Dinner for Two

by Mike Gayle

  ‘Dave Harding?’ she says eventually. ‘Are you Dave Harding?’

  I don’t speak. This isn’t what I had planned for the next half-hour, I tell myself. I left the office to get a sandwich. I was going to go back to the office and eat it at my desk. That was what I had planned. I’m not prepared for this. I haven’t had enough time to think about this properly so it can’t be happening.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, still looking at me. ‘I shouldn’t have come, should I? You’re at work. I should’ve waited for you to call me, like you said you would. It’s just that when I got your message I couldn’t wait.’

  She looks like she’s going to cry. I can’t stand the thought of her crying.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say softly. ‘Honestly. Don’t worry about it. I’m really glad you came . . . Nicola . . . Nicky . . . Nicola. Which do you prefer to be called?’

  ‘Nicola,’ she says. ‘Mum sometimes calls me Nicky, but I prefer Nicola.’

  ‘Okay, then, Nicola,’ I begin, then realise we’re standing in the middle of the pavement. ‘I think we’re in the way here,’ I tell her, and point to a newsagent’s with a large awning under which a number of people are waiting for the rain to stop. ‘Shall we stand over there?’

  Nicola nods and follows me. We stand at the edge of the crowd and look out into the rain rather than at each other.

  ‘Have you got a day off school or something?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  ‘You’ve bunked off?’

  She nods.

  I laugh gently in an attempt to put her at her ease. ‘I did that once when I was about fourteen,’ I tell her. ‘Not even for a particular reason, really. I just wanted to see if I could do it. I liked school.’

  She doesn’t say anything.

  ‘How did you find me today?’ I ask.

  She bites her lip. ‘I looked in the magazine for the address,’ she tells me, ‘and saw that it was on Tottenham Court Road so I thought I’d come and meet you. I’ve been waiting for you since about half ten, sitting over there.’ She points to a bench across the road outside a row of electrical stores selling discount TVs and hi-fis. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you. I thought the best thing to do was to see if you came out for lunch.’

  ‘What would you have done if I hadn’t?’

  She shrugs. And I join her in a brief silence of my own and watch the cars and taxis go by.

  ‘This is weird, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do now.’

  She shrugs again.

  ‘Well, how about this?’ I say, trying to make my voice sound a bit less scary and a bit more cheery. ‘How about we go to McDonald’s or Burger King or wherever you want just to get out of the rain? Are you hungry?’ She shakes her head. ‘Thirsty, maybe?’ She shakes her head again. ‘You don’t have to eat if you don’t want to but if you change your mind I’ll get you some food.’

  ‘There’s a McDonald’s at the top of Oxford Street,’ she says quietly. ‘Mum and I go there sometimes.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll go there.’ I step out into the rain but she’s still standing under the awning. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.

  At first she doesn’t reply. She still looks tearful but now she looks apprehensive too. Then she says, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Anything.’

  I smile, trying to reassure her. ‘That’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. We’ll walk down to McDonald’s and, well, we won’t say a word. What is it? A five-minute journey? That’s plenty of time. You think of all the questions you’d like to ask me. I’ll think about all the questions I’d like to ask you and, hopefully, by the time we get there we won’t have forgotten any of them.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says, and steps out to join me.

  stare

  We reach McDonald’s and I ask her if she’s changed her mind about eating and she shakes her head. I ask if she’s vegetarian and she laughs for the first time, then tells me she just isn’t hungry. I offer to get her a coffee or a tea or any kind of drink she wants, but she refuses everything. I nod in what I hope is an amiable fashion to show her it doesn’t matter. Because I don’t know if she’s genuinely not hungry or just being polite I order a Big Mac, fries and a strawberry milkshake as well as my chicken sandwich in case she changes her mind.

  When the food is ready I take the tray from the guy behind the counter and look around to see where we might sit. The restaurant is packed with lunchtime trade, which consists mainly of tourists, so we make our way downstairs and find a booth in a far corner. I set down the tray on the table and sit down while she slides in opposite me. I place the tray with the Big Mac, fries and milkshake in front of her and arrange my meal in front of me. Then, once again, we stare at each other wondering what to say.

  ‘This is still weird, isn’t it?’ I say, opening the polystyrene container with my chicken sandwich in it.

  She nods and looks at the fries. Maybe she’s hungry after all, I think. ‘You can have one of those, if you want. In fact, you can have them all – the whole thing’s yours.’ I laugh. ‘Did you think I was going to eat two meals by myself?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  I take a bite of my sandwich. I can’t remember the last time I had a McDonald’s. I only suggested it to Nicola as a knee jerk reaction – assuming that McDonald’s was the type of place a teenage girl might like to go. Judging by the way she’s warming to the food in front of her – dipping her fries into the ketchup and rearranging the contents of her Big Mac (neither the lettuce nor the pickled gherkins made the final cut) – I reckon I’ve made the right choice.

  ‘So,’ I say, when we’ve consumed about half of our lunch, ‘I think that us eating has made this whole thing a lot less strange. Now we’re just two people eating, aren’t we?’

  She nods carefully.

  ‘It must have been a bit of a shock seeing me in Teen Scene.’

  ‘I didn’t know what to think,’ she tells me. ‘It was like something out of a film.’

  read

  She’d had a rough day at school and had wanted something to read to cheer her up. She’d saved Teen Scene until after her dinner because she liked to read it all in one sitting undisturbed. She’d begun in her bedroom lying face down on her bed with a pillow under her chin and the magazine propped against the headboard.

  She liked to read magazines by flicking through from front to back to get an overview and then head to the articles and features that had caught her eye. She’d flicked past the contents page, the letters, the bits of celebrity gossip, a couple of features, the horoscopes and the fashion and makeup pages. When she’d got to the problem pages she’d stopped. ‘Brand New Look Extra-sized Confidential Confession’, the headline read. She’d searched for ‘Ask Adam’ only to discover that he’d been replaced by a new agony uncle called ‘Love Doctor Dave’. She’d read my column and when she’d finished her eyes had been drawn back to the photo of me at the top of the page.

  She thought she recognised me, but she couldn’t think where from and then something clicked. She ran into her mum’s room and searched the bottom of the wardrobe, scattering shoes and clothes around her, until she found what she was looking for: a photo album. She returned to her own room and flicked through the pages until she found the photo of the young man with his arms around her mum. She compared it with the picture in the magazine. Then she looked through the contributors list in the magazine for a Dave Harding.

  And that was it.

  She’d found me.

  fame

  I don’t interrupt her as she speaks. The deeper into her narrative she gets, the more she seems to come out of her shell. By the time she concludes her story her whole manner has changed and she has relaxed. But then she suddenly becomes aware that she’s dominated the conversation, withdraws into her shell and begins to chew her lip again.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ I say.

  She nods.
>
  ‘You said in your letter that you haven’t told your mum about me and I was just wondering why not.’

  ‘I just didn’t.’ It seems that that is as much of an answer as I’m going to get. ‘Was it strange getting my letter?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah. Very. If it hadn’t have been for the photos I don’t think I would have believed it.’

  Immediately she looks uncomfortable. ‘I don’t want anything from you,’ she says. ‘I didn’t get in touch with you to get things.’

  ‘I didn’t think you did.’

  ‘I just want you to know that.’

  ‘I do,’ I reassure her. ‘Have you thought about what you’d like to ask me?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t ask any more questions then,’ I say. ‘Maybe we should just talk like two normal people eating in McDonald’s.’

  She nods and, to change the subject, I ask her what kind of music she likes.

  ‘Anything really.’

  ‘Pop, death-metal, hardcore rap, classical?’

  ‘I don’t think I know what those are,’ she says seriously.

  ‘Me either,’ I tell her, ‘but people like me spend ages making up new musical categories: Brit-pop, Shoe-gazing, Hard House, UK Garage, Drum and Bass, Jungle, New Wave of New Wave, Nu-Soul, Nu-metal, New Acoustic Movement – how ridiculous is all that? It’s just music at the end of the day. But we’re not satisfied until we’ve slapped a label on it so we can dismiss it once we’ve got bored of it.’

  Nicola looks at me blankly. Obviously she hasn’t got a clue what I’m talking about. ‘I like pop stuff, really,’ she says. ‘The stuff you hear on the radio. Things you can sing along to.’ She looks at me earnestly. ‘What music do you like?’

  ‘I like anything, really. Apart from pop music – can’t stand it – dance music too – can’t stand that either or death-metal and classical.’

  She laughs. She has a nice grin and a nice laugh. ‘So what does that leave?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But don’t you write about pop music in Teen Scene? How can you write about it if you don’t like it?’

  ‘I know. It’s terrible, isn’t it?’

  ‘You interviewed two of my favourite bands in this issue.’ She proceeds to name two cheesy UK pop acts. ‘It must be fantastic meeting famous people all the time. What are they like in real life?’

  ‘Like me and you. Only less so. They’re nothing special.’

  ‘They are to me,’ she says. ‘I think they’re the best bands in the world.’

  Her reply is so earnest that momentarily I’m lost for words. I was right, I tell myself, teenage girls do know what music is all about.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘They probably are the best bands in the world.’

  ‘You used to write for a magazine called Louder, too, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, I did. How do you know? You weren’t a Louder reader, were you?’

  ‘The Internet. We have it at school. I put your name into a search engine on one of the computers in the library when I was supposed to be doing a geography project.’

  ‘And you came across the Louder website?’ She nods. ‘I thought they’d shut it down.’

  ‘The pages and links are still up there,’ she says. ‘You used to write about a lot of bands I’ve never heard of. Were they any good?’

  ‘Some of them were good. Most of them were rubbish.’

  ‘Is that why you became an agony uncle?’

  ‘Sort of. Louder closed and a friend offered me this job as a stop-gap.’

  ‘Did you have to go to university to learn to be an agony uncle?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘So what did you do to get the job?’

  I have to think hard before I answer this question. It feels wrong to admit that I’m just a jobbing journalist. I don’t want to shatter the illusion that I know what I’m talking about. ‘I had some special training. But mainly I’m just a bit of a natural when it comes to relationships and stuff.’

  ‘Have you got any other kids?’

  Her question takes me by surprise but it’s a fair one to ask, given the circumstances. A shadow of sadness falls over me but I refuse to let it stay. ‘No,’ I tell her. And then I wonder if she wants me to add the words ‘apart from you’. She doesn’t look like she has a secret agenda of any kind but I don’t say it anyway.

  ‘Are you married?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah, I am.’

  ‘What’s your wife called?’

  ‘Izzy.’

  ‘Is she pretty?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘What does she do . . . for a job?’

  ‘Have you heard of Femme magazine?’

  ‘It’s the glossy one that’s for “women who know what they want”, or something,’ she says, paraphrasing the magazine’s strap line. ‘Mum sometimes reads it.’ She giggles to herself and adds, ‘I’m not too sure she always knows what she wants though.’

  ‘Well, Izzy works on that magazine. She was deputy editor there. Today she found out that she’s going to be acting editor.’

  ‘Does she get paid a lot?’

  ‘She does okay,’ I say, ‘but the world of magazines sounds a lot more glamorous than it really is. Basically they’re just a bunch of people sitting in an office all day answering the phone and typing at a computer.’

  ‘Does she get to interview celebrities?’

  ‘A few.’ I name three who I think might impress a thirteen-year-old girl.

  ‘I’ve heard of all of them,’ says Nicola. The earnestness is back again and she is awestruck. ‘It’s amazing she’s met them. What were they like?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I tell her, which is true. ‘I think they were all right.’

  ‘I’ve never met anyone famous,’ she says, then adds, ‘Apart from you.’

  ‘But I’m not famous.’

  ‘Your face is in a magazine,’ she says. ‘Girls at school have read your column. That’s famous to me.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ’bye

  By the time we’re ready to leave (the remains of Nicola’s strawberry milkshake having melted to a pink slush at the bottom of the cup; the few remaining French fries having gone cold and hard; the odd bit of lettuce and abandoned gherkins having gone even more limp) I still haven’t come to terms with what has just happened. Nicola, the daughter I hadn’t known existed until yesterday, is sitting right in front of me. And we’ve just eaten lunch in McDonald’s as if we’re on a first date. It all seems too unreal for words and yet there she is. It’s all I can do to stop myself leaning forward and prodding her arm to check that she’s real.

  ‘Have you got to get back to work?’ she asks, as we stand up. ‘You must have loads of letters to read.’

  ‘Yeah, I have,’ I reply, as we tidy away our trays and rubbish.

  Together we make our way up the stairs and out of the restaurant on to Oxford Street. Sitting in the bowels of the restaurant I’d been oblivious to the world outside and had focused all my attention on this one person. Now suddenly I’m in a different environment and the adjustment seems to be taking longer than usual. It is no longer raining and the traffic seems louder, the sky brighter, the people around us busier.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ I ask.

  She shrugs.

  ‘You could go back to school,’ I suggest.

  ‘I don’t think I will, if that’s all right,’ she says, looking down at her shoes. ‘I think I’ll just go to the library and look at some books.’

  ‘Have you got enough money to get home?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. I bought a Travel Card.’

  ‘And you’ll be all right getting back to Wood Green?’

  ‘I’ve been to Oxford Street on my own loads of times,’ she tells me. ‘I’m usually with my friends, but I’ll be okay.’

  ‘Listen, how about I give you the money for a cab? I
don’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon worrying about you.’

  ‘I’ll be okay.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’ She looks at her watch. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Okay, then. Well, it was really good to meet you.’ I think about shaking her hand but it doesn’t seem appropriate. ‘Your mum must be really proud of you.’

  She half smiles in acknowledgement but avoids eye-contact. ‘It was good to meet you too . . . Oh, and thanks for the McDonald’s.’

  Neither of us moves. A bus roars by and several taxis and cars exchange heated debate via their horns.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she says again, and begins to walk away.

  She’s only taken a few steps before I call out her name. She stops immediately and turns round.

  ‘I know we haven’t had much time today,’ I tell her, ‘but how about meeting up again? If you want to, that is.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, really. When shall we say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I’ll have to think about what I’m going to tell Mum. I don’t want to lie but . . .’

  ‘You can tell her you know about me if you want. I don’t think you should keep secrets from her.’

  She stops and thinks. ‘I want to tell her but not yet. Do you mind?’

  ‘It’s up to you. I just want you to be okay.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Also, I think that today should be the first and last time you bunk off school and the last time you come into London on your own. Maybe when we meet again I’ll pick you up? Shall I call you and we’ll arrange something?’

  She nods. ‘I’ll see you, then.’