The Little Shop of Afternoon Delights

by Sarah Lefebve

  KATIE

  “What happened after the afro wig night, Katie?” Fiona asks, pulling a piece of mushroom off her slice of pizza and popping it into her mouth.

  She’s come over to help us celebrate. If I still have anything to celebrate, that is.

  Matt has left us to it and gone to the pub with the lads, on the grounds that this definitely qualifies as ‘girl talk.’

  “He phoned to take me out for dinner the following night, but Becky and I were spending the weekend with our friend Harriet so he had to take both of them out too!”

  “Aah. How lovely.”

  “I know. It cost him a fortune.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I went back up to Leeds and forgot all about him. Until he phoned, two weeks later and asked if he could come up and see me.”

  “So she kicked me out of the house for the weekend,” I add, and Katie laughs.

  “He drove up on the Friday afternoon and when he arrived I opened the door and he was stood there with a huge bunch of tulips – he had remembered me saying they were my favourite flower. He looked really sexy too and I thought, ‘oh you’re actually quite nice!’

  “We went out for dinner and talked all evening. He’d recently been to New York on holiday and was telling me all about it. I’d never been before and he said he’d take me there one day. It sounds dead cheesy, but I knew he meant it. He wasn’t being flash – he was being genuine.

  “The next day we went to our York – the one up north – because he’d never been there. And I remember on the way home I said I had to nip to Tesco for some washing powder because Becky and I had run out. I apologised because it seemed like such an unromantic thing to do. But later he told me that that was one of the best bits of the weekend, because it was such a couply thing to do and it made him feel like my boyfriend!”

  Fiona is mesmerised with the story that Emma and I have heard a thousand times.

  “That evening was the first time I kissed him.”

  Fiona’s eyes widen. “Really?”

  “Yes. We hadn’t kissed yet.”

  “You mean he’d driven all the way to Leeds to see someone he hadn’t even kissed yet?”

  Katie nods.

  “We went to this bar in York. I went to the loo and when I came back he was talking to this couple and they were laughing. I think that was when I started falling for him.

  “We were both quite drunk when we left the bar and I remember thinking I had to kiss him. So I just grabbed him and kissed him. In the middle of the street. Up against a police van!”

  Emma snorts. “I still can’t believe you did that!”

  “Did you really?” Fiona laughs.

  “Yeah. I did. And that was it really. He came up most weekends after that – or I’d come down here.

  “Then one weekend, after we’d been seeing each other for about two months, we went out with Becky and Alex and our friend Catherine and her boyfriend. And Catherine asked him what his intentions were towards me. You know, just as a joke. She did it all the time. Anyway, right in front of me he looked her in the eye and said: ‘I love her and one day I’m going to marry her.’”

  “No!”

  “Yeah! And it didn’t scare me,” she adds – as if she’s just realised it herself for the first time.

  “It creeps up on you. You have to have been through other relationships to know. You learn what you like, what you don’t like, what suits you, what you need… By the time I met Matt I knew myself. And I was completely myself when I was with him. There was no pretence. I knew it was right. I never really had a ‘wham bam’ moment or anything. It just crept up on me. All of a sudden I just realised I was completely in love with this man and I knew that I wanted to be with him forever, that I wanted him to be the father of my children.”

  Fiona nods in agreement.

  “He has the same values as me,” Katie continues. “I like the way he treats people. He’s decent. He makes an effort. He’s not afraid to show his feelings. He’s comfortable with who he is. He’s not confrontational. But he’s not afraid to stand up and say what he believes.

  “There are so many things that make up a whole,” she says. “But ultimately it’s just got to feel right. And you’ve got to at least believe it will still feel right in years to come. Because it’s fine when you are both young, and sexy. But you won’t always be. Can you still see yourself with that person when they are old and wrinkly, sitting on a park bench?

  “That’s the question you have to ask yourself. You have to know that when you’re sixty, or seventy, that you’ll still want them to be sitting there, next to you, holding your hand.”

  It’s such a touching moment, but I can’t help myself. I burst out laughing. Because I suddenly have a picture in my head of Katie and Matt, old and wrinkly – she’s wearing Nora Batty stockings, he’s got a pipe in his mouth, sitting on a park bench, sharing a Tupperware box of cheese and pickle sandwiches.

  “That’s beautiful,” I tell Katie, trying to compose myself. “Just beautiful. But you do realise you’re going to have to tell me all over again?”

  I wave my empty pad and pen at them all.

  “I haven’t written any of it down!”

  They all roll their eyes at me. And then Emma refills our glasses and we have a toast – to my very first feature.

  “How do you know you’ve met Mr Right?” we all shout.

  FIONA

  “How did you meet Adrian, Fiona?” I ask, once Katie has told her story all over again – this time with me making copious notes.

  “He was a PE teacher at the school where I worked before I left to start The Pink Frog. That’s where I met Caroline too. I had just started there and we had a staff meeting – they had one every morning – and Caroline told me how she could predict where everyone would stand – science teachers in one corner, foreign language teachers in another, support staff in another. Nobody ever mixed, apparently. And she was right. When they filed into that meeting, everyone stood exactly where she had said they would. After a couple of weeks I realised I was never going to get to know anyone like that so I moved – went and stood over with the geography staff – right next to the PE teachers. It totally threw everyone. But anyway – I ended up standing next to Adrian this one day and we got chatting. And we just hit it off, I suppose. But I was in a relationship at the time, so nothing happened. Then my boyfriend and I went through a horrible break up and I moved in with my mum for a bit. I was quite upset and about a month later I spoke to Adrian about it. The next day he sent me flowers. We got together after that.

  “Did you know he was the one?” I ask.

  “I wasn’t sure in the early days. Adrian kept saying he knew I was the one, but I wasn’t sure. My ex boyfriend really hurt me and I guess I was scared of getting hurt again. So I cooled things off and Adrian was really upset.

  “But then I realised he was nothing like my ex. He was really lovely. He is the most caring person in the whole world. We got back together and soon after that he asked me to go skiing with him and his family. They go every year. So we went. And he was lovely. He taught me to ski and he was so patient. I was absolutely rubbish, but he never moaned. He stayed by my side the whole time. And he did my boots every morning – because I couldn’t even do that. And when I complained that my hands were cold he went out and bought me some heat pads for my gloves. He was so wonderful that I just started falling completely in love with him.”

  If I didn’t know better I’d say even cynical Emma is getting a soppy grin on her face at this story. I look at her and smile and she laughs and digs me in the ribs.

  “Then one day we were standing on the top of the mountain on our skis, surrounded by this breathtaking scenery. And my nose started to run.”

  Emma snorts at this.

  “I didn’t want to take my gloves off because of the heat pads. So he got this little hanky out of his pocket and wiped my nose for me! I knew right then and there that I loved him. When
we got home I moved in with him.”

  “And is he Mr Right?” I ask.

  “Yes.” She doesn’t have to think about it. “I never thought I’d meet someone I would want to spend the rest of my life with. I’ve had other relationships, and I’d always got bored with people eventually. But with Adrian I just knew I’d never get bored. Like Katie I just knew that further down the line I’d still feel exactly the same.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  Next on my hit list is Caroline, who throws her arms around me when I walk into Potty Wotty on Monday afternoon.

  “I’m so pleased for you,” she says, handing me a box wrapped in bright pink paper.

  “This is from Fiona and me.”

  Fiona is spending the day with her shop fitter, so it’s just Caroline and I for the afternoon.

  “What’s this for?” I ask, putting the box on the edge of the counter while I take my jacket off.

  “It’s just a little congratulatory gift we made for you.”

  “I bet Fi picked the paper,” I say, tearing it off.

  “How did you guess?” she chuckles.

  I let the paper drop to the floor and open the box.

  It’s a plate, with a picture of a girl holding a notepad and pen. It’s a stick person – an arty stick person, though, not the kind I’d draw with horizontal arms and a square head. I think it’s meant to be me. I hope it’s meant to be me. It’s the only time in my life I will ever have a figure like that.

  “Thanks, Caroline, I love it!” I say, holding the plate against my chest with one arm and hugging her with the other.

  “You’re welcome. And whenever you need time off to do your research or whatever, just let me know. I’m sure Fiona won’t mind helping out.”

  “Thanks. But actually you might be able to do better than that,” I grin.

  CAROLINE

  I think Caroline will be the perfect person to quiz about Mr Right. She’s married. She hasn’t filed for divorce. Yet. And she still phones her husband several times a day. Just to say hello.

  And what’s more – she’s really excited about being interviewed too.

  “I’ve never been interviewed before, not for a magazine,” she tells me later, after we have set up two customers with paints, pots, glasses and a corkscrew. They are adults, by the way. We are not in the business of encouraging five-year-olds to get plastered whilst painting pots.

  We open late on Mondays and people can bring their own wine to drink while they paint – with interesting results, I might add – and not always bad. One woman discovered artistic talents she never knew she had after three quarters of a bottle of Chardonnay.

  As Caroline pulls the cork out of our own bottle of wine I put some new batteries in my Dictaphone and press record to test it.

  It’s not one of those trendy digital things that you can buy these days – the ones that are barely bigger than a book of matches. It’s one of the ones that records everything on a mini cassette tape. I bought it when I was at university, for the days when I could just about drag myself out of bed after a big night in the student union bar and make it in for my 9am lecture (okay, 11am), but couldn’t quite stretch to lifting pen to paper to make any notes.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” I say into the microphone.

  “Testing, testing, testing,” Caroline laughs, as I switch it off and press rewind.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” my voice comes back at me. It doesn’t sound anything like my voice. Caroline doesn’t seem unusually alarmed by the alien voice coming out of the machine in front of us both though, so I guess it must sound like me to her. Yuck. Horrid. I must get a new voice.

  “So,” I say, hitting the record button for real this time.

  Suddenly Caroline looks nervous.

  “It won’t hurt. I promise.”

  Caroline met Dave at the school where she and Fiona worked. It strikes me their school is the perfect place to meet men. Perhaps I ought to think about a future in teaching if this writing thing doesn’t take off. They could list it as a selling point, even – benefits: competitive salary, twelve weeks holiday a year, future husband guaranteed.

  Dave was married with a young stepson when they met but it was an unhappy marriage. His wife had just ended her third affair. They were trying to make it work for the little boy’s sake, but Dave was miserable. Caroline felt sorry for him.

  “I wasn’t interested,” she says. “He was in such a shit situation at home. If anything I pitied him. I feel terrible about that now. He and his wife finally split up and he took some time off work. When he came back everyone started saying we were perfect for each other and kept trying to get us together. But nothing came of it. I was almost running the other way, if anything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t like him like that. I wasn’t interested at all. I felt people were trying to push me into something I didn’t want to be pushed into. The next thing I heard he was going out with one of the science teachers.”

  “Were you jealous?” I ask, concluding that it must have been the green-eyed monster that finally got them together.

  “No, I was relieved, which is really weird when you think how happy we are now. But anyway, they split up after a while and again, people started pushing us to go out. We went to a few mutual things, and we chatted. But he never approached me. He never asked me out. So it kind of took the pressure off.

  “Then one May Bank holiday neither of us had anything on and he asked if I fancied going out for a bike ride. He was so casual about the whole thing, so I said yes. I realised that day that my whole perception of him had been wrong. I had expected him to turn up in tight Lycra shorts and an equally tight t-shirt. But he didn’t. He actually looked quite trendy! And he was such a gentleman. He sorted everything out – the route, the picnic. We sat eating lunch by the river and I looked at him. I caught his eye. And in that split second I just knew.”

  “What? That he was Mr Right?” I ask, excited.

  “No, not then. I just knew there was something different about him. Different from anything I’d ever felt. We went back to my parents for a curry party that evening and I kept wanting to touch him – to hold his hand, to put my arm around him. But we were meant to be just friends. It was weird. We went for a long walk and then back to mine to watch a film. And then he went home. He didn’t kiss me. He didn’t do anything.

  “The next time we went out it was to a work do. He had to leave early to pick up his brother from the airport. I could tell he wasn’t going to kiss me then either – so I kissed him instead! Later he told me he hadn’t wanted to ruin things. We got together after that.

  “I always say to Dave I feel like I haven’t got a choice in this relationship,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know it’s right – so there’s no point in thinking what the alternative might be. This is my fate. There’s no point questioning it or thinking about meeting anyone else because Dave is the person I’m meant to be with. It’s weird. I can’t really explain it.”

  “What makes him so special?” I ask. The question comes out a bit sarcastically – unintentionally –and she laughs.

  “It’s a comfortable feeling. Secure. Maybe it’s not wise to feel that but I do. He’s my best friend. I can tell him anything. I can do anything when I’m with him.

  “He listens to my dreams,” she says, as if she’s just remembered this crucial detail that explains why Dave is the man for her.

  “Every morning, poor guy. And I have some very strange dreams. And I can sit on the loo and have a chat with him.” Another key criteria. “Although he probably wishes I wouldn’t,” she laughs.

  “I know he’ll love me no matter what. I always want to be with him. And when I‘m not with him, I miss him.”

  “Did you ever think you’d found Mr Right before Dave?” I ask her.

  I want to know if you always know for sure, or if you can get it wrong – if you can think someone is Mr Right and th
en realise at some point – a day later, a year later, a whole lifetime later – that they’re not so right after all.

  “I was with my first boyfriend, Sean, for ten years,” she says. “I thought he was Mr Right. But we were both very young. We had a lot of growing up to do. If he hadn’t cheated on me we’d probably have ended up getting married though. I’m glad we didn’t. Because I would never have had all the other experiences I’ve had since I was with him. And we’d probably be divorced by now anyway.

  “But I think that’s why I get on so well with Dave – because he’s so similar to Sean, without the bad bits.

  “I was with my second boyfriend for five years. I still miss him in some ways. But he was never Mr Right. With Dave I can be who I am. I can be me. But I never could be with Pete. He got so frustrated with things. He threw a video recorder out of a window once because he couldn’t get it to record Match of the Day. He would never have laid a finger on me, but he was so volatile. I was constantly worried about upsetting him.

  “I loved him though. I don’t regret any of the relationships I’ve had in my life, because they are all part of what has made me who I am today.

  “I remember having lunch with some friends one day just before Dave and I got together, and saying how I wished I could meet someone who had all the best bits of all my previous boyfriends. That’s Dave.

  “Ooh, wait, I like that,” I say, scribbling some extra notes to accompany the recording.

  “Do you want to know the best bits?” she asks, with a cheeky glint in her eye.

  “Will I have to censor the tape?” I laugh.

  “He has Sean’s stability, his maturity – apart from the whole cheating thing, obviously.

  “He has Pete’s adventurous nature, his willingness to try anything. And Mike – the one after Pete,” she says, raising her eyebrows, “well that’s where you’d need to censor. Let’s just say Mike taught me a lot. Most of what I know, in fact!

  “And Dave – well he is everything. My wish came true. That’s why I’d never look for anyone else. Because he’s the best of all things.”