by Danny King
She paused for a moment, then chuckled and asked me if I was serious.
I had been up until she’d chuckled and asked me if I was serious, but now I was just plain confused. What was wrong with that? It had all the basic components that any date should have: booze, food, bright lights and handbag handles.
Charley stopped chuckling when I didn’t start and told me she didn’t mean to mock.
‘Oh, well, no, it sounds lovely, and Leicester Square’s great and all, but I was thinking of somewhere a little less touristy,’ she said, making me wish I’d suggested the Lamb and the fucking bookie’s after all. ‘I’ll tell you what, do you know the Workers’ Social?’ she asked.
‘Which one?’ I asked.
‘No, silly, it’s a bar. In Noho.’
Noho? Where the hell was Noho? And what did she want to go to a Workers’ Social for? I figured Charley was probably still on her ironic kick but I suddenly didn’t mind. I’d take a date of darts and dominoes and having a sing-song round the piano in the corner over a night of spilling egg fried rice all down my front any day of the week given the choice. With this in mind, I told her I knew it well and that I’d see her there at eight sharp and hung up the phone sporting the first smile my face had seen since I’d left her place two days earlier.
5 The workers ain’t that social
It took me ages to find out where Noho was in the A–Z, my search being slightly hampered by the fact that there isn’t actually anywhere called Noho. It’s just what trendy people call the streets north of Soho. Robbie put us straight the next day and said he even knew the Workers’ Social because a mate of his brother’s worked there in the evenings, and he scribbled down the name of the street for me.
‘Shit place it is. What you want to go there for?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, what’s wrong with the British Legion in Wowo?’ Jason smiled, all pleased with himself for about five minutes until it started pissing down again. ‘Oh, what is this?’
Wednesday proved a bit more productive and we actually got eight hours under our belts, much to everyone’s relief. I beamed with excitement and whistled ‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah’ all day long until a vote was taken and the lads packed me off to the other end of the site to fill in joists. I couldn’t wait to see Charley again and as much as the clock tried to drag its heels, it couldn’t hold our date off for ever and the wait was finally over.
Well, almost. I arrived in Noho half an hour early and found the Worker’s Social right where Robbie’s brother had left it.
It wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting. From the outside it was all neon signs, blacked-out windows and miked-up bouncers, a light year away from the working men’s clubs I remembered going to with my old man when I first left school. But that was like nothing compared to what I saw when I actually walked through the door. The place wasn’t even half finished. It was all breeze-block walls, exposed lintels and concrete floors. Cables and pipes ran between exposed wooden joists in the ceiling and even the bar was just a slapdash, badly pointed bare brick wall topped off with an old scuffed-oak surface. Most astonishing of all, though, were the seats in this place. They’d all been cast out of concrete. Even the tables. I could see the impressions where the wooden frames had been dismantled after they’d set.
Forget about a piano in the corner, this place needed a muck mixer.
Still, I’m not such a big lug that I can’t appreciate a bit of variety and I recognised this place for the cutting-edge trendy theme bar it was. Did seem a bit odd calling it the Workers’ Social, though. Wasn’t exactly the sort of place I could see my dad heading down after a hard day on the sites. It also wasn’t subsidised.
‘How much?’ I almost choked.
‘Three seventy-five,’ the expressionless barman repeated.
‘Three seventy-five for half a lager?’
That’s right, half a lager. The builders hadn’t got around to putting any pumps in yet either so the only beers they sold came in bottles, which meant the price of a pint worked out at about £7.50. Oh yeah, my old man would’ve fucking loved this place, all right.
I found a vacant Flintstones table with a clear line of sight to the entrance and sat myself down.
It was now a quarter to eight, which meant Charley would be here in fifteen minutes and this realisation released a thousand butterflies to buffet me from the insides. I don’t think I’m naturally a cowardly sort of bloke and will happily scale the tallest scaffolding, stand up to the biggest bully and tackle the meatiest spiders, but women were another matter altogether and about the only thing on this planet that could reduce me to a tear-streaked gibbering wreck. My nerves soon started showing on the surface and I fidgeted and palpitated, shivered and wheezed as my limited-edition collector’s beer sprinted through my body at breakneck speed.
Fortunately it was so dark and noisy with a constant thump thump thump of monotonous DJ funk that no one around me even afforded me a glance, and when my watch finally struck eight, I lifted my eyes to the entrance and kept them there for a full ten minutes.
No one even resembling Charley came in during that time and when my watch just kept on ticking away regardless, my anticipation finally cracked and my hopes began to crumble.
She wasn’t coming, was she? Charley wasn’t coming.
We got to quarter past and I couldn’t hold on any longer. I bought the second instalment of my pint and retook my seat to wait some more.
Twenty past.
I’d put so much stock in seeing Charley on the stroke of eight that for her not to be here and sitting across from me twenty minutes later was almost too much to bear. Worse-case scenarios started filling my head and images of Charley suddenly sitting bolt upright in the middle of EastEnders, shrugging, then sinking back into the sofa to watch the end (and then possibly What Not to Wear) filled my head. I even began to picture her having a right good laugh at my expense when all of a sudden my phone beeped inside my jacket and I received a text message.
I ripped it out of my pocket and pressed half a dozen wrong buttons before I realised the keypad was still locked. I took a deep breath, carefully typed in the correct code to unlock the keypad, then read my message.
Fucking Car Phone Warehouse.
Apparently I was entitled to two free ring tones if I upgraded my handset with them in the next month. All I had to do was pop into my nearest store for details and give them a share of my wages for the next year.
‘You big cunts!’ I shouted into my phone, then looked up to see Charley standing in front of me and smiling.
‘Good news?’ she enquired.
‘Oh, shit, sorry, I didn’t see you there,’ I explained, as mortification and relief swept over me all at once. ‘Shit, do you want a drink?’ (Stop swearing!!!)
‘Yeah, please. A glass of dry white wine would be nice.’
I rushed to the bar and almost strangled some bloke next to me when he cut in front of me, ordered half a dozen different cocktails, a cup of espresso, asked what crisps they did, asked the barman if he knew a guy called Curtis – played the bongos apparently – paid by credit card, then got so sidetracked comparing record bags with some other sandal-wearing dipstick that he didn’t notice the barman waiting patiently for him to tap in his PIN number to the little handheld verification machine.
In fact, we would’ve probably both still been there today had one of us not pointed out to the other that all his records and/or teeth were likely to get smashed in if he didn’t sort himself out and fucking hurry up.
That shifted things along nicely.
‘Sorry about that,’ I told Charley when I finally retook the seat opposite her. ‘A right palaver that was.’
Charley said it was no problem and thanked me for the wine, then smooched momentarily with the rim of her glass and smacked her ruby red lips with satisfaction.
‘Lovely,’ she sighed.
And I had to agree, she certainly was.
In fact, she was more lovely than I remembered. Tall, c
risp, sparkling and sharp. Charley scrubbed up great and looked more like the sort of girl you’d see in a catalogue than anyone you’d normally find opposite me. She blazed with femininity and wore herself better than any woman I think I’ve ever been on a date with before. OK, let’s not get carried away here, I was only five minutes into our date and I admit that I still knew very little about her, but judging by her cover, she looked like a fantastic read.
‘Who were you talking to up at the bar?’ she asked while I was still collecting my thoughts.
‘Oh, no one, just having a bit of a laugh with old matey, that’s all,’ I explained. ‘Anyway, cheers. You finally made it.’
‘What? Oh, yeah, sorry, I’m late. Were you waiting long?’
She’d turned up at twenty-eight minutes past eight. The maths were pretty simple.
‘No, I just got here myself,’ I decided to tell her.
Charley said that was good, because she was a bit of a klutz with time. All her friends were always saying that she was always late but that wasn’t fair because she really tried. I lied and told her that I completely understood, then asked her if she’d had a good week so far.
‘It’s been such hard work,’ she told me. ‘I’ve been in meetings with the client all this week about the upcoming campaign and even though they green-lit the overall strategy months ago, we can’t get them to agree on the key targets. How can you push a campaign forward if you can’t even agree on the basics?’
I was fucked if I knew, so I told her she just had to try and make the best of it, then asked her what she did and what she was talking about?
‘I’m an advertising account manager. Don’t you remember?’
‘Let’s just pretend, for the purposes of this conversation, that I don’t,’ I said, then came clean when she asked me what that meant.
‘Well, anyway, I handle a particular advertising account and liaise between the client and our team who plan and run the campaign.’
I nodded anyway.
‘And it’s just been a bit of a nightmare getting the client to agree to our proposals. There’s always something they don’t like and they’re forever insisting on last-minute changes.’
‘I see,’ I saw. ‘Er… so who’s your client? Would I have heard of them?’ I asked.
‘Naldesco. They make food products, cooking sauces, tinned meals, condiments, that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘They’re very big.’
‘Well, you’re doing a bang-up job because I eat nothing but Naldesco tinned pies,’ I reassured her.
‘Christ, I hope not, for your sake. Anyway, there’s no such thing as a Naldesco tinned pie. They make tinned pies but they’re marketed under the brand name of Auntie Kate.’
‘Urgh, hang on a minute, I’ve had one of those, they’re horrible,’ I blurted out, before I could get the cat back in the basket.
Luckily Charley agreed.
‘Yes, they are, but I don’t work on that account. Naldesco’s got a lot of brand names and subsidiaries: Auntie Kate’s pies, Cotswold Country Sauces, Highland Heaven Puddings, Tonbridge Traditional Treacle…’
‘All knocked up in a big decommissioned missile silo next to Sellafield, I expect,’ I joked, but Charley just nodded and said pretty much. ‘So which account do you work on?’ I asked.
‘I’m handling a new account for a new range of table sauces. Rocket Man Sauces.’ She smiled apologetically, then added, when she saw I was slightly confused, ‘You put them on your chips and suchlike. The bottles are shaped like rockets and we’re considering releasing a range of action figures to be sold alongside them so that children can wash out the bottles when they’re done and use them as toys.’
‘Well, you can’t argue with that,’ I said.
‘It’s an age-old trick, give away a free toy and kids will pester their mums to buy them it regardless of whether they like the product or not.’
‘Yeah, I used to get my mum to buy Weetabix when I was a kid because it had Doctor Who scenes on the box and little cardboard figures inside,’ I shared with her for some reason. ‘I was always chuffed to bits when I got a Dalek, but no matter how many boxes we got through we never found a sea monster. I mean, there were three of us, me, my brother and my sister, all eating Weetabix around the clock. You’d think that, in all that time, we’d have found at least one sea monster, wouldn’t you?’
Charley sympathised and agreed it had been a bad time for everyone.
‘Do you think they deliberately held some figures back so that people kept buying and buying and buying Weetabix to complete the set?’
‘Now there’s a thought.’ She smiled knowingly. Bastards, I knew it.
‘So, it’s not going well, then? With your client?’
‘They want to go saturation right away, but we’re concerned about a negative backlash and want to build up, targeting individual towns and cities first of all to give the main campaign a launching pad, so to speak.’
‘That’s right,’ I agreed. I tried to think of a follow-up question to ask, about saturating launching pads and stuff like that, but I didn’t really understand what she was talking about and I was worried if I pressed her further on the subject she might twig this, so I settled on a more obvious line of questioning. ‘So what flavours do you do, then?’
‘It’s not me,’ she assured me, but told me that for the moment Rocket Man Sauces came in spicy tomato, barbecue, curry and sweet & sour flavours, otherwise known as lunar, solar, cosmic and galactic space fuels.
‘And are they nice?’
‘No.’
‘Oh,’ I said, somewhat surprised. ‘I bet that makes your job a bit harder, then, doesn’t it?’
‘Not really. Not from a marketing point of view anyway. It’s not the taste angle of this product we’re pushing,’ she explained, confusing me even more.
‘But hang on, the moment someone buys this stuff and ruins their dinner with it, it’s game over, isn’t it? No matter how many laser guns you’ve got on the bottle,’ I pointed out.
‘There are no laser guns on the bottle, the designers have gone more retro space exploration rather than sci-fi with the look of the packaging.’
‘But how does that matter when the stuff inside taste like something out of Ghostbusters?’
Charley didn’t think it was all that important, though. It wasn’t in her brief so it wasn’t her concern.
‘Besides, we can’t do anything about that aspect of the product, so why worry about it? We have to focus the campaign on the positives and let Naldesco concern themselves with that side of things.’
It was a fair point, I guess. Me and Jason simply laid the bricks we were told to by our governors. It wasn’t down to us what shape the houses were, how many bedrooms they had or even what bond we laid. That had all been decided years before between the architects, the building firm and the local authority. We were the monkeys. They were the organ grinders. Charley didn’t quite see herself as a monkey but didn’t get a chance to expand on her point of view because at that moment some shaven-headed bouncer came over and told me I had to hop it.
‘What?’
‘Come on, let’s go. No arguments,’ he said, giving me directions over his shoulder with one of his stumpy thumbs.
‘Hold your horses, what’s this even about?’ I protested, standing up to face him. It was then that I saw my little mate with the record bag and never-ending bar round standing just behind him with a surly puss and some bloke who looked like record bag matey’s psychological back-up.
Oh dear.
‘Outside,’ the bouncer repeated, making to grab one of my arms.
I pulled it away and gave him some free advice about keeping his hands to himself, which he told me he’d take into consideration, and I got myself all set to stick one on him the next time he laid a finger on me, when I suddenly remembered Charley.
I looked down at her and saw her emerald eyes full of fear and confusion and I knew it would be all over between us the moment I chinned one of my n
ew mates standing in front of me. That’s when I decided to holster my fists and resort to my brains.
‘Keith, can you come down here a moment?’ the bouncer asked his microphone and I had an emergency flash of inspiration.
‘Here, do you know Alan?’ I asked the bouncer.
‘Alan who?’
‘Alan Law. Robbie’s brother.’
But the bouncer didn’t know him.
‘Terry, what’s going on?’ Charley finally asked. I acted all baffled and told her it was probably just some silly misunderstanding, but I knew she wasn’t going to buy that for very long, especially once me and Kojak started demolishing the place with each other. Our date would be well and truly over.
‘Are we going to have trouble with you?’ the bouncer enquired, so I tried to appeal to his better side.
‘Look, mate, I don’t know what the problem is, but I’m on a first date here,’ I explained, playing my joker. ‘Can’t we sort this out like grown-ups?’
But a stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp on the stairs brought another grown-up into the proceedings and it was obvious that this grown-up had grown up eating his greens.
‘Wass up, Kev?’ the man mountain asked, his eyes firmly fixed on my lapels.
‘This one here won’t leave,’ Kev told him.
‘Is that right?’ he asked.
Well, it had been up until about two seconds ago but now I wouldn’t have put my house on it.
I noticed Charley was still sat in her chair, albeit uneasily, and I couldn’t blame her really. Was she really going to stand by some trouble maker you couldn’t take anywhere and follow him out into the street after he’d been kicked out of her swanky local in less time than it took to warm up her seat? No, of course not.
What sort of a sophisticated girl about town needed aggro like that when there were no end of apes hanging in Noho’s trees and she had all the bananas?
‘You can go out on your feet or on your head, it’s entirely up to you,’ all seven foot of Keith said, listing my options in no particular order. I didn’t hold out much hope but I thought I’d try one last throw of the dice before I was dragged upstairs by the jacket anyway.