Love @ First Site (7 page)

Seven

T
wo dates so far, and I've paid the bill both times. I must have 'sucker' tattooed on my forehead. Have I?" I jab my finger into the crease above my nose.

"No," laughs Tab, "you haven't. You've just been unlucky, that's all. Maybe you've had all your bad dating karma in one go and the next date will be someone like Sean Penn," she says, choosing my unfathomable crush as a crumb of comfort.

"Or Pig Penn," I mumble through a mouthful of croissant.

We are in the
Good Morning Britain
canteen, home to various "breakfast rolls" with unidentifiable fried objects in them, pastries that could break the teeth of Jaws from the Bond films, and the salmonella poisoning of a game show contestant that was hushed up and miraculously kept out of the gossip columns.

Tab pulls a hair out of her bacon roll, stares wordlessly at it, then places it at the side of her plate and carries on munching. It's so commonplace that neither of us consider it worthy of comment.

I knock back a swig of black coffee. "Aaaaah! Let's hope the caffeine kicks in pronto. God knows I need it this morning."

"Grim?"

I nod silently. Tab knows what I'm talking about--our breakfast topics are nearly always the same, only the description changes. It's the
Good Morning Britain
makeover.

Today, I have what I can only describe as a giant armadillo requiring my attention upstairs. Usually, there is always an attractive woman just waiting to be wheedled out from under unkempt hair, left to its own devices amid a life of daily school runs and piles of washing up. More often than not, it's a simple case of giving them a funky haircut and dragging their makeup routine kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. But not today. Today's challenge, to put it mildly, has no redeeming features whatsoever.

"I want to look like Julia Roberts," she'd said tersely at the first consultation over an hour ago.

"God knows, I'll be struggling to make her look better than Joan Collins," hissed Kevin Makepeace, our resident celebrity hairdresser. Never had a man been so unsuited to his surname. He wreaked havoc wherever he went, with his penchant for making bitchy comments and stirring up a hornet's nest of discontent among the staff members by pitting them against each other.

After years of dealing with Richard, I had Kevin's measure perfectly. I knew he was trouble, he knew I knew, and we rubbed along together nicely. Here he is now, mincing across the canteen towards Tab and me.

"Busy are we?" he whines sarcastically.

"We got it right the first time," I counteract, smiling sweetly.

"Oooh, get you." He noisily scrapes back a chair and sits to my right, a look of sheer hopelessness on his face. "I hope you've booked a plastic surgeon, because fuck knows she needs one. What a Picasso arse."

Clearly baffled by such verbal eloquence, Tab looks at me for an explanation.

"It means her bum is too big, her knickers too small, and the overall effect is that she has four buttocks," I say matter-of-factly, translating one of Kevin's many inimitable phrases.

"Oh." Tab looks mildly uncomfortable, obviously casting her mind back to that morning's choice of underwear and wondering whether she too fits this description.

"There must be
something
we can do," I muse.

"We"means Kevin, the makeup artist Trudi Pearson, and the program's fashion editor, Camilla Safford, a woman so dense that if brains were taxed she'd get a rebate. But when it comes to slimming down trucker-style arms with a wispy piece of sheer lace or frill, she's a towering genius.

My role is simply to sift through all the letters requesting makeovers, find one with an interesting story, and book her--or, occasionally, him--taking care of them along the way. The general idea is to think televisually and choose one who would benefit from some expert guidance.

"You must have been having one of your Stevie Wonder days when you pulled this one out of the hat," says Kevin, stirring his Slimline Latte vigorously.

"Come on now," I say soothingly. "Think silk purse."

He purses his lips. "Love, we're not just talking sow's ear here. She's got the snout and trotters too."

I sigh. "Last week you castigated me for choosing one that was too pretty. You said it was easier to make a dramatic transformation with someone a little more moose-like, to use your exact words."

Kevin runs a hand through his blond highlighted hair, accentuating the little Tin Tin quiff at the front. "True, but now we have the other extreme, and I have Gollum waiting in my chair upstairs. Cut me some slack, will you? In the future, choose one of the other twenty million women in the country that I can work with."

Standing up, he grabs his latte, pokes his tongue out at me, smiles at Tab, and minces back towards the exit in his bright pink trainers.

"Gosh." Tab looks taken aback. "Is he always that high maintenance?" In her department of cookery and gardening items, the worst she has to deal with is the wandering hands of an overly lecherous expert on herbaceous borders who comes in from time to time.

I nod. "Most of the time. But there's never a dull moment, and I much prefer that to having to while away the hours with nondescripts."

"Maybe." She shrugs, staring into the middle distance.

"You OK?" Amid the Kevin whirlwind of the past few minutes, I noticed Tab had seemed a little distracted.

"Not really." She shuffles uncomfortably in her seat. "I got my period this morning."

I look at her blankly for a couple of beats, knowing her desperation for a child, but wondering why the arrival of this period should be any more devastating than any of the others.

She registers my incomprehension. "Which means the IVF has failed."

I instinctively clasp my hand over my mouth, horrified by my own thoughtlessness. "Tab, I'm so sorry." I feel a total, self-obsessed heel. "You poor thing. What awful, terrible luck."

It was Tab and Will's first attempt at IVF, and even before knowing the outcome, they had been to hell and back, enduring the effects of her hormone injections and the uncomfortable egg-harvesting procedure. Not to mention the $5,000 cost they could ill afford.

"Don't they say that the second attempt is usually the most successful?" I say, dredging back through my memory to some IVF slot we'd run on the show months earlier.

"I don't know." Her voice is small and there are tears in her eyes. "But I do know it'll be a while before we're able to afford it."

We lapse into silence for a few seconds, then I clear my throat. "I wish I could lend you the money, but I'm broke," I say, rather pointlessly.

She smiles weakly. "Thanks, but don't worry. Will's parents have already offered, but we want to pay for it ourselves rather than build up huge debts."

Silence again. Then she leans forward, an urgent look on her face.

"Jess, what if I can
never
have children? What will I do?"

I'm rather floored by the question, so opt for the get-out clause. "It won't come to that." I shake my head. "No way. You'll have children, I can feel it in my bones."

"Do you really think so?" She visibly cheers up at my psychic nonsense, and it suddenly strikes me how quacks and cowboys easily make so much money exploiting desperate people at such a vulnerable time of their lives. Want to get pregnant, ma'am? Just pay us several hundred dollars for this course of "miraculous" powders and potions. Women in Outer Mongolia swear by them and they're having babies all the time.

The irony is that, over the years, Tab and I have had endless discussions about contraception, worrying about the threat of unwanted pregnancy. Once, several years ago and with a previous boyfriend, Tab even thought she
was
pregnant. It turned out to be a false alarm, but not before she'd spent a week agonizing about it. Now, here she was, desperate to conceive and nothing was happening.

"When did you get your period?"

"Here, this morning." She looks pale with disappointment. "Just after the morning meeting."

"Have you told Will?"

She shakes her head. "Not yet. He's in a meeting himself until ten. I'll wait until later. He'll be so disappointed." A tear falls silently down her cheek and plops into her tea.

I lean across the table and squeeze her forearm. "Don't cry, sweetie. Everything will be fine, you'll see."

She brushes the moisture from her cheek. "If it turns out that I can't have children . . ." Her eyes are huge and inquiring. ". . . do you think Will would leave me?"

I scoff loudly. "Don't be ridiculous, of course not. He adores you."

"I know, I know." She nods. "But if I can't give him what he so desperately wants . . ."

"Tab." My stern tone surprises even me. "Stop being so negative, that won't help your mind-set at all. You've had bad luck with the first try, and even then there are a million other options after that, including egg donors or even adoption. Believe me, you
will
be a mother, so start thinking positively."

"You're right." She looks sheepish. "There are so many other people worse off than me. I should stop being so self-obsessed."

I didn't actually mean it like that, but as she's looking a bit happier, I decide to leave things the way they are.

When I first met Tab through a friend of a friend, we were both keen to break into television in some behind-the-scenes capacity. We had a lot in common in other ways too, so when my particularly loathsome South African flatmate buggered off back home--leaving me with a $600 phone bill to clear--Tab moved seamlessly into the empty room.

By day, we wrote endless amounts of application letters to TV companies, by night we either stayed in watching and eating crap, or went to the local wine bar in search of any Mr. Will-do-for-nows.

Eventually, Tab landed herself a research job with Granada Television, working on the daytime talk show
What's Your Problem?
It was a fantastic opportunity, with one drawback--it was based in Norwich. That was the end of "the Dangerous Sisters," as my father affectionately referred to us, and I was looking for a new flatmate.

Naturally, we stayed in regular touch, more so when I landed a research job on a local news program and we'd exchanged letters packed with industry gossip. Four years later, Tab transferred back to London when the all-powerful host of
What's Your Problem?
was unearthed as having a raging affair with a Granada executive and moved the show to London to be closer to her.

By that time, I had scraped together enough money to buy a one-bedroom, top-floor flat in Tooting, so she crashed on my floor for about three months, then rented a place of her own.

We resumed our wine bar crusades, but this time Tab had a different agenda. She didn't quite hand any potential suitors a questionnaire, but she may as well have done. During every first date, she would throw in the question "Do you want to have children?"

Sure, she'd try to make it sound as casual and spontaneous as possible, but of course the men would balk instantly, most visibly paling, some even spluttering their drink.

In their minds, she had suddenly transformed from this amiable girl they'd met in a wine bar into a wild-eyed bunny boiler who would have them choosing kitchen units before they could say "commitment-phobe." Needless to say, they'd never call again.

"Maybe you should refrain from asking about children until you've been on a few dates . . ." I suggested during a lunch we shared the day after one date had made his excuses and left less than ten minutes after the big procreation question.

Tab wrinkled her nose in disapproval. "I don't see why I should waste even a few hours of my time on someone who doesn't have the same objectives in life that I do," she said firmly. "If he's not man enough to deal with such an obvious, sensible inquiry, and see it for what it is, then I'm not interested."

And then along came Will. True to form, she asked him the killer question on their first date, and he answered: "Oh yes, I want children more than anything else in the world."

And, pow, that was it. Within weeks, Tab was telling anyone who'd listen that he was "the one."

My view of Will now is exactly the same as when I first met him. He's an affable, rugby-player type whose social uniform is a Hackett shirt with the collar turned up, faded cords, and battered deck shoes--as befits him and all the other real estate agents based in Fulham.

Despite an expensive public school education, he isn't terribly bright, and I've always felt he wasn't interesting enough to be with Tab. But I've never doubted his unswerving loyalty to her and she, in turn, seems happy with him. So who the hell am I to question their relationship?

The canteen has suddenly emptied and I look up at the clock. It's 10 a.m.

"Shit!" I jump to my feet. "We're on air in an hour and I've got Gollum waiting to be transformed upstairs. I'd better go check on the progress."

Tab stays where she is. "I'm just going to sit here for a few more minutes," she says quietly. "My prerecorded item is finished anyway."