Dan Taylor Is Giving Up on Women (10 page)

‘Hey, sport, you OK? Was there an accident? Have you been hurt?’

The absence of a sarcastic tone in Rob’s voice made me feel guilty.

‘Relax, I’m fine. It wasn’t me. It was Rachel.’

‘Is she all right? Seriously hurt?’

‘No, the doctors said she should be fine now.’

‘Are you under arrest for something?’

‘No, well, not yet. The police are asking me some questions.’

‘So you’re not hurt, she’s going to be OK, and you haven’t been nicked. You better tell me what’s going on, and make it interesting, buddy-boy. You’ve nearly given me a heart attack.’

I filled Rob in with the details of what had happened since we last spoke when my evening looked no worse than a missed opportunity to be at home watching repeats of Sarah Beeny. As I talked to him my feelings kept swinging from boredom and frustration at being stuck hanging around, to hyperventilating panic that I was going to be carted off to a cell and get the chance to find out if all those jokes about the showers in prison really were based on truth.

‘Well, you don’t do simple bad dates, I’ll give you that,’ Rob said when I’d brought him fully up to speed. ‘I’ll come and pick you up now. If you do get hauled off to Paddington nick in the meantime, let me know, and I’ll pretend to be your lawyer.’

As I put the phone down PC Hawkins materialised in the room once again.

‘It’s your lucky day,’ he said, ‘or rather, my lucky day. What Miss Evans says seems to corroborate what you have to say, and more to the point she doesn’t want to press charges, as apparently it would impact on her karma. But she also said I’d have a better coloured aura if I could incorporate more mauve into my uniform, so she may not be quite in her right mind at the moment. I’ll be keeping your details in case she changes her mind.’

‘What do I need to do? Should I call you if I’m not going to be at home? Do I need to report to the station? Should I give you my passport? Will I get an ankle tag?’

‘Are you taking the mick?’

‘Christ, no! I mean no — sorry for swearing — just wasn’t sure of the protocol. First time I’ve nearly been arrested, want to make certain I’m doing it properly. Wasn’t sure if you’d need some of those sideways photos,’ I said, offering him a view of my profile.

‘Just pick up the phone if we try and get in touch. Now I think you should clear off. Docs have said she can go home soon, and I don’t think she’ll be wanting to see you again.’

‘Thanks very much, Officer,’ I said, before adding as we headed back to the waiting room, ‘and hey, be careful out there.’

I got another of those looks as the constable weighed up whether I really was taking the piss this time, or just genuinely as big a moron as I appeared.

‘Goodnight, sir,’ he said as he walked, shaking his head, towards the hospital canteen.

‘Danny, it’s me. Are you all right, hun?’

I picked up the phone call from Hannah as I stepped outside and passed the smokers’ PVC shelter, empty except for a heavily pregnant woman and a couple of doctors still in their surgery scrubs.

‘I was in bed. Rob just said you’d nearly killed your date but that everything was fine now and he was headed out to get you.’

‘That’s about it,’ I said glumly. ‘So much for SuperDan, eh?’

‘You were there at the scene of a desperate medical emergency and helped to save the day? Sounds pretty super to me.’

‘When you’re being super I don’t think you’re supposed to be the cause of the crisis, nor are you supposed to nearly faint when you see someone’s head doubling in size. And after all your hard work on the Internet, I’m afraid she’s not going to be calling again.’

‘She sounds like she was as mad as a box of hatters. You don’t want to end up with some madwoman. Not one who’s mad from the start anyway. It’s more fun when it takes years to uncover the layers of insanity.’

We went quiet for a moment.

‘Was she very pretty?’ asked Hannah softly.

‘Way out of my league.’

‘Now don’t be thinking like that. Nobody’s out of your league — you’re a giant killer. Were you wearing the powder-blue shirt tucked into those new charcoal trousers?’

‘Yep.’

‘And had you shaved the night before so you had a little bit of tidy stubble by the evening?’

‘A new blade last night, going with the grain, just like they say in the magazines and makeover shows.’

‘You would have looked very handsome, then.’

‘She mainly seemed to notice I went beetroot red whenever I tried talking to her. It’s caused by my emotionally immature fondness for processed snacks harshing my vibes, apparently.’

‘Pah. Blue-eyed, brown haired,dressed like an architect? You’d’ve looked gorgeous.’

‘Listen to you,’ I said, smiling a bit for the first time in ages, ‘a married woman on the phone asking some poor innocent boy what he’s wearing. Shocking.’

‘If you want to be shocked you should ask me the question back. The answer would have you scandalised.’

I gave a small, slightly strangled laugh.

‘You’re blushing right now, aren’t you?’

‘It’ll be the Dairylea cheese slice I had for lunch, that’s all.’

‘Well, put your mind at rest. I’m in my cosiest winceyette pyjamas and bed socks, cuddling a fluffy hot-water bottle. It’s all glamour here. But come on, tell me everything that happened. What was it like riding in an ambulance? Did anyone say “stat!”? And how’d you hold up under police interrogation? I need all the details.’

I regaled Hannah with a dramatic retelling of the night, getting big laughs out of the humiliations I’d inflicted upon myself, and ego boosts when I needed them. Talking it through with her, and getting that sympathy, made me feel a lot better while I sat on a cold wall next to the smokers. It made me feel good to make someone laugh as she had, and when she hung up there’d been a tenderness when she said goodnight that I’d missed for a long time.

I stopped myself. What kind of thinking was that?

I stood up and started pacing about, pretending the plumes of condensed breath in front of me were smoke as I did when I was a kid. I was lucky to have friends like Hannah and Rob, I told myself. That was all there was to it. And after all these years it was good to be getting to know Hannah in her own right, instead of as part of a double act. When this experiment came to an end, I’d have got that out of it, if nothing else.

A new friend. A friend. Just a friend.

‘Taxi for Crippen. Dr Hawley Crippen?’

While I sat lost in thought Rob had pulled up, and gave a toot of the horn in his knocked-about old Audi.

‘Get in, kid, I’ve got some puppies I’ll show you,’ he said in a loud raspy voice that had the pregnant smoker looking over disapprovingly.

‘You don’t think I should tell them I’m leaving, do you?’ I asked, leaning into the car. ‘Say goodbye, or sorry?’

‘Sneaking out while the broad’s still in bed is one of the core principles of the one-night stand, so I don’t think it’s necessary. And they say not to return to the scene of a crime either. Now get in.’

I slid into the passenger seat, and Rob gave me a couple of light punches on the arm while I did up my seat belt.

‘You all right, buddy?’

‘Remind me again why I was wrong to give up all hope of trying to find a woman?’

‘Because this is fun! You’re living. Now come on, I’m starving. Let’s get you home and you can buy me a pizza.’

‘Look at that, sport. Doesn’t it just make your heart glad?’

‘Who? Where? I missed her.’

We were driving along the Thames, Nelson Riddle era Sinatra on the stereo. I’d assumed that I must have missed out on seeing another group of girls in short skirts and high heels, the effects of several fruity vodka cocktails their only protection against the biting cold as they headed for a disco on a boat. It was usually something like that that got Rob philosophical.

‘I’m talking about out there,’ he said, waving an arm in the direction of the city ahead of us. Lit up in the dark, London was brimming with people, passing under the spotlighted buildings and illuminated advertising hoardings, still out and about at a time Big Ben was telling us was really quite late.

‘Being here. It’s like living in a movie.’

We’d taken a bit of a scenic route on the way out of the hospital, past the silly-expensive car showrooms of Park Lane and up by the Houses of Parliament to Westminster Bridge. With the London Eye, Oxo Tower and other icons of the South Bank as a backdrop, I stared out of the window at the gawking tourists and staggering drunk businessmen on the bridge. A red double-decker bus went by, adding to the London tourist board promotional shot feel, and as it trundled past it revealed a couple snogging while the world went by them.

It was difficult to get a good view of what they looked like as we drove by, their faces mutually obscured in the kiss, but it looked as if they were probably about my age. After years together they could have just got engaged right there on the spot. Or they could have been friends, overcome by the beauty of the setting, who decided it was just too good a moment to let their fear of rejection stop them risking their relationship by finally kissing. Or it could be a pissed-up office fling that wouldn’t last much beyond the span of the bridge, sparking months of awkwardness at work, and simmering guilt and resentment towards their partners at home.

The point, though, was Rob was right — you could feel as if your life deserved to be on the big screen when you drove through the heart of London. In a car you were in the scene, close enough to really feel part of the city and its glamour and romance, but far enough removed to not always see the homeless teens and drug users, or smell the stale piss and the sick of Spanish students who’d overdone it.

‘Make your life like something out of the movies,’ he said. ‘When was it we’d talked about doing that?’

‘God…years ago. Me and Kate were still together. I think it inspired the disastrous proposal.’

‘Still seems like a good idea to me. The grand gestures. The things that people see at the cinema and wish they could do themselves. And could, if they put in a bit of effort.’

‘You can’t do it all the time,’ I said. ‘You’d give yourself a hernia. Maybe you could make life like television.’

‘Sure, that’d work, if we’re talking prime time, not daytime. There’s got to be some decent drama.’

‘Maybe if it’s happening to somebody else. I think I’d rather my storyline was a bit more in the background right now.’

‘You’ve got to try and enjoy it. Keep that plot moving forwards.’

Rob’s mood seemed to drop a little as we moved away from the white and gold glow of the city.

‘Y’know these last few weeks, with you upping your game and giving this dating resolution a go, has been friggin’ brilliant. At home, we’re getting a kick out of it all the time.’

‘Well, obviously I’m an endlessly fascinating character.’

‘Hey, don’t flatter yourself too much. It’s more that if we’re not talking about this, we’re not talking about anything. We’d either be rowing about kids, or the lack of them, or communicating through the shopping list on
the blackboard. Even on that we don’t make the effort we used to.’

Rob smiled sadly while we pulled in for an ambulance to pass, its lights flashing, but sirens silent.

‘It used to be we’d try and get the other to buy the most embarrassing things we could think of when it’s their turn to do Tesco’s,’ he continued. ‘There’s one checkout assistant who still looks at my trolley suspiciously since the day H sent me just to buy a bottle of vodka, KY Jelly, and a large butternut squash. I also had to get one of those inflatable rings for piles. And tell her it was my birthday.

‘But that was, what? Nearly a year ago now? More than that? It can’t be good when you have to think that hard to work out the last time you and your wife had fun together. Now it’s just bickering over forgetting toilet rolls.’

‘They do use a lot of it,’ I said.

‘You’re telling me. I’m betting a four-pack could last a single man like you most of a year. For us, it’s gone before I’ve finished my coffee for breakfast. But a squabble like that’s a good day.’

I fidgeted with the button for the glove compartment, and struggled for the right thing to say.

‘It’s just winter. It’s a phase. You two are great together.’

‘When people are around, maybe. But the rest of the time? Not so much any more. Tonight, while you’re out getting a woman into bed on your first date, Hannah’s gone to our bedroom with her friggin’ celebrity magazines leaving me on my own watching crappy football by eight o’clock. We’re like flatmates, but without the underlying sexual tension.’

Before long we were passing through Clapham, where Rob and Hannah and I had shared a flat in a Victorian mansion block after university. Hannah had been away for a lot of the time doing her legal training in Bristol. Then in Exeter, doing a teacher training course, and finally in Birmingham doing her knowledge management course. Kate had still been in Manchester too, so it had been just us guys for a lot of the time. A lot of lager cans around, eating ready-meal curries straight out of their plastic trays, and sitting about in front of a TV the size of a department-store display window.

Men being men, you could say — if you ignored the fact I’d be hoovering constantly, keeping up with the recycling, and leaving out coasters.

We’ve come a long way since we lived here. Well, we’ve moved two miles down the road. And if I want to hang out and peruse Rob’s Clint Eastwood DVD collection I now have to walk twenty minutes to the Harrisons’ flat. And of course Kate is long gone. But aside from that I’m not sure how much has changed: same conversation, same contrasting degree of ambition, same movies. Although sitting in the car together I began to wonder about that assumption I always made.

All that stuff was still there, but this dissatisfaction with life Rob was talking about seemed new, or maybe I was noticing it for the first time. Thinking back, it had started probably six months earlier, when the occasional bitching about work and home over a game of chess had become more regular. It also felt more real, and less like an impression of the kvetching neurotic New Yorkers we’d seen in the movies. It couldn’t be laughed off with a reference to telling his analyst or a shrugged ‘whadaya gonna do?’.

It seemed there was more edge sometimes to what he could say too. Jokes could feel more like digs, and you could never be as sure of what he might turn his sarcasm on. But maybe that wasn’t new either. Maybe I was just noticing it more. It could be I was getting sensitive, but lately putting me in the ‘hapless little buddy’ routine didn’t seem so funny. It felt less like an act, and more like my life.

We stopped at the lights, and outside a club a group of rowdy local residents were queuing to get in. Rob stirred into life as snatches of dance music filtered into the car.

‘Hey, do you fancy going for old times’ sake? Few drinks, try and get beaten up by a few old school arseholes in rugby shirts?’

I looked at Rob from under a raised eyebrow.

‘No, I don’t either. Don’t know why I suggested it even. Jesus, maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe that’s what it is.’

He slumped back behind the wheel. With a mechanical crunch and a whirr, the CD on the stereo switched over from Sinatra to eighties’moody Springsteen, and took Rob further down the road to introspection with it.

‘I’ve always felt like I was ahead of the game. Now everyone seems to have caught up and is overtaking. I was first to get married. First with the proper good job when most of you were scratching your arses and trying to find another course to stop you having to work for a living.’

‘First to start greying, first to be balding,’ I sympathised.

‘First in my year to get pubes, first whose balls dropped,’ continued Rob grandiosely.

‘First to get served under age in pubs,’ I suggested.

‘First to get fired from a proper good job, and find a better one.’

‘First to visit a clap clinic.’

‘First to get divorced.’

It went quiet then for a second. I looked at Rob, who just winked.

‘First to get sent to rehab. First to marry a dollybird twenty years his junior. First with erectile dysfunction,’ he said.

‘First for a triple bypass and hair transplant,’ I suggested. ‘First to get dementia.’

‘You’re right, sport, I’m still ahead of the game. Fuhgeddaboudit.’

The workday on Friday had been a bit of a write-off. After Rob and I had headed back to mine for oversized pizzas and beers, the night had turned into a wee small hours session of whisky, cards, and a Neil Simon film playing in the background. At the office even the sight of Delphine, in what I can only describe as probably the world’s first erotic mohair jumper, barely got my pulse above the levels for long-term coma. Knowing this meant I was not well, I skipped the pub at the end of the day and sloped home for medicinal cider and leftover pizza for dinner.

It felt like a long time since I’d collapsed at home by myself on a Friday evening, with nothing to do but circle through the TV channels until bedtime. I was looking forward to it but felt an underlying itchy buzz of tension, as if something in my subconscious wasn’t shut properly. I didn’t think I could relax until I found it and fixed it, or just piled things on top of it till it stopped making a noise.

Rob and Hannah had plans for me for Sunday. But, even as punch drunk as I was from recent humiliations, I didn’t think it was that bothering me.

Delphine had said something I thought might have been a bit flirty as we walked back through the office from the sandwich man, and I’d fumbled my response. Sullen, unshaved and hungover as I was, she’d said I was looking magnificently mean and moody, but I think I ruined the atmosphere by complaining that someone had taken the last packet of Frazzles®. I felt stupid about that, but after banging my head off my keyboard a couple of times when I got back to my desk, I’d just filed it with all the other instances of failed repartee in my mental files. So I don’t think it was that.

I don’t even think it was the stern reminder from Janice on the proper use of the all-office email address list — my nose and forehead had combined while bouncing off my desktop to accidentally send a message to all employees that merely said, ‘yfknu ubtf6k unyk vyuk6g fu ign7po tdiu’.

No, I couldn’t quite get it out of my head that Rob had joked about getting a divorce.

It was just a gag, inspired by a tough time they were having together, but, as someone wise had once said, there’s no such thing as jokes — I think it was either Freud or Les Dennis. Were things really that rocky between them? It was horrible for me to think of the idea of them not being together. For almost as long as I’ve known the Harrisons
as a couple they’ve had what I wanted, and sometimes it felt as if by proxy I had it too. The prospect of that ending — was this how the children of divorced parents felt?

Would they be able to do it amicably? Could I avoid picking sides? Rob would still be around; he might even end up moving in for a while if it took some time for him to get himself set up on his own.

But would Hannah drift away? Get on with her own life?

Single and available again…

But this wasn’t happening; it was just a joke, I reminded myself, rubbing my head furiously. It was no more true than the idea Rob was going bald, the luxuriantly hairy bastard. I needed to stop being silly. And stop daydreaming about what could happen if it did. But the buzzing was still there, so I muted the TV, put on some music, and fired up my laptop.

Now what was a single guy, on his second can of cider and home alone on a Friday night, to do when he started Internet surfing for a distraction from a life that seemed to be getting more awkward and complicated?

That’s right, go on to a dating website and look at the profiles of all the men on there.

I felt a strange bubbling nervousness and excitement in my stomach as I started a search for the soullyforyou.com website Rob and Hannah had registered me on. Even though I was on my own and nobody was watching — except perhaps a particularly bored spy somewhere — I couldn’t do it directly.

First I went to a news site. The headlines there said there’d been some sort of scandal involving some sort of financial shadiness involving some kind of politician; a natural disaster was happening in one of the parts of the world least in a position to cope with it.

And oh, look, I said to myself, what’s that over there with a picture of some young thing enjoying a glass of white wine on a sunny day?

A banner ad for a new dating website, you say?

Well, I suppose I could just click on it to see what these young people are getting up to these days.

I clicked on the link and a parade of potential soulmates of all genders and persuasions blinked across my screen. A picture, a username, a tagline, and then gone.

I glanced through them for a while, failing to not be judgmental. A description mentioning ‘a killer smile’ meant she had enormous head-filling teeth. His fascination with the human mind meant he was manipulative, needy, and under the misguided impression he was some kind of Derren Brown. She used way too many exclamation marks. He was not even remotely as good-looking as that expression suggested he thought he was. You couldn’t trust anyone like her who’d had moodily lit studio shots of themselves done. He’d just said he liked surfing so he could justify a picture with his shirt off. She was really cute, but used the word ‘chillax’. His joking about being a stalking potential serial killer actually did make him sound like a stalking potential serial killer.