Reversing Over Liberace (3 page)

I sighed and shoved the photo away. I was no longer that gauche, slightly podgy, badly assembled girl. No, I was a completely different gauche, badly assembled girl and the pudge had transformed into curves, the bad hair into a reasonably sleek shoulder-length style. I waltzed in front of the mirror, embracing a scarlet hook-and-eye-bodiced dress which made me look like a surgical incision, but was, at least, neither tarty nor sternly practical. It was therefore my choice of dress for Luke. Katie had to be pessimistic. She stood as the voice of reason to Jazz and my enthusiastic overreactions. But there was no escaping that not only had Luke recognised me, he'd rung almost straight away. In my book, that meant interest of a more than catching-up kind.

I yelled a “goodnight” to Clay and went to bed, hanging the dress up from my wardrobe door so that I would see it if I woke during the night, and remember that this Sunday was going to be different.

Chapter Three

Sunday evening saw me ready at least three times. I kept making vital errors of judgement, firstly on the makeup front (when I put on so much that if I'd turned round suddenly my expression would have remained where it was), then the shoes (the red dress demanded heels, the distance I had to walk demanded flats). Then, just before I left I realised that the slim skirt made my underwear visible from four counties, and had to discard my big pants for a thong. Which, combined with the heels (put comfort over appearance? Are you
mad
?) made my entry into the bar a mince-wince-fest.

Several people looked up at my entrance. None of them was Luke. I ordered myself a grapefruit juice and sat down by the windows overlooking the river, to give me something to gaze moodily at. I was working on a nice case of stood-up paranoia when there was a touch on my arm.

“Willow? Hello, sorry I'm a bit late.”

He was folding away his mobile as he spoke and I noticed what a neat, up-to-date little thing it was, what beautifully casual trousers he was wearing, that his shirt looked freshly pressed. Anything rather than look at his face. Even so my stomach was doing its warm-up exercises.

“Oh, um, hello, Luke.”

I managed to keep my eyes below neck-level, but any moment now I was going to have to look up, or be thought terminally rude. I flipped a peek up and straight back down again, hoping he wouldn't think I was fixated with his groin. Despite the supersonic speed of my glance, I noticed that he was smiling at me, holding a chair slightly away from the table.

“Is it all right?”

“Oh, yes, sorry, yes, do. Sit. Yes. Down,” I burbled, moving my jacket, bag, the menu, rearranging my glass on the table, anything but look directly at him. “Have you had far to come?” Despite myself, my gaze treacherously slithered upwards and rested on the bridge of his exquisite nose. Oh dear God, but he was gorgeous.

“Not really. I'm staying in the Moat House across the river until I can find a place to buy.” He indicated the ridiculously pricey breeze-block pile which loomed over the river like a concrete frown. “How about you? You said you live in York now?”

I struggled to reply coherently. All the while the windmills of my stomach ground and turned, and I fought that grapefruit juice to an internal standstill. We chatted a little more, about university life, the very few mutual friends we had had, including Tom who was now, apparently, a well-regarded glamour photographer. I hoped his spots had finally cleared up.

“I really fancied you back then, you know.” I half-raised my hand to cover my mouth then realised that I didn't have to. Amazingly enough, the words had been spoken by Luke.

“You what?”

“Yeah. Christ, I'm still ashamed of myself, the way I used to follow you around. I was too shy to do anything about it, of course.”

I coughed, and the grapefruit juice did a little celebratory dance. “Shy? Were you?” Shy? This man—I met his eye for the first time—this man had regularly taken most of his clothes off on stage in front of hundreds (another of the reasons why I had attended just about every gig Fresh Fingers gave) and been famous for his double-mooning trick in the Union bar.

“With girls, yes. Terrible. So. Sorry. I bet you're, what, married now?”

How did I play it without making myself sound like someone who only dated during total eclipses. “Not really. I mean, no. Not married. In fact”—inventing quickly so as not to sound less attractive than a case of typhoid—“I've recently split up with someone actually.”

Luke let out a long sigh. “Yeah, know the feeling.” We kind of stared at each other for a moment. At least, he stared and I clenched. “Bad breakup?”

“Pretty bad, yes. I caught him with someone else.”
What happened there?
I mean, one minute we're in
True Confessions
mode, and the next I'm laying down the ‘How I Dated a Serial Cheater' precredit sequence for Jeremy Kyle's new TV extravaganza.

“Shit happens, yeah? Was it the guy from last night? The one with the crazy eyes?”

Crazy eyes? Jazz?
Although, now you come to mention it… “Look, do you mind if we don't talk about it? I'm still feeling…” a bit like a lying cow. Why hadn't I simply admitted that my last relationship of any kind had been six months ago? It had ended because I couldn't find model aircraft flying at all fascinating and we'd broken up
sotto voce
on his mother's couch during one of her feted scone and jelly teas. Answer—because I didn't want to look a total tit.

“Yeah, course. Sorry. So.” Was it my imagination or did he really look quite sorry to drop the subject of my love life. “What do you usually do on a Sunday night?”

Oh, you know, the usual. There's the laundry. If I'm really feeling like pushing the boat out, I might pumice my feet. “Not a lot. Well, sometimes I sing in a band.” Yeah, right. Sometimes, like when Jazz's band is completely desperate and even its last-ditch singer, the one with a squint and no boobs, has got dysentery.

“Hey, that's great. We'll have to get together sometime, have a jamming session.” Luke leaned across the table and a waft of exclusive aftershave hit me in both nostrils. “I hope you don't think I'm some kind of weirdo, stalking girls I used to have a thing for. It was completely accidental, but I'd been thinking of you a lot. After so long away, I guess, all the old gang were on my mind.”

A sudden, grim thought struck me. “You aren't confusing me with someone else, are you? I mean, we didn't really move in the same circles much.” And every time I saw you, you completely ignored me. And I'd noted the words “used to”.

Luke gave a grin so hot that diamonds would have gone runny. “Oh now, let me see. You had longer hair, love the new cut by the way, read English, rode around on a bright red bicycle like you thought you were at Cambridge, wore possibly the biggest boots on campus and hung out with Katie somebody.”

“O'Connor,” I supplied.

“Yeah. I was so crippled up with shyness that I could hardly even bear to look at you.”

Now our eyes met properly. His gaze was level and steady. The stomach churning was becoming unignorable and my throat began to constrict, but the eye contact was luscious with promise. If I ran for the toilets now I might never see a look like that again.

I made a quick decision—pulled my jacket towards me and pretended to be having a coughing fit, searching for a handkerchief whilst in reality I was throwing up the grapefruit juice into a pocket. It was short, sharp and nasty, but Luke thankfully didn't seem to notice.

“So then. Would you like another drink? Or”—he waved a hand at the crowded bar—“would you rather go on somewhere else?”

I would have toured the inner circles of hell to keep Luke Fry's attention focussed on me. I mean, how much would it take to make
you
vomit in your own pocket? We ended up walking through the darkening streets, and before I knew it, he was walking me home. It had started to rain at some unnoticed point and umbrellas were erupting around us. The streets shone, colours bleeding into one another as my eyes glazed with sheer happiness. Our heads bent together in introspective conversation, what with the twirling
parapluies
, the neon shimmer and the encroaching hush of Sunday night falling on a suburban area, it was like the closing scene of a Jeunet film. Luke bid me a decorous goodnight. (Although I noted, when he leaned against me to give me a peck on the cheek, the bulge in his trousers indicated that he would have gone for something a lot less chaste.) I did the cliché thing of closing the front door and leaning against it breathing heavily. This ended swiftly in a very unclichéd rush to the bathroom, where I stripped off all my clothes from which a slight smell of sick was beginning to waft.

Chapter Four

“No, I'm sorry, Luke. I can't make it tonight. I have a very important meeting to go to. Perhaps some other time?”

“What'cha muttering about? You goin' bloody loony on us then, Will, or what?”

I looked up from my computer screen to see Neil and Clive, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the front office, hanging over my desk. “What?”

“All this chuntering away to yerself, soundin' like you're as barmy as”—a gesture—“the Lady of the Lake down there.”

The lady in question, namely Katie, could be heard singing a Killers track from the filing room, which was meant to be soundproof but wasn't because the boys hosted farting competitions in there and the tiles had fallen off. “No, I was just…”

But Neil and Clive had lost interest in me and my amusing foibles and were taking themselves off to annoy Katie. She gave much better value in the irritation stakes since she had a far wider vocabulary of expletives and, because of the twins, was always slightly sleep deprived.

“No, really, Luke,” I continued to myself as I absentmindedly typed in the wording for a badly written advertisement. “I am so
terribly
busy. Maybe next month, sometime.” And then the telephone rang, making me jump. “Hello,
York Echo
, how can I help you?”

“You can let me take you out for dinner tonight.”

“Luke?”

“Sorry, yes. But if it makes it any better, I'm covering for Brad Pitt.”

I laughed out loud without thinking, and the rumpus from the filing room stopped. “Bloody 'ell, that's it. She's laughing to 'erself now,” I heard Clive mutter.

“Tonight? Are you sure?” I lowered my voice to a semi-whisper.

“Now, let me see, if I move Fearne Cotton to Thursday and put Cat Deeley on hold until next week—yes, Willow, I'm sure. I'll pick you up at seven thirty, okay? I mean, will that be all right?”

I agreed, I must have done, because the next thing I knew the tiny office was full of Neil and Clive and their body odour, with Katie elbowing her way past the lot of them shrieking, “Have you got a date?”

Neil shook his head. “Fuck me, about time.” Neil and Clive didn't know about my little problem with men, you see. Oddly enough, I was never troubled in the digestive department by either of them, my tastes running to men whose neck measurements are a fraction of their IQs rather than double it. “Tasty bit like you shouldn't be moping about on 'er own. Tell 'er, Clive.”

“Yer. 'S right.”

Morecambe and Wise they weren't. When they left, I brought Katie up to speed on the current Luke situation. Obviously she'd had a blow-by-blow breakdown last night when I'd got in, plus a military-style debriefing over the coffee machine this morning, but I was always up for another round.

“Whoa, two nights in a row? He
must
be keen.” Katie sounded almost wistful. “He didn't, um, he didn't remember me at all, did he, Will?”

“We didn't really talk about university much,” I lied. Luke had failed to remember anything about Katie apart from the fact that she'd been my friend, until I'd half-jokingly reminded him that he'd asked her out once.

Katie carried on. “I mean, he didn't
seem
shy. Not when he chatted me up. Seemed perfectly at ease, actually. You know, cocksure, like he knew exactly what he was doing.”

I loved Katie dearly. As she always said, we had far too much dirt on each other to ever be enemies. So I didn't tell her what Luke had told me. He'd been part of a group of science students who looked down on us arts-and-humanities types and he was too shy to go against peer pressure by chatting me up. One night, however, he'd got raving drunk and had somehow ended up asking Katie out in the hopes that she'd introduce us. Telling Katie he'd only talked to her because he was drunk would go against the whole spirit of sisterhood. Plus, she might hit me.

“Where's he taking you?” Definitely wistful now. Poor Katie. Since the birth of the twins, she and Dan regarded putting the wheelie bin into the driveway as an evening out.

“No idea. He didn't say. I'd better not wear the red dress again.”

Katie and I looked at each other. “This might be a case,” she said, portentously.

“For the black chiffon!” I finished. Demure at the front, but low cut at the back, it somehow managed to say “I'm pure and untouched” and yet growl “come and get me, big boy”. “As long as he wants to take me somewhere reasonably grand. I really can't go into Burger King, not without knickers.”

“Well, he's got cash, hasn't he? What was it you said he did, something to do with classic cars?”

“Yes, he and his brother have got a car-import business, bringing classic cars from all over the world. Luke's been in the States for the last year, setting up a franchise in Boston. His brother's out there now sorting it out. They've got another one in Milan and Luke wants to open one up here in York. He's come to check out the competition, look at the market, plus he wants to buy a house here in the city.” The words “and settle down” hung in the air, large enough to bang your head on.

“Sounds perfect.” Katie picked up another armful of potential filing. “But make sure he takes you somewhere really nice. You deserve it, Will—you really do.”