Raven (10 page)

RYAN: Hey sorry about last night. Phone died. No way to contact you. Can I come and make it up to you tonight?

ME: Oh really. Why should I believe that? I won't be jerked around and I know what shits most men are.

RYAN: No, honest. My iPhone5 battery is terrible.

ME: And it took you all day to let me know?

RYAN: Been in meetings all day at work. [I had no idea what his vague ‘management' job description entailed and neither did I care.]

ME (softening slightly): So what are you proposing?

RYAN: I can come over tonight at 8. Okay? I owe you a full body massage…followed by passionate sex.

ME: Better make it super-passionate then.

RYAN: Don't worry. I will want to rip your clothes off as soon as I see you. [How could he be so sure? I wondered.]

ME (totally forgetting my promise to myself of the night before): Well, then you'd better charge your phone. Now.

Early that evening I took a long scented bath and carefully went through my whole grooming routine, then deliberated over what to wear, finally choosing a pair of figure-hugging black trousers and sleeveless lacy top. I laid the clothes out on my bed and started to work on my hair, which could take a fair bit of taming.

He had said he would call before setting off, in order to confirm directions to my house, so when it got to 7.30 and I still hadn't heard anything I texted him, a little uneasily: ‘Helloooo. What's happening?' I got a return message a moment later.

RYAN: Send me a photo of you.

ME: Sorry? You want me to audition?

RYAN: Want to see what you look like.

ME (crossly): I don't do naked pics and you already know what I look like with clothes on. Should we just say you're a twat and call the whole thing off?

RYAN: Take a photo now.

ME (even crosser): Fuck off. I don't need to demean myself for anyone.

RYAN: Send a classy pic in your lingerie and I'll be there.

ME: How's about a pic of you in Y-fronts? Got a six-pack? How many inches are you?

RYAN: You send a lingerie pic first.

ME: Otherwise you're not coming?

ME AGAIN (after receiving no reply for several minutes): Right, I'm done messing around. You need to grow up. Bye.

I couldn't believe I had wasted hours, once again, on that Irish lecher. He was 35, going on 15. I could just picture him in another ten years, still manning his dodgy stall on the dating site, luring in unsuspecting females and then setting them up with his deceitful blarney and adolescent demands for lingerie shots.

But maybe that's what I had coming, for not waiting calmly and patiently for Charles to re-emerge from his business exec's purdah. Almost three weeks had passed since our last, highly promising tryst, during which we had exchanged only the odd brief ‘how are you' text. I was eager to be with him again. Where was he already?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

And where was I? Ah yes, the Scotsman, the Irishman and then came the Englishman, whom I will call George, naturally.

George, who was 48, so hated his job as a property lawyer that he gave up the law, but then promptly forgot to find some other means of earning his daily crust. So when we met he had been unemployed for a couple of years and had by now possibly become unemployable, because he appeared to be doing nothing with his life besides hanging about on the dating site day and night, gazing at women's photos, checking out their profiles and sending random winks and messages to the ones that caught his horny eye.

I fell into this net one evening when George messaged to say he found me ‘enticing' and asking whether I had any plans for that evening. He looked fairly presentable and his profile, if somewhat awkwardly and self-consciously composed, seemed sane at least.

ME: This evening? Boy, you move fast. And would it be a drink and conversation you are after, or something more intimate? I am not one of those desperate older women, you know, gagging for a shagging.

GEORGE: That would be entirely up to you. I'm not the type to pressurise a woman into anything.

ME: Yes, I am sure you are well-behaved. But I've been getting overt come-ons from guys younger than my sons who only want the one thing and even before they've met me, for Pete's sake.

GEORGE: All men want the one thing. It's just that some of us are more honest about it than others. Lots of men will feed you the flannel and bullshit which they think you want to hear. So…fancy meeting up?

ME: Well, first of all I would have to take a bath, wash my hair, decide what to wear. That would take us up to 8.30 at least.

GEORGE: Okay, let's meet at nine.

I always felt I had Sara sitting on my shoulder at times like that, and she would now doubtless be jumping up and down.
Don't do it!
But George called me on the mobile and we talked in a sensible, grown-up fashion, he was quietly-spoken and articulate and, what the hell, I wasn't doing anything that evening. So I invited him over for a drink.

As he lived in Islington, he drove across London from east to west and through Regent's Park, arriving at my place on the dot with a bottle of wine. We sat down on the sofa, sipped our drinks and conversed about our lives, as the light summer breeze flowed in from the garden through the French doors, and George was, to all intents and purposes, like some old-fashioned ‘gentleman caller' in a play by Tennessee Williams. Very genteel, we were.

But the longer we talked the more morose George grew. It was clear that he hated himself. He told me he had never married, never had kids and never had a relationship which lasted more than a year or two. Besides all that, he said he had failed to find his true vocation, was a layabout and embarrassment to his family and friends, and had put on weight and was now fat. This last self-accusation was patently absurd, as he was actually quite trim.

He appeared to be a fundamentally decent guy and I felt sorry about his being carried away on this tidal wave of self-loathing. ‘I'm a failure and a coward,' he declared gloomily. I didn't want to agree with him, yet I knew that he would scornfully wave aside any of the standard platitudes usually wheeled out to buck people up in such situations. Because the key thing about George was that he was extremely intelligent and you couldn't bluff him with banalities. Just about the only thing he seemed proud of was the fact that, as a kid from an ordinary small-town family who had attended a run-of-the-mill comprehensive, he had won a scholarship to Oxford and got a first-class law degree. He interested me.

‘Just out of curiosity, George, without a job, what do you do for money?'

‘Live off savings.'

‘What about when your savings run out?'

‘I'll sell my house.'

‘Yeah, and then what?

‘I dunno.' He shrugged. ‘Something will happen.'

He was scathing about the women he had met through the dating site: ‘Boring secretaries, mostly, who take holidays in Torremolinos.' He had also tried the personal ads columns in some of the newspapers. ‘First I tried the Guardian. Had a few dates. It was like going out with Swampy. Women in ugly sandals with pierced noses, who belonged up a tree. So I moved on to the Times, where the women looked more respectable but all thought they should be married to a cabinet minister. They had no time for me, obviously an abject failure.'

He seemed so paralysed with hopelessness and the expression on his face was so despondent that my heart went out to the guy.

Fatal move. The next thing I knew we were heading upstairs for the act of human compassion commonly known as a mercy fuck.

George wasn't such a pessimist, however, that he did not come prepared with a supply of condoms. Our coupling was an intense but mechanical affair, during the course of which a baffling number of condoms were put on and taken off, at odd moments. The whole process didn't convince me that there should be a follow-up.

Later, as I ushered him out the front door, I gave his cheek a playful pinch. ‘Try not to beat yourself up, George. It's a real downer for other people and you'll never get a girlfriend that way.'

‘I'm a loser.'

‘You will be if you keep telling yourself that. Just find something you like doing and do it.'

‘Easy for you to say.'

‘Yes it is. Because it's true. And meanwhile find somebody nice to date. It shouldn't be so difficult online.'

He threw me a doleful look as he strode off to his car. ‘Oh yeah? Try being a man.'

‘I'd love to!' I called after him. ‘It's a man's world, in case you haven't heard!'

But I'm not sure I really believed that.

*

Every few days I had noticed that Charles was active on the dating site. Of course I would never mention this to him. I wouldn't want him to think I noticed, or cared. I did care, needless to say. But I knew the worst thing I could do was give the impression I was snooping on him. But anyway, as a well-behaved man he was probably only logging on to the site, every so often, to send polite replies to the many ladies understandably captivated by his charms, the army of winkers and messagers. Right?

Meanwhile I carried on trucking with my own dating activities, for good or ill, so I was hardly in a position to gripe about
his
doings. Something had happened between Charles and me, of that I was certain. He just needed time to realise that fully and take the next step. After all, he was a man, and men required careful, patient handling or they would take fright like skittish horses and gallop off into the dusty distance.

At this point an affable old geezer took a fancy to me, clearly beguiled by the crafty reference on my profile to my former biker chick days. ‘Grab your leathers, put your helmet on, and meet me down the Ace Cafe for a fry-up. You're only young once!' wrote the 65-year-old DanBoy, retired oil rig worker and as-yet-unretired biker dude. When I send an appreciative response, he wrote: ‘You're unique!! Most people on here wouldn't go within a mile of a bike, let alone a biker who plays guitar in a rock band.' (Rock music was another of his passions, and I admit that appealed to me. He might be getting on a bit, I told myself, but DanBoy knows how to have a good time.) It also occurred to me that, while it hadn't worked out with the Harley-riding LondonsBurning, I might yet hop back on a pillion with this new contender.

There was a downside to DanBoy, however. In addition to the photos of him performing with his fellow old-fart rockers, and the ones showing him astride his Honda Blackbird, his profile displayed a few snaps showing a boring caravan sitting by itself on a bleak, windswept landscape. What was that all about? I wondered. And I soon found out.

‘I keep a caravan on the north Norfolk coast,' he informed me, ‘and love to go there for long spells to enjoy the peace and beautiful scenery.'

This was off-putting indeed. I recalled my married days, decades earlier, when we owned a weekend cottage in a small north Norfolk village. A worryingly remote part of the country, where you were considered irredeemably foreign if you didn't have five generations of ancestors buried in the village graveyard. Even the denizens of the neighbouring village, five miles down the road, were seen as strangers and treated warily. These in-bred locals spoke in a flat, dull accent and definitely could have done with a dose of bright lights, big city, to jolt them out of their rural torpor.

And then there were the scurrying mice in the thatched roof…

At the end of every Norfolk weekend, as we hit the road back to London, my heart lifted with hope and joy.

Should I tell DanBoy any of this?

He called me one evening and we had a long chat, although he did the lion's share of the talking. For the first fifteen minutes I heard about the devastating breakdown of his first marriage, due to the adultery perpetrated by his heartless wife, and how neither he nor his children ever forgave her. That was bad enough. Then came the second fifteen minutes, during which DanBoy shared with me the trauma of his Wife Number Two's intolerable behaviour towards him, exacerbated by her drink problem. In the end she ran off, too, shattering once more his faith in womankind. And all this time I was thinking: where's the fun, dude?

Still, I made all the right sympathetic noises, and by the end of our elongated conversation we had planned our first date. On the following Saturday evening, three days hence, he would drive into London from his home in Hertfordshire and we would dine at a favourite haunt of mine, a Chinese restaurant near Hampstead. I booked a table.

But DanBoy texted me on the Friday: ‘Hi. Hope you don't mind but as this rare fine weather is due to last into the weekend I have decided to make the most of it and take my grandchildren away to the caravan. Perhaps we can catch up during next week. Dan x.'

I was slightly miffed at being so easily blown out. There was my plan for Saturday evening gone. Now what would I do? It would have been worse, of course, had he suggested taking
me
to the caravan for the weekend. But even so. If anyone was going to do blowing out, I would have preferred to do it myself.

The following week came and went, and the week after that. I didn't hear from DanBoy again and never contacted him to find out what had put the old buffer off. Another mystery, like that French freak, Édouard. So once again, there would be no hot-shot biking for me. Nor any bopping along to his rock band's rendition of Long Tall Sally at some small-town garden fête. But I didn't care much. As I took one last look around his photo gallery and gazed at the snaps of his beloved caravan stranded in that East Anglian desolation, I imagined my own miserable face peering out through one of its rain-splattered windows.
Help! Get me out of here!

But with one bound I'd been set free.

After this episode I adopted a harder edge. No longer would I unfailingly respond in kindly mode to every message received, no matter how lamentable the sender. ‘Thank you for your interest, I do appreciate it…' From now on I would just ignore the ones that didn't immediately grab me. Too dull? Not good-looking enough? Can't spell? Next!

Would this new-style Raven have driven through the rain all the way up to the dreary north London hinterland to sit with NiceMan in a tiny sitting room, smiling uncomfortably whilst he attempts to cajole her into a relationship? No, I fear this Raven would have cut NiceMan off at the knees very early on, with no chance at all of ‘face time'.

*

I am having dinner at one of my trendy local eateries with my friend Francine, who is three years younger than me. She runs her own business and is one of those women who is successful and tough and powerful in her professional life but, as she readily admits, hopeless in her relationships with men. She has had three long-term relationships and they have all ended in acrimony. Talk about rascals. These men abused her, cheated on her, lied to her and took her money. She always manages somehow to pick a rotter, who then proceeds to trample all over her life. I haven't seen her since the last of these relationships ended a few months earlier, and Francine tells me she is through with being a victim. It seems she has discovered her inner Boadicea.

‘Harry used to make me so depressed,' she says, and her expertly made-up face and expensive coiffure ooze glamour in the warm light of the candle on our table. Her perfume wafts over to me. ‘In the office I am always in charge, everyone respects me, I'm happy with myself and my achievements. But with Harry, as soon as I walked through the door at home I felt useless. I did everything I could think of to please him, but nothing ever did. When he told me I was too fat I went on a diet. I bloody starved myself for that man and lost twelve pounds and he didn't even notice.'

‘He was jealous of you, Franny,' I say as I munch my rocket salad, ‘because you are way more successful than he is.'

She nods thoughtfully. Then her eyes light up and she announces: ‘Anyway, I'm free now! And I'm not on a diet any more! From now on no one can tell me what to eat, what not to eat. The day after Harry and I split up I went food shopping and I went crazy in the supermarket, charging up and down the aisles, tossing all my favourite things into the trolley – stuff I hadn't bought in years because
Harry
didn't approve.'

‘Oh yeah? Like what?'

‘Walnut Whips!'

I laugh and then she laughs and I give her arm a squeeze.

Then Francine asks about my internet dating and I give her a summary of the story so far.

‘I hope you're being careful,' she says.

‘Well, sure, I try to be. Pretty much.' I smile at her feebly. ‘Sara wants me to text her with the name, rank and serial number of every bloke I have a drink with. Ha ha!'

‘I don't mean that. I mean I hope you're using protection.'

‘Oh.' We are going to have the condom conversation.