The Cupid Effect (24 page)

‘Try to do some reading?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ceri, do or do not, there is no try.'

‘Yeah, all right, Yoda. I'd better go.'

‘All right, good luck. Call me tomorrow to let me know how it went, bye.'

‘Bye.'

chapter twenty-one

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I'd practically stripped my left thumb of its top layer of nail by the time Craig arrived in my corner of the Senior Common Room.

Craig, who was researching his PhD and teaching in the sociology department, gave me the impression that he'd been waylaid on the road to something bigger and better. I also suspected he'd be studying for his PhD for nigh on for ever for that same reason. He was a man with far too many things on his mind. He'd be talking to you one minute, his dark brown eyes watching intently behind his thin framed glasses, then he'd ‘sit back'. Not physically, mentally. Mentally, he'd take a back seat to the conversation, his mind calculating something of extreme importance.

‘There you are, Ceri,' he said, dropping his regulation paper pile on the table where I sat. ‘I've been halfway round the college looking for you.'

‘And you didn't think to look in here?'

He thought about it for a second, shook his head. ‘No.'

‘I've been here since,' I looked to the large white clock on the wall above the far door, ‘eight-thirty. My office partner had tutorials from 8a.m.'

‘Oh,' Craig said.

‘You didn't try my office either, did you?' I said.

Craig's brown eyes stared at me as he shook his head.

If I wasn't so nervous about my assessment, I would've laughed. As it was, I was so nervous I'd worn a skirt. I'd even flirted with the idea of wearing a blouse, I'd gone as far as taking it out of the wardrobe but I didn't actually put it on. I stuck to my favourite long-sleeved red top that was slightly bobbly, but fit me perfectly.

When Craig had come bursting in, I'd been contemplating another herbal tea. The last six hadn't calmed me down. Maybe lucky number seven would do it. I wasn't used to these kind of nerves. It felt like my first day on the job all over again. Only worse. With this, there was no blagging, she'd had a chance to read what I'd done so far. I had a whole lot of reading stored in my brain cells. But still, I felt I should be doing something more. Something. Anything. I was of the busy generation. I couldn't do one thing at a time. I was often writing and watching television; reading and listening to the radio. It also felt unnatural to be prepared and finished in time; I was usually working right up to the wire. Some of my best work had been done two hours before a deadline.

‘Anyway Craig, what was so important you looked practically nowhere for me?' I asked.

‘Oh, oh your research supervisor called. She's got food-poisoning, she can't make your appointment.'

‘What?' My chest loosened, my stomach tightened. ‘WHAT?' I slapped my hands onto my cheeks. ‘Why didn't she call me?'

‘She called you at home, your flatmate said you'd left; she tried your mobile, it was off; so she called here and I told the secretary that I'd find you.'

I flopped forwards on to the table, all my muscles unclenching. ‘I've been terrified the whole weekend for nothing. Nothing.' I could've enjoyed getting drunk on Saturday night. Not been so brusque with Mel yesterday.

‘At least you've done the work,' Craig offered.

I met his philosophical gaze with one as hard as flint. ‘Don't get all positive on me Craig, I'm not in the right frame of mind. My nerves are shot. I've been dreaming about this meeting. It's so important.' I got up, went to the white jug kettle on the kitchenette sideboard, flicked it on. I raised a cup to Craig, he shook his head.

‘It's like getting all dressed up but with nowhere to go.' I folded my arms, leant back against the counter top, lightly butting my bum against it. I pointed at my dark denim skirt. ‘Literally.'

Craig checked his watch, sat down. He obviously had time to spend with me. ‘What's your research about anyway? I know you said before that you're not doing a PhD, you're just doing research but I never got around to asking what it's about.'

He hadn't ‘sat back' yet – this was a good sign, I still had someone to talk to. To unload on. And after the way I'd worked myself up into a frenzy, there was rather a lot that wanted to be unloaded. Poor Jake and Ed had been tiptoeing around me all Monday night – even offering me herbal tea and cheesecake had been tantamount to offering me an ‘outside' (i.e., calling Angel a big girl's blouse, and asking me to step outside for a fight to the death). Neither of them, rather cleverly, said, ‘You've got nothing to worry about.' I would've battered them if they did.

Craig was actively listening right then. He probably realised, though, I'd be unloading whether he was listening or taking a jaunt through his mind.

I poured hot water onto the tea bag. The scent of peppermint wafted up in the steam leaving the cup. ‘I'm writing a paper on subliminal advertising,' I explained. It was, of course, more than that. More than just a case of ‘subliminal advertising'. It was more to do with perception and communication and the way our conscious and subconscious minds worked independently and dependently. How we found out things without being directly told; how we told people things without actually saying them. On the most basic level, it was about how we perceived things without realising we'd perceived them.

Take for instance the case of someone calling you a few minutes after you've thought about them. You think, that's strange, I must be psychic. However, it might not be psychic ability at all. It could actually be that at an earlier date you'd said you hardly went out on Wednesdays. Maybe you'd mentioned that telly was much better on a Wednesday night, or that you preferred going out on a Thursday rather than a Wednesday night. So, that person you're talking to unintentionally, subliminally, has it in their head that Wednesday is the best day to call you. You, without realising it, always think of that person on a Wednesday because you've started on some level to associate them with you not going out on that night of the week. Also, subliminally, you've told them that the best day to call you is a Wednesday. So, when they call, it's not cos you're psychic or have super-enhanced women's intuition, you have subliminally communicated when to call you.

And that was my study. On subliminal perception, on the ways people subliminally advertise things.

This information had a strange effect on Craig. A light bulb seemed to go off in him and he physically sat forwards in the chair. ‘Yeah, course. It's quite obvious if you think about it.'

I frowned, put down the kettle, stirred the tea. ‘What do you mean it's obvious?'

‘Well, that's what you do, isn't it? You subliminally advertise sex.'

The spoon slipped from my fingers. Huh? How had he come to that conclusion? Wasn't I the one who hadn't had sex in over six months, and who had accepted the most exciting my life was going to get was through trying a new hair conditioner? And had Craig actually looked at me? Apart from today, which was a glitch in the otherwise normal wardrobe, I had an asexual way of dressing. I wore combats and jeans. Long-sleeved tops. All right, so I wore big hoop earrings and I occasionally slicked on lipstick, but I in no way advertised sex, subliminally or otherwise. Pamela Anderson had nothing on me breast-wise, but there were hoards of men who would swear on the continued longevity of their penises that the last thing that came to mind when they looked at me was sex.

‘I don't,' I stated with a frown.

‘You do,' Craig replied. ‘You make me want to have sex every time I see you.'

The spoon, which I'd picked up, slipped from my fingers onto the side again. ‘What?'

‘You make me want to have sex every time I see you.'

I stared at him. ‘It's true,' Craig shrugged.

‘Craig, have you seen me? I'm hardly
Baywatch
material. Apart from these babies,' I said, pointing at my chest, ‘I'd probably be turned down for
Readers' Wives
.'

Craig shrugged again. ‘I don't know what it is about you. You don't show flesh, except for that little bit of curved abdomen where your tops never quite reach the top of your trousers. And your bum's not exactly pert, but it's juicy and round. And your breasts, always encased in jersey tops, but . . . I don't know, I really don't. Maybe it's the way your hair's so black and the way it touches the nape of your neck, or the way you smile and show all your teeth . . . to be honest, Ceri, I don't know what it is, but I can guarantee that after I've seen you, I'll have sex with my ex-girlfriend. Most of the time I can hardly bring myself to talk to her, but I've been with her almost every day since you started. We even have a laugh together.'

‘Bollocks.'

‘It's true. I don't know why, but it's true. I mean, before, I hated her. Really hated her. I'd go out of my way to avoid her or anywhere she might be, but I swear to God, since you started working here, I can't keep away from her.'

I picked up the teaspoon, ran it under the tap. I dipped it back into the cup of brown liquid, an oily film had formed and when I withdrew it, clumps of the film stayed on the spoon.

Without thinking, I poured milk into my tea. Stirred. I put the cup to the lips, the strong scent of peppermint stopped me drinking. I looked into the cup, it looked horrible, it would've tasted worse.

‘Anyway Ceri, got to go, but good luck with the research.'

‘Mmm?' I replied, looking up. Craig was halfway out the door with his papers in his arms.

‘See ya,' he called.

‘Oh, yeah, see ya.'

‘Well, it's obvious, isn't it?' Drew said to me on the phone. ‘He fancies you.'

‘No he doesn't,' I said. Drew now knew the conversation with Craig word for word and I'd waited with baited breath for his opinion. He came next in the list of people to consult when I had a dilemma. Jess, with her several trillion degrees came first, she was the smartest person I knew.

Drew, who went under the moniker of ‘my other best friend' only seemed to be contactable via phone nowadays even though we worked in the same city – in fact, I saw him more when I lived in London.

‘Only a man who fancies you notices all that about you,' Drew added.

I sighed. ‘Will you stop. He doesn't fancy me. It was only when I told him about my research that he brought it up. I mean, I'd told him I was single before, he never leapt on that. It was only the subliminal bit that got him to say that. He was obviously speaking as he thought, not flirting.'

‘Oh.'

‘Anyway, it'd be a pretty bad way to flirt with me, wouldn't it, saying he was still knocking off his ex-girlfriend?'

‘True.'

‘And he's not the first person to say it to me. Someone else said the same thing but not in the same way. And
they
certainly didn't fancy me.' That's what had freaked me out about what Craig said, it reminded me of Jess saying that I made men fancy her. I made people do things and that couldn't be right. I had to get a third opinion. Hence the calling of Drew at his management consultancy conference, which I'd never do unless it was a real emergency. Which this was, in a way. ‘Do you want to have sex after you see me?'

Drew thought about it for a few seconds. ‘No. Can't say I do. Sex doesn't even enter my mind.'

Big foamy waves of relief washed over me. I wasn't a freak. I didn't send people scurrying off to satisfy their lusts elsewhere. Then I was completely affronted. The Git. After flirting with me for all those years, after cuddling up to me and having pornographic conversations with me, sex didn't even
enter
his mind. He really was an affection tease, wasn't he? Or, horror of horrors, had I always been so sexually uninteresting to him that he could flirt with me by rote? That thought made me shudder.

‘Tell you something, though, I did always pull with you around,' Drew's voice said thoughtfully.

‘What?'

‘Yeah, thinking about it now, whenever we went clubbing, I'd always pull. Always. It was weird. It never happened when I went out without you.'

‘WHAT?!'

‘It's true, you were like my lucky charm. I couldn't get a girl to look twice at me when I went clubbing without you, but with you, I was like the most popular man on earth.'

‘So how did you pull Tara then?'

‘That was a fluke. And she didn't go for me for my looks, it was my personality that attracted her.'

‘I didn't realise just how bad her taste was.'

‘Funny. Anyway, are you sure this guy wasn't coming on to you?' Drew asked.

‘No. I mean, yes, I'm sure he wasn't coming on to me. At least I think he wasn't.'

‘So you admit the possibility?'

I thought about it. It was a possibility that Craig was coming on to me. So slim a possibility it didn't even qualify as a poss. ‘It is possible. Less possible than, say, me marrying Angel, but a possibility.'

‘You're a freak, you know that?' Drew replied.

‘And that's why you love me, right?' I said.

I could hear him smile down the phone. ‘Absolutely.'

‘But what does it mean?' I said, flopping back into the office chair.

‘Don't know,' Drew replied, the line rustled as he switched his mobile from one ear to the other. ‘Maybe you just appeared in one of his dreams – of the moist variety.'

I sighed. ‘It didn't sound like that.'

‘Or maybe it's an X-file. Y'know, one of those mysteries we'll never work out, like how you, an almost thirty-year-old woman, could still believe you're going to marry Angel.'

‘You know, sod you Drew, time will prove me right on that. And when it does, you're going to be a bridesmaid – and wear a dress.'