"Okay, but remember vampires can’t go outside in
daylight."
"Ha, ha, ha. I’m serious, Dan. She has it in for you
because we have what she doesn’t. If we can get her a man, if we can make it so
that she’s happy with her own life, then she won’t be half as interested in
ours."
Dan closes his book and fixes me with his if-you-say-so
look.
"Babe," he finally says. "How on earth do you
intend to find a man for her? You’ll never find one good enough. It took her
six months to choose her living room curtains. How is she ever going to choose
a boyfriend?"
"She was happy once," I say. "With my father.
She could be happy again."
"The only male she’ll ever have room for in her life is
that damn dog."
"Okay, so I’ll find someone who likes animals. Someone
who’ll understand that the dog comes first."
"I don’t think Saints-R-Us is open on a Sunday,"
Dan quips.
"Or maybe Baby is just a replacement for a man, and if
we find her a real person to love, the dog won’t be so important."
Dan has a wide range of looks reserved for every occasion
and this time I get his you-
are
-insane gaze. He doesn’t need to say
anything. He thinks I’m crazy.
"This is a good idea," I tell him. "I’m going
to look into this."
"Look into going to sleep." He wraps his arms
around me and leans over to switch the TV off.
I snuggle down next to Dan but I can’t get the idea out of
my mind. My brain whirrs long after Dan is snoring quietly next to me. I know
I’ve hit on a good idea: I just don’t know where to start.
CHAPTER 3
The next morning I get up long
before Dan, firing up my laptop and trying to make some notes.
My mum is forty-nine-years old—fifty in six months' time. I
will be hung, drawn and quartered if I mention that in public. Not that I don't
understand. I'm far too close to being thirty for my liking either.
What kind of a man would my mum like? I know her celebrities
of choice include Kevin Costner, Bryan Adams and Martin Clunes. (No, really.
Martin Clunes.) How can I translate that into real life? I decide that the
connecting factor is height and fair-coloured hair. But perhaps looks aren’t
all that important in the right guy. Oh well, it’s a start if nothing else. So
far I’m looking for a tall, fifty-ish blond guy. With blue eyes. I add that to
the list.
After being married once, and with so many years off the
dating scene, this can’t be just any man. This has to be the
perfect
man. And I’m going to find him for her.
I haven’t even begun thinking about where I’m going to
unearth such a man. I’m a twenty-nine year old woman, I don’t know a lot of
fifty-something men. In fact, I don’t know any at all.
"Whatcha doing?" Dan asks, making me jump.
I spin around in my chair. "Trying to figure out what
kind of a guy my mum would fall for."
Dan almost laughs, but he stops himself just in time when he
sees the serious look on my face.
"Are you really doing this?"
"Uh huh," I nod.
"Well, good luck with that."
"Jeez, Dan, some help wouldn't go amiss."
"You're never going to find a man good enough for
her."
I glare at him.
He rolls his eyes and sits down next to me anyway.
"What have you got so far?"
"Kevin Costner’s long-lost twin brother?"
Dan laughs. "Okay, so," he reads the screen over
my shoulder. "Elevated, pale, blue-eyed OAP."
"Dan!" I slap at his thigh. "I need ideas,
not a stand up comedian. And fifty is hardly old age pensioner status."
"Sorry. Right. Okay then. He has to like animals."
I type that in. "And he has to have animals. Otherwise
he won’t understand why my mother treats her dog better than she treats her
children."
"Good," Dan says. "And walking. She’s always
walking, right?"
I nod. "Oh, and swimming. She likes swimming. And he
has to drive because she doesn’t, and unless you want to be taking her shopping
for the rest of your life, he needs a car."
"A good car," Dan adds. "Jeez, would I like
to get out of that Friday Night Torture." He’s referring to what we call
our Friday nights—not to my mother’s knowledge of course—when every Friday
night after work, Dan and I drive my mother down to Sainsbury’s for her weekly
grocery shopping. While that, in itself, isn’t such a problem, the fact that my
mum is the most irritating person to shop with in the world has turned Friday
nights into absolute torture. Dan and I will whiz round with a basket each and
load our stuff into the back seat of the car because we know that it won't fit
into the boot by the time Mum has finished. We rush back in, only to find Mum
still in the first aisle, trying to decide between raspberry or vanilla scented
air freshener.
Every week we hope she’ll be a bit quicker, and every week
she seems to take longer. God forbid when they have offers on. Dan and I could
go out for a three-course meal and return only to find her halfway through her
shopping list. A shopping list that she never reads and usually forgets half
the things on it anyway. This always ends up resulting in an inevitable eight
o'clock on a Saturday morning call that goes something along the lines of,
"Mackenzie, can you be a dear and pop up to Tesco for me, I forgot to get
sweetcorn." I have no idea what she does with all the food she buys. Every
Friday she gets enough to feed a small army, and yet there's only her and Baby
- the canine waste disposal machine.
"He has to watch soaps," Dan says. "Or at
least, not mind her watching them."
"Like she’d give up
Eastenders
for anybody."
I type frantically. My list of Ideal Man Attributes is
growing fast.
"He has to have the patience of a saint," I say to
Dan. "She’s the most indecisive woman I’ve ever known, so he has to be
patient and good at decision making."
Dan looks over at me seriously. "Do you really think
this is going to work?"
I shrug and stop typing. "It’s worth a shot, right?
It’s as good a chance as any, and yeah, I think it might work."
"So what you’re saying is that we’re just trying to palm
her off on to some poor, unsuspecting man so we can get a bit of peace and
quiet."
I smile at him. "I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but
that is the general idea, yeah."
He laughs. "Okay, what else do we need?"
"Likes gardening? She’s always complaining about her
garden." I add that to the list.
"And shopping."
"Oh, can we get someone who’s good at DIY? He can put
up her bloody bookshelves for her."
Last month Dan had been roped in, or more precisely,
lassoed, to put up bookshelves in my mother’s newly spare bedroom. She needed
somewhere to put her Catherine Cookson collection. And he’d tried, bless him.
He'd been there for two hours, working harder than he'd had to work on our
entire house. When the shelves were finally up, although they looked perfect to
me, apparently they weren't.
Mum came into the room and demanded he take them down again
while lamenting that, "If you can’t do a job properly, you shouldn't do it
at all."
I add DIY to the list.
"I need more to go on," I tell Dan.
"You’re never going to find a guy good enough, no
matter how much you have to go on."
"Have a little faith, Daniel. All she needs is a little
romance in her life."
"Hmm."
I know he isn’t convinced, but I am. This is great. This is
doable. I don’t actually expect to adhere to everything on the list. It’s just
a rough guide. Although some things on there are essential, like being able to
drive—because Dan and I are not going to be ferrying her around for the rest of
our lives.
"So, now that we know what we’re looking for," Dan
says. "Where do we look for him?"
"Maybe I could start by asking around in work, maybe
with friends and stuff. If you ask all your mates too, we’re bound to find
someone with a father or an uncle or a friend who’s single and looking."
"Okay, but I’m going to make sure my friends know
exactly what she’s like. I can’t dupe my buddies' fathers into dating a psycho.
I couldn’t live with that on my conscience."
"Don’t be so melodramatic."
CHAPTER 4
I'm more excited to go into work on
Monday morning than I have been in a long time. I want to begin grilling my
co-workers about their fathers, uncles, cousins, friends and otherwise.
Work itself is not a very exciting prospect. I'm a nail
technician at Beehives and Bikini Lines, a local hair and beauty salon. This is
a job that's only mine because my best friend, Jenni, is the manager and head
hairdresser.
It isn't particularly exciting or even that interesting, but
I never could work out exactly what I wanted to do with my life, and now I'm
too old to change my career and I wouldn't know what else to do anyway.
I wait until lunchtime when Jenni, Liz, and I are all in the
kitchen.
"I have a question for you guys, and you have to
promise not to laugh at me," I say.
They both look like they’re about to laugh even before I’ve
said anything. Funny how that sentence has that effect on people.
"I’m trying to set my mother up on a date, and I was
wondering if you girls know of any fifty-ish, single men who’d be
interested?"
"I thought your mum was never dating again because all
men are from Pluto."
Oh yeah. I remember that particular rant well. Mum had come
in to have her hair done (why, why, why couldn’t she choose another salon?
Any
salon, apart from the one I work in. Was it really too much to ask?) And the
innocent joke from Liz about how men would be after her with her new haircut
had resulted in a quarter hour rant about how all men should be shot, and
really, who was buying that men came from Mars and women came from Venus
rubbish? Women were from Earth, and clearly men were from a completely
different galaxy where there was no such thing as women to teach them how to
behave.
And I’d had to show my face again the next morning.
"Well," I say. "It’s a bit like a blind date.
The thing is, Mum won’t date without my encouragement. If I tell her to find a
date then she’ll moan and complain about not knowing where to look and tell me
she's too old, but if I can tell her that her date is waiting at such and such
a place at a certain time, I’m almost positive that she won’t stand him
up."
"Almost positive?" Says Jenni.
"Very positive," I correct.
Jenni shrugs. "Good luck to you, Mac."
"How about William, you know, the window cleaner?"
Liz asks. "He seems lonely. He's always hanging about in here."
"That's because he's a cross-dresser," Jenni says.
"A cross-whatter?"
"Dresser. He likes to wear women's clothes when he's at
home," she says.
"How do you know?"
"One of my clients knocked on his door one night and he
answered in a blonde wig, lipgloss and black stilettos. Apparently he goes by
Wilhelmina on the weekends."
"That's a great idea, Mac," Liz says. "He and
your mum could have loads of fun talking clothes and makeup."
"No," I say. "Absolutely not. I cannot have a
stepdad who looks better in a dress than I do."
Jenni laughs.
"No wonder our windows are so shiny, he probably spends
half the day admiring his bloody reflection in them!"
"Getting away from cross-dressing window
cleaners," Jenni says. "I could always ask my dad. He hasn’t found
anyone serious since he and my mum divorced six years ago."
"That’s great," I say. "That’s exactly what
she needs."
Jenni calls me after work that night.
"My dad says yes," she tells me.
Yippie! I have secured a date. But what now? I haven’t even
told my mum that she is soon going to have a long list of dates to go on. I
can’t just send her to meet any old Tom, Dick or Jeffrey that crosses my path.
If this guy isn’t perfect, then the whole exercise will be pointless. And the
first guy is the most important. If the first man she meets is a bust, then
she’ll have no faith in my matchmaking skills and will strap on her parachute
and bail out. Even if things don’t work out with the first guy, then she still
has to believe I’m capable of finding a decent man in an ocean of mediocrity.
This one has to be good, and there is only one way to ensure that. I have to
meet him first. If he isn’t what I’m looking for, if he will never in a million
years get on with my mum, or if he happens to be cruel to animals or small
children, he isn’t getting past the bouncer at Mum's front door—me.
"Mac?"
"Yeah, I’m here. Just thinking, sorry. Um… Right. I’d
like to meet your father, if I could?"
"I thought you wanted a date for your mum?"
"I do. It’s just that it’s, well…" I struggle for
a nice way to put it. "It’s a very specific type of man that she needs to
meet, and at this time in her life I don’t think there’s any point in just
blind dating every guy I can find. He has to be compatible, otherwise she’ll get
disheartened."
"So you’re screening men?"
"Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but yes,
in a way I suppose I am."
"That’s actually a pretty good idea."
"You think?"
"Sure. Who knows your mother better than you do,
right?"
"That’s what I was thinking. Okay, so if she was in her
twenties she’d probably have fun dating around, but she’s nearly fifty, and I
think she’s pretty much given up on ever finding another man. I have to show
her that there are men her age out there who are as lonely as she is."
"Okay, so where do you want to meet my father?"
"Starbucks?" I suggest off the top of my
head.
"Fine by me, and I’m sure he won’t mind. Time?
Date?"