The Cupid Effect (16 page)

Right Ceri, lighten up. It's a party
. I cast my eye about the room again, this time less critically. This time, looking for boys.

Ohhh, he was all right. Him with the shaved head, beautiful brown skin, huge eyes, flat nose, pouty lips. Hmmmm, very all right. Now, fix him with a look that says you're interested. No,
interested
, not desperate, lighten up on the eyebrows, smile a little more, hey, he's smiling back . . .

I peeled myself off the wall, smiled a little more, fixed him with my dark, mysterious eyes . . .

The lad smiled back. He nodded, ‘come here'. I finished unsticking myself from the wall and a young slip of a girl skipped over to him, flung her arms around his neck and started snogging his face off.

He looked about fifteen anyway.

I guzzled beer, looked even further around the room. And this time, I caught someone's eye. He was definitely looking at me, his eyes were practically drilling into me. I'd recognise that stare anywhere – he was the man from the pub a couple of weeks ago. Across the smoke and flashing lights and music, he was leant back against the wall, can of beer in one hand, glaring at me. I knew it was me because I glanced around me, there was no one else even remotely close enough to be on the receiving end of that glare. Maybe I knew him. I peered through the smoke and moving bodies to get a closer look. But no, he didn't look familiar. I was pretty sure I didn't know him. Maybe he was a writer I'd commissioned in London who was unhappy with the final edit of his feature, so he now scowled at me in revenge.

Like the time in the pub, he made no attempt to hide his glare now that I'd spotted him: if I was caught giving evils to someone – even someone I hated – I'd at least have the good grace to look away, go back to glaring in a minute or two. This man clearly had no grace. He glared and stared and evilled like I had my back to him.

Well, two can glare at that game. I shifted slightly, blanked my face so my mouth was a flat line, my eyes flat, then returned his stare. Mine wasn't so vicious, I'd save the viciousness for later. I simply stared at him like he stared at me. Pretending the music and dancing people and haze weren't ther—

‘Fancy seeing you here!'

I jumped slightly as Mel stepped between me and Staring Man. ‘How you doing?' he shouted above the music.

‘Fine. How you doing?' I shouted back.

Mel shrugged untidily. ‘Do you want a drink?'

I raised my can. ‘Got one, thanks.'

‘Oh,' Mel replied. He swigged from his can of beer. He was, of course, wearing a Levi's combo, but this time he had on a white T-shirt instead of a jumper. ‘Are you all right, then?' he asked. This had all the hallmarks of becoming a small talk conversation. He was embarrassed because he'd shown me a side to him very few people saw. And, while part of him yearned to get back to that intimacy, the rest of him was horrified about it. Why would any sane person tell a virtual stranger all those things, especially one who they saw in and out of work? Why indeed. I often asked myself this when someone had dragged me into their life.

‘Yeah, I'm fine, Mel. How are you?'

Mel shrugged again.

‘How come you're here?' I asked. ‘I came with Jake and Ed.'

‘What?'

‘I came with Jake and Ed,' I said loudly. ‘Who do you know?'

‘One of my students from All Souls. She lives with The Met lot. And I know quite a few of The Met lot anyway. But my student asked me to come here.'

‘Right.'

‘Do you want to dance?' Mel asked, indicating to the now packed dance space in the cleared out living room.

‘Honestly?' I replied.

‘It's shite music, isn't it?' Mel laughed.

I nodded.

‘Give me a bit of Wham any day. I only come to these parties cos it beats sitting home alone.'

There spaketh a lonely man. Mel was used to company. His marriage had just broken up. It was, I suppose, understandable that he needed someone. The noise and the distraction. The only way to stop the constant noise in your head. To stop thinking about what you did to ruin your life. Going out was so much easier than living with the pain. Than thinking the thoughts and feeling the feelings.

‘I know what you mean,' I replied. The music mutated into another ‘song' bastardised from a good tune, dubbed into oblivion.

‘I've been doing a lot of thinking,' he said, ‘since I came to your place.'

I nodded.
I thought you might
.

‘It's . . . I've been doing a lot of thinking.'

‘Thinking's not all it's cracked up to be, is it?' I replied.

‘No. No it's not. I, er, almost called my wife.'

Oh?!
‘Oh?'

‘But I didn't know what I was going to say so I didn't.'

‘You could try what I do: open my mouth, say whatever words find themselves in my mouth at the time. It's almost as good as having a plan.'

‘If I did that, I'd probably tell her about . . . you know . . . and she'd be devastated.'

And she isn't now?
‘Why did you split up? I mean, if she doesn't know about,' I waved my hand about expressively, ‘why are you apart?'

Mel looked about him, checking the coast was clear before he shouted more of his love life story above the music.

‘COME DANCE!' a student screeched in our faces. Young, dark-haired, not as pretty or sophisticated as Claudine.

‘No,' Mel laughed. Almost like an ageing uncle telling his young niece he didn't want to dance at her older sister's wedding. (Well she wasn't going to be talking to me, was she?)

‘Oh, come on!' she persisted, she grabbed his hands, pouting. ‘Don't be an old git!' Did she give me a sideways glance, when she said ‘old git'? Cheeky cow. I should get out there, show her what dancing's all about. Or just slap her.

Mel gave me a ‘should I? Well I'm going to anyway' look. I dutifully took his beer and his carrier bag of cans from him.

The young lady dragged Mel out into the middle of the living room, elbowing aside anyone who had the audacity to get in her way. She had her man and she was going to make sure everyone knew it. She soon wrapped herself around Mel, arms around his neck, body welded to his. She was angling and positioning herself for a kiss, her head kept looking up at him from a side angle, just perfect for him to lean down and place his lips over hers. She was the student who'd invited him to the party, I'd guess. And she'd taken it as a personal come-on that he'd shown up. If I was her, I would – I'd once taken it as a declaration of love that Drew gave me 10p because I didn't have enough to buy an ice-cream; a man coming to a party that I'd invited him to would've meant he was proposing marriage and offering painless childbirth. It wouldn't occur to her – or me if I was in her position – that he'd come out to escape the silence in what would've been his marital home.

Mel openly wasn't interested. His body moved in time with the music, but his attention moved everywhere, settling nowhere. And it went nowhere near the woman who was attempting to become his second skin.

In a microsecond of silence between tunes, the atmosphere charged up, someone stuck the whole room into a plug socket and flicked the switch. I felt the electricity of the moment bolt through every cell in my body. Mel froze mid-dance, as though someone had just pressed the pause remote at him. But it was just his body that froze, his face mutated itself into the very picture of horror and terror, his eyes fixed to the door that led from the back door. I looked to the door. Claudine. She was ex-Met. He was ex-Met. The party was Met. It'd stand to reason she'd be here.

Now, from Claudine's standpoint, this didn't look good. I could clearly see how this might come across: Mel, who'd been confessing love and all sorts to her, who'd been saying ‘leave your boyfriend' without actually saying it, was dancing rather closely with a good-looking young student. Those last two adjectives (‘good-looking' and ‘young') and one noun (student) when applied to someone Mel was dancing with weren't going to help matters, either. From Claudine's point of view, these weren't the actions of a man who's madly in love with you. Or even in love with you.

Claudine wrenched a smile across her face and came into the room, followed by her friends. Not lecturers at All Souls, but most of them were her age, well-dressed and very sophisticated. (That was how I wanted to look, all the time. Well-dressed and sophisticated, even if I wore a bin liner. And, whilst one of them looked like she was wearing a bin liner, she still looked sophisticated. I bet her farts smelt of flowers, too.)

Mel extracted himself from the student and, smiling, went to Claudine. The student followed him, stood beside him as Mel and Claudine talked. It was quite comical really. The student slung her arm around his waist every other second and Mel kept shrugging the arm off, while talking to Claudine. No matter how much he removed the arm, the following second, it tried again to re-establish itself on Mel's body. She didn't even seem to mind the fact he was completely blanking her. Mel and Claudine talked for a bit, then Claudine gave the most bothered ‘I'm unbothered' shrug and stalked across the living room with her friends. They were soon surrounded by the men. Real men. People who were nearer my age than the rest of the students' ages.
Where the hell had they come from?
I thought as I watched them salivate over Claudine and her friends.
I've been here since, like, for ever and I didn't notice one single eligible man and now they've all come out of the woodwork. That's fair, isn't it?

Mel, followed by his student, came back to me, snatched his carrier bag from me. He raked his hand through his hair a few times, all the while glaring at Claudine. ‘I'm going home,' he said. ‘Do you want to come with me?'

Clearly, the best offer I was going to get all night.

chapter thirteen

Cheat

Mel made angry tea.

That's not tea that was called angry, he made tea angrily, huffing and puffing as he slammed cups onto the breakfast bar, then slam-dunked tea bags into them. Having said that, if
Like Water For Chocolate
was to be believed, all his anger and frustration would come through in the drink and I'd soon be choking on his fury by simply taking a sip of the tea. As it was, I was too scared to tell him I didn't drink proper tea unless it was an emergency.

He lived about three streets away from the party and it'd been an angry pound from there to his house. Part of me had been scared. Not that Mel was a scary man,
per se
, it'd been his nefarious mood upon leaving the party. Of course, the other night I had thought he was kill-and-bury-you-under-a-patio material. But, even in the dark of the party I could see he needed a friend.
And, yes, all right, all right, brain, I'm not meant to be doing this sort of thing any more, but you try walking away from someone who's suicidal
.

Mel wasn't overtly suicidal. Mel wasn't booze and overdose, or take a shotgun to his chin suicidal. He was down a bottle of whisky and go pick a fight with a really large individual suicidal. He would get the living daylights beaten out of himself, to hurt physically so he wouldn't hurt emotionally. So he wouldn't have to feel what he was feeling. That's what happens in his situation: first, the only way to douse your feelings is to drink. Then you drink, and drink more. Then, the booze stops helping and the going out being surrounded by other people while totally bladdered stops helping, so the next stop is physical pain. Punching the walls, or going out to pick a fight with an obliging thug so you could get your head kicked in. I'd felt Mel's desperation, his eagerness to be hurt at the party, started to feel desperate too, so, naturally, I went with him.

‘My wife is an interior designer and decorator,' Mel explained as I oohhed and awwed over his American-style fridge, his huge sixties leather chairs, the cream carpets, white walls, padded breakfast stools, fake fur rugs, light wood and chrome fittings. This is how my flat was meant to look. How it was always going to look – until I actually moved and discovered how expensive and time-consuming decorating was.

‘Ah, right.'

‘That's how we met,' he said, plonked a cup of tea on the glass-topped side table in the living room and threw himself into one of the leather sixties chairs. He slumped in the chair, his head hanging, his feet not quite reaching the ground, swinging his legs back and forth. Mel reminded me of my five-year-old nephew and how he sat when he felt unjustly blamed for something.

‘I'd just bought this place. It was a student house the landlord had got bored of running so I got it dirt cheap. I even had money left over to get some decorators in. I found her number in the book and booked an appointment. I went to her office and . . .' Mel stared down into his tea, suddenly less angry, more lost. ‘And she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.'

He paused. ‘We flirted outrageously during that meeting and, of course, I asked her out. She didn't date clients, but she made an exception with me. About six months later, she moved in here. She started her own business in that time and our house became a bit of a show home for what she could do. Philippe Starck chairs, Bang & Olufsen speakers, Habitat rugs, chrome, light wood, Smeg fridges, etc., etc. . . . Her office was upstairs and my office was upstairs too. The rest of the house had to be kept immaculate cos of clients coming round. My room – my office – it's a tip. Always has been. Always will be.'

I sat on the sofa playing with my mug of angry tea.

‘We got married about a year later. We didn't even need a wedding list cos we had everything most newlyweds ask for.'

‘Did you feel that you missed out on starting a new home with someone?' I asked.

Mel's face registered surprise; looked at me as though realising for the first time I was still there. Shrugged. ‘Maybe. Who knows?'