Emma took big gulps of her wine, almost polishing the glass off in one inhale. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, setting down her glass and already looking for their waiter to order more. ‘All totally lovely.’
‘And just a bit scary,’ supplied Gaby. This was the version of Gaby that Nadia knew best: the slightly cynical, romantically careful one.
‘Well, if I meet him at seven, I’ll expect your phone call at … seven fifteen?’
‘When there will be a horrible emergency.’
‘And I’ll have to come right away.’
‘You’ll be terribly sorry.’
‘Devastated!’
‘And scarper so quick that you’ll forget to leave a number.’
The three of them laughed, articulating a blind date plan they’d all had for years now. In theory, it was easy enough to realize it wasn’t going to work with somebody almost right away, but amongst them only Emma would really announce, fifteen minutes into a date, that it wasn’t going to work and so they had better call it a night already. As a dating columnist she’d had a lot of practice, Nadia supposed, and when she dated like it was her job – because for a while it had actually been her job – it was easier to be businesslike about the whole thing. Meanwhile, Nadia had spent evening upon evening trying not to hurt the man across from her’s feelings, willing herself to find the thing they were compatible on, or in agreement about. That was the downside to being a romantic: by being so committed to seeing the best in her dates she’d had several that should never have happened at all.
Emma widened her eyes. ‘Oh my gosh – are you going to tell him your real name?’
‘Why … wouldn’t I?’
‘I don’t know. Safety? You don’t want him knowing who you really are, do you?’
Nadia thought about it. ‘That doesn’t seem like the best start to a relationship,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s any harm in telling him my name is Nadia. Right?’ She looked to Gaby for reassurance.
‘No,’ Gaby said. ‘But also, listen: I still resolutely believe that you should meet Sky Garden Guy. I promise you – he is your man. I know Train Guy is witty and fun and whatever, but Sky Garden Guy is all of those things too.’
‘Well, if Train Guy is a dud, yes, I accept your offer. That’s even if he’d still like to meet after I stood him up.’
‘I’m sure he would,’ Gaby said.
‘What are you going to wear?’ Emma asked.
Nadia thought about it. ‘I know this sounds weird,’ she said, ‘but I feel like I want to look as close as I do for work as possible. Like, that’s how he knows me. If I turned up in platforms and sequins with a full face of make-up, I’d be mortified if he didn’t recognize me!’
‘Oh my god,’ Emma said, ‘I didn’t think of that – he knows what you look like, but you have no idea what he looks like …’
Nadia nodded. ‘I know. Every morning I get on that train and I think, “Is it you? Is it you? Or you?” And honestly, he could be any of them. But that’s part of the excitement. And, you know. How bad could he end up being?’
Gaby shuddered. ‘That would give me the creeps, knowing that I’m being watched.’
Emma hit her shoulder. ‘She isn’t being watched! Don’t say that! Some commuter has noticed her a few times and thought she was cute. That’s all.’
‘Devastatingly cute,’ interjected Nadia.
‘Devastatingly cute. Fine. It’s not like he’s following her to work or back home and spying at her from the bushes.’
Nadia’s eyes widened. ‘Oh my god – do we think that could happen?’
Gaby gave a pointed silence.
‘Absolutely not,’ said Emma, shooting her daggers. ‘And look. You are so smart, and so aware. You can get a read on people’s energy like that.’ She clicked her fingers as she said ‘that’. ‘And we’ll call you so you have an out if you need it, which you won’t, but if you do, then … well. You can leave and then move house and jobs and start wearing a wig and you’ll never have to see him again!’
Gaby laughed in spite of herself, and the waiter came over with more wine. He asked if he could get them anything else.
‘Yes,’ Nadia said. ‘Some new best friends, please.’
The waiter smiled and walked away.
‘You’re going to be fine,’ Emma said. ‘Isn’t she, Gaby?’
Gaby smiled, not quite enthusiastically. ‘Sure you are,’ she said. ‘And if you’re not, I’m at the MoD on Friday. I can arrange to have him killed.’
Emma poured more wine into their glasses, even though she was the only one who had emptied hers. The three of them cheersed again.
At home, Nadia sat down with a blank piece of paper, a pen, and another glass of wine. At the top of the paper she wrote ‘Pros and Cons’. On the left side, she wrote, ‘Everything That Could Go Wrong If I Meet The Guy From Missed Connections’. Under it, she put:
Potentially all a big catfish.
Potentially he thinks he is writing to somebody who Is Not Me, and will be totally devastated and insulted when I turn up, and won’t be able to hide the look of disappointment on his face. Will be like when food comes out of the kitchen at a restaurant and you’re starving and you think the waiter is coming over to you and so you sit up straighter and bite your bottom lip in anticipation, but then it goes to the table next to you and you look like an arse.
I will think we are getting on, and when I go to the bathroom he will pull out his phone and play on Tinder and I will see over his shoulder when I come back and be too polite to say anything. (Thus wasting a further two and a half hours of my life when I could be at boxercise, or with Emma – who says she is much better, but I am still worried about her.)
My picture will end up in the paper, because I will go missing on the way home from the date, and he will be the prime suspect. Picture will be from my twenty-eighth birthday when I tried to save money beforehand by waxing my own eyebrows and had to draw them back on, and everyone will think any woman who looks as mad as I do probably brought it all on herself.
I will find him dizzyingly charming and the chemistry will be undeniable and I will go home with him and won’t realize he’s put Rohypnol in my drink and I wake up to see he has covered the whole bedroom in cling film and has a very sharp knife and I only just manage to escape before he starts carving me up into pieces to fry up and eat for breakfast each morning.
I actually won’t wake up from the Rohypnol and so will get carved up and nobody will ever find me and my mum will be really upset and won’t know I’m dead – she’ll just think I’m being selfish and have skipped the country for a laugh.
He won’t show up after all, and I’ll have write to the newspaper to shout at him. (NB if I do that, I will do it very calmly and sensibly, in the manner of that nineteen-year-old on The Lust Villa who got dumped and gave a very rousing speech about loyalty, and not like when Sharon Osbourne stormed off The X Factor that time, ripping off her fake eyelashes and screaming at everyone uncontrollably.)
In the other column, she wrote: ‘Things That Could Go Right If I Meet The Guy From Missed Connections’. Underneath it she wrote:
I could meet the love of my life.
21
Daniel
Daniel paced up and down outside the bar, mentally talking himself through what was about to happen. Come on, he told himself. This is no big deal. It’s just a date.
He forced himself to breathe in and out through his nose, doing the ‘victorious breath’ his mum had learnt at the one yoga class she’d ever done, twenty-five years ago. It was a loud and deliberate noise, like trying to steam up a mirror but with the mouth closed. The one and only thing she’d learned that day was that if you can control your breath, you can control anything. It had been the soundtrack to his teenage years, that saying, even though a nasty flatulence incident had meant she’d never done yoga again. (‘It was your dad’s braised bloody cabbage that did it – I made the loudest chuffing noise as I went into a forwar
d fold! I can control my breath, Daniel – but I dare anybody to retain full sphincter control after his buttered bok choy!’) For every knee scrape and heartache and exam stress, it always came back to: If you can control your breath, you can control anything. Breathe, Daniel.
Daniel laughed to himself at the thought that he could control any of what was about to happen, causing two men walking by to look up in alarm and scurry past him with their eyebrows raised, as if extreme romantic nervousness was catching.
I mean, potentially this is the last first date you’ll go on in your whole life, he thought to himself, and the last first kiss you’ll ever have. Not that a first kiss is a given, but, you know, if everything goes well. Which it will, as long as you’re not too over-eager. Like you are now, being fifteen minutes early, and giving yourself a pep talk instead of going in, getting a seat at the bar, and ordering a drink so she finds you already doing something instead of waiting to pounce like the title character in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Daniel remembered his breathing. His dad would tell him to get a drink in him to calm down. He tried to reason with himself.
Go in. You’ll be fine. Eat a Tic Tac and breathe deep. If you can control your breath – your breathing and being minty fresh – you can control anything. Go on.
Daniel took two big gulps of the summer air, July now giving way to August, London thick with syrupy heat, and pushed through the door of the bar. It was already half full with office workers out with their colleagues, what with Thursday being the new Friday. He caught sight of himself in the mirror as he grabbed a seat, and had his first kind thought about himself all afternoon. You look all right, he told himself, with his undone dress shirt rolled up to his sleeves, the way the fabric fell across his shoulders. He’d lost weight since his dad had died – probably he wasn’t eating enough. It was hard to keep track of food when the world was ending. But Daniel’s jaw looked sharp in his reflection and he thought for a minute how he seemed a bit rock ’n’ roll. Grief and hope looked good on him. It was a small, silly comfort.
The barman made eye contact to let Daniel know he’d be next, and Daniel panicked about what to order. Did a pint make him seem too predictably blokey? A glass of white wine a bit too Stanley Tucci? If he ordered a bottle he worried he might as well say, ‘I’m trying to get you drunk so I can shag you,’ which was absolutely not the case.
Oh god – they weren’t going to shag, were they? He hoped not.
Well. He wanted to, eventually, of course, not only because it had been a while since he’d dipped his brush in somebody else’s paint pot, so to speak, but also because Nadia was beauty and grace personified so who wouldn’t want to shag her – or, make love to, maybe. Was that too Mr Darcy, too inhibited? Oh god, why were dating and sex and love and romance so full of booby traps? Women got all the airtime when it came to hang-ups about sex, but Daniel knew it wasn’t just him who got a bit out of sorts at the thought of doing it with somebody you liked. Insecurity wasn’t the reserve of females. It was the reserve of humans, full stop.
The drink, Daniel, just pick a drink.
He knew a lot of his mates’ wives went in for rosé or something bubbly when it was warm out, and he’d read in the Sunday supplements that cava was the new prosecco, since it was drier and naturally carbonated and actually a lot closer to champagne, but if she didn’t know that and he was drinking cava he’d seem cheap, because historically everyone thought cava was cheap. The barman finished serving the guy at the other end and made his way over and Daniel could see him coming and oh god – what should he get? Fuck. He would have …
‘A small glass of white, please. Anything. You choose.’ He reached for his wallet and located his bank card. Handing it over, the tiniest visible shake to his hand, he added, ‘And a shot of tequila too. I’ll start a tab.’
22
Nadia
She floated through the corridor and down in the lift. This was it. The Date. Nadia hadn’t been so convinced that her life was about to change since, well … since the morning she had declared The New Routine to Change Her Life, which was the morning she’d first seen his Missed Connection. If she really reached for it, Nadia could almost believe she had pulled this man into her life by sheer force of will.
She felt like anything was possible. After all of those stories she’d fed Emma for the column, and all the coffee breaks she’d had with Gaby the morning after the night before, wondering if it was she who was the problem, not the men she was dating, Nadia relished the double-time beat of her heart and the somersaults going on in her tummy. This was what life was about: getting excited and being deliberate with her fate and seizing chances when they presented themselves. Put yourself in the way of beauty, she’d read in a Cheryl Strayed book. That’s exactly what she was doing. Daring to hope for her romantic future made her Superwoman, she thought. Turning up for a date with genuine excitement after everything – after Awful Ben – made her a bona fide hero. The hero of her own life.
‘Look at you!’ Gaby yelled, from across the lobby.
Nadia grinned, doing a little spin as she approached.
‘What do you think?’ she said. She was wearing a loose navy-blue Cos dress with flat navy sandals, and carried a navy-blue leather bag. With her blonde hair and a touch of red lipstick, not to mention the slight bronze the summer had given her, she looked like her most radiant self.
‘You’re beautiful, Nadia. Truly beautiful.’
Nadia took a big breath. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That was the exact right thing to say.’ She pulled out her phone and looked at the time. ‘Okay. I can’t stay and chat. Destiny awaits! But – call me fifteen minutes in?’
‘Yes ma’am. I’ve got you.’
‘Okay. And, could you, like, wish me luck?’
Gaby smiled warmly. ‘Nadia: go get ’em.’ She winked.
Nadia headed for the bar with the confidence of Blue Ivy.
She had a feeling she wouldn’t be needing Gaby’s call.
23
Daniel
Daniel had only just unlocked the screen to his phone when his mother’s face flashed up, alerting him to the fact that she was ringing. It was the photo he’d taken of her at her sixtieth birthday that he’d set as her avatar in his phone, a gin in one hand and a half-smoked Marlboro Light in the other. Daniel had never known his mother had smoked until that night. She had told him sixty was the year she ‘stopped giving so many shits, like Helen Mirren said’, and that included hiding her four-a-day habit from her grown son. ‘Life’s too short!’ she’d hooted, before they both knew just how short. Daniel had thought it was hilarious. ‘All power to you, Mum!’ he’d said, laughing, his dad simply shrugging as if to say, ‘What can you do?’
Daniel stared. He wouldn’t normally cancel her call but this was about to be the first moment of the rest of his life. He couldn’t talk to her now. He didn’t want to be on the phone as his future began. He deliberated for half a second before hitting the red cross, watching her face disappear. He waited for his drinks and, staring anxiously at the open door, waited for his date too. She’d be here any minute now. Any minute.
24
Nadia
Nadia took the back way to the courtyard, so she wouldn’t have to battle with an army of commuters heading home, or walk past the massive pub on the corner that would no doubt be heaving at this time, the weather being what it was – London came alive in the summer that way, at the first hint of sunshine it was after-work drinks and walks along the South Bank – and if she crossed the road before the corner and took the first right, she’d be able to loop through the cobbled passage that would bring her out right opposite The Old Barn Cat without having to use her elbows to fight through throngs of half-drunk people. Not that she’d mind that. Everything looked beautiful to her. The sun was low and warm and she hummed lightly to herself as she ducked out of the crowds and through to the alleyway. She stopped just before the corner to pull out her compact and check her lipstick. Perfec
t enough, she thought to herself happily, but I’ll just add a little more.
25
Daniel
‘Hiya Mum, what’s up? I’m a bit tied up at the moment.’ She’d called Daniel again, not seconds after he’d rejected her first call. Daniel couldn’t evade her twice. It wasn’t like her not to take the hint. His instinct told him to pick up.
‘Danny boy, darling – it’s me, it’s Mum.’
Daniel crumpled his brow. Obviously he knew it was his mum. ‘Yes, Mum, I know. Of course I know it’s you.’ She sounded upset. ‘Are you crying, Mum? Mum, what happened?’ He presumed she’d got stuck trying to reverse the car out of the driveway again, or didn’t know how to get the Apple TV on. There was a lot she’d had to learn about living alone, and much of it frustrated her.
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