39 Weeks (7 page)

‘Girls night out is it?’ The tallest one
with one of those sad tee-shirts that are printed to look like a shirt with waistcoat and bow tie
said.

Gosh I thought
acerbically
, such sparkling and original repartee
, I’
m positively week at the knee’s, o
ne of us at least can’t fail to be attracted by
such an inspiring chat up line
such as that
. Bu
t what I said was nothing
. In fact we all just ignored him.

‘How about a dance?’ The one with glasses
and a really bad haircut
said to
Short
Fran. To which she withered him with a you must be joking look.

‘Come on girls, let us buy you all a drink
.’ Bow
Tie T
ee-shirt said.

‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ Shelley said and turned immediately back to the rest of us to continue our conversation.

‘Isn’t that why you came?’ The last member of the trio said. Actually he wasn’t that bad looking and maybe if he’d been on his own,
or with someone other than Bow T
ie
T
ee-shirt, or B
ad Haircut and G
lasses, he’d have passed muster. But as it was he got lumped i
n with them and was deemed a lo
ser
from the outset
, a too young for any of us to take seriously
lo
ser
at that
. ‘I mean that is what you’re here for isn’t it?’ He continued
,
completely
ignoring the fact
that
we were all ignoring him. ‘T
o
pull a bloke or three? . . Well look no further
girls
, here we are.’

So he was that kind of guy, a smart arse
who
thought he was
being
so
funny, a totally
resistible
lo
ser
kind of
guy
,
Mmm now where have I seen one of those before? . . . Oh I know . . . everywhere.

Tall Fran could take no more, she turned toward
Smart A
rse
L
o
s
er and flashing her most dazzling smile
and with all the fake charm she could muster
said
‘Actually we’re not out on the pull, just out, but if we were hoping to meet someone we’d prefer
it to be a grownup
. Now why don’t you go and torment some underage bimbo’
s that are
much more likely to fall for your um . . obvious charm and charisma.’

‘Please yourself Darling, but you don’t know what you’re missing.’ Bow Tie Tee-shirt said with what he thought was a wicked grin, but came off as more of a sneer.

‘Oh I think we do
. T
hanks anyway.’ Tricia said.

Of course as soon as they moved awa
y, which they did pretty smartish
as it was obvious we weren’t going to play ball or any other sort of game, not with them anyway, we all cracked up laughing at
our own
clever
ness
and
at how
witty we all were, and at just how pathetic they were. 
   

Tall Fran and Short Fran decided to have a bit of dance and see if that generated any male interest, while scoping out any possibilities that might be hovering nearby that they might have missed on our way in, and
they
headed over to the small area designated for
just
that
sort of
activity.
Meanwhile
Daniel seemingly
having lost his
new clingy girlfriend,
sauntered over to talk to Tricia. At first we suspected he was just going to torment her but actually he looked rather apprehensive
,
and
once he realised she wasn’t going to bite his head off
persuaded her to have a drink
with him on their own
,
so they could talk
she said
while
looking coy.

Shelley and I watched them for a minute, and then she turned to me and said ‘I bet you ten pounds she’ll be going back out with him before we go home this evening’.

‘You don’t say Einstein. Well who’d have thought it.’

‘Alright smart arse. How are you holding up anyway?’

‘I’m fine, bit tired but it’s so good to be back in the land of the living again.’

‘Well it was your choice to stay away.’

‘I know, and I’ll probably have to start staying away again after tonight, you don’t know how hard it was trying to find something that
fitted.’

‘How about the morning, I mean evening sickness, how’s that?’

‘Well, touch wood,’ and for lack of any available nearby wood I touched my h
ead, ‘it seems to be okay. Whatever
happened to that Mark guy who was going to phone you, and take you
out
to dinner?’

‘Oh him. He did phone
eventually
, and we did go out for dinner
.’

‘And?’

‘And he was the most gorgeous, beautiful looking
,
bore on the planet.’

‘No. Was he? Why what did he talk about?’

‘Well that’s just it, he didn’t talk much at all, he just sat there looking stunning, but evidently that’s all he was capable of, just looking the part.’

‘Oh
. S
o you won’t be seeing him again then.’

‘Um no.’

We watched Tricia and Daniel as he squirmed his way ou
t of being seen with the clingy
girlfriend and sweet talked his way back into Tricia’s life, and we watched the two Fran’s as they succeeded in attracting
a couple of maybe’s into dancing with them. And then the looker of all lookers and his friend came over to the bar and stood two feet away from Tricia and me while he tried to attract the barman’s attention.

‘Oh my God.’ Shelley
mouthed silently at me. ‘I’ve died and gone to heaven.’

‘Shut up
Shell
.’ I mouthed b
ack, blushing like mad as he
turned to smile at us.

The friend,
who introduced himself as
Nick, zeroed in on Shelley. To my surprise she was
quite happy about this as her ‘o
h my God’ was directed at him and not toward the looker as I’d thought.
As they got talking and
were seemingly
more pleased with each other as every minute passed, the
looker smiled at me and said ‘seeing as we seem
to have been forgotten about
,
in mind if not in body,’ and he looked meaningfully in the d
irection of Shelley and Nick, ‘h
ow about if we introduce ourselves, I’m Rob as in Robin. I’m sorry my friend seems to have taken over your friend but he was just too  . . well too
embarrassed
to be able to walk over here himself and talk to her, so I . . .’

‘Well he seems to have found his
voice
now alright
doesn’t he?
I’m Judy.’

‘Hi Judy, nice to meet you. So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

Come on that’s dreadful I thought, surely you can do better than that. My Dad probably said something like that to my mum when he first met her about fifty years ago.
Rob as in Robin must have caught my thoughts or at least the look on my face while I was thinking it, even though I’d tried hard not to let it show, because the next thing he said was ‘I can’t believe I just said that. Can we scratch that and start again?’ and then as I smiled he said ‘Hi I’m Rob, and you must be Judy
.
Do you come to this place often?’ He asked.

I looked at him stone-faced and didn’t bother answering
.

‘I did it again didn’t I? Sorry I can’t seem to stop.’

‘Have you been taking chat up lessons from your dad?’

‘No
,
from what my mum says he was even worse at it than I am.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Ouch. Well can I get you a drink to make up for it?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Okay, how about a dance?’

Well he was persistent I’ll give him that, and he was drop dead gorgeous even if he wasn’t the smooth talker I’d somehow been expecting. And who knew when I’d next get the chance to flirt or smooch with anyone this attractive, possibly never. So I threw caution to the wind and agreed to a dance.

As I’d hoped an
d feared all at the same time dancing with him
was to die for
. He held me close enough to let me know he was there, oh how I knew he was there, yet not close enough to be one of those purvey grabbers that thinks agreeing to a dance means you’ve agreed to foreplay.

After our initial embarrassment, and for my part anyway the electric frisson I’d felt when we touched had died down a bit
and my heart had started beating again
, we got to talking. I mean really talking not just bad dialogue like some
awful
teen movie that is more customary in
these sort of situations. We actually talked like . . . well like real people talking.

I told him I’d recently passed my exams and could now call myself an accountant, and amazingly he thought that was cool. And he told me he was a freelance photographer. Now that was cool, I mean really cool. Then he said he used to work for one of the monthly glossy’s, Home from Home or something like that, it was difficult to concentrate on the actual words he was speaking, him being something of a Greek god
, and me barely managing to resist just staring at him dumbstruck. Anyway the magazine he
’d
worked for was all about decorating and lifestyle and all that pretentious stuff that ordinary people like me would never be able to afford
in a million years
, never mind carry off, and he
’d got
fed up with it and wanted something a bit more challenging, a bit more real he said, so he’d left and was now trying to make a go of it as a freelance.

Wow I thought. I’d never met anyone this
glamorous
before
ever, not just to look at
, but his job
and the way he talked, and now I came to think about it
even
the way he
was
dressed, just everything about him was wow. And he was talking to me, interested in me. To quote Shelley earlier I really had died and gone to heaven.

Eventually we tired of dancing, and went back to the bar where I let him buy me that drink. I was on cloud nine, or fifteen even. We were still talking, and laughing, and . . . well if you’ve ever been on the singles circuit you’ll know just how amazing that is, to find a bloke that can talk is pretty amazing
,
but to find one that has something to say that you actually find interesting or amusing is almost unheard of.

Tricia was still deep in conversation with Daniel, they’d got to the Daniel was leaning in and Tricia wasn’t backing off phase. Short Fran and Tall Fran had
hung on to their maybe’s, so maybe they were more than maybe’s by now, and had gone to sit with them at their table. And Shelley was nowhere to be seen, or Nick, so it was pretty obvious they were together somewhere. Anyway that meant I had Rob all to myself, which suited me down to the ground.

As the evening wore
on Rob
told me a bit about his life and his family,
he was thirty one, and had been in two serious relationships, neither of which had worked out, the last one ending some two years previously,
he had a married sister with two children, and until recently had been living in a spacious flat in Ealing somewhere
,
but had to move out when he
’d
quit his overpaid job on the magazine as he could no longer afford it, and was looking for a place around here, a cheap place
,
at least until he’
d started making some money as a freelance that is.
In the meantime he was staying with the sister, but it wasn’t ideal as she onl
y had a two bedroom flat
and they were all getting on top of each other. It was on the tip of my tongue to say you can live with me, rent free and with all your meals and as much sex as you can handle thrown in, but
with heroic will
power
I resisted, more
though
because I thought he’d run a mile than because it was a com
pletely insane
thing to suggest
.