Chapter Three

Saturday evening saw me ready at least three times. I kept making vital errors of judgement, firstly on the make-up front (when I put on so much that if I’d turned round suddenly my expression would have remained where it was), then the shoes (the red dress demanded heels, the distance I had to walk demanded flats). Then, just before I left I realised that the slim skirt made my underwear visible from four counties, and had to discard my big pants for a thong. Which, combined with the heels (put comfort over appearance? Are you mad?), made me walk into the bar with a strange sort of wiggle, which I suppose might have been construed as alluring, but only by someone who’d never actually met a woman in real life.

Several people looked up at my entrance. None of them was Luke. I ordered myself a grapefruit juice and sat down by the windows overlooking the river, to give me something to gaze moodily at. I was working on a nice case of stood-up paranoia when there was a touch on my arm.

‘Willow? Hello, sorry I’m a bit late.’

He was tucking away his mobile as he spoke and I noticed what beautifully casual trousers he was wearing, and that his shirt looked freshly pressed. Anything rather than look at his face. Even so my stomach was doing its warm-up exercises.

‘Oh, hello, Luke.’

I managed to keep my eyes below neck-level, but any moment now I was going to have to look up, or be thought terminally rude. I flipped a peek up and straight back down again, hoping he wouldn’t think I was fixated with his groin. Despite the supersonic speed of my glance, I noticed that he was smiling at me, holding a chair slightly away from the table. My heart was beating so hard that I could see the front of my dress moving.

‘Is it all right?’

‘Oh, yes, sorry, yes, do. Sit. Yes. Down,’ I burbled, moving my jacket, bag, the menu, rearranging my glass on the table, anything but look directly at him. ‘Have you had far to come?’ Despite myself, my gaze treacherously slithered upwards and rested on the bridge of his exquisite nose. Oh dear God, but he was gorgeous.

‘Not really. I’m staying in the Moat House across the river until I can find a place to buy.’ He indicated the ridiculously pricey and ugly pile which loomed over the river like a concrete frown. ‘How about you? You said you live in York now?’

I struggled to reply coherently. All the while the windmills of my stomach ground and turned, and I fought that grapefruit juice to an internal standstill. We chatted a little more, about university life, the very few mutual friends we had had, including Tom who was now, apparently, a well-regarded glamour photographer. I hoped his spots had finally cleared up.

‘I really fancied you back then, you know.’ I half-raised my hand to cover my mouth then realised that I didn’t have to. Amazingly enough, the words had been spoken by Luke.

‘You what?’

‘Yeah. Christ, I’m still ashamed of myself, the way I used to follow you around. I was too shy to do anything about it, of course.’

I coughed, and the grapefruit juice did a little celebratory dance. ‘Shy? Were you?’ Shy? This man – I met his eye for the first time – this man had regularly taken most of his clothes off on stage in front of hundreds (another of the reasons why I had attended just about every gig Fresh Fingers gave) and been famous for his double-mooning trick in the Union bar.

‘With girls, yes. Terrible. So. Sorry. I bet you’re, what, married now?’

How did I play it without making myself sound like the lonely spinster I sometimes feared I was becoming? ‘Not really. I mean, no. Not married. In fact’ – inventing quickly so as not to sound less attractive than a case of typhoid – ‘I’ve recently split up with someone actually.’

Luke let out a long sigh. ‘Yeah, know the feeling.’ We kind of stared at each other for a moment. At least, he stared and I clenched. ‘Bad breakup?’

‘Pretty bad, yes. I caught him with someone else.’ What happened there? I mean, one minute we’re in True Confessions mode, and the next I’m laying down the ‘How I Dated a Serial Cheater’ precredit sequence for Jeremy Kyle’s new TV extravaganza.

‘Shit happens, yeah? Was it the guy from last night? The one with the crazy eyes?’

Crazy eyes? Jazz? Although, now you come to mention it … ‘Look, do you mind if we don’t talk about it? I’m still feeling …’ a bit like a lying cow. Why hadn’t I simply admitted that my last relationship of any kind had been six months ago? It had ended because I couldn’t find model aircraft flying at all fascinating and we’d broken up sotto voce on his mother’s couch during one of her feted scone and jelly teas. Answer – because I didn’t want to look a total tit.

‘Yeah, course. Sorry. So.’ Was it my imagination or did he really look quite sorry to drop the subject of my love life. ‘What do you usually do on a Saturday night?’

Oh, you know, the usual. There’s the laundry. If I’m really feeling like pushing the boat out, I might pumice my feet. ‘Not a lot. Well, sometimes I sing in a band.’ Yeah, right. Sometimes, like when Jazz’s band is completely desperate and even its last-ditch singer, the one with a squint and no boobs, has got dysentery.

‘Hey, that’s great. We’ll have to get together sometime, have a jamming session.’ Luke leaned across the table and a waft of exclusive aftershave hit me in both nostrils. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of weirdo, stalking girls I used to have a thing for. It was completely accidental, but I’d been thinking of you a lot. After so long away, I guess, all the old gang were on my mind.’

A sudden, grim thought struck me. ‘You aren’t confusing me with someone else, are you? I mean, we didn’t really move in the same circles much.’ And every time I saw you, you completely ignored me. And I’d noted the words ‘used to’.

Luke gave a grin so hot that diamonds would have gone runny. ‘Oh, now, let me see. You had longer hair, love the new cut by the way, read English, rode around on a bright red bicycle like you thought you were at Cambridge, wore possibly the biggest boots on campus and hung out with Katie somebody.’

‘O’Connor,’ I supplied. ‘She’s Katie Gardner now, she married Daniel, do you remember Dan?’ Shut up, Willow.

‘Yeah. I was so crippled up with shyness that I could hardly even bear to look at you.’

Now our eyes met properly. His gaze was level and steady. The stomach churning was becoming unignorable and my throat began to constrict, but the eye contact was luscious with promise. If I ran for the toilets now I might never see a look like that again.

I made a quick decision – pulled my jacket towards me and pretended to be having a coughing fit, searching for a handkerchief whilst in reality I was throwing up the grapefruit juice into a pocket. It was short, sharp and nasty, but Luke thankfully didn’t seem to notice.

‘So, then. Would you like another drink? Or’ – he waved a hand at the crowded bar – ‘would you rather go on somewhere else?’

I would have toured the inner circles of hell to keep Luke Fry’s attention on me. I mean, how much would it take to make you vomit in your own pocket? We ended up walking through the darkening streets, and before I knew it, he was walking me home. It had started to rain at some unnoticed point and umbrellas were erupting around us. The streets shone, colours bleeding into one another as my eyes glazed with sheer happiness. Our heads bent together in introspective conversation, what with the twirling parapluies, the neon shimmer and the muffled background sounds of Saturday night falling on a suburban area, it was like the closing scene of a Jeunet film.

Luke bid me a decorous goodnight. (Although I noted, when he leaned against me to give me a peck on the cheek, the bulge in his trousers indicated that he would have gone for something a lot less chaste.) I did the cliché thing of closing the front door and leaning against it breathing heavily. This ended swiftly in a very unclichéd rush to the bathroom, where I stripped off all my clothes from which a slight smell of sick was beginning to waft.