The Cows

by Dawn O'Porter

  She’s funny, my mother. Somewhere between liberal and conservative and I never really know which way she’ll go.

  ‘I know, Mum. If you could remind him that I’m forty-two, that would be great. Anyway, look at what we got out of it?’ We both peek through the hall door and into the living room. Annie is taking selfies on Mum’s iPhone.

  ‘She needs a father figure,’ Mum says.

  ‘She doesn’t need one, Mum, we’re fine. But it would be nice for her to have one. And it would also be nice for me not to die alone.’

  ‘Do you have a date set up for tonight?’ she asks.

  ‘I do. He looks OK, works in media, cute. Hopefully not a murderer.’

  ‘Tara, please. Don’t joke. I read about a girl getting murdered on a date. It’s not funny.’

  ‘Mum, people have been dating a long time. But OK, I’ll try not to get murdered.’ I open the front door. ‘Give my love to Dad.’ I shut the door, then quickly open it again. ‘By the way, what does he think I do on Friday nights?’

  I’m curious to know what Mum came up with, because she’s right, the idea of me being with men makes my dad convulse.

  ‘I told him you’ve started a knitting group.’

  ‘What? Mum, that’s pathetic.’

  ‘You might have to buy something on eBay and pretend you made it for his birthday. Sorry, I panicked. It was the first thing that came to my head.’

  I hug her, and leave. She opens the door a few seconds later and shouts, ‘You don’t have to sleep with them all, Tara!’ down the street.

  Was that liberal or conservative? I can’t quite be sure.

  Back at home I have a quick shower, slip on a cute silk shirt with my faux-leather trousers, a bit of make-up, bouff my hair and I’m ready. I gave up making too much effort on dates ages ago. I always wonder what it must look like to guys, who just wear whatever they wore to work that day, when a woman arrives dressed to the nines in something fancy, with loads of make-up. It sets a precedent at the start that I really can’t be bothered to maintain, so I wear a mildly more uptempo version of my usual clothes. I think that’s right. Although I’m still single, so I guess that says something.

  Being single when you have a kid is weird. Not just because everyone you meet either judges or sympathises with you, but because you have to think about so much more than just fancying someone. It’s called being responsible, I suppose. I can’t allow fuck buddies into my home to meet my daughter, it would be too confusing for her, so I generally don’t have them at all. That’s good for Annie but it sucks for me.

  Annie has never known me to be in a relationship, so I need to handle the situation carefully. I introduced one guy to her last year because he was so completely awesome. I seemed to abandon all elements of fear when it came to Annie and invited him into our lives. Turns out he was so awesome that he was married. Because obviously, excellent men in their forties are never single. Why would they be? Fuckers.

  He spent a Saturday afternoon in my house making Annie laugh so hard she went to bed giddy with joy. When she was asleep he and I started having sex and halfway through, his phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Eventually, because it was really killing the mood, he answered it, then burst out crying. It was his wife letting him know that his dad had just had a heart attack and died. He was literally inside me as he took the call. I mean, it was possibly the worst thing to happen during sex since those two people in China were doing it up against a floor-to-ceiling window in their apartment and the window fell out. He was so devastated, I couldn’t even have a go at him about not telling me he was married. I had to comfort him, when what I really wanted to do was cut his penis off with some nail scissors and throw it in the road. I was also just really, really gutted.

  He left minutes later and I never heard from him again. Annie still asks for him; she refers to him as ‘Mr Giggles’. One day I’ll tell her that Mr Giggles ended up being about as funny as a dose of the clap. Which, along with the terrible memory of a horrible evening, he also left me with.

  Taking treatment for an STD when you have a little girl feels grim. I felt ridden and contagious and begged the bottle of antibiotics to be finished. When they were gone, I vowed never to introduce her to anyone ever again unless a) I was certain they didn’t have a wife and b) I hadn’t needed an STD test after sleeping with them.

  I now hold a lot of hope for my Friday night dates. I want someone good. Someone honest, safe and fun. You never know; tonight’s guy, Al, looks OK in his picture. But first, a quick drink with my best friend Sophie.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ says Sophie, walking slowly up to me at the bar. ‘I was getting my hair done, she was taking ages then I decided I didn’t like the colour so got her to go back to … anyway, heyyyy.’

  Sophie is always late, which is why I brought my Kindle.

  Sophie and I are both only children. This means that we have a relationship a lot like sisters and claimed each other around the age of ten, as the people who would play that role in each other’s lives. I questioned it loads, because she drove me so crazy half the time. Then another friend at school said that if her sister wasn’t family, they would never be friends, but she loved her anyway, because that is what sisters do. That really resonated with me because I realised that if Sophie was to be the sister I never had, it was OK and normal for us to not always see eye to eye. I just had to love her, which I did and still do, because we have history – and you can’t erase that, no matter how many times someone prioritises a blow dry over spending time with you.

  ‘Hair looks nice,’ I say, because it does. It always does, she’s gorgeous. Skinny, blonde, perfect skin. It’s annoying, but mostly natural. Other than the hair colour.

  ‘Thanks. OK, can we drink champagne? I feel like I need something fizzy.’

  I order two glasses but she shouts for a bottle. So there we are, sitting at a bar at 6.40 p.m. on a Friday, drinking champagne for no real reason.

  ‘I only have twenty minutes. I have a date with a guy called Al at seven.’ I smile a little, I have that pre-date hopeful buzz … maybe it will be a good one. But probably not.

  ‘God, I can’t believe you’re still dating, I can’t even imagine,’ she says. ‘Mind you, I never really dated like you do. Carl was my only ever formal date and I ended up marrying him, so it clearly works. Cheers to that!’

  I still can’t accept that Sophie is married; she was so wild, almost feral. I don’t think I have ever met anyone with such a hungry attitude towards sex and partying. Her stamina for both was always fascinating to me.

  ‘So how is Carl?’

  ‘He’s good, yeah. You know, same old. Marriage is fine most of the time, as long as I don’t mention my past.’

  ‘Still, really?’

  ‘Yup, it’s the big sexy elephant in the room. I mean he doesn’t know anything of course, I’d never tell him. But he’s made all these assumptions about me, and the kinds of things I used to get up to. Annoyingly, they’re all pretty accurate.’

  ‘But where’s he getting it all from?’ I ask.

  ‘He says he can’t understand how someone who looks like me didn’t get loads of sex when I was single.’

  ‘OK, you know that is actually quite insulting, right?’ I say, as I realise it is insulting, but that Carl is absolutely right. Sophie got a lot of sex.

  ‘Yesterday, Beth Taylor, remember her from school? She tagged me in an old photo on Facebook. It’s a picture of a load of us, we were about seventeen, and in the background I’m snogging some guy. She tagged me and wrote, “This is how I remember you, Sophie. Hope you’re well.” What a fucking idiot, why would she do that?’

  ‘Yeah, I saw that. I thought it was funny. And I suppose most people in their forties aren’t married to people who would give them a hard time for snogging someone when they were seventeen?’

  ‘True. Maybe, but still. I have to be so careful. He’s just so old fashioned and I need this to work. It’s just easier if I edit my past a littl
e. The fucking Internet means I have to be on guard all the time. Anyone could tweet me, or post a picture of me from back then. Do you remember that time we went to Ibiza, the foam party? Thank God it was just before camera phones, but what if someone had one of those disposable cameras we all used to have and stumbles across me on Facebook? There’s probably pictures of me up to all bloody sorts. Jesus, I told Carl I’d never done drugs. He’d lose his shit if he knew the kind of stuff we used to do. As it is, every time a Facebook memory comes up I break into a cold sweat!’

  I drink some champagne. ‘Hey, we had fun though, didn’t we?’ I say, giving her a wink.

  ‘I’ll drink to that!’

  I don’t know how Sophie does it, being married to someone who won’t accept her for who she is. Playing a new role, with a new past. Watching Sophie coordinate her life around hiding who she was – is? – from her husband has been such a lesson to me, in terms of what I want. There is no way I want to find someone who won’t take me for what I am. I don’t want to have to lie, or hide, or deny anything. Sophie would never admit it, but she married Carl because she partied her entire life and isn’t qualified for anything she would enjoy, so a rich city guy was the only way she’d end up in a nice house and money to buy bottles of champagne when you only have twenty minutes to drink it in, and absolutely nothing to celebrate. I’d rather be poor and lonely.

  ‘OK, I better go, don’t want to be late for my hot date,’ I say, stepping down off the barstool. ‘Here’s some money for the champagne.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, that’s what this is for,’ she says, flashing Carl’s credit card. ‘Oh, and if he asks can you tell him we were with a bunch of people? It would make things easier.’

  ‘Sophie, we’ve been best friends since we were at primary school, does he still not like us going out together?’

  ‘Nope. When it’s only us he presumes we get up to bad stuff, that you’re a bad influence. Don’t look at me like that! Please, just say it was a few old faces from school. The more eyes he thinks are on me, the better he’ll think I behaved, OK?’

  I sit back down.

  ‘It’s quite controlling, Sophie. It worries me,’ I say, forcing her to look me in the eye. She offers a little smile, then breaks away.

  ‘Maybe I need a bit of controlling?’ she says, sipping the champagne. ‘I can’t be left to my own devices, who knows what would happen.’ She shoots me a critical look, and I know what she means. We partied hard for most of our lives, but after I had Annie I had to stop. It became immediately clear that despite being wild myself, I was nothing compared to Sophie. Somehow, over the years I had stopped her from spiralling too far out of control. I hadn’t even realised I did it, but I took her home when she’d had too much, I dragged her out of bedrooms she shouldn’t have been in, I stopped her snorting more lines of coke than she should, prised shot glasses out of her hand. When I got pregnant, there was no one around to do that for her and we saw the danger of that instantly. I was six months gone when I found myself in A&E one Friday night. The hospital called me at two a.m., saying she’d been found in an alley with her skirt around her waist, so out of it she could barely say her name. I’d gone in immediately and found her crying in the hospital bed. She’d been roofied by a barman in a club. There were no signs that he’d done anything sexual to her, but judging by the bump on her forehead and the state of her clothes, he had obviously tried.

  ‘I can’t look after myself,’ she’d said, pathetically, looking up at me from the bed. ‘And you can’t look after me any more, so I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

  I took her home and I did look after her, for a whole week. But then she went back to her place, to ‘start afresh’. She was determined to change, to grow up. There were a few more ‘incidents’, but then she met Carl. They were married within a year, and now she is being looked after as she wished, and as uncomfortable as it makes me feel, I know she is probably better off for it. And she does love him, because he’s rich.

  ‘He’s good to me in other ways,’ she says, flashing the card again. ‘I’m happy, I promise. I love you.’

  ‘I love you too,’ I say, loyally. ‘I have to go.’

  She pours herself another drink, and I remind myself it’s not my problem any more.

  I walk into the Sanderson Hotel on Berners Street and look around the bar. This place is way more fancy than anywhere I would choose; I’m more a pub girl than a bar girl but hey, I’m not going to say no to posh drinks in a nice place if that is what the gentleman so wishes. I’m here to meet Al; his picture was nice, he works in the media, and he was free tonight. Those are three great reasons to go on a date, as far as I’m concerned. Mostly the bit about his picture being nice, of course.

  I scan the bar and see him. He’s cute, but the photo was obviously an old one. His hair is much longer now, and his face much older. But that’s OK. I don’t judge people for using the most flattering photo of themselves for online dating, of course they do. Therefore, I always expect to be a little bit disappointed in real life, and hope their personality makes up for it. Al certainly looks older than his photo, but as I get closer to him, I realise he’s really, really gorgeous.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, sitting on the stool next to him. ‘This is so fancy, do you come here often?’

  I’m joking. Obviously. No one ever actually says, ‘Do you come here often?’ He looks a little surprised that I take a seat. Was I supposed to ask his permission?

  ‘No, I haven’t been here before actually. I’m not the kind of guy who comes to places like this, if I’m honest.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, thinking it odd that he suggested it then. I’d never come to a posh hotel bar like this either, they reek of affairs.

  ‘What are you drinking?’ I ask, presuming he’s just a little nervous.

  ‘A Pisco Sour.’

  ‘Great, I’ll have the same.’ I gesture to the barman to bring me one over.

  ‘Just a drink though, OK? I’m not up for anything else,’ he says, sternly.

  I am so stunned, the best response I can give him is my jaw falling open.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t mean to be rude. But I don’t like leading people on.’

  ‘I literally just walked in the door. Maybe I don’t fancy you either, thought of that?’ I say, stepping down off the stool.

  ‘Well, I suppose if you’re doing well and in a position to be picky, then that would make sense.’

  ‘Doing well? What? Just because I swiped right on your weird photo doesn’t mean I was gagging for you, it’s just dinner.’ I should walk away, but after dealing with Shane Bower and my boss, I’m done with not arguing back to misogynistic arrogant men who think it’s their God-given right to belittle women. Screw him.

  ‘I bet you’re married with kids and looking for some young piece of ass to fuck before you go home to them, aren’t you?’ I continue, a little surprised by my own vitriol.

  ‘Woah. Firstly, no, I’m not married and I don’t have kids. Secondly, what the hell does swiping right mean?’

  ‘What do you mean, “what the hell does swiping right mean”? Tinder. You know what I mean.’

  ‘Tinder? I’ve never been on Tinder in my life,’ he says, looking genuinely baffled.

  I look properly at his face.

  ‘You’re not Al, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not Al. And I take it you’re not a hooker?’

  ‘No! No, I am certainly not a hooker.’

  He follows my eyes to the other end of the bar, where a guy with shorter brown hair in a grey shirt is angrily tapping away on his phone and simultaneously looking towards the door. I get my phone out of my bag. I have five messages from Al, each describing himself in more detail and asking ‘Which one are you?’

  ‘I’m Jason,’ he says, reaching a hand towards me.

  ‘Tara,’ I say, realising I am wildly attracted to him.

  The barman brings over my drink.

  An hour later, Jason and I have dru
nk three Pisco Sours, eaten two bowls of crisps, a bowl of olives and torn up three swanky bar mats. We’ve talked about politics, how much we miss our childhood dogs, and even had a heated but jovial altercation about the correct way to make a good Bolognese.

  As we appear to be having an unexpected but sensational connection that feels like a date, I notice the real Al leave with a woman in a very tight dress.

  ‘There you go,’ Jason says, ‘Al did alright in the end. In one hundred pounds’ time it’ll be like it never happened.’

  ‘I made a lucky escape,’ I say, sipping the last of my drink, allowing my eyes to flirt for me. ‘So you’re single, you don’t have kids, you don’t sleep with hookers and you don’t use Tinder. You were also just sitting in a bar alone on a Friday and not waiting for someone. Now tell me, what is wrong with you?’ I ask, cheekily.

  ‘Hey, I love hookers. I just didn’t fancy you.’

  I affectionately thump him on the leg.

  ‘I’m old fashioned, I guess. And hopeful. I don’t use Tinder because the idea of it doesn’t sit right with me. I think I’m single because I’m picky and I pick the wrong women. And I’m sitting here alone because my publisher summoned a meeting to assure her that my book was coming along, and after a right royal rollicking I have been sitting here and pretending it’s all fine for the last two hours.’

  ‘Your publisher? You write?’ I ask, finding that painfully sexy.

  ‘Actually no, I’m a photographer. But I’m doing my first book and I stupidly agreed for there to be a lot of words as well as pictures. My deadline is in three weeks. My assistant has locked me out of the Internet and I’m about to crawl into a cave to get it finished.’

  ‘What’s the book about?’

  ‘Well my work is usually centred around people, and mostly people not being who they seem. I did a big story for The Times Magazine about multi-millionaires who live like they’re on the dole, and it got picked up as a book. It’s great, but the article was a thousand words and this will be around forty thousand words and I seem to write approximately ten words every seventeen hours.’