“So, what’s the latest news from the young, free, and single?” she asks, dipping a biscuit into her cup and leaving it there to soak for far too long. I watch, waiting for it to fall into her cup with a dissatisfying floop noise. Joan is no amateur and saves it at the final second. “Last night’s date?” she prompts. “Not still in there, is he?”
“No!” I exclaim, horrified. “I don’t sleep with men on the first date.”
“Anymore,” Joan points out.
“Anymore,” I confirm sheepishly. “I didn’t go.”
“We’ve talked about this,” Joan chastises. “You only live once. How will you know if he’s the one, if you don’t even go on a date with him?”
“I didn’t go,” I say, nibbling another biscuit—this will be my brunch, I decide—“because he stood me up. Or, rather, he canceled. Again. And so that’s it.”
“Are we swearing off men again?”
I shake my head. “No. That way lies madness. But I’m swearing off him.”
“Good girl. On to the next.”
I look at Joan. Does she imagine I have a conveyor belt of men that I’m working my way through? I offer a nod rather than a comment. “What are you doing today?” I ask, happy to change the subject.
“Lunch at my friend Sheila’s, drinks with a lovely man named Geoff this evening.”
“Really? Who’s Geoff?” I dip my biscuit into my coffee, daring to hold it in for a fraction longer than I should. Unsurprisingly, it disappears into the depths of the dark liquid and I’m left deciding whether to drink/eat it or fish it out with my fingers. I do neither.
Joan doesn’t answer. She’s looking into my cup and then raises an eyebrow at me. “Do you want a new coffee?”
I laugh at myself. “No, this one’s still good.”
She hides a snigger. “Geoff’s a lovely man I’ve been introduced to by my daughter. Thinks I’m lonely.”
“Are you?”
“Not really, but no man is an island, and all that.”
A date will be a good thing for Joan. “And what’s he like—this Geoff?”
“He’s very nice. Good-looking. A bit younger than me.”
“Joan,” I joke. “You minx!”
She laughs, enjoying the limelight focusing on her love life for once. Not that I have a love life. Just the distant thought that there might be one. I date. But it’s a string of first dates and I’m exhausted. Every now and again they progress to a second date. Sometimes even a third. And then it all fizzles out. The lure of dating apps and the ease with which we can swipe someone into our lives, then swipe someone out of our lives, means that nowwe’re forever chasing something else, someone else. It’s making us lazy.
I long for those magic days Joan talks about when she met her husband as they both tried to rent the last deck chair on Southend seafront, both finding the other attractive and neither of them deciding to rent the chair. Instead her future husband bought them both an ice cream, and they sat on the sand under the pier to escape the heat of the midday summer sun. Why don’t people meet like that now? I drink my coffee, forgetting there’s a clump of soggy biscuit lurking within its depths, which hits me in the mouth as Joan continues to tell me about Geoff, whose picture she’s seen, but whom she’s never actually spoken to. At my suggestion, Joan fetches her mobile and proudly displays a photo of Geoff.
“Is he wearing a leather jacket?” I ask admiringly. This seventy-something man is trendier than I am.
“He is,” Joan says, then takes the phone back and looks at Geoff’s image. “I do hope he’s not a complete bastard,” she goes on, and I cough out the last of my biscuit-laced coffee.
—
Even Joan’s love life is more exciting than mine, I reflect as I go about the worst part of my weekend—the ritual of cleaning my flat from top to bottom. I save it for Saturday so that it’s out of the way, leaving Sunday blissfully free.
I don’t know why, but I think about Davey, a man I’ve never met or seen a photograph of, but to whom I have spoken. In stark contrast to Joan, who hasn’t spoken to Geoff but who she has seen in a photograph.
If Davey messages me again, as he says he would, I’m going to get brave and ask for a photograph. Would that come across as strange? I just want to know what he looks like now. Maybe I won’t ask next time. I’ll ask the time after that. If he messages, that is.
—
We’re sitting in the pub that evening surrounded by Christmas decorations. It’s the only “old man” pub, as Miranda and I affectionately name it, that’s near us. Brown bar, brown tables, brown chairs, cheap chrysanthemums in dusty jars. But on Saturdays the owner’s Thai wife takes over the kitchen and the food offering moves up a few notches. Paul, Miranda, and I used to eat here every Saturday night before she moved in with him, and it’s a tradition we’re loath to stop, now that the food’s got so good.
