All the Single Ladies (18 page)

They smile at me demonically as if to say, ‘Of course we’re serious!’

‘You honestly think I’m going to put my picture on this bloody thing and announce to the world that I’m shopping for another bloke?’

‘Oh it’s not like that,’ Ellie says dismissively. ‘Everyone does it this way these days.’

‘Everyone? So why aren’t you, Jen?’ I ask defiantly.

‘She’s attached. She’s got her waiter,’ Ellie reminds me.

‘I haven’t any more,’ Jen confesses.

‘Oh. Sorry, Jen,’ I say. ‘When did this happen?’

‘Yesterday,’ she replies, looking surprisingly un-depressed. ‘At least I know what went wrong with this one.’

‘Too much texting?’ suggests Ellie.

‘Actually,’ she says proudly, ‘I dumped him.’

This is a first.

‘He wanted to do webcam sex. And phone sex. And every type of sex except real sex,’ Jen tells us. ‘And while I’ve got nothing against it in principle . . . I mean, if I
was married to a man who worked on an oil rig or something . . . well, I’d get that.’

‘But?’ asks Ellie.

‘He lived five minutes away. Plus, I’d only known him three weeks, which begged the question of what he’d want to do after three months.’ She takes a deep breath.
‘Worse than that, though . . . I was no good at it, especially the phone stuff.’

‘Really?’ I frown.

‘I couldn’t stop giggling. And squirming. And –’ she shrugs – ‘I guess I’m not a throbbing-cocks and hungry-pussy sort of girl.’

There isn’t a great deal you can say to that.

‘You get seven times more interest if you put a picture on this,’ Ellie announces, drawing us back to the website. ‘So you’re going to get nowhere without one.’

‘You say that as if I want to get somewhere,’ I point out.

Ellie tuts and closes down the site. ‘Fine! I’m trying to help you, Sam. I’m starting to think you don’t want to help yourself.’

A silence lingers.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ I reply sheepishly. ‘I know you’re trying to help. And while I get the idea of finding a boyfriend, at least a pretend one, I feel uncomfortable
doing it this way. On webuyanydate.com. It’s so embarrassing.’

Ellie scrunches up her nose.

‘I know loads of people do it these days,’ I continue, preempting her response. ‘I know that someone in your accounts department is getting married to someone they met online,
and that my second cousin Sarah shagged a bloke who looked like Ashton Kutcher on a dating website.’

‘Really? I wonder if he’s still on there,’ muses Jen.

‘Then what’s the problem?’ adds Ellie. ‘Besides, have you really got time to wait around for it to happen the old-fashioned way? It’s only a few months until
Jamie’s going to be flying off into the sunset. You need to get your skates on.’

‘I’ll do it if you will,’ Jen says, nudging me.

I look up. ‘Really?’

‘It’s not as if I’ve got anything to lose. Neither, by the way, have you.’

We spend the next hour and a half perfecting our ‘profiles’, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. I don’t know why, but trying to sum myself up in less than seven paragraphs
proves impossible because: A, it’s cringe-worthy, and B (and this is really sad), I’ve spent so long defining myself as one half of a couple, I struggle to define just me.

So Ellie writes mine for me. But that involves fifteen rewrites and several major amendments by me – including the removal of any reference to my bra size – before we end up with a
version close to acceptable.

‘“I’m happy, sociable, ambitious, optimistic and easy to get along with”,’ Ellie reads out loud. ‘“I love my job but value my leisure time too. I am
looking for a man who is loyal, well-travelled and with a good sense of humour.”’

‘Am I looking for those things?’ I ask.

‘Course,’ she replies. ‘Besides, everyone thinks they’re loyal, well-travelled – even if the furthest they’ve been is Devon – and have a good sense of
humour. You should get plenty of takers.’

She returns to the keyboard. ‘“I do a huge amount of charity work in my spare time” . . .’

I frown. ‘But I don’t. I don’t have enough spare time. I’d like to do charity work—’

‘Sam,’ interrupts Ellie. ‘You have taken it upon yourself to help more children in Africa than the United Nations has done. You’ve got so many good causes on your
Facebook profile I’m surprised the thing hasn’t crashed. You can’t emerge from the supermarket unless you’re plastered in collection-box stickers for everything from
Macmillan nurses to the Cats’ Rescue Society.’

‘Actually, I don’t do cats.’

‘What’s wrong with cats?’ asks Jen indignantly. She has two.

‘Nothing. But there’s a whole world of people out there. I’ve got to prioritize.’

‘You put some cash in an RSPCA collection box two weeks ago,’ Ellie says accusingly.

‘Look,’ I huff. ‘The point I’m making is that none of this is charity work. This is giving away my loose change. They aren’t big donations.’

‘They are when you add them up,’ Ellie insists. ‘Right, final sentence: “I also love sports and am the captain of my local volleyball team.”’

‘I haven’t been near a volleyball since fifth year!’ I snort.

‘Everyone bends the truth a little,’ Jen says dismissively. ‘Besides, it will instantly conjure up an image of you in those teeny shorts the American girls wear on the
beach.’

‘Which is a hideous image,’ I point out.

A long debate ensues during which Ellie and Jen repeatedly maintain that this is about creating an impression – not reality – and eventually I lose the will to live, so give up. A
volleyball champion I apparently am.

I only hope nobody asks to see my dive and roll.

With my profile posted, the next stage in finding a boyfriend – or someone who can pose as my boyfriend until my rightful one comes back – involves searching the
website.

‘Now for the good bit,’ says Ellie, bringing in a pack of crisps the size of a sleeping bag.

I am astonished to discover that on this website alone there are 427 eligible men within a twenty-mile radius of my postcode.

‘That’s unbelievable,’ gasps Jen.

‘I thought you’d been out with most of them,’ quips Ellie, prompting Jen to throw the bag of Kettle Chips at her head.

It is fair to say, however, that while we have no complaints about the quantity, the quality is, well, variable. While you can happily filter out men for being too short, too heavy or living too
far away, there is no filter that comes under the heading ‘Loser’.

Some are so firmly in the ‘not if he was the last man on earth’ category I feel like crying for them. Such as the guy who fills up all eighteen available picture slots with photos of
him and his parrot. Or the one who repeatedly emphasizes his enthusiasm for boiled eggs. Or the ‘lusty older man (aged fifty-six)’ looking for an ‘attractive and energetic younger
lady (max twenty-three) to share no-strings adventures’.

Then there’re the usernames. Between ‘Cunninglinguist’ and ‘Iwillgetyou’, I’m convinced some must’ve been in the throes of a hallucinogenic trip when
they signed up.

Having said that, I’m also pleasantly surprised. The majority are clearly normal, nice men who simply haven’t found the right woman. And there are a few who are nothing less than
devastatingly gorgeous.

As the night wears on, I reach several conclusions:

I’m not as enthusiastic as Jen, of course, who was sold in minute one.

‘This is like being in a sweet shop,’ she says breathlessly, clicking away on her laptop.

‘This one looks good,’ exclaims Ellie, who has taken on the role of my professional agent. She brings up the profile of a nice-looking thirty-year-old who lives in Frodsham.

‘He says he’s looking for a woman “aged max ninety-nine”,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not saying I want someone fussy but a little more discernment is in order,
surely?’

‘How about this one, then?’ she says.

I start reading. ‘He can’t spell.’

She throws me an exasperated look. ‘Are you after someone beautiful and single or someone to write essays for you?’

‘I could never be attracted to a man who couldn’t spell,’ I reply, sticking to my guns. ‘There needs to be equality on an intellectual level, Ellie. I couldn’t go
out with a thicko—’

‘Even if he looked like this?’ Jen asks, gesturing to her screen.

I look over her shoulder at the profile.

His username is Iluvpotnoodles. He has smooth tanned skin, mesmerizing eyes and – as displayed in the fifteen shots of him on a beach – the most sumptuous biceps I’ve seen
outside a professional swimmers’ convention. I read his advert:

LOL! I never thort I wuld do this sort of thing – LOL! But thort I wuud try my look. LOL!

‘Ooh,’ I bite my lip. ‘Moral dilemmas . . .’

‘Let’s give him a “wink”,’ Ellie suggests. And before I have a chance to argue, she has officially declared my interest in a man attempting to break the world
record in the use of the term ‘LOL’.

This is only the start. Jen and Ellie spend the rest of the evening winking so often you’d think they were touting for business ahead of a busy night in the bordello. Fortunately, these
particular ‘winks’ are all virtual ones, because otherwise I’d be seriously worried for both their virtue and their optic muscles.

‘What happens now?’ I ask.

‘We wait and see if anyone responds,’ shrugs Ellie.

Within an hour, I’ve had four winks, two of whom (not, I should point out, the nineteen-year-old from Turkey called ‘Ilovematureladies’) are promising.

One wants to ‘instant message’ me. He’s not one of my favourites. In all honesty, I suspect immediately that he won’t be my type; he’s too skinny and has too many
ju-jitsu pictures.

But I remind myself of two things: first, that I’m not genuinely looking for a boyfriend (whatever Ellie thinks) – only a stand-in; and second, he can spell.

Ten minutes into our chat he has a question for me.

When I wake the next morning, my head is filled with a too-familiar subject: Jamie. Even now, nearly seven weeks after he left, I roll over in a half-sleep, expecting to drape
my arm over his torso and press my body against his. The brutal reality hits me in seconds: I’m spooning my spare pillow.

As I open my eyes and let sunlight filter in, my thoughts turn to the men on the dating website. Scores of them, all over the country – the world, in fact – who are waking up on this
Saturday morning, alone. Having still not found their soul mate. It was obvious last night that there was nothing wrong with most of them. There were solicitors, firemen, writers, doctors,
entrepreneurs – all with one thing in common: they haven’t found ‘the one’.

The fact that I have found ‘the one’ only makes me more determined to keep hold of him. Even if I’m not one hundred per cent sold on Ellie’s methods.

I drag myself out of bed, pull on my dressing gown and make a cup of tea to take through to the study, where I log on to my laptop with an unnerving thought: what if nobody asks me out?

Twenty-four hours ago I’d have thought that was an impossible scenario once you’d signed up to a dating website, but that was before I knew how they worked. I’d been under the
impression that you simply posted your details, said ‘hello’ to whoever you liked the look of and instantly arranged to meet.

As I’ve now discovered, before there’s a sniff of a get-together you have to endure a strangely old-fashioned courting ritual, involving declarations of interest, chats via instant
messaging, and then – you hope – the elusive first date.

I’m indescribably chuffed to discover that I’ve had sixteen winks and five emails since last night. Admittedly, some aren’t much to get excited about; three winks are from the
guy with the parrot, and two consist of one line: ‘hi hun how’s u?’

But among the others are some genuine, bona fide prospects and I feel ridiculously excited. I reply briefly to them all. The brevity is for two reasons. First, I’m not sure what to say.
Making small talk with blokes on the internet isn’t something in which I’ve a great deal of experience. Secondly, although I’m doing this in order to win Jamie back, corresponding
with other men feels like a betrayal.

Particularly given the text that arrives from the man himself at the exact moment that I’m scrutinizing the profile of a water-ski instructor from Cornwall.

I take a deep breath and return to the screen, reminding myself that this state we’re in – of romantic limbo – is precisely the reason why I’ve got to
take the dating website seriously, no matter how wrong it feels. Although perhaps the water-ski instructor might not be geographically practical.

I’m midway through an email when the doorbell rings, and I leap out of my chair.

I shut down the laptop and my first panicky thought as I scurry to the door is that this might be Jamie. Part of me would love it to be – except I’m not dressed, am wearing no
make-up and my unbrushed hair looks capable of removing burnt food from a stainless-steel hob.

I tentatively open the door . . . and am confronted by Julia.

I use the word ‘confronted’ not because my sister announces herself aggressively, but because she is dressed in chic wide-legged trousers and a tailored stone-coloured leather
jacket, and her hair is nothing less than immaculate.

‘How can you possibly look like that first thing on a Saturday morning?’ I ask, letting her in. She looks me up and down. ‘I know I look like shit. I’ve only just got
up,’ I add, before she can answer.