Here's Looking at You (2 page)

She scanned the throng for a ghostly echo of the face she’d seen in the pictures. Not only was it dark, but Anna was used to a disconnect between the profile photographs and reality. In her online profile, she’d tried to balance out a few flattering snaps against a realistic sample to avoid the horrific prospect of her date’s face dropping when she arrived. Men, she guessed, thought more pragmatically: once they had you in the room, their charisma could take over.

‘Hello, are you Anna?’

She managed to turn ninety degrees to see a cheerful, inoffensive-looking man with thinning brown hair grinning at her delightedly in the murk. He was wearing a Berghaus jacket. Fell-walking wear on someone who wasn’t fell walking. Hmmm.

On first impressions, Anna wasn’t too sure about Neil’s dress sense. I’m pleased to say she chose his outfit today, or he’d probably have said his vows in Gore-Tex …

He looked approachable and trustworthy, however, smiling his gap-toothed smile. Not a problem for her; Anna was not the slightest bit fussed about pretty boys. In fact, she was positively suspicious of them.

‘I’m Neil,’ he said, shaking her hand and going for a peck on the cheek.

Anna proffered the spare Negroni she was holding.

‘What’s that?’ Neil said.

‘It’s gin and Campari. A favourite drink from my homeland.’

‘I’m a beer man, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh,’ Anna withdrew it and felt foolish.

Chrissake, wouldn’t you drink it to be polite? she thought. Then: maybe this is something we’ll laugh about eventually.

Apparently Anna was shocked to discover Neil didn’t drink cocktails and he made a great first impression by disappearing off in pursuit of a beer. Start as you mean to go on eh, Neil?
(Pause for more weak laughter.)

Anna knocked back her Negroni and quickly made inroads with the second. At that moment, as ’80s Madonna hammered in her ears, she was Singlehood In London, distilled. It was all too familiar a feeling for her, experiencing intense loneliness in a room so crowded it must be nearing a fire regulation risk, feeling as if life was happening elsewhere. Right when she was supposedly in the beating heart at the centre of everything.

No! Positive thinking. Anna repeated the mantra she’d rehearsed a thousand times: how many happy couples trot out a dinner party origins tale about how they didn’t fancy each other at first? Or even
like
each other?

She didn’t want to be that woman bearing a checklist, always finding that suitors fell short in some respect or another. As if you were measuring space for a new fridge and moaning about the compromise in the dimensions of the ice-box.

Plus, it hadn’t taken her many internet dates to realise that the
There You Are
thunderbolt she’d so craved simply didn’t exist. As her mum always said, you have to rub the sticks to get the spark.

‘Sorry, a few of those and I’d be out for the count. Falling-down juice,’ Neil said, returning with his Birra Moretti. Anna wanted him to be nice and this to be fun with every fibre of her being.

‘Yes, I’ll probably wish I’d followed your example tomorrow,’ Anna shouted, over the music, and Neil smiled, making Anna feel she could make this work through sheer force of will.

Neil was a writer for a business and technology magazine and seemed, as per their previous communications, the kind of decent, personable and reliable sort who you’d fully expect to have a wife, kids and a shed.

They’d spoken only briefly online. Anna had banned the prolonged woo-by-electronic-
billet-doux
since the hugely painful disappointment of Scottish Tom the author, whose wit, charm and literary allusions she fell hard for, over a course of months. She’d started to live for the ping of the new message alert. She was halfway to in love by the time they finally planned to meet up, when he apologetically disclosed a) a spell in Rampton Secure Hospital and b) a ‘sort of wife’. After that, Anna changed her sort of Gmail address.

As the alcohol took effect, she found herself laughing at Neil’s tales about the ‘rubber chicken’ speaker circuit and shyster make-a-million industry gurus.

By the time they got to the table and over-ordered soak-up-the-booze-mattresses like meatballs, calamari and pizza, Anna was telling herself that maybe Neil was exactly the kind of solidly plausible candidate she needed to take a chance on.

‘Anna isn’t a very Italian name?’ Neil asked, as they both prodded battered hoops of squid and dragged them through a small pot of aioli.

‘It’s short for Aureliana. I changed it after school. Too … flowery, I suppose,’ she said, cupping a hand underneath her fork as the squid made a late bid to get back to the sea. ‘I’m not very flowery really.’

‘Hah no. I can see that,’ Neil said, which seemed a trifle presumptuous.

Her free hand involuntarily moved to her hair, which was in the usual messy knot. Perhaps she should’ve done more with it. And added make-up beyond reddish tinted lip balm, applied in haste while on the Tube. Start as you mean to go on, she always reasoned. No point pretending to be a dolly-bird type and disappointing him later.

‘The pork and fennel meatballs are the best variety, by the way,’ Anna said. ‘I’ve tried them all and can confirm.’

‘Have you been here a lot?’ Neil said mildly, and Anna squirmed a little.

‘A fair amount. With friends as well as dates.’

‘It’s OK. We’re in our thirties. You don’t need to pretend to be the blushing ingénue with me,’ he said, and Anna found something rather dislikeable in his pointing out her discomfort. Although maybe it was merely a slightly inept attempt to put her at ease.

Conversation stalled amid a loud Prince track, one of the ones where he went squeaky and frantic about wanting to filth a lady.

‘I’m actually poly,’ Neil said.

He’s actually Polly?!
‘Sorry?’ Anna leaned in sharply against the noise, fork in mid-air.

‘As in polyamorous. Multiple partners who all know about each other,’ he added.

‘Ah yes. I see!’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Of course not!’ Anna said, perhaps too enthusiastically, fussing with what was left on her plate, thinking:
I don’t know.

‘I don’t believe monogamy is our natural state but I realise that’s what a lot of people are looking for. I’m willing to give it a try for the right person though,’ he smiled.

‘Ah.’ Good of you.

‘And perhaps I should say that I’m into mild sub and dom. All hetero, but I’m not vanilla.’

Anna gave a grimace-smile and debated whether to say: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak kink.’

What was she supposed to do with this information? Blind dating fast-tracked the personal stuff, that was for sure.

‘I mean, I’m not that
out there
in the scene,’ Neil continued. ‘I’ve tried figging. But we’re not in the realms of the Shaved Gorilla though, hahaha.’

He was invoking shaving and animals in the boudoir. And figs, if that was what figging involved. Anna wasn’t disappointed anymore. Disappointment was a motorway junction ago. She was passing through into severe bewilderment and at this rate she was likely to take the next exit into a Welcome Break.

‘You?’ Neil said.

‘What?’

‘Anything your “thing”?’

Anna opened her mouth to reply and faltered. She’d usually go with ‘none of your business’, but they were on a date and it putatively was his business. ‘Uh … uhm. Usual sex.’

‘Usual sex.’ Oh God. She was underprepared and over-refreshed. This was like that temp job in a cinema one summer where, during the fun selection process, she’d been asked: ‘If your personality was a sandwich filling, which would it be?’ She got brain-blankness and said: ‘Cheese.’ ‘Just cheese?’ ‘Just cheese.’ ‘Because …?’ ‘It’s normal.’ Normal cheese and usual sex. She shouldn’t even be on the internet.

Neil surveyed her over the rim of his water glass.

‘Oh. OK. From your profile I thought you presented as heteronormative but might be genderqueer, for some reason.’

Anna didn’t want to admit she didn’t know what the key parts of that sentence meant.

‘Sorry if this is quite confronting,’ Neil continued. ‘I’m a big believer in honesty. I think most relationships fail because of lying and hypocrisy and pretending to be something you’re not. Much better to say This Is Who I Am and be completely open than for you to say on our fourth date, woah.’ Neil held his hands up and beamed reassuringly, ‘You like piss play?’

So ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to charge your glasses and raise a toast to the happy couple, Neil and Anna. And to the blushing bride, bottoms-up. You’ll want a full bladder for later.
(Applause.)

‘Right, I’ve got Inspector Google on this Shaved Gorilla bullshit,’ Michelle said, squinting at her iPhone screen, Marlboro Light aloft in the other hand, smoke curling upwards in the empty dining room.

Anna couldn’t have coped with so many bad dates without the prospect of her friends to flee to at the end of the evening. Fortunately they worked hours that made them ideally suited to nightcaps rather than nights out.

Michelle’s ‘traditional British cooking with a twist’ was served at The Pantry, just off Upper Street in Islington. It was Grade II listed, with antique chandeliers, potted palms and buttercream wooden panelling. The kind of place where you have wartime affairs with men called Freddy in BBC dramas, and use phrases like ‘it was a horrid business’.

Daniel, Michelle’s long-standing front of house, was one of those semi-famous maître d’s who got mentioned in
Time Out
for being a ‘character’. The word character could be a euphemism for ‘tiresome git’, but Daniel had genuine charm and authentic eccentricity.

It was partly his appearance: a sweep of thick sandy hair, a bushy beard and high-magnification glasses which gave him cartoon eyes. He looked like a
Looney Tunes
lion crossed with an Open University professor. He dressed like Toad of Toad Hall in vintage tweed suits and spoke with an arch, old-fashioned cadence, like a junior Alan Bennett.

The three of them often met for drinks once Michelle had closed up, draped across the waiting area sofas, as the stubby candles guttered on the tables. Michelle was businesslike in her chef’s whites and kitchen-only Crocs. Her short, shiny bob, dyed exactly the same red you found in curry houses on tandoori chicken, was worn tucked behind her ears. She had ginormous hazelnut-coloured eyes, a generous painterly mouth, and a statuesque figure that flowed from a prow of a bosom. A supermodel, but out of time. She was instead stuck in an era where people would call her a beauty but a ‘big girl’.

‘Maybe it’s not deviant,’ Daniel said from across the room, where he was sweeping up. ‘Maybe everyone else but us is doing the shaved gorilla and the funky chicken and the … jugged hare.’

‘I’ve had jugged hare on the menu and I can assure you it’s nothing you want to be a sexual euphemism, given the amount of blood involved,’ Michelle said, still peering at her phone.

Daniel set his broom down and joined them.

‘Someone asked me why I wasn’t wearing a hair net today,’ he said vaguely, as he poured out a port from the cluster of bottles on the low-slung table.

‘What? Who? Did you say “Do you think you’re in Pork Farms”?’ Michelle asked.

‘Your head hair, but not your beard?’ Anna asked.

‘No, they said that was unhygienic too.’

‘A beard net? Because there’d be nothing more reassuring than someone serving you food in a surgeon’s mask,’ Michelle said. ‘Hang on. Who asked you this? Was it table five who had the vegan, the wheat intolerant and the one who subbed the cheese for more salad in the Stilton and walnut salad?’

‘Yep.’

‘How did I know? A band of pleasure dodgers.’

‘Subbed the cheese?’ Anna asked. She could’ve applied her brain to it, but she was by now pretty drunk.

‘Americanism. Infuriating trend. Act as if they’re in a sandwich bar saying
hold the mayo, extra pickle
,’ Michelle said.

‘We’re firmly in the era of the fussy fuck I’m afraid and there’s nothing we can do about it,’ Daniel said.

His Yorkshire-accented lisp pronounced it more as
futhy fug
,
so it sounded like it could safely be uttered on a Radio 4 panel show. This was Daniel’s secret in defusing problems, Anna thought: whatever the words, the expression was gentle.

Michelle ran her index finger up her phone screen.

‘Gotcha! The Shaved Gorilla … oh my,’ she said, as she read. ‘I’m not sure our grandfathers died for this.’

‘He did say this is what he
isn’t
into?’ Daniel said.

‘Dan, get with it. Classic grooming technique to float it as a joke first,’ Michelle said, shaking her head. ‘Brace yourself, it’s something gruesome with jism.’ She turned her phone screen to Anna, who squinted, read it and grimaced.

‘Want me to try figging?’ Michelle asked.

‘No! I never want to try figging! I want to meet a nice man who wants to have standard sex with
just me
. Has that really gone so far out of fashion?’

‘If something’s never been in fashion it can never go out,’ Daniel said, tweaking his own lapels, as Anna weakly shoulder-punched him.

‘I mean, where’s the romance and mystery?’ Anna continued, holding up her glass for a refill. ‘Mr Darcy said
you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you
. Not, you must allow me to tell you I’m into this spunk-throwing thing.’

‘We don’t live in the right era for an Anna,’ Michelle agreed. ‘Not much formality and wooing. But, you know. If you lived in Jane Austen time you’d have teeth like Sugar Puffs and seven kids with no pain relief. Swings and roundabouts. What appealed about this Neil’s profile, before you met him?’

‘Uhm. He seemed sane and pleasant enough,’ Anna shrugged.

Michelle flicked her fag into the Illy coffee cup that was performing ashtray duties. She was constantly giving up, then falling off the wagon.

Anna and Michelle had met in their early twenties at WeightWatchers. Anna had passed with flying colours, Michelle had flunked. One day, their bouncy cult leader was barking: ‘Strong minds need healthy bodies!’ and Michelle had said loudly, in her West Country lilt: ‘That’s Stephen Hawking told, by Jet from Gladiators,’ and then, into the shocked silence, ‘Fuck this, I’m off for a boneless bucket.’ That week, Anna missed her weigh-in and made a best mate.