‘I don’t see why the bedrooms should be single sex,’ says Ant. ‘We’re all grown-ups, after all. I mean, I’ve seen thousands of breasts. What makes you girls think I’d be so keen to see yours?’
Eddie makes a coughing sound that sounds like ‘bullshit’. The old jokes are often the best.
Kate starts to laugh. ‘But I don’t want to share a room with a guy. The snoring, the bodily functions…’
‘I can go a weekend without touching little Jimmy and the boys,’ says Ant.
Ew.
Kate is laughing even more now. ‘That’s not the function I was referring to.’
‘Come on, I know it’s all you girls think about…’ he says, leaning towards her.‘I’ll have you know, there’s a very high criteria for girls to make the J-list.’
‘Two feet and a heartbeat?’ I call down the table.
‘Oh, hello, look who’s getting involved now!’ he calls back. ‘Private conversation here, thanks.’
‘Privates conversation…’ quips Kate, and Ant laughs far harder than he ought to.
I hope she’s not confusing his sleaze with naughty charm. It’s a classic pitfall for the newly single. Then again, she’s a big girl, and I’m not about to tell her what to do. I turn back to Eddie and Bloomie, who are having a serious conversation about whether you could pack blue cheese on a skin infection and it would work like penicillin.
‘Guys…seriously. That’s gross. I was just thinking that I’m hungry. It’s gone now.’
‘We’ve already eaten dinner,’ says Eddie. ‘But I was about to cook up some sausages as a bit of a late supper.’
Love men and their perma-hunger.
‘Is Maeve coming this weekend, by the way?’ asks Bloomie.
‘Uh, she has to work,’ says Eddie.
I turn to look at Eddie and frown thoughtfully. He catches my eye and frowns back, and gets up to go to the fridge. I follow and stand right behind him as he rummages in the fridge pulling out sausages and butter, turns around and jumps.
‘Jesus, woman!’ he exclaims. He clearly didn’t realise I was there.
‘Are you still going out with Maeve?’ I ask quietly.
‘Why would you ask that?’ he replies.
‘Answer me.’
There’s a long pause. He looks at me, sighs and says, ‘We broke up two months ago. I just haven’t been in the mood to talk about it.’
‘Are you serious?’ hisses Bloomie, who’s propped herself against the back of the kitchen island, facing us. Everyone at the kitchen table is now very involved in the bodily-functions conversation and not listening to us.
‘Oh fuck, and you wonder why…’ Eddie shakes his head and hands me a bag of onions. ‘Chop these, please.’
I grab the onions, a board and a knife and start chopping. ‘Teddyboy, what the hell? What happened?’
He shrugs, pouring oil into a large saucepan and putting it on the stove. ‘It just…fell apart. I haven’t been crying myself to sleep about it.’
Bloomie shakes her head. ‘That’s so repressed.’
‘It IS,’ I agree, wiping away a tear. ‘Sorry, it’s the onions, though obviously I am devastated about Maeve, too…Do you want to talk about it?’
‘Do you want a hug?’ asks Bloomie. She looks genuinely tearful. Yikes, love is making her squishy.
He starts to laugh. ‘Fuck off, girls,’ he says affectionately. ‘I’ve already got two sisters.’
Bloomie and I look at each other and shrug, and start frying up the onions and sausages. Eddie slices and butters baguettes, and within 15 minutes, we’re all at the kitchen table again, tucking into huge sausage sandwiches.
‘Holy shit, do you want some food with your mustard, love?’ I hear Ant saying to Kate, and she laughs in response.
‘Hands up who wants to play touch rugby in the morning?’ exclaims Harriet. Everyone ignores her. ‘Well, I’m going to try to catch the highlights of the cricket on TV. I was watching it all afternoon on my computer at work. It was so exciting!’ See? So annoying. She stomps off towards the other room with her sausage sandwich, followed closely by Neil. Heavy calves. (Both of them.)
All I can hear for a few seconds is the sound of happy munching.
‘Ahh…I love a good sausage,’ says Tory archly, raising an eyebrow at Fraser. Why do some people think their private jokes are, ahem, impenetrable to outsiders? Bloomie and I collapse laughing, and then simultaneously remember the conversation in the car and laugh even harder. Tory looks over and has the grace to look embarrassed.
Eddie’s mobile rings. He looks at it and says decisively, ‘Mitch. Lost.’
He answers it.
‘Mitch…No kidding. Well, it’s an easy turn-off to miss…Yeah, totally. Well, that makes sense. And…Sorry? You’re where?’
He starts to laugh.
‘Oh…man. I’ll see you in like, four hours.’
He hangs up. ‘They are lost in Wales.’
‘Who’s that?’ calls Ant from the other end of the table.
‘Mitch, Jake, some guy called Sam.’
I sense Kate and Bloomie looking at me meaningfully and ignore them. Bugger. He’s not turning up anytime soon, then.
We start clearing up. The so-called Friday night party is a bit
of a fizzle. Neil and Harriet are glued to the cricket on TV, Tory and Fraser go to bed almost immediately, and Ant is practically humping Kate’s leg.
‘Well…I’m turning in,’ I say.
‘Me too!’ chorus Bloomie and Kate.
‘We are so old these days,’ grumbles Eddie. ‘Three years ago we’d be, like, hammered by now.’
‘Come on, let’s play strip poker!’ exclaims Ant. ‘Katie, kitten-pants, are you game?’
‘Tempting!’ says Kate brightly, looking at me with ‘help me’ eyes. I knew she wasn’t interested.
‘I’m stealing her, sorry, Ant,’ I give him a beaming smile. He gives a very obviously fake smile back.
Bloomie, Kate and I head upstairs to my room and flop down on the bed.
‘Was that good? With the flirting?’ asks Kate.
‘What, darling?’ says Bloomie. ‘Just then? With Ant?’
‘Yeah…’ she says. She’s looking so hopeful.
‘You were definitely flirting a bit,’ I say. ‘But to be honest, he’s kind of like…’
‘…a randy dog?’ finishes Kate. ‘Yeah, I know. But I thought it was good practice. He’s not that bad, underneath all the bullshit. He said he’s probably going to have to sell his house and move back in with his parents, because of this whole redundancy thing.’
We hear a car pull up outside. We all look at each other and gasp dramatically, and scurry to the window. Love being immature sometimes (all the time). Bloomie pokes her head out.
‘Tara Jones, I think,’ she says disappointedly. ‘With…is that Perry?’
Tara Jones is one of Mitch’s ex-girlfriends, and Perry is her baby brother. She’s very quiet and sweet, though I haven’t seen her in over a year. (That’s what happens when someone moves to North London.)
The outside light goes on as Eddie goes out to greet them. Bloomie looks out again.
‘Yup, Tara…and holy shit…Wow, he certainly has grown…up…’
Kate and I start giggling and push her out of the way. Tara and Perry look up and wave, and we wave back. Perry was always boyishly handsome, but he’s now less boyish and more very, very handsome.
‘How old is he?’ murmurs Kate under her breath.
‘Not sure,’ I say. ‘23…24?’
‘Mmmm…’ she says distractedly.
I pull my head in and start to giggle. ‘Kate’s just seen what she’s having for dinner tomorrow night.’
By the time they leave my room, it’s past midnight. I lie in bed for awhile thinking.
I know I shouldn’t overthink things, and I know I often do, but I need to remind myself that the odds that Jake is a rooster-prick like Rick are high. I think back over every time that I’ve met him. He’s always been pretty suave and confident, which is probably a bad sign. He approached me in the kitchen at Mitch’s party with no shyness at all. Only a bastard would be that cocky. He’s Mitch’s cousin, and Mitch is such a player and it probably runs in families. And Jake hasn’t ever really done anything to make me think he’s a nice or thoughtful person. He’s just a bit funny, that’s all. If it’s Jake versus the Sabbatical, then the Sabbatical wins every time. And with these thoughts, I drift off to sleep.
Waking up at Eddie’s, I have a moment of where-am-I confusion till I look around the room and remember. A huge double bed, a big cupboard, sunshiney light escaping around the edges of satisfyingly thick double curtains, a vanity table (God, I’ve always wanted one of those), and a little ensuite. I’ve always had this room when I come here, and I’ve come to think of it as mine.
The morning starfish stretch and sigh that I noticed on that first Saturday of the Dating Sabbatical is back and, thanks to inside-out happiness, more enjoyable than ever. This morning I’m halfway through it when I remember that today I will, absolutely positively definitely, see Jake, and my nervous stomach kicks in again, hula-hooping away. I tell it to shut up, and remind it about the Dating Sabbatical and what I decided before I went to sleep last night. It ignores me and starts hopscotching.
I look at my watch and decide to go downstairs to the kitchen, get some coffee and have a little sit in the garden. It’s huge and stunning, the kind of garden you never, ever see in London, and Eddie’s mother’s pride and joy. I think she’s even won awards for it. This early in the morning there’ll be birds and things to look at. Ooh! Maybe butterflies. (I’m so at one with nature, you know?)
No one else is up yet—it’s just past 8 am—and I pad happily
around the big kitchen finding a cafetiere, a tiny saucepan, some Illy coffee, and some milk. I put the kettle on to boil, pour some milk in the saucepan and put it on a low heat, spoon exactly three and a half tablespoons of coffee into the cafetiere, pour the boiled water gently on top, and stir it exactly three times anti-clockwise, three times clockwise, and then three times anti-clockwise. I poke my little finger into the milk and tap it on my wrist to check it’s the right temperature, stir it briskly and take it off the heat. Finally, I press down the plungey thing on the cafetiere and pour the coffee and milk in the biggest mug I can find, till it’s absolutely the perfect colour. I hum to myself happily throughout all this.
‘Yet again, you are looking completely crazy,’ says a voice from the corner.
I let out a scream—I know, I know, it’s so girly, but I can’t help it, I thought I was all alone—and turn around. It’s Jake.
‘Oh, God! You scared the…you scared me.’
‘Sorry,’ he says. He’s sitting right at the other end of the long kitchen table, reading a book. He’s looking—well, sorry, but it’s true—delicious. His hair is a bit longer than last time I saw him, and he’s all clean but dishevelled, like he woke up, showered and then didn’t look in a mirror. He’s wearing a rather loved-looking pale pink T-shirt with a hole on the collar. It takes a strong man to wear pale pink, I always think.
It has to be said, that after convincing myself he’s a Rick-esque slick, smooth-talking, smartarse bastardo for the past few weeks, seeing him sitting here in boyish scruffiness, reading quietly, brings my over-active brain fluttering to a halt. My stomach, in the middle of hopscotching, falls over and skins its knee, and my heart starts hammering.
Ooh, the heart thing is new.
‘No problem,’ I smile back. I feel flushed with self-consciousness, and remember I’m wearing Ol’ Grey and a pair of very baggy black boxer shorts. Goddamnit, why don’t I own decent sleeping
gear? ‘One moment please,’ I say, and dash into the little bathroom next to the pantry to quickly check myself out. My eyebrows are practically AWOL, my hair is all over the place, and I definitely have morning breath. I spy a tube of toothpaste under the sink and quickly eat some. On the good side, I don’t have any mascara panda eyes, my eyes are clear and my skin looks alright, so bugger it. Do I need my mantra? No. I haven’t needed it in ages, come to think of it. Not since that night with Rick at the Botanist when I couldn’t even remember it. I point at myself in the mirror. You are still on a Dating Sabbatical. Jake is probably a bastardo so it’s absolutely fine. I blow my nose quickly and run out.
‘Dratted hayfever,’ I say, as an excuse.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘May I have some of that coffee?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I say. ‘Milk? Sugar?’
‘I want it exactly how you’re having it,’ he says. ‘I have a feeling it’s something you’ve worked out over a long period of time.’
‘Perfection takes effort. You couldn’t possibly understand,’ I nod, pouring out a mug of perfect coffee.
He grins up at me and stands up as I walk to the opposite side of the table. I sit across and one down from him, and hand over his coffee. I grin back at him, but now we’re up so close, I’m having trouble sustaining eye contact. I try to hide it by pretending to rub my face sleepily. Damn, my heart won’t slow down. And the sun coming in the kitchen window is making this room awfully hot. Just chat to him. Don’t flirt. Remember Rule 3.
‘So I heard you had navigation issues,’ I say, glancing up at him through my fingers.
‘Navigation issues, petrol issues, Mitch snoring all night issues…’ he says, taking a sip of his coffee. ‘Oh Minxy. Thank you. That is amazing coffee. Amazing. I am so impressed.’
I smile back, and am about to reply something flip when my eye is caught by his book.
‘
Lucky Jim
! Oh my God, that’s my favourite book.’
‘You’re kidding,’ he says. ‘My sister just sent it to me…She thinks I’ll like something she called “the hangover scene”.’
‘That is particularly hilarious,’ I agree. I’ve read Lucky Jim about 20 times, and could quote the opening lines of the hangover bit to him verbatim, but that’s a bit showponyish, even for me.
‘I love it so far,’ he says, and clears his throat. ‘She sends me books to “de-stress” me. And I had a thing at work that was a bit crazy the last few months, so this is…relaxing.’
I can’t think of what to say, apart from ask way too many extremely uncool questions (What’s your sister’s name? Do you think I’m insane after the Botanist thing? What’s your relationship history? What do you do? Do you like it? Why was it crazy? What’s your favourite food? Do you like me? Can I sit on your knee and smell your neck? Are you a bastardo?) so I just nod and smile at him.
‘So, how have you been?’ he asks. Yes. Time to make small talk.
‘Uh, great,’ I say. Throwing glasses of wine over ex-boyfriends, you know, the usual.
‘Did you drive from London last night?…from your house? Where do you live, anyway?’ he asks. I tell him, and tell him about the trip down with Kate and Bloomie, my inability to drive and various botched driving lesson attempts by friends over the years. He laughs at the appropriate moments and makes funny little comments that make me giggle. I don’t think Rick ever, ever asked where I lived until he wanted to get into my pants and needed to tell the taxi driver where we were going. He never asked anything about me at all, really. Why have I been comparing Jake to Rick all this time? My nervous tummy is suddenly calm and still as a yoga master. I look at Jake’s smiley, crinkly eyes as he takes a slow, deliberate sip of his coffee. I can hear birds singing outside. How fucking Disney.
‘So what’s the plan for later?’
‘I’m not sure…’ I say. ‘Last night didn’t really take off. Eddie will probably go into host overdrive now and try to make it the best weekend party ever, TM.’
‘Oh, no, I meant for me. For me and the men. I figured you and the rest of the girls—sorry, women—would be preparing food all day.’
‘But, damn, I forgot to pack my favourite pinny…’
‘I’m sure we can rustle one up from somewhere in this enormous kitchen. Or…one of your little friends would have packed a spare, surely?’
‘Well, one would assume so…after all, Bloomie likes to close billion-pound deals in her favourite apron. But you don’t think it might, like, undermine this whole “cool” persona I’ve set up, you know? I mean, the Fonz doesn’t cook.’
‘True. And he is the coolest of the cool…’ Jake says. He takes another sip of his coffee and makes an exaggerated, satisfied ‘ahh’ afterwards. I giggle. We lapse into silence again for a few seconds, smiling at each other. This feels familiar and just so…lovely.
He stands up. ‘Would you like to help me make breakfast for everyone?’ That’s not something a smartarse bastardo would say. ‘Then we’ll be able to bunk off cooking duty and go to a local pub and play cards all afternoon.’ Hmm,
that
is. But it is a good idea.
‘Perfect plan!’
We head to the kitchen and in unison start pulling breakfast ingredients out of the fridge and pantry. Bacon, sausages, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, bread. Jake starts by putting bread in the toaster.
‘I wouldn’t put the toast on yet, it’ll get cold…Do the mushrooms instead like a good boy,’ I say, filling up the kettle with water.
‘You’re even bossier than I am.’
‘I said it charmingly,’ I protest.
‘I’ve never been bossed around so charmingly,’ he says. He
leans over and puts the radio on. It’s Jason Donovan’s ‘Sealed With A Kiss’.
‘I love the music they play up here in the sticks,’ I say, lining up sausages and bacon to put on the grill.
‘We’re in Oxfordshire, darling. Not Far East Kentucky,’ replies Jake, chopping mushrooms briskly.
‘When I first heard this song, I thought it was about sea eels,’ I say. ‘Because it’s about summer, which means swimming, and I’d just found out that sea eels even existed, and it seemed to make sense.’
‘Sea eeled with a kiss?’ repeats Jake, and starts to laugh. ‘What about…like a sturgeon?’
I laugh, and immediately go through fish names in my head to match up with song titles. All you have to do is think of a fish, sing the name in your head, and a song usually appears. ‘What about…hake a chance, hake a chance, hake a ch-ch-ch-chance…’
Jake throws the mushrooms and a load of butter into the saucepan, and leans over to turn the radio off. ‘Salmon chanted evening…’ he sings.
And then, as breakfast comes together in a whirl of chopping and frying and toasting and buttering, I discover that Jake is irritatingly good at wordplay.
‘When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s…a moray?’ (Me.)
‘Pollack in the saddle again!’ (Him.)
‘Prawn in the USA!’ (Me.)
‘Who let the cod out?’ (Him.)
I groan. ‘Oh, dude…’
‘Uh-oh, Minxy, looks like you can’t think of one…’ he says, chopping bread. ‘My turn again. Prawn to run!’
‘I just said Prawn in the USA. You’re just repeating my fish and my artiste!’
‘Different song. It’s a song game, not a fish game. Sing a song or accept defeat.’
‘Ummm…Shark the herald angels sing…?’
‘I see you, baby…shakin’ that bass…’ He starts shaking his bottom extremely unmusically.
‘Oh dear, you’re rhythmically challenged…’ I say sadly. ‘Ooh! Who let the dogs trout?’
‘Not allowed, I actually used that exact song title. It has to be a different song. Same fish is OK, not same song. Don’t look at me like that, Minxy, you know the rules as well as I do…’
‘OK, OK. Let me think…’ I pause for a minute. ‘Get troutta my dreams?’
‘Accepted! Hooked on an eeling?’ Damnit, he had that one ready. I need to think.
‘The hills are alive…with the flounder music?’
‘We are whaling…we are whaling…’
That one really makes me laugh, and I can hardly get out my response: ‘Cod put a smile upon your plaice…two fish! One song!’
‘Bream a little bream of me…also two fish in one song,’ he smiles smugly.
‘That’s the same fish, dude. That doesn’t count!’ I’m outraged.
‘I’m not even sure I want to ask what’s going on here,’ says a voice behind us. I turn around and see Bloomie. She’s all showered, dressed and pretty, and leaning against the kitchen table with her arms folded across her chest.
‘We’re cooking breakfast, clearly. And having a fish-song-title competition. Just as clearly,’ says Jake.
‘Clearly,’ agrees Bloomie, coming over to give him a kiss and hug hello. As she leans over his shoulder she gives me an excited-child face.
I suddenly remember that I’m still wearing Ol’ Grey and my boxer shorts.
‘Well, I’m going to go and, uh, clean up. Can you take over from here, Blooms? I’ll be back in 20 minutes.’ I fill up my coffee mug and hurry upstairs to my room. I feel all smiley and giggly.
Ignoring that I had just woken up and looked like shit, that was just…so goddamn fucking nice.
I take a long hot shower with the usual routine. (I won’t go through it, you must know it by now.) Make-up is Country Lite: fresh-faced and pink-cheeked. I am dressed as No Theme today. Battered old jeans, Converses and a thin-rib white Henley top. You can’t have themes in the country. What would be the point? You’d just look a bit mad. (You have to have a theme in the city. Otherwise you’ll just get lost in all the people.)
When I go back downstairs, everyone, apart from Jake, Tara and Perry, is sitting at the table having breakfast. Mitch, as usual, is holding court.
‘I suppose, though, that the upshot of the story is that Wales is surprisingly pretty,’ he nods sagely.‘You’d never think it, looking at the Welsh.’
‘I’m half Welsh, Bitch!’ shouts Bloomie, throwing a mushroom at him.
‘Well, it can’t be the top half, darling,’ Mitch says, smiling a Cheshire cat grin.
I get myself another coffee and a banana from the fruit bowl, and sit down at the end of the table next to Kate and the new guy. He’s tall, like Jake, but has a mess of pale brown hair and huge black-framed Harry Palmer glasses. He politely stands up as I sit down, causing much heckling from Mitch and Ant. Kate introduces me quickly—it’s Sam.
‘Oh, hi!’ I say. ‘I met you, briefly, at Montgomery Place that night.’
Sam looks confused.‘Oh, the night of Claudette’s dinner party! It was fucking traumatic! She actually corrected my table manners at dinner. Twice.’
‘Maybe they needed correcting?’ I grin, taking a bite of my banana.
‘No, I assure you, I have exemplary manners. Thank God Ryan was so keen to get us out bar-hopping.’
Ryan? Jake Ryan?
‘Really?’ I say. ‘Did you make a bit of a night of it, then?’
‘We just started at the end of Kensington Park Road and had a drink in each bar till we found you lot, actually. Hell of a coincidence, really.’