I’d bought a bag of chips on the way home and reasoned that life was pretty good, all things considered. I fell asleep with the TV on and would have slept for days had I not, at four in the morning, been woken by a curious beep.
I looked around and saw that my phone was lighting up the room. I had a text message.
I yawned, knocked the telly off, rummaged around to find my glasses, and then picked up the phone as its light began to fade.
It was probably Wag, drunk and lost in London, texting me in case I happened to be close by.
I squinted to read it. There was a message, but no name. And it was an unrecognised number.
Zero-zero-six-one?
Who was that?
I read the message
And then I sat bolt upright.
RING ME. I’M COMING TO EDINBURGH.
It was from Lizzie.
Four days later I was waiting in the arrivals lounge at Edinburgh International Airport with butterflies in my stomach and a flower in my hand.
And then there she was, pulling a suitcase behind her and smiling.
I couldn’t believe it. It was Lizzie.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said.
And then we hugged. And we laughed and looked at each other.
And then she said the words that I’d been longing to hear.
“What’s with the mullet?”
Chapter 14 In Which Daniel and Lizzie Climb a Mountain, Visit a Brass Rubbing Centre, and See a Bad Play
I had been waiting for what seemed like days for Lizzie to wake up.
After ’d realised she was going to take me up on my offer, I’d phoned her straight away. Was she sure? I’d asked. Could she really? She told me she’d been hoping to come back for quite some time. This was the perfect excuse. Her work was sorted; she was her own person. She could do it. Especially now that she had a ticket.
I was overawed—and nervous. I mean, who does something like this? What kind of girl is that spontaneous? What kind of girl would drop everything and just think, Yeah, I’ll do that, why not?
“I got your postcard from Amsterdam,” she’d said in the taxi on the way back. “The one which said sometimes you’ve just got to do things like that. I thought you were right.”
So she’d travelled for twenty-four hours to London. And then an hour more to Edinburgh. And now here she was asleep in front of me in a slightly murky Travelodge in the centre of town. The power of postcards.
She’d arrived in the morning, and it was now getting on for nine at night. Edinburgh was orange and phospherous outside my window. The streetlights blushed through the condensation on the glass. I watched the news with the sound down. Eventually I fell asleep too.
“I can’t believe you bought me a ticket,” said Lizzie, buttering her toast.
It was the next morning. We sat in front of two fry-ups in the City Café round the corner. I was unbelievably happy.
“I can’t believe you came here,” I said.
Things were just as they’d been eight months earlier in London. Nothing seemed to have changed or shifted. It felt … natural. But exciting.
“Don’t you think it’s a bit … odd … though?” I asked.
“What? That I got on the plane or that you bought me the ticket?”
“Well … both.”
“Yes. It’s very, very odd,” she said. “But that’s good, isn’t it? Life should be odd.”
I thought about it. And I agreed.
“I brought you a present,” she said.
“What is it?”
She opened up her bag and pulled out a picture. It was of a Big Cow.
“A Big Cow! Brilliant!” I said.
“Geek,” she said.
I suppose it must be a boy thing. I suppose in Melbourne or Adelaide or Canberra these Big Things must attract boys from miles around, while the girls just sit there in the car, wondering what on Earth they’re doing with their lives.
“So …,” she said. “What are we going to do today?”
“Absolutely anything you want,” I said. “The whole festival is ours.”
We went to the zoo.
The days flew by in the best way possible.
We did whatever came up, whenever it came up. We walked down Princes Street and accidentally ended up following a ghost tour. We walked by the shore in Leith and down by the sea, she made me buy cod. We moved out of the Travelodge and moved into the grand old Balmoral just because the mood took us, and we wore dressing gowns and sipped whiskey, and then we moved back to the Travelodge the very next night. She wanted to buy haggis and a deep-fried Mars bar and looked a little green after a mouthful of both. We had fun.
I marvelled at the power of Yes.
One time over a hot chocolate, Lizzie took the brochure of shows out. She flicked through it. She read some of it. She slammed it shut and threw it down on the table.
“You know what we should do?” she said.
“What?” I said.
“We should walk out that door and just go to the first show we get a flyer for. Whatever it is. No matter how bad it sounds.”
I laughed. I’d kind of been doing that anyway, of course, but now it seemed like fun. Because we’d be sharing a Yes.
“Okay,” I said.
A couple of hours later I had seen a show about betrayal, rape, and death for the third and hopefully last time.
We took another leaflet as we strolled down Clerk Street and booked ourselves in to see The Lady boys of Bangkok in a big tent in the meadows later that night.
As the days progressed we clambered up the sixteen thousand steps of the Scots Monument and sampled the brew in all two million of Edinburgh’s pubs. On a rainy morning we bought a guidebook, and Lizzie stuck a pin in the museums section. We spent an hour in the Museum of Early Keyboard Instruments on Cowgate. Later we passed the Oxford Bar and sat there and drank tea and felt like characters from an Ian Rankin novel. We ate chips on the steps of the castle and bought things in Kookie Hill we didn’t need. We swung by the brass rubbing centre, playacted fascination, and swung straight out again. We bought tickets for Hot, Hot Heat and Franz Ferdinand. We read papers in the Drum and Monkey. I taught Lizzie words like “stushie,” “bampot,” “weejie,” and “youze.” She taught me “barrack” and “doodle.”
One morning days later at 5 a.m., we were weaving our way home through a deserted city, carrying a half-full bottle of wine, when I suddenly became completely and utterly convinced that I could make this more special for Lizzie. I decided there would be snow on top of Arthur’s Seat, the extinct volcano that watches over Edinburgh. I was drunk, yes, but I was determined too, and I told Lizzie I had a surprise for her, and she was to follow me at once. We walked and laughed for what would have been more than an hour, but didn’t seem half that, until we were eight hundred feet up, standing at the top of the hill, overlooking the Firth of Forth and Fife and a city so splendid in the early morning sun that I didn’t know what to say. There was, of course, no snow. It was late August, for God’s sake, of course there wasn’t. But that didn’t matter. Because this had surprised us both.
I realised that in all the years I’d been coming to Edinburgh, I’d never once walked to the top of Arthur’s Seat. I’d never been to the galleries, I’d never been to the museums, I’d never been to the things that are there all year round. They were always there for me, but I’d never used them, never said yes to the opportunities I thought would always be there. It was like I’d discovered a new Edinburgh through Lizzie. But somehow it meant more than that.
It was like the world was full of Yeses or something. But what I want you to understand—what I think it’s important you understand—is that I wasn’t saying Yes because I was playing the Yes game. I’d all but forgotten about that. I wasn’t saying yes to prove anything to myself anymore, or to Ian, or to anyone else. I was saying yes because I wanted to. I was saying yes because all of a sudden it was coming naturally. I was saying yes because
when you’re in love, the world is full of possibilities, and when you’re in love, you want to take every single one of them.
And that’s my roundabout, slightly awkward way of telling you that … yeah … I was … you know … In love and that.
“In love?” said Ian over the phone.
“Yeah,” I mumbled shyly. “In love and that.”
“Wow,” said Ian thoughtfully “Cool.”
“I mean, I must be. I can’t stop saying yes to things.”
“Oh. Well. What a turnaround.”
“But I don’t even think about it when I’m with her. I’m saying yes because I want to. Everything seems like a good idea, so long as I’m doing it with her. It’s like I’ve gone Yes mental.”
“Or … Yental.”
“That doesn’t work.”
“No, it doesn’t. But all this is great, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “So, maybe Yeses are meant to be shared. Maybe that’s what all this is about. Maybe life’s about finding opportunities to share with someone. That’s all it is, when you think about it. A series of opportunities to share.”
Ian sounded like he’d need more convincing.
“Weirdo.”
But maybe Lizzie felt differently. Not about me being a weirdo—God knows I hoped she felt differently about that—but about the other stuff. I don’t know. Maybe this was how she always led her life. Open to opportunity. Spontaneous. Ready to go somewhere, do something. Maybe she was always a yes girl. With or without me.
I flew back down to London with Lizzie a few days later. I took her to the same terminal I’d taken her to when we’d last said good-bye. We hugged.
And then as quickly as she’d arrived, she was gone again, and I knew, somehow, that that would be the last time I ever saw her.
Saying yes had bought me another ten days with Lizzie. Ten days I never thought I’d have.
But it had also cost me a little bit more. I’d had to say bye to a girl I once liked but now loved. But I wouldn’t truly realise that until the next day, in fact, when Lizzie would already be thousands of miles away, and I would wake up and look around and for the first time see just how alone I really was.
Chapter 15 In Which Daniel Receives Some Unexpected News
For a couple of weeks and a day I did very little.
It felt like I was back at square one.
Nothing much was happening anymore. The whole Lizzie thing had kind of knocked me for six. It’s better to have loved and lost, they say. Yeah, maybe. But not that bloody quickly.
I’d started putting in more time at the BBC. I threw myself into my work. I wrote a detailed and comprehensive report on all the shows I’d seen while at the festival, using words like “powerful” and “evocative,” and telling Tom who I thought it was worth him getting in for chats and so on. I said yes to all the meetings I was asked to go to. Not because of Yes, but because I wanted to do a good job for a fine company. I turned up and worked even when my contract said I could be sitting at home, larking about. Work was becoming my focus. Because as long as I was working, I was … well … safe. Work couldn’t hurt. So I worked.
The Challenger seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. My e-mail to Jason had clearly worked. The e-mail I’d sent Thorn hadn’t bounced back, but it hadn’t been returned, either. And his mobile number had been disconnected, presumably to make way for a New Zealand number. Still, no matter: The Yes Man had conquered. I couldn’t help but feel that should have made me happier than it did. In actual fact I was a little disappointed that it had been so easy. Now I had neither a love life nor a nemesis—and life’s exciting when you’ve got a nemesis.
But my work at the BBC had clearly paid off. If nothing else, a couple of months’ worth of Yeses and my impressive commitment to whatever I could at the festival had marked me out as a man of dedication and positivity. Tom asked me if I’d like to come in to talk about a new position that had opened up over at TV Centre. He said he thought I could well be the man for the job, but he just wanted to have a chat first.
I said yes.
* * *
That weekend Ian was desperately trying to work out what I wanted to do. I was slouching, unshaven on the sofa in my boxers and a T-shirt, and he was sitting on the chair opposite, smartly dressed and smelling of aftershave.
“So … do you want to go the pub?” he said.
I shrugged.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Or … do you want to go the cinema?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Or we could go and play pool.”
“Great,” I said flatly.
“Yes to that as well,” said Ian. “Right. Well … do you want to … I dunno … go for a bloody yog?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged again. “Whatever, really.”
Ian was perturbed.
“Jesus, Dan. You don’t have to keep on just saying yes. It’s me.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I’m just trying to find out what you want to do.”
“Cool.”
“So, which is it? Pub, cinema, pool, or jogging?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sounds good. Whatever. Let’s go.”
However distracted I may have been, I suppose I was still at least saying yes to things. I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore. The thrill was gone. It was automatic. But I couldn’t see the point of it all in the way I once had, in the way I’d hoped I always would. And I didn’t want to think about it.
“I suppose now would be a bad time to tell you I’ve come up with the perfect punishment for you, if you don’t do this?” said Ian.
I glared at him. He looked frightened.
“This is worse than when you always used to say no,” he said. “At least then I didn’t have to hang around with you.”
We went to play pool.
Ian had managed to pot nearly every ball on the table. I was finding it hard to muster up the energy to compete.
“Dan … you’re not going to slip back to how you were, are you?”
I looked up from my shot.
“How do you mean?”
“Well … you’re not going to give up and revert back to how you were a few months ago are you? Because if you are, I will be able to put the punishment into action a little sooner than I’d thought…”
“Oh piss off with your punishment talk. You blatantly haven’t thought of one yet.”
Ian looked genuinely hurt.
“I have so.”
“What is it, then?”
“Okay, I haven’t. But I will. And it will be excellent.”
I thought about what to say and leaned against the table.
“When I won that twenty-five thousand pounds, and then lost it again, it didn’t really bother me. You know?”
Ian nodded.
“Because Yes had given me something. The fact that I lost it didn’t matter. But then Yes gave me something better than twenty-five thousand pounds. It gave me Lizzie. And that was a cruel thing for Yes to do, because I couldn’t keep her. It gave me someone who lives on the other side of the world, and it made me fall in love with her. And then she was gone. That’s why I’m in a foul mood. That’s why I think Yes is stupid. That’s why I’m playing pool in this pub with you, thinking life is a mess, a sad fucking mess, and I wish I’d just said no a bit more. No’s all I want to say, now, Ian. I don’t want to be like I was, but I’m so sick of saying yes. All it does is tire me. It was supposed to help. It was supposed to be exciting”
Ian put his pool cue down and nodded sadly.
“What Yes giveth,” he said, “Yes also taketh away.”
Ian must have told Hanne what had happened.
The next day she wanted to meet up at a café near Old Street.
“Hey,” I said, sitting down.
I was twenty minutes late, but she didn’t say a thing. She was clearly in sensitive mode.
“Hey,” she said softly. “So I just thought we should meet up. It’s been
awhile. I wanted to see how you are.”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? You don’t look fine.”
“Honestly I’m good. I’ve just been a bit distracted lately.”
“Something else is wrong. I can tell.”
“No, you can’t. And no, it isn’t.”
“It is. I can read you, Dan. I know you better than anyone.”
“I’ve got a lot on my mind, that’s all.”
“Look, I know things are a bit funny, because of me and Seb, but …”
“Hanne. Honestly. That’s not what this is about. And you don’t have to worry. I’m absolutely not obsessed with you, and I didn’t want to go on your bloody date with you, and I’m sorry about the flowers and the small African child. It was odd behaviour, I know, but please, if you don’t mind, let’s put it behind us. I moved on ages ago. Seriously. You and Seb are fine. You’re great. And you and me—well, we’re friends. Great friends.”
Just then Hanne’s phone rang. She was about to turn it off, but I gestured for her to take it, pleased for the interruption. It was her mobile phone company. I could hear them, tinny and loud, from where I was sitting. They wanted to know whether Hanne had a few moments to talk about her mobile phone bill. She said not really. I smiled. It must be nice to be able to say that. But again I gestured for her to continue. I had nowhere I needed to be. I had my meeting with Tom at the BBC, but that wasn’t for hours yet.
“Okay …,” she said, mouthing sorry to me between answering questions. “Surname is Knudsen …,” she said, before giving the first line of her address, her date of birth, and her security password.
“Norway. N-O-R-W-A-Y.” She rolled her eyes. “Yes. Like the country.”
Well, what else was it like? The colour?
“Sounds good,” she said. “Okay, thanks …”
She hung up.
“They’ve moved me to a better call plan. Free text messages, twenty percent off my bill. Glad I took the call …”
At least saying yes was working out for someone.
“So, listen …,” she said.
“I’m going to be fine,” I said, cutting her off. “Life’s just a bit … strange right now.”
Yes Man Page 26