by Neal Doran
‘I’m talking about out there,’ he said, waving an arm in the direction of the city ahead of us. Lit up in the dark, London was brimming with people, passing under the spotlighted buildings and illuminated advertising hoardings, still out and about at a time Big Ben was telling us was really quite late.
‘Being here. It’s like living in a movie.’
We’d taken a bit of a scenic route on the way out of the hospital, past the silly-expensive car showrooms of Park Lane and up by the Houses of Parliament to Westminster Bridge. With the London Eye, Oxo Tower and other icons of the South Bank as a backdrop, I stared out of the window at the gawking tourists and staggering drunk businessmen on the bridge. A red double-decker bus went by, adding to the London tourist board promotional shot feel, and as it trundled past it revealed a couple snogging while the world went by them.
It was difficult to get a good view of what they looked like as we drove by, their faces mutually obscured in the kiss, but it looked as if they were probably about my age. After years together they could have just got engaged right there on the spot. Or they could have been friends, overcome by the beauty of the setting, who decided it was just too good a moment to let their fear of rejection stop them risking their relationship by finally kissing. Or it could be a pissed-up office fling that wouldn’t last much beyond the span of the bridge, sparking months of awkwardness at work, and simmering guilt and resentment towards their partners at home.
The point, though, was Rob was right — you could feel as if your life deserved to be on the big screen when you drove through the heart of London. In a car you were in the scene, close enough to really feel part of the city and its glamour and romance, but far enough removed to not always see the homeless teens and drug users, or smell the stale piss and the sick of Spanish students who’d overdone it.
‘Make your life like something out of the movies,’ he said. ‘When was it we’d talked about doing that?’
‘God…years ago. Me and Kate were still together. I think it inspired the disastrous proposal.’
‘Still seems like a good idea to me. The grand gestures. The things that people see at the cinema and wish they could do themselves. And could, if they put in a bit of effort.’
‘You can’t do it all the time,’ I said. ‘You’d give yourself a hernia. Maybe you could make life like television.’
‘Sure, that’d work, if we’re talking prime time, not daytime. There’s got to be some decent drama.’
‘Maybe if it’s happening to somebody else. I think I’d rather my storyline was a bit more in the background right now.’
‘You’ve got to try and enjoy it. Keep that plot moving forwards.’
Rob’s mood seemed to drop a little as we moved away from the white and gold glow of the city.
‘Y’know these last few weeks, with you upping your game and giving this dating resolution a go, has been friggin’ brilliant. At home, we’re getting a kick out of it all the time.’
‘Well, obviously I’m an endlessly fascinating character.’
‘Hey, don’t flatter yourself too much. It’s more that if we’re not talking about this, we’re not talking about anything. We’d either be rowing about kids, or the lack of them, or communicating through the shopping list on the blackboard. Even on that we don’t make the effort we used to.’
Rob smiled sadly while we pulled in for an ambulance to pass, its lights flashing, but sirens silent.
‘It used to be we’d try and get the other to buy the most embarrassing things we could think of when it’s their turn to do Tesco’s,’ he continued. ‘There’s one checkout assistant who still looks at my trolley suspiciously since the day H sent me just to buy a bottle of vodka, KY Jelly, and a large butternut squash. I also had to get one of those inflatable rings for piles. And tell her it was my birthday.
‘But that was, what? Nearly a year ago now? More than that? It can’t be good when you have to think that hard to work out the last time you and your wife had fun together. Now it’s just bickering over forgetting toilet rolls.’
‘They do use a lot of it,’ I said.
‘You’re telling me. I’m betting a four-pack could last a single man like you most of a year. For us, it’s gone before I’ve finished my coffee for breakfast. But a squabble like that’s a good day.’
I fidgeted with the button for the glove compartment, and struggled for the right thing to say.
‘It’s just winter. It’s a phase. You two are great together.’
‘When people are around, maybe. But the rest of the time? Not so much any more. Tonight, while you’re out getting a woman into bed on your first date, Hannah’s gone to our bedroom with her friggin’ celebrity magazines leaving me on my own watching crappy football by eight o’clock. We’re like flatmates, but without the underlying sexual tension.’
Before long we were passing through Clapham, where Rob and Hannah and I had shared a flat in a Victorian mansion block after university. Hannah had been away for a lot of the time doing her legal training in Bristol. Then in Exeter, doing a teacher training course, and finally in Birmingham doing her knowledge management course. Kate had still been in Manchester too, so it had been just us guys for a lot of the time. A lot of lager cans around, eating ready-meal curries straight out of their plastic trays, and sitting about in front of a TV the size of a department-store display window.
Men being men, you could say — if you ignored the fact I’d be hoovering constantly, keeping up with the recycling, and leaving out coasters.
We’ve come a long way since we lived here. Well, we’ve moved two miles down the road. And if I want to hang out and peruse Rob’s Clint Eastwood DVD collection I now have to walk twenty minutes to the Harrisons’ flat. And of course Kate is long gone. But aside from that I’m not sure how much has changed: same conversation, same contrasting degree of ambition, same movies. Although sitting in the car together I began to wonder about that assumption I always made.
All that stuff was still there, but this dissatisfaction with life Rob was talking about seemed new, or maybe I was noticing it for the first time. Thinking back, it had started probably six months earlier, when the occasional bitching about work and home over a game of chess had become more regular. It also felt more real, and less like an impression of the kvetching neurotic New Yorkers we’d seen in the movies. It couldn’t be laughed off with a reference to telling his analyst or a shrugged ‘whadaya gonna do?’.
It seemed there was more edge sometimes to what he could say too. Jokes could feel more like digs, and you could never be as sure of what he might turn his sarcasm on. But maybe that wasn’t new either. Maybe I was just noticing it more. It could be I was getting sensitive, but lately putting me in the ‘hapless little buddy’ routine didn’t seem so funny. It felt less like an act, and more like my life.
We stopped at the lights, and outside a club a group of rowdy local residents were queuing to get in. Rob stirred into life as snatches of dance music filtered into the car.
‘Hey, do you fancy going for old times’ sake? Few drinks, try and get beaten up by a few old school arseholes in rugby shirts?’
I looked at Rob from under a raised eyebrow.
‘No, I don’t either. Don’t know why I suggested it even. Jesus, maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe that’s what it is.’
He slumped back behind the wheel. With a mechanical crunch and a whirr, the CD on the stereo switched over from Sinatra to eighties’moody Springsteen, and took Rob further down the road to introspection with it.
‘I’ve always felt like I was ahead of the game. Now everyone seems to have caught up and is overtaking. I was first to get married. First with the proper good job when most of you were scratching your arses and trying to find another course to stop you having to work for a living.’
‘First to start greying, first to be balding,’ I sympathised.
‘First in my year to get pubes, first whose balls dropped,’ continued Rob grandiosely.
&
nbsp; ‘First to get served under age in pubs,’ I suggested.
‘First to get fired from a proper good job, and find a better one.’
‘First to visit a clap clinic.’
‘First to get divorced.’
It went quiet then for a second. I looked at Rob, who just winked.
‘First to get sent to rehab. First to marry a dollybird twenty years his junior. First with erectile dysfunction,’ he said.
‘First for a triple bypass and hair transplant,’ I suggested. ‘First to get dementia.’
‘You’re right, sport, I’m still ahead of the game. Fuhgeddaboudit.’
The workday on Friday had been a bit of a write-off. After Rob and I had headed back to mine for oversized pizzas and beers, the night had turned into a wee small hours session of whisky, cards, and a Neil Simon film playing in the background. At the office even the sight of Delphine, in what I can only describe as probably the world’s first erotic mohair jumper, barely got my pulse above the levels for long-term coma. Knowing this meant I was not well, I skipped the pub at the end of the day and sloped home for medicinal cider and leftover pizza for dinner.
It felt like a long time since I’d collapsed at home by myself on a Friday evening, with nothing to do but circle through the TV channels until bedtime. I was looking forward to it but felt an underlying itchy buzz of tension, as if something in my subconscious wasn’t shut properly. I didn’t think I could relax until I found it and fixed it, or just piled things on top of it till it stopped making a noise.
Rob and Hannah had plans for me for Sunday. But, even as punch drunk as I was from recent humiliations, I didn’t think it was that bothering me.
Delphine had said something I thought might have been a bit flirty as we walked back through the office from the sandwich man, and I’d fumbled my response. Sullen, unshaved and hungover as I was, she’d said I was looking magnificently mean and moody, but I think I ruined the atmosphere by complaining that someone had taken the last packet of Frazzles®. I felt stupid about that, but after banging my head off my keyboard a couple of times when I got back to my desk, I’d just filed it with all the other instances of failed repartee in my mental files. So I don’t think it was that.
I don’t even think it was the stern reminder from Janice on the proper use of the all-office email address list — my nose and forehead had combined while bouncing off my desktop to accidentally send a message to all employees that merely said, ‘yfknu ubtf6k unyk vyuk6g fu ign7po tdiu’.
No, I couldn’t quite get it out of my head that Rob had joked about getting a divorce.
It was just a gag, inspired by a tough time they were having together, but, as someone wise had once said, there’s no such thing as jokes — I think it was either Freud or Les Dennis. Were things really that rocky between them? It was horrible for me to think of the idea of them not being together. For almost as long as I’ve known the Harrisons as a couple they’ve had what I wanted, and sometimes it felt as if by proxy I had it too. The prospect of that ending — was this how the children of divorced parents felt?
Would they be able to do it amicably? Could I avoid picking sides? Rob would still be around; he might even end up moving in for a while if it took some time for him to get himself set up on his own.
But would Hannah drift away? Get on with her own life?
Single and available again…
But this wasn’t happening; it was just a joke, I reminded myself, rubbing my head furiously. It was no more true than the idea Rob was going bald, the luxuriantly hairy bastard. I needed to stop being silly. And stop daydreaming about what could happen if it did. But the buzzing was still there, so I muted the TV, put on some music, and fired up my laptop.
Now what was a single guy, on his second can of cider and home alone on a Friday night, to do when he started Internet surfing for a distraction from a life that seemed to be getting more awkward and complicated?
That’s right, go on to a dating website and look at the profiles of all the men on there.
I felt a strange bubbling nervousness and excitement in my stomach as I started a search for the soullyforyou.com website Rob and Hannah had registered me on. Even though I was on my own and nobody was watching — except perhaps a particularly bored spy somewhere — I couldn’t do it directly.
First I went to a news site. The headlines there said there’d been some sort of scandal involving some sort of financial shadiness involving some kind of politician; a natural disaster was happening in one of the parts of the world least in a position to cope with it.
And oh, look, I said to myself, what’s that over there with a picture of some young thing enjoying a glass of white wine on a sunny day?
A banner ad for a new dating website, you say?
Well, I suppose I could just click on it to see what these young people are getting up to these days.
I clicked on the link and a parade of potential soulmates of all genders and persuasions blinked across my screen. A picture, a username, a tagline, and then gone.
I glanced through them for a while, failing to not be judgmental. A description mentioning ‘a killer smile’ meant she had enormous head-filling teeth. His fascination with the human mind meant he was manipulative, needy, and under the misguided impression he was some kind of Derren Brown. She used way too many exclamation marks. He was not even remotely as good-looking as that expression suggested he thought he was. You couldn’t trust anyone like her who’d had moodily lit studio shots of themselves done. He’d just said he liked surfing so he could justify a picture with his shirt off. She was really cute, but used the word ‘chillax’. His joking about being a stalking potential serial killer actually did make him sound like a stalking potential serial killer.
Character assassination after character assassination, I began to feel queasy at the extent of the bloodbath my sniping at the innocent was causing. I was also avoiding what it was I’d set out to do. I took a deep breath and kept going. I hesitantly put in a search for male, 25-35, living in London. On page two of the results, grinning back at me in an ill-advised hat, in a room lit like a pub, and with signs of a group of people having a good time together around him, was the man I was looking for.
Me.
‘SuperDan82’.
I studied the picture for a while and tried to remember where it had been taken. Obviously a time when I was out with Hannah and Rob, otherwise why would they have the photo to put on the profile? Drinks for Angus’s thirtieth last September, I figured. There’d been a few photos as the birthday boy was testing out the new digital SLR his girlfriend Sarah had got for him. I think I’d been in the middle of telling the half-dozen or so people at the table about the time we’d got mugged in a park a few years ago when we’d met to hang out with the papers.
I’d turned up with The Times, a grab bag of WalkersTM, and a couple of Snapples. He’d brought a full-scale picnic with chilled beers, canapés, salad and garlic-roasted quail. Angus had let the two scary muggers take the booze and our phones, but nearly got in a fight and chased them off with a cheese knife when they tried to grab his rare vintage gingham picnic blanket.
It was a pretty good shot of me, I thought, apart from the stupid hat — a flat-cap effort, which I think actually belonged to Sarah. If anyone else was as mean as I was when looking through the profiles, they’d immediately assume I was bald. I rubbed the top of my head and its double crown meditatively, to reassure myself that that wasn’t the case.
There were more photos of me, the page said, and a more detailed profile too so I clicked to have a look. There was just a blank silhouette and a message saying to see more I needed to create my own profile. It was easy and free, they assured me.
So I started putting together a description. I decided if I was going to be ogling pictures of myself, I might as well do so with a female profile. But what sort of woman would be looking at a profile like this? I wondered. Or what kind of woman would I want looking at it?
First t
hings first, a username. FunnyGal. That sounded friendly to me, and not necessarily someone drawing too much more attention to their character rather than their looks — which couldn’t be said of my first idea: MissGreatPersonality. However I discovered that I wasn’t the only person to think that FunnyGal made a good ID — the name had been taken. FunnyGal483 was available though, as was, the website told me, FurryGal.
I wasn’t sure if I was worried that Rob and Hannah were trying to find a woman for me on a website that considered remarkable feminine hirsuteness was a quality worth highlighting right up front, or relieved that no one had yet taken them up on their offer. FunnyGal483 it was.
The rest of the description I skimmed through: dark hair, average height, attractive, late twenties, non-smoker, into going to pubs, restaurants, cinema, not into politics and clubbing. I left the description of my figure blank; the options like slim or curvy always struck me as euphemisms for fat or anorexic so it was just too loaded an area. I was surprised that nobody had thought to have the option of putting the term ‘big knockers’ in the drop-down box. That’d cut to the chase and get plenty of attention. I realised I was starting to spend too much time worrying about making my profile for an imaginary woman seem attractive, so I moved on. I did give her a career in journalism though — that sounded cool — and a nice flat in north-west London, where she’d be handy for town and have a nice local deli and coffee shop.
Registration completed. I was in.
I opened up the full profile. What did Rob and Hannah have to say for myself?
SuperDan82
A hopeful romantic…
Dark brown hair, grey-green eyes, tall-ish…
Well, I could’ve done without the ‘ish’, but better than saying average-ish, I guessed.
I work in market intelligence for the soft drinks industry. It’s an interesting and fun job, but we’re not here for you to get bored hearing all about my day, at least not yet. And I’d want to hear about yours first, of course ;-).
An emoticon! They’ve used an emoticon! Reading that you’d think I was a young person in my twenties living in the early twenty-first century, who wasn’t anally hung up on traditional grammar and wasn’t going to judge you based on your use of a semi-colon.