Читать книгу A Brand New Me: The hilarious romantic comedy about one year of first dates - Shari Low - Страница 8

‘So?????’

Their little faces were the epitome of expectation.

‘I got the job!’ I replied gleefully, joining in an exaggerated group hug thing that almost toppled them off their bar stools. They’d been waiting in the pretentious, overpriced wine bar around the corner from Zara’s office for the last two hours, so they were already struggling slightly with minor issues like balance and staying upright.

‘Told you she was desperate!’ Trish exclaimed helpfully.

That’s the thing about Trish–I love and adore her but she went to the Joseph Stalin School of Friendship. She’s brutal, thoughtless, self-obsessed, and prone to dictatorial behaviour. However, unlike Mr Stalin she’s also funny, kind and, underneath the complete lack of compassionate social skills, she has her friends’ best interests at heart. We’ve known each other since our first day at college in London, when I bumped into her as she wandered along the corridor outside the catering department clutching a toffee pavlova (yes, the stains came out eventually). Surprisingly, given her truculent disposition, we’ve never fallen out, although that’s probably because I’m subconsciously aware that if I crossed her there’s every chance she would dismember me while I slept.

The first thing that struck me (after the pavlova) about her was that she was so different from my group of friends back in the sleepy suburb of Norfolk where I grew up. In my little gang of middle-of-the-road, normal, everyday pals, not one of them had a navy-blue Mohican and wore Doc Marten boots with long flowery dresses. She looked like the love child of Sid Vicious and Laura Ashley. In fact, that had been a major puzzlement when her husband Grey first met her. Let’s just get this out of the way–he’s a fireman. No jokes about large hoses, sliding down his pole or relighting his fire, please–that kind of shallow innuendo does nothing but demean the role those courageous men play in today’s society. But he is a big hunka hunka burnin’ love who could set any female’s knickers alight.

Anyway, they got together after he was called to her apartment by a neighbour who spotted thick smoke coming out of Trish’s window. A few bee-baws later he was carrying a semi-conscious Trish out of her front door while the plug-in, hot-wax kit that she’d inadvertently left on after trimming her bikini line burnt down her kitchen. Electrical fault, apparently. Thankfully, she was fine, but when she regained consciousness while waiting for an ambulance, Grey asked her why she was wearing boots with a nightdress. They’ve been together ever since that moment and she vowed right there and then that she’d never again wear floral prints, men’s boots or well-trimmed nethers.

Now her wardrobe is more Kate Moss on a slightly lower budget–a hip, eclectic and edgy combination of vintage and high-street jeans, T-shirts, waistcoats and various other chic pieces that definitely shouldn’t work together but somehow on Trish they just do. Meeting Grey also brought about the last of the Mohican. Her hair is now a screaming shade of scarlet and shaped into a razor-sharp asymmetric chin-length bob, a style that’s maintained in pristine fashion by our mutual best chum Stuart. Another college relationship that’s lasted the distance, we met Stu when he advertised for hair models in the first month of his hairdressing course. Trish and I, fuelled by the combination of permanent bed hair, cheap cider and empty bank accounts, went along, and despite the fact that he bestowed upon us crew cuts that made everyone around us view us in a whole new light (if you’re reading this, Julie McGuiness, thank you for the k.d. lang poster), we’ve been friends ever since.

Oh, and just in case you were doing that whole stereotype thing, Stu is as straight as Russell Brand with the horn. However, he is…

‘That’s great news, Leni! I’m so proud of you! But stop the hugging, honey, because this virus I’ve got might be an airborne one so best to keep your distance.’

…a hypochondriac. Or should I say, the post-millennium version, a cyberchondriac. First sign of a sneeze and he’s on the computer inputing his symptoms into medical websites, and the next thing you know he’s claiming bubonic plague and ringing a bell before he enters the room. Still, much as the web does invariably throw up the most dramatic diagnosis, we’re glad he’s finally binned the old-fashioned medical dictionary. When he was addicted to that he’d get stuck on the same letter for days and go into psychosomatic meltdown. That terrifying week back in 2002 when he contracted piles, pleurisy and pregnancy will be etched on my memory forever.

We keep hoping that he’ll meet his perfect woman and the security will rid him of his morbid obsession, but so far all attempts to set him up with a member of the nursing profession have met with a premature end. He once got as far as a third date with a geriatric nurse but she dumped him in the middle of an episode of ER when he asked her to talk him through a prostate examination. And not in a good way. It’s a shame really because, neurosis aside, he’s a grounded, cool, entirely macho six-foot-tall specimen of gorgeousness with close-cropped black hair, piercing green eyes and an abdominal rack so tight you could play bongo drums on it. Of course, he’d never let you for fear of cracked ribs, punctured lungs and internal bruising.

Oh, and he’s successful. Courtesy of his achingly hip salon, he’s a rising star (vertigo, altitude sickness, anxiety) in the hairdressing world (nits, life-threatening finger cuts, inhalation of toxic perm lotions). He styles Chelsea mothers, precocious teenagers, a few daytime-telly celebs and does the weekly makeovers for What?!! magazine. Trish has vowed that she’ll get him the Great Morning TV! slot one day, but that often involves whisking viewers off to sunny climates so he’ll have to overcome his fear of flying first. Not only is he terrified of the actual big steel tube/plummet to death scenario, but he’s phobic about germs since he heard that aircraft ventilation systems simply recycle the air, spreading everyone else’s bacteria. On the plus side, his in-flight panics often have a silver lining–if first class is quiet, he regularly gets upgraded because the stewardesses are worried that the sight of a terrified grown man sweating in a medical facemask might upset the other passengers.

I hopped onto a bar stool next to them–but not close enough that Stu’s highly virulent Ebola virus could kill me before I’d had a large glass of wine and a packet of Nobby’s Nuts.

I gave them a full debrief and they were, by turn, astonished, enthralled, proud and…horrified.

‘You have to what?’ Trish almost spat her vino across the table.

‘You’re not doing it,’ Stu commanded, like a stern parent forbidding underage drinking, discos and any contact involving the pelvic region.

‘Right then, Dad, I won’t–but only if you increase my pocket money this week.’

‘I mean it, Leni, it could be dangerous. Twelve men? Do you know that statistically at least two of them will be carrying a sexually transmitted disease? Not to mention that there’s a high chance that at least one will have a criminal record.’

For a macho guy he really did get hysterical sometimes (anxiety disorder, raised blood pressure, wrinkles).

Now that he was looking at me with an expression that sat somewhere between horror and disbelief, with a helping of concern thrown in just to make me feel even worse, my teeth started to grind. Of course he was right. And deep down I knew it. Taking this job would be utterly insane. Dates? I couldn’t go on twelve dates. I’m the woman who takes weeks to decide to try a new washing powder–and even then I feel bad for the old one. But then…My mind flicked to the pile of books at the side of my bed. Shouldn’t I feel the fear and do it anyway? Shouldn’t I fake it until I make it? Shouldn’t I take those ten steps to a new me? Aaaaaargh! Shouldn’t I stop reading bloody self-help guides and actually put some of their theories into action instead?

It was time for me to get a life–one that I actually bloody liked. I could do this. I could. I was feeling the fear so it was time to get on with it.

I decided to bluff bravado.

‘Stu, I’m not going to sleep with them, I just have to date them. You know–dinner, bowling, art galleries and stuff like that. And how bad can it be? Look at my track record in picking men. Ben? Married. Donny? The Olympic World Champion in the field of Unmitigated Boredom. Gary? Ran off with my chiropodist. Goliath? Tried to snog Trish at last year’s birthday barbecue.’

‘I warned you not to go out with someone called Goliath–bound to have inferiority issues,’ she piped up.

‘Thank you, Dr Jong,’ I replied curtly.

‘You’re still not doing it. It’s way too dangerous, and besides, you’ll hate every minute of it. This just isn’t you, Len,’ Stu demanded, thumping his bottle of Bud on the square pod we were gathered around.

He was so, so right–so irritatingly, bloody annoyingly right. My emotional pendulum swung back from ‘fearless’ to ‘realistic’–there was no denying that when God doled out adventure and ambition, I had refused with a, ‘No thanks, I’ll stick with consistency and predictability.’

I threw back a few of Nobby’s finest to break the emotional tension of it all. Take the job. Don’t take it. Take the job. Don’t take it. I used to be indecisive but now I wasn’t so sure. Once again, aaaaaaargh!

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake stop being so dramatic,’ Trish argued. ‘She’ll be fine. She might even meet someone who’s slightly elevated above her usual selection of losers and reprobates.’

Shucks. I didn’t know whether to be grateful to Trish for the encouragement, offended by the observation, or horrified that she didn’t seem at all perturbed that I might meet an axe-wielding maniac.

But her observation had already crossed my mind.

I was twenty-seven years old and I’d never had a serious/ humming-the-wedding-march/ flicking-through-bridal-magazines type of relationship. The longest one had been the two years I’d spent with the (as yet) only man I’d ever been in love with: Ben (sob–sorry, still can’t think about him without involuntary gulp and flaring of nostrils), the gorgeous stranger I’d met on a train a couple of years after I’d finished college. We were definitely world leaders in the ‘unlikeliest couple of the year’ award. Me: reserved, prone to wimpish behaviour with an adventure rating that never went any higher than trying a new muffin in Starbucks. Him: a serving marine, six foot four inches of testosterone-oozing manliness who–bearing in mind that he was a trained killing machine–had the sweetest, most caring nature. Unfortunately, at the end of two years I discovered that he also had a wife and child in army barracks in Felixstowe. Turned out that the majority of his ‘covert manoeuvres’ took place well away from the front line. Handling the Taliban must have been light relief after the stress of juggling a wife and a girlfriend, neither of whom had an inkling about the other until…nope, I didn’t even want to think about it. I threw back some more nuts and mentally fast-forwarded to the brutal aftermath that mostly consisted of me lying on the bathroom floor sobbing into the shower curtain, wishing hell and damnation of the entire male species. Since then, I’d just drifted along, embarking on a few flings with obviously incompatible blokes just to give myself a break from serial singledom.

In hindsight, what I should have done was loaded up a backpack and taken my mind off the heartbreak by trekking across Nepal seeking religious enlightenment. Or headed to the Great Barrier Reef to discover the wonders of nature and shallow sexual couplings with long-haired Australian surf dudes. Instead? Same job for years, unexciting love life, and I still lived in the same Slough/Windsor border, one-bedroom flat that I’d been renting since I first moved there. Actually, it was more Slough, but if I hung out of my bedroom window at a forty-five-degree angle clutching a set of binoculars, I could just about make out the castle. Not that I had. Well, only that once, and Mrs Naismith from next door had been holding my ankles to prevent me from plummeting to my death.

I took a long, deep breath, and in the manner of a fearless superhero (aka Nobbygirl), adjusted my jaw to a position of strength and determination. There was no way I wanted to look back on this moment and regret that I hadn’t grabbed the new opportunity with both hands (or at least the one hand that wasn’t busy chucking salted protein nibbles down my throat).

What had I vowed to do at New Year? Carve out a brand new me. And given the reminders of my mundane, deathly boring life and my deeply unsatisfactory romantic history, I was surer than ever that a little bit of crazy unpredictability was exactly what I needed to change my life.

And Zara Delta was definitely a little bit of crazy unpredictability.