Twenty Something (16 page)

‘No, but I have got us tickets for Wimbledon tomorrow.'

The perfect day at Wimbledon. The sun shone and Daddy paid for the strawberries. Watched a bevy of gorgeous Russian
teenagers up close on the outer courts before taking our centre court seats to watch a Brit lose the first two sets to a wild-card entry from Slovenia and then overcome him 12—10 in the fifth. My retired dad with his unemployed son. We can spend all the time we like together now.

‘I meant to ask you,' said Daddy on the way home. ‘How's your search for a purpose going?'

‘Pretty badly really. Tried pure hedonism. It doesn't work. As soon as I get drunk, all I want is a girl to share the moment with.'

‘And how are the girls?'

‘Equally bad. I'm fine at expressing my emotions with people I don't care about. But rubbish when it comes to someone I actually like.'

‘What about that Leila girl you mentioned?'

‘Messed up completely.'

‘And other girls? Are you dating?'

‘Don't you start, too.'

‘And career plans?'

‘Hmmm, nonexistent.'

‘And Rick and Lucy?'

‘Together.'

We look at each other.

‘Poor bloke,' we say simultaneously. We collapse into laughter.

‘Yes, don't tell your mother, but I was never a great fan.'

‘Fortunately, Rick's got the patience of a saint, innit.'

We laugh again and sit in happy silence for a while.

‘Daddy, you know how you once said I could ask you anything?'

‘Yes, although I don't like the sound of this.'

‘Er, do you still have, er, ink in your pen? Does the twitch subside as you get older? Are you still shackled to a mad beast? Does it become clear who's right for you and who isn't?'

‘Chin up, Jack. Give it time. You'll be fine.'

‘You haven't answered my question.'

‘I'm aware of that, Jack,' he says, with a twinkle in his eye.

Midsummer's Day and I've resolved to start playing the dating game. Rick has Lucy, Leila might or might not have an accountant, Flatmate Fred's got a Jasper sandwich and all I've had or almost had recently is a sixteen-year-old whose mum fancied me.

This is a crap situation and it's got to change. But how the hell do you go about dating in London?

There was a time when finding a girl was easy. In your youth you played doctors and nurses. In your teens you turned up to a sleepover with a large enough sleeping bag and waited for the alcopops to transform you into a charming Casanova. By university you had your own room, and the size of student beds made intercourse inevitable, if not always accomplished. And, just as you'd blown your chances with one year group, a brand new team of replacements would arrive in September. You may get older every year, but eighteen-year-old freshers are always the same age.

And then suddenly you're in your mid-twenties, and you enter the Wasteland. When I left university I had Lucy. When I left Lucy, Leila preoccupied my thoughts. And now I have no one.

I really need a date. Perhaps one of them will turn into a girlfriend and we can work out our purpose in life together.

‘Fred, have you got any attractive friends?'

‘Shut up.'

I'm going to ring Claire (doctors 'n' nurses).

Claire's house party. Got three numbers. Result.

I hate asking for people's numbers. To the first one (Lizzy) I offered a lame excuse about wanting to help her get a job in
banking. The second (Sarah) I stole off Claire's mobile because I was too scared to ask myself. And with the third (Jean) I embarked on such a pathetic Hugh Grant detour — ‘Er, Jean, yes, I just wanted to say, really, that, er, I mean, that, well, I enjoyed meeting you and' — that she interrupted and grabbed my phone off me.

‘Look, do you want my bloody number or not? You've already got two others, so you might as well have mine, too.'

Direct. I like it.

There was also someone there called Miranda who refused my request point blank.

‘There's no point, is there? You'll just wait three days and then send me a witty little text. I'll wait another day before I reply. Then we'll meet up, spend
£
30 on crap food and I'll fancy you no more then than I do now, which is not at all. So let's just leave it, shall we?'

Very direct. I preferred Jean's answer.

Rick's twin Katie was there too, but I'm still in her bad books for not getting back to her. First Kiss and First Shag were also hovering, but I'm in their bad books as well for not seeing them for ages. Why are women so bloody political? They've made no effort to see me for ages, either.

Never mind. Three lost, three gained. It's a score draw.

I'm beginning to tire of my listlessly lethargic Lothario lifestyle. When you're in a proper job you cram a huge amount into your spare time. When you're lazing around at home you can make a trip to the supermarket take up the entire day. Your free time isn't free time any more. It just becomes a new routine. I actually miss the structure.

It's almost the end of the month and I appear to have done next to nothing with my time.

In fact, it's been a month of almosts. I almost died of
testicular cancer, but didn't. I almost completed the Circle Line, but couldn't. Almost gave up alcohol, but didn't. Almost told Leila how I felt, but backed out. Almost started dating. Almost pulled a schoolgirl. And got absolutely nowhere close whatsoever to working out what my purpose in life is.

Perhaps I should get a useful job — join the big debates over society's future. Perhaps I should start reading the newspapers properly and see what's going on in the big wide world beyond my piss-boring, selfish little existence.

Perhaps.

Right, I'm going to text Lizzy, Sarah and Jean. It's been two and a half days. Perfect timing, even if I say so myself. After one day they're just beginning to regret giving their number out. If you text then, they'll think you're a desperate loser. After two days the fear is just setting in that you might never get in touch. The trick is for your text to arrive just as they're beginning to analyse what they did wrong to put you off. You have to lift their mood just as it's starting to sag. Wait any longer and you've lost them.

This was my text: ‘Hey [
insert Christian name here
], really good to meet you at Claire's. Wld be fun to have a drink some time if you're not too busy. I hear Sunday night is the new black Jack x'.

For simplicity's sake I sent the same text to all three of them and tried to ignore my phone for the rest of the day. I had to restrain myself from texting again five minutes later, saying, ‘Look, are you coming or not? Put me out of my agony.'

I hate the in-between bit. It's like finishing an exam and waiting two months for the result.

Still no reply from any of them. I detest modern technology. It makes you compulsively check everything — email, voicemail,
text messages. When someone contacts you, you're disproportionately delighted. And when no one does, you're a picture of abject misery. It must have been so much easier when your messages had to trot across country-wide staging posts and not zing through satellites.

Beep, beep.

Aha, this will be one of the cheeky little maidens now. I wonder which one.

It was Rick. ‘M8, nt sure how to say this, but me and Lucy r getting mrrd, innit. We'd luv u to b bst mn. Rick.'

I've just noticed that the last three months of my life have all ended in emotional cliff-hangers. At the end of April, Lucy announced that she was pregnant. At the end of May, I discovered that Rick and Lucy were an item. And now, at the end of June, I discover that Rick and Lucy are so much of an item that they're planning to get married.

I have to hand it to the two of them: they've got a unique sense of dramatic timing.

Although the content of Rick's text yesterday was understandably surprising, the tone was familiar enough. If Rick wanted to tell his best mate that he was planning on marrying his ex-girlfriend, it would strike him as only natural to use an illiterate text full of ‘innits' and smiley faces. In fact, ‘innit' was just about the only thing he'd spelled out in full. I mean, what kind of word does he think ‘M8' is? And ‘luv'? Where's the love in that? With predictive text messaging there's really no excuse for these horrors. ‘Cu', ‘wld' and ‘cld' are just about OK. Anything else is right out.

But I digress. I wanted to shoot the messenger, not the message. So I rang up to ask for an explanation.

‘Ah, Jack. Glad you called. Was worried when you didn't get back to me yesterday. Are you happy to be best man?'

‘Delighted, Rick. Ecstatic, overjoyed, elated, jubilant and euphoric. I am over the moon and strumming a harp on cloud nine.'

‘Wow, I wasn't expecting you to be that happy about it.'

‘I'm not. I'm markedly unhappy about it. Isn't it just a little
bit hasty, a wee bit precipitous, a fraction rushed? What else have you done since I last saw you apart from get engaged? Gone to Mars, sold a multi-million-pound start-up, found a cure for AIDS?'

Silence.

‘OK, perhaps you wouldn't mind explaining how it happened?'

‘Well, it was Lucy's dad's idea, really.'

‘Ah, Mr Poett. How romantic. Why don't you marry him instead?'

‘Would you shut up a moment. While you were out fiddling with jail bait a couple of Fridays ago, Lucy went home and told her dad that she was four months pregnant. He hit the roof. Assumed it was you. Wanted to sort you out good and proper.'

‘Rick, Mr Poett's a stockbroker, not the godfather.'

‘Anyway, the point is that Mr Poett was livid.'

‘And what — when Lucy told him that the father of his grandchild was you and not me, he calmed down and said, “I have not lost a daughter, I will gain a son”?'

‘Er, pretty much, yeah. You know what these stuffy upper-middle-class parents are like.'

‘Rick, your dad's a QC.'

‘Yeah, well anyway. Her dad says that Lucy has his blessing, on condition that she marries me immediately.'

Blimey, not so much a shotgun wedding as a scattergun wedding.

‘And you want to marry her?'

‘Yep.'

‘Do you love her?'

‘Yep.'

‘You love her so much that you've stopped saying “izzit” and “innit” every second sentence?'

‘Yep, it drove her crazy, innit.'

‘Well, that is true love, then.'

‘It's a small sacrifice to make. So, come on, are you going to be my best man?'

‘Dunno. I need time to think, OK?'

On reflection, Mr Poett's attitude makes me very angry indeed. I've got half a mind to get hideously drunk and tell him to fuck off again over the phone.

I mean, who does he think he is? Some kind of latter-day Mrs Bennett ordering his errant daughter down the aisle? He is a relic of the dark ages, a snob of the worst kind who can't face the realities of the modern era. Single mothers are everywhere. What does it matter whether Lucy Poett becomes Lucy Fielding and starts wearing a wedding ring? There's no more chance of her and Rick staying together just because she changes her surname and has a couple of extra wedding-gift fish knives from distant relatives.

It's no longer social death to be born out of wedlock. Bastards are people like Mr Cox, who treat their employees like dirt. Bastards are people like Buddy Wilton-Steer, who badmouth their ex-girlfriends. Bastards are fathers like Mr Poett, who try to pressurise their daughters into socially acceptable arrangements that won't get the neighbours talking. Bastards are hypocritical fools like Rick, who go along with it. Bastards are not children who are brought into this world by two parents who were too wise to make a spur-of-the-moment lifelong commitment.

Their child isn't going to thank them for a marriage of convenience a couple of months before it's born. It's the fact they're having the baby that is important. Not the marriage. Why can't they just concentrate on that? Babies can't be unborn.

It's none of my business, but I really need to talk to Lucy about this.

‘It's none of your business, Jack.'

‘Look, please, Lucy. I'm not trying to get in the way; I'm just trying to help. For old times' sake. Please can we talk about all this?'

‘OK, let's meet up next weekend.'

‘Not sooner?'

‘No, next weekend.'

Bint. She always did get her own way.

I'd just put my mobile down when it beeped and two texts arrived. One from Lizzy, another from Sarah.
Result
, I thought.

Actual context of texts was less of a result. They were identical. They read like this:

‘Thanks for texting us both. Sunday is indeed the new black, the new rock 'n' roll Which is why I have no intention of spending it with you. It's not me; it's you.'

Oh dear, I really am a tit. Perhaps I should have realised that sending identical texts to two friends was a stupid error.

Anyway, you lose some, you lose some humiliatingly. To be honest, they were both last-window girls. There's still Jean.

‘Fred, you know how when girls live together in close proximity, their periods start synchronising?'

‘Yes, I'm aware of that.'

‘What do you reckon the male equivalent is? Do you and I get elated and depressed at similar times? Do we get sudden urges to go on CD shopping sprees and gorge on curry and beer? Do we go on and off sex at the same time?'