Would Like to Meet

by Polly James

  Hi Dan,

  Nice to speak to you earlier today, despite the circumstances. I was so shocked to hear about Hannah I forgot to ask you something, so I was glad to find you on this site. Has anyone told Hannah’s partner about what’s happened yet? I think he’s abroad at the moment …

  What partner? Apparently Esther knows this mystery man well enough to have his number on her phone, even though he only exists in her imagination. Her warped imagination, not that mine’s much better. I seem to have doodled a tombstone with “RIP Esther” inscribed on it while I’ve been reading through her message to Dan, and I’m just about to scribble it out when I notice her P.S.

  If you ever fancy meeting for a drink, just give me a call. I’m sure we’ve got loads more in common than our match percentage indicates!

  She finishes with a stupid smiley face, but I’ll soon wipe that off her duplicitous, Hide-the-Blemished one. I pick up my phone and hit speed-dial.

  Chapter 58

  “Hi, Hannah,” says Dan, though he’s hard to hear over the hubbub of noise in the background. He and Ms Ultimate Betrayal are obviously still in the pub.

  “Ask Esther to give you my so-called partner’s number,” I say. “Do it now!”

  “What?” says Dan.

  His tone’s changed from concern to hostility, so it’s now a pretty good match for mine.

  “I’d have thought you’d have that number already,” he adds. “So why play games?”

  “Oh, I’m not the one who’s playing games,” I say. “But Esther is. Go on, ask her for the number.”

  I can hear Esther saying something to Dan now, though I can’t make out what.

  I do hear what he says in reply: “Hannah wants to know her partner’s number, for some unknown reason.”

  There’s a pause, and then Dan adds, “Though I don’t know why she didn’t ring you, instead of me.”

  That thought seems to get the cogs spinning in his brain, even if they’re not exactly whirling round at the speed of light, because then he says,

  “Hannah – how did you know Esther would be with me this evening?”

  He sounds so confused, I’m almost feeling sorry for him by now. Almost.

  “Never mind that,” I say. “What does Esther say the number is? Tell her to hurry up.”

  I wait for what feels like hours while Esther starts mumbling again, but finally Dan comes back on the line.

  “She says she can’t find it,” he says.

  “That’s because she never had it in the first place, Dan,” I say. “Imaginary partners tend not to be contactable by phone, and I ought to sue the bloody woman for slander for saying I have a boyfriend when I don’t. For libel, I mean. Seeing as she wrote it down.”

  Dan remains silent, presumably while his cogs do a bit more whirring, so I wait a few seconds and then I add,

  “Can you come round now, or do I have to come to you? If you choose the latter option, you’d better warn Esther to make herself scarce before I arrive. I don’t like people who lie, or stab their friends in the back.”

  I don’t know who’s more surprised by Rambo Hannah: me or Dan. I quite like her, though.

  * * *

  Dan’s definitely scared of Rambo Hannah. He turns up less than half an hour later, probably to avoid my threat to go to the pub and punch Esther if he kept me waiting. I’m not sure I’d really have gone through with the punching part, but it seems as if Esther believed I would.

  “She admitted she lied just before I left,” says Dan, as I open the front door and usher him in. “Though God knows why she did, or why she asked me out. I only agreed to meet her because I wanted to find out about your secret partner.”

  I’m still letting that information sink in, when Dan asks a tricky question.

  “How did you know she’d written something about him down?” he says.

  Oh, God. Now’s not the time for Rambo Hannah to lose her nerve, but I think she might be going to. I swallow, hard, then try to position my face so Dan can’t see my swollen eye.

  “I will tell you in a minute, I promise,” I say, “but first, there’s something else.”

  Dan looks across at me and, all of a sudden, his face looks lined, and almost as anxious as I bet mine does.

  “What now, Hannah?” he asks. “I’m not sure I can take much more. It’s been a very stressful week already, what with thinking you might die.”

  I didn’t know that was even a possibility, but it’s nice to hear he wasn’t too keen on the idea, even though he’ll probably change his mind once I’ve told him the awful truth.

  “I love you, Dan,” I say, gabbling the words and looking down at my feet to avoid meeting his eyes. “I still do, as much as I ever did. More, probably, now I’ve realised how much I was taking you for granted before you decided we ought to split up.”

  “You decided that,” says Dan.

  This is hard enough already without hairs being split all over the place, so I give him a reproachful look to silence him.

  “And I wish you’d come back,” I continue, still gabbling in case of further interruptions. “Though you definitely won’t want to, once you know how I found out what Esther wrote. I hacked your No-kay Cupid account.”

  I glance at Dan’s face, which looks incredulous, and then I reach over and grab the vodka bottle that’s still on the coffee table where Eva left it, hours and hours ago, or so it seems.

  “How the hell did you know I was on No-kay Cupid?” Dan asks, as he snatches the bottle from me and takes a swig.

  I make a variety of noises, ranging from “Erf” to “Um”.

  This next bit’s going to be even trickier, and I’m not sure where to start.

  Eventually, I try another “Erm”, and then I add, “Because I’d already hacked it once before.”

  Now it’s Dan’s turn to make unspellable noises, while his colour fades to a shade halfway between grey and pistachio green. It’d make a popular addition to Farrow and Ball’s heritage paint colour chart, but it isn’t a particularly flattering choice for the complexion.

  “So you know about –” he says.

  Then he stops dead, and takes another giant mouthful of vodka. He can’t even say her name, can he? Unsurprisingly, I can.

  “Pammy, you mean?” I say. “Oh, yes, I know about her. All about her, actually.”

  Dan looks so guilt-ridden that I feel terrible. He starts to speak, but I put my fingers to his lips.

  “Hang on a sec,” I say. “I ought to show you something, before you explain.”

  I go out into the hallway, and rummage about in the cupboard under the stairs where I almost succeed in giving myself a new head injury. I’m tugging at a box overhead when I dislodge one of Joel’s old skateboards which falls down, missing me by millimetres. It makes a hell of a crash, and Dan shouts to ask if I’m all right.

  I won’t know until I’ve shown him what’s in the box I’m trying to reach, so I don’t answer. I just tug at it some more and, eventually, it jerks free, just as Dan comes into the hallway to look for me.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, again.

  “You tell me,” I say, as I pass him the box. “Go and sit back down, then open it.”

  He does as he’s told, and I sit right next to him. That’s why I can only see one side of his face when he finally lifts the lid of the box to reveal a folded black latex costume, with a Catwoman mask on top.

  * * *

  Dan spends what feels like ten minutes staring at the Catwoman costume, and then he says, “It’s you?”

  His expression’s so inscrutable I’m lost for words, so all I do is nod.

  If I was expecting a big romantic ending at this point – which I wasn’t, though I was keeping my fingers crossed – I’m disappointed. Dan doesn’t take me in his arms, he just stands back up again.

  “You lied and said you were Pammy, for all that time?” he says.

  It sounds terrible, when he puts it like that.

  “Yeah, I did,”
I say, eventually. “I’m sorry.”

  Dan shrugs, so then I start to jabber.

  “It was an accident,” I say. “To start with, anyway, and then I fell back in love with you. But, by then, you seemed to be falling in love with Pammy and wanted to meet her, which is why she had to go to China. By that point, I was too scared to tell you I was her, because you liked her so much better than me.”

  Dan sits down again, heavily. I don’t like to mention that he’s parked his bottom on top of my tucked-up feet.

  “I was falling in love with Pammy,” he says. “She reminded me of you when we first met. The you I fell in love with back then, the one I thought was gone forever.”

  He probably feels like adding, “To be replaced by Rambo Hannah,” but he doesn’t. He takes my hand, instead, and starts to spin my wedding ring on my finger, round and round.

  “Did you lie about everything when you were being her?” he says, as we both watch the ring rotate. “Not just about her name, I mean?”

  “No, not everything,” I say. “Just the name, being in China … and working for MI6 while I was there, of course. The rest was true.”

  Dan makes a really strange noise, and for one horrible moment, I think I may have made him cry. Then it dawns on me that he’s laughing.

  “It is you,” he says, and then he kisses me, hard, on my puffy, pouty Pammy lips.

  * * *

  Dan and I stop kissing when we hear a cough. One of those “Ahem, someone’s watching you” coughs – emitted by Joel, who’s come into the house without slamming the door for the first time in his entire life.

  “Don’t mind me,” he says, when we turn to face him. “I’ll go and see if Marlon’s around, and give you guys some privacy.”

  He starts to walk out of the room, then ducks back in, quickly, just to make a thumbs-up sign.

  “He seems pleased,” I say, to Dan. “Though I’m not sure how we’re going to explain to him how all this came about.”

  “Well, you’re the one with the most explaining to do,” says Dan. “So I’m leaving that bit up to you. Now how about if I help you put this costume on, then take it off again?”

  I agree, on condition he tells me what he learned at the Sex Museum while he’s at it.

  * * *

  Next time Dan and I attempt to have sex, I think we’ll do it round at Bonkers Alice’s house. That way we can’t be interrupted by Joel returning home less than an hour after he went out.

  “Bloody hell,” he shouts, as he comes in and reverts to his usual form by slamming the door. “Mum, you won’t believe what I’ve just found out!”

  It’s a good job Dan’s already removed my Catwoman outfit, as otherwise I might have died of a heart attack from the stress of trying to explain to Joel why I was wearing it. As it is, I just pull on my dressing gown in a hurry, while Dan dons his trousers and shirt, and then we head downstairs.

  “You’ll never guess who Marlon’s dating,” says Joel, pulling the world’s most disgusted face.

  I match that, though with a shocked one, when Joel answers his rhetorical question.

  “Eva,” he says. “Your cougar mate!”

  “No! She promised me she wouldn’t go there,” I say, bewildered by why Eva would betray me, too.

  Can’t I trust any of my new friends? Next Albert will probably turn out to be a retired gangster or something equally out of character.

  I dial Eva’s number, and she answers on the first ring.

  “I was just going to phone you,” she says. “I know you’re going to want to kill me, but there are mitigating circumstances, honestly.”

  These turn out to have something to do with the hazards intrinsic to pulling someone while they’re unrecognisable, due to face paint and fancy-dress.

  “By the time I realised the sexy zombie was Marlon,” Eva says, “things had gone too far to stop. You get that, don’t you, Han? It’s a bit like what happened to you with Pammy, isn’t it?”

  It is, annoyingly, so I shut up. It’s not up to me to judge who people fall in love with, after all – unless it’s a purely one-sided obsession like the one Esther seems to have developed for Dan. Eva’s chuffed I’ve dealt with her, but now she wants to know what I’m planning to do as my next step.

  “I assume you’re going to resign?” she says. “Seeing as you can’t carry on working alongside that bitch.”

  I haven’t even thought about that yet, but now Eva comes to mention it, the idea of resigning’s very tempting. I can’t do it, though, not without another job to go to, and not when Dan and I have just agreed we’re going to take things slowly and date until the contract expires on his room at Alice’s. Even if he was moving straight back in, he couldn’t afford to keep me unless his redundancy package is a lot bigger than he’s letting on, and I wouldn’t expect him to, anyway. I need a job to keep my brain from atrophying. Once it’s recovered from being hit by a 4x4, that is.

  “I can’t see why your brain’s a factor,” says Eva, when I explain my reasons for not telling Halfwits to stuff their job immediately. “It’s not as if you’ve been using it while you’ve been working there. Not your creative brain, anyway.”

  “Good point,” I say, although some of the suggestions I got from Halfwits users in answer to my question about how to take revenge on Esther were inventive, to say the least. Most of them were probably illegal, too.

  “I know my job’s not right for me,” I say, “but it’s not as if anyone’s offering a better option.”

  As usual, Eva proves me wrong.

  * * *

  There’s no greater feeling than resigning from your job because you’ve got one a million times better, is there? Especially not when it allows you to tell your new line manager to go fuck herself at the same time.

  I do the sweary part by sending a text to Esther, so as not to punish anyone else at Halfwits for her sins. Then I write a perfectly polite email to the Fembot, suggesting that we stay in touch, and saying how much I’ve enjoyed working for her (a bit of a fib, at least until recently), and with my team (largely true, apart from Geoff).

  I end the email with a bang.

  As soon as I’m declared fit to work again, I’ll be starting my new job as an illustrator for Viva Vintage.

  Winter

  Chapter 59

  It’s fab, Dan being able to take time off whenever he likes now he’s working for himself, though he still won’t tell me what he’s up to. He says he’ll be ready to make the big reveal by New Year, just after he moves back in with me. In the meantime, he’s booked us a long weekend by the sea to celebrate us getting back together, and my new job.

  We’re sitting in our rented apartment looking out across the ocean. Even though it’s December now, the sun’s just come out from behind the clouds, and it’s glinting off the waves breaking onto the beach below the apartment block. I’m still not supposed to look at flashing lights, but I’m hoping that sparkles on water don’t count.

  They’re difficult to sketch in pencil, though, so I’m just rummaging around for my watercolours when Dan says, “You’ve explained yourself, but you still haven’t asked about my reasons.”

  “Your reasons for what?” I say.

  “Why I acted the way I did after we had that stupid row.”

  I push my sketchbook aside as Dan explains how things panned out, from his point of view. It’s a revelation, to say the least.

  “I spent the next few days waiting for the blow to fall,” he says, “with the tension building up and up. Eventually, it got to the point where I couldn’t take it any more, so I thought it’d be easier to bring the hammer down myself.”

  “Well, that was a bit drastic,” I say. “Wouldn’t talking to me about it have been a better option? Or even apologising?”

  Dan gives me a warning look, which scares me a bit, but then he winks and carries on.

  “If you weren’t going to eat humble pie, I sure as hell wasn’t going to,” he says. “And, anyway, I was shocked.�
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  It seems we both were, mainly at how an argument can become serious so quickly, especially when it starts with something as ridiculous as half-naked Brits staggering about in Spain.

  “But you’re the one who said you didn’t fancy me,” I say, thinking back.

  That was the killer, as I recall.

  Dan rolls his eyes, then says that no one fancies their wife in the middle of a shouting match.

  “Except in films,” he adds. “When they go from hating each other’s guts to shagging each other’s brains out within a split second.”

  There should be a law against scenes like that, if they’re so misleading.

  “But you implied you hadn’t fancied me for ages before we had the argument,” I say, after a pause. “You know you did.”

  Dan strokes my shoulder as if to acknowledge that statement might – just might – be true.

  “But we’d been doing nothing but snap at each other about stupid, petty things for ages by then,” he says, in mitigation. “And you’d go mad whenever I asked, ‘What’s the point?’”

  I move my shoulder out of stroking reach. I always hated it when Dan said, “What’s the point?” He might just as well have said he wanted to split up, there and then.

  He sighs, pulls me back towards him, and resumes the stroking. Then he says that nothing sums up the difference between men and women better than this.

  “When I said, ‘What’s the point?’ I was asking what the point was in having such a stupid argument,” he says. “But you always heard, ‘What’s the point of our relationship?’, didn’t you?”

  “Um,” I say.

  I did, but I hate it when I’m in the wrong. (That’s who Joel gets it from.) There must be some way to defend myself against Dan’s accusation, which is seeming more unfair by the minute, now I’m making an effort to find it so.

  “But –” I say, only for Dan to interrupt.

  He seems to know exactly where I’m going to accidentally go with this, if I’m left to my own devices.

  “Let’s go for a walk, or something,” he says, “before we end up having another row. That’s what we should have done last time.”