by Mike Gayle
“Thanks for the compliment,” I said, offering my hand. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“I’m Alexa Wells,” she said, as if it was a name I should know. “I kind of know the music video director, Mark Basset, and his fiancée Julie Watson.”
“Do you really?” I asked, balking at the fact that Mark had become so successful that he’d joined that selective band of people whose job title preceded their name.
“I mentioned to Mark last time I went round to theirs for dinner that the program I work on was looking for a comedian. He told me about you and gave me a video of your act a couple of weeks ago. I only got round to watching it yesterday but I really loved it. Really, really loved it.” She floundered momentarily, embarrassed by her own enthusiasm. “Erm . . . anyway, when I saw in Time Out that you were on the bill here tonight I just grabbed a bunch of the researchers and the assistant producer”—she pointed at a group of unfeasibly trendy twenty-somethings, their faces obscured in a haze of Marlboro Light smoke—“and dragged them here to see you. And I have to say it was worth it. You were brilliant tonight. So relaxed and confident.”
“Cheers,” I said diffidently. I could feel my forehead furrowing apprehensively—partly because I always got embarrassed by compliments but mainly because I hadn’t the faintest clue how Mark had got hold of a tape of one of my gigs. He had mentioned to me several weeks ago that a friend of his who worked in TV was looking for a comedian. He’d even given me the address to send the tape to. It was still on the kitchen cork notice board back at the flat.
“What are you up to now?” asked Alexa, lighting up a cigarette and squinting in an outrageously sexy manner as the smoke got into her eyes. She noticed me staring at her. “Oh, I’m sorry, did you want one?”
I shook my head nervously. “Not at the minute.”
Silence.
“So?”
I looked at her, bewildered.
“What are you doing now?”
“Right now?”
She nodded.
What am I doing right now?
“Nothing,” I said, a little too late for it not to be totally obvious that I’d been trying to think of an excuse why I couldn’t talk to her. “Why? What do you want to do?”
She laughed loudly, unfazed by my lack of social skills. “You go find a seat,” she said patiently. “I’ll get us a drink and we’ll have a quick chat.”
I chose a seat as far away from the bar as possible. My friends downstairs were so Scrooge-like they were bound to send out a search party for their drinks. With my head hidden behind a large cardboard lunchtime menu, I watched as Alexa hovered in the middle of the room looking for me, seemingly unaware that nearly all the pub’s male clientele were watching her every move. I waved cautiously. As I stood up to give her a hand with the drinks, I imagined the whole pub sigh collectively as the same thought occurred to all of them: “What is she doing with him?”
“So,” I said, sitting down, “what exactly is it you do? All Mark said was that you work in TV. What are you, a runner, researcher or a producer?”
“None of the above,” said Alexa, laughing knowingly. “I used to present a cable TV music program about five months ago, but now I co-present The Hot Pop Show.”
“I watch that!” I exclaimed a little too excitedly. I wasn’t lying either. Since Dan and I had been living together, watching Saturday morning kids’ TV had become one of the highlights of our weekend survival ritual. “I watch it every week. I’m a huge fan.” I paused. “How come I don’t remember seeing you on it?”
“You might be a huge fan”—she smiled and took a sip of her Beck’s—“but you must have been busy for the last few weekends because I’m the show’s latest presenter.”
She was right. I had been busy on Saturday mornings lately. Busy doing engaged-couple things with Mel.
“Come to think of it, I might have read something about you,” I said. “In one of those men’s mags that always have about a zillion pages of car and clothing ads.”
She smiled and delved into her shoulder bag on the floor and pulled out a magazine. “Pages fifty-six and fifty-seven,” she said succinctly as she handed it to me.
There in full color was the woman sitting across the table from me, wearing what could only be described as La Perla–type underwear and a big grin. Across the picture ran the headline: TV’S HOTTEST TOTTY!
“Nice use of light,” I said, examining the picture carefully.
“Yeah.” She smiled. “That’s what they all say.”
“Do you always show men you’ve just met pictures of yourself in your underwear?”
She shook her head and smiled. “Only the nice ones.”
We talked for quite a while. She told me about how she’d finished drama college two years ago, gone traveling in Thailand, come back to England expecting to end up on the dole and instead found herself at an audition for a presenter on a cable TV music program and got the job. She stayed there for about a year before she was poached to front The Hot Pop Show.
“That must be amazing,” I said as she finished her story. “You have the coolest job on earth. What are you doing talking to me? I’m not worthy.”
Although I was joking, there was a degree of truth to what I’d said. I couldn’t help but think, What does a woman like this want with me?
“I’m talking to you for two reasons. Firstly, like I said before, we’re looking for a comedian for the show. Just to do little sketches and gags and all that. I have to be truthful: the powers that be are auditioning quite a few people, but I’d really love it if you came down and gave it a try. What do you think?”
“Yeah, why not?” I said casually, as if it was every day that I was asked to do a television audition. “Sounds okay.”
“Right then.” She smiled. “I’ll be in touch.” She looked at her watch—a huge, chunky plastic affair with about eight million buttons. “It’s bedtime for me. I’m shooting a piece about urban rock climbing at six A.M. tomorrow morning.”
I smiled and nodded knowledgeably, as if I well understood the rigors of early morning shoots.
She stood up and we shook hands. “It was nice to meet you.”
“It was nice to meet you too,” I replied imaginatively.
She handed me a business card. “It’s got my work number on it and my mobile . . . so you can get me when you want to.”
“Cheers,” I said, placing the card in the back pocket of my jeans. “I’ll see you around maybe,” I added, although I was pretty sure that the places we chose to be “around” weren’t exactly going to coincide. I watched as she turned, walked halfway across the room, stopped and came back again.
“I was just wondering . . . are you doing anything tomorrow night?” she said, toying with the mobile phone in her jacket pocket. “I’ve got tickets for a preview screening of some new Hollywood blockbuster. Lots of explosions, crashes and bullets—a boys’ film basically. Do you fancy coming to see it?”
“With you?”
“Yes.”
“Just the two of us?”
“Uh-huh.”
I thought about her invitation very hard in the few seconds allotted to me, and then as casually as I could, which probably wasn’t all that casual given that for some reason I was unable to use the personal pronoun, I said, “Can’t. Staying in with girlfriend.” And if that wasn’t bad enough, I managed to spit the word “girlfriend” at her like it was a bulb of garlic and she was the Bride of Dracula.
“That’s a shame,” she said as if she truly meant it. “Maybe another time.”
“Just one more thing,” I inquired carefully. “You said that you were talking to me tonight for two reasons. What was the other one?”
She smiled cryptically and said, “I’ll tell you all about it another time.”
It’s not a big deal.
It’s not even a medium-sized deal.
If it’s any sort of deal at all, it’s a teeny weeny teeny tiny one.
All I’d
done was have a drink and a chat with a female kids’ TV presenter for half an hour tops. All she’d done was have a drink with me, look fabulous and ask me out to a film preview.
She couldn’t have fancied me, I thought as I left the pub.
Women like that don’t fancy men like me, I convinced myself on the bus on the way home.
So, if she didn’t fancy me, there’s no reason to tell Mel about the bit where I thought she fancied me, ran my thought processes through my sleepless night.
Nice try, said my conscience next morning, but you know as well as I do that you’re guilty as a guilty thing.
I laughed so hard milk
came out of my nose
Propelled by guilt I decided it was time to spend more quality time with Mel. So the next evening, a Friday night, as Dan had an overnight gig in Northampton, I invited her round to the flat so that we could spend some time on our own. I tidied up in anticipation of her arrival and actually considered cooking a meal, but thought better of it and sorted out a Chinese takeaway instead.
Together we consumed a couple of bottles of wine, ate king prawns in black bean sauce, watched TV and chatted about nothing in particular. She lay on the sofa with her head on my lap, and as I stroked the hair at the back of her neck with my fingertips I suddenly became aware that this cozy domestic scene might just be a snapshot of the future. This is nice, I thought. It feels . . . comfortable. Then it occurred to me that although I liked comfortable, I needed to be honest with Mel even more.
Though some twenty-four hours had passed since my encounter with Alexa, I was still feeling guilty. While there was a slim possibility that if I told Mel what had happened she’d see the whole thing my way, I had to accept that my small deal ran the chance of being a big deal to her. Massive. Gargantuan. Even so, I still felt the need to confess everything.
Up until this point in my life I’d worked on the basis that what Mel didn’t know about couldn’t hurt her, and without much trouble I’d managed to gather together a nice collection of so-called skeletons in the cupboard. They didn’t rattle too much and gave me absolutely no trouble at all, but since The Proposal Mel had, unbeknownst to me, managed to instill in me something approaching a conscience, and I now couldn’t rest. I wondered whether now was the time to get those skeletons out. A few sprang to mind immediately, and just for my own amusement, while Mel dozed, I took them out of storage in my head and had another look at them.
The Crossover Skeleton
There was a slight crossover period of two weeks between the end of my last girlfriend and the beginning of Mel. I didn’t count this as a particularly big skeleton because its existence was due to the fact that I was terrible at dumping girlfriends. Her name was Amanda. She was a comedian I met at a gig at the Edinburgh festival. As she lived in Manchester we only ever saw each other at weekends, which was handy because although she was fun, she certainly wasn’t proper girlfriend material.
When the time came, I tried to tell her it was over between us in the only way I could—I didn’t phone, I was sullen and surly whenever she came to London to visit, but she thought I was just being enigmatic. I even told her, “Look, Amanda, I’m sorry but it’s over. I’m going out with someone else,” but in her mind that only served to make me even more alluring in a “he’s a challenge” sort of way.
Eventually I had to call upon Dan’s master dumping skills to assist me. Which was of course a bad move. A very bad move. He told her that I was dead. She turned up one day at my old flat in Wood Green, and Dan, after having spotted her out of my living room window, answered the door with tap water dripping from his eyes. Employing his very best acting skills he sobbed, “Amanda! Haven’t you heard? Duffy was killed last week in a terrible accident. Workmen were repairing Lambeth Town Hall, and as he was walking past, some loose masonry fell and killed him. Instantly.” She believed him, as you would do (who’s going to make up something like that?), and even wanted to come to the funeral, but Dan told her it was for close family only.
It should’ve been perfect. Immortalized in Amanda’s head as the Difficult Dead Boyfriend. She would’ve forgotten all the bad bits about me, and remembered only the good times. But me being me, I had to go and bump into her three weeks later at a club in Hoxton Square when I was out with Mel. She didn’t say a single word to me, but her menacing Mancunian scowl spoke volumes.
Mel noticed Amanda’s looks of hatred immediately and asked me who she was, so I told her the first thing that came into my head: “She’s a stalker. Comedians get them sometimes.”
In my defense for the overlap, I didn’t count it as cheating on Mel because I really was trying to do The Right Thing.
The Naked Skeleton
Last year I kind of semi-lied to Mel and told her I was going with Dan to the Prince Charles to see a rerun of Get Carter, when in fact the two of us went to a topless bar called the Rising Moon in the West End. It was all Dan’s idea. He’d become obsessed with an article he’d read in a men’s magazine, “101 things you must do before you’re thirty.” Of the 101, Dan was pleased to discover he’d done ninety-two of them. Of the ones that remained, two were illegal, one he decided was definitely immoral, and with his limited finances he wasn’t in a position to do any of the others, with the exception of attending a lap-dancing club. We both agreed that lap-dancing clubs were both morally reprehensible and ludicrously expensive, so we compromised and settled for a topless bar.
As neither of us had ever been to a place like this before, we weren’t entirely sure what to do when we got inside. So taking a table in the darkest corner possible, we sat for ages making the tiniest of small talk, pretending that this whole thing wasn’t really happening. Eventually a G-string-clad young woman, profoundly gifted in the chest area, sauntered over to us to take our order. Embarrassed beyond belief, I couldn’t bring myself to look at her breasts and was too ashamed to look her in the eyes, so I conducted the entire conversation focusing on her nose. Our topless waitress looked about our age. In fact she reminded me of a girl I went to college with called Karen Braithwaite. She had blonde hair and the same puffy forehead that Karen had, but she had a much nicer body, although technically speaking I’d never seen Karen Braithwaite in a G-string. I thought about asking her if she was Karen, but then it occurred to me that if she was the same person this wasn’t really going to be the right moment for us to talk over old times. I ordered two bottled beers and she disappeared, leaving Dan and me to gape around the room.
The bar was full of solitary businessmen, tattooed fat blokes with their tattooed fat bloke mates, and large groups of young men on stag nights. This depressing sight brought me to my senses as I was suddenly struck by three things:
1. it was depressing to discover I had anything in common with these people;
2. I’d never felt more embarrassed in my life;
3. none of this was giving me any pleasure whatsoever.
As Dan and I sipped our beers in silence, I thought about being there and I tried to remember the last time I had thought about anyone but Mel. And I couldn’t. It was a key moment for me. Like being handed the meaning of life on a plate. Mel was all that I wanted.
The Artistic Butcher Skeleton
About two and a half years ago Mel and I split up. We just weren’t getting on very well. So she called an end to it. Depressed beyond belief I met a girl at a gig who mistook my melancholy for sensitivity. I suppose we had a common cause: we both hated our day jobs (she worked in a butcher’s but by night painted abstract images in her Clerkenwell studio) and we’d both been recently dumped. I tried to put her off; I told her about my ex-girlfriend and how wonderful she was, but she said, “You can’t have been that serious if you weren’t even living together.” I didn’t really have an answer for that one. I told her I didn’t want anything to happen and I also told her I certainly didn’t want a relationship; we could be mates and nothing more.
One evening, we met up for a drink after work. She tried to kiss me and failed;
then later I tried to kiss her and failed too; then some time around midnight we both tried to kiss each other and succeeded and I ended up staying the night at hers. I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t even like her. I especially don’t know why I called her the next day and left a message on her answerphone asking if she wanted to go to the cinema. Guilt, I suppose. I thought I owed her something. But whatever it was I owed her, she obviously didn’t want it because she never called back.
Mel and I got back together a week later.
End of skeletons.
Is anybody home?”
At the sound of Mel’s voice I shook my head clear of the cobwebs of deep thought. I’d been reflecting so intensely on my skeletons that I hadn’t noticed her awaken from her nap. Now she was staring up at me intently and probably had been for quite a while.
“What were you thinking about?” she said, curious.
“Oh nothing,” I said dismissively. “What’s on telly?”
Mel sat up and looped her arm through mine, squeezing herself closer to me. “Don’t tell me ‘nothing,’ Mr. Benjamin Duffy. What were you thinking about? Come on, I can tell when there’s something wrong.”
It was true. Mel had an amazing ability to monitor my emotional landscape—evidently even when asleep. My mulling over the skeletons must have alerted her sleeping body to my troubled psyche. Resistance would be futile.
