The Dating Detox (6 page)

‘No,’ I say, looking at his chin. ‘Everyone in this agency works
hard, Andy. If you and your team didn’t spend half the day looking at YouTube, you wouldn’t have to stay late to get the work done.’

I see the account managers smiling at this.

‘It’s creative research,’ he says loudly. ‘We need stimulus. We actually create things, you know…’

God, you’re pathetic, I think.

Suddenly I don’t feel intimidated by him. Right this second, I don’t care if he—or any of them, actually—likes me or not. I am in charge of this pitch, and I am not going to let some charm-challenged man-boy fuck it up for me.

I stand up and look him straight in the eye. ‘Well, for the next month, you and Danny and Ben are going to have to get your creative stimulus outside working hours. This is the most important thing to ever happen to this agency. I don’t want creative to be responsible for losing this account, and I’m sure you don’t either.’

He stares at me without speaking. I stare back. He looks away first. Fucking hell! Yeah!

Danny raises a hand. Gosh, what am I, a teacher? ‘Yes, Danny?’

‘One of the clients at my last agency was Johnson & Johnson. I know the market. I’d like to be involved.’

‘Great.’ Dude, what part of ‘Coop wants everyone to help’ don’t you understand, I think. Then he flickers a little smile at me and I realise he might actually be speaking up to show support to me, and give two fingers to Andy. Double gosh.

Charlotte clears her throat and raises her OPI I’ve Got A Date To K-Night!-manicured hand. ‘I’d really like to be involved too, my team will be able to manage all my existing clients.’ Her ‘team’—two account execs (recent graduates that she works like dogs)—glance at each other in anguish. ‘Is that OK?’

Even Charlotte is treating me like I’m in charge? ‘I’m sure that’s fine. You’ll have to run it past Scott, though.’

She nods. Everyone is looking at me expectantly. What do I say now? Class dismissed? ‘OK, well, see you all the boardroom at 3 pm.’ The office disperses quickly, but the rise in buzzy chatter shows how excited everyone is about this pitch. Shit, it really is a big deal, you know. And Coop asked me to be in charge, kind of.

As I walk back to my desk, Laura beams at me and I wink back. I feel pretty good. In fact, I feel great. I sit down and realise my heart is racing with excitement. I just can’t believe how well that went. I look over. Andy is loudly inviting his team out for coffee. And a Sass-slagging session, I expect. Laura and I are not, obviously, invited.

I’m busy for the next few hours doing work for existing clients, and when Coop comes back and looks over to me with raised eyebrows, I just nod back with a little smile. Everything is fine, dude. Totally fine. The 3 pm brainstorm goes equally well. Apart from Andy loudly denigrating every idea I have, and coming up with none of his own. My brain is 100% dedicated to the task at hand. Men, love, dating—these things are no longer worthy of my time and energy.

As the meeting finishes, I stand up and say ‘Thanks everyone’, mostly to genuinely thank everyone but also as I want Andy to know that he hasn’t beaten me. He ignores me. I grin at Cooper on my way out and he gives me the thumbs up back. I choose to take it as a message of solidarity. Thank God he’s back from Germany. It’s so much nicer sitting in the office without big bad Andy dominating it.

With only a few hours left till the weekend, I settle down to one of my favourite regular jobs: a monthly chatty email to teenage girls about their spots for a skincare client of ours. (When they sign up to the social networking bit of this
skincare site, they’ll get an email a week for a few months. It’s mostly skin-related stuff, and some period/hormone/ hygiene/boy talk. And the odd discount and competitions and prize draws.)

Let’s see…Discover the power of perfect skin. Discover the joy of perfect skin. Imagine perfectly soft, deeply clean skin. Finally, perfect skin could be yours. Picture perfect skin, every day. Transform your skin, and your life. Yikes, that’s a bit much. Let’s go with the first one. Discover is a nice strong active word, and alliteration is always a positive pleasure. Plus, it’s not promising perfect skin. You can’t really promise something like ‘Perfect skin, guaranteed’. You have to just talk about how good it
could
be to get perfect skin. Otherwise—according to the neurotic marketing manager at the skincare company, anyway—someone who uses the stuff and gets a spot could sue. (Really, who would bother?)

The power of positive persuasion. That’s what I’d title today. Coop positively persuaded me to take a bit of a lead role in telling everyone, and I positively persuaded everyone to get behind it.

As I start writing the rest of my peppy teenage copy, I get lost in an odd, reflective mood. Poor teenage girls, I muse. I found it quite tough being a teenager. I was attacked by a shyness bug from 14 through 17, and had a slight stammer/babble problem when I did talk. It’s not exactly unusual: apparently Kate was shy, too. (Bloomie never was, unsurprisingly.)

Some girls must be born knowing how to make life happen exactly as they want it to. I assume they’re not the ones reading these skincare emails, but I’ve seen them on the King’s Road in Chelsea: dewy-skinned, pouty little 16-year-old madams with the air of cream-fed, much-adored cats. I was not one of those girls. When I was 13, my parents moved from London to Berkshire, and I changed from a bookish, liberal little Notting Hill school where everyone was a bit keen and giggly and geeky
like me, to a rather posh, uptight, sporty, country one where the lustrous-haired pouty missies ruled the roost. They looked at me, recognised my stammering inadequacies instantly, and dismissed me. And of course, when someone doubts you, the more you doubt yourself, until you’re unable to talk at all, or at least I am.

That’s when I started the mantra. ‘Posture is confidence, silence is poise.’ The idea was that if I looked confident and poised, I’d feel confident and poised. And people might think I was about to say something brilliant. And then, if I did want to say something, they might actually listen, which might stop me stammering.

In other words, fake it till you make it.

Thanks to my mantra, I survived school. Then I went to university, where I met kindred spirits, particularly in the form of Bloomie and Kate, and discovered I didn’t really need the mantra anymore. Everything is so much easier when you have friends who think you’re funny. Inside every shy girl is a loud showoff dying to get out.

I still grasp the mantra like a security blanket in times of need. Which is basically, when something intimidates me. Like work. Or a bad date. Or, now that I think about it, every time I ever saw Rick, towards the end.

Hmm.

The mantra certainly worked this morning. Everyone acted like I was, well, not to sound too dramatic, but like I knew what I was talking about. But that’s not because of the mantra: I really did know what I was doing, and everyone else knew it too. Fuck fake it till you make it. I made it. I fucking made it.

I just had a good day at work. Not just a good day.

An awesome day.

Thinking this, I stare at the wall for a few minutes till I realise it’s ten to five and my copy is due at 5.30 pm. I push everything else out of my head and finish the email copy, proofread it, and
send it to the account manager. Oooh, the adrenaline rush of a deadline met.

I know I’m breaking my don’t-talk-about-work (or dreams) rule, by the way. Don’t worry. It’s nearly the weekend. All I usually think about on the weekend is what to wear and where to drink. (And in the olden days, who to date.) As I head down to the tube, I skippy-bunny-hop a couple of steps. Then right outside the Crown pub on Brewer Street, I run smack-bang into Cooper coming out of the door with his pint, almost knocking him over in the process. I never go to the Crown. Smart Henry broke up with me there.

‘Coop! I’m so sorry!’ I exclaim, laughing. ‘I was running for the tube…’

Cooper grins at me. ‘You were skipping, actually.’ I laugh even more, and turn to look at the guy he’s with. About 35, very nice grey suit, slightly too-long hair. Rather chiselled cheekbones and bluer-than-blue eyes. I quickly compose myself and look back at Cooper, who introduces us. His name is Lukas, and he’s about to move to London from Berlin to be the UK MD of Blumenstrauße. (That explains the Euro haircut.)

‘Oh, fantastic,’ I say. ‘We’ve been talking about your company all day.’

‘I’ve been talking about it for eight weeks, since I joined,’ Lukas says, smiling at me and holding very thorough eye contact.‘Please, let’s talk about something else. Like…what you would like to drink.’

Is he flirting? ‘Oh, um, I’d love to, but I have to get home. I have plans tonight,’ I say. (Rule 6: No accidental dating.) ‘Thank you, though. Lovely to meet you. I’ll see you soon.’

‘Yes, you will,’ he says back. ‘Very soon.’ His German accent is mild, and gives his words a nice clipped sound. ‘Have a good night.’ Definitely flirting. Slightly sleazy. Probably a bastardo.

‘See you Monday,’ says Cooper.

I hurry down to the tube, running over everything that
happened today again, and realise I should try to put work out of my head and think about what to wear tonight. Normally I’d have had that sorted by about 10 am. God, what’s happening to me?

The party is just getting underway when Bloomie and I get there at about 9 pm. On the way, I reread the Dating Sabbatical Rules, and then fold them up and tuck them safely in my lucky yellow clutch. I’ve resolved to never be without them.

Mitch lives in the far back end of Chelsea, almost in Fulham, in a fully party-proofed little flat: there’s a tiled, wipe-clean kitchen, a living room with—this is key, I’m sure you’ll agree—no carpet, and a not-particularly-nice back garden that can’t get ruined. Despite cosy appearances, it fits over a hundred people with the appropriate social lubricant (gin, vodka, beer, wine). Right now, only about 15 people are in the front room, mostly playing that never-ending party game, No My iPod Playlist Is Better, and a few more are in the kitchen. Bloomie dashes off to join them and unload her goodies.

I see Mitch supervising the iPod war, kiss him hello, and then feel obliged to kiss everyone else in the room hello, which means I’m basically tottering around darting my head about everyone’s face like a little bird for the next three minutes. Finally, I finish working the room and get back to Mitch.

Mitch is one of my best friends, but forget any ideas you might have about me secretly falling in love with him or vice versa: he spent the first year of university chasing after Bloomie and I, then resigned himself to best friendship, and now professes to find us physically revolting. He’s a banker, like
Bloomie, but I’m afraid he probably is an arsehole, at least some of the time.

He’s also a complete tart, but since he never leads the girls to believe it’ll be anything more than just sex, he gets away with it. Just.

‘How’ve you been, Special Forces? I heard about you and Posh Mark.’

‘Mmmm,’ I say. Special Forces is his nickname for me—because of SAS/Sass. Except when I’m really drunk. Then he calls me Special Needs.

‘Tough luck, though he was too thick by half. But for fuck’s sake don’t talk to me about your feelings. DO talk to me about this intriguing Sex Vacation.’

‘Dating Sabbatical.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Big crowd tonight, Bitch?’ I ask. It’s not a very clever nickname, but it makes us laugh.

‘Don’t change the subject…But about seventy or so, I should think,’ Mitch says, scanning the tight-white-jeans-encased bottom of a girl in the iPod group. He turns to me. ‘I’m a trendsetter, you know. These parties are totally recessiontastic.’

‘Huh?’ I say.

‘Houseparties are the new going out. Front rooms are the new Boujis Beer is the new Cristal.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Where’s Gekko? I need to talk to her about a work thing later.’

‘Kitchen.’

Mitch calls Bloomie ‘Gekko’ in a rather sweet Wall Street reference—she says she hates it, but I’m not sure she does. He walks through to the kitchen, high-fiving and low-fiving people all the way. Mitch is good at collecting people. Most of the crowd tonight will be our university friends, and then satellite friends from everyone’s work, school and extended family. Being part of this
insta-crowd makes living in London a lot easier: an ever-evolving gang without too much effort. My first year in London, pre-Mitch and Eddie and Bloomie and Kate joining me, is barely worth talking about. I call it The Lost Year, the one before I went out with Arty Jonathan. I spent most of my time getting drunk with the other new, green Londoners in horrible chain bars, and taking nightbuses back to Mortlake, an area in South London that you can only get to by buses and sheer willpower, where I shared a manky little flat with four strangers. Then, thankfully, the old group all moved to London and I quickly phased out my new friends for the cosy reassurance of my old ones.

‘Sass! I hear you’ve become bitter!’ says Harry, a podgy architect who’s been involved in a passionate conversation about Jack Johnson for the past few minutes. He was skinny on the first day of university. His shirt now strains against his gut so tight that I can see the cavernous shadow of his belly button. I smile at him and don’t say anything. He adds cheerfully, ‘Sworn off all men!’

The rest of the iPod-battlers look up and grin.

Holy shit, my friends are gossips. Looks like news of my Dating Sabbatical has hit the streets. Rule 4: avoid talking about the Sabbatical.

‘I’d rather swear off them than under them!’ I reply cryptically. I’ve made better comebacks, but I decide to pretend it was a killer riposte, raise a knowing eyebrow at Harry and swan off to the kitchen to find Bloomie.

Despite work very nearly getting in the way of a timely sartorial decision, I managed to come up with a rather soul-cheering outfit. It’s a rather short fitted black mini dress with sheer black tights and ankleboots, and my hair done in a rockabilly-quiffy-ponytail thing. (Yes, yes, why I am dressing as a Robert Palmer girl meets Elvis when I ostensibly don’t want to attract attention is a mystery to me too, but old habits die hard. Anyway, ‘drop your style standards’ isn’t one of the rules.)

Bloomie is standing at the counter, a cigarette jammed in the corner of her mouth like a cowboy as she manhandles a bottle of vodka, a bottle of blue Curaçao, a punnet of blueberries and a blender lid. Eddie—one of my other best friends in London—is standing next to her, holding two bottles of Morgan’s Spiced Rum, a bag of bananas, a coconut and some mango juice. This is the point of Mitch’s houseparties, by the way. We all bring various ingredients, he borrows blenders from everyone who has one (are you kidding? I don’t own an iron, dude, let alone a blender) and we make up cocktails and name them. Yes. It’s dangerous.

‘This is it, kids,’ announces Bloomie as dramatically as you can with a cigarette in the corner crease of your lips. ‘Prepare to experience the most mind-blowingly awesome cocktail since the Knickerless Bloomer.’ That, obviously, was the name of her cocktail at the last party (white rum, coconut milk, Malibu, strawberries and a pinch of cinnamon).

‘No fucking Malibu this time,’ calls Mitch, as he leaves the kitchen with a round of shots for the iPod brigade. ‘Every cocktail Gekko makes has fucking Malibu in it. It’s like being at school. And stop fucking smoking in my kitchen.’

‘You wish, Bitch, my darling…’ says Bloomie, very obviously more concerned with arranging the ingredients on the counter.

I lean over and kiss Eddie hello. Eddie and I dated for two weeks at university, and broke up for heartfelt reasons now forgotten. (He doesn’t make the list as one of the official breakups, obviously.) Eddie’s been in a long-distance relationship for the past two years with a girl called Maeve who lives in Geneva, of all places. They see each other once every two months, and he doesn’t even talk about her much. I secretly suspect he’s just lazy and doesn’t want to bother to play the field. Eddie’s an engineer. What he actually does all day, I just don’t know. Builds things?

‘What’s shaking, Edward?’ I ask.

‘Not much,’ he says.‘My sisters are in London tomorrow night. They’re going to Spain on Sunday. Wanna help me entertain them? Dinner, somewhere cheap and cheerful in Notting Hill?’

‘Good luck finding that,’ interjects Bloomie.

‘Love to,’ I say. ‘Love the lovely sisters. How’s Maeve?’

‘Good, fine, she’s fine. Now, do you know how to open a coconut?’

‘“Open” a coconut?’ I repeat.

‘I’m making a tropical punch.’

‘What a stunning idea,’ I say.

‘Not original enough for you, my little creative bunny? Fine. Here’s a twist for you: when someone drinks it, you have to hit them in the face. Get it? Tropical punch.’

I start to laugh. ‘Take my fag, darling,’ Bloomie interrupts. This darling means me, I know, so I reach over and take it from her mouth, and she immediately whirls around and throws her hands in the air. ‘Everyone! I have a secret weapon! I have a pestle and mortar and I shall be muddling blueberries with sugar as the base for tonight’s winning cocktail!’

The crowd in the kitchen laughs and whoops. After a few minutes of muddling, and some blending of ice, vodka and Curaçao, she pours the cocktail into about 15 of the many double-shot glasses Mitch purchased specifically for his parties. She raises her glass: ‘A toast to the Blue-mie Moon!’ and drinks it. We all repeat ‘the Blue-mie Moon!’ and follow suit. (If this drink takes its inspiration from the mojito, then it’s a long-distant, slightly inbred, unpleasantly blueberry-skin-filled cousin.) The night has begun.

An hour later, and we’ve had Mitch’s Marvellous Medicine (tequila and crème de menthe; disgusting), the Molasses Fiend (this one was mine, and if I may say, it was a toffee-espresso delight), a Deep Deep Burn (Tabasco—need I say more?) and a Bite Me (butterscotch schnapps and Baileys, garnished with crushed up bits of Crunchie). Eddie has been banished outside
to wrestle with the coconut and a large cleaver, and someone new has discovered, as someone new always does, that blending lemonade and ice leads to tears.

Bloomie and I have taken up our customary early-party position perched up in the big kitchen window, so we can hold our fags outside and comment on activities inside at the same time. It’s a delicate operation in a mini dress, but the adroit placement of a teatowel over my thighs sees me through. The best thing about sitting in the kitchen window, of course, is that it’s low-effort socialising: everyone comes in when they arrive to say hello and try a cocktail or five before situating themselves near the booze-and-ice buckets planted strategically around the living room, stairs and garden.

I tell Bloomie about my night with Kate, and the finger-gunning Yank. She cackles with laughter.

‘I also had some rather good stuff happen at work today,’ I grin, and waggle my eyebrows.

Bloomie whoops. ‘About fucking time, darling. Did you bitchslap them back into place?’

‘Something like that,’ I say. ‘I won’t bore you with the details…Where’s The Dork?’

Her face goes gooey with happiness. ‘On the way. He just texted me. He had to have dinner with his sister tonight. She’s pregnant. Her name is Julie. She lives in Paris. She sounds really nice.’

I am shocked. This kind of babbling is entirely unlike Bloomie and utterly delightful to see. We smile at each other, but before we get caught in a sickly-sweet moment I quickly turn my smile into a manic, scrunchy-nose-frowny-pig grin and turn my face back into the kitchen…just as an utterly divine man walks in from the living room.

He’s very tall, with broad shoulders and dark hair. And his eyes are locked directly on my scrunchy-pig face. Shit. I quickly try to set my face to pretty, but it’s too late. He’s already glanced
over me and back to the group of people he walked in with. Good thing I’m not in the market to get attention from men, I say to myself.

Bloomie swings her legs back in. ‘Mitch’s cousin is here!’ she says to me. That’s Mitch’s cousin? I think. Mitch is blond and skinny. She hops down from the window sill with the careless aplomb of someone wearing jeans, and skips through the crowd shouting ‘Jake!’

I ease my way down delicately and decide, Dating Sabbatical or not, I can’t quite face meeting a good-looking man named Jake who just saw me looking like a pig and will therefore dismiss me without a second thought.

Instead, I turn to see what the current mixologist is up to. It’s Fraser, another old friend from university. He’s looking his usual prematurely middle-aged self in corduroy trousers and a slight belly, and is pulling Valrhona chocolate powder, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, full-fat milk and a bottle of brandy out of an Ocado delivery bag. We kiss hello.

‘Help me!’ he says. ‘How the bugger do I work this godawful contraption?’

‘It’s a blender, sweetie,’ I say. ‘Holy fatgrams, Batman, what the sweet hell are you making?’

‘Dessert cocktail. Had one on a date the other night. Ruddy nice, actually.’ Fraser’s dad was in the army and Fraser talks just like him. Gruff, with very abbreviated sentences and archaic curse words.

‘The cocktail or the date?’ I ask.

‘Cocktail. Date got blotto and threw up. Waste of a night, actually. Think I was boring her.’

‘No way,’ I say. ‘Not possible.’

It’s entirely possible, if he started talking about the history and structure of the British Armed Forces. He’s such a lovely guy, but this is probably the fiftieth bad-first-date story I’ve heard him tell.

‘She clearly has a drinking problem, Fraymund,’ I say, as we finish measuring in the ingredients and press blend. ‘Onwards and upwards. Now, what are you going to call that? The Muffin Top? The Spare Tyre?’

Fraser laughs. ‘I was going to call it the Dessert Cocktail.’

‘Good call,’ I say. We pour the thick concoction into the glasses and ring the large bell Mitch also bought specifically for these parties. (He takes them seriously. Did I mention that?) Everyone without a drink crowds round and takes a glass, and Fraser leads the toast (‘The Dessert Cocktail!’), then writes the name of the cocktail on a chart on the wall. It’s delicious, though—unsurprisingly—sickeningly rich. The crowd gives it a seven out of ten. I then show Fraser how to take the blender apart (‘Cripes, it’s like a ruddy rifle,’), blast it with the hose in the sink and leave it upside down on a teatowel to dry, next to the other blenders waiting for their next chance to shine. Fraser starts talking to two girls standing next to the chart about the merits of full-fat milk, and I collect all the used glasses in the kitchen and run them through hot soapy water.

‘This is far too complicated. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned drinking?’ says a voice behind me. I turn around and—you’ve probably guessed it, but it’s true—the scrunchypig-face guy is talking to me. What did Bloomie call him? Jake. I assemble my thoughts quickly.

‘This is drinking on a more evolved level. It’s taken years to iron out the kinks.’

During the last four seconds, I noticed a few more things about him. He’s about six foot three, I’d guess. Slightly crinkly-round-the-edges eyes. Teeth almost straight and very white. Eyelashes dark but not too long. Lips look like they get sunburnt a lot. In short, attractive as hell.

Go-go-Gadget mantra. Posture is confidence, silence is poise.

‘Looks like a slick operation to me,’ he says.

I nod nonchalantly. ‘The last remaining kink is that as the
night goes on, the names and scores become hard to read. So we never really know who the winner is.’