Dan Taylor Is Giving Up on Women (16 page)

One thing about having one side of your face banged up after a run-in with a pavement slab was you got a bit of personal space on the tube. So getting into work on Tuesday morning was a relatively comfortable experience. I was also lucky that when above ground it was one of those cold, porcelain-blue, clear days, so I could wear my sunglasses in the face of the still-rising sun without feeling like a total pillock. After lying in bed too long, and toying with not going in again, I was running late, so would be entering an already full office and be forced to speak to people, which I wasn’t looking forward to. Still, I figured it was going to be better than sitting at home drinking black tea all day because the milk had run out, and keeping my mobile switched off because I didn’t want to speak to anyone, and then turning it on to check it every fifteen minutes in case someone did want to speak to me.

I headed into the office building and I checked how I looked in the mirrored walls of the lift up to the third floor. From the comfortable brown shoes up I was the model of a modern, casually smart office worker. Until you reached my head, where one tired, bloodshot eye was mismatched with one barely open, but even more bloodshot one. The colours and tones of the bruising on my face were changing again, I could tell. I’d spent a large portion of Monday looking at the damage in a mirror, and it was like watching a sunset. It kept changing, but you only noticed the changes after they happened.

‘Ohmigod, Dan! Are you OK? Those children didn’t mug you again, did they?’

I tell you, you let one group of teenagers take your wallet and your Oyster card — they didn’t want my ‘gay’ phone — because you think you’ve seen one of them has a knife, and you’re never allowed to forget it. Janice was the first person I bumped into once I was through the door. She gripped my forearm with a casually vice-like grip, and stared intently into my bad eye.

‘No, no children were involved, just a fall.’ I tried to set aside her hand but couldn’t, despite a fair bit of tugging.

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know. They’re feral. I was reading about them in
Femail.
You could’ve been killed!’

I managed to escape but before I was past Reception Tony, the overly peppy American pharmaceuticals expert, was heading straight for me.

‘Taylor! Helluva shiner, man. I should see the other guy, right, buddy?’

‘Only if there was a chance he could do something worse to you, you brash little tosspot,’ I mumbled as he trotted past, giving me a far too hard pat on the back as he went. I got as far as the first row of cubicles before Jennifer and Mandy from Reception bumped into me and started asking about my injuries. That was quite nice, actually. They normally barely said a word to me, and the sympathetic cooing and arm-stroking gave me a bit of a boost. That buzz lasted until about the time Weird Boring Chris started telling me little-known facts about periorbital hematoma. Apparently there was potential with head trauma for undiscovered clots to cause sudden strokes and even death days later, with the victim none the wiser right up to the moment they hit the floor in a coma.

Finally reaching my desk, I fired up the computer to check onto some medical health sites to see whether the slight itch I was getting in my left ear lobe could be a hidden sign of imminent embolism, or whether I was just getting a spot. The idea of work didn’t seem very appealing, but luckily things looked quiet. The only internal email of note I’d received since I’d left on Friday was one sent five minutes ago from Nigel, my boss, making sure I didn’t have any clients coming in today, and to hide myself in case anyone else did. It felt slightly sinister that he’d learnt about my hideous appearance quite so soon after I’d walked into the office and it only supported the rumours he had some sort of multi-camera CCTV system hidden away in there. But the warmth and concern for employees’ well-being that could be read between the lines of the instructions not to be seen in public compensated for all that.

Hiding at my desk seemed the ideal thing to do today, and the lack of proper work meant I could get on with what
I intended to do with the morning — write an email to Hannah that pretended that absolutely nothing had happened, while simultaneously apologising for it. I needed to do that soon-ish so that I could get in touch with Rob, who’d called and texted a couple of times since Sunday night but who I’d ignored. I was too nervous to speak to him before checking with Hannah what was going on with them, and what he knew.

One of the thoughts that had kept coming back to me was what if, in a ferocious argument about fidelity, Hannah had hit Rob with the low blow of saying his best friend had tried to get off with her that night — not that that was exactly what had happened, I remembered to tell myself. I didn’t think that she would. But then, I didn’t think Rob was the sort of person to have affairs at the office. Or that I was the sort to make passes at friends’ wives — although
that
— stick with the programme, Taylor — had been a misunderstanding.

I settled down for a day of email diplomacy. I needed it all to come together before this evening, when I’d be hanging out with Rob at the monthly Tuesday Night Poker meet-up at Angus’s flat. I sat there, fingers hovering over the keyboard, for minutes on end. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what to say to her. All the casual references to too much drink and adrenalin I’d been planning on the way in sounded hollow. And there was something, a tiny devil on my shoulder replete with pitchfork and red horns, suggesting maybe it was proving so difficult because I didn’t want to apologise.

‘Morning, Danny, you’re back in this hellhole!’

Delphine, wearing a cream V-neck sweater and tight navy trousers that seemed designed to, well, make men’s trousers get a bit tight too, sauntered to my desk. I forced my eyes to stay up at eye level as she launched into a catalogue of her latest dramas.

‘You wouldn’t believe what he did zis weekend — he left me alone so he could go and visit his grandmother. He told me before she’d been dead for five years! And my ‘airdresser ruined my hair, and my client is getting pissy about getting reports when it hasn’t even been two weeks since the deadline, and, my God, what happened to your eye?’

I blushed a bit as she leaned in, her forehead cutely knotting as she examined my bruise with concern and, I suspected, a quiver of excitement.

‘It was…listen, would you mind if I didn’t talk about it?’

‘Ohh, Danny, you can tell me…’

I didn’t know if it was possible for a woman to make her cleavage look instantly bigger when she wanted to know something, but I’d have sworn that was what happened when I wouldn’t tell Delphine what was going on.

‘Really, I’d rather not.’

‘Were you in a fight?’

‘No, just a little fall. Nothing to remark upon.’

I was surprising myself with the ability I was suddenly displaying to not give Delphine everything she wanted, but for once I had other priorities, and I didn’t have the time to get into drawn-out discussions about being rugby-tackled by London’s most dedicated shop guard.

‘You’re hiding something from me, I know,’ she purred.

I gave a non-committal shrug.

‘Oh. OK,’ she said, with a look of barely hidden irritation that made her eyes flash, ‘I will find out from you on Saturday.
Á plus tard.
‘

She walked off, and for the first time since she’d been here I couldn’t be bothered to swivel in my chair slightly to watch her go. Well, OK, I did shift around a little bit, and, my goodness, a bit of indignation managed to put even more sway in those hips, and those trousers could almost make a man forget his tiny social circle was about to implode. I also wondered what she meant about Saturday.

‘Jesus, half your face looks like the skin on an old banana!’

Jamie the new guy was standing next to me, looking down on my bad side. I think he might have been there for a while, equally distracted by Delphine’s petulant departure. ‘Don’t tell me, I know, one of those weekends, eh. But the story’s never as interesting as the damage looks, right? Been a while since I’ve woken up with a mystery injury though.’

‘Yep, dull, dull story,’ I agreed.

‘So good weekend, though?’

‘Oh, you know, pretended to be a woman online, went shoplifting and got arrested, participated in the collapse of a friend’s marriage.’

‘Excellent! I stayed in and watched TV with a few beers too. Anything planned for the next one?’

‘Aside from a spot of armed robbery and adultery? Absolutely nothing.’

‘Great, ‘cos I was just popping by to let you know we’re having a bit of a party in our flat this weekend. Few of the girls from here are coming, and wanted to know if you fancied it too.’

I’d walked straight into it. I’d forgotten the rule that said that unsolicited enquiries into whether you have any plans for a specific time in the future should always be treated as a prelude to an invitation you might want to have an excuse to avoid.

‘Um, yeah, sure, sounds good, although surely you don’t want someone nearly thirty acting like everyone’s parents, do you?’

‘No worries, it’s going to be a very refined, chilled night now we’re all grown-ups and have proper jobs. I’ll probably wear a cravat and a silk dressing gown. D’ya think French birds like that sort of thing?’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘Wicked. I’ll send you the details.’

‘Great.’

With a punch in the arm, Jamie was gone. At least now I had an excuse to avoid any plans Rob or Hannah might have been thinking of for me. And it sounded as if Delphine was going too. Over the course of a couple of weeks, my hopeless crush on her had become one of the more rational things in my life, which I found strangely comforting. Alone at last at my desk, I opened an Excel file of busy work as a cover, and went to my email.

The only non-spambot generated communication in my entire inbox was a reminder from Angus saying poker kick-off was at seven-thirty, and to make sure that we eat first as he was only doing a few light savouries for later in the night and not cooking a dinner. Of course, Angus’s idea of a couple of snacks would usually involve half a dozen different types of canapés, and several elaborate quiches he’d had left over from the weekend. This was usually a little more fancy than anything offered when it was one of the other guys’ turn to host, when taking the Pringles out of the tube and in a bowl was considered making an effort.

This was my opportunity, I decided. I sent a blokey ‘reply all’ response about how they should also remember to bring a change of clothes, because by the time I’d finished winning I’d have the shirts off their backs. As I expected, Rob was hard at work in his office too, and a similarly laddish reply-all response from him immediately came in, suggesting it wasn’t the first time I’d tried to get them all half naked. Two emails between the guys before the camp sexual slurs came out. I think that was a new record for restraint.

A personal reply from Rob came hot on its heels.

Sport! Where’ve you been? I was beginning to think you’d breached the conditions of your parole and were back in the slammer without access to your mobile. And how come I’m hearing about your private and personal humiliations from my wife? A man with a less well-developed sense of his personal worth might begin to feel left out of his own social experiment…

Sifting through for clues as to what was going on, it seemed he and Hannah hadn’t had any big talks yet about his supposed infidelity, and so far I was still off the hook too. Get us and our tangled webs, I thought to myself as I
pinged back a quick reply.

Sorry, headaches all night, slept all day so been totally out of it. Also, the campaign for the ethical treatment of animals are beginning to question your cruel testing methods, and half a dozen Hollywood starlets have been explaining to me I’m a victim of man’s terrible inhumanity to other living creatures. Still won’t let me shag them, though.

It seemed we were still OK, which was good, because this was where my loyalties lay, whatever he’d been doing, I reminded myself. Weren’t you supposed to stick by friends in situations like this even if you didn’t agree with their choices?

In what passed for difficult times in my life so far — when Kate left, when I lost my first job, even when I was finding university a bit much but was too embarrassed to admit I was homesick and on the verge of quitting, Rob was always looking out for me. It wasn’t usually helping in obvious ways, and half the time it felt as if it certainly wasn’t the right way — a night stuck in Soho being persuaded by two very large men to spend all the cash we could get out of the ATM on champagne for bored Eastern European strippers was not the ideal way to try to get over losing what might have been the love of my life. But he did it, and he stuck around for the months after, when I couldn’t cope with the nights sitting watching the telly when everything on seemed to remind me of being with Kate and had to tell someone about it.

But then hadn’t I suspected he always seemed happiest when he felt most in charge of situations and could dispense his wisdom to the needy? That was a harsh way of looking at a friendship, I told myself, and I should be ashamed for even thinking like that. Sitting at my desk, looking at my reflection in my computer monitor, I could still almost feel where Hannah’s face had been pressed against my neck and her hands had hooked over my shoulders. I probably shouldn’t tell Rob that at poker tonight.

Unless I
really
needed to distract him when I was bluffing.

Later in the morning I was in the stationery cupboard and frustratingly unable to get any mobile signal so I could watch telly on my phone. I’d decided to duck into the cramped room — overly lit and oppressively warm because it doubled as the office server room — when word reached me from above that a client tour was about to take place and I was to make myself scarce. If there’d been somewhere to sit down I think I could have happily gone to sleep, but as it was I was left pacing and rooting through boxes of office supplies looking for something that might be worth nicking. I wondered if life could get more straightforward again if I had a load of transparent A4 wallets to tidy everything into at home, and had just started putting together an armchair made of stacked-up reams of copier paper when the door opened and Janice slid into the room.