by Neal Doran
Where the hell did that come from? It was true, but I didn’t know what possessed me to say it.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Your eyes sparkle when you blush.’
‘The bridge of your nose has a lovely crinkle when you think you’ve said something funny.’
Smiling, Hannah thumbed her nose at me, before dropping her hands back onto the table.
‘That’s the sort of thing, you old charmer,’ she said, not looking up at me, but flicking my hands with her index finger.
The door abruptly thunked open, and Rob was back in the room. I dropped my hands to my lap, and Hannah sat up straighter in her chair.
‘Work. Bastards. And Angus called while I was out there too. Drinks with him and Sarah tomorrow lunchtime. You’d be invited, sport, but you’ve got blind dates to wow. Now. I need a slash.’
As quickly as he came in, he was gone again.
‘Are you sure you want me to take the badge? I know you two have had a row, but still… Sentimental value and all that?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s not like I’m giving away the jewellery. Better that you have it. And besides, the exams weren’t the whole story about the day he got it for me. He’d done something pretty dumb himself at a club night at The Academy the night before, and was trying to make it up to me. Never really liked it.’
‘So where are we at?’ asked Rob as he came back in the room.
‘I’m off,’ I said. ‘The around-the-world-in-eighty-dates exercise will have to be finished another time.’
There wasn’t a massive effort made to get me to stay this time. With a shoulder punch and a convoluted handshake Rob wished me luck for Sunday, and with a peck on the cheek Hannah reminded me to never, ever, say to a date, ‘Hey, how you doing?’. I headed out taking the steps two at a time. At the communal front door I paused for a second to catch my breath and shake off some of the tension. By the time I reached the front garden gate, I could distantly hear from inside the shouting that must have started the second the latch clicked in the door.
Chapter Thirteen
‘So what do you call this, then?’
‘Clearly it’s a late Victorian TV remote,’ I said. ‘The brass levers in the polished wood casing were used in semaphore-based sequence to communicate the desired channel, the clockwork knob here used for Ceefax. Notice also the elegant curve of this ivory attachment, which doubled up as a boot scraper and tool with which to oppress native peoples. Every household worth its salt had one of these, after Prince Albert was seen with it in one of the earliest photographs. Sitting in his pants on a chaise longue at Balmoral, he was pointing it at the wall where the first TV would be just five short decades later.’
‘Is that so? And there was me thinking it’s a steam-powered sex toy.’
My date with Sam was going fantastically.
I’d arrived at the designated coffee stand five minutes early, and she’d been twenty minutes late. She brazenly said she’d been hanging around spying on me to make sure I wasn’t obviously an arsehole from the way I drank a cappuccino. She also pointed out I’d missed a spot when I’d cleaned up the spilt froth from down my front after trying to drink it when it was too hot. Apparently I was scrawnier than she was expecting, but I’d not been guilted into tipping the server by the presence of a big bowl of coins with a sign saying ‘For Karma’ so I was worth a second glance.
She had a Leeds accent, which for some reason surprised me, as if everyone from the north should hand them in when they arrive to live in London — unless they’ve got a job as a BBC radio newsreader. It made all her sentences sound like statements of irrefutable fact, and her questions sound a little bit as if she was taking the piss. This air of unimpeachable sarcasm was only heightened by the feline upturn of her lips and the sculpted arch of her thin, dark eyebrows that made her look privately amused by everything. The drowsy fug of the previous forty-eight hours, with its bad-date aftermath and confusing best friends, was blown away by this biker-jacketed, red sneakered, no-nonsense whirlwind.
‘It does have wipe-clean surfaces,’ I agreed as I put the antique contraption back on the trestle table outside the curios shop.
‘Come on, let’s go over to the hummus stall again, see how many free samples we can get through before the hippy gets all bread-head on us.’
We walked through the market and its battling smells of incense and more incense, bumping into each other familiarly as we weaved through crowds of locals and tourists.
‘Nice scarf, by the way,’ Sam said as the hummus guy started sweating anxiously, and looking at me pleadingly as if I could stop her double dipping his dwindling pile of pita bread. ‘Someone buy it for your or are you metro-sexual enough to choose your own accessories?’
‘I picked it myself, thank you very much,’ I lied, wondering how it was Sam could intuit that the hooped wool scarf that looked as if it had been knitted by my tipsy nan had been a purchase following a shopping argument I lost with Hannah.
‘It’s lovely. You fit right in with the ponces ‘round here.’
The hummus hippy bridled, and pointedly removed the basket with the last few scraps of flatbread from the top of his counter.
‘Hey, whose idea was it to meet here, anyway?’ I asked defensively before realising it could well have been ‘me’. Fortunately the idea was all Sam’s.
‘It’s a great litmus test, this place. Any bloke who shows up and gets overexcited about some hundred-quid lampshade he’d ignore if it was a fiver in his local Oxfam is on his bike after he’s bought me a pie.’
‘Well, I’m glad you’re not afraid to really challenge southerners’ stereotypes of Yorkshire folk.’
‘Tha knows, pet. Have you met my whippet, Boycott?’ she asked as she dipped her finger directly into the crushed chickpeas and winked at the stallholder as she sucked her finger clean.
‘So you do a lot of online dating, then?’ I asked.
‘What, you thought I should be holding out till meeting you?’
‘I thought I was special…’ I said with a grin.
‘I tell you what, I’m amazed at how many fellas gets really huffy about the idea I’ve been doing this for a while. They should have known me at uni… You’re new to all this, then?’
‘You’re not my first, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve had plenty of experience,’ I said, rather nervously.
‘So what, this is your third blind date?’
‘Second.’
‘How’d the other one go?’
‘She ended up in A and E.’
‘I’ll watch myself, then,’ she said with a glint.
A wink and a nudge in the ribs from Sam and I knew I didn’t have to try and explain the nut with the allergies again, at least not yet.
‘Say no more… You should see the state I’ve left some right big blokes in,’ she said, snapping her teeth at the startled hummus hippy before saying a very sweet thank you and turning away.
As we walked — well, I walked, she virtually prowled — we talked about what we did for a living. She’d been at the call centre she worked at for a few months now, and was at the stage where she had to think about leaving before they started talking about promotions and careers trajectories. She didn’t want to be caught up in that, so she was going to see what she could get away with before she got fired.
She’d come down to London because she thought that acting might be a laugh, and would still occasionally go to auditions; she was also singer in a band that sounded almost unbearably cool to me. However, hitting her mid-twenties as she was, she reckoned she was getting a bit old for poncing about on stage and was looking for something else. She’d thought about something with a bit of action like the police, but ‘they’re a bit crazy obsessed with rules and all that bollocks’.
‘So what do you think you’ll end up doing?’ I asked.
‘I think I’ll set up on my own. That way everyone agrees when I tell the world the boss is a gobshite. How about you?’
I started to talk up my job, on the basis that no one wanted to go out with a loser who hated what he did. But then I realised that that rule probably didn’t apply here.
‘I basically copy and paste things other people have said and then write conclusions that are also copied and pasted from whatever it is the client has told me they’re hoping to hear.’
‘Sounds like fifty-seven varieties of arse,’ said Sam.
‘And I’m not even any good at it,’ I replied gleefully.
‘Do you have a laugh with your mates there, and get paid all right?’
‘Yeah, mostly.’
‘Well, there you go, then. It’ll do for now.’
We walked along for a while longer, taking the piss out of most things as we went along, and I got some throaty laughs from some ideas I had about the dangers of really chunky jewellery, and what actually happened to the vats of olives that must be sold in London from every market.
But she also caught me up in her genuine enthusiasm for the things she did like, like the old record shop and its stock — even though we had wildly different musical taste. I couldn’t convince her that, regardless of how rare an early EP by members of Bob Marley’s first band was, no form of reggae was suitable for anyone but American middle managers on Caribbean cruises.
‘Let’s go for a sit-down somewhere,’ said Sam, after putting the EP back in Easy Listening where no other aficionado was likely to find it.
‘Is this where I buy you a steak and kidney and you do a runner?’ I asked.
‘This is where we get a bit of stomach lining so we can go to the pub, talk bollocks about our lives and I see if you can take your lager. Your trendy new boots must be killing you anyway. But I do like the taste of whoever chooses your clothes for you.’
‘I can’t believe I’m taking fashion abuse from a woman wearing a biker jacket. And doesn’t even have a bike to go with it.’
One beautifully crafted black eyebrow raised itself to new heights, and the permanently mischievous smile became positively evil.
‘Sod the pies,’ she said.
‘Oh, Jesus! Oh, CHRIST! Oh, please, let’s not die! Let’s. Not. Die. Oh, Christ! Fuck! SHIT! Look out! Jesus! Taxi! FUUUUCKKKK!’
I closed my eyes as we overtook the ambling recycling truck by swerving into the opposite lane and almost going headlong into a black cab. I could hear the angry blast of its horn Dopplering behind me. It was the first time I’d ever been on a motorcycle and — clinging onto Sam’s waist as she weaved in and out of traffic and ratcheted up the speed on clear stretches of road — I found it a little bit nerve-wracking.
I don’t know much about bikes, but from what I could tell it was a big one. Sam said something about a Honda Fireblade, but I’d been putting on her spare helmet at the time and was too busy checking straps and giving my head vigorous taps to make sure it was in working order to really pay attention.
Then she turned the engine on, and I could hear nothing but the screams inside my head for the next thirty minutes.
It was the second time I’d been driven along the Embankment in less than a week, but the pace was much less sedate and reflective this time. Adrenalin had been pulsing through me since I’d clambered onto the pillion, first gingerly putting my arms around Sam’s surprisingly tiny waist, then taking a much stronger grip and burying my head in her back as she turned onto Commercial Street and went from nought to sixty in less than three expletives.
From time to time as we sped through central London she’d turned slightly to say something to me, but on no occasion could I hear what it was she was talking about. After the second time I realised it was probably an indicator we were about to go into a sharp turn at uncomfortably more than the speed limit, and that I might need to lean with her to stop us ending up in a billboard. Unsure which was the right way to go, I just held on tighter and wondered how surprised people at my funeral would be at the cause of my demise.
Finally, after an unexpected wheelie down Long Acre, we parked up. We sat there on the bike for a while, me enjoying the sensation of not moving.
‘You’re probably OK to let go of me now,’ said Sam, removing her helmet as I sat frozen and hugging her. ‘You’ve got good strong arms there. You almost squeezed the life out of me when we took off from those lights against that Harley.’
‘Did we win? I had my eyes closed for most of that part.’
‘Oh, those City Harley boys are no contest, too worried about getting their chrome scratched up. You need to be ready to spin-off if you’re going to race properly.’
‘I’m so glad I didn’t know that at the time.’
I was simultaneously terrified and elated. I’d never done anything like it, and, while I was happy to have stopped, I couldn’t help but feel maybe I’d want to do it again some day.
Some, theoretical, day, far in the future when surgery techniques had advanced to the point where bionic-man-style rebuilding was available on the NHS, but doing it again nonetheless.
‘Wow, so you, like, use that every day just to get around town?’ I asked as we headed for a backstreet pub she liked between Covent Garden and Leicester Square. ‘Aren’t you permanently in fear your brains are going to be dashed in a puddle under a railway bridge?’
‘I’ve had a few spills, my collarbone’s not exactly where it’s supposed to be these days, but it’s the excitement! I mean, that was just a relaxed easy Sunday drive to get from A to B, but some nights, just being able to take off halfway across the country and back, race other riders, and do something that’s a bit dangerous, it’s exhilarating.’
‘You don’t have to tell me. I’ve travelled home on the Northern Line at closing time in Christmas party season. I’ve even got the night bus on occasion.’
‘Christ, you’re obviously an adrenalin junkie — no wonder I like you.’
It would be unfair to say that I blushed like a girl at that point, mainly because it was an outdated sexist stereotype that we should no longer put up with. But also because it’d be true and mentioning it would be just mean.
‘Well, if we’re going to hang out you’re going to have to raise your game, missy,’ I said. ‘There were at least three red traffic lights on major intersections where, like a wuss, you chose to stop. And at no point did we jump over a double-decker bus. These are the minimums I expect for city motoring, even on a little scooter like yours. I just feel you should know this up front.’
‘Now if we’re being honest and up front, then there’s actually something important I need to ask you too,’ she said.
We stopped walking, stood outside The Gap. Sam looked at me seriously and earnestly, even slightly nervously. The pause and locked-on eye contact caused a nervous fluttering that started in my stomach and spasmed its way through all my extremities.
‘Have you accepted Jesus Christ Our Lord as your only saviour?’
Gravity seemed to double its pull on me in a millisecond as she took hold of my hand and clasped it between hers as if in prayer. My eyes shifted as I tried to figure which way to turn for the nearest tube, while I tried to work out the polite way to say that, while I’m generally in favour of happiness, I’m fundamentally opposed to clappiness.
‘You should see your face!’ Sam cackled. ‘You fell for that one. Maybe I should stick with this acting lark for a while longer!’
‘Oh, you’re going to hell for that,’ I said as she dragged me, still holding my hand, into the clothes shop. ‘And what’s this now — you’ve tricked me into going girly clothes shopping? You’re buying the first two pints now.’
‘I just need to have a quick look. It’s part of my religion,’ she said, still laughing.
This was turning into my year of hanging around in fashion outlets, I thought as I watched Sam take a serious look at a cowl-necked stripy T-shirt. Then, like a meerkat, she stretched up to scan the contents of the rest of the shopfloor. I glanced around myself, conscious of making sure my eyes didn’t rest too long on the underwear section. Sam nudged
me and murmured, ‘Come on, let’s go to the pub.’
‘Well, I guess this is a more sedate way to spend a Sunday,’ I said cheerfully as we walked through the store to the door.
‘I think I know the level of excitement you can manage in one day,’ she said quietly with a sly smile.
There was something about the way she adjusted her jacket as we headed to the door that made me think. I didn’t remember seeing her put that stripy top back on the table. Then we were at the doors, walking through the security alarms as another couple came in through them.
The alarms blasted on as we walked through. I instinctively went to stop, tap my pockets, and look around for a staff member to give me the go-ahead to move on.
Sam grabbed my elbow from behind and sweetly whispered, ‘Keep walking,’ in my ear.
She guided me out onto the street and down towards St Martin’s Lane when a voice behind us shouted, ‘Oi! You! Come back ‘ere!’, and Sam shouted, ‘Run!’
She took off sprinting down the street and instinctively I followed her.
‘What’s going on?’ I yelled.
‘Don’t worry, he’ll give up when we reach the main road. Faster, he’s catching!’
We passed through crowds in a blur and I could only imagine the looks of disapproval and mild fear at seeing people being chased down in the street. My God, it was exciting, like being in a detective show. I was on the lam, Bonnie keeping up with Clyde, or vice versa. And running as fast as I could, I still had to fight an urge to start giggling with over-stimulation.
But then, stepping out into the road to avoid a family of expensively raincoated tourists bickering about maps, I nearly crashed into a pensioner looking at me a bit fearfully.
I didn’t want to end up with someone that thought this was OK for Sunday teatime, I realised.
I slowed down to a stop, apologising as best I could to the startled old lady. I watched Sam sprint into the distance and vanish in the Sunday West End crowds. What had I been thinking?
I didn’t have the chance to come up with an answer, however, before I felt a juddering thump in the small of my back as The Gap security guard rugby-tackled me to the ground, and my head hit the pavement with a reverberating ‘kloink’.
