The Plus One

by Sophia Money-Coutts

  ‘Good, that’s sorted,’ I said, trying to sound confident, as if the scan was a routine check-up and there was nothing to worry about. ‘Now let’s have a sniff of those prawns.’

  By Friday afternoon, I had six posh babies and their scan pictures. Where the hell were another four going to come from? My phone vibrated beside my keyboard and a text popped up from Bill, an old friend who always threw a dinner party at the end of the first week of January to celebrate the fact the most cheerless week of the year was over.

  Come over any time from 7! X

  I looked back at my screen full of baby scans. Jesus. A baby. That seemed a long way off. I hadn’t had a proper boyfriend since university when I went out with a law student called Harry for a year, but then Harry decided to move to Dubai and I cried for about a week before my best friend, Lex, told me I needed to ‘get back out there’. My love life, ever since, had been drier than a Weetabix. The odd date, the odd fumble, the odd shag which I’d get overexcited about before realizing that, actually, the shag had been terrible and what was I getting so overexcited about anyway?

  Last year, I’d had sex twice, both times with a Norwegian banker called Fred who I met through a mutual friend at a picnic in Green Park in the summer. If you can call several bottles of rosé and some olives from M&S a picnic. Lex and I drank so much wine that we decided to pee under a low-hanging tree in the park as it got dark. This had apparently impressed Fred, who moved to sit closer to me when Lex and I returned to the circle.

  We’d all ended up in the Tiki bar of the London Hilton on Park Lane, where Fred ordered me a drink which came served in a coconut. He’d lunged in the car park and then I’d waited until I was safely inside my cab home before wiping off the wetness around my mouth with the back of my hand. We’d gone on a couple of dates and I’d slept with him on both those dates – possibly a mistake – and then he’d gone quiet. After a week, I texted him breezily asking if he was around for a drink. He replied a few days later.

  Oh, sorry been travelling so much for work and not sure that’s going to change any time soon. F

  ‘F for fucking nobody, that’s who,’ said Lex, loyally, when I told her.

  So, that, for me, was the total of last year’s romantic adventures. Depressing. Other people seemed to have sex all the time. And yet here I was, sitting in my office like an asexual plant, hunting for scan pictures, evidence that other people had had sex.

  I squinted through the window up the alleyway towards Notting Hill Gate. It was the kind of grey January day that couldn’t be bothered to get properly light, when people hurried along pavements with their shoulders hunched, as if warding off the gloom.

  Whatever. It would be six o’ clock soon and I could escape it all for Bill’s flat and a delicious glass of wine. Or several delicious glasses of wine, if I was honest.

  At one second past six, I left the office, winding my way through the hordes of tourists at Notting Hill Gate Tube station. They were dribbling along at that special tourist pace which makes you want to kick them all in the shins. Then, emerging at Brixton, I walked to the corner shop at the end of Bill’s street to buy wine. And a big bag of Kettle Chips. ‘Let’s go mad, it’s Friday, isn’t it?’ I said to the man behind the till, who ignored me.

  Bill lived in the ground-floor flat on a street of white terraced houses. He’d bought it while working as a programmer at Google, though he’d left them recently to concentrate on developing an app for the NHS. Something to do with making appointments. Bill said that it was putting his nerd skills to good use, finally. He’d never tried to hide his dorkiness. It was one of the reasons we became friends at a party when we were teenagers.

  Lex had been off snogging some boy upstairs in the bathroom (she was always snogging or being fingered, there was a lot of fingering back then) and I’d been sitting on a sofa in the basement, tapping my foot along to Blue so it looked like I was having a good time when, actually, I was having a perfectly miserable time because no boy ever wanted to snog me. And if no boy ever wanted to snog me then how would I ever be fingered? And if I was never fingered how would I ever get to have actual sex? It seemed hopeless. And, just at the moment when I decided I might go all Sound of Music and enter a convent – were there convents in South London? – a boy had sat down on the other end of the sofa. He had messy black hair and glasses that were so thick they looked double-glazed.

  ‘I hate parties,’ he’d said, squinting at me from behind his double-glazing. ‘Do you hate parties too?’

  I’d nodded shyly at him and he’d grinned back.

  ‘They’re awful, aren’t they? I’m Bill by the way.’ He’d stuck out a hand for me to shake, so I shook it. And then we’d started talking over the music about our GCSEs. It was only when Lex surfaced for air an hour or so later, gasping for breath, mouth rubbed as red as a strawberry, that I realized I’d made a friend who was a boy. Not a boyfriend. I didn’t want to snog Bill. His glasses really were shocking. But he became a friend who was a boy all the same. And we’d been friends ever since.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Bill said when I arrived. He opened the front door with one hand and held a pair of jeans in the other. ‘Sorry, I haven’t changed yet.’ He grinned. ‘You’re the first.’

  ‘Go change,’ I said. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘No. Leave those bottles on the side and open whatever you want. I’ll be two minutes,’ he said, walking towards his bedroom.

  I opened the fridge. It was rammed. Sausages, packets of bacon, some steaks. Something that might once have been a tomato and would now be of considerable interest to a research scientist. No other discernible vegetables. I reached for a bottle of white wine and fished in a drawer for a corkscrew.

  Bill appeared back in the kitchen in his jeans and a t-shirt that said ‘I am a computer whisperer’ on it. In the years since I’d met him, he’d discovered contact lenses but developed a questionable line of t-shirts. ‘I’ll have one of those please. Actually, no I won’t. I’ll have a beer first. So, how’s tricks?’ he asked, opening a bottle. ‘How was Christmas? How was your birthday and so on? I’ve got you a card actually.’ He picked up an envelope from his kitchen table and gave it to me. ‘Here you go.’

  ‘Being single at 30 isn’t as bad as it used to be,’ the front of the card read. I smiled, ‘Thanks, dude. Really helpful.’ I put the card down on the side and had a sip of wine. ‘And Christmas was lovely, thanks. Quiet, but kind of perfect. I ate, I slept. You know, the usual.’ I’d been worrying about Mum and her scan all week, but I didn’t want to mention it to anyone else yet. If I didn’t talk about it, I could keep a lid on the panic I felt when I woke in the middle of the night and lay in bed thinking about the appointment. I had decided to wait for the results of the scan and then we could go from there. ‘Anyway, how was yours?’

  ‘Terrible,’ Bill replied. ‘I was working for most of it, trying to sort out some investors.’ He took a swig of beer and leant on the kitchen counter. ‘So, I haven’t left the office before midnight this week and I’m doing no exercise apart from walking from my desk to have a pee four times a day. But that’s how start-up life is,’ he sighed and had another slug of his beer.

  ‘Love life?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m still seeing that girl, Willow. I told you about her before Christmas, right?’

  I nodded. ‘The Tinder one? Who works in… ?’ I couldn’t actually remember much about her. I was always, selfishly, slightly peeved when Bill was dating someone because it meant he was less available for cinema trips and pizza.

  ‘Interior design, yeah. She’s cool. But everything’s so busy at the moment that I keep having to cancel on any plans we make in favour of a “chicken chow mein for one” at my desk.’

  ‘Have you invited her tonight?’

  ‘Yeah. But she couldn’t make it.’

  ‘OK. So, who’s coming?’

  Normally, Lex would be here too, and she and I would spend the night drinking wine while discuss
ing our New Year’s resolutions. But Lex had gone away to Italy with her boyfriend, Hamish, this year. So, I was slightly nervous about who Bill had invited. Or not nervous exactly. Just apprehensive about having to talk to strangers all night.

  ‘Er, there’s Robin and Sal, who you know. Then a couple I don’t think you’ve met who are friends from home who’ve just got engaged – Jonny and Olivia. Two friends from business school you haven’t met either. Lou, who’s in town for a bit from America, who you’ll love, she’s amazing. And a guy called Callum I haven’t seen for years but who knows Lou, too.’ He looked at his phone as it buzzed. ‘Oh, that’s her now,’ he said.

  ‘Lou, hi,’ he said, answering it. ‘No, no, don’t worry, just a bottle of something would be great… number fifty-three, yep? Blue door, just ring the bell. See you in a tick.’

  By 11 p.m., everyone was still sitting around Bill’s kitchen table, their wine glasses smeary from sticky fingers. I’d drunk a lot of red wine and was sitting at one end of the table, holed up like a hostage, while Sal and Olivia, sitting either side of me, discussed their weddings. How was it physically possible for two fully grown women to care so much about what font their wedding invitations should be written in? I thought about the countless weddings I’d been to in the past couple of years. Lace dress after lace dress (since these days everyone wanted to look as demure as Kate Middleton on her wedding day), fistfuls of confetti outside the church, a race back to the reception for ninety-four glasses of champagne and three canapés. Dinner was usually a bit of a blur if I was honest. Some sort of dry chicken, probably. Then thirty-eight cocktails after dinner, which I typically spilled all over myself and the dance floor. Bed shortly after midnight with a blistered foot from the inappropriate heels I’d worn. I couldn’t recall what font any of the invitations were written in.

  ‘Polly,’ they said simply at the top. Just ‘Polly’ on its own. Never ‘Polly and so-and-so’ since I never had a boyfriend. Sometimes an invitation said ‘Polly and plus one’. But that was similarly hopeless since I never had one of those either. I reached for the wine bottle, telling myself to stop being so morose.

  ‘Who’s for coffee?’ asked Bill, standing up.

  ‘I’m OK on red.’

  ‘You’re not on your bike tonight?’ asked Bill.

  ‘Nope, I’ll Uber. But touched by your concern.’

  ‘Just checking. Right, everyone next door. I’m going to put the kettle on.’

  There were murmurs of approval and everyone stood and started to gather up plates and paper napkins from the floor. ‘Don’t do any of that,’ said Bill. ‘I’ll do it later.’

  I picked up the wine bottle and my glass and walked through the doors into the sitting room, collapsing onto a sofa and yawning. Definitely a bit pissed.

  Sal and Olivia followed after me and sat on the opposite sofa, still quacking on about weddings. ‘We’re having a photo booth but not a cheese table because I don’t think it ever gets eaten. What do you think?’ I heard Sal say.

  As if she’d been asked her opinion on Palestine, Olivia solemnly replied, ‘It’s so hard, isn’t it? We’re not having a photo booth but we are going to have a videographer there all day, so…’

  I yawned again. I’d been at uni with Sal. She once stripped naked and ran across a football pitch to protest against tuition fees. But here, discussing cheese tables and photo booths, she seemed a different person. An alien from Planet Wedding.

  ‘So, you’re a fellow cyclist?’ said Bill’s friend from business school, sitting down beside me on the sofa.

  ‘Yup. Most of the time. Just not when I’ve drunk ten bottles of wine.’

  ‘Very sensible. Sorry, I’m Callum by the way.’ He stuck his hand out for me to shake.

  Stuck, as I had been, between two wedding fetishists, I hadn’t noticed Callum much. He had a shaved head and was wearing a light grey t-shirt, which showed off a pair of muscly upper arms, and excellent trainers. Navy blue Nike Airs. I always looked at men’s shoes. Pointy black lace-ups: bad. The correct pair of trainers: aphrodisiac. Lex always criticized me for being too picky about men’s shoes. But what if you started dating someone who wore pointy black lace-ups, or, worse, shiny brown shoes with square ends, and then fell in love with them? You’d be looking at spending the rest of your life with someone who wore bad shoes.

  ‘I’m Polly,’ I replied, looking up from Callum’s trainers.

  ‘So you’re an old mate of Bill’s?’

  ‘Yep, for years. Since we were teenagers.’

  He nodded.

  ‘And you met him at business school?’

  He nodded again. ‘Yeah, at LBS.’

  ‘So what do you do now?’ I asked.

  ‘Deeply boring. I work in insurance, although I’m trying to move into K&R.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Kidnap and ransom. So more the security world really.’ He leant back against the sofa and propped one of his muscly arms on it.

  ‘How very James Bond.’

  He laughed. ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Do you travel a lot?’

  ‘A bit. I’d like to do more. To see more. What about you?’

  ‘I work for a magazine. It’s called Posh!’ I said, as if it was a question, wondering if he’d heard of it.

  He laughed again and nodded. ‘I know. Sort of… society stuff?’

  ‘Exactly. Castles. Labradors. That sort of thing.’

  He grinned at me. ‘I like Labradors. Fun?’

  ‘Yup. Mad, but fun.’

  ‘Do you get to travel much?’

  ‘Sometimes. To cold, draughty piles in Scotland if I’m very lucky.’

  ‘How glamorous,’ he said, grinning again.

  Was this flirting? I wasn’t sure. I was never sure. At school, we’d learned about flirting by reading Cosmopolitan, which said that it meant brushing the other person with your hand lightly. Also, that girls should bite their lips in front of boys, or was it lick their lips? They should do something to attract attention to their mouths, anyway. My flirting skills hadn’t progressed much since and, sometimes, when trying to cack-handedly flirt with someone, I’d simultaneously touch a man’s arm or knee and lick my lips and end up looking like I was having some kind of stroke.

  ‘Hang on, hold your glass for a moment,’ he said, leaning across me.

  My stomach flipped. Was he lunging? Here? Already? In Bill’s flat? Blimey. Maybe I didn’t give myself enough credit. Maybe I was better at flirting than I realized.

  He wasn’t lunging. He was reaching for a book. Underneath my glass, on the coffee table, was a huge, heavy coffee table book. Callum picked it up and laid it across both our laps.

  He leant back and started flicking through the pages. They were exquisite travel photos – reindeer in the snow around a Swedish lake, an old man washing himself on some steps in Delhi, a volcano in Indonesia belching out great clouds of orange smoke.

  ‘I want to go here,’ he said, pointing at a photo of a chalky landscape, a salt flat in Ethiopia.

  ‘Go on then. And then… let’s go here,’ I replied, turning the page. It was Venice.

  ‘Venice? Have you ever been?’ He turned to look at me.

  ‘No.’ Was now a good moment to touch his arm? I quite wanted to touch his arm.

  ‘Then I will take you.’

  ‘Ha!’ I laughed nervously and clapped my hand on his forearm.

  We carried on turning the pages and laughing for a while, discussing where we wanted to go until the photos were becoming quite blurry. I wasn’t really concentrating anyway, because Callum had moved his leg underneath the book so it was touching mine. I glanced across at him. How tall was he? Hard to tell sitting down.

  ‘Right, team,’ said Bill, sometime later from across the room, draining his coffee cup. ‘I think it might be home time. Sorry to end the party but I’ve got to go into the office tomorrow.’

  Callum closed the book and moved his leg, stretching out on the sofa and yawning.
‘Fun sponge.’

  ‘I know, mate, but some of us can’t just drink for a living. We’ve got real jobs.’

  ‘Talk to me when I’m in Peshawar.’ He stood up and clapped Bill on the back in a man hug. ‘Good to see you after so long, mate. Thanks for dinner.’ He was the same height as Bill, I noted. Sort of six foot-ish. A good height. The size I always wanted a man to be so I didn’t feel like a giraffe in bed next to him. That thing about everybody being the same size lying down is rubbish.

  Around us, everyone else was saying goodbye to one another. ‘Thanks, love,’ I said, hugging Bill. ‘Don’t work too hard tomorrow.’

  ‘Welcome,’ he said back, into my shoulder. ‘And I won’t. I should be around on Sunday if you are? Cinema or something? Is Lex back?’

  ‘Yup, she gets back tomorrow so said I’d see her for lunch on Sunday. Wanna join?’

  ‘Maybe, speak tomorrow?’

  I nodded and Bill turned to say goodbye to Lou behind us.

  ‘Where you heading back to?’ Callum asked as we stood by the open front door. I was squinting at my phone, trying to find Uber.

  ‘Shepherd’s Bush.’

  ‘Perfect. As you’re not cycling I will escort you home.’

  ‘Why, where are you?’

  ‘Nearby,’ he replied. ‘What’s your postcode?’

  This never happened. Sightings of the Loch Ness Monster were more common than me going home with anyone. I frowned as I tried to remember what state my bikini line was in. I probably shouldn’t sleep with him; I had an awful feeling it looked like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, looking at my face.

  ‘Nothing, all good,’ I replied quickly. Also, I knew I hadn’t shaved my legs for weeks. Or months, maybe. So, a few minutes later, in the back of the Uber, I reached down and tried to surreptitiously stick two fingers underneath the ankle of my jeans to check how bristly my legs were. They felt like a scouring brush.

  ‘What you doing?’ asked Callum, looking at me quizzically.