The Single Girl's To-Do List (17 page)

‘Sleeves in good condition,’ Hairy Muso Man began giving it an automatic once-over. ‘Mirror vinyl, Canadian import. Very nice.’

Maybe it’s a sign, I thought to myself, while they ummed and ahhed: all roads lead to Canada. Maybe I was supposed to sell this and use the money to fly to Ethan where we would fall in love and immediately get married. That made sense, didn’t it?

‘I reckon we could do you about five hundred quid,’ he said, not letting go of the record.

Until that second, the proudest moment of my life had been when I’d picked up the keys to my flat. Or the time I did not dry-hump James Franco in the make-up chair. As of that moment, it was not snatching the money out of Hairy Muso Man’s hand and running for the hills. Five hundred quid? Really?

‘Oh,’ I shrugged and held my hand out for the record. ‘I can probably get more than that on eBay. Thanks though.’

‘Eight hundred,’ Bald Music Shop Man said quickly.

‘Hmm.’

‘Eight-fifty. Best I can do.’

I tried very hard to look unconvinced while I weighed up my options. On one hand, there was a chance that this was sort of technically stealing. But at the same time, Simon was an evil scumbag who had callously abandoned me with the record, which sort of somehow suggested that he wanted me to sell it. Didn’t it? And I would very much like eight hundred and fifty pounds.

Hairy and Baldy were literally on the edges of their seats. Pursing my lips, brushing off the skirt of my stripy sundress and hitching my handbag back up on my shoulder, I shrugged.

‘Done.’

Walking back out into the sunshine, I felt a little dazed. I had nearly nine hundred quid in my handbag. I pulled out my notebook, checking my shopping list to try and ground myself, but instead of seeing a list of tasks, I just saw £850, written about seventeen times. The worst thing was, I didn’t even feel bad. Not a jot of remorse. He hadn’t picked that record up since bringing it home two years ago; he would never even know it was missing. I hoped.

Dodging a fruit and veg stall set up in the middle of the street, I headed back up Berwick Street, narrowly avoiding walking face first into a stupidly hot man. We danced around each other for a moment until he laughed and hopped into the street.

‘Sorry,’ I said. I hated the left-right swerve game – why couldn’t we just agree everyone would walk on the left, like on Tube escalators?

‘No worries, angel,’ he smiled back. Why couldn’t everyone be as friendly as a gay man wandering around Soho in the middle of a Thursday morning, I wondered, almost immediately encountering an identical situation with an angry looking man in a suit. Gays were lovely.

Unless you forgot to buy their birthday present. Oh bugger. There was no way on god’s green earth I was going back into the record shop, not now I was winning. Which left only one option. Looking up, I spotted exactly where shorts guy had come from. Prowler. Lovely Soho and its gay sex supermarkets …

Ten minutes later, I was back on the street, clutching a gay porn parody of
Jersey Shore
and a selection box of Trojans just to be a bit fancy. Matthew would love it. Done with Soho for the day, I prepped myself and my eight hundred and fifty pounds to brave the sprint to the Northern Line at Tottenham Court Road. And I really was just about to leave when I spotted a glass-fronted shop off to my left. In the windows were two dummies, decked out in nothing more than nipple tassels and top hats. It was hardly a shocking sight in Soho but this shop made me stop in my tracks. Because this wasn’t just any shop. This was Agent Provocateur.

Emelie had been a devotee of luxury lingerie since she’d opened the floodgates in La Senza in the second year. Since then she’d graduated through Elle Macpherson Intimates, Cosabella and Calvin Klein and now she was onto the hard stuff. La Perla, Coco de Mer and of course, Agent Provocateur. It wasn’t that I didn’t like pretty things; I did, but Em earned an awful lot more money than I did. Two hundred quid on a bra? I just couldn’t do it. She’d spent several years trying to convert me, insisting that spending that much on something created exclusively to make you feel like a sex kitten could only be good for you, but I could always think of at least five other ways to spend that money. But now, newly single Rachel was going to have to Do It with someone new for the first time in years. And I wasn’t twenty-three this time. Sure, new Rachel had already proved she was confident and potentially certifiable – but sexy? It just wasn’t a word that sat well with me. A confidence boost couldn’t hurt, could it? And I didn’t have to spend two hundred quid. I could just look. Probably.

‘Hi, can I help you with anything?’ asked a painfully beautiful pin-up-a-like as I walked through the door. Clad in a short pale pink dress and black stockings, she gave me a smile with deep red lips. Speaking as a professional, it was a great make-up job. Speaking as a normal girl it was wildly intimidating.

‘I’m just browsing, thanks.’ My plan was to make a polite lap of the store, pick up two things, check the prices and then go for a tactical exit. Until I saw it. Pink silk, black lace overlay and oh my but it was beautiful. Just seeing the bra hanging there made me want to have sex; I couldn’t even begin to imagine the power it might wield on an actual person.

‘The Françoise. My favourite.’ The pin-up spoke in a quiet voice. Her reverence was entirely appropriate. ‘Would you like to try it on?’

‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Yes please.’

Looking at myself in the dressing-room mirror was an extraordinary experience. My boobs hadn’t got any bigger, my thighs hadn’t got any slimmer, and I hadn’t suddenly developed Jessica Rabbit curves, but suddenly I was sexy. I was wearing nearly five hundred quid’s worth of lace and elastic and I’d never felt more incredible. Not that I’d be able to get into the stockings and suspenders ever again without the shop assistant’s help. But when was I going to wear it? I asked myself, turning around, holding up my hair and checking out the back view. It was entirely pointless. I could get just as nice stuff from M&S. Probably. Just because I’d sort of stolen nearly a grand from my ex-boyfriend didn’t mean I was made of money, this was ridiculous, this was … I stopped striking ridiculous poses in the mirror for one second and carefully removed the single girl’s to-do list from my handbag. Buy something. And unless I was very much mistaken, the addendum to that decree was ‘something obscenely expensive and selfish.’ Like designer lingerie. Like five hundred pounds’ worth of designer lingerie. With the money you just made from selling your ex-boyfriend’s ultra-rare Beatles record. Well, his mum’s Beatles record but she had it coming as well. The cow never had given me her chocolate cheesecake recipe and I had asked for it time and time again. Maybe she kept it from me because she knew we were never getting married and she wanted it to stay in the family. Cow.

‘Everything OK?’ Pin-Up Gal asked outside the changing room. ‘Can I get you anything else?’

‘Do you have any more of the knickers in stock?’ I said, letting redhead Rachel take over. It was just easier if she dealt with these decisions.

‘Absolutely,’ she confirmed through the door. ‘Just the briefs?’

‘All of it,’ Redhead Rachel confirmed. ‘I’ll take all of it.’

And from that moment on, with Dita von Teese as my witness, I vowed I would never wear a greying bra with no elastic and a little bit of plastic underwiring poking out, ever again.

Having spent the morning buying designer underwear, hanging out in gay sex shops and selling expensive records that didn’t belong to me, I felt like the afternoon belonged to tasks my mother would have approved of. Stashing my ill-gotten gains in the bedroom, I changed out of my dress, into a T-shirt and started painting. More people than I’d anticipated had responded to my Facebook invite to the party on Saturday, presumably pity acceptances given that they’d all seen my newly single status on FB. Not that I cared. Pity popularity was still popularity. Of course that meant I couldn’t really leave the living room in its current state – masking tape around the light switches wasn’t avant-garde, it just looked stupid. As Em had pointed out. Yes, oddly enough, neither she nor Matthew were available to help me out when I’d called to see what they were up to. In Emelie’s defence, she was working. Dead-Dad rich Matthew however, had no such excuse. He was just AWOL. As he had been a lot over the last couple of days. If he wasn’t with me, he wasn’t giving up where he was. Pushing away my concerns that there was no estranged dead dad and that he was turning tricks somewhere in South London, I got back to the job at hand. Hands on hips, I stared down the tins of paint in the corner of the room.

‘It’s just you and me,’ I said out loud, plugging in my iPod dock and putting it on shuffle. And then skipping when ‘Love Me Do’ came on. Maybe just a bit of Madonna. Me, Madonna and two tins of Dulux Sexy Pink silk emulsion. What could go wrong?

About a month or so after we’d moved into the flat, Simon and I had been scoffing spaghetti bolognese on the sofa, watching Kirstie and Phil, when it happened. Laura the journalist was looking for a London crash pad and, after several misses, Phil eventually found her a beautiful studio in Clapham. And inside that studio in Clapham was a hot pink wall and a red leather sofa. My eyes had lit up in a way that scared the pants off Simon. I hadn’t even said anything before he declared a loud, clear ‘no’, got up, put the kettle on and refused to listen my pleas. Eventually, I got my red leather sofa but he wasn’t having any of the hot pink wall. Well, fuckadoodledoo, Simon; now it was my living room and I was having my hot pink wall. And I was listening to Madonna while I did it. In a T-shirt and my knickers. Mostly because it was really hot but also because who cared? Who knew how long I’d be able to stay here if he decided he wanted to sell, but for every last second I had in the flat, it was going to feel like home. My home. Checking the sofa and all immovable furniture was properly covered, I stood back, paint tray in hand, and made sure I was ready to start. It was a big day for proud moments. Having actually used masking tape was the kind of achievement that made me want to call my dad. It was Facebook status update big.

Singing very loudly, I merrily started slapping paint on the wall, beginning with the edges and then moving onto some more experimental designs. Such as writing ‘Simon is a dick’ in two-foot-high letters right in the middle of the wall. I stopped to take a quick snapshot with my phone before beginning to paint over it. Utterly absorbed in the task at hand, my mind started to run away with itself. Maybe I could stretch out from make-up design to interior design. I was clearly a natural. Perhaps I could put some colour in the bedroom. Maybe some red. Maybe blue. Caught up in redesigning the apartment, and halfway through a vital reinterpretation of ‘La Isla Bonita’, I realized the doorbell was ringing. Missing out on anything being one of my greatest fears in life, I turned down Madge, dashed to the front door and pressed the buzzer to let them up, only then remembering I wasn’t wearing any trousers. Oh well, I told myself, probably a Jehovah’s Witness, they wouldn’t mind. Regardless, I was already on shaky ground with the commandments as it was, so one of heaven’s reps turning up while I was semi-naked was hardly likely to be the crucial black mark against my name. As it turned out, I would have been much happier with a Jehovah’s Witness. Or even a Coldseal Windows salesman. Or Hitler. In fact, I’d have been happier with pretty much anyone but Dan Fraser.

‘Hi.’ Dan stood in front of me, back in his regulation jeans, T-shirt and trainers, looking far more confident than he had any right to. ‘Can I come in?’

I peered around the doorway and attempted to stare him down. It was easier with the tins of paint. ‘Why?’

‘Because?’ He ran his hand through the back of his hair, making his curls flop forward into his eyes. Not that I was noticing his eyes. Or his curls. Or the way his bicep curled against the white fabric of his T-shirt when he bent his arm. ‘Rachel, just let me in.’

I considered slamming the door in his face for a moment before relenting and opening it fully. Redhead Rachel was going to have to go back in her box for ten minutes. ‘I honestly have absolutely no idea why you’re here,’ I said, closing the door behind him. ‘Unless Ana sent you to kick my arse.’

‘Ana could kick your arse all by herself.’ He walked through to the living room and surveyed my handiwork. ‘Maybe not Emelie though. You’re painting? Or just graffiti-ing your own house?’

I looked at the oversized abuse on the wall and shrugged. ‘He is a dick.’

‘Definitely, definitely all over then?’ he asked.

‘We’ve been through this. I think it was just before your girlfriend went mental in the bogs of a very classy event.’ I sat on the arm of my chair, keeping a safe distance in case he came down with a case of the kisses again. Kissing Dan would be awful. Genuinely terrible. I really hadn’t given it a second thought and I absolutely hadn’t lain awake thinking about how our almost-kiss made my heart race and lips tingle. ‘Apparently I’m boring.’

‘Couple of things.’ He still had his back to me as he picked up a paintbrush and began painting around my eloquent message. ‘Firstly, she’s not my girlfriend. Secondly, you were the one who ended up being carted off in a police car and, thirdly, no one can call you boring. As evidenced by my secondly.’

Why hadn’t he mentioned the fact that I wasn’t wearing any trousers? Why hadn’t he acknowledged that he’d tried to kiss me? She wasn’t his girlfriend? Which pants was I wearing again? Why was he here?

‘I wasn’t at my most stable,’ I admitted, picking up the second paintbrush and starting on the other wall. ‘Things are a bit up in the air at the moment. And she was such a … such a—’

‘Such a dick?’ he interrupted.

‘Well, yes,’ I looked over to watch him happily painting away with a smile on his face. I supposed it would have been a shame to have those biceps in the neighbourhood and not put them to good use. The biceps and the lovely back muscles that moved under his too tight T-shirt every time he stretched up. And I wasn’t sure how his backside was helping, other than temporarily putting me into a trance every time he bent down to reload his brush. ‘I’m sorry, I know you two are, well, whatever, but I can’t deal with it any more. She’s a moron, Dan.’

I wasn’t able to engage my tact muscles at the same time as my perving muscles, apparently.

‘Yeah, she is a bit,’ Dan agreed, making short work of the white wall. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’

‘It’s possible that you weren’t,’ I suggested, slightly relieved that he hadn’t walked out before finishing that difficult bit up by the ceiling. I hated stepladders. ‘As usual.’

‘How’s the list going?’ he turned quickly, catching my checking him out completely.

I blushed and turned back to painting my wall, hoping that he could only see one set of cheeks blushing.

‘Fine.’ I really didn’t want to go into my lingerie purchase with him right now. He was seeing all he was going to see of my underwear there and then.

‘Good.’

We painted along to low levels of ‘Crazy for You’ until I decided enough was enough. We weren’t going to talk about the fact that he’d tried to kiss me the night before? I put my brush back in the tray, checked they were in fact decent, full-coverage knickers and cleared my throat.

‘Dan?’

‘Rachel?’

‘Without wanting to sound ungrateful, why are you here?’

He stopped painting, turned around and pulled a face.

‘It’s a good question actually,’ he said, pink paint dripping onto his white trainer. ‘I was at a camera shop in Old Street and I was walking back to Angel then the next thing I knew, I was here.’

‘Right.’ I noticed a smudge of paint on his cheek and fought the urge to rub it off. Redhead Rachel was clearly insane and she did not like being put in a time out.

‘Thought I’d check to see whether or not they’d sent you down.’ Dan spotted the paint on his shoe and sat down cross-legged on my hardwood floor to wipe it off. ‘I just wanted to see if you were all right.’

Well that was nice. Really nice.

‘You could have called,’ I suggested. ‘Sent a text?’

‘I could,’ he agreed.

Right, I needed trousers. The overwhelming urge I had to knock Dan onto his back and find out just what that kiss would have felt like was entirely being-in-my-knickers-related, obviously.

‘Back in a minute.’ I dropped my paintbrush on a dustsheet and pelted into the bedroom. I just needed a pair of trousers, shorts, anything. A pair of knackered cut-offs that had somehow survived the cull won the race and I slipped them on while giving myself a stern talking-to. This was Dan. This was my friend, Dan. OK, so yes, when you very first met him you thought he was cute, but as soon as he’d established that you were the hired help and not a model, he’d turned off the charm, turned on the bullshit and any thoughts of an office romance were quickly banished. He probably just felt sorry for me because I’d been dumped. Or maybe Veronica had told him I wanted the Sydney job and he was here to let me down gently. Either way, hanging around my flat looking cute and helping me with the painting … well, it wasn’t a crime but he needed to leave. It was too weird.

‘You know, I’ve never actually been inside your flat before,’ he called from the living room. ‘It looks like you.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, striding back in with a great sense of purpose. A sense of purpose that was somewhat shaken when I saw that Dan had taken his T-shirt off. Oh. My God.

‘I didn’t want to get paint on it,’ he explained, pointing to his shirt on the chair, like butter wouldn’t melt. It was one thing to see your attractive co-worker in far-too-tight-for-a-straight-man jeans and T-shirt, and one thing to see him looking gorgeous in a tuxedo, but to have him half-naked in your living room was quite another. Had he always had that body? Yes, the great arms I could understand, he was always lugging camera equipment around, but actual abs? Muscles that I could see and count? Not that he was body-builder bulgy, just nicely defined and perfectly tanned. And while I’d always thought I preferred Simon’s smooth chest, the curly brown rug that perfectly matched the hair on his head wasn’t hurting. We weren’t talking Tarzan and the apes, just a light dusting right across his broad, broad chest.

Shi-i-i-t.

‘All right, Fabio.’ I picked up his T-shirt. ‘I’ve put my clothes on; you put on yours. It’s time to leave, I’ve got plans.’

‘Fine, but I think you’re going to want another coat on this unless you want people playing
Catchphrase
on your wall.’ He set down his brush and pulled on his shirt. Promptly getting pink paint all over it.

‘Say what you see, Dan,’ I said, holding the front door open. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

‘Wait.’ He paused on the top step. ‘What are you doing Saturday?’

‘Day?’

‘Night?’

Ruh-Roh, Scoobs.

‘I’m actually having a birthday party for Matthew,’ I stammered. ‘Here.’

‘Oh.’ He picked at the paint on the front of his shirt. ‘That sounds like fun.’

‘You can come if you want.’

The words were out of my mouth before I’d had time to think them through. Damn you, Redhead Rachel. I needed to be careful; this whole split personality was all going a bit
Black Swan
. Except I was not Natalie Portman and no one was going to be giving me an award for going mental. ‘Nineish?’

‘Done,’ he gave me a grin and vanished down the stairs. ‘See you Saturday, Summers.’

I didn’t know what I was most worried about. The fact that I was going to see him on Saturday or the fact that I was super excited about it. Preventative measures had to be taken.

Back in the living room, I sat down for a second and stared at my freshly painted pink wall. What exactly had just happened? Completely weirded out, I dragged my handbag across the floor and pulled out my phone, the scrap of paper with Asher’s phone number on it coming out too. Right. I was supposed to call him. Maybe a palate-cleansing date with the cute Clark Kent-alike yoga teacher was exactly what I needed. Because Dan hadn’t asked me out on a date. And even if he had, I wouldn’t have said yes. Probably. I tapped the numbers in quickly before I could go any further down that line of thought.

‘Hello, Asher speaking,’ he answered right away, which was nice.

‘Hi, Asher.’ I wasn’t good on the phone; texting had been invented for a reason. ‘It’s Rachel? We met at the thing at …’ Where was it that I’d set the sprinklers off and caused thousands of pounds’ worth of damage and watched my best friend punch a supermodel in the face? Oh yeah. ‘The Savoy last night.’

‘Oh, hi.’ He didn’t hang up! He actually sounded happy! He didn’t know that I was the psycho who’d probably cost him his deposit from Moss Bros! ‘I didn’t really think you’d call.’

Oh.

‘But I’m really glad you did.’

Oh!

‘Did you get out OK? How mad was that scene with the sprinklers?’

‘Yeaaah.’ I was very glad he could not see my face. ‘Mad. Totally mad.’

‘I was thinking, do you have plans tomorrow night?’ he asked straight out. Wow! A date! This is what happened to Emelie all the time!

‘I don’t,’ I said, trying my best to sound flirtatious. This was, after all, the potential father of my children. Christ, my mother would die from happiness if I told her I was marrying a yoga teacher. Although, as we hadn’t even been on one date yet, there was a chance I was putting the cart a little bit before the horse.

‘Brilliant,’ he definitely sounded happy. ‘I’m teaching a class in Islington and I thought you might like to come along.’

Really? He’d gone to the trouble of giving Emelie his phone number so he could recruit me into one of his bloody yoga classes? Sorry Mum.

‘And then maybe we could go and get a drink?’

The wedding was back on.

‘That sounds lovely,’ I lied through my back teeth. The drink sounded fantastic; the yoga sounded like sheer torture. ‘Can’t wait.’

He gave me the time and whereabouts of the class, we said quick goodbyes and I hung up. Yoga date. Either this was a brilliant idea – lots of potential for touching and hilarious stories for the kids, or a terrible idea – I would end up back on muscle relaxants and we’d only have kids because we kept dating out of a weird sense of obligation since he’d injured me and I was embarrassed. Once again, I had that cart rolling well ahead of the horse.

While I was on a roll, I checked Facebook for any new messages from Ethan and giggled like a little girl when there was one waiting.

‘Hey again,’ he started, ‘I can’t believe you’re single.’

I took one look at the ever more obvious ‘Simon is a dick’ on the living-room wall and struggled to see his difficulty.

‘You’re still ridiculously cute – remind me why we never got together? You could have been my first kiss instead of Verity Smith. Have you seen her on here? Not a pretty picture …’

What? Still cute? There had been a level of cuteness previously established?

‘Sorry, that’s awful. But yeah, sucks that you’re not with someone awesome. If you were here or I was there, I’d totally be asking you out. You never thought about emigrating? Toronto is great!’

Obviously I hadn’t thought about emigrating to Toronto but, as of that second, I was mentally packing my bags. I could live in Canada. So what if it was a bit cold. So what if I didn’t know anyone there except for the love of my life. It was close enough to New York that I could get good, high-profile work – and it wasn’t as if there wouldn’t be work there. I was fairly certain people wore make-up and read magazines in Canada. At least, Emelie did, and she was Canadian. Technically.

Giving up on the painting, I ran a bath and thought about the items left on my list. We were more than halfway along now and it was getting tricky. I still had everything crossed that Veronica would be able to get me on the Sydney job, which would cross off the travel requirement. Writing the letter to Simon was something that needed doing while I was in a more stable mental state. Or a less stable state. One or the other. Which only left finding a date for my dad’s wedding and bungee jumping. Or similar. I wasn’t sure which was more worrying. Not that anything was as worrying as the fact that I could not stop thinking about Dan’s chest hair. Sinking into the deep bubble bath, I closed my eyes and tried not to picture his arse as he bent down to pick up the paintbrush. A bungee jump would definitely be less trouble than this.

It was Friday. And what a difference seven days could make. It was like I was living in not quite a Craig David song, although I sincerely hoped I’d be chilling by Sunday. Except without actually saying chilling, because I could never get away with saying that. What with me being 28, middle class and white. In an attempt not to think about the fact that I had my first date in five years later that day, I’d started the morning off with a run marginally more successful than the last, in that I didn’t fall over; then put another coat of paint on the living-room walls and been out to buy food and booze for the party Saturday night. I’d even made my very own chocolate cheesecake in lieu of the forbidden royal iced sponge that Matthew had outlawed. No one had dropped by uninvited, no one had thrown up and no one had dumped me. So far it was one of my better Fridays in recent memory.

Emelie and Matthew had finally surfaced to come and wish me well on my date, in that Emelie was texting Paul, halfway through troughing a giant chicken vindaloo and Matthew was texting ‘nobody’ and had just spent over an hour trying to get the hottest photo of his new tattoo for Facebook (he said Facebook, I was pretty sure he meant Grindr). Oddly enough, neither of them felt up to coming to yoga with me. I wasn’t asking them to come on the date, just the yoga class for a bit of moral support, but when six thirty rolled around, I was standing at the front door in a pair of Emelie’s tight little workout trousers and a hot pink vest that just didn’t cover nearly as much as I would like and clutching Matthew’s yoga mat. Alone.