‘What if he was nasty to you now?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You think he might say something when you next meet?’
‘Yes. I think he’s snide by nature and I’ve not helped myself by annoying him in this meeting.’
‘Then encourage it. Get him to goad you. Then take it to John and say you can’t work with him for these personal reasons, and someone else from that agency should take over.’
‘Oh. Wow. Yes, I suppose that could work … depending on what he said.’
‘Look on it as insurance. If he says nothing too dreadful, then you can cope. If he taunts you, he’s sealing his own fate.’
Anna thought about this. The idea of taking the lead and giving him attitude emboldened her. A psychological layer of armour.
‘Thanks. This is brilliant advice.’
‘One tries one’s best.’ Patrick patted her arm again.
‘You’re my furry Pandarian hero,’ Anna said, grinning.
Patrick beamed.
Anna wasn’t confrontational by nature. While Patrick had the odd spluttering fit at idle students, Anna always tried to empathise. You never knew anyone’s full story. She played the ‘what if’ game. What if they have money worries … what if they have an illness? (‘Like Lazy Bones?’ Patrick said.)
But being unpleasant to James Fraser? She reckoned she was up to that.
19
At the end of a long week, Anna found herself, her coat, bag and her glass of red wine a seat in the basement café-bar of the Soho Curzon cinema. She didn’t want to do a meerkat at every man who walked in and hoped Grant would recognise her.
He was quarter of an hour late, although Anna didn’t mind. She knew some women were very concerned with the respect implied by strict punctuality and chairs being pulled out and generally Walter Raleighing about, but she really wasn’t. As long as he seemed respectful and didn’t swear at her for not getting all the drinks in, Anna was easy-going. Dating was difficult enough without sweating the detail.
She liked it in here and often ducked in, even when she wasn’t seeing a film, to people watch over a hot chocolate. It was a little oasis of cerebral calm when the city upstairs felt frenetic.
Unlike Anna, Michelle wasn’t from London, having moved here from the West Country when she went to catering college, and saw it with outsider’s eyes. She said London was one of the worst places to have a bad day and one of the best to have a good day.
Anna knew what she meant. She’d left for that meeting at the British Museum with a Beach Boys soundtrack in her head, and walked back to Joy Division.
When Anna had a particularly terrible time at school, she used to take a book to Mayesbrook Park and walk, and read, and walk some more. She learned that sitting in her bedroom, brooding on what the next day might bring, was unhealthy.
So she had intended to wait longer after the Pied Piper of Piss incident to go on another of these dates, but she recognised her need not to dwell. Plus Grant had messaged his extreme enthusiasm. Everyone on dating sites was available for a limited period only. If you turned them down, they went to the next on the list, a person who might take them out of circulation.
Anna could miss the love of her life if she hung back. Grant could be the one for her and she’d have let BDSM Neil and James Fraser ruin it for them. Imagine that! Yep, it was the lottery logic again. And what were your odds for winning that, and getting yourself the gated mansion and the bull mastiffs called Pucci and Gucci?
Her Granny Maude said anyone single after thirty had a ‘problem’. It was up to you to find out what that was. ‘And if you don’t see what the problem is at first,’ she said, pausing for effect, ‘you’ll find out what it is, soon enough.’
Aggy inhaled the anthrax spores of their gran’s wisdom with wide eyes. Late teenage Anna, in her CND symbol-Tippexed Doc Martens, with an aubergine streak in her hair, had started to question the older generation.
‘What if you’re a widower and that’s why you’re single? What if that’s the problem?’
‘Yes. And who’d want someone who wanted someone else and couldn’t have them? You’d always be second-best.’
What was Anna’s problem, in that case? Granny Maude had died, so, probably mercifully, she’d never get her opinion.
‘Hello, Anna?’
She’d been deep in thought, leafing through the Curzon’s programme of forthcoming events.
‘Hello! Grant?’
‘Are you OK for a drink?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Anna said.
‘Right, give me a sec …’ Grant said, shrugging a trench coat off and flinging a briefcase down by the chair legs.
Cor. Hang on. He was quite dashing. Mid-blond hair tucked behind his ears, strong nose, tall, broad shouldered, looked like he might win boat races or get a small role as a philanderer with Velcro mutton chops in Downton Abbey.
She’d thought he was attractive in the photos, but as always, deferred excitement until meeting in the flesh. He had an impressive job, communications director for a big charity. Anna felt a shiver of anticipation and adjusted her skirt over her woolly tights. After Neil’s ‘not flowery’ remark, she’d done her hair in a coiled, plaited bun, put more make-up on and bought a tighter dress than usual. It wasn’t difficult – everything in Topshop was like a tourniquet.
Grant set a pint of Kronenbourg down.
‘Sorry I’m late, got something dumped on me as I was leaving work.’
‘Ah, I know that feeling.’ Pause. ‘Do you enjoy it? What you do?’ Anna asked.
‘Most days. Now my last manager, Ruth, has left. She was the hardest taskmaster you’ve ever met, honestly. In the end me and a few colleagues made a formal complaint. She didn’t leave but there was a disciplinary and then after that she was even worse. We were asking, is it even worth making a complaint … What are HR for? Ruth had no idea how to assess us, she’d never even done the job and it was all—’ Grant made an Emu-style talking hand pincer, ‘“Wah, wah, do it like this.” And we were like, OK, whatever. She’s in Doncaster now.’
‘Oh dear …’ Anna said, wondering why Ruth had got so much airtime. Maybe the memory was raw.
‘How did you get into comms?’
‘Comms? Good question, I did pharmacology for my degree. At Newcastle. It was the right degree for me at the time and I got a 2:1 but then I was like, do I want to go into this? It’s a good discipline to have you know, don’t get me wrong, but in essence I’m a communicator, I like talking to people.’
AT PEOPLE, Anna thought, and tried to silence her rebellious inner voice.
‘So then I moved to London and at first, my brother’s in IT, and I was like – is IT for me? I temped at his place and it was, you know, OK, and he was all “You’re good at it, you can have a job” and I was like, hmmm. Maybe there’s more for me, you know? Then I went to Indonesia with my girlfriend … Haha, my ex-girlfriend, I should say …’
Grant leaned over and squeezed Anna’s arm, reassuringly, and some would say, over confidently.
‘That took my perspective and shifted it. Amazing place. Have you been?’
Anna shook her head, biting the insides of her cheeks, as she realised they were about to spend a year in Indonesia as a result of this answer. Grant indeed embarked on Indonesia, its topography, customs, cuisine. Its … SHOES? The kind of shoes people wore? Oh boy.
Anna’s mind boggled. Whatever topic was introduced, Grant had absolutely no filter. It was like turning a tap on. Ask him something, get an information flood, until the room was ankle-deep and you were calling Dyno-Rod.
At first it was perturbing, then infuriating, then blackly comic, then very, very boring.
An hour later, Anna no longer knew how to arrange her face so it didn’t look like one you might see filling the porthole window of a crashing plane.
She could’ve embarked on monologues of her own by way of retaliation, but what was the point? Grant wasn’t sufficiently interested to ask
any questions and Anna was sure that unless he produced documentation to prove he had Yapping On Disorder and she was legally obliged to give him a second date, she was never seeing him again.
Grant was now on Indonesia’s critically endangered Sumatran Orang-utans and the attack he suffered at their long-fingered hands. It was a topic with the potential to be interesting, but for the fact they were working backwards, covering every inch of his travel arrangements to get him face time with the primates. From the Greggs cheese and onion lattice at Gatwick onwards.
Anna started to cut the moorings and drift away. While Grant was narratively hacking through the jungle, she was mentally writing her supermarket shopping list and drafting two work emails.
‘Another?’ Grant said, second drink finished. Anna had been willing the last two inches of his beer to disappear for a long time.
‘No, sorry, ’ – she checked her watch – ‘I’ve got to meet my friends.’
‘Ah,’ Grant said, clearly thinking: invite me?
Anna felt bad for him and hated herself for being so weak that she felt bad for everyone, constantly, even when their level of sensitivity was ‘endangered rhino hide’.
The farewell outside involved Anna keeping a pointed distance. She didn’t see how Grant could possibly think this had gone well enough to warrant kissing, but then she didn’t understand a lot of things about Grant.
‘We should do this again,’ Grant said.
‘Erm …’
Anna stuck her hand out for Grant to shake. He obliged, slightly blank.
‘Thanks. I’ve had a lovely time. I think my dating odyssey continues though.’
‘Oh. Uh, OK …’ Grant smoothed his hair, ‘Is that a “I don’t want to see you again”?’
‘I don’t think we sparked,’ Anna said. The spark thing again. A word to cover a thousand sins.
‘What does that mean?’ Grant said.
‘The – rapport,’ Anna said, gesturing with a palm on her chest, then flapping at the air between them. ‘Between us.’
‘I thought conversation flowed!’
Conversation. If you went to a lecture on climate change, did you come away thinking you’d had a great chat with Al Gore? Anna wrestled with kindness versus cruelty, and frustration and cheap red plonk edged her into ‘cruelty’.
‘You talked a lot more than I did.’ As she said it, she felt how sad and undignified this was, standing in the street, telling someone why they didn’t measure up as company.
‘You asked a lot of questions,’ Grant said, frowning.
‘I suppose I did,’ Anna said, wanting desperately to be gone now, hoping Michelle would ring with their location rather than text, and save her from this post mortem. ‘Sorry.’
There was no nice way to say, and no point in saying: we’re not on the same wavelength and never will be and the fact that you can’t see that proves the wavelength point beyond all doubt.
Her phone rang.
She loved Michelle anyway, but at that moment, she loved her more than sunshine, cake, or the orang-utan called Hercules that had slapped Grant on the forehead.
20
In the purple of the evening light, Anna made out Michelle, scuffing her feet on the street outside Gelupo, puffing on a smokeless e-cigarette that looked like a tampon holder.
‘Can’t you smoke those inside?’ Anna said, when she reached her.
‘Penny’s here,’ Michelle said, grimacing.
‘Ah.’
‘We’ve already had a barney. She made a big thing of giving a fiver to some guy sat in a doorway, then went on about how she doesn’t understand people who only give a quid and how she always gives them enough to get a hot square meal. I said “a hot square meal of HEROIN” and then it was stereotyping the poor mweh mweh mweh.’ Michelle did the rodent-like meeping noise that she used to impersonate Penny. ‘I wouldn’t mind the sanctimony if she was some aid worker who stood a chance of being blown up, but it’ll be bloody Daniel’s fiver. Why are bleeding-heart hippies always the most selfish people you could meet?’
Anna laughed. She knew Michelle’s Penny rants well.
‘Don’t make me go back inside,’ Michelle laid her head on Anna’s shoulder.
‘How about the ice cream though?’
Michelle sagged.
‘Count the number of seconds it takes for her to say something rude or gloaty to you. Just count them.’
Inside Gelupo’s warmly lit, sailboat blue-and-white interior, Anna ordered chocolate and espresso granitas for herself and Michelle and felt guilty at Penny’s enthusiastic waving at her across the room. There were wafer cones the size of wizard hats on the counter but Anna opted for scoops in tubs, the calorie calculator in her never completely switched off.
‘How did the date go?’ Penny said, flicking her long straight hair out of her own pink ice cream, as they sat down. She had a moon-shaped face, a large fringe that seemed to start very far back on her head and a tinkly voice. Like Daniel, it made it seem as if the content couldn’t be harsh. But unlike Daniel, it could be.
‘Cataclysmic. So boring I felt as if I could bend space and time and see into the future.’
‘You’re so unlucky with your dates. I wonder why it is?’
Michelle checked her watch, in Anna’s eye line.
‘It’s not easy to find, somebody who is just your kind, to quote a song,’ Daniel said to her, drawing the back of a spoon out of his mouth.
‘Do you ever think you might be too choosy?’ Penny said, with her head cocked to one side.
Across the table, Michelle swiped a finger in the air to make an imaginary ‘one’ score.
‘Whenever you’ve been single for a while people always say that. I’m not sitting there being picky about near-misses, I promise you. More “a mile wide of the marks”,’ Anna said.
‘Yeah, plus it’s the sort of analysis only single people get. You’d never say to couples: “Do you think you weren’t choosy enough?”’ Michelle said, smiling broadly.
‘I mean, how much can you really tell from one date?’ Penny said. ‘Who did you meet tonight?’ she persisted.
‘Grant.’
‘OK. Maybe right now he’s thinking oh gosh darnit!’ Anna had forgotten Penny liked to use the language and mannerisms of a 1920s Southern Belle. ‘I sure wish I could have another date with that Anna, but I blew it.’
Penny did a click of the fingers with swinging hand motion.
Anna looked blank.
‘But maybe if you went on a second date, it’d be like, magic click!’ Penny said, clicking fingers on both hands, with a glittery laugh.
It was generally Michelle who lost patience with Penny, but tonight it was Anna’s turn.
‘I don’t have time left to date everyone who I don’t like twice, while looking for someone I do. And maybe that does mean I’ll miss Mr Right. Frankly there’s a good chance that if he ever existed, I missed him years ago. We were waiting side by side for the same late train in 2002 at King’s Cross and at the last minute he walked further up the platform and we never spoke. Now he’s in Kuala Lumpur up to his nuts in his new bride and I’m only looking for Mr Happens to Be Available at the Right Time. But I don’t see why that condemns me to waste nights of my life with Mr TripAdvisor to prove it’s not me being picky. Maybe it looks like a romantic adventure from the perspective of a relationship, but it’s a grind. A grind that makes you sad. You start off thinking “this could be the one” with every date and you soon realise it won’t ever be the one. You’re lucky to get “half decent” or “not a nutter”.’
‘Oooh! Calm down,’ Penny said, patting Anna’s arm, while Anna glowered at the table and tried not to bite her.
‘Fuckin’ well said,’ Michelle said. ‘Which is why I don’t date at all.’
‘I’m giving it a rest for a while,’ Anna agreed, glumly.
‘Be careful that you two don’t end up a pair of old grumpies! You’re like Marge’s sisters on The Simpsons!’ Penny giggled, w
hile Anna and Michelle exchanged a look of disbelief. Self-styled ‘nice’ people were truly dangerous.
Daniel, polishing off the last of his ice cream, seemed oblivious to Penny’s misdemeanours.
‘If you don’t mind sharing,’ Daniel said. ‘I can go Mormon if you like, and save you all.’
Michelle did one of her ‘Nyaaah’ filthy laughs and peace was restored.
‘I have some more madness for you,’ Anna said. ‘Guess who was in my first British Museum meeting. Evil James Fraser from school who I saw at the reunion.’
‘What? The one who …?’ Michelle broke off, in deference to Anna not wanting it hauled over in front of Penny. ‘How come?’
‘He’s one of the digital people doing the app and whatever. Emphasis on the whatever.’
‘Does he know who you are now? Did he apologise?’
‘Don’t think so and no. I decided to go on the attack, and if he has a go at me I’ll get him moved off the project.’
Anna feared more questions from Penny about how it was possible that someone from school didn’t recognise her. She was grateful to Michelle possibly sussing this and saying, ‘And more identity surprises, remember the cock and balls flasher the other night? He came and introduced himself because he’s running a burger van opposite. Now, what’s the one thing you wouldn’t say he was?’
‘Shy?’ Daniel said.
‘Posh! He’s posh! “Guy”! Apologising for the flashing like he was Hugh Grant after the prostitute on the chat show. We had taken drink … lot of high jinks … shenanigans … tomfoolery. Waffle coughle.’
‘Nice of him to say sorry?’
‘I think he didn’t want me phoning the police and ruining his pop-up burger racket. They’ve called it “Meat Cute”. The burger is “Beefy The Hunger Slayer”. There’s not one menu item without massive smug as the main ingredient. I give it a month.’
‘I’ve tried one. Absolutely delish,’ Daniel said.
‘Dan! Can I have some bloody loyalty? My front of house giving money to the competition?’
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