Dan Taylor Is Giving Up on Women

by Neal Doran

  ‘It’s always the quiet ones,’ said Martin.

  ‘The results of the Israeli vote are looking very iffy,’ tutted Jim, looking at his BlackBerry.

  Everybody called the blinds, and Martin dealt out a flop of raggedy-looking middling-number cards. The kind of cards that used to make it difficult to know whether to shout ‘higher!’ or ‘lower!’ when watching Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right as a kid.

  ‘Check,’ said Angus.

  ‘Yep,’ I chipped in as my turn to bet came around, ‘as matchmakers go, Rob here’s up there with the best. The people who introduced Amy to Blake, Sid to Nancy, Antony to Cleopatra. Check.’

  ‘Check,’ said Jim.

  ‘Hey, don’t blame me — it’s H who’s finding these poor victims. I’m just doing my best Dan impression on the phone to seal the deal. You know, it’s actually very difficult to convey perpetual blushing over the telephone,’ said Rob with a cold smile. ‘Raise.’

  ‘You’re pretending to be him? But you sound nothing like each other,’ Martin said.

  ‘They don’t notice. Probably because before he’s had a chance to speak he’s had to call in the coastguard to rescue them after taking a wrong turn,’ said Rob.

  ‘Up the creek without a paddle,’ said Martin. ‘Fold.’

  ‘They still haven’t found that solo round-the-world sailor since his GPS went faulty,’ murmured Jim.

  ‘You’d almost think with these catastrophes he’s doing it on purpose to get sympathy hugs from my missus,’ said Rob, winking at me. ‘You should see ‘em, gossiping away about body-language signals and outfits. She’s like a girl with a new gay best pal.’

  ‘I’m out,’ said Angus. ‘Anyone for mini hot dogs?’

  ‘Call,’ I said, with the closest I could manage to an indulgent smile as I tried not to rise to Rob’s baiting.

  ‘Call,’ Jim said.

  Martin dealt out another card to the board.

  ‘What surprises me is, I would have thought Robbie here would be an excellent choice for finding hot-to-trot women,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, but this is finding them for somebody else,’ I said, abandoning my position on the moral high ground. ‘Raise.’

  ‘Call,’ said Jim.

  Rob looked at me for a long moment, rifling his chips between his hand and the table. He looked as if he was about to say something.

  ‘Call.’

  ‘Three left in,’ said Martin as he dealt out the final card, an Ace of Clubs. ‘When we were working together the place was heaving with totty you couldn’t help ending up talking to at some do or another.’

  ‘Like a leaving drink, or a client dinner, you mean?’ I asked. ‘Like you had last Friday, Rob, right?’

  I picked up my cards to check my hand and put them back on the table, before repeating the process over and over, unable to remember what I’d just seen as the tension tightened around the small table.

  ‘It was a client dinner, going on to some leaving drinks,’ Rob said, slowly and deliberately, ‘and it’s your bet, sport.’

  ‘Check,’ I said.

  ‘Check,’ Jim said.

  ‘A call on the flop, then a raise, and just a check on the river. What are you up to?’ mused Rob, his eyes flicking back and forth between the cards on the table and me.

  ‘I…am not up to anything,’ I said, keeping my head down and sorting through my chips, ‘sport.’

  The room went quiet for a while, with the only sound a distant song from Dire Straits on the AOR radio station playing in the background.

  ‘The Russians are still posturing at the UN over their nuclear-deterrent capabilities,’ reported Jim as his thumbs twiddled away at a message on his handset.

  ‘So what do I think you have?’ mused Rob. ‘Not a lot of help on that board, lot of hearts there, but I don’t think you’re holding any more. I reckon a couple of pairs, but nothing big enough to beat me,’ he concluded, smirking and engaging in his favourite poker pastime of needling. ‘Now I just need to work out how much I can get out of you. You’ll go along for the ride, but how much can I make it cost before you get too scared?’

  ‘I wouldn’t assume you can take everything you want and get away with it,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t assume you have the nerve to call any bet if the stakes get too high.’

  ‘Do you think these two are aware of the metaphorical subtext of all this verbal jousting?’ Angus asked Martin loudly in the background.

  ‘I dunno. The simmering tension’s looking to reach boiling point though,’ Martin replied. ‘That or they’ve both got really shit hands.’

  From the corner of my eye I could see Rob counting up the chips in front of him, snorting at the remarks. He was still looking straight at me, and I was still staring straight ahead, not looking at anyone.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to worry about,’ Rob said. ‘A fiver. Five hundred in chips. Do you think you should match that? Or do you need to phone a friend? Hannah should be home.’

  I wasn’t going to be bullied, I resolved, and I wasn’t going to be bluffed by someone who thought they knew what I was thinking, but had no idea what I really knew or wanted.

  ‘Call,’ I said.

  ‘Call,’ said Jim.

  Rob was the first to show his hand, a pocket pair of Aces, meaning he had three of a kind, more than enough to beat what I had, which, when I looked at my cards and remembered the game it was that we were actually playing, was absolutely nothing.

  With a raised eyebrow Rob patiently waited for me to turn over my cards, his lips twitching with a wisecrack waiting to be released as he gathered the winnings to join the rest of his stack to reaffirm his alpha-male status.

  ‘Straight flush,’ said Jim unexpectedly, revealing his unbeatable cards before I had a chance to surrender my own. We sat and looked at him as he began plucking handfuls of chips and lining them up in small piles in front of him.

  ‘You had a three and a seven of hearts and you played that hand from an early position? And just called even when you’d got the absolute nuts on the turn?’ said Rob incredulously.

  Jim shrugged and smiled, his fingers moving twitchily as if he were still holding his phone and writing a message.

  ‘Jesus Christ, the brains around here. It’s like playing with the Girls of the Playboy Mansion tonight,’ said Rob before stomping off with his cigarettes and phone to brave the cold and the potential for knife crime for a smoke outside.

  ‘So the Playmates have a reputation for not being much good at cards, then? Must have missed that bit of the show,’ Martin said.

  ‘And guess who thinks he’s Hugh Heffner,’ I replied.

  ‘What is going on with you two tonight anyway?’ asked Angus. ‘You realise that in that last hand “Baker Street” was on the radio, and neither of you even paused to play air sax, never mind miming duelling guitar solos. You had some sort of row?’

  ‘No, no, nothing going on. We’re fine, just long days, I bet.’

  ‘Must have been shitty days,’ he said. ‘You’re acting like you’re on the brink of a divorce. I just want to know who’s been cheating on who.’

  On the table in front of me, my phone began to ring. I looked at it, slightly confused, as the name flashing on the screen jarred with my surroundings. My heart rate, only just slowing after the nervous last hand of cards, started racing upwards again. She never usually called me…

  ‘Delphine?’

  At the mention of a woman’s name, the heads of the other guys at the table bobbed up. Glances, head bobs and winks were exchanged with everyone looking in my direction. Jim started nudging me in the arm incessantly with his elbow, and Angus looked rapt waiting for my next move. I decided to go out to the hallway before Martin turned his back to me and pretended to do that kissy-huggy thing where you ran your fingers up and down your own back.

  ‘Hello, Danny! ‘Ow are you?’

  ‘Good, good. And you? You’re calling… Is everything OK?

  ‘Oh, ye
s. Yes. Everything is good. Well, you know, no worse than usual. I just thought I’d let you know — he has two grandmas.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Alex. He has two grandmas. So when he said he was visiting her, he was with the one that is alive, and the other one is still dead.’

  The row with her boyfriend she’d been telling me about that morning, I finally realised. We’d obviously not got to discuss it enough earlier.

  ‘Well, that’s good news,’ I said, ‘about the live one, anyway.’

  ‘So…’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I thought you’d be relieved to know.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ I felt as if I should be concentrating more on this call, but the sniping over the poker table was still lingering.

  ‘And…how is your eye? Still sore?’

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘Not getting in any more fights?’

  ‘No,’ I said, rubbing the side of my head. ‘Not fist fights, anyway.’

  ‘So that’s what it was! You were in a fist fight?’ The excitement tingled in Delphine’s voice, and sent a bit of a bolt through me, but standing in Angus’s draughty hallway, with the guys almost certainly earwigging on the other side of the flimsy door, was not the time to get into this.

  ‘That’s not what I meant. No.’

  ‘Were you being bad?’ she asked teasingly.

  ‘It was…really nothing that interesting. Just an accident.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, unconvinced. ‘I will find out what it is you have been doing, Danny Taylor. You will not be able to resist my interrogation on Saturday night.’

  ‘That sounds a challenge, but I’m not sure I’m going to make the party.’

  ‘Don’t you dare not, monsieur.’

  I was trying to think of a smart answer back, when a whiff of tobacco heralded Rob coming in through the front door.

  ‘Listen, I’d better go,’ I said, barely giving her the chance to say goodbye before cutting off the call.

  ‘Well, that sounded like an absolutely scintillating conversation,’ said Rob.

  ‘It was Oscar Wilde again, asking for tips on sparkling repartee.’

  ‘Listen, sport. I’m sorry for being arsey.’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ I said, ‘for…well, I’m just sorry.’

  ‘Bit of tension at home, but shouldn’t be taking it out on you guys.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘She’s got some half-arsed idea in her head, I think. It happens, from time to time, y’know?’

  ‘Saturday morning was brutal. And she still seemed a bit upset when we spoke on Sunday.’

  ‘You probably frightened her with your bad-boy bruises and prison tattoos.’

  ‘I think she’s worried about you.’

  ‘I think you’re finally getting to see close-up that these big relationships you think are going to be the solution to everything just bring a load of new problems.’

  ‘Should she be worried?’ I asked.

  Rob paused and rubbed the glass front of his phone with a corner of his jumper.

  ‘Straight flush, last to speak, and he didn’t even raise. What are we going to do with these people, bud?’

  ‘Keep playing the right way, and it comes around in the long run.’

  ‘Yeah, well, until then Martin’s wasting my money on baby’s new shoes, and Jim’s…doing whatever it is he does when he’s not running the planet.’

  We stood there in the gloom of the hall, listening to Angus wrongly singing about ‘the warm smell of fajitas rising up through the air’ along to ‘Hotel California’ on the radio, and Martin trying to get Jim to find out the QPR score.

  ‘We should go back in,’ said Rob.

  The idea of sitting back down for another couple of hours of boysy banter made my shoulders slump, and I didn’t want to jeopardise my shaky truce with Rob — any bravado from him would just start me sniping again about his not answering whether there was anything going on with him.

  ‘This eye’s giving me a headache,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get the train. Play the rest of my chips for me. Angus is chickening out of the big hands because they’re trying to save money for new curtains, and Martin’s talking too much when he’s got a good hand.’

  ‘You’re able to tell the difference with the talking too much he does when he has a bad one?’

  ‘Speak to you later,’ I said, grabbing my coat from the wall.

  ‘Hey, who were you talking to, by the way? Sounded like a woman.’

  ‘Delphine. She wants to cross-examine me about my injuries at the weekend.’

  ‘Finding dates on your own? You know, for us to believe you’ve got it together with her I’m going to need to see video evidence.’

  ‘You see, I knew you were going to say something sordid like that.’

  We both smiled and I headed for the front door. With a yelled ‘see ya, guys’ I was out into the hallway and on the way home — before I popped my head back in again to shout a thank you for all the food to Angus.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I took the scenic route home, heading for the District Line for Wimbledon so I could see some of town as I travelled, and would get a decent walk at the end of it. But on the busy above-ground train I quickly got tired of looking at dark streets whizzing by with nothing to really see, except the reflection of me and the businessman sitting next to me. I was thinking more than I wanted to about the Harrisons.

  Taking a leaf out of Jim’s book, I played with my phone a while. I was looking up the news, and while I was there I thought I’d just casually look at the mobile version of the dating site. From the window reflection, I could see the businessman next to me was peering over my shoulder, and gave me a look up and down as I signed in as FunnyGal483 and touched my way through to the section of profile pics of Men Seeking Women. I checked to see who was currently online; there was a couple of dozen names of people spending their Tuesday nights looking to find someone with whom they could do more fun things on future Tuesday nights.

  But most importantly SuperDan82 was around.

  It was a strange feeling when your heart skipped a little faster because you’d seen a thumbnail picture of yourself, but it was what happened. Pulling up the full profile with its large picture of me caused the guy sitting next to me to do another double take. He seemed to have no intentions of moving from his spot lurking over my shoulder, despite the carriage having emptied out since we both got on, and I leaned away from him, resting my back on the glass divider separating my seat from the train doorways. What I did with myself while sitting on the train was my business.

  But what did I want to do? I wondered. With all the stuff that had been going on for the past few days, right at that moment I was happy to settle for just a friendly, uncomplicated chat with Hannah, without the need for any more apologies.

  Well, as uncomplicated as a conversation could be when you were pretending to be a woman and talking to a friend’s wife who was pretending to be you. And you suspected that you both knew it…

  FunnyGal483: Evening handsome! Still on the lookout for the gal of your dreams?

  There was a bit of a wait when no reply to my message came back, and I started to worry that maybe I’d been too forward with my hello. But I reminded myself I wasn’t writing as me, I was a hip North London woman journo and could say what I liked, and the consequences didn’t matter because I didn’t actually exist.

  SuperDan82: And as if by magic she appears… Hello Ms 483, still photographically challenged I see.

  FunnyGal483: You know all these photos I have are fine in capturing the superficial heart-stopping beauty, but I still haven’t found one that captures the gorgeousness of the inner me.

  SuperDan82: You know, a lesser man might begin to worry that this is an elaborate ruse to avoid posting a pic of a face that could be mistaken for a bag of spanners…

  FunnyGal483: A better man wouldn’t try and provoke me into revealing myself with taunts.
You’re off the list for the tasteful Helmut Newton nude ones now. So, what are you up to this gloomy Tuesday?

  SuperDan82: Would you believe at the minute I’m sitting at my computer? I should be working, but how anyone is supposed to use these things for work when there’s funny dogs doing tricks on YouTube is beyond me. You?

  FunnyGal483: I only came on here so I could tell someone I’m on the train. It’s a sad thing when you have no one to call when you’ve got that kind of big news.

  SuperDan82: Glad to be around to hear it. What are these magical-sounding train things of which you speak? I’ve been thinking though, about being single, and that it’s those little things that you miss the most sometimes, isn’t it? Having someone who just wants to be in touch, just for the pointless sake of it…

  FunnyGal483: The first person you think of sharing a link with when you see a pipe-smoking bulldog who’s best friends with a skateboarding duck…

  SuperDan82: Or telling that you’re having a shitty day and are looking forward to a DVD box set and a glass of wine when you’re both home.

  FunnyGal483: The reminders to get milk…

  SuperDan82: Well, that’s cheered me up no end. I’m alone, unwanted, and just remembered I don’t have enough semi-skimmed to make a comforting hot chocolate. Thanks for stopping by…

  FunnyGal483: Hot chocolate’s a bit of a girly drink for a burly fella like you, isn’t it?

  SuperDan82: I spike it with Bourbon.

  FunnyGal483: The drink or the biscuit?

  SuperDan82: No comment.

  The conversation had started well, I thought. She, or rather SuperDan, was talking to me, which was one of the less likely scenarios I’d imagined when I’d thought about how my next conversation with Hannah would go. I figured I’d try and push my luck a bit.

  FunnyGal483: So, what’s got you all melancholy and contemplative?

  SuperDan82: A bit of a falling out with a friend. Just got me a bit angry and confused.

  FunnyGal483: Something you want to talk about?

  SuperDan82: Not really…just something I’ve got to get over. You know how you can think you know someone, then boom…