How to Get a (Love) Life (5 page)

‘Which one?’ I quipped.

‘Don’t be cheeky.’

My mother was on her third marriage. The latest was a high-flying investment banker who dyed his hair and drove a Porsche convertible. He was the polar opposite of my father – a struggling artist with straggly hair, whose bold canvasses looked the same, whichever way up they were hung.

‘No, I haven’t heard from Dad,’ I sighed.

‘Fine. If you do will you please tell him to call me. Guy and I are going to buy a holiday home in Menorca and for some strange reason Guy wants to decorate the place with your father’s art. Must be mad, but he’s adamant.’

‘I don’t know how to contact him, Mother, he always calls me. You know what he’s like.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she said, resignedly. ‘Well, I thought I would check on the off chance,’ she said ready to hang up. ‘Life fine with you?’

‘Yes,’ I replied automatically.

‘Good. Okay. Bye, Nicola, I’ll see you at the fair.’

‘Oh yeah, twenty first, isn’t it?’ I rolled my eyes, mouthing an ‘Oh God’ at the ceiling.

‘I knew you would have forgotten.’

‘No, I haven’t forgotten, I’m
really
excited about it.’

‘There is no need to be sarcastic,’ she sniffed. ‘Must be off then.’

She hung up before I could properly say goodbye.

Switching off the horror film, I walked through to the kitchen to find my half bottle of Emergency Merlot. I poured myself a large glass, barely tasting it as it passed my lips. The silence of the flat weighed heavy in the air and I took another gulp. I felt utterly hopeless. The oven timer blinked at me. It was only 9:30 p.m. but I’d had enough of today. The thought of my king-size bed with its creamy Egyptian cotton sheets, crisp and inviting, won out. It would all look a lot better in the morning.

I’d only just rested my head on the pillow when my mobile sprung back into life. Damn! Why hadn’t I remembered to turn it off? I answered it blearily.

‘Mum, I’m—’

‘—Sister!’ Mark sung down the phone. ‘You’re in, thank God.’

I struggled up into a sitting position, ‘Oh, Mark. Hi, I thought you were on a date?’

‘I was.’

‘Bad?’ I rubbed my eyes.

‘Dreadful. I’m outside your door. Julio let me in, hold on …’

What?!

I heard a key turning in the door to my flat, and my brother saying ‘Thanks, Julio!’ Then, a Portuguese voice: ‘No problem. Tell Neecola I say hello.’

‘Are you in
bed
, Nic?’ Mark asked, his eyebrows raised as he appeared unsteadily in the doorway to my bedroom.

‘No,’ I frowned, wrapping the duvet around me protectively. ‘I’m … I … was … reading,’ I gestured to my book on the chest of drawers ten feet away.

‘Hmm. You’re lying.’

I rolled my eyes at him. ‘I bow to your superior powers of observation.’

‘I’m making tea, want one?’

‘Tea? No, Mark, I don’t want tea, I want answers. Why are you here, for one, and when are you going, for another?’

‘I was going home after my date and my motorbike packed in. I couldn’t afford a taxi so here I am!’ He did a ‘Ta-da’ for good measure and advanced on me in a wobbly line. ‘
Plus
, I wanted to see my little sis. Yes, I did, yes, I did.’ He waggled my cheek like I was a baby. He smelt of stale cider and cheese and onion crisps. He was clearly still drunk.

‘Fine,’ I said slapping his hand away. ‘I’ll make up the spare room, you get the tea.’

‘Excellent.’ He skipped through to the kitchen and I tried to block out the noise of one man making two cups of tea. Soon enough, we were both settled on the sofa, tea was warming me out of my sleep and Mark seemed a little more sober. Although he was cracking himself up by making shadow puppets have sex with each other on the wall, so not
entirely
sober. I wiggled my toes out in front of me and felt relaxed for the first time that evening. Mark was, at the very least, a distraction from my own tightly wound brain.

‘Who were you on a date with?’ I asked him.

‘Carole,’ he replied.

I sat up, the sudden movement causing my tea to slosh perilously close to the edge of the cup. ‘Carol, as in THE Carol?’ I asked.

‘No,
Carole
,’ he said. ‘I met her earlier this week. Carole with an
E
.’

‘Earole?’ I giggled.

Mark stared at me. I fell silent.

‘So what about THE Carol? How is that little um …
difficulty
?’ I ventured.

‘He is still very much around.’

‘Oh.’

Mark nodded miserably. He’d been in love with Carol, a girl who worked at the planetarium with him, for nearly two years now. She had long flame red hair, a tiny waist, enormous tits and an interest in natural history. It had been the latter fact that, of course, had had my brother drooling.

‘We had a fight the other day about what was the best mammal, living or extinct, and she said,’ he chuckled quietly to himself, ‘she said the lemur.’ He scoffed, as if I was meant to shake my head and cry
OUTRAGEOUS
! Smiling, he dreamily repeated, ‘
The lemur
.’ He was lost in his little rodent world. His happy place. ‘It’s probably because the females are socially dominant,’ he mused. Then he looked up sharply, his expression insistent. ‘I will marry her.’

‘Okay, that’s Plan A but, just for argument’s sake, let’s say that falls through, what is Plan B, Mark? Is there anyone else?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, come on, there must be someone. What about this date tonight?’ I persisted.

‘She was awful,’ he shivered, not offering any details. Then he added thoughtfully, ‘And she is too old.’

‘Again? You have a thing about age, Mark.’

‘She is too old,’ he insisted.

‘How old is this one?’ I asked.

‘Thirty three’

This rang a bell.

‘Brother, do you have a problem with the number thirty three in general, or is it just woman who happen to be that age? Why is thirty three such a problem?’

‘It’s highly probable she’ll be infertile,’ he said with a casual shrug.

‘What?! At thirty three?’

‘Well, no, but by the time I’ve taken her on dates, wooed her, courted her, gone on holiday with her, proposed to her, married her and then knocked her up, she’ll be of an infertile age. So I really need to meet someone younger to do all that and then I can fertilise her and get on with things.’

I sat through this entire exchange with my mouth wide open.

‘What?’ Mark asked innocently. ‘What is it?’

Lying in bed an hour later I couldn’t sleep. My mind drifted over the day’s conversations and I tossed and turned trying to block them all out. I was shaken by my brother’s charming announcement about thirty-three-year-old women. Of course, I didn’t take it seriously, but it had unsettled me. Should I be worried? When I was younger I’d never imagined I’d be lying in a bed alone at twenty-nine with little prospect of a relationship anywhere on the horizon. I hadn’t imagined that life would ever not be what life was always supposed to be. You get a job, you meet a man, you fall in love, you marry him, you buy a house with a garden, you have children, you buy a bigger house with a swing set for the garden, you bring up your family, you retire and take up watercolour classes. That was how I’d always assumed my life would pan out. But how many people really did end up with this reality? Wasn’t my own mother on her third marriage? Wasn’t my brother thirty four and single? Hadn’t things veered completely off course for me?

I didn’t like these thoughts. I threw off the duvet in frustration and focused on the breeze brushing past me. Kicking myself out of bed, I stepped quietly through to the bathroom, being careful not to wake my brother, who was no doubt in the middle of his favourite dream: ‘I wake, yeah, and I’m a fruit bat, right …’

I examined myself critically in the mirror. My heart-shaped face peered back from the glass, the bobbed hair exaggerating my long neck. I leaned closer. My grey-blue eyes were perhaps a little red-rimmed, a few faint lines could be seen when I smiled at the mirror. My lips seemed marginally thinner these days. Was my jawline as defined as it once was? Was
I
running out of time? It suited me to be alone right now, but soon I would be thirty-three, then thirty-six, then thirty-nine. What if I changed my mind? Would it be too late?

I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and stared deep into my own eyes. Maybe Caroline was right and I did need to take a chance for once, to get
out there
. Maybe I
could
stand to go on a date or two. Maybe I
did
need to move on from the past.

I rested my head against the cool glass and closed my eyes. Something had shifted. I knew I wasn’t happy. Not really. I took a long breath. Perhaps I
could
be brave enough to take a risk. Because I knew, in my heart, that I didn’t want to live like this forever.

‘I’ll do it,’ I whispered to Caroline the next day.

‘Hmmm?’ She looked up from her computer keyboard.

‘Your dare. Tell me what to do. I’ll do it.’ I held out my hand. ‘You’re on. I’ll get a date for Valentine’s Day.’

Caroline didn’t laugh as I expected she would. Instead, she took my hand, shook it and broke into an enormous grin.

‘Excellent.’

Chapter Seven

Single girl with good prospects and nice eyes, seeks man who wants to stare into them.

Contact: Box No. 367

My weekend began with a continuous humming noise. The humming was coming from the sitting room and, unless it was a seriously happy and very indiscreet burglar, I figured it was Basia’s weekly clean. Being a teensy bit careful with regards to cleanliness (fine, bordering on obsessive), I paid a Polish lady, Basia, to come in every Saturday to go over surfaces and make sure that the kitchen and bathroom were left sparkling. She was pathologically cheerful and had an absurdly energetic way with a bottle of Dettol and a scrubbing brush. Today, as I entered the kitchen, Basia was in her usual perky mood, pausing to laugh inexplicably at her reflection in a saucepan.

‘Ah, Mees Brown I wake you?’ she asked, trying to look sorry but failing miserably as her light-beam smile hit me full in the face.

‘No, no I was just resting my eyes.’

Basia frowned at this so I mimed my eyes shut. She threw her head back and laughed. I clicked the kettle on and wished that some of Basia’a enthusiasm would rub off on me. I thought dolefully back to yesterday and the moment I’d signed my life away (quite literally, ten minutes after agreeing, Caroline had made me sign an actual oath).

‘I, Nicola Brown of Flat C, 26 Hewston Gardens – is that really necessary? –’ I’d argued, ‘do hereby promise to do everything in my power to find and secure a date for Valentine’s Day next year. I promise to seek love, not hide from it.’

I’d rolled my eyes at that point, forcing Caroline to bark, ‘Continue, Nicola Brown of Flat C.’

‘I promise to meet new people and see who’s
out there
. And I promise to take risks when before I might have said “No”.’

So I’d signed, and as I was doing it, I felt a sense of relief to be giving power and control over to The Dare, ready to take on the new challenges it would bring. But today was a whole other day.
What had I been thinking?
As the kettle boiled, it occurred to me that all my soul-searching yesterday had probably just been because I’d had a bit of a low day. I’d
obviously
been a little depressed after the whole hideous ‘fertilisation’ speech from Mark. That, combined with Caroline’s comments about my being unadventurous, meant I’d acted too hastily.

I jumped as the kettle clicked off, cracking Basia up as she cleaned the hob. Pouring myself a coffee, I offered Basia one too. She looked as if she might burst with happiness at the offer. ‘Mees Brown, thank you I would yes to honestly love one.’

I set about making two coffees, ‘Milk?’ I checked, moving to the fridge.

‘Oh yes, thank you, yes,’ she said, flinging her Marigolds down in glee.

I poured in the milk, daring to ask, ‘Sugar? One?’

I waited for an answer, spoon hovering over her mug. She clasped her hands together. ‘One fantastic yes.’

‘Here you go.’ I handed her a mug and scuttled out of the kitchen before she could embrace me or light a candle in my honour.

Walking through to the sitting room with its painted white walls and tan curtains, I plunged gratefully into my squashy cream sofa and continued to mull over yesterday’s turn of events. It had taken me less than an hour to change my mind. I didn’t want to go through with it. But before I’d had the chance to pipe up and tell Caroline it had all been a ghastly mistake, that I was absolutely fine and that the dare was so
not
necessary, she had already swung into action. By lunch she’d emailed me the names of six men she knew who might be suitable date material, and had sent me a link to a website called
findmeamate.com
with two hippos kissing on the homepage. By each name on her list of potential men, Caroline had been kind enough to list a few reasons as to why they had made the shortlist. For example, in at Number Four, Brian apparently owned a boat (she didn’t specify yacht or rowing) and had a holiday home. Number Six liked to go wine tasting in France (I assumed she’d included this as a positive and it was not her cunning way of telling me he was an alcoholic. ‘Yes I like to wine taste in France, England, hic … Iceland, Mexico, hic … anywhere really …’). Number Two was self-employed and
had only been married once before
. I’d examined her list and wondered if I would ever contact them. It would just be so …
awkward
, wouldn’t it? Still, I was touched she’d thrown herself into the task and I’d spent an uncomfortable hour wondering how I was going to break it to her that, if I was going to do this at all, I wanted to tackle the challenge in my own way. Never one to rush into things, I’d already formulated a rough outline of a plan. I would go through my old address book and underline the men I knew were single and I would cross out those I knew were married/in long-term relationships or were family (even distant – I shivered to think of second cousin Hugh who had once letched on me on Remembrance Sunday). I then planned to draw up a chart using Microsoft Excel. I’d type the potential men’s names out in alphabetical order, in a separate column I would enter the reasons
to
date them, and in a third column the reasons to
not
date them. I would then draw up a fourth column with a potential score out of 20, which I would decipher from a number of bar charts detailing all the potential dates’ qualities, both positive and negative, in order to work out our compatibility. I’d been at my desk thinking about what colours to make the various sections in my bar charts when a piece of paper in the form of a paper dart bounced off my forehead and landed in my lap. I’d bent down to scoop up the childish missive. It read: ‘7 p.m. Café Rouge, next Tuesday.’ I looked up at Caroline to ask what the heck this was, but maddeningly, she was on the phone, so instead I mimed angry gestures in her direction. She just smiled and gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up. When she put down the phone, she swivelled her chair in my direction.