have a good Christmas
home in Paris?’
‘Ugh. My family, Danny. My sister. My mother. And then there was Jean who thought that, seeing as I was at home, we could carry on where we left off. And Julien. I will send you an email. Later.’
With that Delphine placed her hand on the back of the hand I had resting on the mouse, and gave me a look of eternal suffering. I watched as she swayed away to her desk, absently leaning further out into the corridor to watch her go. I stayed there, long after she’d gone, with my temple rested on my hand, daydreaming about the first time I’d seen her. It was just a few weeks ago, in her kitten heels and a pencil skirt, using the aisle between the office cubicles like a catwalk, and I’d unselfconsciously stared as she disappeared from view.
Hotpatootie1.
Bingo. I logged on, ready to wait all morning for an important internal email.
Lunchtime arrived, and so far work had been a pretty unproductive place to be. So I’d clearly got straight back into the swing of nine-to-five life. By midday, the majority of the office had passed my desk and, if any rivals had wanted to know how one of Europe’s premier niche trend analysis firms had enjoyed Christmas, I had the data to show it had been not only ‘not bad’, but also ‘quiet’ for nearly a hundred per cent of respondents.
I was waiting for the office-wide email that heralded the arrival of the sandwich man. You’ve got to be quick before all that’s left is a choice of some ungodly combination involving dolphin-unfriendly tuna. While I waited an instant message from Hannah popped up on the screen.
@Hannahmatic: Hey mister. Know any good synonyms for average?
@aDanTaylor: Standard? Regular? Middling? Mediocre? Run of the mill? Pedestrian? Unremarkable? Dull?
@Hannahmatic: In a positive mood for a Wednesday then? You’re not making filling in this profile on soullyforyou.com any easier.