You Had Me at Hello Read online

  Mindy pushes her way through the door, Ivor trailing behind, hands in pockets. He leans in and gives me a peck on the cheek. I can tell from his reluctant demeanour that Mindy’s given him a ‘Congratulate Her On Making A Good Choice’ lecture on the way here. He holds out a Marks & Spencer bag.

  ‘From me, but not chosen by me, I hasten to add,’ Ivor says. ‘I did not touch cloth, as they say.’

  I peer inside. Pyjamas. Really nice ones, in cream silk.

  ‘You’re not going to cry are you?’ Ivor says. ‘The receipt’s in there.’

  ‘I’m not going to cry,’ I say, tearing up a bit. ‘Thank you.’

  As Mindy turns this way and that, looking for the right surface to put the flowers, she leaves a massive sweep of ochre pollen on the pristine, wedding cake wall.

  ‘They’re from Ivor too,’ she adds, finding her pitch and marching over to the coffee table, more pollen from the trembling flowers shaking a fine, fire-coloured powder in her wake.

  I discreetly put a hand over my mouth, surveying the mess.

  ‘You’re welcome!’ Mindy sing-songs, turning round and seeing me, taking it as being agog at the gift.

  Ivor has followed my line of sight. He adds under his breath: ‘Let’s say they’re from you. I’ll clean up, shall I?’

  ‘What do you think, Ivor?’ Mindy calls, doing a gameshow-girl twirl to indicate she means the flat.

  ‘I think it looks like a female American Psycho’s lair. Patrick Batewoman.’ He rinses a chamois under the tap, which is on one of those bendy arms you usually see in industrial kitchens. ‘In a good way.’

  As Mindy potters around in vermilion ankle boots, taking it all in for a second time, Ivor gingerly dabs at the damage. He turns to me and nods, to say it’s coming off, and gestures for me to join Mindy.

  ‘Drink?’ I ask, wondering as I say it where my kettle is and what I’m going to do for milk.

  ‘I can’t stay actually, I’ve got a date,’ Mindy says.

  ‘Bo … Robert?’ I ask.

  ‘Bobby Trendy’s been given his cards,’ Ivor interjects, breaking off from his cleaning up.

  Robert was always head-to-toe in All Saints with bicycle chains hanging out of his back pocket and got the nickname ‘Bobby Trendy’ from Ivor. Unfortunately, once uttered, it was hard to un-stick it from your mind.

  ‘Yeah, he sacked my family dinner off for a paintballing thing with his brother-in-law.’ Mindy waves her hand. ‘Enough was enough. There should be a TripAdvisor on dates, so you can give feedback. Nice view. Bad service. Book waaaay in advance.’

  ‘Small portions,’ Ivor coughs into his fist.

  ‘Who’s this one from, Guardian Soulmates?’ I say.

  ‘My Single Friend.’

  ‘Is that the one where a friend recommends you?’

  ‘Yeah. I posed as a man and sold myself as a low-maintenance mamacita who “works as hard as she plays”.’

  I make an ‘oh dear’ face.

  ‘It only means solvent, not a clinger, potential for sex,’ Mindy adds. Ivor grimaces.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I say. ‘Isn’t someone else supposed to do it?’

  ‘How could anyone else describe me better than I can describe myself?’

  ‘Why join a site where that’s the point then?’

  Mindy shrugs. ‘Men trust tips from other men. Recommendations from other women are like, “bubbly, great social life” and they think, ho hum, hooched-up woofer.’

  ‘Narcissism and deception, the classic inceptors of healthy relationships,’ Ivor says, dropping down on the sofa next to us.

  ‘Anyway. I’ve kind of over-fished on Guardian Soul Destroyers. Waiting for stocks to replenish. This one’s twenty-three.’ Mindy chews her lip. ‘And he likes grime. The music, you know, not dirt. God knows what we’re going to talk about.’

  ‘Well, him, if your previous experiences are anything to go by,’ I say, and Ivor laughs.

  ‘But his profile picture – young John Cusack,’ Mindy sighs.

  Ivor gives me a look. I return it. Neither of us say anything. Mindy has a theory of compatibility and none of us have ever been able to persuade her out of it. She says instant physical attraction is a pre-requisite for any successful relationship – it’s either identifiably there, or not, from the start. Thus she’s only ever bothered with boys who she thinks are good-looking, reasoning she needs to find a handsome man with whom she has other things in common. No amount of contradictory examples or criticism about being shallow has ever moved Mindy an inch on this. Of course, it means she’s dated a procession of vain Prince Charmings with the souls of frogs.

  I check my watch.

  ‘When is this date? Are you going for high tea?’

  ‘It’s not until eight but I’ve got to get ready. I’m going to get some pure oxygen and have my eyebrows threaded.’

  ‘You know how it works. Mindy goes into pre-production, like an over-budget Hollywood blockbuster. Development hell,’ Ivor says.

  ‘Obviously, I should just change my t-shirt and pour a bottle of Lynx Caveman all over myself,’ Mindy snaps back, standing up.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Ivor says, mildly, ‘Lynx is for men.’

  Mindy shakes her head at Ivor and gives me a hug. ‘Start planning the party. Who knows, if this goes well, I might bring Jake.’

  ‘Jake,’ Ivor scoffs. ‘He’s even got a name that dates him as post-1985.’

  ‘Says Ivor.’

  ‘My name’s never been in fashion so it can’t go out. It only dates me as post ninth century, dear.’

  ‘Whevs! Bye, Rach.’

  ‘Good luck with the Relic Hunter!’ Ivor shouts, as I show her out.

  Mindy turns in the doorway and gives him two fingers.

  ‘Do you think,’ I drop down on the sofa and squeeze an oyster coloured cushion to my body, then feel the shop-fresh plump starchy newness of it and realise these cushions aren’t for squeezing and put it back, ‘Mindy will ever revise this ruthless policy of looks first, personality a distant second, compatibility irrelevant?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  We shake our heads.

  ‘What’re your plans? Want me to stay?’ Ivor asks, and I wonder why today feels like a series of polite rejections. ‘Or go?’

  ‘Erm,’ I say, trying to work out what he wants me to say. I feel as if a strange stigma is clinging to me. I have some insight into how the newly bereaved crave people who don’t walk on eggshells around them.

  ‘I was going to make use of Katya being away for the weekend and have a Grand Theft Auto marathon and eat vacuum-packed pork products,’ he continues. ‘You’re welcome to join me.’

  ‘Hah, no, thanks, I’m fine. Enjoy killing all those hookers.’

  I see Ivor out and tell myself sternly that I’m very lucky to have supportive friends, and being single means getting used to your own company and not inventing excuses to keep people around you. None of which makes me feel any less bereft. The latest revelation: you have to relearn being on your own again. Rhys and I had separate interests. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets. Yet the empty quiet of the flat stretches like an island around me, and the city an ocean beyond that.

  I do some more unpacking until the discovery of the old framed photo from university starts me crying, and the intensity of the urge to call Rhys and say I’ve changed my mind is like Class A withdrawal. I sit scrolling up and down to his name in my mobile phone address book. I wouldn’t have to say anything desperate: all I’d be doing is checking in on him. I stop. However he’s getting through today, I need to let him get on with it. I’ve put myself beyond being able to help him, on this. I imagine him alone in that bed tonight and think: I’m lucky. I get a fresh start in new surroundings. He has the site of our old life, minus me.

  Unbidden, my mind starts playing me a montage of our edited highlights. The first night we spent together at his old flat and me falling out of bed and onto his effects pedal, which was a baptism of fire for
new love – I screamed the place down and had a bruise the size of a handprint on my back. The run to the shops to get painkillers and the breakfast he made me the next day, involving seven pans and three types of eggs. The day I met his family, when I was virtually levitating with nerves, and Rhys saying on the doorstep: ‘They’ll love you. Not because I do. Because everyone with eyes and ears does.’ The weekend in Brighton with the world’s worst car journey down, the dubious Nazi-run B&B that was nowhere near the seafront and the bistro with the horrible waiters. It could’ve been awful but instead I remember laughing like a pair of school kids for two days solid. The day we moved into our house and drank champagne out of mugs, sitting on the stairs, in a furniture-free desert of sandy carpet, arguing about whether his frightening Iggy Pop photo had too many pubes on show to be fit for the ‘reception rooms’. The scores of in-jokes and shared history and special knowledge I couldn’t imagine having with anyone ever again, not without a Tardis to whisk me back to being twenty.

  What was I doing, throwing all this away? Did it all add up to say I should stay with Rhys? Was I making the biggest mistake of my life? Probably not, purely on the basis that award has already been handed out.

  I tell myself, this day is as bad as it’s going to be. This is a day you have to get through. It occurs to me that it’d be easier to get through unconscious. I crawl to the huge bed, cover my face with my arms and weep myself to sleep.

  As I drift off, I imagine the supermodelly Indian girl animating in her portrait, looking down, saying: ‘Well, that’s not what this flat is for.’

  14

  I awake to an odd noise, like a bee trapped in a tin can and something scuttling over a hard surface. I sit bolt upright in the twilight and think, Mindy better not have neglected to mention some kind of vermin infestation of B-movie proportions. As I shake off the sleep I see that the noise is coming from my vibrating mobile as it pushes itself around the nightstand. I pick it up as it’s about to clatter to the floorboards and see it’s Caroline.

  ‘Did you nick my towels after all?’ I mumble, sleepily.

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘No! Been asleep.’ I rub an eye with the heel of my hand. ‘Although that sounds an interesting idea.’

  ‘I wanted to see how my policy of leaving you in splendid isolation was going. I’ve started to feel guilty, which is downright inconvenient.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I laid down the law that we should give you tonight on your own.’

  ‘Cheers!’ I splutter, incandescently annoyed for a quarter of a second.

  ‘If we came round tonight and got drunk, you’d have hungover Sunday night blues on your first night alone in the flat. This way, it gets it out of the way.’

  ‘Or it’d bundle all the bad things together,’ I grumble.

  ‘Is that how you feel? I can come round now if so.’

  I look around at the strange and new surroundings. Rupa’s got some sort of fairylight addiction: strings of red roses, the stamens replaced by pinprick bulbs, those snakes of clear tubing with a disco pulse throbbing along them. Even through the grey filter of my misery, I concede it looks rather beautiful. And, as ever, Caroline’s tough love is a good thing.

  ‘Ah, I’ll cope.’

  ‘Go and get yourself a bottle of wine, order a takeaway, and I’ll come round tomorrow.’

  After I hang up, I discover I’m not hungry, but I do recall spying a bottle of Bombay Sapphire on Rupa’s shelf. I swipe it and tell myself I’ll replace it twice over before I leave. I don’t have any tonic so it has to make a rapper’s delight of gin and juice with a carton of Tropicana. As I switch the television on and let a medical drama wash over me, another worry surfaces. One I hadn’t wanted to admit to having. It’s just, Ben hasn’t called. And I’ve started to think he’s not going to.

  I shouldn’t be thinking about it. It’s positively distasteful, he’s a married man, not a potential date. Only: if he never calls, it’s going to say such an awful lot. It would be an extremely eloquent silence.

  Half an hour of you was enough. In fact, it was too much, but I grinned and bore it. The past is the past and you’re the only one living in it. See you again, on the tenth anniversary of never. And by the way, that haircut makes you look like Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code.

  In my heart of hearts, I know that’s my guilty paranoia talking, not Ben. Ben is the person who irrationally apologised for so much as mentioning his wedding when I told him about my ex-engaged status. So why is it, when I examine every exchange between us so many times, perspective collapses? I can’t help but think about the killer detail – he took my number, but he never volunteered his, did he?

  He was the one saying it’d be great to go out, reassures the angel on my shoulder.

  That’s the kind of thing you say to be nice during the social disentanglement process and don’t necessarily make good on, counters the devil.

  Oh God, he’s never going to call and I’m going to see Ben and his Olivia of Troy examining high thread count linen in John Lewis and fall backwards over someone in a wheelchair in my haste to escape.

  As the patient on TV goes into something called ‘VF’ and the crash team swing into action, I settle on a theory that suits both my fatalism and my knowledge of Ben’s character. He did mean everything he said about it being nice to get together. He asked for my number in good faith, he probably believed he’d use it. Then he thought it through, debated how to describe me to his wife. That consideration alone could make him reassess whether it was a good idea. I can imagine a few memories that might’ve helped him come to a conclusion. And at that moment, he scrolled down to my name in his phone, felt a pang of regret. Then found his resolve, hit delete, and continued with his charmed, Rachel-less life.

  Half an hour later, my phone starts flashing with a call. Mum, I think. I prepare myself to be falsely positive for five minutes. I check the caller display: unrecognised number.

  ‘Hi, Rachel?’

  I recognise the warm male voice instantly. I go from someone half asleep at six in the evening to the most awake person in the whole of Manchester. He called! He doesn’t hate me! He didn’t lie! Adrenaline shot with endorphin chaser.

  ‘Hi!’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine!’

  ‘It’s Ben.’

  ‘Hello, Ben!’ I say this in a voice that people usually reserve for ‘Hello, Cleveland!’

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK? You sound a bit odd.’

  ‘I am, I was – I was …’ Christ, I don’t want to admit I’ve been asleep this afternoon, like an eighty-two year old ‘… having a lie down.’

  ‘Ah. Right. I see.’ Ben sounds embarrassed and I sense he thinks I mean some sort of afternoon singleton lie down, with company. ‘I’ll call back.’

  ‘No!’ I virtually shout. ‘Honestly. I’m fine. How are you? It’s weird you called now, I was just thinking about you.’

  Mouth, open. Foot: placed inside.

  ‘All good things I hope,’ Ben says, awkwardly.

  ‘Of course!’ I squeal, with the ongoing note of hysteria.

  ‘Uhm, I wanted to see if you wanted to meet my colleague after work one night next week to discuss this story?’

  ‘Yes, that’d be great.’

  ‘Thursday? I’ll come along, if that’s OK?’

  ‘Totally fine.’ Totally, amazingly, wonderfully fine.

  ‘He’s all right, Simon, but he’s a bit full of himself. Don’t let him take any liberties if he starts up about the evils of the press.’

  ‘I’m sure I can give as good as I get.’

  ‘So am I,’ Ben laughs. ‘Right, I’ll email a time and a place at the start of the week.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Have a nice weekend. I’ll let you get back to your lie down.’

  ‘I’m standing up now, think I’ll stay that way.’

  ‘Whatever works best.’

  We say a stilted goodbye and ri
ng off, with me on a strange, pain-free, woozy high. Onscreen, the patient’s heartbeat has returned.

  15

  I should be listening to the details of when, on or about the 26th of August last year, Michael Tallack of Verne Drive, Levenshulme, obtained monies by deception by strapping on his brother’s leg iron and claiming spurious disability benefits.

  Instead, mentally, I’m far, far away and long, long ago: part of a group watching a fireworks display at Platt Fields Park in the autumn of my first year of university. I ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ as each explosion bloomed and faded into spiders of glittering dust. I turned to Ben to say something and saw he was watching me instead of the night sky. It was an intent look and gave me a sensation similar to when you think a fairground ride has come to a stop and it hasn’t, quite.

  ‘Uh …’ I stumbled over the words that were previously on the tip of my tongue, ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘In those?’ Ben asked, sceptically, pointing at my gloves. They were Fair Isle, multi-coloured. Admittedly, the size of hot water bottle covers.

  ‘They’re nice!’

  ‘If you’re seven.’

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not really,’ Ben said. ‘Hadn’t noticed.’

  His eyes sparkled. In the freezing atmosphere, I felt heat rise to the surface of my skin. I breathed deeply and clapped my mittens together.

  A girl joined us, winding her arm through Ben’s in familiarity. I angled my body away from them and when I turned back to say something, they’d slipped away. I found myself craning my neck to try to spot them in the crowd. I felt ever so slightly abandoned. Which was ridiculous, and clearly a sign of how much I was missing Rhys.

  ‘All rise,’ barks the court clerk, snapping me back to the here and now.

  I wait politely for everyone to file out ahead of me, instead of overtaking to slice the fastest path to the door, in my usual tetchy work mode. My mind’s very much on my after-work appointment with Ben. Equal parts terror, anticipation, excitement, guilt, confusion …

  I get a cow-shit coffee and go to the press room to drink it in peace. I see Zoe has got there before me. Despite her doubts, she’s taken to court reporting brilliantly. The ability to spot a story is one you can’t really teach, and she clearly has it. She’s also had the confidence to leave a courtroom where nothing much is happening and seek something better. It took me ages to find the guts to do that. I’d be pinioned to the bench listening to a ten-a-penny aggravated twokking, doing side-to-side slotting eye movements, like a portrait in a haunted house when backs turn.