by Neal Doran
Oh. OK. I’ll be fine. I think…
I hoped she was going to be OK. It felt difficult leaving someone who’d gone out on a limb to suggest doing something stuck at home, rejected and miserable on a Sunday afternoon. I’d been there myself enough. But I was also a bit relieved to have an excuse to say no in some ways. Things were moving perhaps a little too fast for me and I just thought Iwasn’t that sort of boy…
For a while I just lay there, considering I should probably get up off the living-room floor in a second. Also that there seemed to be a potential fortune in coins and old pen tops under the furniture when you looked from this angle. After a minute or two more of vacant staring, I hauled myself to my feet and braced myself for my expedition into uncharted territory with Hannah.
Chapter Six
‘We’ll start at Gap and Designers at Debenhams, then tea and cake on the way, and finish with cocktails at Selfridges.’
Hannah explained the plan for the day as we emerged from the underground at Bond Street and joined the scattered but growing early afternoon crowds. At this time of day it was mainly slightly disappointed-looking tourist families, and the early risers amongst London’s gangs of mopey and surly-looking teens.
‘Couldn’t we just go straight to M&S?’ I asked. ‘There’s a sale on, then we could be in the pub by one-thirty.’
Hannah gave me one of her stern looks, usually reserved for Rob, as she raised an eyebrow in my direction. Wearing a black and white belted mac, she looked like a no-nonsense detective from the fashion police. I was in her manor now. I was worried to see that she was wearing a pair of Keds that would in no way stop her from walking for miles.
‘No can do, Dan. Marks is great for some things, but unless you’re telling me you’re in the market for a new bra and some decent everyday knickers, we’re moving on.’
I looked myself up and down. I didn’t think the grey round-neck sweater I was wearing was that offensively inoffensive, and it certainly didn’t look as if it was concealing moobs — not on a day when I’d spent nearly an hour in the gym. Hannah shook her head as I gestured hopefully that the High Street favourite hadn’t let me down too much in the past.
‘Sorry, it’s a lovely colour on you, but today we’re going to have to be ruthless, and with Rob not here I’m going to have to be bad cop as well as good cop,’ she said with a cheeky grin. ‘You’ll also have to fill in for Rob holding my handbag and looking a bit awkward outside changing rooms while I try on things.’
Girly clothes shopping? My look of general reluctance to be out in the spitting rain traipsing from department store to department store — does anyone ever traipse when they’re not shopping? — intensified into one of sheer horror. A cry of ‘Nooooo!’ rose up in my throat.
‘Just kidding,’ said Hannah. ‘It’s all about you today. I’m not even going to look in the sales. We’ll start on you from the ground up. Time to get you in some decent shoes.’
Despite my efforts to slow the inevitable by suggesting getting a big Starbucks and a bun, within ten minutes we were nursing buckets of coffee and sitting on an island of overstuffed shiny leather stools while an effortlessly aloof teen went to collect the size tens Hannah had picked out for me.
‘Did you see the headgear he was wearing?’ I asked. ‘It looked more like something you’d get working for the CIA, not the Sunday boy in a shoe shop.’
‘Can’t escape from technology these days. I think he was playing it up a bit when he started talking into his sleeve and asking if codename oystercatcher came in half-sizes,’ observed Hannah.
‘I’m still not sure why we’re in here. I only bought these shoes three years ago.’
‘They’re round, Dan. A man’s feet should not be round. They make you look like a flat-footed pony.’
‘But these ones I’ve got to try are a bit showy, aren’t they? With the unnecessary zips and funny stitching?’
‘They’ll look good on with the rest of your new look. And if you’re meeting a lot of women they’ll be the first thing that they’ll pick up that shows you’re making a bit of an effort. You don’t want to look like you still get taken shoe shopping by your mum.’
I tried to think back to the last time I’d been accompanied by anyone when shopping for shoes. I couldn’t remember doing it with my ex, Kate, and my head instead filled with glimpses of being a kid, the vinyl-covered stools with sloping rubberised foot rests and metallic measuring devices with bits of tape measure across them. I developed a nostalgia for Velcro, and remembered blushing as I sat with Mum having my big toe prodded by the pretty sixth-former Saturday girl.
‘I hope these socks haven’t got holes in them,’ I said.
‘I’m just popping over to have a look at those boots in the sale while we wait,’ said Hannah.
Hannah returned at the same time as the special agent assigned to my feet, and requested that he get the twin of the heeled boot she was unevenly standing in. I wrestled with the elaborate lacing of a pair of distinctly continental-looking shoes while Hannah tried to imagine how the boots she was wearing would look with a skirt, rather than jeans rolled up as if she were planning on going for a paddle.
‘How do you mean I’ll be meeting lots of women?’ I asked.
‘It’s all part of the plan and you’ll find out soon enough. We’re just thinking maybe if you get a bit more practice you’ll get a bit more comfortable with the whole thing.’
‘Friday that much of a disaster, was it?’
‘You know it couldn’t exactly be described as a roaring success…’
‘If only Rob hadn’t felt me up I might not have nearly choked.’
Hannah paused for a minute in front of a mirror and looked thoughtful as she rotated a booted foot on its heel.
‘There’s not many times emergency first aid helps the atmosphere on a date, but by then I think it was already too late,’ she said.
‘Do you think so? I had a bad start, but I thought I was really making up for it by the time we were eating.’
‘By the time we were eating the game was over, sweetheart.’
Staring at the unfamiliar shiny brown boots on my feet, I was unexpectedly winded by the announcement.
‘She’d decided I wasn’t her type already?’ I asked as I walked gingerly to the mirror and back, before slumping squeakily onto a seat.
‘Whose type do you think you came across as?’ Hannah asked, sitting down next to me, and leaning her shoulder onto mine. ‘That sounds mean, but what I’m trying to say is…if there was a problem with choking, it happened long before you got caught out with the starter. As soon as you came through the door you were acting so hyper, and when Niamh arrived you spent so much time going back and forth from pale and sickly to having hot flushes I thought you were going through the menopause. It just wasn’t…’
‘It wasn’t really me? I know, I need to try and be more myself sometimes, I guess.’
‘Yes, but like the edited highlights. You’re trying to impress someone, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re trying to find someone you’ll want to impress for the rest of your life so you need to dial some things about you up a little. Your best qualities, maybe not the…anxiousness. There’s just so much good about you, but you don’t need to leave that hidden for people to discover over time. You need to get this stuff condensed into one big bowl of Dan terrificness. Basically, you need to be SuperDan.’
‘SuperDan?’
‘SuperDan.’
‘Why stop there? Not UberDan?’
‘You’ve got to show the other guys a bit of mercy now, mister. UberDan would have the power to wreck previously happy marriages.’
‘I always thought Rob had a little thing for me.’
‘Hands off my hubby, loverboy.’
Our attending spook noiselessly materialised again next to us. Or maybe he’d been there all along; it’s impossible to know considering the dark arts these operatives must be trained in.
‘We’ll take these,
please. And we’ll have the boxes,’ Hannah said authoritatively. As we stood and waited for our cards to clear, she turned to give my slumped back a bit of a rub.
‘Niamh did say you seemed really nice once she got to know you a bit. She even said that you’d make a really sweet boyfriend for someone.’
‘Ooh, nice AND sweet? That’s harsh…’
‘You know me, have to tell it like it is. Now come on, time for jeans.’
After we moved on to shopping for trousers, the novelty of the day began to wear off a little bit. If buying shoes was a more complicated process than I’d previously appreciated, jeans was worse — colour, cut, finish all had to be considered before they got dumped on the pile I was carrying around to try on. I realised at least with shoes you had the advantage of mainly sitting down to do the trying on; now I was hopping around in a small cubicle wrestling stiff denim. It was a well-known fact that thousands of accidents a year happened when men were trying to put their trousers on, and here I was risking my life over and over again for something I’d previously just bought off the shelf if they matched the combination blue, 32W, 34L.
‘Come on, turn around and lift your jumper up. If we’re going to do this we can’t afford to be shy,’ said Hannah as I gingerly stepped out from the changing-room pod.
I passed another man in front of a full-length mirror who was apparently capable of making his own decisions on clothing, nodded to the headset-wearing attendant in charge of the section — the spies were everywhere today — and ran the gamut of other expectant partners waiting for their charges to emerge.
‘They feel quite comfortable,’ I said hopefully as I complied with the instruction.
‘Right. Comfortable. Now come over here in front of this mirror and you can tell me what’s wrong with them.’
I walked over to stand next to Hannah with the scratchy flapping of the cardboard labels and plastic security tags running down my leg singling me out as someone to be judged. Sheepishly I stared at my legs. They did look a bit clownish, I supposed. I looked at Hannah through the mirror.
‘I guess they’re a little baggy? Around the thighs?’
‘A little baggy? You could get someone else in there. Which is a waste, because this is not a look that’s going to make anyone want to get in your pants. Here, c’mere.’
Hannah stood up close in front of me; with me in just my socks her head was bumping against my chest.
‘Now look at your bum in the mirror,’ she said. ‘Except you can’t see it at the minute because it’s hidden in these terrible jeans. You look like a dieter wearing their “before” pants. Now if I just do this…’
Her head dipped slightly as she stood in closer and grabbed the loose fabric on each side of my trousers. I was hit with a burst of the smell of her shampoo, or conditioner, or whatever it was that went in all those bottles with the made-up science words on them.
‘Now look again. There it is, very small and neat, but definitely there, your legs don’t just meekly disappear into your back. This is a good thing. And this…’ she gave my trousers a tug as if she were pulling the reins on a skittish horse ‘…this is the level of exposure you want. Any less and it looks like you’ve nothing there to hide, any tighter and you look like a West End rent boy.’
‘I can’t imagine all this attention is being paid to my, to my bum.’ For the first time all day, I could feel myself start blushing a bit.
‘I know. Women, eh? Deep down we’re all looking for great personality. It’s just there’s a lot of places where we try and find it. Remember we’re talking first impressions here and if we get this right we can buy you some time. So get back in there, and come back out when you’ve found the right ones and let me see. Yell if you need me to get any more sizes. And put your shoes on too — that’s important.’
‘All right,’ I said, like a petulant teenager, ‘but I’m not doing up the laces.’
I headed back into the changing room, suddenly feeling the eyes of the world on my backside. After a couple of near-misses on colour and leg cut, we found the jeans that went in and out in all the right places, and I was ordered to buy two pairs. Then it was on to tops and before I knew it I was being bombarded with T-shirts, shirts, cardigans, sweaters, and polo shirts. Being told where it was OK to have a bit of pattern and branding on show, and when it wasn’t. I was being dressed up, and dressed down. I was told I could no longer wear anything in my favourite colour, because with my skin tones it made me look like an anaemic refugee from Chernobyl. OK, maybe Hannah put it a bit more politely than that, but I knew what she meant. The number of boxy paper bags I was carrying kept rising, as did the stinging ridges from where the string handles of the bags cut into my fingers.
Just as I began feeling that I was being played with a bit too much like an oversized Ken doll, but without the intellectual capability, Hannah mercifully declared a break.
‘Good work, soldier, now it’s time to get that afternoon tea I promised.’
The prospect of a cup of tea and a stale scone had never seemed so appealing.
The changing-room curtain opened with a triumphant, swooshing ‘schhe-vingggg’.
‘It’s so short I’m going to have to make friends with the Thighmaster again, and to work up at the front I’m going to need a lot of duct tape, but I love it!’
Just to avoid any confusion, I should point out that it was Hannah who said this, talking about the electric-blue sequinned frock she was trying on — I hadn’t had an epiphany about my life choices on the second floor in Selfridges.
‘It looks great,’ I said as she tottered about in her bare feet on tiptoes, looking at herself at different angles in the shop-floor mirrors. ‘You work it, girl!’
She stopped her catwalk voguing for a second to look at me, before we both started laughing at what was the worst attempt to sound like a New York fashion diva ever undertaken in public.
‘What?’ I asked as I unconvincingly waved my arm side to side in a Z shape and executed a series of finger clicks like a very camp Zorro. ‘You look fierce, girlfriend.’
‘Watching that, I honestly cannot see why your mother would be convinced you’re gay,’ said Hannah.
‘I’m not selling that? How about something a bit more manly – Phwoarr!’
‘Hmm, maybe that’d work better if you weren’t clutching my handbag.’
Afternoon tea and cakes, it turned out, had not been scheduled to take place at the all-the-pastry-you-can-eat buffet in a department store. Instead it involved tiny little sandwiches and a large glass of prosecco — OK, maybe two — in an Old Bond Street hotel, classified by the official AA hotel inspectors as ‘swanky’. By the time we got down the last stretch of our shopping trip to Selfridges, the atmosphere might have turned a little silly.
‘Right, I’m buying this. I never want to wear anything else again. Do you think I can do it like shoes — leave my old unwanted stuff here and wear this home?’ Hannah asked, watching herself as she pulled her hair up off her neck and gave another twirl.
I have to admit I was distracted for a minute as I watched her too. It wasn’t as if Hannah ever looked terrible. But watching her unselfconsciously excited — and in a head-turning dress that accentuated, well, everything — I was surprised by the transformation. Maybe it was the dress, maybe it was the fizzy wine, but for a second I saw her as the cute girl I’d noticed at a party years ago and not the sensible wife of my best mate. It might sound odd, but I’d never really thought of her as someone with legs before.
Through the mirror she gave me a sly ‘not bad, eh?’ smile.
‘Um, you could wear it home,’ I said, remembering her question, ‘but it depends how close you want to get to the checkout assistant who has to take out those security tags.’
‘Good point,’ she said as she sashayed back to the changing room, only slightly put off the stride of her signature modelling walk by an outbreak of hiccups.
At the till we queued with a few other women laden with their
purchases, collectively vibrating with excitement.
‘I LOVE this dress,’ Hannah said to the uninterested checkout girl as she neatly folded and bagged her outfit.
‘It is a terrific dress,’ I said, before getting an elbow in the ribs for adding loudly, ‘Looking at you in it no one would ever think that you were really a man.’
Hannah calmly paid more than I’d spent all day on that single item. And to think I’d broken out in a cold sweat paying more than fifty quid for a single pair of jeans. Another rush of excitement flowed over her as she took back her credit card and receipt and posh-looking bag. We headed up the escalator to the menswear section with arms linked and bags clattering by our sides. As we rose to the top of the stairs, the bass boom of dance music hit us, islands of exotically coloured clothes appeared, and large video screens displayed — evidently very male — models barely wearing any of them. Head-setted super sales agents were swarming everywhere.
‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘I’m done. We’re going over there for cocktails.’
And thankfully Hannah didn’t argue. At the cleverly positioned second-floor bar we slumped in uncomfortable leather seats. The reflections of a glitter ball twinkled on us as we clinked glasses over a round of martinis.
‘So you did it, mister!’ Hannah said. ‘You got the core of a wardrobe that doesn’t make you look either like a very young fogey, or very old student. The girls will be all over you like slugs on lettuce.’
‘Yeah, these girls you mention, what is it exactly you’re planning for me to meet them?’
‘All will be revealed in good time. But for a start that French bird will notice the change.’
‘Delphine? You think so? I wouldn’t wear this stuff to work though, would I?’
‘No, this stuff is what your mum would call “for best”, but maybe next time she calls you in the depths of Parisian despair because her LOVER is more interested in the sports than her, I might let you go and be a well-tailored shoulder to cry on.’
