Don't You Want Me? (21 page)

‘Oh, I’m braced,’ says Louisa with a grin. ‘I am
so
braced.’

Try as I might, I can’t seem to get excited enough about this double date. Frank and Louisa disappeared for an hour and a half yesterday, when he took her to look at his paintings. I sat and watched a sleeping Honey and Alexander, which was initially sweet but subsequently so dull that I joined them and had a quick nap myself. By the time my only two friends in the whole of London – the two people I am closest to – came back, I’d been awake for twenty minutes and was suffering agonies of annoyance. Bloody Frank, ruining my girly afternoon. I scanned their faces for signs of guilt (pointlessly, since, as I know, Frank doesn’t do guilt), as well as for signs of snogging, but I didn’t get much chance for scrutiny because Louisa only stayed another ten minutes and Frank went straight back to the studio. Mary was in the living room – I’d asked her to come because I thought – hoped – that Lou and I might get drunk again, and have another funny, silly afternoon – so I couldn’t even ask the questions I wanted to ask, assuming that I would have done so. Which isn’t a given. Ignorance is bliss, and, failing ignorance, doubt: there’s always the possibility that you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

Louisa scooped Alexander up and wheeled him home, and I was left feeling lonelier and crosser than I’ve felt in quite some time. I sat and drank tea with Mary for a while, and then paid her off, thanked her for her wasted journey,
told her I’d see her the next night – Double Date Night – and went to bed at the same time as Honey. I didn’t hear Frank come home. I’m not sure he did.

So here I am twenty-four hours later, trying – again – to get ready; feeling – again – that my heart isn’t quite in it. Why does one have to
go
on dates, anyway? What’s so wrong with being single, and content, and just sort of pottery? Nothing, I sigh, pencilling in my left eyebrow, nothing at all if you
are
content. But I’m not. I don’t want to live the rest of my life on my own, without sex, lonely again. And so needs must, as Tim the neighbour might say. (His wife came back from Majorca today, and I felt an odd sort of pang as I watched them all pile into their absurd people carrier, no doubt going out for a celebratory meal. Silly, weird Tim, his over-made-up wife, their two slouchy, trainered sons … so neat and dull and naffly 2.4-ish: for one fleeting moment, I’d have swapped places with any of them.)

My eyeshadow’s gone wrong and I look like Joan Collins. I rub the worst of the excess away, and take a good look at myself in the bathroom mirror. Me, or a twenty-three-year-old with no conversation and fabulous tits? No contest. No, really. If I were a man, I’d go for the pert-breasted retard every time. No wonder women like me all end up either having affairs with married men or becoming lesbians. Frankly, there isn’t a wild amount of choice. Speaking of lesbians, I should ring that nice old Barbara. Perhaps I could become that nice old Barbara’s faithful companion.

I am beginning to depress myself, and I haven’t even got dressed yet. Lou rang this afternoon, quizzing me
about the kind of ‘look’ Frank liked best – how should I know? The female look, I told her. The look that has a vagina. Don’t bother getting dressed, I said. She giggled stupidly and said she was off shopping. Meanwhile, I hate all my dresses and the kind of look Yungsta likes is not, I imagine, a look I am capable of mustering up: I’m twenty years too old. Why am I about to spend the evening with a man whose vocabulary flummoxes me and whose hand gestures make me want to laugh?

We’re on to lipliner now, and I smile as I remember Frank’s pitch-perfect imitation of Yungsta’s patois cadences. I smile, and I don’t know what comes over me, but suddenly I wake up. Get over it, I tell myself. Get over whatever’s bugging you. You don’t have to take a vow of chastity, or become a lesbian, or have an affair with a married man. You’ve been asked out on a date by someone nice-looking, and single, who is clearly interested in you. Now pay attention. Sort your face out, fish out your sexiest dress, and
be grateful
, you whining cow. Go get ’em. Be fabulous. Look like you’re a dirty ride.

I can hear the front door slam and then Frank, not seen since lunch time yesterday, chatting easily to Mary and Honey downstairs. I hear him come up and call my name. ‘I’m in the bathroom,’ I shout back, ‘getting ready.’

‘Let’s go together,’ he says through the door. ‘Louisa and, er, the DJ are making their own way from Regent’s Park Road.’

‘OK. I’ll be out in ten minutes.’

‘No hurry – I have to have a shower and shave and so on. Find some clothes. I’ll see you downstairs. Call a cab, though, would you, if you finish first?’

‘OK.’ Why is he making such an effort? Usually, when
Frank goes on dates, he brushes his teeth and maybe –
maybe
– changes his T-shirt. He is going to unusual trouble for Louisa, I realize. So what? So bloody what? I am making an effort for Adrian. And, I realize in a flash of lucidity, I am going to pull out all the stops.

I’m really glad I know how to do make-up properly. I cleanse my face free of modest, wholesome, gild-the-lily Take 1, and spread all my brushes out in readiness for Take 2, the paint-myself-a-new-face option. I fish around in my make-up bag: here we go, I tell myself, my stomach contracting.
Here we go
. Concealer. Light-reflecting foundation, custom-mixed. Touche Eclat. Minutely subtle shading, around the nose and under the chin. (Oh, yes, I can be
very
professional: my Parisian adolescence didn’t go to waste.) Cheeks: with my two blushers, I can give myself cheekbones like paperknives, and I do. New eyebrows, with the help of tweezers, some brown powder and a hard pencil: straight and demure, very vampy. Eyes like a cat’s: three shadows, which change the shape of my eyes completely and turn them into long, wide almonds.

Eyelash curlers. Three coats of mascara, and an eyelash comb. And Vaseline, on my lips, because I don’t actually want to look like a prostitute. I take a step back and admire my handiwork: fabulous. Five stars. Someone else’s confident, pouty, sultry face stares back at me: I don’t know her, but she’s pretty lovely, and she winks at me. My work is done. I shove my brushes back into the make-up case and turn off the light.

‘Blimey,’ says Frank, looking me up and down rather solemnly. ‘You scrub up well.’

‘Thought I’d make an effort,’ I reply breezily, as though
I didn’t already have face-ache from my two tons of slap. ‘You know, for my date. For Adrian. Sexy Adrian of sexiness. Sexy Adrian of total ride-worthiness. Just as you have, I see. How sweet. New shirt?’

‘Yeah,’ Frank shrugs. His duck-egg-blue shirt works very well with his grey eyes. ‘But it’s hardly the same thing. I’ve never seen you with proper make-up on. Your sexy make-up of sexiness.’ He is grinning, but also sort of gawping,
boggling
, immediately making me feel that I’ve overdone it by a mile, which I expect I have. ‘New dress?’

‘This?’ I shrug back. ‘Pah! No, it’s ancient.’ I am wearing – and already feeling slightly uncomfortable in – a heavily corseted black number, purchased a couple of years ago in a moment of madness. (Mary had to come and lace me in earlier, making me feel like Scarlett O’Hara.) Still, as pulling dresses go, this one is fairly impressive: up go the bosoms, in goes the waist, out sticks the bottom. It’s got arms, so I don’t have to expose my thirty-eight-year-old’s crêpiness, and it’s got a longish, straight skirt, so ditto re thighs. It’s pretty sexy, the dress, but it does make me feel slightly on display. I mean, all that flesh: too much information, really. Too much information, too soon.

‘And you’ve grown, I see,’ says Frank, still staring, looking down at my fuck-me footwear, a narrow, black suede pair of pointy boots with killer stiletto heels. These hurt like crazy, and will prove to be a fatal mistake if we have to walk anywhere, or – God forbid – dance. I really, really hope my DJ date doesn’t take us dancing. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might until now, stupidly.

Frank looks at my knees, then his watch. ‘Nice pins. Did you call the cab?’

‘Yes, he’ll be ten minutes.’

Frank is pacing around the living room like a child.

‘Calm down, Frank, we won’t be late.’

Frank smiles briskly, and carries on pacing. I’ve never seen him so filled with anticipation for a date before, especially considering he saw Louisa only yesterday. Only this morning, perhaps, if he really didn’t come home, the filthy, disgusting pig-stopout. With this elaborate whale-boned corsetry, it would be agony to sigh, so I don’t. I put my pink velvet coat on instead – my favourite coat, this, with its wide belt and no buttons.

Twenty slightly awkward minutes in the taxi later – he preoccupied, me longing to ask him about Louisa but thinking the better of it just in case I didn’t like his answers – we pull up outside Melon, which is heaving with young trendies with eccentric facial hair (boys) and facial piercings (girls) and stupid low-slung trousers (both).

‘I feel like I’ve come to collect my daughter from the school disco,’ I whine. This all suddenly strikes me as a very bad idea. What am I doing here, and dressed like this?

‘I feel like you’ve wrapped me up, stuck a ribbon around me and handed me to your mate,’ says Frank – his first complete sentence in twenty minutes – but I ignore him.

‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to collect Honey from Year 5. Honestly, Frank – I feel ancient.’

‘If this were the school disco, you’d be the mum all the boys fancied,’ Frank says kindly, ‘so don’t worry about it. Come on,’ he says, giving me the nicest smile of the evening so far and taking me by the hand. ‘Let’s go and find them.’

We squeeze and weave our way through a packed crowd of people standing shoulder to shoulder and shouting through their goatees. The music is very loud; the décor
industrial: concrete, lots of grey paint, exposed ducts. (Funny how this look never goes away: I remember being in places like it fifteen years ago. We thought it was
really modern
even then.) Beyond the hall-like bar area, though, the space opens out into a sitting area of sorts: an angular, spiky-looking row of concrete tables, hard-seeming chairs and functional, brown banquettes – not quite the comfortable den one would have wished for, but better than nothing. Adrian and Louisa are sitting down, facing a small rectangular table, drinking cocktails out of Duralex glasses. We see them first; Frank’s warm, dry hand tightens imperceptibly around mine, and then he lets go.

‘Wow,’ Adrian whistles loudly, standing up. ‘You look amazing.’ He says the words in a perfectly ordinary Home Counties voice and then corrects himself, coughing. ‘Fly,’ he says, puzzlingly.

I kiss him hello demurely. I think I’ll keep my coat on for a while. A pin from my chignon is digging into my head.

‘Hello,’ says Frank to Louisa in a low voice. She is looking extraordinarily pretty, like a flower, or an angel, all fresh-faced, blonde wholesomeness, but with a killer body. One look at her, and I immediately feel overegged. Her low-slung, embroidered Maharishi trousers show off that enviably flat and bronzed stomach; a slinky little vest top shows off her tight, pert chest and muscular upper arms. Her eye make-up is a perfect example of the ‘I’ve spent three hours putting on make-up that looks like I’m wearing none’ look so popular, I’ve noticed, with men, who claim such women are natural beauties until they accidentally catch them bare-faced and vomit with shock. But Louisa
is
a natural beauty. Even bare-faced, she looks like a prettier,
softer, fresher version of Madonna. With the make-up, she looks sensational.

I feel extremely overdressed and not natural at all. Even my coat looks like it’s about to go to the opera.

‘You look
great
,’ says Frank to Louisa.

We all sound like teenagers going on their first date.

‘You don’t look too bad yourself,’ says Lou from beneath her eyelashes. ‘Come and sit down.’

Adrian pats the banquette beside him, so I sit down too. Alas, I am not able to return his sartorial compliment: my date looks like an arse, as Frank might put it. He is certainly handsome under all the clobber, but seems intent on ruining his looks with a series of grotesque accessories. The first problem is facial hair: in honour of our date, Adrian has trimmed his goatee so that it is perfectly minuscule, a tiny tuft of black hair sprouting like a growth or squashed bug from his otherwise more than presentable chin. He is also wearing huge coloured plastic shades, à la Bono, in pale pink, which makes his green eyes look like rabbits’. Plus, if there’s one person I physically can’t abide, it’s Bono (Bono!
Bono!
What’s wrong with these people?), so the look doesn’t do much for me – it dimly reminds me of insects with huge boogly eyes, in fact. Further down, we have gold jewellery around the neck and wrists, and
a beige track suit
, apparently two sizes too big, though curiously tight around the crotch, I notice, glancing down. Still, he looks comfy, at least, and the tracky’s worn with nothing underneath so that I can see his well-developed, gym-friendly chest, which is mildly sexy. It is a sign of my advanced years, though, that instead of focusing on the perfect pecs, I imagine him, yearningly, in beaten-up jeans and a cashmere jumper. He’d look so much nicer. Why is
he wearing so many rings on his fingers? Does he have bells on his toes, too? And has he never watched Ali G, for heaven’s sake?

‘Whatchou drinkin’?’ Adrian asks, his thigh pressing against mine.

‘Champagne cocktail, please.’

‘Not in here, mate,’ he laughs. Mate! Men who call you ‘mate’ ought to be shot.

‘Glass of champagne, then,
pal
.’

‘Me too,’ says Louisa. ‘Hi, Stella. You look fantastic.’

‘Thanks. You too.’

‘Hoegaarten for me,’ says Frank. He is looking at me most curiously, almost as though he wanted to laugh.

People walk up and down past our table: it’s a little like being at the zoo. They are extraordinary creatures. I see why Adrian chose this venue, though: he blends in perfectly. He occasionally detaches himself from the frankly lacklustre conversation – Frank oddly tense, until the drink kicks in, Louisa too gabby, Yungsta too patois, me too bemused by him – to high-five somebody, or throw those weird hand shapes at somebody else, or mumble nonsensical phrases. Frank seems to know a couple of people here and there too. Louisa and I sit admiringly, glad to have been allowed out, imagining a world not dominated by being by oneself.