Life and Soul of the Party (12 page)

‘Daisy Duke from
The Dukes of Hazzard
,’ said Chris straight away as Laura gave us a twirl.

‘I should’ve known you’d get it straight away.’

We then all looked at Cooper who was wearing motorcycle leathers that clearly didn’t fit him and holding a toy rifle.

‘Is it the cop from the Village People?’ asked Chris grinning.

Cooper, offended, protested it wasn’t.

‘I haven’t got a clue,’ said Vicky.

‘He’s Australian,’ said Coop offering up a clue.

‘The guy from
Mad Max!
’ said Chris.

‘You should’ve known that,’ said Cooper. ‘It was our favourite film when we were kids.’

Next up was Vicky. Her outfit was strange to say the least. Under her cream coat (which wasn’t part of her costume) she was wearing a pink T-shirt, pink jeans and pink shoes.

I guessed Alicia Silverstone in
Clueless
and Cooper guessed Little Bo Beep in
Toy Story
, but we were both wrong.

‘You’ve got to think whole film rather than a single character,’ prompted Chris.

With that I got it straight away.
‘Pretty in Pink
!’

Next for our scrutiny was Chris who looked completely normal until he opened his jacket. He was naked from the waist up and across his torso were various words and sentences scribbled in black marker pen.

‘That’s a no-brainer, you’re the bloke out of
Memento.
’

‘Got it in one,’ replied Chris. ‘Which means you win tonight’s star prize.’ He threw his arms round me and squashed my face into his naked chest until I screamed.

‘So what about you?’ asked Cooper once Chris had finished torturing me. ‘Who have you come as?’

As I straightened myself out my friends looked my ensemble up and down: a shirt, tie, waistcoat, cream wide-legged trousers and flat black shoes.

‘You look like a clown,’ said Cooper. ‘Are you Charlie Chaplin?’

‘First off,’ I replied sternly, ‘no, I do not look like a clown and secondly, Charlie Chaplin’s got a moustache.’

‘Julie Andrews in
Victor/Victoria
,’ suggested Laura.

‘Never seen it.’

‘Barbra Streisand in
Yentl
,’ guessed Vicky, ‘or possibly Barbra Streisand in
What’s Up Doc?
’

‘Wrong on both counts.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Chris. ‘Give us a clue? Are you supposed to be male or female?’

‘I’m saying nothing until somebody guesses.’

‘If Paul was here,’ laughed Chris, ‘I bet he’d get it straight away.’

Everyone looked from Chris to me and back again and Chris looked as though he wanted the earth to open up and swallow him.

‘Look, it’s fine,’ I said as everyone waited for my reaction. I looped my arm through Chris’s. ‘We all know he’s right: Paul probably would guess it in a second but . . . you know what? I don’t care. For the first time in a long while I feel really good and whether Paul’s here with Hannah or whether he doesn’t turn up at all it doesn’t matter. All that does matter is that I’m here, I’m with my friends and no matter what it takes I’m going to have a brilliant time.’

I’m not sure that any of us really believed Melissa’s little speech, least of all Melissa herself, but we all nodded and agreed with her anyway. Collecting the booze we’d brought with us from our various cars we made our way to Cath and Simon’s three-bed semi and rang the doorbell. Within seconds the front door was flung open to reveal Cath in a big white flouncy-looking dress which, according to Vicky, made her Maria from
The Sound of Music.
Simon greeted us wearing a black hooded top with a grey T-shirt underneath, ridiculously tight jeans and white Adidas trainers. I hadn’t clue who he was supposed to be but then I noticed the black stick-on moustache he was sporting and the toy pistol sticking out of his back pocket. ‘You’re Axel Foley from
Beverley Hills Cop
,’ I pronounced triumphantly.

Cath and Simon then took their turns guessing our costumes. But when it came to Melissa’s they too were stumped.

‘One last go,’ demanded Simon, whose guesses so far had ranged from Melanie Griffiths in
Working Girl
through to Anne Hathaway in
The Devil Wears Prada.
‘Is it Stan Laurel?’ Melissa scowled and informed Simon in no uncertain terms that she was not ‘Stan-sodding-Laurel’, and that if people weren’t going to guess properly she was going to go home.

Relieved to have got all of the guess-who stuff out of the way for the time being, Cath invited us to head to the kitchen for a drink. I’d been about to go along with everyone else when Vicky pulled me aside.

‘What’s up?’

‘What do you mean “what’s up?”.’ she replied. ‘Didn’t you see how Cooper and Laura were?’

‘I’m guessing they’ve had some sort of row. And?’

‘Well, aren’t you worried?’

‘About what?’

‘About what they’ve been fighting about?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m sure at some point tonight Laura will give you a blow-by-blow breakdown of everything that happened.’

‘Well, don’t you think you should find out Cooper’s side too? Make sure he’s okay? Don’t you remember how he was after he split up with Angie?’

Angie was Cooper’s last proper girlfriend and the reason he left Derby to join me in Manchester. They were sort of childhood sweethearts who were together from the age of sixteen until they both turned twenty-eight when she left him for some guy that she had met at work. It had taken him years to get over her and even now there were times when I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure that he had fully recovered.

‘I’ll have a word with him later, okay? Come on, this is a party, isn’t it? So why don’t we just try to enjoy ourselves?’

For the first couple of hours at the party I really did try my best to have a good time. Initially I stuck with Vicky and Laura while they circulated catching up with all the usual suspects but I barely contributed anything to the conversations. For the most part my mind was focused on whether or not Paul would arrive with Hannah and how I would be when I finally saw them face to face.

Leaving Vicky and Laura exchanging work anecdotes with a group of Cath’s friends I was about to go in search of Chris when out of the corner of my eye I saw a face that I recognised. It was Billy, the young guy who had tried to chat me up at Ed and Sharon’s New Year’s Eve party. He waved and came over to talk to me.

‘
Annie Hall
,’ he said with a grin.

For a second I was confused but then I realised he was talking about my costume, and gave him a round of applause.

‘Finally,’ I replied in relief. ‘I’ve been here since eight and you’re the only person that’s got it right. You wouldn’t believe some of the guesses I’ve had. When I was getting myself a drink some guy actually asked me if I’d come as Dustin Hoffman in
Tootsie.
Can you believe it?
Tootsie
? I can tell you they got a kick in the shins for that one.’

‘They must be mad,’ laughed Billy. ‘First off, Dustin Hoffman in
Tootsie
was a bloke dressed as a woman and second, you look nothing like Dustin Hoffman dressed as a man either.
Annie Hall
should have been easy. I mean, isn’t it in everyone’s all-time top ten films?’

‘Well, the answer to that is obviously a big fat no. If it isn’t, I must have come up with the worst fancy-dress costume in living history.’

‘So come on then. Return the compliment. Who am I?’

‘Okay,’ I mused looking Billy up and down. He was wearing black shoes and trousers, a white short-sleeved shirt with a striped tie in two different shades of red and looked like he was some kind of shop assistant. The icing on the cake was the patches of red marker pen all over the shirt that I guessed was supposed to be blood.

‘When we met last time didn’t you tell me your name was Billy?’ I asked, pointing to the green Curry’s electrical store name badge on the front pocket of his shirt which said: ‘STEVE BAMFORD.’

‘It is . . . and before you ask, no, I don’t work at Curry’s. I bought it off eBay from this Bamford guy.’

I wracked my brains for the answer. His costume was ringing a bell but I couldn’t place him. ‘I take it it’s from some kind of action film?’

‘Action-ish,’ shrugged Billy. ‘Though it’s probably more cross-genre.’

‘Action crossed with what?’

‘That would be telling.’

‘I have no idea,’ I replied, still drawing a blank. ‘You’ll have to give me a clue.’

‘Okay, here’s a clue. Are you ready?’

He let out a long groan that was so loud, it took both me and the group of people around us more than a bit by surprise. Billy was not only unfazed by the looks he was receiving but appeared to be relishing the attention.

‘What was that about? It sounded like you were about to throw up.’

‘It was a clue.’

‘You groaning was a clue?’ A picture slowly began to form in my head. I knew the film. It was about zombies and starred the bloke who used to be in a sitcom that Paul and I used to watch sometimes on a Friday night. I could even see the cover of the DVD from when Chris, Vicky and I had rented it from Blockbuster when it first came out. Finally it came to me.

‘Shaun of the Dead.
’

Billy gave me a small bow.

‘I wasn’t the first to get it right though, was I?’

‘It doesn’t matter that you weren’t the first to guess,’ grinned Billy, ‘the bottom line is you’ve managed to win tonight’s star prize.’

I was well aware that this was probably the lead up to the world’s cheesiest line but I didn’t entirely mind because Billy had already begun to grow on me.

‘Okay then,’ I replied. ‘What, pray tell, is tonight’s star prize?’

With a theatrical flourish as much for his own amusement as mine, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a keychain with a red plastic lobster at the end of it.

‘The perfect present for Annie Hall,’ he said and handed it to me. ‘From Alvy Singer with love.’

Melissa’s face when she saw the lobster was priceless.

‘How did you do that?’

‘Do what?’

She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘The lobster, it’s a reference to the bit in
Annie Hall
where Alvy tries to cook live lobster for Annie and they end up escaping. Now either you constantly walk around with red plastic lobsters in your pocket or somehow you guessed that I was going to come as
Annie Hall . . .
which is impossible because I only came up with the idea half an hour before I left my flat.’

‘The truth is I have the gift,’ I replied. ‘Either that or I’m a dab hand with smoke and mirrors.’

Of course Melissa didn’t fall for any of this but that didn’t really matter because I was making her smile and, given that this had been my main objective since I hatched this plan several weeks ago, I considered the mission to have been accomplished very well indeed.

The whole lobster thing came about as a result of a chance mid-week night out with my housemates Seb and Brian. Seb worked in the accounts department for a firm of solicitors in town and he’d recently been up for promotion, so when he came home one night and told us he’d got it and wanted to celebrate we all agreed to go out with him. For a change Seb suggested that we go to Blue-Bar on Wilbraham Road rather than the Duck and Drake. I tried to talk him out of it because Blue-Bar was one of Freya’s favourite places and as I was still trying to avoid her I didn’t really fancy it but Seb wouldn’t budge. Half an hour later we arrived at the bar, and as I walked in I was completely blown away because the first person that I saw (standing behind the bar pulling pints, no less) was Melissa.

Melissa had been on my mind off and on ever since we’d met on New Year’s Eve. Even though nothing had happened between us she had made a real impact on me and so seeing her working in this bar that we didn’t normally go to suddenly didn’t seem like any random coincidence. It seemed like something bigger. Like it was all part of a plan. And the fact that she looked just as amazing as she had done on New Year’s Eve was the icing on the cake.

I could barely take my eyes off her, and before long Seb and Brian noticed my distraction and tried to cajole me into going over to talk to her. But then I told them about my opening salvo the first time we’d met, about our matching Converse. Once the boys had finished laughing, I added that Melissa might also have a boyfriend so talking to her would hardly be worth the bother. But then Brian volunteered to do some digging with Martha, a Polish girl he’d been after for the longest time, who occasionally worked in Blue-Bar at the weekends.

Brian called Martha and reported back everything he had learned. Melissa was a student at Manchester university. She worked six shifts a week at Blue-Bar. She was popular with customers. She liked music and cinema. She lived in Chorlton. Her flatmate was a bit strange. She had a bit of a complicated relationship with her ex-boyfriend but was currently single. The biggest revelation was the fact that Melissa (who on the night we’d first met I’d guessed to be somewhere between the ages of twenty-five to twenty-eight, tops) was actually ‘somewhere in her mid-thirties’.

I think this was more of an issue for Brian and Seb than it was for me as for the rest of the evening their running joke became, ‘So if you two get hitched, when you’re thirty-five she’ll be forty-five,’ followed by ‘when you’re forty-five she’ll be fifty-five,’ and then finally ‘when you’re one hundred and ten she’ll no doubt be dead.’ The bottom line was that I didn’t care how old Melissa was, all I knew was that I liked her, and that given that she wasn’t seeing anyone I was more than prepared to have a go at trying to make her like me in return.

Later that night I called my sister Nadine and asked her to invite me along the next time her mates had one of their get-togethers. She guessed straight away that my interest was more than likely due to my being ‘in pursuit of skirt’ and when I told her how old ‘the skirt’ was she duly informed me that I had no chance.