Mackenzie.
And now, I hope to never hear from you again, you twerp. My,
how I wish I’d added that sentence on to the end of the email. Now that would
have really upset him.
CHAPTER 28
You know that good feeling I had
about guy number seven? It is perfectly correct. After the week’s exploits,
Saturday night is my last scheduled date for the time being, and with the guy I
was most hopeful about. And after the jerks of the last seven days, I could use
an easy night. And that is exactly what I get with Alan.
He presents me with a bunch of yellow roses when I arrive at
the restaurant. The first guy ever to bring
me
flowers. I’m touched, and
tempted to give him Eleanor’s number and go home for the night right there and
then. But I decide that I had better go through with it as scheduled.
"Thank you," I say. "They’re beautiful."
"You’re welcome. Thank you for meeting me."
I briefly check him over. No Wellington boots. Sober. No
porn DVDs stuffed inside his jacket. No obvious signs that he’s about to ask
for a blowjob. Ding ding ding, I think we have winner.
"I’m Alan," he says, shaking my hand.
"Mackenzie," I introduce myself for the millionth
time. I think that maybe I should just wear a name tag that says:
"
Mackenzie.
Twenty-Nine.
Nail Technician.
Now tell me about you
."
At least it would cut out all the mindless small talk. And I
feel like I’ve been doing these dates way too often to enjoy them anymore.
As if he is reading my mind, Alan smiles at me and asks,
"Have you had much success with the website?"
I shake my head. "I’ve had quite a few dates, but none
successful."
"So, how did you come to be tasked with finding love
for your mother?"
I think I should add, "
My mother is
an interfering battle-axe
lonely
" to that name
tag. "She’s lonely," I tell him. "I just moved out, and I think
it would be nice for her to have some male company. She hasn’t dated for a very
long while, so what better time to start."
"Exactly."
"How did you come to be on an internet dating
website?" I ask.
"My wife left me. She slept with my cousin, and then
she divorced me. That was three years ago."
"Ouch."
He nods.
Seriously, what is it about wives and affairs these days?
This is the second man I’ve met—that I know of—whose wife has cheated and then
left. I thought men were the bad guys in a relationship. I thought men were the
ones who were supposed to cheat.
"Sorry to hear that," I say. I smile in what I
hope is a sympathetic way.
He shrugs.
"So," I say brightly, hoping to get off the
depressing subject matter at hand. "You like animals. Four cats and five
dogs is a lot of animals."
"
Five
cats and
four
dogs," he
corrects me. "But yes, I love them. They are my livelihood."
I briefly wonder if he has adopted animals as a replacement
for his wife. Without the sex, obviously. I hope.
But if he has been trying to replace real family with cats
and dogs, then he’s got more in common with my mother than I thought.
"Does your mother like animals?"
"Loves them. She has a little Yorkie that she treats
just like a child."
"Oh yes. Well, they are our babies."
Holy shit, is this guy a match or what? If it wasn’t for the
fact that Dan has the chocolate torte that I love so much on for dessert
tonight, I’d give Alan her number and go home now.
"What kind of dogs do you have?" I ask, suddenly
worried that he’ll say four Great Danes. IE: not a small dog person.
"Two Dachshunds, a Whippet, and a Pomeranian."
Okay then. This guy is in. I can’t believe it’s taken me
this long to find such an obvious instant match. My mum is going to love him.
"He’s great," Mum says, coming in the door.
"I’m seeing him again on Friday."
Even though I had a good feeling about this one, I still
can’t believe what I’m hearing. My mum actually likes a guy. "That’s
fantastic," I say. I hope my voice doesn’t sound too overjoyed. Success at
last! "So what did you do tonight?"
"He took me ice skating. Ice skating at my age! But
I’ve always wanted to do it, and he said ‘great, lets go,’ so we did. It was so
much fun! And then we had a hot chocolate to warm up, and he said that next
time we could do something more refined, like go for dinner in a nice restaurant.
He’s going to book us a table at somewhere fancy for Friday."
"Brilliant," I say. "Absolutely
brilliant."
Wouldn’t it be just fantastic if this was the end? If this
was the guy.
The One Number Two
. I wonder, being my pessimistic self, if
it is really going to be that easy. Not that it has been all that easy at all.
But I see no reason why not. As far as I can see, Alan is super compatible with
my mother. Now, I just have to cross my fingers and hope it works out.
Mum’s second date with Alan, at a fancy Italian restaurant
that I can’t remember the name of goes just as well as the first. This is why I
am completely unprepared for the phone call that comes on Saturday night after
their third date.
"Mackenzie, I have such a bone to pick with you!"
Mum is shrieking very angrily into the phone.
"What? Why?" I ask, holding the handset away from
my ear.
"I’ve just found my date in my living room, doing…
Well, doing something he shouldn’t be doing."
"What was he doing?"
"Masturbating," she whispers.
Ugh. God, no.
"Seriously?"
"Seriously. You know I invited him over for dinner
tonight, well, I went up to the bathroom, and I came down to find him stark
bollock naked in my living room, pulling on his you-know-what."
"No way," I say, wondering whether I should laugh
or cry. "That’s disgusting. And you didn’t tell him to?"
"No, I didn’t tell him to!" She yells. "Why
would I tell him to do that?"
I shrug, but I know she can’t see me on the phone anyway. I
have no idea why I even asked.
"So what did you do?" I ask.
"I screamed. Then I told him I was calling the police
if he didn’t put his clothes back on and leave that instant."
"And?"
"He left. I told him never to call me again. That was
way more Alan than I ever needed to see."
"Yuck."
"Yuck is all you have to say for yourself?"
"Yuck isn’t good enough? Besides, why do I have to say
anything for myself?"
"You found him for me, Mackenzie. You set me up with
him."
"How did I know he’d turn out to be a demented
pervert?"
"You should have known."
"Well, you had two great dates with him, you should
have known too."
"That’s not the point." She knows I’m right. I can
hear it in her voice.
"I’m going now," she says. "I have to recover
from the shock."
"Bye," I say.
Oh well. Another one bites the dust. Bye bye, Alan. Hello
FriendsReunited.
CHAPTER 29
I’m not really sure whether
FriendsReunited is a good idea or not, but it’s not long before I find myself
logging on to the site and looking up classmates from Mum’s year of her comprehensive
school. In fact, I feel a little insane and stalker-ish. I mean, do I really
need to do this? This Neil guy—I have no idea what his surname is, and didn’t
like to ask—is in no way, shape or form still going to be unmarried and
available. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I suppose, on Dan’s logic,
finding out what it was like to date my mother, but do I really need to know?
I’m trying to assess where I’ve been going wrong with the
dating thing. Obviously, it’s not working out. All men I think are suitable,
according to my mother, are obviously not. In fact, they’re obviously very
highly unsuitable. Why is it so difficult to find a man that she might be happy
with? I don’t even want instant gratification. I just want to find a guy that
there is even a slight possibility she might, one day in the distant future,
want to settle down with. Want to grow old with. Hmm. Maybe I do need Neil
after all.
Oh, there he is! I spot his name on the site. Well, I spot a
man called Neil listed for the year my mum graduated, so I assume it’s him.
There are no other Neils. I suppose the only way to confirm it is to email him.
Or to pump Mum for information, and while she doesn’t mind me finding men for
her, I don’t think she’d be too impressed at me tracking down old boyfriends.
Even though the only old boyfriend I’ve ever heard of is Neil. I click on his
profile and read through.
Oh. Well, he’s out then. His profile says that he married
someone foreign and is now teaching English to kids in Russia. As you do. Why
couldn’t Mum’s high school boyfriend have been some normal bloke who was
single, unmarried, child-free and living just down the road, having never
really gotten over the girl who broke his heart in high school?
I decide to email this Neil guy anyway. It’s somehow less
scary now that I know he lives in a foreign country, and I don’t have to go out
and meet him somewhere. Again, I have to register for the site and pay another
subscription fee. This had better damn well pay off, or I’m going to be bankrupt
by the end of the year, and my mother is still going to be man-less.
And the hard part of course is figuring out what the hell to
put in an email to Neil. I guess I just have to jump right in there and be
honest. After much editing, changing, and moving words around, I have come up
with this:
Hi Neil,
This may sound like a strange request, but my name is
Mackenzie Atkinson, I am the daughter of Eleanor Atkinson, who as far as I
know, you dated when you were seventeen and in Forest Green Academy. I hope you
remember her, but please ignore this message if you don’t.
I’m sorry to just approach you out of the blue like this,
but I have a question for you. Eleanor got divorced a few years ago and has
been on her own since then. I recently moved out, and she’s been very lonely
lately, so I decided to find her a man. I thought that if she could find
someone to love then maybe she could be happy again. However, it is not going
very well. Obviously I have the wrong taste in men. So I’m emailing you with a
very strange request. I need some insight in to my mother’s dating habits. I
need to know: what was it like to date her? What was it she wanted in a date?
What she wanted in a man? As you were one of her first boyfriends, possibly her
first love, what were her dreams for the future? How did she expect her love
life to turn out?
I know this is strange, and honestly, feel free to ignore
this email as the weird ramblings of some psycho off the internet. I’m just
looking for all the help I can get. I’m not doing a very good job of finding a
decent man here, and any insight I can get in to what my mother wanted before
her love life got all messed up with my father would be extremely helpful.
Thanks for your time,
Mackenzie.
I have absolutely no hope for him ever emailing me back. I
actually do sound like some psycho off the internet. I guess no amount of
editing can change the fact that I am the daughter of a woman he dated thirty
something years ago, emailing him out of the blue to ask for tips on how to
date my own mother. I really am insane. I have lost my ever-loving mind.
I am also extremely surprised to find a response in my inbox
that night.
Hello Mackenzie,
Fancy hearing from you! Of course I remember Eleanor. She
was my first love as well. Was I really hers? Did she say that? How old are you
anyway? When I first read your email, I had a horrible feeling you were writing
to tell me I was your father. Yikes. But obviously not. Great to hear from you
anyway.
My, that is a strange request. Um. I have no idea what to
tell you. It’s been a long time. But Eleanor was always a lot of fun. She
always wanted to try new things, and she was very unpredictable. No date was
ever the same twice. And she loved to talk, but she had quite a short attention
span—she would get bored very easily—and would often get ticked off with me
because I’d still be talking about one thing while she’d moved on to the next.
As for her love life, and what she wanted out of it,
well, she always said that she was searching for a soulmate. For her other
half. She was very romantic about it. I tended to disagree and think it was a
load of old cobblers about there only being one person out there for each of
us. But there you are. That was what she wanted to think. Nowadays I tend to
agree with her. I met my wife here in Russia, and have never been happier. We
have two gorgeous children—two girls, five and seven—and although I miss the UK
very much, I love it here.
Anyway, it has been great to hear from you, and such a
surprise. I didn’t even know that Eleanor had a daughter!
Please give her my regards next time you talk to her.
Tell her to drop me a line sometime, I’d love to hear from her. Is she still as
pretty as she used to be?
Thank you for the email,
Neil.
Wow. Holy cow, the man actually replied. And with help too.
I send him back a quick email, telling him I’ll pass on his regards to Eleanor,
which I won’t, because then she’ll know I’ve been digging up ex-boyfriends, but
Neil doesn’t need to know that. I also thank him for his help and assure him
that he is not my father. Poor guy.
But he has been very helpful. I search his email for things
I can garner to help my next potential date. So, Mum wants a bit of excitement
and unpredictability in her life, does she? And she wanted a soulmate.
The
One
. I wonder if she considered my dad to be
The One
. I think about
it, but I don’t think she did somehow. Oh yes, she loved him for sure, but I
don’t think she ever considered him to be the all being, all ending soulmate.
Her other half. I don’t even know why I think that, but I do. Huh. Who knew my
mum was such an old romantic?