The Love Market (14 page)

‘Why do I feel I’m already screwed?’

‘I don’t know, Mike. If that’s how you feel then why are you here?’

We hold eyes. ‘I want to fall in love. I miss being in love,’ he says. His reproachful gaze cruises over my face. And it strikes me, when he looks at me like this, how much regret is still there. And I want to find somewhere to look other than at his sad, still-loving eyes. I want to. But I am failing miserably.

‘Cute versus sexy?’ I tap my pen on my note pad waiting for his answer. We’ve finished off the wine. Mike has been entertaining me with some of the radio station sexual politics stories that I have, admittedly, missed. I note that the upbeat jazz has been replaced with Katie Melua’s
Nine Million Bicycles
, one of her songs that Aimee and I really like. I can hear Aimee’s little voice droning along to it. ‘I have to have these answers for my personal profile. If you don’t want to—’

‘No, ask away. What was the question?’ He was off listening to the song too. ‘Oh yeah… Cute is sexy, isn’t it? Did you fix the bath tap?’

‘I called someone in to do it, yes.’

‘To fix a tap? I’d have done it.’

‘It’s done.’ My eyes go back to my notepad. ‘Your definition of thin?’

‘Kate Moss. I still don’t know why you’d pay somebody to fix a tap. How much did he charge?’

‘Thirty pounds. Who is a lucky person?’

He tuts. ‘The tap man, I’d say. Easy money for some.’ He sighs. ‘Brad Pitt’s a lucky person if you want to know.’ He starts whistling, sits far back in the chair, stretching his arms across the back.

‘What’s hot?’

‘Somebody who argues passionately but knows when to stop. Somebody who laughs a lot, and isn’t always searching for things they don’t even know if they really want.’

‘What makes you laugh a lot?’

‘Not a lot these days.’

‘What would you have liked to be if you weren’t who you are?’ I press on.

‘Virtually anything that’s not a married human being. A dog. Geese are good too. A walking stick. A postage stamp, then I’d get to travel.’

No, I’m not being hypersensitive. Mike is sticking it to me in this ever so slightly passive aggressive way he has. ‘You’re not batting highly on the compatibility score. I did once have a woman who wanted to be a walking stick, but my geriatric clients were all fighting for her.’

‘You haven’t really started taking on geriatrics have you?’ he asks, his spot of sullenness has past.

‘No. Not yet. But we’re all getting older. We’ll all be on my books in thirty years, if we don’t get taken soon.’

‘Do you want to be taken soon?’

His gaze confronts me. I have to look far across the room, to not see it, and to struggle to keep the tears back. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘That’s a shame.’ He sits far back in the chair, with his legs spread; like a man subconsciously trying to maximise the space he takes up to assert his status, like he does when he’s into you. Or, in this case, perhaps just because he’s more comfortable this way. ‘You deserve to be taken. To be swept off your feet.’

Another Katie song now. Seems like we’re getting the whole Katie CD. It’s too mellow for the occasion, and for some reason makes me feel very sad. ‘Maybe I don’t. Maybe I once was and I didn’t even know it.’

‘Meaning?’ he says.

I look down at the top of the table and feel his eyes burning into the top of my head. The waiter comes and saves the moment by asking if we want dessert.

‘Why don’t you go and find him?’ Mike asks, when the waiter goes again. It’s Mike’s magnanimous capacity to care for me that makes him selflessly detached at the oddest moments.

The restaurant has cleared out, Newcastle folk now having moved on to a bar or a club. We’ve been here a long time. Time always used to just disappear when I was with Mike, that’s how little he bored me. ‘Find who, Mike? And why do you care so much that I find anybody? Can’t you just be a normal divorced, bitter, resentful sod of an ex-husband?’

He shrugs. ‘Find anybody. Someone who is a vast improvement on what you had.’

‘But that would be difficult in many ways.’

‘You know, you almost sound like you mean that.’

I have to drop my eyes from his. ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him, my voice rasping.

He cocks his head. ‘What for?’

‘Everything left unsaid.’

We sit like this for a while, wordlessly, as Katie sings
The Closest Thing to Crazy
. Then he says, ‘the things we painfully find out long after it stops mattering: just because you’re in love doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy. And just because you’re not in love, doesn’t mean you’re going to be any worse off.’

We study each other until my eyes smart from the raw burn of his gaze.

‘You and your fake dates,’ he says, not bitterly, and I look away through a cast of tears. ‘You know, I always imagined that while you were out there dining with your Jims you were secretly hoping for an opportunity to jump ship.’

I look at him, sadly. ‘With a belief in me like that is it any wonder that we’re divorced?’

‘Why are we divorced?’ he quickly asks. ‘I mean, I know, but I don’t know.’

I look at him now and he holds my eyes so grippingly that I am deadlocked there.

I think of him saying to me, ‘I can’t be with you when there is not a doubt in me that I am somehow holding you back.’ I had wanted to ask him, From What? It seemed he knew, maybe more than I ever did.

‘Don’t do this Mike,’ I stare at a spot far across the room again. I can feel him staring at me, his eyes soaking me up.

We sit in silence until the bill comes. The lad watches while Mike puts down the money, says a grudging “thanks.” Mike never was a great tipper. I can almost read the young lad’s thoughts:
you greedy Ferrari-driving bastard.

As we walk out, Katie Melua is singing
My Aphrodisiac Is You
. I reckon we couldn’t have picked a better time to leave.

~ * * * ~

When I get home, Jacqui, who has been minding Aimee, looks up from reading a book, cross-ankled, on my couch.

‘That bad?’ she studies my face.

I flop down in the armchair. ‘I should never have agreed to do it.’

‘Do it and call off the debt.’

‘I don’t feel there is a debt.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Yes I do.’ I pick up the cat and cuddle her.

Jacqui studies me for a long while, then says, ‘Do you want the good news, or the better news?’

‘Both. Please.’

‘Patrick rang.’

I blink. ‘What’s the better news?’

‘There isn’t any. That’s it.’ She smiles. ‘Actually, he was phoning from his hotel in London.’

‘London,’ I say to myself, but out loud.

‘Shouldn’t you be there with him right now?’ she asks. ‘What are you waiting for?’

My father has an appointment at the dentist’s. He has to get his upper wisdom teeth removed, and asked me if I’d go with him. When he’s on the phone I say to him, ‘Dad, do you think that it’s ever a good idea to go back? That if you have something that was almost perfect once with somebody, you can ever recapture it?’

‘What has this got to do with my teeth?’ he asks.

‘Not a lot. But I was just—’

‘Love is love,’ he interrupts me. ‘If the person’s state of mind hasn’t drastically changed, then those feelings never change. Whether it’s a good idea to go back is another question.’

Then he surprises me by saying, ‘But I don’t know why you’re thinking this. You obviously divorced him for a reason.’

~ * * * ~

‘I don’t understand,’ I tell him in the car. ‘If you’ve had your wisdom teeth for seventy-five years, what’s the big rush to get them out now?’

He sits beside me in his navy blazer with the brass buttons, the red handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket. He looks paler than normal, his hands clenched into fists on his thighs.

‘How about I ask you a better question? Are you getting back together with Mike?’

I glare at him. ‘No!’

‘Well you should,’ he says. ‘That is, if you love the man. If you don’t, well, obviously that’s a very different matter.’ Then he looks out of the window. ‘They’re far back, so they’re hard to brush. And besides, the rest of the teeth are crowded, so once they’re gone, the top teeth will finally have room to stretch out.’

We shoot each other a suspicious glance, then he directs his gaze out of the window again, and seems to refuse to look at me.

I sit reading a well-worn magazine while he’s in the chair. There is a whirring of dental instrument noises, and the dentist’s pleasant and reassuring voice from time to time. A radio quietly plays chart hits. The receptionist makes dinner plans on the phone with her boyfriend.

And then, after about an hour, my father reappears with the dentist—a tall, serious-faced but not unattractive man—walking him out.

‘All right?’ I stand up, as my dad manoeuvres toward the reception desk, mopping saliva from his chin with his red hankie.

‘He’ll be fine,’ the dentist smiles at me. He has a nice voice, and manner. I tell him, ‘thanks.’

The receptionist confirms he knows which mouth rinses he has to do, and tells him she’ll ring him in a day or two to see how he’s getting along.

We leave. My dad still hasn’t spoken.

‘Are you sore, Dad?’ I lay a hand on his arm.

From behind his hankie, he mumbles oral hieroglyphics.

‘Go on then, give me a little look.’ I reach to pluck his hand from his face.

He swipes me away, mumbling a mouthful of invective. And it’s only then that I catch a glimpse. His greying, peg-like teeth have gone, and a set of skittle-like creations, the colour of double churn butter, have mysteriously appeared in their place.

‘Say cheese,’ I coax him, as we wait for the lift. I’m dying for another glimpse. Has my dad really got dentures?

He turns his head away, like a dog whose mouth you are trying to remove a bone from.

‘Go on. Please. Cheese.’

He turns his head away more. His hands are still clasped into fists by his sides; his small shoulders square and rigid.

‘Hah can hawk,’ he says.

‘What was that?’

‘Hi said, hi can-t hawk,’ he repeats himself, slowly.

‘You can’t talk?’ I say, cottoning on. ‘Ah! You should have told me!’

We walk to the car. Driving home, I steal glances at him when I hear the sound of tiny chomping noises coming from him.

‘Heep your eyes on the hoad,’ he growls.

‘Okay!’ I say. ‘I’ll keep my eyes on the road. Like any good driver.’

I met Jennifer Platt a few weeks back when I was posting an ad for The Love Market on the bulletin board of an exclusive Jesmond tennis club. Jennifer works there part time, while she is trying to get a home business off the ground making gourmet meals for National Express East Coast—the North East to London train line. What struck me about her was the fact that here was a pretty lady with a brain and ambition, who seemed to be the real thing. She said she would never have considered going to an introductions service before if she hadn’t met me personally first. I’ve agreed to take her on and waive my fee, mainly because I know she’s not well off, and I can think of a few men who are going to be interested in her. She’s got virtually everything (minus the hair colour) that the modern man goes for. Yes, the textbook male client, as written up in the Daily Mail, wants a five-feet-eight inch blue-eyed blonde, who is an extremely fit size twelve, who rents rather than owns her own flat, and makes less than twenty-five grand a year. I just want them to occasionally surprise me.

We meet in Deb’s Tea House in Jesmond, near where she lives.

The first thing she says to me is, ‘I’m nervous about getting back out there. It’s been so long. I was married for eight years. I don’t know how I’m going to cope with someone else’s sexual preferences, navigate someone else’s body. What if I’m no good?’

Haven’t I spent nights wondering the same thing? Dreading stripping off for someone new? Having to adjust to a new pace? Third date pressure—or is it second now? Wondering if there are new sexual positions that have rendered what Mike, Patrick and I have done passé.

I can see that Jennifer’s temperature has risen just by talking about this so I instantly rule out two of the men that first came to mind for her because their sexual personalities might be a bit too intimidating for her.

‘Don’t ever think in terms of you being inadequate, Jennifer. No man who is lucky enough to be in that position with someone as lovely as you is going to be worrying about your skills or adequacy.’

Wish I could take my own advice.

She smiles. ‘That’s very kind of you, thanks.’