Here’s Looking At You

‘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.’

10

‘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 any more, 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.

Dear Anna,

I am sorry you didn’t feel our date had the required ‘spark.’ I enjoyed it very much. If you will allow me to give you some feedback in return, I think you may be more likely to discover this elusive ‘spark’ if you are more open in your attitude. I found it difficult to get you to enter into a real conversation and our topics rarely strayed from the superficial. In fact, I got the sense you found honesty positively intimidating. I require a little more confidence in my lovers. And in general, I am tired of women over thirty who claim to want to meet an available man, then play the game of ‘catch me if you can’ once they know he’s interested. This rigmarole is not for those of us not in the first flush of youth

However, having said this, I’d be prepared to try a second date if you persuade me it is worthwhile.

Best wishes,

Neil

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

Dear Neil,

I’m not playing any game, I’m simply saying no thanks to another date. Maybe you’d have had more luck if you didn’t make presumptuous and egotistical judgements like this about women you don’t know. Or make rude observations about their age. Or quiz them on their sexual preferences on the basis of a half hour acquaintance.

Best,

Anna

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.

11

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.

Anna’s mum made his native cuisine in trencherman portions as an apology to her father for not being in his sunny homeland, even though he had left under his own steam in 1973. And while he loved Tuscany and often complained about London, he never expressed any serious desire to return.

She extended the policy of indulgence to Anna and her sister, who managed to combine the most fattening elements of two cuisines. Cheese, pasta, ragus as nod to their Italian roots, Oompa Loompa orange chicken nuggets and oven chips in nod to their Barking surroundings. Plus Somerfield’s Neapolitan ice cream to notionally combine the two.

Anna was ten stone by the time she was ten years old.

Slimming was both mind-bendingly simple and psychologically complicated, all at once. Anna realised that seeing off a whole Marks and Spencer’s tiramisu in one sitting was not her reward for being exiled from the world of the normal-sized, it was what was keeping her there. She swapped the stodgy carbs for fish and salads, and began running, pounding the streets in flapping old tracksuit trousers.

And Anna joined WeightWatchers. She didn’t do it expecting results, she did it in the spirit of testing the hypothesis she was born to be hefty. If it didn’t work, she could cross ‘ever being slender’ off the Bucket List.

As she lost pounds, then stones, her former identity melted away and a strange thing happened. She discovered she was pretty. The possibility had never occurred to her and, she was fairly sure, anyone else.

Previously, her expressive dark eyes, neat nose and sardonically amused Cupid’s bow of a mouth had been completely lost in a pillowy face, like raisins and fruit peel in dough. But as her bones sharpened, indistinct features were revealed as the regular ones of the conventionally attractive.

‘Aureliana looks like an actress!’ trilled her aunty, on the first Boxing Day where Anna was not doing the ‘roast potato challenge’ with her Uncle Ted. For once in her life, when Anna pasted on a shaky smile, then ran away and cried, it was with happiness.

Initially, the wonders didn’t cease. Anna learned there was a whole secret world of coded glances and special treatment from the opposite sex that she never knew existed before. It was like joining the Masons, with arse-pinching in place of handshakes.

Even now, ten years on, when a student was sitting slightly too closely as she leafed through their work, or she got her coffee loyalty card peppered with stamps after one drink, she had to remind herself: they’re flirting with you.

Some larger people could never adjust to being smaller, kept picking up Brobdingnagian trousers and getting halfway to the till before they realised they weren’t the width of a doorway any more. Anna suffered the same perception shortfall. She couldn’t get used to being thought attractive. ‘Gorgeous and insecure, the chauvinist’s dream,’ Michelle said.

Having assumed she would only ever have the pick of serious young men of the kind she dated at Cambridge, with huge IQs, dour expressions and well-ironed shirts, suddenly, the doors to a kingdom of choice had swung open.

So who did she want? It turned out, she didn’t know.

At first, out of a sense of loyalty to her tribe and in some confusion, she dated the same kind of quiet, studious men as before, when she was bigger. These failed experiments had a pattern. At the start, she was worshipped like a goddess, as if they couldn’t believe their luck. Eventually, they decided they definitely didn’t believe it and the relationship collapsed, eroded by corrosive suspicion and buckling under the pressure of extreme possessiveness.

Anna had been completely committed to clever Joseph, her only long-term boyfriend to date, who understood jet propulsion but didn’t understand how it was possible for Anna to spend an evening out that wasn’t a hunt for his successor.

As for good-looking, confident men who sought a similar woman to be their matching bookend: Anna was too sardonic, too aware of their machinations to be suited as a partner. She bristled at any sense that it was beauty rather than her brain that had piqued their interest, and it manifested in prickly defensiveness.

And there were some negative consequences with women, too. There were rules of engagement when you were a ‘looker’ that she was very late to learning.

She didn’t recognise the signs of jealousy when they flared, and rush to douse them with buckets of self-deprecation. Or join in when females were enthusiastically listing their flaws, which had occasionally been taken to mean she didn’t think she had any. Anna had never needed to itemise her shortcomings, as it had always been done for her.

She never felt she fitted in, the same way she hadn’t before.

Anna was unusual, a one off, an awkward oddity, and thus finding what people blithely called their ‘other half’, someone who tessellated, seemed impossible.

It was no coincidence her best friends were Michelle and Daniel, two people for whom image meant little.

And as desperately as Anna didn’t want to be defined by those terrible younger years, she still felt much more like the girl who got called a hairy beast, than the woman who was wolf-whistled.

12

James knew the moment of reckoning would arrive eventually, and arrive it did, at 11 a.m., after Spandau Ballet’s greatest hits had left him feeling destitute.

‘Guys, just confirming we’re still on for the big night out for the company’s fifth birthday. I’ll email the itinerary soon,’ Harris said to the room. He was in his ironic t-shirt that said BOB MARLEY under an image of Jimi Hendrix and a pair of tartan drainpipes. ‘We all good?’

James had turned the options over already. He could play for time and simply say yes, he and Eva were still coming.

But the deposit was £100. He’d need a reason for Eva’s no-show. Something gastric, or a family crisis. James would be telling the kind of fibs that tie you in knots, bind your legs together and trip you over, face down onto a hard surface.

So far, failing to tell them he and Eva had split up was a lie of omission, navigating little semantic slalom courses when someone asked what he’d been up to at the weekend.

This would require active untruths – doctor’s appointments and non-transferable flights to Stockholm and remembering who’d done what, and to whom he’d told it. And when the truth of her absence was finally revealed, they’d work backwards and work it out. He could picture Harris, in one of his Playdoh-bright tank-tops, holding a hand up and saying: ‘OMFG, dudes. That was why she didn’t come to the five bash? I always thought the cancerous nephew was a crock of plop.’

The pity would be all the greater, mixed with derision. It was bad enough they had to know; James couldn’t bear them knowing he minded them knowing.

‘Uh. Actually, change my plus one. Eva and I have split up.’

Harris goggled at him. Ramona’s jaw dropped almost as far as her Tatty Devine MONA plastic nameplate necklace. A hush fell over the room, a hush punctuated by the squeak of half a dozen people turning in their chairs at once. Lexie, the pretty new copywriter, audibly gasped. Charlie, the only other married member of staff, who still dressed like he’d wandered off a skate park, mumbled a sorry mate.

‘Seriously?’ Ramona said, always ready with the wrong word.

No, she danced off in clown shoes squirting a custard gun.

‘Seriously.’

‘Why …?’

James mustered every last scrap of nonchalance he didn’t possess.

‘Wasn’t working out. It’s pretty friendly, it’s fine.’

He sensed Ramona’s desperation to ask who-dumped-who, but even her level of crass shrank from it. For now.

‘OK … well, I’ll put you down for one place then?’ Harris said.

James wrestled with the stigma of divorcing loser. Wrestled with it for only seconds.

‘Actually I was going to bring someone else. If that’s OK?’

Ramona’s jaw clunked open again.

‘Someone …? There’s someone new already? Oh. Is that why …’

James felt totally, completely justified in having not told them the truth. This was agony.

‘It didn’t help,’ he said, in a brusque, heartbreaker manner.

James turned back to his screen and congratulated himself on a job done, if not a job well done. He’d take plenty of time getting his lunchtime sandwich so that the analysis would be done by the time he returned.

So all he needed now for the birthday party was a one-night-hire-only girlfriend. Sounded like the kind of thing Laurence could help with.

13

‘Welcome to Sleeping Beauty. I am Sue and I can make your fairytale dreams come true!’ the boutique owner chirruped, which Anna thought was a fairly mental claim. Wasn’t Sleeping Beauty in a persistent vegetative state for a century?

Sue looked like a backbench MP in a skirt suit and pearls and Anna guessed her sales techniques would be brisk, despite all the wispy pouffiness around them.

Aggy and their mother’s eyes shone at her words, and Anna knew she was a lone cynic in the realm of true believers. It was an enchanted grotto for those who wanted to walk down the aisle looking like a Best Actress Oscar nominee.

The salon was softly lit by peachy bulbs. It had a deep, spotless cream shag pile and lavender wallpaper with a dragonfly print, and rococo oval dressing-room mirrors – the sort wicked queens consulted.

The air was heavy with a sweet freesia scent, like some kind of sedative love gas. Michael Bublé crooned from hidden speakers, no doubt using subliminal hypnosis techniques.

Promise me your heart, give me your hand … and the long number on the front … now the expiry date, yeah baby.

There were racks of giant gowns, stiff and sticky-outy with net and bustles and laced corsets and an ‘aristocrat before the French Revolution’ attitude to making a bit of a show of yourself.

Sleeping Beauty could have been called Go Big Or Go Home. It was one big Pavlovian memory-trigger to Disney fantasies, in a world where the magic wand tap was the swipe of the Visa card.

Brides-to-be disappeared into a changing room through a crystal beaded curtain, to reappear transformed. Anna tried to imagine uttering the words ‘something simple’ in here, and failed.

‘You must be my bride,’ Sue said to Aggy. ‘I can tell you’re going to suit everything. Some fresh-faced young women simply make natural brides. And a sample size ten; the world’s your oyster when it comes to choosing a style.’

Anna itched to say: ‘What happens to the old broiler chickens then? Do you not flog them stuff?’

Aggy near-gurgled at the flattery. Physically, Aggy was a more angular, shorter version of her sister, but what she lacked in height and width she made up for in noise.

Aggy worked in PR, specialising in event management, and she was superbly suited to the job. She’d been organising things to her liking since she was very small, and her wheedle power was second to none. You wouldn’t mistake Aggy for an academic: today she was in a puffa coat, high-heeled boots and carrying a Mulberry Alexa. She lived life in caps lock. GETTING MARRIED LOL!

There were two years between the sisters, and in some ways, a chasm of difference.

‘This must be the beautiful mother of the beautiful bride,’ Sue said, speaking to their mum as if she was serving her a soft-boiled egg in an assisted living facility. ‘And this is the gorgeous sister and chief bridesmaid.’

‘Judy’ and ‘Anna’, they said in turn, as Sue clasped their hands and gazed at them with expression set to ‘purest bliss’.