Millie's Game Plan (4 page)

When Sacha came in from her late shift, she was almost as excited to see the pictures as I was. I’d downloaded them to my laptop and had already cruised through them several times and started a spreadsheet to record the men’s details and suitability grading. Despite being completely bowled over by Victor, I regained enough sanity to return to the original plan. I had to give the others a chance, but it wouldn’t be easy.

I’d bought us Crispy Duck as a special treat because I really felt like a celebration was in order. I’d over-catered on the green veg front in a vain attempt to notch up the required five-portions-a-day. One blueberry muffin for breakfast didn’t really count. And I’d splashed out on a bottle of Supermarket Cava and some Crème de Cassis so I could make us Kir Royales – or perhaps I should say ‘Kir Proletarian’ since it wasn’t your bona fide
Champagne.

We settled down on the sofa and Sacha slurped her glass of Kir. ‘Right, let’s see the contestants.’

I began with Romwick, where the pickings were slim indeed. She was, however, quite taken by the maverick crew from Itchenfield. ‘They look much more fun.’ But since I’d not snapped any of them in detail, we moved on to Oldersbury.

I surprised myself by finding one of the contenders from the Beasley team more interesting than I’d expected. He was tall, dark and my guess,
Mediterranean. ‘I bet there’s a drop of Greek blood coursing through his veins,’ I suggested.

‘Nah – Italian,’ said Sacha. She’d had a bit of thing for Italians, ever since an encounter with a ski instructor on a school trip to the Dolomites.

He was also displaying a tantalising wisp of chest hair beneath his shirt. That’s one thing Sacha and I are in agreement over: chest hair only works on tanned skin. You wouldn’t want to tangle with a sandy thatch on dough-coloured skin…at least, we wouldn’t. Which made me contemplate what might be lurking beneath Vic’s shirt – naturally.

‘Not bad,’ said Sacha as we perused Mediterranean Man in close-up. ‘I like the sultry look – especially that one,’ she pointed to a shot of him out on the boundary, crouched slightly, hands on thighs, waiting for an opportunity to catch the ball. Yes, he certainly had potential so we stuck him in at number one – for the time being.

I could feel my heart quickening as we approached the Marshalhampton contingent. I needed to remain completely impartial when we got to you-know-who.

First up was a group shot of the batsmen resting outside the pavilion. Amongst them was a tall guy with a text-book handsome face but a beer-belly under development. ‘Not bad,’ she murmured.
‘Could make good breeding stock.’ Unfortunately, I hadn’t done a study of this one (too carried away by Victor, I suspect) and had no idea if he was single or not.

My heart was really pounding as I clicked forward to my first shot of HIM.

Sacha nodded, ‘He looks okay.’

Okay
? I wanted to shriek but solemnly clicked on to the money shot – the one of him shaking hands with his team-mate and the sun warming his features and highlighting the texture of his hair.

‘He looks better there,’ she said. ‘Nice teeth.’

I’d edited out most shots of him, so as not to appear biased, and we moved on to his batting companion who was shorter, with straight dark hair and a crooked nose – but not disfiguringly so. In fact, I find some crooked noses quite appealing. There were two more good-lookers in Marshalhampton and we decided that Mediterranean Man was still in the number one slot, with Victor-who-shall-not-yet-be-named at number two. Sacha christened him The Golden Smiler.

I was feeling vaguely guilty for not fessing up to Sacha where my heart was already leaning but then, it was supposed to be an exercise in rational selection and I didn’t want her to see how impetuous I could be. In any case, he might turn out to be the kind of married man who refuses to wear jewellery, or a cosy chat over tea with Vonnie might reveal he was a serial lothario, working his way through the willing housewives of Marshalhampton and environs. No, I owed it to my plan to remain circumspect where Vic was concerned.

Vic. I struggled with that name.

‘Are you going to print out the favourites and stick them on the wall?’ Sacha asked. ‘It’ll be like the X-Factor. We can put crosses on them when they’ve been evicted from the competition.’

‘Oh, great idea. Then if I invite one of them round for coffee, I can point out how well he’s doing.’

We both giggled. All the same, I did paste pictures of the leaders into the spreadsheet – and called the file X-Men.

As I put the laptop away, Sacha noticed when I winced slightly. My hand, whilst not completely shattered, was bruised. ‘What’s the matter – don’t tell me your shutter finger’s got repetitive strain, already?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘It doesn’t look like “nothing” from here. What did you do – stop a cricket ball?’

Immediately she said it, I looked up. I’m not great at hiding my feelings and even worse at telling lies. Dad used to say it’s because I’m a Virgo. Then again, it could be down to my mother’s catholic zeal for honesty. Probably it falls somewhere between the two – a bit like me, coloured as I am by Dad’s liberal-minded-verging-on-New-Age philosophy of life and Catholic guilt, which hangs around my mother like a woollen scarf – warm but scratchy. She felt she had a lot to be guilty about – marrying out of the faith
and
leaving her family in Andalucia to settle in England.

‘Oh my God!
You stopped a cricket ball, didn’t you?’ Sacha laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you volunteered to play. That would be so desperate.’

‘Of course I didn’t. I just happened to be standing in the line of fire.’

‘Ouch. Still, I hope you milked it for all it was worth. Damsel in distress and all that,’ she said, before draining the last of her Kir.

‘I’m not the simpering damsel type.’

‘Shame. Did you cry?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘And just when you needed to suss out the chivalrous men, I bet it was a woman who came to your aid, wasn’t it?’

She pounced on my hesitation like a cat on a bird. ‘Millie Carmichael.’ She clutched my wrist. ‘It was one of the men, wasn’t it? Oh, please tell me it was Mediterranean Man.’

I looked back into her expectant face and told her, as matter-of-factly as I could, what had happened. After describing the unique quality of his eyes and the way small dimples formed when he smiled, I noticed this huge grin spreading over her face, and it dawned on me that I might have gone a teensy bit too far.

‘Aha!’ She was exultant. ‘So it’s The Golden Smiler who floats your boat.’

‘Nooo!
He’s the only one I’ve spoken to, that’s all. I’m sure if Mediterranean Man had talked to me, I’d have just as much to tell you about him. And that other one in the crowd who I forgot to study. I mean, you said yourself he was handsome. And he was. Very handsome.’ Of course, I was back-pedalling like a clown on a unicycle and looking just as ridiculous.

Sacha was having none of it. ‘Millie – it’s so obvious. You have this really quirky meeting – like in the movies – he rushes over in concern, he
touches
you; that’s a big plus…’

‘For heaven’s sake, he was checking on my injury not feeling me up.’

She nodded her head, completely dismissing my explanation. ‘He smiles long enough for you to describe, in anatomical detail, his eyes and leaves you panting for more.’

‘I am not.’

‘You’ve gone all twitchy, Millie. If that’s not a dead give away, I don’t know what is.’

I stood up. ‘This is not how it’s supposed to go. I need to keep a cool head and stick to my plan. Next week, Marshalhampton are playing at Romwick, so I’ll be going over there to get more data and interact with some of the others.’ I headed off to the kitchenette in the corner, and took the duck out of the oven.

‘Well, I think you’re mad.’

‘And then I’ll have to go to Churchill.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a team I haven’t checked out yet. I can’t make any decisions till I’ve assimilated all the data.’ I began shredding meat off the bone.

Sacha came over and leaned against the counter. ‘You have a lot more self control than I do. Because if I really fancied the guy, I’d be camped out in that pub at Marshalhampton for the rest of the week, on the off-chance he might pop in for a beer.’

I stopped shredding for a moment and looked at her.

A smile broke over her face. ‘You like my idea, don’t you?’

I wondered if it would be such a bad thing – getting a head start on one of the contenders. So I shrugged. ‘Well, I wouldn’t go every night, but maybe we could pop in one evening for a bite to eat.’

Sacha clapped her hands. ‘Now you’re talking like a real woman – and not some professional marketeer with a pen up her arse.’

Moments later, as we sat on the floor by the coffee table, Sacha stopped smearing Hoi Sin sauce over her pancake, and fixed me with a troubled look. ‘This
photographic project you’re doing, how’s your hero going to feel when he finds out it’s all a huge scam? I mean, will he really want the mother of his children to be a con artist?’

Ouch!

This was, I confess, a topic I’d been skating around, myself. Throughout the planning process, the ‘man’ in question had been purely hypothetical. Now, there was a face…a number of faces. When The Chosen One and I reached the snugly, post-coital, pillow-talk stage I would, undoubtedly, confess all. ‘I prefer the term: creative strategist.’

She raised her eyebrows and looked momentarily preoccupied as she gathered up a generous pinch of spring onion. ‘So you’ll tell him, then? You’ll say, “I thought you’d make good marriage material so I stalked you.” Not got a very romantic ring, has it?’

‘And dating agencies have? Feeding your personal statistics into a website, so some computer program can match your data strings with somebody else’s?’

‘Will you go the whole hog – check criminal records, credit bureau, list of registered child abusers…?’

‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’

She held her arms out. ‘Millie, either you’re serious about this or you’re not. I know a couple of cute cops who might be happy to assist you with your inquiries.’ She winked.

‘Ha, ha, very funny.’

‘Well, I just hope Mr Right doesn’t come across that spreadsheet when he’s using your laptop to surf porn sites.’

‘Do you know what? I wish I’d never told you.’ I started herding chunks of crispy duck around the plate and then fixed her with a look. ‘Sach, I want to meet a really lovely man who will become my husband and a wonderful father. So, I’m prepared to put time and effort into doing some research. If he’s the kind of man I want him to be, he’ll be delighted I made the effort.’

‘But won’t the foundations of your relationship be based on a lie?’

With a slurp of Kir, I hit an oasis of mental clarity. ‘Actually, no, because it might be one of the traits he admires in a woman. He might want his children to grow up to be hugely successful. A passive wallflower is hardly going to breed the next Richard Branson or Stella McCartney, is she?’

Sacha shrugged. ‘Okay. But you’d better ask me to be bridesmaid or I’m not coming.’

I forced a smile. I needed to return to that positive mind-set I’d been cultivating so assiduously for the last couple of weeks. ‘That, my dear Sacha, will be up for discussion with my fiancé.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ she announced, knocking back the last of the Kir. Then she leaned across and threw her arms around me. ‘I know this is really big for you, Mills. And I’m so glad I’m going to be in there at the beginning. I promise you, I’m behind you all the way.’

‘Thanks.’

With a final squeeze, she smacked a noisy kiss on my cheek before demanding we treat ourselves to ice-cream with more of the Cassis.

‘Great,’ I agreed but couldn’t quite shake the idea I might go down in history as the biggest sexual deviant to come out of Europe since Lucrecia Borgia.

On Monday evening, I lay on my bed and imagined myself into the future, where the Royal Academy was holding a photographic exhibition entitled, Bowled Over. I saw myself in a figure-hugging cocktail dress, greeting my public with a cool flute of champagne. I imagined my adorable husband – Victor – standing proudly next to a ceiling-high shot of his face. I was being proclaimed the new Annie Liebowitz. Cameras flashed. And then my phone rang.

Mother.
‘Hi Mum,’ I said, dreamily.

‘Hola, chica,’ she said, echoes of Andalucia on her tongue. ‘And why have you not given your old madre a call?’

‘I only spoke to you last week.’

‘I remember.
Tuesday. Six days ago.’

There was a pointed silence. My brain whirred and finally screamed,
Shit
! It was Dad’s anniversary. ‘Oh no. I’m so sorry.’ How had I managed to forget? It had been three years and this was the first year when I hadn’t thought about him at 2.55pm, which is the time he’d died.

‘Probably best you get on with your own life. He wouldn’t have wanted you dwelling on his passing,’ she said and sniffed.

‘No, but I should have called you. I’m sorry. Have you heard from Trina and Tony?’

(That’s Trina – christened Katarina – my older sister, happily married to an accountant called Elliot, with twin five year olds, Amy and Lucy; and Tony – christened Antonio – my younger brother who married his childhood sweetheart, Emma, and has a baby called Moses. Was it any wonder I put myself under such pressure to find a mate?)

‘Oh, yes. Trina’s rushing about, making the twins their outfits for ballet. I don’t know how she keeps it up, working full-time and chasing after those two. And she’s talking about another baby. Tony popped round with Moses this morning. He’s grown, you know – and so full of personality.’

‘Ahh,’ I crooned, with a mental note-to-self to see the little guy more frequently.

Mum continued. ‘So, chica, are you any closer to finding me a handsome son-in-law, so that I might be bouncing your little niños on my knees before my arthritis gets too bad?’

‘Er…well…’

‘Dios mio!’ Her excitement crackled down the phone line. ‘Don’t tell me there’s good news?’

‘Hang on, Mum. I don’t want to build up my hopes or yours, but I
might
be on the verge of meeting someone really nice.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that there’s a definite possibility.’

‘Well, I’ll assume the poor man has no idea. Which probably means nothing will happen. Dear Lord, how I pray some fine man will come along and sweep you off your feet.’

She continued along that line of thought until I was able to extricate myself from the conversation. As I hung up, my eyes were drawn to a picture of Dad on my dressing table. We used to be like a double act; where as Tony was always mad for any kind of sport and Trina loved to cook and make things, Dad was a drama teacher, and we were both into music and theatre, joining the local am-dram-soc, camping it up with other thespians. He made a cracking dame in panto, gave Hampshire the best Higgins in My Fair Lady, and fostered in me a deep and abiding love of amateur theatre.

His legacy is Hamlets, and the project was my baby now. Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings were taken up with rehearsals. It could be pretty draining, since aside from theatrical stuff, I often ended up listening to all kinds of adolescent trauma and angst. Not that I minded. I remember how difficult it was to be a teenager. Even though I had an older sister to talk to, she was always too lofty, too goody-goody for my kind of traumas.

I love working with the kids. I guess I get that from Dad. He was, however, more easy-going than I am, hugely funny and always my biggest champion. And that was my challenge – finding a guy who’d be every bit as good a dad as he was. Why would I want to settle for anything less? Remembering how much I loved him – still do love him – brought a massive lump to my throat, and I didn’t fight it. After all, if you can’t have a good blub on your dad’s anniversary, when can you?

I wailed as I opened the wardrobe. Tucked away at the back, zipped into a suit cover, was an old thick woollen sweater of his. I pulled it out and buried my face in it, kidding myself there was still the faintest whiff of him on it; the soft fibres reminding me of cuddles I’d never have again. As the tears and hiccups threatened to overwhelm me, I pushed the sweater back into its cover, slid the zip closed and hunted for some tissues. I didn’t want to indulge my misery for too long, worried it might be upsetting Dad – if he was out there, hanging around on some spiritual plain and tapping into my emotions. I mean, there are times when I really think I feel him around me – usually when, out of the blue, I start singing
The Rain in Spain
or, occasionally, just before I wake up, I swear he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, grinning at me and telling me I’m still his Millie-minor.

Well, you never know, do you?

Sacha was seriously up for me pursuing The Golden Smiler. So, on Tuesday night, we headed off to Marshalhampton with the adolescent hope of seeing him. But the closer we got, the slower I seemed to be driving. I wasn’t sure it was such a great idea, especially with Sacha in tow, batting her eyelashes, flicking her blonde tresses and acting like my press agent.

As we pulled into the pub car-park, which was surprisingly empty, we saw the sign – CLOSED FOR REFURBISHMENT. I wavered between relief and disappointment.

‘Bollocks!’ snapped Sacha. ‘Is this the only pub round here?’

I shrugged and suggested we drive on to see if we might discover a second. We pulled onto the road and headed towards Romwick. Since our prime objective was scuppered, I found myself driving away from the pub faster than before. Maybe I wasn’t quite the go-getting-woman I’d thought I was.

The country roads began to wind and dip…only I hadn’t accounted for them winding and dipping quite as much as they did. Suddenly, I was face to face with a tractor and half my life was superimposed across the windscreen.

‘ShI-I-I-It-!’ we both cried, as I stamped on the brakes, bringing my little Fiat to a shuddering and miraculous halt beneath the nose of a John Deere. (I’m no connoisseur of agricultural machinery but its name was emblazoned on the grille and etched onto my retina.)

From that angle, I couldn’t see the driver but I had a feeling I was about to.

Sacha looked at me. Her cheeks were pale – as I dare say mine were. ‘That was close,’ she said and giggled at the understatement.

‘Should we get out?’ I asked, wiggling the gear lever with indecision.

I checked behind to see if there was a space to reverse into. There was a growl from the engine above us before it cut out. The driver’s cab door swung open.

I pulled a face at Sacha. Perhaps when he saw us, his sense of road rage might be replaced by good old-fashioned misogyny. I could cope with that.

There was a crunch as he jumped down onto the road. Instinctively, I locked the doors. As he came into view, Sacha whimpered. I looked at her reassuringly only to discover she was slack-jawed and wide-eyed with something approaching wonder. I turned to look at our potential assailant as Sacha murmured, ‘It’s Mediterranean Man.’