Dan Taylor Is Giving Up on Women (19 page)

So I went back to my war of attrition built on forwarding edited clips of cartoon characters from my youth singing hardcore rap songs. In the end I’d had to stay a bit late at work on Friday, because I was finishing up stuff that I really should have been doing when I was searching for the latest irresistible viral video clip that would make Hannah speak to me again.

I’d been struggling to make a pie chart of preferences amongst mineral-water drinkers between the descriptions ‘lightly carbonated’, ‘gently sparkling’, and ‘fizzy’, when I felt a pair of hands around my neck. It was Janice, providing a surprisingly gentle and relaxing shoulder massage, and for a few seconds I forgot that she often claimed that her hands were registered lethal weapons. She mentioned some health and safety guidelines on working at computer screens all day and that the tension in my neck muscles showed I’d been working too hard without the right posture. She also said I should be taking regular breaks from all the intense Internet research I’d been doing this week. This last bit was said with a sympathetic conspiratorial smile. I hoped she’d enjoyed all the cute animal videos she’d been snooping on.

Finally I made it home in time to keep my date with the delivery driver from the Mahal Palace. Another night spent just casually checking in to soullyforyou.com, to find I wasn’t there. It was past midnight by the time revolving through flipping TV channels and mucking about online lost out to post-takeaway drowsiness. The telly went on standby and I was set to shut down the computer when I spotted SuperDan82 was back online.

My dhanzak rumbled nervously in my stomach as I dived in.

FunnyGal483
: Hey you.

SuperDan82
: Hello, stranger. :-)

That was the great thing about us being on here: we were different people, and nothing had happened.

FunnyGal483
: So what are you up to?

SuperDan82
: Oh you know, just hanging, checking out the scene on here. Seeing if there’s anyone about up for some fun in the wee small hours. ;-)

FunnyGal483
: Seeing who’s drunk and desperate you mean?

SuperDan82
: Lol. You sound like my kind of girl.

Winks and lols, I pondered. She was in a chirpy mood tonight. A bit flirty even. I hoped this meant that I was finally forgiven. I bit the bullet and delved a bit more.

FunnyGal483
: So how’s your week been?

SuperDan82
: Fantastic. But busy, y’know? It’s a hard life being a man in demand. But right now I’m just looking to forget what’s gone by and have a good time now.

Yes! Let’s let bygones be bygones, I said to myself as I studied the screen. I thought she was taking the piss out of me with the ‘man in demand’ bollocks, but, hey, I deserved it. I thought I’d try another veiled apology, and move on.

FunnyGal483
: The week I’ve had, I know what you mean. And there were things I wanted to do, but just couldn’t work out how to do them.

SuperDan82
: Sounds tough.

FunnyGal483
: For others more than me. But now it’d just be good to blow off some steam.

SuperDan82
: You’ve come to the right place. But I see you haven’t got a profile picture yet — that’s no fun.

FunnyGal483
: I think Boots have confiscated my negatives.

SuperDan82
: That’s my girl. Do you have a webcam? ;-)

That was an odd thing to ask. Was she trying to push me into coming clean? It wasn’t part of our deal on here…

FunnyGal483
: Um, yesss…

SuperDan82
: Why not just take one right now? I’d like to see if you’re as gorgeous as you sound.

Alarm bells started ringing in my head. Was she setting me up?

FunnyGal483
: I dunno if that’s a good idea, I think they have to be cleared by a moderator anyway…?

SuperDan82
: If you did want to send me a pic, I’ve got an email address you could send it to. Completely private.

This didn’t sound right. Then another message pinged in.

SuperDan82
: I could tell you exactly what I think of it. Or show you ;-).

This really didn’t sound right.

SuperDan82
: If you’re feeling shy it doesn’t even have to be your face. :-o

This wasn’t Hannah.

SuperDan82
: I could go first…

It was Rob.

You’d come to a crappy point in your life when your supposed best friend thought you were a pissed vulnerable woman and was trying to groom you.

Suddenly, I was furious. He was using my dating account to try and get smutty pictures! God knew how many women he’d harassed who thought I was a pervert. If I get slapped unexpectedly in the street now I’ll know why, I thought. Then I couldn’t help wondering if he’d had any luck getting any… But that was beside the point! I reminded myself. This man was objectifying me as a woman. The laptop pinged.

SuperDan82
: Are you still thinking about it, or are you getting ready…?!!

I did what any self-respecting female would do at that point. I sent a final message calling him a tiny-dicked creep, accompanied by a grumpy emoticon giving him the finger. Then I shut down my computer completely and glared at it.

Saturday morning was spent in very tired agony. I’d barely slept, trying to work out what I was supposed to do. Should I tell Hannah that Rob had been posing as me and asking for saucy photos of me with my top off? Or was it one of his jokes — did he suspect FunnyGal483 was me, and was playing me along? Had Hannah told him we’d been talking online? What would that mean if she had?

It felt like an endless cycle of questions that just kept coming back on itself, like watching repeats of repeats of
QI
on Dave. By the time Delphine texted about the party to say that she, Janice and Weird Boring Chris were meeting in the pub for a couple of drinks before going to Jamie’s, the idea of getting drunk with my clinically oddball colleagues seemed a lot more sane than sitting at home by myself trying to figure out what was going on in my own life.

I had hit rock bottom. I was voluntarily and deliberately going to a party.

I woke up with a start as I heard the front door to my flat pulled shut. I sat up in bed quickly, confused for a moment and fearfully suspecting it was someone coming in. Then the sound of the brushed whoosh and cracking hinges of the fire door on the landing let me know it had been someone leaving. There was a whoosh and a crack in my head too as my dehydrated brain caught up with the rest of my skull, which had been jerked into a vertical position much quicker than it was expecting, and collided like a gang of Keystone Kops into the back of my eyeballs.

It was Sunday morning and I was at home with a hangover that was already showing the intent to squat with me for days.

I was in a bed I wasn’t the only one to have slept in.

And I had no idea who it was that had just escaped from sharing it.

I closed my eyes for a minute and let the waves of pain washing through my head subside sufficiently so I could feel the roiling nausea in my stomach again.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said out loud.

With the back of my head leaning against my bed frame, I lay there and thought that I should get up and go to the living-room window to see who it was that was leaving the building. But it was probably too late, and the idea of moving on the off-chance seemed like too much to ask anyway.

I tried to think back over the night before, but even thinking about the noisy dance-music pulse of Jamie’s house party started my ears ringing, and the accompanying blur of faces and drinks forced me to hold my breath to stop myself from being sick. I gingerly stretched out my hand to clutch a glass of water, filmy from having sat on my cabinet for several days, and took a couple of sips.

I convinced myself I was feeling a bit better, until I began to feel intolerably hot under my duvet. I threw it back and was surprised to see myself naked. It had been a while since I’d woken up in that state, I thought to myself, with the first hint of optimism poking through the self-recriminating fug.

Then a voice in my head started whispering that, considering how pissed I was, things might not have gone as well as one would have liked, and it might not be the time to be pleased with myself.

Immediately feeling cold again, I pulled the duvet back, and tried to wind back to a time on Saturday when I could remember more than clinking Stella bottles, glasses of wine, glimpses of my acting out songs through dance, and rowdy boys cheering over something going on in another room.

Memories from the night kept washing over me, some in clear bright high-definition clips, some shaky and interrupted by bad reception, and others just vague impressions as if heard on a tinny radio in the next room.

The party had come at the end of a rough day. By the time I got there a quickly downed beer or two had seemed a good idea, and then I’d switched onto wine. Well, mainly onto wine, but I’d taken whatever other booze I was given too, if a memory as shaky as my hands were to be trusted. The switch to wine might have been a mistake, as I was knocking it back at the same pace as the lager, filling awkward gaps in conversations with friendly strangers with prolonged sips, and escaping when I could find nothing else to say by running for refills.

I lay there in bed cold and sweating getting nowhere with the answers to the current big questions I was trying to answer, like what I’d done at the party, who’d come home with me, and how I was going to find the strength and courage to move again so I could go for a much-needed piss.

Summoning the strength to move, my bare foot landed on something rubbery and slimy, and my heel was tickled by a jagged piece of foil wrapper. Well, I guess that clarified one thing, I thought, and I could console myself I’d been what they like to call ‘safe’.

My entire face flushed red as a brief suddenly remembered clip of the night played in my head — of my fumbling with latex in the dark under the covers, shifting away from a grabbing foreign hand and saying, ‘It’s OK, I’ve got it,’ before yelping and complaining that a couple of hairs must have got caught.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to work up the enthusiasm to move further, I then remembered Weird Boring Chris, looking mottled and sweaty after taking to the floor in the living room on his own and trying to get the dancing started. He’d failed to get anyone to join him despite his grabs for the hands of any of Jamie’s friends — pretty much all twenty years his junior — as they strayed anywhere into his vicinity. He didn’t seem to care too much when they escaped, sniggering, while he swayed and gyrated ecstatically but erratically, lost in the music to the point where he couldn’t even seem to locate its basic rhythm.

‘Dan! Loosen up, it’s a party!’ he’d shouted to me. ‘I can’t believe these young people just standing around. We’ve got to show them how it’s done!’

Disturbed as I was that Chris was putting me in the same age demographic as him, rather than the bright young things around us, I had to admire his transformation from the vague yet obsessive office oddball into another type of oddball altogether. After I’d declined the opportunity to join his interpretation of the latest routine from Lady GaGa, he’d admitted defeat and rested a damp clammy arm around my shoulder and sighed contentedly.

‘Isn’t it great to be away from the artificial strictures of the office?’ he’d asked, and I could see no reason to entirely disagree. ‘And from home too. Too many restrictions, eh?’ I’d told him how I lived by myself and how restrictions didn’t apply so much when you were able to wander about in your pants eating spaghetti hoops from a can.

‘No women, you see?’ he’d said, after rolling around the phrase ‘wander about in your pants’ in his mouth a couple of times. ‘Women are always trying to define who you are, and what you can do. It’s the same for society. It’s too hard to express everything you can be.’

I’d noticed that the friendly arm around my shoulder didn’t seem to be going anywhere so I’d suggested we got drinks. A whole new knot tied in my stomach as I remembered a look in Chris’s eye as we toasted men being men and not needing women and then chinked mugs containing healthy measures of whisky — hold on, my central nervous system protested, whisky too?

It had been a look I’d last seen when he spotted a solitary eclair in a box full of pastry treats brought in for an office birthday that made it obvious what he wanted.

On the edge of the bed I feverishly searched my memory, trying to work out what had happened in our conversation after I’d begun to feel a bit like a cream-filled bun. My hand tingled as I remembered a moment from later, in bed at my place. I remembered my fingers tracing the curve of a breast before sliding down over cool smooth skin… No, unless Chris was wearing some sort of unforgiving corsetry to keep a pair of pert soft moobs really under wraps in the office, and unless the tufts of chest hair that stuck out of his collar whenever he took his tie off had been waxed for the occasion, I could be pretty sure I hadn’t discovered something new about myself with a forty-six-year-old married father of two. My mother would be disappointed her latency theories were as yet unproven, and I was no nearer to identifying my escaped bedmate.

And I really needed to get up for that wee.

I finally stumbled across my bedroom and into the bathroom. Exhausted by the effort, I couldn’t even piss standing up, so I sat down on the toilet, and leaned my head against the cool of the sink next to it. I decided I’d maybe stay there for a bit while I got some strength back for the return trip, and another memory floated up from the wreckage of my brain.

‘Why do men have to be such bastards?’ I had asked, slumped on a shabbily upholstered sofa between Delphine and Janice, the three of us staring despondently at the party going on around us. It had gone up through a couple of gears by this point, whereas I think we were on a bit of a slump.

‘They think they can just show up when zey want something, and, boof, they just disappear again.’

‘They poison your drinks and play upon your allergies.’

‘They tell you things they know destroy your confidence, then act all lovey-dovey as if nothing has happened.’

‘They grass you up to the law, then don’t even call to see if you’ve got bail.’

‘They get so angry when you just ask them a simple question.’

‘Zey think nothing of cheating on their partners with you, but then blame you when they feel bad about it.’

‘They wait ten years and then make a pass at you when you’re at your most vulnerable because of a relationship going through a sticky patch.’

‘They think they can get away with it, but Karma catches up with them,’ Janice had said, looking angrily into her Bacardi.

‘But that’s bollocks!’ I remembered exploding. ‘They do get away with it. And you let them! You just keep going back for more. You put up with the odd infidelity here, the odd lie there. Men that are TERRIBLE for you, but you stick with them, you forgive them. You say you won’t put up with anything more, but then you DO!’

‘It’s not that easy, Danny,’ Delphine had said.

‘Yeah, well, it should be.’

‘And women are no angels, remember. I am not so easy to put up with,’ she’d added.

‘And men let themselves be so manipulated, and are so gullible. Thinking with their willies,’ Janice had chimed in.

‘Well, I just think you’re two really great girls, and I hate that you seem so unhappy all the time… You deserve so much better!’

God, that would have been the gin from earlier talking — pre-party sharpeners in the pub. Another good idea at the time. It always gets me a bit tired and emotional. I think I must have got a bit teary, because I seem to remember some sort of group hug, and then Chris had arrived and proposed a round of Jägermeister shots — don’t, I know… — before insisting that we go off for some synchronised dad dancing to an old track by Lily Allen.

In my bathroom I stood up again, then paused with my hand gripping the basin while the room revolved a few times before coming back into focus. I slunk back across the hallway to bed.

Then I remembered sitting on the landing at Jamie’s flat, having a heart-to-heart with Janice. Whether it was before or after my outburst on sisters standing up for their love rights, I’m not entirely sure, but I do remember it being confusing again. She was asking about how my black eye really happened and I told her again I’d tripped on the street. She said with this heartbreaking small reflective smile that when she’d tripped on the street last she’d decided to take Tae Kwon Do lessons so it wouldn’t happen again. We chatted for a while about her ex, who had been controlling, and unreliable and demanding, and had only got the idea they were over with the help of a court order. But he had been kind at first, when she had needed him to be, and loving. He’d helped her out of a home situation that had been pretty fraught.

Whenever I heard about somebody’s life that had been more eventful, and more difficult than mine had ever been, I struggled to know what to say, because my only comparisons came from the TV show
Brothers & Sisters
. People didn’t always appreciate hearing that Rob Lowe and her from
Ally McBeal
experienced similar difficulties with a troubled extended family. The other thing about learning a bit more about why people did things was it made it that bit harder to judge them for their actions. Which was obviously massively inconvenient. Behind Janice’s ever so slightly manic grin and doll-like eyes was a sensitive, kind, vulnerable soul.

Just one that would have you fired, at best, if you accidentally happened to wrong her by taking advantage when she was drunk, say.

God, I thought, I hope I don’t need to be thinking about updating my CV just now.

Another flashback and I’m in the car park outside my block leaning someone up against the side of someone else’s car, my hand up their top, their hand edging down inside my belt. There’s giggling and kissing. Then I get myself loose from the tangle of clothes and limbs and, with my hands on my knees, gesture that I’m going to need
a minute, as I’m feeling a little nauseous. I remembered the feel of the freezing night air in my lungs and battling against throwing up over what looked like an expensive pair of shoes, but it passed, and I suggested that maybe we should go upstairs.

But who I was saying it to remained elusive.

At some point Alex, Delphine’s putative boyfriend, had arrived at the party, I remembered. We’d been introduced for about the sixth time in a couple of months, and he again pretended not to remember my name. This must have been quite late on, because I remembered going over the top with my fake friendliness, under the impression that he’d not realise that my disproportionate interest in all elements of his life assurance business and views on the afternoon’s football results was sarcastic. It was like two rutting stags, except they’d decided to try and prove their virility through passive-aggressive mateyness and ironic admiration for the size of each other’s antlers.

I seemed to remember asking for his card, in case I ever had a large amount of money I wanted to put into financial vehicles that would really set me up for life after I was dead. I thought that one won the round for me as he did this little laugh and promised to ‘catch me later’. Next thing I saw he was in a heated discussion with Delphine before he scattered a load of coats on the floor in the search for his black leather jacket, and headed for the door on his own.

Later, I remembered, I was talking to some young giggly blonde, a friend of a friend of Jamie’s, about just how great Harry Connick Jr was, and how much more she liked him than that young Michael Bublé. That I don’t remember going off on a rant about Frank Sinatra being the unmatchable original and best led me to believe I must have thought I had a chance with the girl.

Another sign I had reason to believe I was in there was that Delphine had appeared, with a pretty fierce look in her eyes, and wanted to talk to me about something. But I’d just brushed her off so I could continue talking to my young friend about her other favourite classic jazz album from way back when: Robbie Williams’ Swing When You’re Winning.

Oh, God, I hoped it was her that had come back with me. A probably humiliating experience with a youthful friend of a new colleague — who would probably be told all the gory intimate details of what had happened, which would then be disseminated around the office to make me a laughing stock in front of all my colleagues — seemed a much more attractive option than the rest of the field of potential victims.