The Single Girl's To-Do List (12 page)

‘No, that’s fine.’ Mum wandered back up to the table and absently stroked my head as she sat down, knocking half my hair down. ‘Yes, tomorrow. Blessed be.’

Blessed bloody be.

I necked my wine and then smiled as genuinely as I could. Which probably wasn’t very.

‘Anything you want to say?’ Mum asked.

‘Paul ate all your pizza.’

‘Rachel thinks you need a boyfriend.’

‘Children,’ my mum sighed, rubbing her forehead. ‘I should have just had cats.’

‘Couldn’t agree more,’ Paul raised his glass.

‘Or at least stopped at one,’ I replied. ‘Definitely just stopped at one.’

After Paul had finished eating everyone else’s dessert and I’d spent a thrilling twenty minutes on the 214, trying to avoid making eye contact with a scary-looking tramp obsessed with singing the entire score of
The Little Mermaid
, I arrived home to an empty flat. A Post-it from Emelie explained she’d had to go home to pick up some stuff she needed for work and that she’d be back late. An overly complicated note from Matthew told me he needed to pop home to do something but to call if I needed him, which I assumed meant he had a date and didn’t know how to tell me. Well, I had to be home alone sooner or later.

Sitting on the sofa, staring at the blank TV screen, my brain immediately started flitting around. I wondered what Simon was doing, how I was going to pay the mortgage on my own, when I was supposed to start my next job, why I still hadn’t bought Matthew a birthday card for Saturday. There was only one way to shut myself up when my brain started messing around like this. Picking my handbag up from the floor where I’d dropped it, I fished around for my notebook. A list would help. I had so much to do. Except, well, I didn’t. Without a boyfriend to look after, there really wasn’t anything that
had
to be done – besides my to-do list.

Feeling one of Emelie’s promised horrible lows coming on, along with an almost overwhelming urge to call Simon and beg him to come back to me, I picked up my phone. My hair couldn’t take another funny turn. And he had said to call if I needed him.

‘What’s up?’ Matthew answered on the first ring.

‘My mother’s a witch and my brother’s an arsehole.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say about your mother.’

‘She’s joining a coven,’ I said, holding the list up in front of me. I was literally itching to put a line through something. ‘I got fired today.’

‘Did you finally punch Dan?’

‘I called the model a vacuous oversexed cow,’ I yawned.

‘Is she?’ I heard some skittering around in the background, hushed words not meant for me.

‘Yes, but that’s not the point,’ I replied. ‘I’m blaming my hair. It makes me do things I would never do. Is someone there? Is this a bad time?’

‘Yes but no, I can talk.’ He clearly didn’t want to go into more detail than that so I let it go. ‘And you’re missing a vital fact here. You did do them. Maybe you’ve always been a redhead at heart. Have you done anything on the list today?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I really wanted to, but what with work and dinner with my mum, today just sort of got away from me.’

‘It’s not too late: go out and rob an off-licence,’ he half joked. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah, I thought I might do some online shopping or something.’ I pulled my laptop out and rested it on my belly. ‘I still need a dress for my dad’s wedding. Because I need all the dresses now. And, you know, actual clothes.’

‘You did get a bit brutal on the clear-out,’ he replied. ‘Women have got the internet all wrong, though. You know it’s really only there for porn, don’t you?’

‘And for ex-boyfriends to humiliate you in an international public forum.’

‘And for that,’ he admitted. ‘You haven’t been stalking him, have you? Take it from an expert, it’s really not worth it.’

In the first few post-break-up weeks, Matthew hadn’t taken his eyes off his phone. He was constantly checking for status updates, new photos, comments on friends’ notes. Anything that would give him a clue as to what was happening in Stephen’s life now that he was no longer a part of it. It was like cyber self-harm. And only now could I completely understand the draw.

‘You know what we could do.’ I opened Facebook, hovered over the search box and then began typing in a name. ‘We could stalk my first crush instead.’

‘Oh, we could.’ Matthew suddenly sounded animated on the other end of the line. ‘That would be fun and nonviolent.’

‘I was sixteen,’ I reminisced. ‘His name was Ethan, he was gorgeous and I was completely obsessed with him. It was all very late Nineties David Beckham. He was the trumpet player in this summer orchestra thing I went to.’

‘You were in an orchestra?’ I could hear him trying not to giggle. I hoped it was at me and not as a re action to anything else that might be happening in his flat. ‘What did you play?’

‘Violin. Badly.’

‘Did that put Ethan off?’

‘I can’t imagine it helped. I sounded like I was trying to abuse a guinea pig. I’m not musically gifted.’

‘I know, I’ve heard you sing.’ Matthew yawned again. ‘So tell me all about Ethan. I’m determined to get you giddy about boys again.’

‘I’m going to get giddy over someone I haven’t seen in twelve years?’

‘Can’t hurt, can it? Little bit of catching up, maybe some online flirting. This is what Facebook is for.’

‘I thought it was for your boyfriend to let the entire world know you’re a used-up old hag who he wouldn’t spit on even if you were on fire.’

‘What’s his surname?’

‘Harrison, Ethan Harrison.’ I tapped his name into the little box at the top of the page. ‘He was blond. And gorgeous.’

‘Like me.’

I let that one sit for a moment.

‘Did you kiss him? Did he touch you up behind the bike sheds?’

‘Sadly not.’ I refused to look at the numbers racking up underneath my shopping cart. ‘He wasn’t interested, I think he thought I was a boy. I did look a bit like a boy, to be fair. It was all very traumatic, lots of longing looks through the music stand, scribbling his name inside my composition books.’

‘I’ve got about seventy-five thousand Ethan Harrisons,’ Matthew complained. ‘Can we narrow this down a bit?’

‘Yep,’ I nodded, looking at the same search page. ‘He went to a different school to do his A levels and then I heard he’d moved to Canada with his family, so try that maybe? I must have cried for about a month after he left, just lay in my room listening to “Eternal Flame” on a loop.’

‘Mine was Ryan Smith,’ Matthew replied. ‘He was such a thug. I’ve never been able to listen to “My Heart Will Go On” since. What a heartbreaker. Are you still looking?’

‘Yes,’ I was down to five possibilities. This was actually quite exciting.

‘Well? Which one is he?’

‘He’s the beautiful one,’ I said, clicking on a photo of my schoolgirl crush, all grown up. ‘He’s the really, really hot one. Dark blond hair, Labrador in the background, father of my future children.’

‘You had good taste as a teenager,’ he whistled down the phone. ‘He is hot. And I never agree with you on boys.

‘What do I do?’ I was actually stroking the screen. ‘What do I do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Matthew admitted. ‘If you were gay, you’d just send him an obscene photo and hope he sends one back.’

‘You’re such a cliché.’ I refused to let him sully this moment with the love of my life. ‘But since I can’t whizz off a picture of my genitals, what should I do?’

‘Cold shower and bed?’ Not a bad suggestion given the circumstances. This was when I realized the more open-to-interpretation items of the to-do list were going to be dissatisfying. Objectives should always be clearly defined.

‘Do I message him?’ I couldn’t get anything out of his profile other than this single pic, but already I’d painted an entire life for him. The photo was just him and the dog, so I’d decided he was definitely single and the dog meant he was loving and outdoorsy. I could be outdoorsy. If I put my mind to it. The shorts and T-shirt combo didn’t give a lot away and he’d cut his hair, which was fair, given that curtains weren’t really a big trend in the twenty-first century. Thank god. But his eyes were the same. His smile was the same. I suddenly had a very strong urge to start doodling Rachel 4 Ethan and listening to ‘Hit Me Baby (One More Time)’. Not that I’d bought that single. Or subsequent album. Cough.

‘Do you want to message him?’ Matthew asked.

‘I want to marry him I replied.’

‘Maybe save that for the second message,’ Matthew advised.

I was still filling in Ethan’s life story when I heard a key in the door. ‘Emelie’s home,’ I told him. ‘I’d better go and put the kettle on.’

‘I know when I’m not needed,’ he said. ‘Use me up then cast me aside as soon as your wife gets home.’

‘Oh, just go back to whatever sordid scenario you were working up to before I called,’ I cackled down the phone. ‘Bye Matthew. Bye nameless, faceless stranger.’

‘Quite, love to the wife.’ He hung up.

I closed up my laptop and took out the napkin. I was going to have to be careful with it – only two days old and it was already looking a little fragile. But then, it was only two days old and I had already completed two of the tasks. My transformation was well under way and I had found my first crush.

‘Em?’ I shouted from the sofa. ‘What are you doing in the morning?’

‘Sleeping,’ she said, clutching the doorframe as though she was about to collapse. ‘I had to go to that Kitty Kitty meeting this afternoon. Honestly, I thought I was going to die. Pretty sure I would have approved Kitty Kitty branded nukes today if they’d painted them Pantone 264 and stuck a cat on them. You?’

‘I called a supermodel a vacuous oversexed cow and got kicked off the set,’ I said, twisting around to see her properly.

‘Fine,’ she turned around and disappeared into the spare room. ‘You win.’

‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ Emelie groaned, her head between her knees as she stretched out in Regent’s Park. ‘Exercising is on your to-do list, not mine.’

‘You’re being supportive,’ I reminded her. ‘And besides, I said I’d come to your crappy charity do with you tomorrow night so shut up and run.’

‘It’s not even nine a.m., you torturous mare.’ She pulled an incredibly unattractive face and then set off ahead of me. ‘Why running? Why not something nice and relaxing like yoga?’

‘Do you recall when we destroyed my excellent credit rating inside two hours on Sunday?’ I reminded her. ‘When the lovely man in Topshop had to call my bank to confirm it was in fact me who was determined to bankrupt myself in such a short space of time?’

‘I have never been so proud of you,’ she nodded.

‘Well, be proud of the fact that I already owned trainers and this doesn’t cost us anything.’

She twisted her head from side to side. ‘Fair enough.’

I hadn’t been enthralled by the idea of running, but the list had to be obeyed and it was the only exercise that didn’t involve exorbitant expenditure or swimsuits. And, as it turned out, an early run through Regent’s Park was lovely. Generally speaking, I was not a morning person. Or an athletic person. But this was just lovely. All of London laid out around us, waking up to another beautiful summer’s day. It was amazing; we’d had more than three in a row. Still, it was forecast to piss it down all next week, my mum had rung to tell me. The BBC and her shaman had both told her so. No Rachel, I told myself, now is not the time to think about whether or not your mother is going to end up working the mines of a Temple-of-Doom-style cult. Now was the time to concentrate on the new you. On your wonderful run. Shake off the cobwebs, get the blood pumping. The park really was beautiful: trees, grass, the odd friendly dog walker to say hello to on the way. Brilliant. This was how every day should start. In fact, I decided, this was exactly how every day would start from now on. The new me was a runner. A redheaded runner who didn’t take shit from anyone and had filthy dreams about doing it with Ethan Harrison in the music room.

‘So my brother said something a bit random last night.’ I ran a little faster to catch up to Em. Damn her ever-so-slightly longer legs and considerable fitness levels. ‘We were talking about my dad’s wedding and he asked if I’d spoken to you about it.’

‘Weird,’ she replied, stepping up the pace a little. Running was fun. Well, maybe not fun but still. ‘Maybe he thought you had forgotten about it and I would have to remind you.’

‘Maybe.’ I was starting to pant a little bit. Good, feel the burn and all that. ‘I just thought maybe you’d talked about it on Friday night.’

‘Well, that would make more sense, wouldn’t it?’ She stared straight ahead, her face hidden behind her giant swinging ponytail. ‘Because you’re hardly likely to forget your dad’s wedding, are you?’

‘Why are you being weird?’ Ooh, bit of stitch there. Not to worry, run it off.

‘I’m not being weird,’ she said, sprinting off even faster. ‘Shut up and run.’

‘Then why is your voice so high that the dog over there is covering his ears?’ My calves were burning but I was not giving up. Not on the running or on what was going on between Emelie and my brother.

‘It’s nothing.’ Em slowed down a little bit until we were shoulder to shoulder. ‘Paul just suggested that I come to the wedding to keep you company.’

‘To keep me company?’

‘Uh, yes.’

‘And did he extend this gracious invitation to Matthew as well?’

‘Uh, no.’

I jogged slowly on in silence for a few minutes, my muscles starting to loosen up. Em slowed down and trotted along behind me, saying nothing.

‘And what did you say?’ I asked once we’d been overtaken by a couple of pensioners. Not embarrassing at all.

‘I said I would go,’ she said quietly.

‘And in what capacity exactly would you be attending?’ I focused on the path in front of me. The muscles that had been loosening up were feeling really rather tight all of a sudden. That was normal, wasn’t it?

‘As Paul’s date,’ she replied. ‘He hadn’t got round to asking anyone yet so I said I’d go.’

I wasn’t sure if it was the sudden sick feeling in the pit of my stomach or the agonizing cramp that got me first but, before I knew it, I was on my arse at the side of the footpath, making some very unattractive noises and gripping my bulging calf. That part, at least, was probably the cramp.

‘Oh shit.’ Em was on her knees in a heartbeat. ‘Rub your calf. It’s just lactic acid, you must not have warmed up properly.’

‘You’re actually going to my dad’s wedding with my brother?’ I asked, tears streaming down my face. ‘Despite, well, despite having met him more than once?’

‘I won’t if you don’t want me to,’ she covered her face with her hands. ‘I just wasn’t thinking. It was after the whole Simon thing and he asked and I said yes and then I didn’t know how to tell you and … you know I’m an idiot. And that I sort of like him and I never like anyone and I know it’s awful because it’s Paul but still, I … I don’t know what to say.’

‘He’s my little brother,’ I wailed. ‘He’s disgusting.’

‘I know,’ she wailed back. ‘I’ll cancel.’

As the pain in my calf started to subside, I looked up at my best friend. She looked gutted. But my brother was such an arsehole. Why was the universe testing me? Wasn’t it enough that my boyfriend had declared me boring and discarded me after one lacklustre shag and taken my toothpaste, without my brother stealing away my best friend? I lay back on the grass, narrowly avoiding a dog turd, hidden carefully from view. Ew. Maybe running wasn’t that lovely. I sat up, shook my head. They were both grown-ups. I couldn’t tell her not to go out with him. Jesus, as if this wedding wasn’t already going to be the shit show of the century, now I was going to have to watch my brother paw my best friend all day long. Aunt Beverley was going to love this.

‘Don’t bloody cancel,’ I sulked. ‘I just can’t believe you’ve got a date for my own dad’s wedding and I haven’t. And don’t you dare say ask Matthew because that’s just sad.’

She threw herself at me in a massive hug and beamed happily. ‘There’s got to be a million people you could ask.’

‘I’m going to have to come up with someone soon,’ I said, clambering upright and trying not to vom. I would just run it off, the cramp and the brother/best-friend-related nausea. Run it off all the way to Starbucks and drown my sorrow in muffins. ‘Any ideas?’

‘A million.’ Em nodded at me to start walking. Bloody leg. Bloody exercise. Bloody list. ‘I could take you to a bar tonight, get a drink and you could go home with absolutely any man in there. Picking up boys isn’t hard – it’s one hundred per cent confidence. But walking up to a stranger and saying, “Hey, want to be my date to my father’s wedding in less than two weeks?” isn’t exactly a big turn-on to most men. Unless you pitch it in stockings and suspenders and pair it with blow-job vouchers. Even then—’

‘But I put it on the list,’ I whined. ‘I have to do it.’

‘How’s that going?’ she asked. ‘The list? Where are we?’

Pulling a face, I tried to pick up my pace a little. Nope. Not a natural runner after all. Shit.

‘It was great on Sunday,’ I said. ‘With the hair and the clothes and everything, I felt amazing. Every time I get dressed in my new stuff it’s like, yeah, I can do this today. And I know it sounds stupid but I really don’t think I’d have told Dan exactly what I thought of him if I hadn’t done it. And I found Ethan on Facebook last night, that was cool.’

‘Wedding date candidate?’

‘Probably a bit far for him to come from Toronto.’

‘Ahh, a fellow Canadian.’ She tightened her giant ponytail. ‘Did you message him?’

I shook my head. ‘What’s the point? The list said I had to hunt him down, that’s all. And honestly, just looking at his photo was enough to send me head over heels in crush with him; I don’t think I could cope with actually talking to him. And it’s not like we were best friends or anything. Wouldn’t it be weird?’

‘Not at all, a little online crush could be just what you need,’ she reasoned. ‘Clear the emotional decks, a little flirting practice.’

‘Maybe.’ I was getting much better at being noncommittal. ‘I’ve got a lot of other stuff to worry about anyway. We only have ten days for me to get a tattoo, bungee jump, break the law, find a real live date to my dad’s wedding, write Simon a letter explaining what a knob he is, buy something obscenely expensive with no money and travel to a country I’ve never visited before.’

‘Nothing dramatic then,’ she suddenly sprinted off ahead. ‘We’d better get cracking, hadn’t we?’

Running lasted exactly seven more minutes before Emelie declared she’d had enough and diverted our course from Regent’s Park to the bus stop. I couldn’t say I was against the idea; there was a slight chance I wasn’t quite the natural runner I’d hoped. And besides, today was going to be a busy day. Today was all about the list. Since Matthew had cleared out everything tainted with Simon’s influence, my flat felt incredibly empty, but at least it meant I could actually sit at the desk in the spare bedroom without tripping over his trainers, a half-empty bottle of vodka or, god forbid, twice-worn pants. Why were men incapable of finding their own way to the washing machine? I’d heard terrible rumours that in New York they didn’t have washing machines in their apartments. I pitied the poor girls forced to date boys who had to actually go out to a laundrette to wash their underwear. They probably crawled down the street all on their own. Pulling aside the curtain so I could see the summer sunshine outside, I set my to-do list, my laptop and a steaming cup of tea down on the desk. OK, I meant business. I felt like tying back my hair and putting on some glasses, only my vision was twenty-twenty and my hair was too short to tie back now.

‘Right, where am I?’ I studied the list carefully. Nope, hadn’t changed. Sipping my tea, I pulled my best Carrie Bradshaw pondering face and peered out into the garden. The point of the list was to catch me up on everything I’d missed out on, to show me how much fun it could be to be single and widen my horizons. So far, it had drained my bank balance, stained three white pillowcases red and given me the subconscious horn. Maybe they were important milestones on the road to becoming successfully single. I wasn’t entirely sure where getting fired for the first time in my life came into it but, surely, there was a lesson to be learnt somewhere. I wanted to believe it was ‘I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any more’ but ‘keep your mouth shut or you’ll be bankrupt and homeless within six months, you complete mental’ was more likely.

I picked up my phone and scrolled through the missed calls. One from my mum, accompanied by a well-meaning voicemail; one from the bank, presumably to ask why I thought it was a good idea to spend All My Money on Sunday, and three from my agent, the first one dating back to precisely one hour post-Anagate. I could do this. I was a big girl. I was in control of my life. I was master of my own destiny. I was ready. Taking a very deep breath and then a sip of tea and then scrolling through a few pages of Asos.com and then another deep breath and one more sip of tea for luck, I pressed redial.

Then hung up immediately and opened Facebook.

Ethan’s profile hadn’t changed in the slightest in the last twelve hours but, given that I could only see one picture and see that he lived in Toronto, that was hardly surprising. The ‘send message’ button on the right-hand side of the screen winked at me.

‘Go on,’ it whispered. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? Worst-case scenario, he doesn’t reply. Best-case scenario, he could be the one!’

My finger was poised on the wireless mouse. One click. One message. It was just a message. How many Facebook messages had I had from people I went to school with? People I went to primary school with? And yes, I’d ignored most of them, but still, I hadn’t shared a Twix with them during a trip to see the London Philharmonic on the fourteenth of August, twelve years ago. That was something. He’d remember that. He’d remember me sitting across the aisle and two rows behind him on the bus. He wouldn’t think I was a freak. But, just in case, I immediately went through my Facebook pictures and untagged any and everything that could be conceivably considered to be unattractive. Gone were the Halloween pictures of me dressed as a Fraggle. Gone were the pictures of me tossed over Matthew’s shoulder. Gone were the pictures of me in a bikini – he could make his mind up about that situation as and when he came to it. Just one message.

I opened up the dialogue box and typed ‘hi’ into the subject. Hi. That was OK, wasn’t it? There was nothing potentially crazy about hi? There was nothing bunny boiler about a simple hello.

Now, for the message. Hi Ethan, I began, I don’t know if you remember me, we were in orchestra together when we were kids.

‘Eurgh,’ delete, delete, delete. When we were kids? Because now I’m a dried-up old crone whom no one wants and so I’ve been reduced to hunting you down online because you’re my last chance at love! How’s it going?

‘They’re always saying Facebook ruins marriages in the
Daily Mail
,’ I whined out loud. ‘Why is this so hard?’ Maybe Matthew was right; perhaps photos of genitals were the way forward. Hey Ethan, Check these out – they’re my boobs. Love Rachel xoxo. This was just too difficult. There was no way to send a message without looking like an obsessive stalker or a sad loser. Until I’d decided which of those was preferable, I’d just keep looking at his manly photo. And keep opening a photo of me right next to it so I could see what we’d look like together. We looked good. And this would be a funny story to tell the grandkids, wouldn’t it? Guess what, before your nana and granddad got together, your nana may or may not have cut herself out of a picture from her dad’s second wedding where her bridesmaid dress looked a bit like a wedding dress and then pasted it into a picture of your dad. Simon once told me loads of guys he knew used Facebook as a porno substitute when they were having ‘a quiet five minutes alone’. I wasn’t sure which was worse, masturbating over the girl in accounts’ holiday photos or Photoshopping pretend wedding photos. Yes I did. Yes I did.