Mr. Commitment (11 page)

And he certainly wasn’t a sodding stuffed animal.

So there really was only one option left.

Thinking back on it, as I walked to the tube with a black hole in the place my heart used to be, it occurred to me that it wasn’t so much the kiss that bothered me. It was his hands on her dress. My favorite dress.

You need to get out more

M
el’s mysterious, lip-kissing, personal-number-plated new “friend” completely threw my world off course. If I was the earth, then Rob 1 was a huge meteorite knocking me off my axis, thus heralding in a new ice age.

I’d never have believed Mel would want to find a replacement me this soon, only a month after we’d broken up, let alone one so solvent, good-looking and upwardly mobile. Whatever happened to grieving periods?
That’s the problem with modern women,
I decided.
No bloody sense of decorum.
The thing that really hurt was that it hadn’t even occurred to me that I might even need a replacement Mel.
That’s how stupid I am.

I wondered whether it was just me being unreasonable. What did “real” people consider a decent mourning period following the death of a four-year relationship? I conducted a (fairly) scientific straw poll of family, friends and associates to find out.

Results from the Duffy Institute of Relationship Statistics as follows:

Dan: “For a woman like Mel? Three months minimum. You’ve obviously made some mistake, mate. This guy’s got to be her brother. What, as far as you know she hasn’t got a brother? Even better, mate, he’s got to be her
long-lost
brother.”

Charlie: “I have difficulty even recalling the existence of any woman before Vernie but I pretty much agree that for a relationship like yours three months would seem to be the industry standard.”

Greg: “For women to get over a relationship of that length, anything from six months to never. But for us men pretty much as and when we feel like it—the sooner the better, though. It’s not sexist, it’s genetics: women want a long-term provider while blokes just want to have a good time. It’s the way of the world.”

Vernie: “Even though I’m a pregnant woman and therefore a cauldron of unreasonability, I have to say this: women can do whatever they like when they like because all men are stupid.”

My mum: “Enough time to heal the hurt but not so much that you drown yourself in depression.”

With the exception of my sister’s answer (and needless to say Greg’s), I interpreted the results of the survey to conclude that Mel should still have been in mourning. She’d obviously made a mistake in her calculations and was gallivanting around town with her new man when she was still, according to conservative estimates, some six weeks away from recovery.

It’s only the beginning of May, woman! You’re meant to be in mourning! You’re not supposed to get over me until at least August!

Up until this stage of events I’d been coping reasonably well with life without Mel—it was as if she’d gone on holiday and was taking a long time to come back—but seeing her with Rob 1 made everything more real than it needed to be—and now it hurt more than anything I’d ever experienced in my life. When I’d split up with girlfriends in the past, I’d dropped out of their lives so completely that it was easy to imagine that they’d stopped existing altogether. But with this stupid let’s-be-friends thing still at the forefront of my mind, I had to come to terms with the fact that the never-ending ache in my heart was bound to get a lot worse before the passing of time would make it any better.

It made no sense to be the only one of us grieving. But grieve I had to. So I let myself go wild for a while. I called in sick at work, canceled all my gigs for the coming week and ate bag after bag of Butterkist toffee popcorn whilst watching bad daytime TV. I even adopted the uniform of dressing gown and blue Marks & Spencer pajamas my mum had bought me for Christmas. I told her at the time that I wouldn’t need them because I slept naked, and I remember quite clearly that she said, “Take them. In case of an emergency.” Now I knew what she meant.

During that week I fell apart. Every few days Dan, Charlie and Vernie would try to drag me out of my melancholy, but I always refused, explaining to them that this was only a temporary measure I needed to go through in order to come out the other side.

Two o’clock Saturday afternoon—approximately eight days since I’d gone into mourning—I did just that. It wasn’t like I’d stopped hurting—I still felt the pain as keenly as ever—I think it was more a case that through my grieving I’d learned to live with it.

I let LadyBic razor and chin meet for the first time in over a week (sweet justice indeed. Mel was forever telling me off for using her leg razors to shave with), I molted my mourning clothes straight into the washing machine, and naked, strode into the shower where I symbolically washed the sadness from me. It was then, as I rubbed a large handful of Mel’s abandoned Laboratoires Garnier frequent-use fortifying shampoo into my scalp, that I made a decision. The decision to change. To become a bachelor boy like Dan—a superstud of seduction, a he-who-will-never-again-come-off-worse-with-the-chicks, a righteous dude committed to anything but commitment.

What I needed to start me off in my new role as a superstud of seduction was a dead cert. Someone to break me in gently. I flicked through my address book looking for past liaisons that might have fallen into that category. A–Z and back again. Twice. None of them had been dead certs when I had met them—and it would have taken an outlandish brand of optimism to make me believe that things had changed that drastically in my four years out of the game.

When I came across Alexa’s card with her phone number I thought long and hard about making contact. “Didn’t she describe you as ‘cute in a little-boy-lost manner’?” said my ego eagerly. “She’s TV’s Hottest Totty, you know.” Alexa was precisely what my ego needed to get over the Rob 1 blow, but I needed practice, a few jogs around the block before I’d be in any shape to tackle a New York marathon like her.

Over mid-afternoon toast and beer (Dan’s idea of a welcome-back-to-the-land-of-the-living feast), we discussed the problem at hand and together arrived at the perfect solution not just to my own predicament but Charlie’s and Dan’s too. Now all we had to do was persuade Charlie.

I’m not going to a nightclub!”

It was later that same day and Dan and I were round at Charlie’s listening to him reject our master plan. He sat on the edge of their huge sofa looking at me and Dan as if we’d lost our minds on the short journey from Muswell Hill to Crouch End. It was at times like this that the age gap between Charlie and ourselves became most apparent. At thirty-four he felt he’d served his time doing pointless youthful activities, and was one of the few people of his years who took comfort in the idea of middle age.

“Nightclub?” goaded Dan. “Have you just beamed in from 1962, Grandad? ‘Nightclubs,’ as you so quaintly call them, lost their ‘not daylight’ prefix a long time ago. You need to get out more.”

“All right, then,” said Charlie. “I am not going”—he faltered as if the word alone was making him feel nauseous—“clubbing.” He paused to see what effect it’d had on him. “I can’t believe you made me say that. What kind of worthless tosser uses words like ‘clubbing’? It’s like ‘pubbing.’ Are you coming pubbing on Saturday? No, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m going clubbing. After which I’m kebabbing and then cabbing home. I hate progress. Suddenly every noun has been turned into a verb.”

Dan and I exchanged glances as if Charlie was going off on one.

“Sorry, lads. I’m too old for this. I am. Look at me.” We did. Although Charlie had a youthful face, his body let him down. The contentedness of married life had increased his girth like the passing of time adds rings to a tree trunk. But somewhere deep inside him we were convinced there was a teenager who wanted to party. We just had to find a way to let him out.

“Don’t stress it,” reassured Dan. “We’ve got everything planned out. A boys’ night out will take your mind off the baby, Duffy’s mind off the whole Mel saga and, fingers crossed, my mind off Meena and her stupid wedding invitation.”

“A boys’ night out,” I said encouragingly. “It’ll be just what the doctor ordered.”

G
etting ready for our night out brought back a flood of memories. Memories of before Mel. In fact before the girl before that and the one before her too, right back to when I was seventeen and every Saturday night had the potential to be
the
best Saturday night of my life. The ritual was exactly the same every week:

1. Watch
Blind Date.

2. During the ad break one of my more organized friends would call with a suggestion of where we could go.

3. Me and Vernie would get into a fight over who was next in the bathroom. I’d lose and have to wait an hour for her to finish, only to discover she’d used all the hot water. While I had a lukewarm bath, another mate would call and leave a message with my mum saying who was going, where and when to meet.

4. A whole gang of us would arrive at the Hollybush—just around the corner from our sixth-form college—half an hour later than we’d arranged, wearing clothes we thought made us look eighteen and reeking of Paco Rabane.

5. After a few drinks, loud conversations and several rebuttals from the convent school girls who frequented the pub at the weekend, we’d get the bus into town and head off to a club, knowing full well that three quarters of us wouldn’t get in.

That was what Saturday nights were supposed to be about: friendship, dressing up and boundless optimism.

Dan and I met up with Charlie in the Haversham at 9
P.M.,
half an hour later than arranged. I could tell by the look on Charlie’s face that despite his earlier reluctance he was just as excited as me. Even Dan, whose Saturday nights had never been all that mundane, had something about him that bit sharper tonight. It was as if we’d all agreed to pretend that the last ten years hadn’t happened to us. For the next few hours we were seventeen again and up for it. It felt great. Such were our good moods that we even invited Greg, who’d dropped into the Haversham by chance, to join us. He was so enthusiastic about the idea that he took a taxi home, showered, and was back in the pub in under half an hour. All present and correct. We were ready to go.

I love this!

T
he club, just off Leicester Square, was called in predictably kitsch fashion “Boogie Nights.” The decision to go seventies had been unanimous. We’d briefly considered trying to get into one of the capital’s trendier clubs, but the feeling amongst the superstuds of seduction (i.e., me and Dan) was that the women in clubs like those tended to be of the choosier variety. So, for a night of guaranteed good times with the kind of girls whose expectations were as low as our own, the seventies night was ideal.

Walking through the double doors into the main room of the club was like stepping straight into 1978. Here was a world where the Bee Gees were groovy, John Travolta was an icon for disaffected youth, and bell-bottoms were so hip it hurt. As we strode determinedly across the scarlet carpet to the bar, the strobe lighting making us look like we were walking in slow motion, I just knew the night was going to be one to remember.

“What are you drinking?” bellowed Greg in my direction.

I scrutinized the optics for inspiration and found none. “I’ll have a Stella,” I replied.

“Me too,” said Dan, checking his reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

“I’ll join you in that,” said Charlie, edging out of the way of a gang of women dancing a drunken conga. He let out a yelp of surprise as they passed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, turning to Charlie.

“One of them just pinched my bum!” he said incredulously.

Hearing this, Dan turned round and gave Charlie a playful wink. “What can I say, mate? You, my son, are dynamite!”

Dan went off in search of a fag machine and Charlie disappeared to the toilets, leaving me alone with Greg, who was now unashamedly scanning the room for “talent.”

“Look at the arse on that,” he said, pointing in the direction of a group of attractive girls who had just walked in. I smiled weakly so that he didn’t feel totally stupid, but refused to indulge him any further. While I was all for the appraisal of the feminine form, Greg’s tabloid manner lacked any subtlety or grace at all. When Dan and I went on the prowl, we’d never say a single word to each other, we just knew—it was a mixture of Jedi mind tricks combined with a unique sense of timing. Greg’s coarseness made me feel as far removed from the purpose of coming out tonight as possible. Now I really did miss Mel.

While Greg disappeared to the toilet, leaving me to stand guard over the four pints of Stella on the bar, I thought about Mel, or more accurately Mel and her new man, Rob 1.

They’re bound to be together tonight. I can picture them perfectly: Rob 1’s being really attentive, telling her amusing stories, making her feel special—doing all the things I used to do when I first met her. Mel’s looking into his eyes, hanging on to his every word, wallowing in that buzz of excitement that comes from anticipating the unknown.

I stopped thinking and felt lower than ever.

B
y midnight we’d all run out of steam. Charlie had spent the last hour looking at his watch, moaning that he’d served his time in nightclubs and wanted to be in bed with his wife like any normal thirty-four-year-old married man. Next to him, a very disgruntled Dan sat on the arm of a sofa, occasionally sipping his beer. He’d spent most of the night scowling in the general direction of Greg, who was on the dance floor in hot pursuit of some helpless girl. The irony wasn’t lost on Dan and me that Greg—the only one of us who was engaged—was also the only one to have spoken to a member of the opposite sex all evening. Even Charlie—a married man—had had his bum pinched. So much for the superstuds of seduction.

“I can see it a mile off,” said Dan irritably. “Greg’s going to get off with that girl. It’s amazing. Why can’t women smell a loser when one whiffs by?”

“Depressing, isn’t it?” I said in agreement. “Here’s us, two young, free, single guys, and there’s him, not so young, certainly not so good-looking, and engaged to be married. I dunno what the lovely Anne sees in him.”

“That’s women for you,” pronounced Dan. I could feel one of his this-is-how-the-world-is speeches coming on. “They believe that inside every heartless bastard is a small boy yearning to be loved. But their theory falls short”—he glared over at Greg again—“because what they don’t understand is that there are certain types of heartless bastard who if hacked in two would only be found to contain yet more heartless bastard.”

As if taking his cue from Dan, the DJ played Gloria Gaynor’s aptly titled “I Will Survive” and the place erupted in unison. A studenty girl wearing a neon blue Afro wig approached the sofa of doom, and without saying anything, grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor. It was a split-second decision: resist and show a modicum of self-respect or surrender and let everyone know how desperate I was. In the end I surrendered, because desperate or not, in spite of the wig I could tell that she was far from ugly.

She grinned at me dementedly and began gyrating as if her life depended on her performance. She knew all the words to the song and was even clicking her fingers in time to the music. It was as if the concept of embarrassment was completely unknown to her. Her confidence was infectious and within seconds I’d lost all my inhibitions as I strutted, boogied and generally got down with my bad self in time to the music.

“What’s your name?” yelled Blue Afro Girl, over the music.

“Duffy!” I shouted back. “What’s yours?”

“Emma!” She held out her hand for me to shake. “Emma Anderson. Nice to meet you, Duffy!”

As we continued dancing I noticed that not only had she got the most beautiful greeny-gray eyes I’d ever seen, but in addition to this she was using them to draw me into her funky world. I tried desperately to remember what I was supposed to do in this sort of situation. The procedure for pulling a member of the opposite sex was supposed to be like riding a bike—something you never forgot—but somehow I’d managed it.

As the song finished I turned to escape, but she grabbed my shirtsleeve and refused to let go. I looked over despairingly at Dan and Charlie, who were clearly enjoying the floor show. Greg, still dancing with the same girl, smiled smugly over her shoulder as if to say, “Wa-hey! We’ve both pulled!”

Just as I was convinced that things could get no worse, the Village People’s “YMCA” came on—my all-time least favorite record. For her tenth birthday, my auntie Kathleen had given Vernie a double compilation album of disco hits called
Boogie’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2.
For the next few months my sister constantly played “YMCA” whilst pretending to be the kids from
Fame.
Every time, she got to be Coco while I had to be Leroy or else suffer the harshest of Chinese burns. It wasn’t fair. I knew Coco was a girl, but she was just so much more exciting than bloody Leroy. This was why I hated the Village People. Looking around the club, I realized I was in a minority. Like a clarion call to the inebriated, the record’s opening trumpets drew the merry throngs from the bar, the toilets and the sofas to the dance floor.

“I love this!” screamed Emma excitedly.

“Me too!” I shrieked back. “Me too!”

My sweat-soaked shirt was clinging tightly to my armpits and back by the time the song came to a close. Emma dragged me determinedly by the hand to an empty sofa at the edge of the dance floor, lodging herself as close to me as possible without sitting on my lap. “It’s hot, isn’t it?” she said feverishly. She peeled off her Afro wig and ruffled her cropped sandy-brown hair. “I bet you thought I really had blue hair!” A wide smile lit up her elfin face. “What kind of a name’s Duffy, then?”

“Duffy’s my surname,” I admitted timidly. “My first name’s Ben but I don’t like it. Sounds too much like the name you’d give a Yorkshire terrier.” Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Dan surreptitiously walking past. Seeing him brought me to my senses. This just didn’t feel right. Sitting here with a strange, slightly mad girl who wasn’t Mel. It was time to admit to myself that I was no superstud of seduction.

“Listen,” I explained. “My friends and I have to go soon.”

“Anywhere interesting?”

I shook my head vigorously. “Home.” She raised her eyebrows suggestively. “Work in the morning, you see,” I added quickly, and then for some unknown reason mimed digging actions.

“So you’re a laborer?”

“Yes. Amongst other things.”

“What sort of laboring do you do?”

“Oh, you know . . . a bit of moving heavy stuff here, a bit of moving heavy stuff there. The work of a laborer revolves around shifting heavy stuff.”

She licked her lips provocatively and squeezed my right arm tightly. “Hmmm. That must be where you get this wonderful physique from.”

Realizing that I was now officially out of my depth and unable to tread water, I made a move to escape before I drowned. Her hands, however, were firmly gripped around my arm and she was using all her weight to keep me anchored to the sofa. “I haven’t finished with you yet,” she said slyly. “And you’re not going anywhere until I have.”

Surely things haven’t changed this much since I last went out on the pull?
I told myself.
Surely I was the hunter and she the hunted?
In an attempt to calm myself down I considered my options:

a. I could escape her advances (and no doubt regret it the next day);

b. I could succumb to her advances (and no doubt regret it the next day);

c. I could defer her advances (and work out what to do the next day).

It had to be “c.”

“I really am going to have to go,” I said firmly, “but do you fancy meeting up for a drink next week?”

“Yeah, brilliant,” she said, nodding enthusiastically. “Whereabouts do you live?”

“Muswell Hill,” I replied. I couldn’t believe it. My first real live date in four years, without even trying! Maybe I was a superstud of seduction after all. “How about you?”

“Hornsey,” she replied, stroking the hair on her Afro wig playfully. “Do you know the Kingfisher in Crouch End? It’s nice in there.”

“I don’t, but I can find it. Sounds great. How about this Tuesday?”

“No can do,” she said, shaking her head.

“Wednesday?”

She shook her head again. “And before you say it I can’t do Thursday either.”

“Busy with university exams?” I asked, hoping that she hadn’t changed her mind about fancying me.

“Not exactly,” she said coyly. “It’s just that my parents will go mental if I start going out on school nights again.”

If it had been possible for the earth to have opened up and swallowed me in my entirety, there would’ve been nothing that could have made me happier. I’d given this life thing a good try, but this time fate had gone too far; now I was reduced to chatting up a girl for whom seventies nights weren’t just an evening of kitsch fun but a lesson in ancient history.

“I think I . . . I—” I didn’t manage to finish my sentence, as a sudden commotion across the dance floor grabbed our attention. We stood up to get a better look, and I saw that it was Dan and Greg grappling on the floor. I took the opportunity to slip away from Emma and over to Charlie, who was standing, pint in hand, watching events unfold before him.

“I knew tonight would end in trouble,” said Charlie, motioning to Dan and Greg.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Charlie took a long, slow sip of his beer. “Greg was snogging that girl he was dancing with, Dan went off on one, and there you have it.” He pointed at our two friends on the floor again. “Like I said, I knew I should’ve stayed home.”

The club’s door staff, eager to justify their existence, were over in seconds and dragged out Greg and Dan with the minimum of fuss. Charlie and I followed them, and while they were forcibly ejected we pooled cloakroom ticket stubs and handed them to the woman behind the counter. As I turned to leave with Greg’s coat in my hand I was stopped in my tracks.

“Were you going to leave without saying goodbye?” said a voice from behind me.

I turned around. It was Emma. In the bright fluorescent light of the lobby she was quite obviously a lot younger than she’d first appeared, but that didn’t stop her being pretty. In fact she was just the sort of girl that the seventeen-year-old me would’ve gladly laid down his life for, and now here I was eleven years later turning her down. At the end of the day it seems everything is a matter of timing.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “As you can see, my mates got themselves into a bit of trouble. I’m going to have to go.”

“I suppose going out next week is off too,” she said quietly.

I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

“It’s because I’m sixteen, isn’t it?”

I nodded again. “You could say that.”

Reaching up, she straightened the collar of my jacket and kissed me gently on the cheek. “You’d better be going, then.”

“Yeah,” I said, as the sensation of her kiss slowly faded away. “I suppose I had.”

B
y the time I got outside Charlie and Dan were nowhere to be seen and Greg was attempting unsuccessfully to hail a black cab. “Taxi drivers aren’t that keen on customers with blood across their shirts,” I said, handing him his coat.

“Cheers,” he said, and snatched the coat from me. “If you’re looking for your mates, they’ve gone.”

“What was that about, then?” I asked, studying his bloody nose.

“Hadn’t you better ask your mate Dan?” He searched through his pockets. “I was minding my own business when he came over and started spouting off about how I shouldn’t be cheating on Anne, like it’s any of his business.” He finally located what he was looking for. He pulled out his lighter and lit a cigarette. “Then it all kicked off. He’s a nutter.”

Dan was totally in the wrong having a go at Greg like that, but he did have a point. I was tired of humoring Greg and his outmoded ways but I wasn’t about to lecture him on his stupidity—I just wasn’t going to bother seeing him anymore. I held out my hand. “Look, I’m sorry for what’s happened, okay? Let’s shake on it.”

Ignoring me, Greg threw his cigarette onto the floor and climbed into the back of a red Datsun Cherry—quite obviously not a minicab but some dodgy geezer on the make—and was whisked away into the night.