Dinner for Two Read online

  CONTENTS

  Dinner for Two

  Also by Mike Gayle

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Part One : (July–August 2000)

  right

  tick

  hello

  mistake

  babies

  home

  readers

  tock

  on

  friends

  them

  talk

  look

  words

  past

  long

  grand

  silence

  Part Two : (November–December 2000)

  worked

  drop

  buy

  dream

  type

  speak

  post-it

  select

  day

  youth

  write

  more

  less

  welcome

  wait

  bloke

  love

  chocolate

  please

  smile

  call

  peroni

  agony

  post

  Part Three : (January–March 2001)

  lift

  bag

  shake

  sun

  photo

  do

  Indeed

  answer

  locked

  right

  below

  eat

  walk

  where?

  stare

  read

  fame

  ’bye

  oh

  perform

  locate

  want

  things

  kids

  band

  quite

  busy

  ago

  changes

  dial

  together

  home

  errr?

  story

  days

  quiet

  house

  personality

  whole

  plan

  imagine

  taste

  mini

  me

  date

  aged

  Part Four : (March–June 2001)

  best

  survival

  do?

  knock

  useless

  hidden

  morning

  later

  you

  out

  her story

  next?

  2.4

  focus

  don’t

  love

  listen

  pop

  tape

  if

  -ish

  10/10

  control

  forever

  rules

  gift

  Time

  choice

  here

  12’’

  CD

  dinners

  low

  measure

  in

  out

  allure

  feeling

  one

  away

  away

  About the Author

  DINNER FOR TWO

  Mike Gayle

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Mike Gayle

  The To-Do List

  The Life and Soul of the Party

  Wish You Were Here

  Brand New Friend

  His ’n’ Hers

  My Legendary Girlfriend

  Mr Commitment

  Turning Thirty

  First published in Great Britain in 2002

  by Hodder and Stoughton

  A division of Hodder Headline

  Copyright © 2002 by Mike Gayle

  The right of Mike Gayle to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

  The lines from Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw reproduced with permission of The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate

  Quotation from Self Made Mann, an interview with Aimee Mann by Tom Shone for the Telegraph Magazine October 14 2001 with permission of Tom Shone, c/o Carlisle and Co.

  The lines from The Apartment by Billy Wilder © 1960

  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved

  The Cosmopolitan article After The Beep by Mike Gayle is reproduced with permission of the National Magazine Company

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  EBook ISBN 978 1 848 94163 2

  Book ISBN 978 0 340 76796 2

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  A division of Hodder Headline

  338 Euston Road

  London NWl 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For monkey one

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to: my wife, Mum, Dad, Phil, Sheila, Andy, Jackie, Jenny, Phil P, Jane BE, Euan, Georgina (I told you so), Cath, Nikki, Math, Mike, Elt, Vic, Ruth, Ange, James, Dave, Maz, Lisa, Chris/John, Helen, Arthur, Charlotte, John, Nadine, Rod, everyone @ Hodder, everyone @ Curtis Brown, everyone @ The Board, the guy I was talking to about MLG at the Astor Place Barnes and Noble event in New York, February 2001 (sorry I lost your e-mail), David Kitt for writing such a 10/10 album in Small Moments, nice Natalie at Natmags and finally the magazines and newspapers where some of these articles originally appeared: Cosmopolitan, B magazine, Living Etc, Express and The Times.

  I do believe that the drinks are on me.

  Prologue

  Apparently (at least, so she told me) it all happened because her best friend Keisha had to stay behind after school for hockey practice. Usually she hated going home on her own because it was lonely. But that day she didn’t even notice Keisha wasn’t there because of Brendan Casey. Her obsession with him had developed to the point where she’d begun to semi-stalk him, watching him at lunchtime in the canteen, or positioning herself next to the classroom windows during English with Mr Kelly on Tuesday afternoons when Brendan’s year had games because it was possible – if she squinted really hard – to just about make out his silhouette on the football pitch.

  That day she’d determined that she was going to speak to him for the first time. Having thought about it a great deal she decided that the best way to do this was to be in his general proximity, smile at him a great deal and hope beyond hope that a conversation would spontaneously evolve out of nothing like some sort of conversational ‘Big Bang’ theory. The moment the end-of-school bell rang she’d raced out to the school’s main entrance and waited.

  She followed Brendan and his friends to the gates without being detected – which was more difficult than she’d anticipated. Brendan and his friends didn’t walk anywhere fast, and each time they stopped she had to bend down and fiddle with her laces, or rummage in her bag, or sometimes she simply stood still and gazed into the mid-distance as if she were looking for inspiration. Eventually, her persistence paid off: the boys made it out of the gates and up the path to the bus stop. She po
sitioned herself directly behind Brendan, a place that up until this moment she could only have ever imagined in her wildest dreams. Brendan, however, didn’t pay her the slightest bit of attention no matter how much she smiled in his direction.

  As the number 23A arrived and the double-decker opened its doors, the orderly queue disintegrated into a free-for-all and she was pushed to the back. By the time she got on Brendan and his friends had disappeared upstairs. She followed them but by the time she got there the top deck was full. She sighed, and made her way back downstairs.

  Ten minutes later when the bus reached her stop she was so angry as she got off that she wanted to scream. She didn’t, of course. As she stormed down the road she decided she wasn’t even going to look back for a last glance at Brendan. Her resolve however melted as she imagined his face pressed up against the window, his eyes searching for her. She turned, but couldn’t see him – and she hated herself for seeing hope where there was none. She hated herself for being so obviously devoid of self-respect.

  It started to rain and she decided she was going to change – that she was going to take control of her life – and the first thing that she was going to do was change her mood by treating herself to something nice. She checked her Hello Kitty purse to see how much she had left – £2.70. Unsure exactly how she was going to treat herself, she wandered into the newsagent at the top of her road and found herself drawn towards the magazine racks. This was what she wanted.

  She wanted a magazine that understood her feelings.

  A magazine that understood her better than she understood herself.

  A magazine that could simply make her feel better about being her.

  She scanned the titles aimed at her age group: Smash Hits, Mizz, 19, TV Hits, Top of the Pops, Teen Scene, J17, Bliss, Sugar and Looks and she immediately felt better. It was as if they were friends all desperately vying for her attention. She knew she had to choose carefully. She couldn’t afford to be disappointed. All of the covers looked the same: beautiful young girls or pop stars with flawless skin and perfectly proportioned features smiling serenely. As for the content, she could barely tell them apart: fashion, makeup, pop interviews, features about boys, features about friends.

  After a few moments she made her choice. Teen Scene: ‘the magazine for girls with go’. It was 10p cheaper than the others; she liked the purple eye-shadow the cover girl was wearing and hoped that they might say which brand it was inside; it had cover-mounted stick-on tattoos which although she considered a little bit babyish she thought might be a laugh; and it had the best advice column, ‘Ask Adam’. Her friends laughed at the girls who wrote in to advice columns, but she knew that when it came to boys, she was as clueless as the girls in the letters. She loved problem pages: they made her feel she wasn’t alone in the world. That she wasn’t weird. That all the thoughts and fears that roamed around inside her head could be solved by ‘Dear Pam’, ‘Ask Adam’, ‘Getting Personal with Dr Mallory’, ‘Boy Talk with Stephen’, and ‘Crisis Confidential with Dear Anne’. The list was endless. But ‘Ask Adam’ was the best.

  She picked up the magazine and went to pay for it. The man behind the counter scanned the barcode, the till beeped, she gave him the exact money and left.

  Chaos theory states that something as simple as a butterfly flapping its wings millions of years ago could have changed world events. Well, if that’s so then for me, Dave Harding, a happily married music journalist, that was the moment at which a butterfly soared into the air and chaos theory became chaos practice.

  PART ONE

  (July–August 2000)

  There they sat, those two happy ones, grown-up and yet children – children in heart, while all around them glowed bright summer – warm glorious summer.

  Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen

  right

  It’s just coming up to midday and I’m at work when the phone rings.

  ‘Dave Harding,’ I say into the receiver. ‘Louder magazine.’

  ‘It’s me.’

  My wife Izzy’s at the other end of the line, calling from her office.

  ‘Hey, you. How’s your day?’

  ‘Fine. What are you doing right now?’

  ‘Nothing that couldn’t do with an interruption.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  Silence.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Silence.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  The silence ends. ‘I think I might be pregnant,’ she says, and bursts into tears.

  tick

  ‘You’re pregnant?’ I repeat.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I haven’t done the test . . . I wanted you to be there. But I’m late. Very late. In fact, late enough for it to be a foregone conclusion.’

  Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be true,’ she says quietly.

  ‘I love you,’ I say.

  ‘This is so terrible,’ she says.

  ‘I love you,’ I say.

  ‘This is the end of everything,’ she says.

  ‘I love you,’ I say.

  ‘But what are we going to do?’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But I love you.’

  hello

  Some people conceive their firstborn on a sun-kissed beach in the Caribbean, others on a stormy night in the Lake District, or in their own bedroom, by candlelight with a Barry White CD playing in the background. What do Izzy and I get? A slightly grumpy midnight coupling on a rainy north London Tuesday last June. Izzy and I try to work out when it might have happened and we can’t help but laugh when we do – Izzy had spent part of that day editing an article on the decline of sexual activity among thirty something couples and had initiated our encounter as a token protest.

  Like her, I make my living from writing for magazines and I know well enough that you should never believe anything you read in a magazine because it’s all written by people like us – jobbing journalists who, at the end of the day, are as clueless and lacking direction as the rest of the world, the only difference being that we’d never admit it. Still, none of this changes the fact that we are pregnant and we hadn’t planned to be so.

  Am I annoyed with the magazine?

  No.

  Am I annoyed with Izzy?

  No.

  Am I even angry with myself?

  No.

  I am – to use a cliché – over the moon.

  Ecstatic.

  Overjoyed.

  This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

  mistake

  Izzy is crying on the phone because she doesn’t want to have kids . . . yet. It’s not as if Izzy doesn’t like kids – we know loads of people who have them and she’s forever cooing over them, making trips with their mothers to baby-Gap and pinning photographs of them on the cork board in the kitchen. The thing is, she wants them later rather than sooner.

  ‘Maybe in a couple of years,’ she’d said, at twenty-eight, when the first people we knew became pregnant.

  ‘I just don’t feel ready,’ she’d said, at twenty-nine, when a whole herd of workmates, friends, cousins and neighbours produced infants.

  ‘I’m not even sure I want them,’ she’d said, at thirty, when she heard that her childhood best friend was expecting her fourth child.

  To be fair to Izzy, her anti-baby stance is both publicly and privately supported by me. ‘We’re not a very child-friendly household,’ I’d say, whenever the subject came up among friends. ‘Me with a kid? You must be joking.’ And then Izzy and I would laugh and joke about how bad we’d be at child-rearing. We even have a little routine to go with it:

  Her: We can’t have kids. We’d make terrible parents.

  Me: We’d end up feeding the baby Budweiser instead of milk.

  Her: Or leaving it on buses.

  Me: Or in supermarkets.

  Her: They’d be the unluckies
t kids in the world with our gene pool to cope with.

  Me: They’d inherit your huge ears.

  Her: And your weird monkey toes.

  Me: Imagine that – a big-eared, monkey-toed child clutching its bottle of milk without using its hands.

  Her: And don’t forget we’re both short-sighted! So that’s a short-sighted, big-eared, monkey-toed child.

  Me: And you were asthmatic as a child and I’m allergic to just about everything: pollen, penicillin, shellfish . . .

  Her: (Takes deep breath) An asthmatic, allergic to just about everything including pollen, penicillin, shellfish, short-sighted, big-eared, monkey-toed child. Incredible!

  Me: It wouldn’t bode well for a kid at all. (Pause.) So it’s just you and me, then?

  Her: Yeah, it’s just you and me.

  Even when the peer pressure was turned up to the max and all the babied-up couples kept pressuring us with their ‘Oh, you must have a baby, it’s so fulfilling,’ mantra, I continued to back Izzy because I loved her. And she loved me. And I wanted her to be happy, whatever we chose to do in life.

  But the truth was, I’d wanted kids from the word go. I didn’t want to wait. If I could’ve had them the moment I met Izzy and kept on having them until we were old and grey I couldn’t have been happier. But I kept it in. I didn’t want to pressurise her. One day, I told myself, she’d change her mind and until then I’d have to be patient. So I was patient while we did the couple thing: installed kitchens, ripped out walls, holidayed in exotic locales far off the beaten track. We were poster children for the twin-income no-kids generation. We had it all and we had it now. But I would’ve swapped the lot for a pile of stinking nappies and the child that had filled them.

  babies

  ‘Which one shall we get?’ I ask.

  It’s now a quarter to seven and Izzy and I are standing in the large Boots store on Oxford Street staring at a long row of pregnancy-testing kits – about which I know nothing. This is all new to me and I hadn’t even been sure where they’d be located in the store. In Feminine Hygiene? Next to Haircare? Between Shapers sandwiches and refrigerated soft drinks? It turns out that they’re in the same aisle as contraception, which I find amusing, on a shelf called, ironically, ‘Family Planning’.