There’s silence all around, and I take a sip of wine so that I’m not expected to speak.
“OK, we’ll leave this there. For now,” Paul suggests, as if he’s in a police drama and is preparing to switch off the interview tape.
“Are you going to talk to him later?” Miranda asks. But I don’t even get the chance to reply as she continues, “Find out his last name. And get a picture.”
“Oh my God,” I mutter as I drink more wine. I wonder if Joan’s getting this much flak about Geoff fromherfriends.
I don’t text Davey back that night, as I said I would, because I’m a terribly drunk human being by the end of the evening. By the time we’ve settled the bill, we’ve finished all the wine and have finally moved on to Singha beers, which I don’t even like that much, but “one for the road” is hard to argue with.
Paul and Miranda walk me back to my place, which is on the way to theirs. The night is full of Christmas parties chucking out of restaurants and moving from bar to bar. We run the gauntlet of revelers with a smile on our faces that we might not have at any other time of year. Christmas does that to people. It’s that special time of the year when anything goes. Even snogging someone at an office Christmas party becomes the norm, when you wouldn’t snog them in the middle of October.
Miranda trips in her heels and we grab hold of her, laughing.She insists on wearing them, even though she’s incredibly tall. She owns her height. I own my medium stature by only ever wearing flats. I’ve never gotten the hang of wearing proper high heels. I’m like a baby giraffe that’s just been born when I try to wear them. So I don’t bother. But Miranda is a thing of wonder. Men stop and stare, but she has no space for that in her life. Totally oblivious. She has a height criteria that any man she dates has to fulfill, and she and Paul met because they were quite literally the only two people queuing at a bar who were head and shoulders above everyone else around them.
I often wonder what it would be like to meet someone who simply…fits. I’m ready to do that, I think. Even though my life is full of friends, work, family, fun things. Wouldn’t it be nice to share that with someone? To have a cheerleader. To cheerlead with someone. I’m tipsy. I need to go to sleep.
I wake on Sunday knowing that the gym is going to be a hard place to drag myself to. But at least my friend George will be working there. He’s a personal trainer and will only rib me if I don’t go, so I’ll dig deep into my energy reserves.
George and I met in the gym a few months ago when they’d installed a new set of power-plates and I clambered aboard and stood there, looking lost. He showed me how to use them and we ended up laughing, as I was shaken around on what has to be the most unflattering gym equipment ever invented. Never again. Most weeks, when I’ve finished working out, and if he doesn’t have a client to train, we hang out in the café, sinking whatever the latest flavor of smoothie is.
But before I head out to the gym, a coffee with Joan will start me off well, so I message her, gather biscuits, and unlock the back door into my wasteland of a garden. I scout around. I really do need to get hold of some pots, or maybe even a veg trug. I realize I’ve been waiting for ages, and there’s no sign of Joan pulling up her roller blind and unlocking her door. I message her again.Another few minutes go by and I start on the biscuits, toying with nipping back inside, now that my hangover has taken hold, and putting at least three slices of thick white bread into the toaster. I dream of slathering them in salted butter. Still no Joan. I go back inside, heading directly toward the white bread, and pause as I start to push the toast lever down. Joan had her date with Geoff last night. And now Joan is not at home. That’s interesting and also mildly disconcerting. I smile to myself. Surely not?
—
In the gym I’m trying so hard to concentrate on the running machine, but am distracted by a true-crime podcast, so that I’m practically walking as I wait with bated breath to discover who the presenters think the killer is. I should listen to music, so I up my pace, but my head still hurts and I’ve drunk all my water. I need to refill from the water station, but the moment I climb off here, someone will leap on, so I stick it out for the next twenty minutes until George swaggers over. He’s beautiful to look at. Some men are handsome, manly. George looks like a Burberry model. He sees my desperate fitness condition week in, week out and knows that if he keeps staring at me with his baby-blue eyes I might cave in and ask him to be my personal trainer. He keeps talking about long-haul holidays, and I suspect he sees me and my dubious fitness goals as a way toward funding that.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he starts. He’s so ridiculously flirty and actually, shamefully, I quite like it. I am sweating. I am red. I am definitely not gorgeous right now, but I’ve stopped correcting him.
We chat for a while about my fitness regimen. George enthuses about a “wonderful” vegan protein powder that he’s just found, and I nod along as we walk to the water station. Obviously I neglect to mention my white-toast-and-butter frenzy this morning.
My phone dings in my hand and, while George talks about the various flavors, I steal a glance at it. For some reason I expect it tobe Davey, but it’s only 6A.M.where he is right now (I’ve looked up the time difference) and, actually, it was my turn to respond. I must do that.
It’s Joan. I’m desperate to know where she was, and what she was doing. I think I know. It didn’t even occur to me that Geoff might have been an axe murderer and Joan was lying dead in a ditch all this time (why always a ditch—they’re actually really hard to find in London).
I don’t swipe to read her message because George is looking at me, that deadly smile that would melt a lesser woman. I’ve obviously missed something he’s said and have to apologize and ask him to repeat it.
“I just asked you out for a drink,” he explains.
“A smoothie in the café?”
“No. I mean a proper one in a bar.”
“Oh, really?”
I’m too confused and he laughs. “Yeah, you don’t fancy it?”
It’s the strangest reply. How do I answer that? “Er, yeah, OK.” Have I just agreed to a date with George? No, this isn’t what he’s asking, surely.
“Tonight?” he prompts.
“Crikey, you work fast.”
He laughs again. “Not really; we’ve been hanging out for a few months. If anything, this is slow for me.”
Oh. Does he like me? That was…unexpected.
He mentions a bar in the Square Mile. “Meet you at eight?”
“Sure.”
