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To that point, my spirits had been rising again. I gave Hannah a look.
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be great!’ she continued, recovering her enthusiasm. ‘We can be Team Dan, and have a secret handshake and special T-shirts.’
The two of them started talking about how they could orchestrate a campaign that, from what I could gather, would turn me into one of London’s most eligible bachelors. And make them rich from having tumbled upon the next big reality TV transformation show.
‘I dunno, guys. I’m… I just said I’d had enough of the humiliation that goes with putting yourself out there on a limb only to be judged wanting by the opposite sex, and your plan is get out there and be humiliated more? But with you two at home taking notes to work up into a full report on the subject?’
‘That’s not it at all,’ said Hannah, giving my hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘It’s really hard to find someone, and we know it’s tough out there — Christ, you should try it as a woman — but we’d be right there to support you. Nobody’s being humiliated, here.’
‘Unless we do decide to send you out to try it as a woman. That might be quite humiliating,’ added Rob.
‘I do have the best legs at this table, though,’ I pointed out.
‘I know. Bastard,’ replied Hannah with eyes narrowed to slits. With a wink she gave me a gentle kick under the table.
‘Really, sport, it’ll be cool. It’s like a big dare. But look at the qualities that make you great. You worry about other people’s feelings, and all that nice stuff. But that’s what stopping you getting in there with women, and where the arseholes and wankers have an edge on you. And everybody is an arsehole or a wanker, so you’re coming in last. Who else do you think would’ve bottled shagging a pneumatic hottie because they were worried about a case of misrepresentation?’
‘Don’t listen to him for moral advice,’ warned Hannah. ‘He’d amputate his right leg and claim to be a bomb-disposal expert to get in your position. But I would say this. You’ve been trying the same thing for years and years, and seem surprised every time it’s proved to not work. We’re just going to help you try some things that are different. What we’re doing is putting you through dating boot camp.’
They really were beginning to think of this as a TV show.
At the first sign of actually having fun, a disapproving waiter descended upon us like a soot cloud. He asked in a barely perceptible French accent — and using only marginally more polite language — if there was anything else we wanted, or would we hop it and stop spoiling the carefully designed corporate ambience of doom? We ordered lattes all round, and pulled faces behind his back.
Taking advantage of the lull in conversation, Rob grabbed his fags and headed outside for a quick smoke before his coffee.
Hannah and I sat silently for a while. It wasn’t that we didn’t have anything to say to each other — we could talk on the phone and email happily about night-out plans or just general nonsense — it was just that when we’d all been hanging out together and there was a sudden absence of Rob, the atmosphere changed. I didn’t know quite how to describe it but the mood was calmer, somehow warmer.
‘Are you all right, really?’ Hannah asked as our glasses of coffee arrived.
‘Myeh.’ I shrugged.
‘You did the right thing, you know.’
‘Hn. Eventually…I let it slide for too long. Thought she might have been into me ‘cos of my sparkling badinage and her good old-fashioned New Year’s Eve drunkenness. But I guess she was thinking of a consolation bunk-up for a sweet old near-widower.’
‘Sounds to me like you were doing all right before the “fiancée” came up.’
‘Maybe. But there’s been enough times when I’ve been the lovely guy at the party who goes off to get the cute girl’s coat so she can go home with the cocky bastard who’s drunk all the decent booze and puked in the houseplants.’
‘Cor, I remember those guys.’
‘And then you married one.’
She smiled affectionately, with the slightest hint of a blush, as we remembered the first time the three of us met — a student party in Manchester. And I’d met Hannah first.
Then she got her sympathetic-advice face back on.
‘You know, we’ve watched you trying to get back out there these last few years, and I just wanted to say — there’s being nice, and there’s being a doormat. There’s waiting for signs and hints, and there’s clutching at straws with totally the wrong women. I say that only because I want you to meet someone who’ll see the absolute doll that we’ve known for all these years. And I think you should try this idea of Rob’s. Worst comes to the worst, it could be fun and something to think back on in your lonely bachelor old age.’
‘Just spoken to Angus,’ said the returning Rob with a consoling hand on my shoulder. ‘As we expected there’s no hope of a second chance with the jailbait. But I did get a bit more on that guy who’ll be reaping the benefits of dating a twenty-one-year-old now determined to prove her breasts aren’t nauseating. That fancy job of his in marketing? He dresses up as a giant ape and hands out flyers for restaurants. More gorilla than guerrilla advertising really. Still, I hear it’s a nice little business and he even owns his own monkey suit. How were you ever going to compete with that?’ he asked, ruffling my hair, and giving me a wink.
‘Is this what I can expect from dating boot camp?’ I replied. ‘Some kind of “knock ‘em down to build ‘em up” exercise? Because I’m down to my constituent parts already. You might want to think about moving on to the good stuff if you want me to sign up.’
‘Oh, you’re signed up, buddy-boy. We’re going home to formulate our plan to turn you into a dating GOD.’
‘Say what you like, I haven’t agreed to anything yet. You can’t make me do anything.’
They looked at each other with another secret smile, and together turned to look at me.
Chapter Two
Bollocks72.
No.
Bumflaps69.
No.
‘Morning, Dan, how are you? Good Christmas?’
‘Not too bad, John. Quiet. You?’
‘Yeah, quiet. See ya later.’
Studmuffin7.
No.
It was the Wednesday morning after the New Year bank holiday and I was back to work. I was not really ready for this.
After leaving Rob and Hannah, I’d stayed up way too late watching old Ally McBeal and Dawson’s Creek box sets. I wouldn’t say it was a guilty secret that I watched these sappy old shows as part of a post-hangover ritual, but it wasn’t something I bragged about. It raised too many eyebrows and questions. It was a bit like vegetarianism, I figured: accepted — almost expected — of women, but when a guy showed an interest he was viewed with considerable suspicion. But it wasn’t as if I had a long bath, shaved my legs, and snuggled up to watch them with a big box of Hotel Chocolat truffles. Although now by even mentioning that stuff I’d created the image of me in a kimono with a towel turbaned on my head crying about Billy dying, hadn’t I?
But anyway, moving on. I was grudgingly accepting the return to the real world — a world I’d happily forgotten about since Christmas Eve. Unfortunately the forgetting had included all memory of my log-in password. My brain, still resenting its second hangover in two days, was being uncooperative as I tried to dredge up whatever combination of naughty words and numbers I’d come up with this month.
Boobies22.
No.
One last chance before I was locked out of the system and would have to go to IT support. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the person in charge of our computer stuff was a stereotypical IT nerd, brimming with sarcasm and distaste for anyone that found themselves in his power. But no, I’d have to call Janice the office manager, the Jill-of-all-trades in charge of virtually everything. Janice who was as beautiful as she was unhinged. And she was pretty unhinged.
I still remember the first day I started here, over two and a half years ago. She stood behind me in a blue summer dress and, smelling slightly of apricots, kept bending forward and leaning gently on my shoulder as she showed me the workings of the file management system. Sometimes her summery blonde hair tickled my neck. It was the kind of delicate incidental physical proximity that makes a man imagine so much more. It was disturbingly reminiscent of imagining myself in love with the new Cypriot girl working at my local barber’s, just because she always brushed against me softly while using the razor on the back of my neck.
That situation caused me to make a fool of myself by suggesting dinner to her after my fourth haircut in less than a month, thereby condemning me for ever after to using the expensive and not quite as good salon two doors down.
Sigh.
Anyway. Janice had followed up the lesson with a quiet gossipy chat about my predecessor, which I interpreted as a manifesto about her power in the office.
Turned out the guy whose job I now had was ‘disappeared’ one day with only mutterings about some form of inappropriate online behaviour emerging from management. I learned he’d been seeing Janice for a while, but dumped her to go back to his ex, with whom he’d had a baby. I was invited to agree with her that this was shocking and atrocious behaviour on his part. It was shortly after this that a ‘routine’ review of the Internet history for his computer had discovered a cache of smut. Janice said it had to be him that was looking at Lonely Farmers Go Wild, as no one else would have had the passwords to get on his computer — excepting herself, of course. She darkly suggested that after he’d got back with his ex finding filthy pictures of slutty-acting old cows was to be expected. A moment had passed when it looked as if she was reliving some moment of righteous vengeance, before she brightly offered to show me where the stationery cupboard was, and invited me to the pub after work to meet some of the other guys.
No, I thought, staring blankly at my monitor, best to try not to disturb her first thing, on the first day back after a long break. Janice was not a person to disturb after a holiday.
I sat and closed my eyes and let my fingers hover over the keyboard, hoping some kind of muscle memory would kick in and my hands would fly over the right keys. ‘Bigwilly90’ suggested itself, and I sat there pondering pressing the return.
‘Back in zis shithole, eh, Danny?’
Delphine Montagne, the new business analyst, shimmered towards my desk, and I blessed again the atrociously sexist employment policies of our creepy boss, which saw the office full of unspectacular-looking men, and decidedly above-average-looking women. Delphine was twenty-seven and gorgeous, she had a lean runner’s body that meant she could wear the kind of archly fashionable high-street clothes always seen in the Metro, and bobbed Hollywood-red hair that must have cost a lot of money to get looking that natural. Her default facial expression was a frown that said she’d discovered the meaning of life, and wasn’t too happy about it. But catch her with the right joke and you could get a girlish laugh out of her that left nearby men grinning like simpletons, and women rolling their eyes. Add to that she was French, and you basically had a combination that knocked me flat on my back, waiting for my tummy to be tickled.
‘Did you get my text?’ she asked.
‘Text? No. Everything OK?’
‘It was New Year’s Eve, just wishing you a happy new year. And also to say zat Alex was being a shit again.’
‘Really? That’s terrible. Sorry I didn’t get it — you know how it is with New Year’s Eve texts…’ I now vaguely remembered having received a message, but I think it was at a point on that long dark night of the soul when I was trying to get some feeling back in my feet after walking through London for two hours in the freezing cold, and trying to work out who was more drunk and morose, me or the cab driver.
‘So aside from New Year’s did you have a good Christmas home in Paris?’
‘Ugh. My family, Danny. My sister. My mother. And then there was Jean who thought that, seeing as I was at home, we could carry on where we left off. And Julien. I will send you an email. Later.’
With that Delphine placed her hand on the back of the hand I had resting on the mouse, and gave me a look of eternal suffering. I watched as she swayed away to her desk, absently leaning further out into the corridor to watch her go. I stayed there, long after she’d gone, with my temple rested on my hand, daydreaming about the first time I’d seen her. It was just a few weeks ago, in her kitten heels and a pencil skirt, using the aisle between the office cubicles like a catwalk, and I’d unselfconsciously stared as she disappeared from view.
Hotpatootie1.
Bingo. I logged on, ready to wait all morning for an important internal email.
Lunchtime arrived, and so far work had been a pretty unproductive place to be. So I’d clearly got straight back into the swing of nine-to-five life. By midday, the majority of the office had passed my desk and, if any rivals had wanted to know how one of Europe’s premier niche trend analysis firms had enjoyed Christmas, I had the data to show it had been not only ‘not bad’, but also ‘quiet’ for nearly a hundred per cent of respondents.
I was waiting for the office-wide email that heralded the arrival of the sandwich man. You’ve got to be quick before all that’s left is a choice of some ungodly combination involving dolphin-unfriendly tuna. While I waited an instant message from Hannah popped up on the screen.
@Hannahmatic : Hey mister. Know any good synonyms for average?
@aDanTaylor : Standard? Regular? Middling? Mediocre? Run of the mill? Pedestrian? Unremarkable? Dull?
@Hannahmatic : In a positive mood for a Wednesday then? You’re not making filling in this profile on soullyforyou.com any easier.
@aDanTaylor : Soully what now?
@Hannahmatic : soullyforyou.com. It’s an Internet dating site, for finding your soulmate.
@aDanTaylor : Are you sure about that? It sounds like a ready-meal range for the lonely and desperate.
@Hannahmatic : It looks good! It was featured in Time Out as fresh and new. Also it’s free, and the alternative costs sixty quid if you actually want to, y’know, arrange a date with anyone.
@aDanTaylor : We’re really doing this? Isn’t this idea supposed to just quietly fade away like a usual drunken resolution to change your life?
@Hannahmatic : No chance. You’re our project for keeping our marriage fresh and exciting. Rob wanted us to join the local swingers, I wanted a new puppy. You’re the compromise.
@aDanTaylor : Jesus…And so far all you’ve got is average?
@Hannahmatic : Oh no! Now I’ve got mediocre height, run-of-the-mill build and pedestrian hair. But I’m putting your eyes down as Mediterranean azure to pep it up a bit.
@aDanTaylor : You realise everyone discounts all descriptions on these things by 20% to counter exaggeration? You’re making me out to be a bug-eyed asthmatic dwarf.
@Hannahmatic : I was just joking, mister. I’m doing a magnificent sales job on you. Taking you down 20% would put you somewhere between Clooney and Gosling. I just realised we hadn’t asked you what kind of woman you’re actually looking for.
There was a question. What was I looking for? What was my ‘type’? I wasn’t entirely certain. Existentially overwrought Parisians, currently juggling a string of humourless and borderline abusive international hunks?
Drop-dead gorgeous IT experts who could learn to understand that their psychopathic tendencies are to the fore just because they’re in need of the love of a good man who won’t mock their choice of the latest reality TV ‘star’ as a personal role model?
Cute PhD students that could excuse the use of a slightly exaggerated account of the loss of a girlfriend to get a hand inside their enticingly flimsy underpants?
I could probably have kept going through the qualities of every woman I’d met in the past twelve to eighteen months, but instead decided to do a quick search on Google Images for the funniest photo I could find of a bimbo with anatomically improbable breasts to send Hannah as an attachment.
What do you mean you knew that that was the time that my boss would obviously come and stand behind me for a chat?
‘Dan, I can see you’re very busy. But I’d like to introduce you to Jamie, our new graduate trainee. He’s starting today in Pharma, and I thought you might have time to show him the ropes a bit.’
My boss, Nigel Pearson, was a scary man. When he got angry he didn’t shout or go purple with rage, he just smiled a bit more. When he was really furious his eyelids also fluttered. I sat, looked at him, then at the giant tie knot dwarfing Jamie’s head, then back at my computer screen with its photo of a famous glamour model, digitally enhanced with Photoshop® to take her chest way beyond the limits that nature imposed on even the most daring plastic surgeon. Turned out the image was also animated, and made giggly kissy noises while the gargantuan knockers jiggled saucily. I looked back at Pearson, whose lips were twitching upwards as my computer kept saying, ‘Mwah! Mwah! Mwah! Ooh!’
I was paralysed with embarrassment, and it was only when a new instant message from Hannah appeared saying ‘Hey you! Don’t be shy! I need totty details!!!’ that I managed to spring into action and shut down all the windows on my desktop.
I hoped maybe the other two hadn’t seen the message, but the cooling breeze on the back of my reddening neck appeared to be emanating from just below Pearson’s manicured eyebrows, and I heard a repressed snigger from the new guy.
Mumbling something about doing bespoke research as a favour to an important client, I said I’d be delighted to give Jamie the low-down on how things worked around here. Not taking my eyes off the pair of them, I then casually leaned over and sharply tugged all the leads out of the back of my computer monitor as the model’s breathy exclamation, ‘Ooh my, what a big boy you are! Yummy! Yummy!’ let me know I’d not properly shut down, only minimised, my browser window.
‘Excellent, I’ll leave you to it,’ said my boss, ‘and can I assume that since you’ve moved on to new research projects it won’t be a problem getting me the presentation on the performance of lightly carbonated tropical fruit beverages against citrus-based market leaders by first thing tomorrow?’
‘Absolutely, no problem,’ I lied, taking like a man my punishment for spending his good money looking up smut. Pearson shimmered away with a noiseless tread, and Jamie grabbed a nearby chair and slumped down next to me, grinning from ear to ear as he swivelled from side to side. Jamie was unusual for a new guy in the office, as he appeared to be reasonably attractive. Not to me, I mean, obviously. But I wasn’t so insecure that I couldn’t realise what women might see in other guys without worrying that maybe I’d been suppressing a fundamental element of my sexuality for the past twenty years. I left that sort of anxiety to my mother.
He wasn’t exceptionally good-looking, but women weren’t that different from men, and a bit of fresh-faced youthfulness could work wonders. He had a confidence that came from being twenty-three and pretty sure, if you could get your MA in consumer responses to corporate marketing practices, you could handle anything the world threw at you. Or maybe it was the energy and enthusiasm of a chirpy ten-year-old in the body of a man that evidently still did sport rather than just watched it that would do it for him. I’ll stop now, because there may be a point where I’ll start thinking my mum might be right. But I’ll just say that energy, positivity, and youthful physical confidence aren’t words you’d use to describe the rest of the male workforce around here.
‘So it’s pretty laid-back around here, then?’ Jamie observed.
Ah, the eager young recruit, still giddy from the job ads and interview process, imagining it was all nice doughnuts in meetings and ‘working hard but playing hard too’ — innocent of the horrors of frontline office politics.
‘Yeah, it’s a great gang,’ I said.
No sense in trying to warn them; they never believed you.
I gave the new guy a quick rerun of the official spiel, told him where he could find the research library and let him in on the secrets of the sandwich man and his wares. I asked him a few questions about himself, and discovered he was the son of a business acquaintance of Nigel Pearson — which would explain how he got past the recruitment process — and that he’d just moved into a new place in Clapham with his mates from uni. They were thinking about having a party. It felt a lot longer than seven years ago when I’d been the same age, and had been planning parties with Rob and Angus for our new place. But I remembered how we felt as if we’d finally grown up.
Jamie and I had a little chat about everybody else in the office, and I cagily tried to fill him in on which of his managers were useless, which were boring, and which were weird, couching everything in as diplomatic terms as possible, in case he became pals with them or it turned out they were related. Never let it be said that I didn’t learn my lesson last year after giving the new girl the inside skinny on Weird Boring Chris on what I later discovered was Bring Your Daughter to Work day. I felt awful, but she would probably agree with my assessment of her useless, boring, weird dad in a few months anyway.
Meanwhile Jamie was most interested in asking — considerably less cagily — about the women in the office.
‘Janice seems really sweet. Is she seeing anybody?’
‘Yes, she’s a…sensitive soul. I think she’s single.’
‘And who were those two over in Mobile Phones?’
‘Monica and Jenny? Yeah, they’re really nice. Both engaged.’
‘On Reception?’
‘Jennifer and Mandy. Single, and just dumped boyfriend.’
This wasn’t so much a conversation as an intro before we both went into a full musical production of ‘Mambo No. 5’.
As Jamie continued to enquire about the office talent I distractedly started reassembling my desktop computer, deleting all traces of the glamour model. Glancing at my email, I saw that the promised message on an emotionally traumatic Christmas from Delphine had arrived.
‘And who’s the one…?’ Jamie mimed an unmistakable expression of Gallic despair, followed by a Carry On look of ‘phwoarr’.
‘Delphine? She’s quite new too. Her life seems complicated,’ I explained.
Just then, John the financial controller went speed-walking by us, and across the office a sudden migration towards the front door had begun. The sandwich man had come. I hustled the new guy to the door as quickly as I could manage, but we were definitely the stragglers, and would be left with the cast-offs of the more skilled lunch hunters ahead of us. Out of politeness I let Jamie have the last sandwich featuring something recognisable as ham, grabbed a tuna, cheese and coleslaw bap, and headed back to my desk to see what trauma had beset Delphine. And how I could best offer a shoulder, or any other body part of her choice, on which to cry.