The Case of the Missing Boyfriend Read online

I shrug. ‘When he calls.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’

  ‘In a week if he hasn’t phoned I suppose I’ll call him.’

  Sarah-Jane hands me a plate of food and a fork. ‘Yeah, best not to seem over-keen,’ she says.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Though this being a heterosexual man, best not leave it too long either, or he won’t remember who you are. Goldfish memory and all that. Did I tell you that George forgot my birthday again?’

  In my taxi home to Primrose Hill, I think somewhat tipsily about SJ and George, and then, as if allowing myself a square of chocolate, I let myself think about Brown Eyes.

  I have little fantasies about the two of us living a perfect love affair that worryingly resembles a carbon copy of SJ’s life, for Sarah-Jane, who I have known since college, has it all. Such people really do exist.

  She has George (who I believe to be the last of the New Men to be churned out before they gave up and switched back to producing Old Men again). She has lovely supportive parents, a great job promoting Macmillan Cancer Trust, Timotei hair, an overactive thyroid gland (it keeps her weight in check, you see), and utter faith that everything always turns out for the best.

  She met George at eighteen and has loved him to bits ever since. I’m not jealous of her – I love her far too much for that. No, SJ’s wonderful life warms me up on an almost daily basis, gives me the hope that comes from seeing that happiness does really exist, that people really do manage it, that relationships really can last.

  It’s just her certainty in the future I envy. For nothing bad has ever happened to Sarah-Jane, and her belief in life is unruffled. Next year she and George will have saved enough to move, and for George to stop travelling, and for her to stop work and start a family. She knows that, unlike Brian, George will stand by her and remain faithful and be a wonderful father, and I think that despite the odds, despite the bastardly men I seem to meet, and despite the relationships I see crashing and burning left, right and centre around me, she’s probably right.

  And I can’t help but think that being so contented about where you have been and being so certain of where you are going, well, that must feel wonderful.

  SAD Syndrome

  When I wake up on Saturday morning, I can hear rain crashing against the plastic roof of the conservatory. I lie in bed as long as possible until hunger forces me from my pit – it’s just after ten. For as much as rain-when-in-bed is cosy and lovely, rain-once- up depresses the hell out of me. I often wonder if I don’t suffer from that SAD syndrome, though everyone I know wonders that, and if everyone has the same syndrome, isn’t that just called normal life?

  Aware that in my best-case-scenario I will have to undress in front of Brown Eyes (I don’t seem to be able to use the Norman appellation just yet), I resist a two-thousand calorie cooked breakfast and make do with a yogurt and a coffee.

  I sit at the kitchen table and make it last as long as possible by simultaneously reading the Guardian and staring out at the rain plummeting onto the lawn, but in the end there’s nothing for it: on a cold, rainy, February Saturday, yogurt does not a soul nourish.

  I dig some thick-sliced, white, pappy bread from the freezer and toast it and smother it with butter and marmalade and make myself a fresh coffee, this time a frothy cappuccino. I’ll just have to consume nothing for the rest of the weekend to make up for it. I wonder, not for the first time, if it wouldn’t be easier to just vomit everything up like Angelica Wayne does.

  The toast soothes and I drift into a much nicer reverie involving my cooking a wonderful healthy lunch for Brown Eyes. I see myself chopping vegetables, and grilling fish like some modern version of a Stepford Wife and then hubby comes in and says, ‘Hello, gorgeous!’ Then, ‘Oh, sorry, love, I don’t think I can handle fish. Not with this hangover.’

  Quite why my daydreams always end up so badly I have no idea. Well, I do. That scene is an act-for-act representation of my life with Ronan. He was an alcoholic, and being drunk, or having a hangover, were his excuse for just about anything he didn’t want to do. Or anything he did want to do for that matter.

  I try another scenario. Brown Eyes and I are shagging away this rainy Saturday. The bed feels warm and wonderful. He rolls on top of me, slips his way in, and then pauses, looks into my eyes and says, ‘You are still on the pill, aren’t you? You know how I feel about kids.’

  You guessed it. Brian.

  As a distraction, I spend a leisurely hour and a half plucking and peeling away any evidence that I too might be descended from an ape. Beauty magazines call this pampering, but there’s nothing pampering about it. It hurts. It’s hell.

  I dress in my favourite tattered jeans and a paint-stained sweatshirt and head back through to the kitchen, half thinking about food again, half realising that I could have missed a phone call whilst I was washing my hair. When careful checks of the BlackBerry and landline reveal that I haven’t, I turn inevitably back to food and cook two sausages to make an evil thigh- expanding sausage sandwich. I then get a grip and bin one of the sausages and one of the slices of bread. When I have eaten the remaining half-a-sandwich, I shamefully peer into the bin to see where the rejected sausage and bread have landed, but they are in a splodge of dried up cat food which means of course that for now I am saved.

  Humm, I think. Cat.

  I frown and look around the kitchen. I call Guinness, but he doesn’t appear. I check the office and the bedroom.

  I peer out of the kitchen window and spot him at the bottom of the garden sheltering under the Leylandii, and then I see what I have been waiting for for months: a flash of yellow behind the fence.

  I open the back door, grab an umbrella from the hall and run outside. Guinness screams his own catty version of reproach at me and bounds inside in a soggy blur.

  At the bottom of the garden, I stand on tiptoe and finally catch Mrs Pilchard beneath the Leylandii. Quite what the old bag is doing weeding in the pissing rain I have no idea.

  ‘Oooh!’ I call out.

  Mrs Pilchard visibly jumps. ‘Oh, you made me jump,’ she confirms. ‘Creeping up on people like that! Honestly!’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I say. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry I made you jump.’

  ‘Sorry, dear?’ she asks, straightening her back and wiping her hands on her pinny.

  ‘Nothing,’ I shout. ‘It’s about your tree.’

  ‘I’m just doing a bit of weeding,’ she says. ‘Lovely day. Such bright sounds.’

  I pause to listen, but other than the white noise of the rain and the swish of cars drifting from the main road beyond the roofs I can hear nothing. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Lovely. Now I need to talk to you about this thing.’

  ‘What thing?’ she asks.

  ‘This thing!’ I say, pointing above our heads. ‘It’s getting out of hand. It is out of hand.’

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she says, smiling up at the tree.

  ‘Well . . . beauty is in the eye and all that,’ I say. ‘But it’s too big. It’s cut virtually all of the sun out. My lawn is dying because of the shadow. I can’t even grow herbs in the kitchen any more. Actually I feel like I’m dying because of the shadow. You have to get it pruned or something.’

  ‘Pruned?’ she laughs. ‘You can’t prune a tree, dear.’

  I think you probably can, but she has gained an advantage, because what I know about trees you could write on . . . well, on something really really tiny. ‘Well, you need to do something,’ I say. ‘Maybe get it thinned, or perhaps . . .’ I cough. ‘Cut it down?’

  ‘Now why would I want to do that?’ she says. ‘A lovely tree like . . .’

  ‘Because otherwise I shall phone the council,’ I say, forcefully. ‘I’m sure there are rules about this sort of thing.’

  Remaining on my toes to peer over the fence is making my feet hurt, which in turn is adding to my general irritation about the Leylandii, and my dingy kitchen, and the rain dripping down my back, and not ever being able to eat enough food to actua
lly not feel hungry, and not having a boyfriend and the many, many disappointments of life in general.

  At this point she places one hand on each hip and smiles at me, and I wonder, not for the first time, if she isn’t a little doolally.

  Demonstrating that she definitely isn’t, she says, ‘Well phone them then, dear. They just started a plant-a-tree-and-save-the- planet campaign. Did you see the posters?’

  As it happens, I did. They’re everywhere.

  ‘I’m sure they would love to talk to you about trees,’ she continues.

  I shake my head and sigh as she gives me a little wave, chucks a, ‘Ta-ta!’ over her shoulder and struts off into her house.

  I return to my kitchen, feeling irritated about the tree, and to be honest, somewhat disappointed that our argument didn’t last longer. It felt like shouting at her was kind of helping my mood. Plus now I still have six hours to kill before I am supposed to meet Darren.

  I move through to the lounge and glance at the TV: anaesthetic on demand. I resist it for a few more minutes by pressing my nose against the bay window.

  I watch a mother run to her absurdly sized 4x4 whilst sheltering her child with her coat. I see the postman push a trolley of soaked letters past and think that it is somewhat irresponsible of him not to flap the lid back over to protect the letters and that if he delivers a piece of soggy pap through my letterbox, I shall tell him so. In a friendly manner, of course. I don’t want to be invited onto Grumpy Old Women! But he just walks straight on to number forty-eight, denying me the pleasure.

  With no further action on the street, I settle onto the sofa nursing the Sky remote. Guinness, who knows that my lap is warmer than the cushion, jumps onto me immediately. He’s still pretty damp, but because it’s my fault he’s so wet, and because his presence, even soaked, is comforting, I let him stay.

  My finger hesitates over the button for an instant, and then I realise that I have not one, but two recorded episodes of Desperate Housewives on the hard disk. Watching how those Yankee bitches deal with their problem neighbours is the perfect balm, because, of course, being American, the solution generally involves murder.

  I click the button to fast-forward through the commercial break. I suppose that as I depend on advertising for a living, this is somewhat contradictory, but I figure that as the monster that is advertising devours my working week there’s no reason to feed it my weekends as well.

  Just as I hit play in order to find out which of the residents of Wisteria Lane have died in the freak tornado that has devoured their homes and ripped up all of the trees (now there’s something to dream about), the phone rings.

  As the number is hidden, I hesitate. My first thought is that it could be Brown Eyes, so I should really pick up.

  But if it is Brown Eyes and he asks me out tonight I will have to miss the photography party thing, or refuse the date which would seem terribly ungrateful.

  Then again, if it is him and he doesn’t leave a message then I shall never know that it was him which would be awful.

  And if I do answer and it isn’t him then I might have to listen to one of those new hyper-aggressive double-glazing callers and have to be rude, which always leaves me feeling bad in a you- horrible-person-she-was-only-trying-to-earn-a-living kind of way.

  Finally I decide that if it is him and I do tell him I’m too busy tonight because I have an invitation to an art exhibition then I shall just appear to be a jolly hip groovy chick with a seductively exciting lifestyle. In the final millisecond before it switches to voicemail I stab the answer button.

  The voice that greets me, though, is not the soulful baritone of Brown Eyes, but the hyperactive twitter of my mother. ‘Oh you are there!’ she says. ‘I didn’t think that you were going to answer and I was just about to hang up myself.’

  ‘I thought you—’ I start, but she interrupts me.

  ‘And then I thought, of course, she’ll be out gallivanting around with all her London friends, or shopping or at work, but no! You are actually in.’

  ‘Yes, But I thought—’

  ‘I’m so glad I caught you though, dear. I tried to call you yesterday but . . .’

  ‘I was at work, Mum.’

  ‘Yes, and then I realised I had the days mixed up. That happens as you get older, you’ll see, and even more when you’re on holiday. The days all just seem to slip into each other. It is Saturday, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. But aren’t you supposed to be in—’

  ‘Well I am dear. I’m phoning you from the hotel.’

  ‘OK . . .’ I say vaguely. ‘It’s just that you always say that it costs too much to call from the hotel and—’

  ‘Yes, but this chap I met bought me this calling card thingy,’ she says. ‘It’s terribly complicated, you have to dial a number and then another number, and then a pin code, and then the number for England, and then your number.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘What chap?’

  My mother doesn’t meet ‘chaps’. In fact even the word ‘‘chap’’ isn’t something she’s particularly comfortable with. She believes that any word invented since nineteen-fifty needs to be quarantined from the rest of the sentence by surrounding it with visual speech-marks. ‘Disco’, ‘DJ’, ‘gay’, ‘laptop’, ‘mobile’ and, yes, ‘chap’ all require inverted commas. I imagine that, on the other end of the line, she has just used her free hand to make them.

  ‘Honestly, love, it’s like a hundred numbers all together, and it took me three attempts just to get them all right, which is why I’m glad I caught you as I don’t think I would have had the courage to try again. But apparently it’s cheap as chips.’

  ‘Great,’ I say. ‘What chap?’

  ‘Oh, he’s just this local lad I met in the souk. He’s been showing me around.’

  ‘What, like a guide?’ I ask.

  ‘Humm,’ she says. ‘Anyway, how are you, my love?’

  Now my mother virtually never asks me about myself, and when she does she certainly never pauses long enough for me to reply. I am surprised and more than suspicious. ‘I’m . . . fine,’ I say. ‘But who is this guy?’

  ‘Which guy?’ she asks, suddenly senile.

  ‘The guy who bought you the calling card,’ I say.

  ‘Oh him. He’s lovely, darling. I’m sure you two would get on like a house on fire. Anyway, I’m glad you’re OK. I suppose I had better hang up though. If I save some of the card I can give you another call next week, though to be honest, I haven’t the foggiest how many minutes I get with this thing anyway.’

  ‘Mum!’ I say. ‘Who—’

  ‘Anyway, have a lovely weekend. Toodle-pip.’

  And with that she hangs up.

  I sit and stare at the handset for a moment, for everything about the call is wrong, starting with the fact that she called me at all.

  Mum has spent the last three winters in Morocco. She stays in a cheap hotel in Agadir with full board from December to March. It would seem that there are lots of oldies doing this now, and she claims that it is cheaper to stay in a hotel there than feed herself and pay the heating bill in England. The way gas prices have been rising she’s probably right. But it remains the case that, until today, not once has she phoned me during these sojourns.

  Also, although the form of the call, her inimitable, uninterruptible monologue, is entirely normal, the fact that she sounded so upbeat, didn’t mention her sciatica or her migraines or even her recurrent sinusitis, is literally a first, for her calls are generally more monologue-of-pain than anything else.

  And yet the obvious conclusion – that my sixty-seven-year-old mother is having a holiday romance – is unthinkable. Isn’t it?

  Or is that just me, doing a classic, my mother-can’t-possibly- have-a-sex-life, thing? My mother-can’t possibly-have-a-sex-life- if-I-don’t, thing . . .

  I put the handset back on the base-station and stare blankly at the frozen image on the TV screen: Teri Hatcher is holding a gun and looking nervous. Her arms look u
ncomfortably thin to me.

  The Right Words

  When I get out of the taxi in Shoreditch, Darren is already standing outside Old Street station – our arranged meeting place. The rain has stopped and the street is glistening with reflected light from neon signs and passing cars. People are streaming in and out of the station, but it’s not hard to spot Darren: he’s the only person wearing carpenter pants.

  As I reach him, I laugh and shake my head. ‘You rat!’ I say. ‘I mean, what’s the point of asking me if you then just ignore what I say?’

  Darren grins sheepishly and pecks me on the cheek. ‘I knew you wouldn’t really mind,’ he says. ‘And they’re so perfect for tonight’s event, I couldn’t resist it.’ He grabs my arm and we head off towards Hoxton Square.

  ‘Only I did mean it,’ I tell him. ‘We’re under contract not to reveal the product before the launch in March. If anyone sees you . . .’ I shake my head.

  ‘Oops,’ he laughs.

  ‘Oops indeed. If anyone asks you where you got them . . .’ I lean back and check his bum.

  ‘No, there’s no brand on this pair,’ he confirms.

  ‘If anyone asks, say you bought them in a street market in Spain. That’s where they get all their stuff made and there are always strays and rejects popping up.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Darren says. ‘If it’s really important I can go back and change.’

  I sigh. ‘No. It’s fine,’ I say. ‘But don’t make a habit of it.’

  ‘Hey, I’m so glad you came,’ he says, steering me across the road. ‘I hate going to these things on my own.’

  ‘Yeah, what happened to Pete?’ I ask. ‘I thought you were in love.’

  ‘Oh, you know me,’ Darren says. ‘There’s always something wrong. It just takes a few days to find out what.’

  ‘Like?’

  He shrugs. ‘We don’t like the same things, or we don’t have the same view of relationships, or we both want to bottom.’

  ‘Bottom?’

  ‘Yeah, we both want to be, you know . . .’ He whispers the final word. ‘Fucked.’