The screen faded to black.
I was shocked to find myself completely overwhelmed. My eyes had misted, and there was an uneasy lump in my throat like I had swallowed a marble. I stared at my hands and noticed a small tremble in them.
‘We’re delighted to have you on board, Freya.’ Aziz sounded genuinely enthused.
‘Thanks,’ I spluttered. I took a deep breath. The eucalyptus oil cleared my senses. ‘I didn’t expect that. It’s, it’s . . .’ I was lost for words.
‘Beautiful.’
I looked up, nodding.
Aziz grinned broadly at me. ‘It’s the truth. BBest doesn’t take risks. You’ve shown your loyalty. Let us repay you.’ He paused briefly and tapped on the screen in front of him. ‘If you could please sign here? We’ll transfer the money immediately.’
I placed my right hand on the screen for five seconds as it scanned my prints.
‘Done and done.’ And then I had an idea. ‘Do you think I could get a copy of that presentation?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘It’s just, well, I think my fiancé thinks I’m a bit of a ditz with money, but this presentation shows that I’m clearly not. In fact, this makes me sound very respectable.’
‘I’ll email it to you.’
‘Do you think you could change the words “luxury items” to something like “essential for life items”? It’s just I don’t think he’s going to see it the same way you and I do, Aziz. I mean, wouldn’t you say this wallet is an essential?’ I dipped into my bag and produced the green ostrich leather wallet that I adored. ‘It holds my cards, otherwise they would just be swimming around in my handbag. Do you see my point? That’s not a luxury.’ I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘And maybe could you take off the diamante sandals? I know they were a bit of a splurge, and I’ve only worn them twice, but I told Mason I got them cheap, and if he sees them here, well, he’ll know they weren’t cheap, won’t he? And I just couldn’t be bothered getting into the conversation with him. They’re beautiful shoes, Aziz, they make my entire wardrobe look classier by just sitting there, you can’t put a price on that.’
Aziz nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Great, great. Delighted we understand each other. Thank you.’
He pushed his chair back as he stood up. It made a small screechy noise across the floor.
‘No, Freya, thank you.’
I walked out into the spring sunshine in a slight daze. Not only did I have money in my account, but Blooming Brilliant was going to be a success. If I managed to walk successfully to the train station in my heels this would officially be the best day ever.
7
I met Mason in the salad bar queue in the BBest canteen six months ago. I was having lunch with Cat. The canteen didn’t bear any resemblance to any work canteen I had ever been in before, it was more like a family-friendly Italian restaurant. Every table had a tablecloth and serviettes, water glasses and real cutlery. There was no cardboard or take-away plastic packaging, and no soggy beans on toast or rubbery scrambled eggs. There was a beetroot and goat’s cheese dish that awoke taste buds I never even knew existed. On this day, I was waiting patiently in line and a tall, brown-eyed guy with a little bit of stubble stared right at me and smiled.
‘Hi.’
I was surprised. I wondered if I knew him from somewhere but I was sure I would remember if I knew him. He was exactly the kind of broad-chested, wide-smiling man I would find attractive. His head was shaved, and it had that vulnerable newborn quality to it. I immediately imagined myself kissing it and feeling the tingle of prickly hairs on my lips. He had a red T-shirt on and I felt myself blush a matching shade. I swallowed, equal parts mouse and lamb. ‘Hi.’
‘How you going?’ He chatted like we’d been friends for years, speaking with a lazy Australian drawl that caused the hairs on my arms to stand up.
I felt my hand raise to my head, self-consciously flicking my fringe away from my eyes. There was something about his grin that made me mirror it. The early eruptions of a giggle popped in my stomach.
‘I’m really good, you?’ I wondered if I was being picked up, or if this was a BBest thing. People did seem very friendly here, maybe I was just a new face and he wanted to know what I was working on. I’d rather be picked up than be a new face. I never got picked up. Not that I’m a wallflower – I have always found that phrase a bit strange: surely all flowers are appealing? But I think it was fair to say I was a little shy. I found the whole idea of meeting someone in a pub and being ‘picked up’ so off-putting. It was all shouts, booze, a little bit of spit flying one way or another, being pulled away from your friends, pretending not to care but caring, smiling, reapplying too much lipstick. So I suppose I didn’t put myself out there. That was my mother’s phrase, not mine. She said I didn’t put out enough ‘single sexy vibes’. I don’t even know what that means. Like what the hell is a vibe anyway? Since the divorce, Mam was most definitely out there. Did you know that STDs were on the rise in the over fifties because of all the casual and unprotected sex they were having? You see, I knew that. I didn’t ever want to know that, but Mam was a sharer.
Red T-shirt smiled and his gaze lifted over my head, and then back to my face. His brow creased, and I could see that a confused expression made him look even more attractive. He bent down slightly to me, and looked directly into my eyes.
‘Sorry, are you talking to me?’
‘What? I thought–’ I felt my mouth dry up.
‘Sure, mate, sure, see you at four.’ He tapped a logo on his chest. He cocked his head to one side like a Jack Russell looking for treats. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘Oh . . . I thought you were talking to me.’ Is that a hole right there? Because I am going to crawl right into it and if you could cover my head with some soil, I’ll crawl out again around midnight when everyone has gone home. Please and thank you.
He grabbed the collar of his T-shirt and said, ‘Wearable technology’ as if I knew what that was. ‘I’m testing out this phone, the mic’s in the collar and there’s a tiny earpiece that you can’t even see.’
I felt my eyes widen as I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Sounds great, and lovely T-shirt. Very fashion forward.’
He looked down at the T-shirt and smiled, rubbing his neck, a little confused, probably at me saying ‘fashion forward’. Who says ‘fashion forward’?
‘Thanks, I think.’
‘Move it up, Mason,’ a shout erupted from down the line. Red T-shirt, who I guessed was Mason, turned around.
‘I’ll, um . . .’ He pointed ahead.
I nodded, wanting him to move his handsome self along now and for this awkward encounter to be over.
He looked back. ‘The beetroot salad is tops.’ And then looked at my plate, which was piled dangerously high with purple goodness. ‘Ah, you know your beets.’
I added a sprig of broccoli to the plate, gave him a close-mouthed smile and backed away from the salad bar.
He got my number from Cat and phoned me two days later, making a bad joke about beetroot and wearable technology. I was flattered; he was handsome. And I mean really handsome. I’m not putting myself down here, I’m attractive, but Mason is gets-stopped-by-modelling-scouts attractive. We’re not in the same league and honestly, I initially found his good looks blinding. His olive skin and spirited eyes made me so nervous on our first date that it was all a bit of a disaster. I couldn’t focus on conversation, and I felt myself constantly blushing, which distracted me from speaking anything other than gibberish. And I was so conscious of other women and men looking at him, and then looking me up and down with a mildly confused and very judgy expression on their faces. It was off-putting.
We went to this hipster dive bar off a laneway on the south side of the city – a faded leather couches, sawdust, twenty-seven types of gin and a caravan out the back offering haircuts type of place – and I spent the entire evening shouty talking at him as we consumed cocktails and crisps. I was a spinning wheel of nervous e
nergy, every muscle in my body taut. I ground my teeth for half the evening. I was not one bit cool cat or sexy. I knew as the female I was supposed to be the spider in the trap making him buzz around while I casually spun my web, but my insecurities and his handsomeness set fire to the web and put a rocket up my spidey arse. I made a lot of noise and was kind of relieved when the evening was over, because I was exhausted and sweaty from trying so hard. That night I did not hug myself to sleep dreaming of our future grandchildren; I collapsed into a semi-coma and snored the house down.
Our second date, dinner in a tapas restaurant overlooking the green at Trinity College, was more revealing. I had calmed down considerably. We met at the restaurant, dimly lit with waxy candles, stone walls and an array of dried meats hanging from the ceiling. Mason was sitting at the back in a cosy corner. He was dressed in a navy shirt and looked smiley and fresh. He did a cute little half stand as I approached the table, and then a full on jump as he planted a kiss on my cheek. He was enthusiastic and nice. I appreciated the effort. I peeled my leather biker jacket off and placed it on the back of my wooden chair.
‘I already ordered some wine. Red. Okay?’ He started pouring into my glass, not waiting for a response.
I nodded politely. It didn’t feel like now was the time to mention that I preferred white.
‘So, how are you?’ His eyes widened enthusiastically and he looked at me expectantly.
‘Good,’ I started and then watched in horror as his hand slipped to the right and casually swiped through his phone. A few seconds went by in silence. He glanced up at me quickly and then back down to his phone.
‘Good, good.’ He reached for his wine. ‘How are the flowers?’ Then his head went back down, reading his screen.
‘They’re okay.’ I stopped, almost confused. ‘Is this?’ I pointed at his phone. ‘Are you . . .?’ Incredibly rude? Lacking in social graces? An idiot?
‘Sorry, it’s work, I’ve just so much on.’ He scratched at an itch on his forehead, flipped the phone over and grinned wryly. ‘Well, it’s work but there’s also a couple of games on. Do you follow the rugby at all?’
I shook my head slowly in disbelief, immediately annoyed that I’d bought a new top for this evening when clearly this guy would rather be in a pub shouting at a giant TV screen. Obviously I didn’t hide my feelings very well.
‘I won’t look. Sorry, it’s rude of me,’ he said apologetically.
With every sarcastic bone in my body I replied, ‘No, please be my guest.’
‘Really? Ah, that’s so cool of you, thanks. I’ll just check in now and again. Cheers, mate.’
Clearly here was a man immune to the wily ways of female sarcasm. And ‘cheers, mate’? Mate? I was wearing chandelier earrings, a low-cut emerald green top, which left a large amount of cleavage on display thanks to an awesome push-up bra and had bright red lipstick on. I was most definitely not his mate.
And honestly, things never really took off from there. I discovered that he loved rugby more than life itself, and looked dismayed when I told him I had maybe watched half a game a few years back but couldn’t remember it properly. He also loved his job, often worked weekends and didn’t mind. He didn’t discover anything about me, because he didn’t ask.
It was all disappointing. He fist pumped when his team scored a try, and even scrolled through a news site at one point. It was a non-event of a date. Mason suggested that I pay for the drinks when the bill arrived, which I wasn’t mad about – I mean, I would have offered, I just didn’t like the matter-of-fact way that he put it on the table. But I think the most revealing thing about the whole evening was that there was absolutely no chemistry between us. Zip. All zip and no zing. I was a little disappointed but not devastated. We weren’t compatible. We’d had a nice enough evening (there were some moments of niceness: he told a funny story about a trip to Barcelona to see the Sagrada Familia but took a bus in the wrong direction and ended up spending a weekend on a pig farm) but there were no fireworks, not even the muted tail of a shooting star. You win some, you lose some. We even shook hands awkwardly, a bit like you might see at the end of a football game when the winners commiserate with the losers, at the end of the night, standing on the corner of George’s and Dame streets on a windy winter’s evening with rain falling in sheets around us.
But, like the glutton for punishment that I am, later that evening, a little bit tipsy and with another glass of wine in my hand for a top up and a wind down, I decided to run our compatibility numbers through BBest. Just for a laugh. If you did this before a date you probably wouldn’t go if you got a low score, or at least I wouldn’t, that’s how much I trusted BBest. But after a date, it was all in good fun. BBest knew me better than I knew myself, it knew who would suit me perfectly, so I expected my compatibility numbers with Mason to be bad, somewhere in the low thirties.
I was shocked when I saw the result was ninety-three per cent. Mason was my match. And not just a bit of a match, a ninety-three per cent match. Nobody gets ninety-three per cent. Romeo and Juliet probably scored in the low eighties, Antony and Cleopatra would have been lucky with a seventy. Ninety-three per cent meant we were written in the stars, he was my man. He was the man I had dreamed of meeting when I had cried with girlfriends over bad dates and they rubbed my back and kindly said there was someone out there for me. It was Mason. He was the someone.
I was surprised. I hadn’t felt any chemistry, but what’s chemistry anyway? He was drop dead gorgeous, stable, had a good job, was clean and well groomed, and he seemed perfectly nice. He was the man I would watch box sets with and tickle torture if he skipped ahead of me on the shows; who I would joke with about getting matching tattoos. We would look at old couples holding hands and know that that would be us one day, holding each other up and rattling off our ailments and medications. We would be the very best of friends and lovers.
Mason called me the next day. He had run the numbers too, and was polite but also perplexed. We agreed that we hadn’t been an obvious connection. But we both trusted BBest entirely and so we did what you do when BBest offers you your very best option: we took it. We dived head first into the relationship, knowing that there was something between us that had to be explored.
In the early days we fished and dug and looked for similarities. We interviewed each other, listed our passions, desires, family backgrounds, embarrassing stories. We searched for histories that we could latch onto, and we’d giddily throw our heads back and announce that’s it, that’s the tiny acorn that we can start our great oak tree of love with.
There had been a strange finality to us since that night, especially after we told friends and family about our numbers. Everyone was delighted that we were all wrapped up in a neat bow, no questions asked. They all agreed that we were destined for each other.
When things didn’t jump out at Mason and I immediately, we both understood that we were going to be a slow burn, but true love would shine for us eventually.
8
‘Seriously, Granddad, I’m not going to sit here and let you smoke.’
‘Well, sit there then.’ He pointed to the chair beside me.
‘That’s not funny. I mean, where can you even buy cigarettes these days, who would sell them to you? It’s against the law. It’s disgusting.’ I was like a broken record. We had this same conversation every time I saw him. I always gave up and he always smoked.
‘I’m seventy-six years of age, do you think I give a shit about the law? I’m my own law.’ He pounded his chest with his hands.
‘Your health?’
‘Hmmph,’ he exhaled a wheezy sound. ‘I’m strong as an ox, and if you don’t like it, you know where the door is.’
That normally signalled the end of the conversation. He knew and I knew that I was never going to walk out. And I would never ever admit it, but the smell of stale cigarette smoke reminded me so much of this house and Granddad that I actually quite liked it. I shook my head at him and stifled a laugh. He was a stubbor
n old goat and hands down my favourite person in the world. He still had a full head of hair as white as a polar bear’s arse, his words not mine, and surprisingly luxurious. He wore sports socks and Birkenstock sandals and he had a selection of six woolly jumpers on rotation. Today he was wearing the green one, which had yellow stripes emblazoned across the front. He wore thin-rimmed glasses all the time now; they used to be just for reading but seeing as he read most of the time they were a constant, perched on the end of his long and prominent nose.
‘I’ll make the tea, shall I?’ I stood up and walked to the back of the shop. I say ‘shop’ but it’s not really a shop. It was just my granddad’s house that had somehow turned into a shop. He lived in an old part of Dublin, Smithfield, in a two-windowed cottage built for workers at the Guinness factory a mile up the road. It’s a unique part of the city, where a lot of older people have lived all their lives, and have kept their old-school traditions: they listen to the radio; they grow their own vegetables on allotments; they go to the pub every night and drink two pints of Guinness, which they call ‘a pint of plain’; and they read books.
All of his life, Granddad had been an avid reader and collector of books – books of the paper variety. And he had never thrown any out; instead, he just built more and more shelves to house them and even an extension out the back of his cottage. The books were in such good condition that they might as well be new. He was known as the Book Man, and neighbours were always calling in, some to borrow, some to buy, some to give. He had a loyal customer base who orbited the shop like it was an undiscovered planet. As bookshops started to fade out of the mainstream high street, his cigarette- smelling shop became increasingly popular with people who wanted to hold on to older things.
He had passed his love for books onto me. Books that gave me shivers; books that made me think; books that made me laugh; books that hurt me – they’re all there in Granddad’s house. And I was so grateful to know that feeling of excitement, that dreamy love affair that only occurs between a reader and the pages of a book. I could lose myself in a passage and read and re-read until the pages grow loose and nearly fall out.
Right Girl Page 5
