by Jenny Colgan
‘That must piss you off,’ I said. ‘If it helps, I’m probably poorer than anyone you know.’
‘It’s not really the money that bothers me,’ he said grumpily. ‘Want to go halfers on an ice cream?’
I’d started to feel that Finn and I were getting on surprisingly well. OK, his nose was a little pudgy, and he talked a lot about science, but here we were, doing a nice, adult, educational thing on a Saturday afternoon, and sitting out on the grass, eating ice cream and watching the duty tourists going crazy with boredom round South Kensington. He didn’t seem like a perv, though. Which begged the question …
‘Why’, I asked, biting into my Magnum, ‘did you ask me out?’
He looked at me, blinking in the mild sunshine, his eyes slightly enlarged behind the thick spectacles.
‘Sorry?’
‘Ehm … you know, why did you ask me on a date? If it isn’t a nurse fixation, ha ha!’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean.’
However, he suddenly began to flush, and clearly did understand. I also began to understand something, and started to give him a run for his money in the flush department.
‘Ermm, I didn’t mean … I mean, sorry, but I just wanted someone to go to the museum with; I normally go alone … I didn’t mean for you to think …’
‘What else would I have thought?’
‘I don’t know. I’m terribly, terribly sorry,’ he stuttered. ‘Really, it wasn’t that at all.’
‘Why not? What’s wrong with me?’
‘Nothing, no, nothing … but I would never just ask someone out like that. I mean … I’m so sorry.’
‘Yes, you said that,’ I said sulkily, standing up whilst trying to keep my ice cream upright – not the most elegant of procedures. Finn stared at me in disbelief.
‘I mean … can’t we be friends?’
‘Finn, that’s what you say when two people have actually had a relationship and it’s been deeply passionate and then it all goes wrong. Which, despite the big fish, has not happened this afternoon.’
‘Fine.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, once again I apologize for the misunderstanding, and it was nice to have met you. Oh, and the “fish” was a “mammal”.’ And he held out his hand.
I hate it when somebody does that. Some people just have no sense of the appropriate drama. I didn’t take his hand but muttered ‘bye’ and stomped off, cheeks high with humiliation. And, naturally, I had to stand that way, waiting for the lights to change, two feet in front of him, whilst he watched me in amazement. Shite.
‘I HATE bloody scientists and I HATE bloody dates which are the bloody Schroedinger’s Cat of dates/non-dates!’ I hollered, as I slammed through the door three bloody quarters of an hour later, after being thrust up against tourists’ armpits as the Circle Line attempted to take the scenic route.
‘Where are the bloody Jaffa Cakes?’
Josh was prostrate on one of the sofas watching Bette Davis with his usual devotion.
‘It’s Penguins, sweetheart – don’t you remember? We still have a hundred and sixty-six to get through since you went to the supermarket. Date not go too well?’
‘You could bloody well say that.’
I stomped into the kitchen. Amazingly, Kate was still there, and still in her dressing gown. This was unheard of. She had hooked up an extension line to the phone in the hall, and her mobile was now connected up to her laptop computer, and she appeared to be continually switching between the two. The pager lay to one side, discarded, as did two cold pieces of toast, and there was a fax buzzing away in the corner which I’d never noticed before.
‘Hey there,’ I said, but she made no sign to show she’d heard me. ‘Can I eat this bloody toast?’
She shrugged her shoulders, so I ate it anyway.
‘Any luck?’
She noticed me at last and looked up, her face drawn.
‘Kate, it’s only the first day. You know, no self-respecting bloke would phone you on the first day after you’d met. Especially one as cool and pretty as John … Thingy. You’d think he was pathetic and needy and you’d probably turn him down.’
Kate nodded like an idiot.
‘But he said he would.’
‘Yes, but he’s also a bloke. Those two things cancel each other out.’
She regarded me with narrowed eyes.
‘How did your date go?’
‘Fine. Oh, and also, why didn’t you tell me he was a prick?’
‘Finn?’ This startled her out of her reverie, although she still kept half an eye on the phones. ‘What happened?’
‘You were there at your birthday, weren’t you?’
‘Ehm, yes, I would have thought so.’
‘You heard him ask me out, didn’t you?’
‘Well, I heard him ask if you wanted to go to the Natural History Museum.’
‘That’s a date, right?’
‘Ehm … why? What else did he say? Dinner? A drink afterwards?’
‘He didn’t have to say anything! You don’t ask someone somewhere just because you want to go there.’
Kate raised her eyebrows.
‘Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that I reckon when he found out I wasn’t a nurse, he changed his mind and made out that it was just a friendly thing all the time.’
‘Really? Well, maybe it was. To be honest, though, Holly, it didn’t seem very like Finn to just start chatting a girl up out of the blue. He got some ribbing for it the next day, and seemed a bit surprised when the Jameses started ripping the piss. Certainly, I’m not used to seeing him being that forward – quiet as a mouse, normally.’
‘What? You knew about this?’
‘Of course not. I’m just saying, maybe he didn’t mean to ask you out, and you made an honest mistake.’
‘Well, of course, you’re being incredibly reasonable about it, because it’s not you who had to listen to stupid theories of FLOWERS for two hours by that annoying, geeky IDIOT.’
‘Oh well, it won’t bother you that he doesn’t want to go out with you, then.’
‘It DOESN’T.’
We both sighed. Kate picked up the pager and checked to see if it was on.
‘God, Kate,’ I said, counting it out on my fingers, ‘let’s see: you gave him your home number, your office number, your mobile, your car phone, your pager your e-mail and your fax number …?’
She nodded miserably.
‘I think we’re just going to have to wait for the law of averages to kick in,’ I observed, ‘whereby he misdials another number, and gets you.’
Josh called a house meeting the next morning. Or rather, he ran up and down the corridor at 8 a.m. banging a ladle on a saucepan and yelling, ‘Fire! Fire! Everyone out!’ Then, when people put their heads round their bedroom doors blearily, he grabbed them and pulled them round the kitchen table.
When I got in there I couldn’t tell if Kate had even gone to bed or not; she was still sitting in the same spot, walled in by electronic communication devices. Amazingly, Addison was there too, blinking in the daylight. He seemed extremely uncomfortable.
I’d never seen him during the day before. Properly lit, he was even more beautiful: the strong curve of his upper lip, and the fathomless depths of his heavy-lidded black eyes making me want to rush back out of the room to put some lipstick on – until Josh caught me, and forced me back down.
‘OK, everyone,’ he announced, ‘this has got to stop.’
I trembled for a moment as I remembered cutting my toenails in the bath, however he didn’t point directly at me but continued:
‘I want this to be a nice happy home for my friends, not some sort of love harpy madhouse,’ he said, as sternly as he could, which wasn’t very. We all stared at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Just look at the situation,’ he said. ‘We’re all obviously deeply bad at running our own love lives.’
‘I’m doing OK,’ I said, untruthfully and petulantly.
‘Holly,
you can’t tell the difference between a love life and a school trip, OK? Addison, you just seem completely uninterested …’
Addison was tapping something into a computer about the size of a pea, and didn’t even look up.
‘… and Kate, I’m worried about your mental health.’
‘Huh?’ she said listlessly.
‘What about you?’ I said.
‘Hum,’ he said. ‘And, yes, perhaps I could improve on my own love life.’
‘Michael Jackson’, I said, ‘has a better love life than you.’
‘So, we’re just going to have to do something about it.’
‘Like what?’
‘I think we should have a house-warming. We’ve never had one. And, I think we should all have to ask one member of the opposite sex.’
‘… or the same sex, if you felt that way inclined,’ I pointed out.
‘Thank you, Holl, interjection accepted … We should all ask one member of the opposite sex who is definitely single and whom we think would be suitable for someone else who’s coming – and then they ask someone too!’ he finished triumphantly.
‘What??’
Even Addison stopped tapping, looking up with a hunted animal expression on his face.
‘It’s called a singles party. I read it in Vogue. You invite a single person, and they bring along a single friend, who brings along a single friend, etcetera etcetera etcetera. It’s a “fabulous and frivolous way to find a mate,” says Vogue.’
He was clearly completely over-excited about his idea.
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Kate, still slumped into her chair. ‘You realize that if we do that, within about five minutes you’ll have invited every single single person in the entire world?’
‘It’s exponential,’ mumbled Addison. ‘But, if you got them all to stand close enough together, I think they could fit on the Isle of Wight.’
‘What if some of them are burglars?’ I asked.
‘Guys! Have you no excitement?! No imagination?!’
‘Addison,’ I said gravely, ‘can I ask you as my single friend?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Ehm, can I ask you then, as my follow-up?’
‘Yes! Ooh, that means I’ll have to ask you again now.’
‘No! No! Come on, guys! It’ll be fun! Please! I’ll hire the caterers!’
Josh believed everything he read in Vogue. As, of course, you should.
‘You’ll get caterers?’ I asked, fatally. Well, I’d never been to a party before where catering didn’t mean half a bowl of peanuts with a cigarette stubbed out in it.
‘Oh yes – if it’s going to be a proper party.’
‘I doubt I’ll be able to make it,’ said Kate. ‘John and I will probably be out that night.’
‘Uh huh,’ said Josh carefully. ‘But say he’s working abroad that night – you would come, wouldn’t you?’
Kate shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t care. Sure.’
‘But don’t ask that Finny bastard,’ I said. ‘He’ll make the punch explode or something.’
‘Excellent!’ said Josh. ‘I’ll get the invitations printed.’ Printed? ‘Shall we say … three weeks on Saturday?’
‘Why are you doing this?’ Kate asked him.
‘This is our year,’ said Josh. ‘This is our summer. People always get it together in the summer. And we should all do it together this year, seeing as we’re all here together, all single, all still young, all supportive of each other …’
I snorted under my breath.
‘… I mean, by this time next year you’ll be thirty.’
Kate didn’t say anything but got up to leave the room, her face like thunder. As she reached the door, however, she accidentally on purpose dropped one of Josh’s Wedgwood teacups – the family-heirloom ones he wouldn’t let me use, only Kate because she was so careful – on the floor. It smashed everywhere.
‘Jeepers!’ said Josh.
‘Oh, did I break something of yours?’ said Kate. ‘So sorry.’
I couldn’t say that Josh’s party idea didn’t excite me. Here, finally, was a chance to get Addison on his own, without me being drunk, in a proper copping-off situation. I had started to dream about him, with the two of us managing to use his computer chair in a variety of surprisingly inventive ways. And he was my fantasy too; it normally went something like this: Kate and Josh decide to run away to sea to be sailors, leaving Addison and me to run the house by ourselves. After some delightfully romantic faffing around – he inadvertently sees me through a gauze curtain over the bath, we go to outdoor markets and laugh loudly, we somehow find ourselves having a glorious night at the opera, that kind of thing – we sit one night in front of the roaring fireplace (currently choked up with bird nests and also illegal, but never mind) and he rests his head on my shoulder and says, ‘Holly, I have never experienced human companionship before, and now I cannot remember why, as I am clearly not weird or anything. But thank God I have found you. Please, never leave me.’ And I say, ‘OK,’ and then we have Olympic-standard rumpy-pumpy. I ignored my worries in that area – e.g. the fact that Addison flinched if one so much as brushed past him – by telling myself that he would be a natural.
I could tell by a footfall where he was; by the gentlest tapping, how engrossed he was in his work; but somehow I couldn’t go into his room during the day – it took the wee small hours and that quiet sense of magic you sometimes feel then. I wanted Addison and I to be special, and that meant not accidentally seeing his dirty underpants. I had it bad.
Kate did not get up from that damn table the whole day. Josh, who was humming about merrily planning party doilies, tried his best to be sympathetic.
‘Skates, do you know what I think?’
‘Hn?’
‘I think there’s a reason he didn’t give you his full name.’
‘Hn.’
‘It was dark in that bar, wasn’t it?’
‘Thank God,’ I added. I was trying to iron a shirt to wear for my first day at work, and making a crappy job of it.
‘Was it dark in the restaurant you went to?’
‘We went to Momo – it’s pitch-dark in there. Proper Moroccan, you see. No electricity.’
‘Not Le Caprice?’ I said, disappointed. They both stared at me.
‘No one goes there,’ Kate said. She can’t have been that depressed if she was still up to sneering.
‘No, me neither,’ I said, and tried to make the sleeves stay in the same place long enough for me to flatten them – unsuccessfully.
‘Well,’ went on Josh, ‘I thought he looked a bit famous. Maybe he was someone famous and was trying to hide it.’
Suddenly it struck me who John Thingy looked like – that guy from all those awful films where he had long hair and the whole world had been destroyed except him and he had to drink his own piss.
‘Oh-my-God,’ said Kate.
‘You mean …’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Josh, shaking his head portentously.
‘It’s impossible,’ I said. ‘Although he did have an American accent.’ I turned to Josh.
‘You would have noticed,’ I added. ‘Somebody would have noticed.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Kate again.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Josh. ‘I mean, you don’t usually expect to see major international film stars in South London. He must have been travelling incognito. Trying to see if you liked him for himself.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Kate again.
‘I’ve heard they do this kind of thing all the time – haven’t you seen Notting Hill?’
‘He talked about Los Angeles quite a lot!’
‘There you go then – proof.’
‘Oh my God. I had a date with Kevin Costner!’ Kate rushed off to the bathroom.
‘What are you up to?’ I asked Josh.
‘Come on, what would you rather do: get dumped by some ferrety-faced married schmuckmeister or some ferrety-faced international superstar?’
; ‘You’re a good man.’
‘Too good,’ he said soberly, following Kate out into the hall, yelling, ‘He probably got called away the next morning to give out an Oscar or something. Don’t blame yourself! He’ll probably make a film about you!’
‘Yeah, and that one can be shit as well,’ I thought, but I kept it to myself.
I was early the next morning, wearing my white shirt, which was almost spotless, and a pair of trousers. I only had one pair of trousers and couldn’t believe that the person who invented the concept for women had done us any favours whatsoever, but they were black and smartish and looked quite a lot like what Chalitha had been wearing in the interview, so I was going along with that. I got a bit of a shock taking off on my bicycle, as the traffic was rather different at 8.30 a.m. than it was at 9 p.m., so I managed to get nearly killed three or four times and be hollering a gypsy curse on all white van drivers by the time I screeched to a halt beside That Special Someone. Mrs Bigelow was unlocking the door, and looked up with a faintly shocked expression on her face.
‘Ah, Miss Livingstone.’
I dismounted in an ungainly fashion, which I think included flashing my pants at her.
‘It’s Holly. Hello again. Ehm, is there anywhere I can put the bike?’
She stared at me as if I was a Martian.
‘No.’
We stood there, facing each other.
‘OK then …’ I checked around, and, for want of anything better, connected the bike to the nearest lamppost, in prime person-tripping and vandalism position. Mrs Bigelow watched me all the while, her several chins seeming to wobble reproachfully at me.
Finally, she opened the door and let me back into the shop I had seen only briefly the previous week.
It was small, with a floor covered in black rubber and the familiar heavy scent of flowers. Buckets of bouquets and posies sloshed around near the door, ready to be put outside for schoolchildren to pinch from. On the wall were several prominently displayed certificates from the Chelmsford School of Horticulture, made out to a Marilyn Gloria Bigelow.