by Danny King
Charlotte? Charley? I didn’t know anyone by either name, especially anyone who could phone me up on my own phone while I was still holding it.
I wondered if I’d flipped my lid and turned into a schizophrenic.
It happened all the time in America, alter egos phoning themselves up to introduce themselves and suggest a killing spree. It’s a lot more common than you’d think.
As it turned out, it was actually the girl I’d left just three minutes earlier, though I only finally twigged this when she relented and explained, ‘You know, the one you left just a moment ago. The one you kept calling Jo all last night?’
‘Oh, yeah, Jo… sorry, I mean Charley. Oh yeah, hi, hello, how are you?’ I asked, my brain still in first gear.
‘Still hung over,’ Charley said.
‘Sorry to hear that,’ I told her, though I didn’t look all that sorry standing in the middle of the street, suddenly grinning from ear to ear like a nutjob with a whole bowl of blancmange to himself.
She had my number? This was great. This was fantastic even.
This was… still a bit weird with what was going on with my phone but I’d figure that one out later on, piece of crap. In the meantime, I had more important things to jump up and down on the spot about.
Like Charley.
She’d phoned me up. I hadn’t even realised she’d had my number but that didn’t matter now. All that mattered was that she’d phoned me up and, more importantly, that she’d phoned me up pretty much the second I’d left. Some people say that you’re meant to leave it a couple of days and play it cool but Charley obviously didn’t buy into this theory and had decided to strike while the iron was hot herself.
Had she, like me, been biting her tongue all morning long, only to finally come to her senses and realise that life was too short to mess around? That if she had a shot at happiness, then she should go for it before it got away and sod the consequences?
Maybe. But if she had, that wasn’t what she was phoning about. No, what she actually wanted was her phone back.
‘You’ve taken mine by mistake. It’s the same model as yours, remember?’
I didn’t, but it did explain a thing or two. It also presented me with one last chance to make an utter dick of myself and see this unbelievably cute, beautiful, graceful, knockout stunner laugh in my face before she slipped from my life for good.
And this time, I was going to take it.
3 Jason and the Lagernauts
‘Jesus, my head. I ain’t drinking champagne again for a while,’ Jason swore, a couple of hours later when I met him in my local, the Catford Lamb. ‘What was it, wedding last night, or you two finally get a room together?’ Tony the landlord chuckled, before shouting over to old Stan in the corner, ‘Couple of pooftas we got in today,’ in case old Stan didn’t get it. Old Stan lifted his half a stout our way and agreed enthusiastically.
‘What’ll it be, then, girls, couple of pink gins?’ Tony then asked.
Sensing this one was set to run and run I decided to take the wind out of the boring bastard’s sails and told him I’d love a pink gin, but only if he was out of Campari. Tony gabbled excitedly and ran through a list of girlie drinks – sherries, shandies, Bacardis and Cokes, Tia Marias, white-wine spritzers and Martinis before eventually blowing himself out trying to recapture the moment. Me and Jason drummed our fingers on the bar as we waited for him to finish and old Stan went back to staring into his past.
‘Port and lemon?’ was his last throw of the dice, but that was basically it, Tony was a spent force, and me and Jason eventually got a couple of pints and a breather from the cabaret.
‘Sandra gave me a right earful this morning,’ Jason told me when he resurfaced from his lager. ‘I just blamed everything on you, though, and she was all right after that.’
I shrugged to show him that this was fine and asked him what he remembered about the previous night.
‘Not much. Bits and pieces. Here, how d’you get on with that old posh bird?’
‘Funny you should ask.’ I smiled, all full of myself. ‘I ended up back at her place, didn’t I?’
‘Did ya?’ Jason gasped. ‘You jammy bastard. How d’you get on?’
‘I haven’t got a clue,’ I admitted.
I told Jason about the big pothole in my Friday night and he filled in a few missing shovelfuls where he could. Apparently, we were already pretty legless by the time the last race came around and that’s when we met… ‘What was her name? George or Bob or something? Some bloke’s name,’ Jason trawled, scratching his chin.
‘Charley?’
‘That was it. Her and…’
This time he didn’t even have a lead on whoever Charley was with, so she got tagged with a simple shrug of the shoulders.
Anyway, Charley and her mate had been at the dogs as well the previous evening, which was a bit weird because the dogs didn’t seem like the sort of place they’d hang out at, but apparently they were being ironic. In the past few weeks they’d been to the dogs, the bingo, a banger race, an amusement arcade and a darts tournament, all in the name of irony, which presumably only left a boxing match, a pie fight and a chimps’ tea party before they could sign off on this whole working-class experience.
‘So if we went and had our lunch in the Ritz in our work togs, that would be ironic too, would it?’ Jason wanted to know.
‘Yeah, I’m sure they’d love it,’ I replied, my head full of images of posh waiters clapping their hands with delight as the pair of us trod cucumber sarnies and Hula Hoops into their carpet.
‘And that’s when we met them,’ I think was where we’d got to.
I cast my mind back and vaguely remembered talking to a few people at the racetrack but none of them seemed to fit either Charley or her ‘posh mate’s’ description.
‘I’m not surprised, the amount you were knocking back mate.
You remember when you got that double come up and you started knocking back double everythings to celebrate?’
I didn’t.
Anyway, apparently at the end of the evening we’d somehow hooked up with Charley and her mate and I was all Billy Big Time with a couple of hundred quid burning a hole in my back pocket so Charley had said she knew a little boozer near by that was open late. Jason, apparently, hadn’t wanted to go, but reluctantly tagged along to make sure these two sorts didn’t rip me off for my winnings and only felt it was safe to leave me once I’d done the lot. What a mate.
‘By the time the other one had disappeared you and that Charley were thick as custard, knocking back the champagne and wowed out to fuck that you both had the same phone,’ Jason explained. ‘You really don’t remember any of this?’
I pulled the same face old Stan pulled when anyone asked him where he lived but none of the previous evening came tumbling back. Scary when you think about it. To get yourself into such a state that you could’ve done just about anything without even realising it. There must be blokes out there in this big wide world who started out on a Friday night with the intention of a few drinks and a bit of a laugh and ended up in prison, or worse still, in the ground, with no idea of how they got there. Silly really, the things we do to ourselves. Jason summed it up nicely one time when he said, ‘Imagine if we ever managed to explore space and found another planet with life on it and there were these little green blokes who were perfectly sensible and hard working for most of the time, then once a week they all went down to a quarry and licked a big green glowing rock, then started smashing dustbin lids over each other’s heads and puking up on the night rocket home. We’d think they were fucking bananas, wouldn’t we?’
We probably would, but I bet we’d have a go on the rock ourselves when they weren’t looking.
Anyway, I’m straying off the point. Nothing bad had happened to me the previous night and I was alive and in once piece and grateful for it. And that wasn’t all I had to be grateful for.
‘You mean you can’t even remember if you gave her one or not?’
‘I can’t even remember if I gave you one or not.’
‘Well, do you… you know… feel like you’ve had it?’ he then asked, gesturing downwards with a drop of the eyes.
‘No, I feel like I’ve been beaten up by a couple of tramps and dragged through several brewery hedges backwards but I don’t feel like I’ve done anything that’ll have the CSA cancelling my Sky subscription any time soon.’
‘Not even in the morning?’
‘No.’
‘What did you do then?’
‘Just had a cup of tea and went. Have you heard of English breakfast?’
‘What, d’you mean like eggs and bacon?’
‘No, like English breakfast tea?’
‘No. What is it?’
‘Well, it ain’t Tetley’s, I can tell you that.’
‘Anyway, never mind all that. What about this bird?’
What about her indeed? I’d taken her phone back and almost choked it again, but at the last moment finally redeemed myself Robert Vaughn-style and asked her if she wanted to… was free to… didn’t mind… had nothing better to do… was bored… stuck… etc… for a drink one night?
‘Um…’ she’d ummed, looking none too sold on the idea, so I’d braced myself for the inevitable ‘see the thing is…’ schtick and even started nodding magnanimously like I was well aware of what ‘the thing’ was. But then Charley pulled the rug from beneath my feet and said, ‘Yes, OK, then. That would be nice.’
Yes?
OK, then?
That would be nice?
Did I hear her right? Well, yes, I’d heard the words but I was worldly enough to know that while ‘no’ always meant ‘no’ from a girl, ‘yes’ didn’t necessarily come with the same twenty-eight-day money-back guarantees. I’d learned this from bitter experience when I’d asked this girl out a few times a couple of years back. I was working on this site down in Sutton – starter homes mostly, one- and two-bedroom maisonettes and flats – when this girl moved into one of the first places to be completed. She was as pretty as a pay packet and used to cause quite a stir when she stepped out for work in her clean and crisp business suit in the mornings. Don’t get me wrong, none of us were ever rude to her or nothing. We just knew her to say good morning to and speculate about behind her back.
Anyway, after a few months me and Jason were sent off from the main gang around the back of her block to build a little retaining wall for the top soil. Miss Business Suit must’ve had that same week off because she was around most days. I guess it was a little less intimidating there being only the two of us in her back garden because she used to come out, chat to us and bring us cups of tea from time to time. And I must say she was even lovelier up close than she looked from thirty feet away in the gables. Nice girl too. Very friendly, bright and smart. A real distraction. That wall took longer to build than Hadrian’s.
Anyway, to cut a long story ever so slightly shorter, eventually (when Jason had sloped off to the sweet shop) I managed to get around to asking her out. She’d said, ‘Yeah, definitely, we must some time,’ and nodded enthusiastically.
Now I’m no language expert but that sounded like a ‘yes’ to me so I allowed myself to feel all chipper and smug and even told Jason about it when he got back with the choc ices. Jason asked me when my date was but we hadn’t quite agreed that much yet so I had to go back and ask her out again, this time with a few of the specifics nailed down.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see again her for the next few days so I was forced to take the bull by the horns and knock on her door. Miss Business Suit answered with her usual smile, so I asked her if she was free at all this week.
As it turned out, she wasn’t and blow me if she wasn’t busy at the weekend too.
‘Oh well, perhaps some time next week, then?’ I relented.
‘Yes, definitely,’ she’d replied, so I’d gone back and told Jason that we were going out the following week.
‘When?’ the annoying bastard had asked me again.
Anyway, the following week came and went without so much as a sighting, so I was forced to stow my hopes away for another long weekend and even found myself looking forward to getting back to work the following Monday so that I could see Miss Business Suit again and get our date sorted.
Unfortunately, I still kept on missing her so eventually I went around and knocked on her door again. I knocked on three separate occasions but she was never in. I even considered hanging around for her after work, but I ruled that one out because I didn’t want to look like a stalking fruity sex-case and I also wanted to get home for my dinner.
Eventually, I saw her a few days later when I was working in a footing with the rest of the gang, but I didn’t say anything then because I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of the lads, so I went round to her place after last knockings and just managed to catch her on her way out – the back door.
Once again she said that she was sorry but she was busy all week long but maybe we could go out some time the following week. Or the week after that. She’d let me know.
By this time all the lads had caught wind of it and thought we were going out. And I couldn’t really blame them either, I mean, I thought we were going out, but I was wrong. And finally I had this confirmed to me one frosty morning when I saw Miss Business Suit leaving her flat with some pencil-dick who wasn’t me. Actually, that’s not fair on him, I don’t know if he was a pencil-dick or not. All I know is that he actually got to go on dates with Miss Business Suit while I only got to ask for them.
Seven weeks, that went on. Seven weeks and I think I must’ve asked her out a total of five times before the penny finally dropped. Each time was a nerve-shredding heart-in-the-mouth stutter-fest and each time she’d said ‘yes’, but her ‘yes’ hadn’t meant ‘yes’, not even her ‘yes definitely’. It had actually meant, ‘No, but I’m too embarrassed to say no. Read between the lines, Bungle’.
Oh, I’m not bitter, because it can’t be easy being put on the spot by some knuckle-headed doughnut who can’t take a hint, but then all it takes is a moment of courage and everyone knows where they are. A bit like asking in the first place – which is an awful, excruciating, miserable, tongue-twisting experience and one I’ve always hated.
Eye-openingly enough, that pencil-dick who wasn’t me became quite a fixture around Miss Business Suit’s flat and they occasionally passed us by when we were working on or near the estate access road. One morning they both even smiled up and said good morning to us when Robbie called down a ‘mawnin’ ’ of his own and she didn’t even blink when she saw me up there next to him. It was like nothing had ever passed between us and there was an unspoken agreement that even if something had, neither of us should ever bring it up again.
I wondered if this was how I’d looked to Charley this morning.
I also wondered if Miss Business Suit’s pencil-dick ever knew about it when she finally broke up with him or whether he just went around there one day and found the locks had been changed and some other geezer wearing his slippers.
‘So you are going out with her, then?’ Jason asked me, meaning with Charley. Forget about Miss Business Suit. That was just me reminiscing. I’m over her.
‘I think so. I mean, she said yes and everything and I’ve got her number in my phone now, so I said I’d give her a call next week,’ I explained, showing him her number as proof of my recent success.
‘Nice one. You’ll do all right there, my son,’ he offered, clicking his tongue against his teeth and rubbing his hands together like Jiminy Cricket on a promise.
‘Really? You think she likes me, then?’
‘Oh yeah, posh birds love a bit of rough,’ he winked, all congratulatory. ‘Everyone knows that, don’t they?’
Old Stan over in the corner rolled his eyes.
‘Yeah, but do you think she actually likes me? You know, actually likes me for me?’
Jason stopped rubbing his hands mid-rub and looked at me as if I’d just taken
the lid off a pot of snakes.
‘Er, well, you know, sure, depends on what you’re talking about,’ he speculated. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, is she only after me for a quick shag or do you think she actually likes me for who I really am?’ I asked.
‘Are you sure you don’t want a pink gin?’ Jason asked, by way of a reply.
‘Oh, don’t give me that old flannel, you’ve been happily married to Sandra ever since you met her in the sandpit, so don’t come the old Confessions of a Bricky bollocks with me. You know what I’ve always wanted.’
‘Well, yeah, Tel, but all I’m saying is you shouldn’t size up every bird you meet as potential life partner material. You’re setting yourself up for a fall every time. And with this Charley bird especially. I can tell you that for nothing,’ Jason told me, as good as his word, for nothing. ‘Just enjoy it for what it is and don’t go twisting your knickers into knots over what it isn’t because at the end of the day you’re only going to shoot yourself in the foot before you’ve filled your boots.’
I think I got what Jason meant, although he could’ve just been trying to sell me his spare Toe Tecs again.
‘So you reckon she’s not properly interested, then? She’s just after a bit of something else?’
‘Oh no, I’m sure birds like that always go searching for future husbands down the dogs, Tel. When they want to get their hands on a real good one like,’ he smirked.
At that moment Tony the barman came over and asked if we were ready for another drink. I was disheartened enough to go for several more barrels so I pointed to the Stella and stuck a hand in my pocket.
‘What d’you think of posh birds, Ton’? Old Prince Philip over here reeled in a bit of a plum-sucker last night and is wondering what his chances of long-term happiness are like,’ Jason asked the Lamb’s resident expert on everything.
‘Has she got money? I’d love to meet a bird with money. Get me out of this shithole,’ he said without even having to think about it.