Here's Looking at You (6 page)

Oh my God, we’re playing good cop, bad cop now? You utter …
James was going to have some words for Laurence when they left, not all pre-watershed.

‘Not exactly,’ James said.

Anna looked at him with burgeoning hostility.

‘James here works for a digital agency, lots of big impressive clients. And I’m in sales. Pharmaceutical sales. So if you’re fresh out of Anusol, I’m your man.’

‘Loz, how about we let Anna get to the right party?’ James said, hoping to redeem himself and halt the haemorrhoids chat. She scowled at him, as if he was trying to get rid of her.

‘I’ve got a better idea. Given this reunion has all the atmosphere of a Quaker quilting party, how about you smuggle us in to Beth’s do, and we buy you drinks by way of thank you?’

‘Loz!’ James said, sharply, writhing with embarrassment.

‘I think Beth might mind,’ Anna said.

‘Nah. Sounds like there’s karaoke in there? I do a belting “Summer
of ’69”. Come on. Don’t you think it’d be a laugh?’

‘Nope,’ Anna said, smiling. ‘Bye.’

She slipped away through the door and Loz let out a low whistle. ‘Was that a second or third degree burn?’

‘You can’t hustle a woman you’ve never met before into drinking with you, without her exerting her free will to tell you to sod off,’ James said, shaking his head.

Laurence gazed at the door, as if Anna might come back through it.

‘Do you think that was a hint for us to follow her?’

‘No, Loz. Now can we go?’

Laurence shrugged, scanned the room and necked the last of his pint.

Minutes later, debating ‘more beer or kebabs’ on the pavement outside, Laurence prodded James’s arm. He urgently gestured down the street.

There, a few yards away, was the Mysterious Anna, climbing into a cab.

‘Can you believe it? The lying …’

‘Haha!’ James liked her style.

‘If she wasn’t really going to that leaving do, why was she in ours?’

‘She was left so depressed by one encounter with you, she couldn’t face any more socialising?’ James said.

‘No. This is officially weird. Maybe she did go to our school and didn’t want to say.’

They watched the cab turn the corner and then set off down the street in the stinging chill, chins angled down into coat collars.

‘Do you remember any Spanish-looking girls at our school?’ James said.

‘Nope. You know, her whole story was off. How could you not read a banner that big? You’d need to be Stevie Wonder.’

‘OK, try this for an explanation. Someone from school is a suspected terrorist and she’s an MI5 spook. The suspect’s gone to ground and the whole reunion was a herd and trap ruse by the British secret services to lure the target out. This Anna is their top woman, on secondment from Barcelona. But crucially, they forgot that to pass muster undercover as an ex-pupil of Rise Park, you need a KFC-zinger-tower-and-twenty-a-day complexion.’

James glanced over at Laurence and started laughing.

‘What?’ Loz said.

‘Oh, just the fact you were actually considering that as more likely than an attractive woman not wanting to talk to you.’

‘So, how did the reunion go?’ Patrick asked, as Anna put down a cup of tea on his desk.

Patrick’s office was as forensically neat as his clothing and, unlike Anna, he didn’t use chairs as receptacles for overflow from his shelves.

‘It was … peculiar.’

Anna debated saying no one recognised her but she realised that would involve pulling worms out of cans like streamers.

‘Didn’t run into any old flames?’

Patrick was a ‘committed’ – read: resigned – bachelor. His terror that Anna might betray singles club by finally meeting someone was only matched in scale by her equal certainty that she never would. She sipped from her own cup of tea and hovered.

‘You must be kidding. No old flames at Rise Park, more scorch marks.’ She wanted to talk about something else. ‘How’s The Guild doing?’

‘Good thanks. Spent the weekend disciplining wayward teenage Danish warlocks and facerolling our way through the current wave of raid progression.’

‘Much like here then. You’re still a panda?’

Patrick always knew he could discuss his hobby without fear of judgement from Anna. She might not be a gamer herself but there was a geek solidarity.

‘In Pandaria. Only temporarily. I used to be a female orc. A shaman.’

‘Ah.’

Patrick was mostly into what Anna had learned to call ‘immersive’ games like World of Warcraft. He always tried to persuade Anna to give it a go, but she was dubious, especially when she found out he wore a headset microphone.

‘Still, glad you went to the reunion, all told?’ Patrick said.

Anna pondered this. She was more perplexed by it than anything.

‘It was a useful reminder of everything and everyone I don’t have to put up with anymore, put it like that. Like a vaccine shot of aversion therapy in the buttock. After that, I appreciate every single little thing about work today.’

She beamed and Patrick beamed back, perfectly in tune.

‘Oh woe, I have first years at ten a.m. I challenge you to appreciate them,’ Patrick said. ‘I think this lot are the worst yet.’

‘We say that every year.’

‘I know, I know … but were we ever this bad?’

‘We did go on to become batshit old lecturers ourselves, so we’re hardly typical.’

‘I suppose so.’ Patrick swilled his tea. ‘I had one last week who sat there and said “Henry VII was brilliant, just brilliant.” As if you can skip the set texts and get your pom poms out and
cheerlead
instead. And I said “Brilliant how?” and he said’ – Patrick mimed a blank stoner face – “Just … brilliant.” Roll over Simon Schama, there’s a new guy in town. Another of them thought parsimony had something to do with income from parsnips. They should get a TV show together,
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Historical Adventure
.’

Anna laughed. ‘’Fraid I can’t say the same in return. My freshers are eager beavers. Plus, Operation Theodora Show kicks off this week.’

‘Well done you. Can’t wait to see it. Feather in your cap with poison Challis, too.’

‘Hope so.’ Victoria Challis was their head of department. She didn’t have a warm and inviting demeanour, it had often been noted. She did, however, have the keys to the research funds and promotions cabinet.

‘Lunch later?’ Patrick said.

‘Yes! My shout. It’ll take my mind off having to go wedding shopping with my sister tonight.’ Anna picked up a folder on Patrick’s filing cabinet and lightly batted it against her forehead.

‘Ah. Choosing flowers and trying different flavours of sponges and so on?’

‘She’s looking for her wedding gown—no, NO sentiment,’ Anna held up a finger as Patrick formed a soppy face. ‘There’s the “aww” factor and also the “argh”. If Aggy finds The Dress and it’s huge, I’ll have to follow the showy theme as a bridesmaid. It’ll be tangerine or canary yellow shot silk with a zebra print fur trim, like some “Santa Baby” swingy thing. My sister’s taste is very “Miami”. She has already uttered the bowel-freezing phrase “seen something in the Ashley and Cheryl Cole wedding”. Given they’ve divorced, it might even be the actual thing on eBay.’

‘Ah. Well. I am sure you’d look marvellous in a refuse sack.’

Anna made her umpteenth face of gratitude. ‘Thanks. See you later.’

Patrick beamed, doing a little wave as she exited.

Returning to her office and sitting down to her computer, Anna saw a name she didn’t recognise in her email and realised it was Neil from Friday. She could see from the preview window that this said rather more than she required; it used the word ‘lovers’. And an emoticon. Christ’s fuzzy clackers.

She opened and read it, feeling her piss steadily boiling as she did so.

Anna wrestled the temptation to craft a stinging riposte. She should resist. Ah, sod it. She opened a reply.

She hit send and took an angry swig of cooling tea.

Online dating could turn the most spangled romantic into a grizzled cynic. Wasn’t the internet supposed to herald a new era of ease and democracy in such matters? Instead it made the league tables, and winners and losers of the game, even more explicit.

Here was its stark reality: seeing that the person who hadn’t replied to your days-old message had logged in mere hours ago. Or noticing that the exciting entrepreneur who told you he was moving to Amsterdam, and thus sadly not free for a date, appeared to be very much still in the UK and available to other women.

Spotting that for all the ‘I want fascinating conversation’ claims, the site’s most popular of either sex were always the conspicuously beauteous. It was really ‘Am I Hot Or Not’, with some bullshit tacked on about how you liked crunchy peanut butter and the cool side of the pillow.

Oh, and men still tended to date five years younger than their own age.

Some people imagined Anna was grandly holding auditions, enjoying testing her market value. Or gadding round as if life was some Nora Ephron film, the world bristling with potential suitors you’d bump into while holding a brown paper bag with a baguette sticking out of it.

No, Anna was searching for a soulmate who probably didn’t exist, in a place where he almost certainly wasn’t.

Well-meaning types would say: ‘You’re the last person you’d expect to still be single! The world’s gone mad!’

Anna had to disagree there. For her, the world had always been this way.

There wasn’t really the conventional phraseology to describe what had happened to Anna, in terms of her physical transformation. If she said something understated like
‘I used to be heavier’
or ‘
I blossomed after university’
or
‘I was a bit of a duckling’
people nodded and said ‘
oh me too, I didn’t really come into my own until my mid-twenties’
, or similar.

But to end up looking like a completely different person, one born to a radically different genetic fortune?
That
journey was so rare as to only usually feature in saccharine films with makeover montages. Bonsai supermodels ‘disguised’ in dungarees, ready to remove the specs and shake their glossy Coke can-sized curls out of a barrette.

Anna had not been a plain child. Plain suggested unremarkable, average, easy to miss. She was very eye-catching. A combination of her inflatable size, oily complexion, orthodontics, heavy metal singer mop of untamed black curly hair and homemade outsize clothes (God how Anna came to hate her mother’s Singer sewing machine), made her stand out.

Seeing any glamorous potential in her future would’ve been deemed blind optimism, emphasis on the blind. Anna was, as her Rise Park peers often reminded her, fat and ugly.

She lost the weight when she was twenty-two. ‘The weight’ as opposed to just ‘weight’ seemed the right term, as her size had become a thing, an entity. Because Anna was A Big Girl. The fact followed her around and defined her. It was the monkey on her back that tipped the scales at an extra four stone.

The process of changing had been kick-started by a simple thought, after coming home in tears from a ‘Oy, Ozzy Osbourne – who ate all the bats’ heckle from a white van not long after she’d started her PhD.

She was intelligent and capable, and ran every other part of her life with rationalism and success. So why did adjusting the ‘calories in/calories used’ ratio to achieve an average BMI defeat her?

Like a lot of people who were overweight in childhood, by the time Anna fully awoke to the fact she was larger than other girls, it seemed incontrovertible.

Her younger sister Aggy was a whippet-thin livewire like their mother. Anna, they all said, was built like her dad. Their father Oliviero was a Central Casting roly-poly ‘baddabing geddoudamah kitchen’ Italian paterfamilias with a big broom of a moustache who advertisers would use to sell olive oil.