‘Eh?’ I said, trying hard not to stare at it.
‘I’m not saying I was small or owt, but it was never that big.’
From my side of the room, I raised my hand, held it up in that area so Ed’s lower half would be hidden and I wouldn’t be tempted to gawp at it.
‘How long have you been like this?’
‘All day. I was pleased at first, I kind of hoped I’d be up to the challenge. I mean, I’m nothing. I’m not as good-looking or funny or famous as her other fellas. I don’t know, I just . . .’
‘Hoped, prayed, wished you could be better in one way,’ I cut in. ‘Just one way, you want to outshine the competition. You can’t change your looks, you can’t change your bank balance and it’ll take her a while to get to know your true personality. But in one way, just one way you want to stand out. Be superior, be worthy.
‘This is, this was, your one chance with someone you’ve wanted, yearned for, for months. This person is number one. You never thought this day would come and now it has come, you’re terrified that you won’t live up to the challenge. That now your dream’s come true, it’s all going to go wrong because of you. Not cos she’s a cow, but because of you. You not being good enough.’
I suppose you could say I had some vague idea of how Ed felt. That deep yearning, that not good enough feeling, that wondering ‘when will it be my turn to get the big prize?’ Self-help book, smelf-help book, when you never got the boy – or girl – you didn’t feel good about yourself. Your positivity was eroded, you seized on every little sniff of romance as THE NEXT BIG THING.
‘That’s all very well, but what the hell am I going to do?’ Ed wailed.
I shifted my hand a fraction, peeked at what should have been his very big pride. The first – and last – time I saw a male member nearly as big had been attached to Mr Perfect Penis and I’d initially been disturbed by its size. When I got to know it, it’d been all right. But I’d been overcome with lust for him from the instant I saw him. It remained to be seen if Robyn even liked Ed; if he went out on a date like that, she’d think he was disgusting. She’d leave before he even got to the restaurant, let alone offered to pay for dinner.
‘There’s only one thing you can do, mate,’ I said.
chapter twenty-three
The Love CV
‘You told him to what?’ Jess said, when I told her the sketchiest details of Ed’s predicament.
We were back in the Black Bull. So much for her not drinking with me again. Although, technically, she wasn’t drinking with me again in that respect. We were about to go shopping in Morrison’s, Horsforth, so we’d done our usual and gone for a fortifying drink down the road beforehand. We used to go shopping every Wednesday night when I lived up in Cookridge years ago. After Star Trek: Next Generation, she’d drive round, pick me up, we’d shop then go back to our lives. We’d slipped back into that routine, but this time on Tuesday, after Star Trek: Voyager.
‘Well, it was either that or cancel the date. And, short of maiming himself and being rushed to casualty – which I’m not sure would’ve convinced her anyway – he couldn’t cancel. Not if he wanted another date with her. It’d taken the poor lad months to work up the courage to ask her out in the first place. Which, I suspect, was why he was in that state.’
‘But still . . .’
‘What would you have got him to do, Dr Breakfield?’
Jess shrugged. ‘Cover it up.’
‘I kid you not, it was huge. Not being funny, right, but I’ve only ever seen one penis that large and, to be honest, it wasn’t as big as Ed’s was and I was a little scared of that one. Every other part of Ed’s trousers were baggy on him, but it was like a huge pole, straining there. I can’t get the image of it out of my mind. And I don’t want to think like that about Ed. Not ever. Anyway, if I’d told him to cover it up, he’d have had to hide behind a large AA Road Map for the rest of his life.’
‘Did your plan work?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ I sipped from my pint of beer Jess had bought me. ‘But I haven’t seen him since that night. Neither has Jake.’
Jess stopped. She’d leant forwards to scrunch out her cigarette in the ashtray but stopped and looked at me. ‘You’re joking! Tell me you’re joking.’
I shook my head. ‘Jake said that he got a message on his mobile from Ed and it was just hysterical laughter.’
‘NO!’
‘Oh yes. And that’s not all. When Jake called him back, Ed just mumbled “bliss” and hung up.’
Jess put out her cigarette and shook her head incredulously. She turned to me, shook her head some more. ‘Let me get this straight. You advise someone to tell a woman he’s got the hots for her so desperately that he’s perma-erect and it works? She actually buys it?’
I pushed the ashtray closer to her. ‘There was more to it than that,’ I replied. ‘I told him to tell her the truth. To explain how much he liked her, why he liked her, because it was more than her looks. The guy genuinely adores her. So he told her. Not the “I adore you” bit. More the reasons he likes her, for example, he remembers exactly what she was wearing when they first met, he listens when she speaks, he gets excited every time she even looks at him. He often wants to tell her something because he knows she’ll appreciate it. So he told her. And he also told her how inadequate he feels compared to her other boyfriends. How he was terrified that he’d screw up on this date and he’d not get another chance. And how his perceived inadequacies had worked like Viagra. I’m assuming it worked.
‘With an ego the size of hers, I’d have been more surprised if it hadn’t worked.’
Jess nodded slowly, her face deep in thought. She leant forwards and took a cigarette from the packet that lay between us, her arm slung across her stomach.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Ceri, but it occurs to me that you live everyone else’s life with the volume turned right up, but your own life is pretty barren.’
‘Barren?’ I said.
‘Don’t get that pet lip with me, Ceresis D’Altroy.’ Now she was using my full name. What was she going to do next, slash my throat with a broken bottle? ‘I said not to take it the wrong way.’
‘What way is there to take it?’
‘What I mean is, you can do almost anything with someone else’s love life but yours, well, you think you’re going to end up with Angel.’
‘I can’t help it if all the men I meet turn out to be freaks.’
‘What about Vincent? He sounded nice enough.’
‘Yes, and he could only have sex if Inspector Morse was playing in the background. He couldn’t even get it up if it wasn’t on.’
Jess’s face double-took into true disgust.
‘I don’t tell you everything, you see. I do try to protect you from the horrors of my love life.’
‘What about, erm, what was his name, Luke?’
‘Forgot to mention his girlfriend was eight months pregnant.’
‘Adam?’
‘His ex-wife cheated on him so all women, particularly his girlfriends, are devil’s spawn. Of course, then there was the time some guy smiled at me and he almost beat him up.’
‘Paul? I met Paul, he was lovely.’
‘Yes, when I saw him, he was lovely. But he kept disappearing for weeks after we’d seen each other. When I called it a day, he started sending me pornographic emails telling me how much he wanted to F star star K me.’
‘What about the, erm, television producer?’
‘Was getting married and I was his last fling. I found out when I opened the local paper and there he was with his bride.’
‘The graphic designer?’ Jess’s voice was waning.
‘Some bloke pushed him in the street, so he went out the next day with a knife in his jacket in the hope he’d see the bloke again and stab him.’
‘The other graphic designer?’
Jess braced herself to hear about this one.
‘Erm, let’s see, his best male friend turned up one night,
to join us in bed. And he was really “upset” when I said no, got dressed and left.’
‘The guy working on his novel?’
‘He stopped calling me after three dates. You can go through the whole list of men and at the end of it, you’ll find they all have one thing in common: they are all freaks. I don’t do it on purpose. I don’t go out looking for them. But they seem to have this ability to track me down. Hunt me out of the crowd, as it were, like I’m a wounded animal.’
‘Doesn’t that worry you?’
‘Yeah! These are the thoughts that keep me awake at night. I’m convinced I’m going to spend the rest of my life alone or dating freaks. I don’t know what it is, but I can pick a nutter at thirty paces. And I’m scared I’m going to keep doing that for the rest of my life. The closest I’ve got to a relationship was with N— Whashisface Tosspot, and look how that turned out.’ (It turned out with me sneaking around for months buying a flat without telling him so he couldn’t stop me with his line in emotional blackmail (aka Jedi Mind Trick/Work Of The Devil). He was a man about it, though: when I told him I was moving and started packing, he didn’t say anything. At all. Or try to stop me. It had nothing to do with my brothers being with me, I’m sure.)
‘What about that thing with you and Drew?’ Jessica asked, looking in her cigarette packet and finding it empty. She tossed it back on the table.
‘Drew has a girlfriend, remember?’
‘Yes, I remember. But he was always so keen on you, why weren’t you interested?’
I almost choked on my beer. ‘Me, not interested? I think you’ll find it was the other way around.’
‘No,’ Jess said, thoughtfully, ‘the way he used to look at you . . . I remember in lectures I’d always catch him staring at you. Even when you’d both finished college, I remember at parties he’d be all over you. Or would look so jealous if he saw you talking to another man. It was . . . I reckon you were his reserve option.’
‘His what?’ I said, eyeing my best friend. I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. Actually, I didn’t like this conversation at all. I didn’t need to be reminded that my love life was, as she said, ‘barren’.
‘I think he thought of you as the woman he’d end up with if something better didn’t come along.’
My head creaked round to face Jess full on. ‘Excuse me! Who are you? Because I’m sure my best friend isn’t allowed to say such things to me.’
‘God, Ceresis, you’re being really touchy today.’
She was doing it again – calling me by my bloody full name.
‘Touchy?’ I stated. ‘You’ve just said that I wasn’t important enough for Drew to fall in love with unless he had no other options. And you’ve just called me Ceresis twice. Why would-n’t I be touchy?’
‘No sweetie—’
‘Don’t you “sweetie” me, Dr Jessica Breakfield,’ I cut in.
‘So you’d prefer Ceresis?’ she replied.
I gritted my teeth and bared them at her.
‘OK, sweetie, what I’m saying is, there’s something about you. Makes men think that they can be . . . I don’t know. Whashisface Tosspot did it, he sucked the vitality out of you so he could get a personality. By the time you and he ended, he was a different person. He didn’t speak in that ridiculous way and he actually had conversational skills. He’d even stopped tucking his jumpers into his jeans, if what you told me was true. As a result, he ended up getting married less than a year after you got away from him. Drew used you as some kind of surrogate girlfriend, always coming back to you when things were going wrong, his safety net for not getting disheartened when another one of his relationships went pear-shaped. He kept coming back to you until he met his current girlfriend . . . there’s something about you.’
A chill went through me and what Drew said to me the other day came to mind. ‘You were like my lucky charm. I could-n’t get a girl to look twice at me when I went clubbing without you, but with you, I was like the most popular man on earth,’ his voice said in my head.
‘Loads of women get treated badly by men,’ I said to Jess, trying to dislodge that thought from my head. This was all going down the ‘you make me do things’ route. A particular route I wasn’t keen to venture down right now. Or ever again, for that matter.
Jess nodded. ‘True. But you’re different. Have you ever been in love, Ceri?’
I didn’t have to think about that question. Not at all. Have I ever been in lust – absolutely (Mr PP, prime example); have I ever been in deep like – yup (man I usually called ‘Love Of My Life’, who left me for someone else); have I ever been in stupidity – damn right (Whashisface Tosspot, take a bow). But love? It was odd when I thought about it. When I really thought about it. I was, the coming summer, about to start the fourth decade of my life and yet, I hadn’t experienced romantic love. I hadn’t said it to someone and meant ‘I love you and I’m in love with you’. Well, no one who wasn’t Angel, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc. I’d never looked at someone in front of me and thought, ‘I love you. I can’t live without you’ and knew he felt the same way.
I’d been through the whole spectrum of emotions in my life, anger, lust, hate, rage, joy, happiness, indifference, anticipation, but I’d constantly skipped over the segment where romantic love lay. Jess was right, my heart was barren. It’d never been toiled over and planted and weeded and watered by someone else. It’d never been loved, like other people’s hearts had been loved. If I told people that I’d never been out with anyone, they’d immediately bring up the man I lived with. Not knowing, not understanding that I’d shared a flat with him. I had my own bedroom. That everyone around us, particularly his family and his friends, thought I was his flatmate – and the woman he sometimes shagged – and because of that, I was never invited to weddings or christenings or family parties. And people who thought I’d lived with someone never knew that the one time he ever said ‘I love you’, he’d immediately taken it back by adding, ‘You do realise I mean I love you as I love all my other friends, don’t you?’ If I told people I hadn’t been out with anyone, they didn’t realise I meant, I hadn’t ever been with anyone long enough for the L word to come up.
So, no, I didn’t need to think about whether I’d been in love before.
‘Not with anyone who’s loved me back,’ I replied to Jess. ‘None of my relationships last long enough for me to fall in love and have them fall in love with me.’
‘That’s really shit, Ceri,’ Jess said. Her voice sounded how I often felt when it came to the subject of my love life, defeated. Others may whine about their troubles with men, but I’ll bet every one of them had some good relationship years to show for it. They’d experienced that mythical state known as ‘In Love’. I had . . . Whashisface Tosspot. And if there was ever a man you didn’t need on your love CV, it was him. For him to be the best you can do, well I wouldn’t employ me as a partner if he was the best reference I had.
‘I know,’ I said to Jess, agreeing with her my love life was indeed shit.
‘But at least we’ve got chocolate and beer,’ she said, her voice rallying suddenly Trying to drag us out of the bog that was my love life.
‘True,’ I agreed.
‘So, let’s get going to Morrison’s and not leave until we get some of that.’
‘God, Jess, you’re going to be fifty,’ I said, wondrously.
It was one of those moments where I said what was on my mind. I’d looked over Jess, tall, slender, waves and waves of auburn hair and hardly a wrinkle in sight – despite those propagated theories on smoking and skin. She looked about thirty-two, thirty-three at the most, not closer to fifty. Fifty. My best mate was going to be fifty when I hadn’t even cleared my thirties. Which was why I said it.
Jess froze as she put mushrooms in a plastic bag. ‘Thanks a lot Ceri,’ she said incredulously.
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said.
‘Oh, and how did you mean it?’
‘That you don’t look th
at old.’
Jess’s eyes widened.
‘No, no, no, no, that came out wrong, too.’
‘Hmmm,’ Jess replied, twisting her face to show how unimpressed she was.
‘It was a compliment,’ I floundered. ‘Honest.’
‘Hmmm,’ Jess replied.
‘I suppose I’ll go get the peppers,’ I said, waving around the plastic bag in my hand. I turned on my heels and headed towards the capsicum section of Morrison’s.
‘You’re going be fifty too one day,’ Jess said as I walked away.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t saying you would and I wouldn’t.’
‘If you’re lucky,’ she hissed.
Jess, who was generally laid-back about most things was probably cross with me now. I really hadn’t meant it like that. Even though she’d not an hour ago told me my life was barren, reminded me I’d never been in love and called me Ceresis (twice), I hadn’t meant to upset her. To curry favour, I wandered past the peppers and round to the next aisle, I’d get her a frozen pizza, then jazz it up with vegetables and make fresh garlic bread. Then she’d forgive me. The route to Jess’s forgiveness centre was, like mine, through her stomach.
I turned the corner, to the next aisle. And there he was. About to lean in to grab a frozen pizza. My heart skipped a beat.
Staring Man.
Instinctively I jumped back out of sight. My heart galloping in my chest. I pegged it back to the produce aisle.
‘Jess, Jess,’ I hissed loudly.
‘What?’ she replied, still in a strop.
I beckoned rapidly to her. ‘Quick, quick, come here.’
She glowered at me for a second.
‘QUICK!’ I hurried.
She came wandering over. I grabbed her arm, dragged her to the corner. I stuck my head around the corner; she did the same.
‘There he is,’ I said.
‘Who?’ she asked, even though he was the only one down that aisle.
I pointed. ‘Him!’
‘Who is he?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but he hates me.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’