Love @ First Site Read online

  "She's right, you know." Olivia looks at me imploringly. "Michael and I didn't hit it off immediately. It took a good couple of dates before we really clicked."

  I turn my shoulders slightly, so my face is obscured from the parentals, and pull a pained expression, silently urging her to shut up. She complies immediately, her mouth clamped in a firm line.

  Dad rarely gets involved in our girly ding-dongs, usually preferring to sink behind a newspaper and let us all get on with it. But I can see his brow furrowing in anticipation of what he's about to say.

  "Do be careful though, Jess." His face is deadly serious. "I know Mum exaggerates, but it's true that people can pretend to be anything they like behind the anonymity of a computer screen."

  Yes, they can pretend to be single whilst they're probably married, I think forlornly. A depression descends again.

  "Point taken, Dad. I'll be very careful, I promise. I'll meet them only in public places and they'll have no idea where I live." I smile reassuringly and stand up to start gathering the plates, hoping it will move the conversation on.

  When I return from the kitchen, they all stop talking and look guilty. Clearly my unconventional social life is troubling them, but I'm not about to reopen the subject for yet more debate.

  "So, Dad," I say breezily, "what's this invention you're so keen to show us?"

  An hour later, after dutifully enthusing over Dad's swivel car DVD holder, Olivia and I pull out of the driveway in convoy, waving at the parentals standing cozily in their doorway.

  I have barely reached the main road when my mobile trills its distinctive "Dancing Queen" ring tone. The caller ID says "BigSis."

  "How can I miss you when you won't go away?" I quip.

  "Very funny. I want to know all about that sparkless date. What really happened?"

  "Is it that obvious?"

  "Yep."

  "He was great and lovely. But I left out the bit about him doing a disappearing act through the kitchen."

  "You're kidding!"

  "Sadly not."

  "Why did he leave?"

  "Richard thinks it's because he's married and saw someone he knew."

  "No! The bastard."

  "Precisely." I stop at some traffic lights and glance to my right to see a picture-perfect family sitting alongside me in a Mercedes estate car. There's a boy of about four or five who looks like Little Lord Fauntleroy and an angelic baby girl straight from a Pampers ad. The parents are sharing an animated conversation, both laughing heartily.

  I let out a long sigh. "Still, two more dates to go. One of those might look like Brad Pitt--though knowing my luck it'll be his long lost brother Cess."

  Olivia laughs, then her voice turns serious. "Maybe these dates aren't such a good idea after all. As Dad says, they can pretend to be one thing whilst being someone completely different."

  "They can do that in wine bars too," I reply. "Besides, too late now. I'm leaping straight back onto the horse after my nasty fall. I've got another date lined up for tomorrow night."

  Six

  Hello, I'm Larry, and I graduated with a degree in electronic engineering from Cambridge. I often work late into the night trying to unravel the mysteries of microprocessors, but I'm seeking a lovely lady to persuade me there are better ways to spend one's evenings.

  Bruised by my experience over lunch with "Simon," or whoever he may be, this time I'm playing it safe and opting for just a coffee by way of introduction. That way, I can make a quick assessment of his suitability without wasting another few hours of my life.

  We have arranged to meet outside Niketown on Oxford Circus, chosen by me as somewhere highly public and therefore anonymous.

  But I soon realize it's a mistake as the crowds pour through the entrance area, some to shop, others taking a shortcut from the tube exit to bustling Oxford Street. My head swivels from left to right like a Wimbledon spectator, not very subtly trying to spot Larry before he sees me.

  My eyes rest on a disheveled white man with short dreadlocks and a scruffy anorak, looking furtively down the street. Please God, no. He suddenly looks across at me and I rapidly glance away, wondering whether to make a run for it.

  After several seconds of inaction, I sneak a look at him again and am overwhelmed with relief to see his attention has turned to his frayed shoulder bag. His hand reaches inside and he pulls out a rolled-up stack of fliers. Panic over.

  A hand taps my shoulder. Panic back.

  I turn round to find what I presume is Larry smiling anxiously at me. I say I presume because, although the hair is the same sandy color as in the photo he e-mailed me, the rest of his features don't ring any bells at all.

  "Hi." His voice is cracked and squeaky, like a twelve-year-old boy on the change. Perhaps it's nerves, I think benevolently.

  "Hi." I smile. It's a false one, but he probably doesn't know that. "I presume you're Larry?"

  "You presume right. Are you Jess? It's just that you don't look anything like your photo."

  I gasp audibly. "Excuse me? My photo is one hundred percent genuine, if a little out of focus. Which is more than I can say for yours."

  He looks slightly taken aback. "It's definitely me. I was on holiday in Greece at the time, so I was quite brown. Maybe that's what threw you."

  Yes, particularly as I'm now looking straight into the face of Casper the Unfriendly Ghost. Since the photo was taken, I doubt this man has even seen daylight, never mind sunlight. His features are so woolly he looks like someone's knitted him.

  "So let's get that coffee then," I say, inwardly thanking my lucky stars I hadn't suggested lunch. I have decided on sight that I don't find him physically attractive, and I doubt his personality is going to change my opinion.

  I gesture for him to walk with me down to the north end of Regent Street, and as he steps forward he shrinks by three inches before my eyes. I look down to see he's been standing on a step.

  Pasty-faced, cheese-paringly critical, and a bloody dwarf. Great. I mentally decide to make the coffee an espresso.

  Two blocks down, we find a small, independently run coffee shop with a lavish display of gooey cakes in the window, tempting save for the couple of overexcited bluebottles buzzing around them.

  I sit down at a table by the open front window, pleased to have a view of passersby to dilute any tedious conversation.

  "Isn't that a bit close to the traffic fumes?" he says with an expression of distaste. I don't answer and he lowers himself into the seat opposite me like a man being strapped into the electric chair.

  "Now then, what type of coffee would you like?" I pick up the menu and scan the options.

  He shakes his head. "None thanks. I don't drink coffee or tea because of the caffeine, and I don't drink alcohol either. I'll probably just have a glass of still water." And there it was. The seemingly innocuous little statement that sealed his doom. Apologies to all teetotalers, but I could never spend the rest of my life with a man who doesn't drink. I would feel as though I were permanently being frowned upon every time I got a bit tipsy, and to me, so many relationship truths are eased out by the lubrication of alcohol. When wine goes in, secrets come out.

  Hey ho, now all I have to do is get through the next half an hour with laughing boy.

  As he peruses the menu, I take the chance to study him properly. The bronzed, smiling man who beamed out from my computer screen couldn't be further from the squat, pasty-faced creature with a sweaty top lip and mid-length, greasy hair. I doubt he ever cuts it, just gives it an oil change occasionally.

  On the plus side, he has kind eyes, but unlike my Nana, who married Granddad "because he had all his own teeth," methinks a little more is needed to sustain a modern relationship.

  A smiling waitress approaches our table, notepad in hand. "What can I get you?"

  "A glass of still water and an espresso, thanks," I say, silently willing her to bring them quickly and release me from this purgatory.

  "Is that all?"

  I nod,
and she starts to walk away.

  "Hang on," says Larry. "I want something to eat."

  I contemplate writing "Help me, I'm a prisoner"on a piece of paper and smuggling it into the waitress's hand, such is my desperation. But she's looking at him intently, waiting for his order.

  "Are the vegetables in batter cooked in vegetable oil?" he asks. "If so, I'll have those."

  The waitress nods and leaves.

  "Don't tell me," I say, closing one eye and pointing at him. "Vegetarian, right?"

  "Yes. I try to follow a macrobiotic diet too, but it's not easy when you eat out."

  I nod, feigning interest in his dreary eating habits whilst mentally logging that he backs up my theory that most vegetarians look like they've crawled out from under a stone. I glance down at his sneakers and note that they're plastic: He's that fanatical about it. I suspect he wouldn't even wear a donkey jacket on the grounds it involves an animal in the title.

  "So what do you do?" There it is again. The abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here question.

  "I'm an engineer." He sniffs self-importantly.

  "What, like a mechanic sort of thing?"

  He smirks slightly at what he clearly perceives to be my misguided ignorance. "I don't think so. No, I work for British Aerospace, designing engines."

  "Oh." I can't think of anything I know less about. "Do you enjoy it?"

  "S'alright." He shrugs, then shifts in his chair, seeming to tire of the subject.

  I mentally prepare a quick sentence to make my job sound varied and exciting when he asks. But he doesn't.

  "Oh my God!" He's staring at the floor with an expression of abject horror.

  "What?" I look and feel alarmed, worried that a giant snake has just slithered under my chair. But Larry is staring into my handbag.

  "You smoke!" he says accusingly.

  Rather thrown by his outburst, I recoil slightly in my seat. "Um, only very occasionally. That pack is a couple of weeks old now."

  He looks at me as if I have just admitted to part-time membership in the Ku Klux Klan. "You didn't say that in your ad."

  I shrug. "I didn't know it was relevant."

  A slight sneer plays on his increasingly moist top lip. "Of course it's relevant, especially to someone like me. I could never have a relationship with someone who smokes."

  The temptation to stuff all fifteen or so fags in my mouth at once and light them almost overwhelms me. All I can think about is escaping from this dullard.

  Feeling and probably looking much like a battered vegetable myself, I breathe an audible sigh of relief when his food homes into view. The end is nigh. Time for a change of subject.

  "So what films have you been to see recently?" I ask cheerily. "I went to see the new Spielberg movie the other night . . . it was terrific."

  He waves his hand dismissively, a piece of battered broccoli falling onto the table. "Commercial nonsense. I don't see any point in going to the cinema unless you're going to be educated by it."

  Someone remove the butter knife before I throw myself on it. I'm about to reply that sometimes it's nice to just chill out and have fun in life, when he speaks again, his mouth full of unchewed florets.

  "I still can't believe you smoke." He shakes his head to illustrate the fact. "Do you know that every time you light a cigarette you are taking several hours off your life? And quite apart from that, your smoke when passively inhaled by others is the cause of several deaths a year."

  I know I shouldn't expend energy on rising to the bait. I know I should just agree with everything he says, promise to stop smoking and get this dirge-filled date the hell over with. But I can't.

  "My great-grandmother smoked forty fags a day, ate copious amounts of dairy, drank a tumbler of whisky every night before bed, and lived until she was ninety-seven." I look at him defiantly.

  He makes a pooh-poohing face. "A fluke. She was lucky, but just think of all those poor people she killed with her secondhand cigarette smoke."

  "Bollocks." OK, so I'm not Jeremy Paxman when it comes to debating, but it's heartfelt. "I read a report the other day that said the so-called dangers of passive smoking have been blown out of all proportion."

  "Saw it," he says flatly. "The report was commissioned by a collective from the tobacco industry, rendering it totally invalid." He flicks at a small piece of unidentifiable vegetable lodged in the corner of his mouth, making me feel quite queasy.

  "And all the reports saying it's killing innocent bystanders are probably commissioned by people like you, with an agenda to tell the rest of us how to live our lives," I reply indignantly.

  He holds his hands in the air. "Hey, if you want to kill yourself by smoking, go right ahead. Just don't kill me in the process."

  Don't tempt me, I think mutinously, fantasizing about force-feeding him the steaming, bloodied steak just being served up at the next table. What was a minor irritation on my part has now mushroomed into fist-clenching frustration at this man's infuriating sanctimony.

  He's what my father would describe as a wishy-washy liberal but, like so many of them, is anything but. Rather than fight for everyone to have a choice--surely the essence of being "liberal"?--they strut around the place telling the rest of us what we should and shouldn't do with our lives.

  He'll be telling me about the repression of black people next, how they're treated like second-class citizens by an "institutionally racist" society. But he won't get the irony of a white, privately educated, middle-class boy preaching to others about the lot of the poor, underprivileged blacks, as if they are somehow too downtrodden or inarticulate to speak for themselves.

  To my mind, his pompous assumption that the black community would even want, let alone need, someone like him to speak up for them is racist in itself.

  I'm really annoyed now, so I resort to trying to pick a cheap but satisfying argument. "So how old is the photo you posted on the Internet?"

  He looks momentarily thrown. "It was taken about ten years ago."

  "That explains why it looks nothing like you. Why don't you use a more recent one?"

  Shrugging, he takes a tiny sip of water. "That was all I had. It was taken by my ex-girlfriend in the early stages of our relationship and she left it behind when we split up. I don't take photos myself. Don't see the point."

  I raise my eyebrows in genuine surprise. "Oh, I love looking through old photos and remembering various happy times throughout my life."

  He nods sagely, as if my statement has simply confirmed his worst fears. "A lot of people feel that way. They feel there's something missing in their lives, and memories are the glue that holds them together."

  That's it. Now even photographs can't be pleasurable, and I can't bear this pompous bore a moment longer. I raise my hand in the direction of the waitress. "Can we have the bill, please?"

  When it arrives, he picks it up first and I inwardly marvel that, at long last, he has a redeeming feature: generosity.

  Pulling out what resembles a child's denim purse from his jeans pocket, he lays the bill in front of him on the table. "I'll pay for my vegetables, you get the drinks. I only had a water."

  My face visibly drops. When he starts counting out coppers onto the table, it caves in completely.

  "Oh, for fuck's sake. I'll get it." I grab the bill and march to the back of the cafe, desperate to hasten my exit from this godforsaken situation.

  When I return, he's still sitting with the handful of coppers in front of him. "Thanks," he says sullenly. "But it was totally unnecessary to swear."

  "Wankety wank, wank, wank, WANK!!!" I bellow, before flouncing out onto the street and breaking into a liberated sprint towards the tube station.

  Seven

  Two dates so far, and I've paid the bill both times. I must have 'sucker' tattooed on my forehead. Have I?" I jab my finger into the crease above my nose.

  "No," laughs Tab, "you haven't. You've just been unlucky, that's all. Maybe you've had all your bad dating karma in one go and the
next date will be someone like Sean Penn," she says, choosing my unfathomable crush as a crumb of comfort.

  "Or Pig Penn," I mumble through a mouthful of croissant.

  We are in the Good Morning Britain canteen, home to various "breakfast rolls" with unidentifiable fried objects in them, pastries that could break the teeth of Jaws from the Bond films, and the salmonella poisoning of a game show contestant that was hushed up and miraculously kept out of the gossip columns.

  Tab pulls a hair out of her bacon roll, stares wordlessly at it, then places it at the side of her plate and carries on munching. It's so commonplace that neither of us consider it worthy of comment.

  I knock back a swig of black coffee. "Aaaaah! Let's hope the caffeine kicks in pronto. God knows I need it this morning."

  "Grim?"

  I nod silently. Tab knows what I'm talking about--our breakfast topics are nearly always the same, only the description changes. It's the Good Morning Britain makeover.

  Today, I have what I can only describe as a giant armadillo requiring my attention upstairs. Usually, there is always an attractive woman just waiting to be wheedled out from under unkempt hair, left to its own devices amid a life of daily school runs and piles of washing up. More often than not, it's a simple case of giving them a funky haircut and dragging their makeup routine kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. But not today. Today's challenge, to put it mildly, has no redeeming features whatsoever.

  "I want to look like Julia Roberts," she'd said tersely at the first consultation over an hour ago.

  "God knows, I'll be struggling to make her look better than Joan Collins," hissed Kevin Makepeace, our resident celebrity hairdresser. Never had a man been so unsuited to his surname. He wreaked havoc wherever he went, with his penchant for making bitchy comments and stirring up a hornet's nest of discontent among the staff members by pitting them against each other.

  After years of dealing with Richard, I had Kevin's measure perfectly. I knew he was trouble, he knew I knew, and we rubbed along together nicely. Here he is now, mincing across the canteen towards Tab and me.