50 Ways to Find a Lover (31 page)

Julia appears in the hallway.

‘What’s a girl have to do to get a cock around here?’ she pouts. Her voice goes up three octaves when she sees my flowers. ‘Oh my God! Sare! Who got you flowers?’

I open the small card attached to the cellophane.
To a wonderful woman. Looking forward to seeing you when I’m back from LA. With kind regards from Eamonn Nigels.

Simon puffs up his chest, places his hand dramatically on his heart and starts to sing his new favourite song, ‘Grandad, we love you.’ It’s his own genius reworking of ‘Grandma We Love You.’ He’s getting good at it. He should be. He practises every day. Julia laughs and offers her cabaret performance of ‘Zim zimmer, who’s got the keys to my zimmer?’ They both laugh loudly until Julia has to stop laughing because she’s choking. I go to the kitchen to get us some Cockalada and walk back to the bedroom. I sit on my unmade bed.

‘You look sad for a woman who’s just been sent a florist’s shop,’ Julia says quietly, joining me on the bed.

‘Hmmm.’

‘What’s up?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did the flowers freak you out?’

‘Well, it cocks everything up. I want to go out now and pull on a quest, but the flowers will make me feel guilty. It’s like having a boyfriend.’

‘Hang about. I thought you wanted a boyfriend.’

‘Mmm. But if I get a boyfriend I’ll have to stop my blog.’

‘But you wanted Paul to be your boyfriend.’

‘That was different.’

‘You know what I think you should do? Get in touch with Paul.’ Julia always serves with this, and I normally slam it back to her with a fast, furious ball to the shins. But I haven’t got any fight in me today.

‘I wish he hadn’t turned out to be a prick, Jules,’ I say sadly.

‘Give him another try. He is gorgeous.’

I would like to. I would love to meet him and for him to say, ‘Simon made a mistake, I was talking to my ill sister. I would never hurt you. Come here and let me hold you and make you laugh and cook you lamb and then let’s start breeding rampantly.’ I would love that to happen. But I can’t allow myself to risk getting hurt by him again. I can’t give him another chance and let him make a fool of me a second time. I sometimes wish I was a man. Men will excuse most personality flaws (except maybe a murderous streak) if a woman is beautiful. Women don’t or can’t do this.

I shall just carry on with my quests and win a Bloggie and hope that soon I’ll be saying, ‘Paul? Paul who?’

‘Girls? I want to show you something.’ It’s Simon, in the doorway. He is wearing his bright Mexican poncho and sombrero, a tacky, bushy, fake moustache and his Calvin Klein white pants.

‘What the hell?’ Julia coughs.

‘Right, I’m doing an ad for Cockalada. I’ve been working on the song and dance. Can I show you both?’

I nod and smile at him. Simon starts singing – I use the term ‘singing’ very loosely – in his dodgy Mexican accent, using a Cockalada as a microphone.

‘Cocka-lada, Cocka-lada, everyone loves the Cock’ – pause, cheeky smile, suck on cock-shaped drink – ‘alada.’

The dance still involves him rotating his hips like he’s doing the hula-hoop for the first time, but it’s really improved. I clap wholeheartedly. Julia is laughing so hard she’s frozen like a heart-attack victim. It’s scary when she gets like this. We wait for her to recover.

‘Simon, that’s brilliant!’ she eventually screams. Simon does a little bow and looks very pleased with himself.

‘Ladies, I have another favour to ask. What are you two gorgeous creatures doing next Friday?’ he asks.

‘I’m free!’ replies Julia instantly.

‘I’m suspicious,’ I tell him.

Simon has asked us if we’re free before he’s told us what he wants us to do. It’s in the
Skill With People
book. Simon has read
Skill With People
eight times. He has also flattered us. I am doubly suspicious.

‘Why?’ I ask in my best guarded voice.

‘Well,’ says Simon and then he stops. ‘Well, the thing is, it’s Cockalada’s first outing and I’ll be introducing the product and selling it in a club. I was wondering if you’d be my Cockalada girls. You know, like tequila girls. But you’d be Cockalada girls!’

‘Sounds like a laugh!’ Julia squeals.

I am more familiar with Simon than Julia is. There will be a catch somewhere.

‘Is Ruth doing it?’ I ask innocently.

‘Er, no,’ he says.

‘Why?’

‘Well, OK, the thing is it’s a fetish club called Club Whack.’

‘Club Whack. I’ve heard of it. Great name for a club, isn’t it?’ exclaims Julia. She does have a point.

‘Yeah, I’ve got some PVC nurses’ uniforms and Cocka-lada slingers for you to wear.’ I look horrified. So he gets down on his bare knees and tilts his sombrero back so we can see his eyes.

‘Please, I will love you for ever.’

‘Course we will. Won’t we, Sare?’

‘Julia, I’m not selling plastic willies in a fetish club! Sorry, Si – anyway, it’s the wedding the next day, we’ll be knackered. Come on, Jules, we need to make a move.’ I get

up and apply just a touch more lip gloss.

‘Come on, Sare. I really want to go to Club Whack,’ says

Julia testily.

‘You can do it, Jules. But there’s no way I am.’

Simon slowly picks himself up off the floor and does

some pretend crying as he walks slowly out of the room.

Julia sits thoughtfully on the bed. She looks disappointed.

I feel bad, but not bad enough to change my mind.

forty-one

I lick the salt off my hand. I knock back my tequila with the others. I bite on a lemon. I hold down some bile. Oh dear. Nikki didn’t manage to keep hers down. There’s a little bit of sick down her
BRIDE TO BE
sash. Two work colleagues help her to the loo. Flora approaches me and Julia. She’s wearing deely boppers and edible pants over her skinny jeans. She looks divine.

‘I need to have a private word with you tonight, Sarah,’ she says.

‘What’s up?’ Julia and I chant. In unison. We look at each other. It’s weird when we do that.

‘It’s about Bertrand.’ She mouths the words with her perfect lips.

That’s the only tantalizing morsel we get before a shimmering group of women apply themselves to us.

‘Sarah, have you been on a date with that eligible photographer bachelor?’ asks Siobhan, Nikki’s flatmate.

‘He was gay.’

‘I like the bloke who writes the poems!’

‘Do you think he really has got a girlfriend?’

‘Oh my God, are you the Spinster girl? I want to know about the older man. Have you shagged him yet?’ screams someone I’ve never met with over-applied bronzer.

‘No, no. I haven’t,’ I squirm.

‘I love your blog,’ yells someone else. ‘Your comments are so funny. That Loveless woman is brilliant.’

‘Yeah, what about that porridge woman? She sounded evil.’

I have only met these girls once or twice. They know intimate secrets about me. I don’t even know where they live or what they do for a living. My life has become a soap opera. I am the workaholic scriptwriter who slaves to keep up ratings. But my show is a hit. It’s thrilling.

‘This is a quest tonight!’ I tell them.

‘Can we all join you?’

‘Yes indeed, ladies.’

‘Ahhh!’ they scream. These women are thirty, full of tequila and smell slightly of vomit but they sound like a group of teenage girls watching an effeminate boy band. They look at me, hungry for immoral guidance. I start to explain Quest No. 6: Pulling on a Hen Night.

Julia claims that you shouldn’t pull on a hen night. She maintains that a hen night is about strengthening the bond between women. I say that sixteen drunken women = male attention = too good an opportunity to miss. Anyway, now I know Julia is into weird fetish clubs it’s best I don’t trust her opinion about anything again.

The strategy is to pull men through the power of dance:

So far I can only foresee two problems:

‘So, ladies, we have to get the men dancing. There are plenty of them here by the bar. But we need them on the dance floor and responding to our charms. For this I have a two-part strategy. One,’ I hold up one finger for emphasis. I wish I had a whiteboard. ‘We need to lead the dancing. If we go through here,’ dramatic point to the dance floor, ‘and wiggle they will follow, believe me. Two,’ I hold two fingers up and nod slowly for effect. ‘Two is good because it gets us up close to our subjects. But it’s not for the faint-hearted. I suggest we stand there.’ I point to the area outside the men’s loo. ‘And we create a female fortress. A man is not allowed access to the toilet unless he demonstrates a dance move.’

Unblinking eyes consume the information. It occurs to me I could become a pulling expert. I could go on
Richard & Judy
.

‘Wow. That’s hard-core,’ says Siobhan.

‘Hard-core! That’s not even apple-core, Siobhan,’ I respond.

‘All this power’s gone to her head. She’s found her inner dominatrix,’ laughs Julia.

‘Don’t get excited, Jules,’ I say. I try to raise one eyebrow but I can’t. ‘I know you’re into that.’ She sticks her tongue out in response.

‘So let’s get into two groups,’ I tell them all. ‘The dance-floor group and the toilet group.’

‘I’ll stay with you guys,’ Flora informs me and Julia.

‘Great,’ we say, wishing someone far less attractive than Flora had said those words.

The majority of girls head to the dance floor, leaving just me, Julia and Flora to execute the toilet plan. We form a line blocking the entrance to the men’s toilet.

The first full-bladdered man arrives. We demand a dance move. He clutches his beer and does a limp jerky shuffle. Helpfully I show him the classic fishing-line-reel-them-in move. He attempts it. He looks like someone with bad hiccups who is gesturing for the bill in a restaurant. I am horrified. I let him go and have his pee. Perhaps it’s best some men don’t dance. There is a slight lull in men needing a pee. So we dance to ‘I Will Survive’ in the meantime. We act out every line. We are very inventive. We are the funniest people . . . ever. The next pee needer is gorgeous. Julia and I call him ‘the Fit Fandango’. He does an overexposed Justin Timberlake move where he cocks an imaginary hat and does a quick turn. I am already naming our children when he leans towards Flora and says, ‘Fuck! You’re gorgeous.’