Buch lesen: «Perfect Match»

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Endpages

Chapter One

It might be date number seventy-one, and perhaps I ought to have cut my losses by this point, but for some reason, I had a good feeling about tonight. Chris (or ‘Thundrill84’ as he was called on his Match.com profile) seemed like a genuinely great catch, so how did things end up going so horribly wrong?

It’s not like I didn’t do my homework. I’m not a fool. I stopped going on dates without googling in advance a loooong time ago. I typed random combinations of words gleaned from our text conversations into the search bar (Chris, Senior Sales Manager, Durham University, Cloud Computing) until I hit the jackpot: his LinkedIn profile. He was legit! In fact, he was better than legit. I discovered a few extra details he hadn’t divulged that made me like him even more. Not only did he have a good job, but he’d been promoted every year and he was head of his company’s charity fundraising committee. And not only did he have a degree in Classical Civilisation from Durham University, but he’d got a first! And he looked exactly the same in his LinkedIn photo as he did on his dating profile – tall, slim and with lovely blue eyes! I really did believe my luck might finally be changing. Seventy-first time lucky! But no, hah! As if. Chris, the seemingly great catch, is now sitting across from me in a dingy Chinatown restaurant droning on about the precise differences between ho fun, udon and ramen noodles, while slurping said noodles and splashing soy sauce all over his shirt.

‘You see, ho fun noodles are interesting, because while you may think that noodles, like pasta, are made from wheat, ho fun are actually made from rice flour!’ Chris enthuses.

‘Mm-hmm…’ I murmur, downing the dregs of my white wine. I place the empty glass back down with despair.

‘Udon and ramen, on the other hand, are wheat noodles – a bit more commonplace, but while they may both be wheat-based, the differences in the way they’re prepared affects their taste to a surprising degree. You see, udon are made using a technique of…’

I peer over Chris’s shoulder while he drones on, hoping to catch the waitress’s eye to order another glass of wine, but she’s running around the restaurant tending to other customers. It occurs to me that perhaps I ought to start bringing a hip flask on dates for this kind of emergency: when a man is so boring that only alcohol-induced merriment can make him remotely tolerable. I wonder how much hip flasks cost. It might be quite cool and edgy to carry one around in my handbag. Maybe I’ll start a trend. It’ll become the next ironic fashion, like the wheeled shopping trolleys hipsters pull around in Hackney.

Chris loudly slurps another noodle, tearing me out of my reverie, while leaving yet another streak of soy sauce on his once-white shirt. He looks like he’s been standing behind a truck that’s been attempting to reverse out of a muddy ditch. He carries on talking. He appears to have changed the subject to hobbies. Or, more precisely, to weird nerdy games I thought were meant for children. I smile awkwardly and shovel my sweet and sour stir-fry into my mouth, as if by eating quicker, I can speed up the passage of time.

‘We meet up every Saturday morning. We used to get together at the gaming shop, but the atmosphere there got a bit too competitive so we meet in a pub now. We all bring along our army figurines and we battle for hours! Right into the evening sometimes. It’s great, although there’s this one guy who keeps beating me. It’s so annoying, but I’ve got a new addition to my army now – Grand Lord Thor – one of the toughest figures in the game. So, he’s in for a treat!’ Chris says with a loud cackle.

Other diners are looking over at us, but Chris is oblivious. I smile tightly, shrinking into my seat.

‘You know, some women are a bit put off when I tell them I play battle games, but I don’t really see what’s so bad about it. It’s just a game. It’s just guys hanging out, isn’t it?’

‘Sorry, what?’ I pipe up.

‘Battle games! We each have an army of figurines, hand painted,’ Chris adds with pride. ‘And then we play battle against each other’s army.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Some men meet to play football, I play battle games!’ Chris says before slurping up his last noodle. It splatters triumphantly on his cheek, leaving a murky brown trail.

‘Whoops!’ he chuckles, reaching for a napkin to wipe it off.

I laugh. My first laugh of the evening. Chris smiles as if we’re having a moment. I don’t think he realises that my laughter is really just joyous relief emanating from deep within over the fact that he’s finished his meal and the date is almost over. I beckon the waitress over.

‘Dessert menu? Bill?’ she asks. Chris looks at me questioningly.

‘Bill!’ I yelp, a little too shrilly.

‘Okay…’ The waitress gives me a funny look before scurrying off to get the bill.

She brings it over and Chris plonks his wallet on the table, while I rummage in my bag for my wallet.

‘I’ll get it,’ Chris says.

‘No! Let’s go halves,’ I insist. ‘One sec.’ The last thing I need after the world’s most boring date is to feel like I owe this guy something just because he bought me dinner. Finally, I land upon my wallet amid a debris of stray receipts, blunted eye-liners and errant hair pins.

‘I’ve got this.’ Chris passes the waitress his card with a charming smile, as I flip my wallet open, pull mine out and thrust it towards her.

‘No! We’ll go fifty-fifty, please.’

‘Oh…’ The waitress looks to Chris, as if for permission.

‘That’s okay with you, isn’t it, Chris?’ I ask, giving him the most beaming smile I’ve delivered all night.

‘Err, okay,’ he relents.

‘Okay,’ the waitress echoes, taking another look at the bill and punching half the total into the card machine for Chris and then again for me. I try not to let my eyes bulge when I clock the figure – since when did Chinatown get so expensive? – and punch in my pin. Even though I’m a bit pissed off that I’ve had to pay an arm and a leg for the pleasure of listening to a lecture on noodle variations and battle games, I can feel my spirits begin to lift. The date is practically over! We leave the restaurant and start walking towards Leicester Square.

‘You know, it’s interesting…’ Chris muses, nodding to himself at some thought he’s had.

‘What’s interesting?’ I ask, immediately regretting the question.

‘Tube stations,’ he says. ‘People tend to think that they’re all roughly the same distance apart but they’re actually not. It’ll only take us a couple of minutes to walk to Leicester Square, but that’s because the tube stations around here are unusually close together. You’d be surprised to know that the distance between Leicester Square and Covent Garden is actually only a third of the distance between Victoria and Green Park.’

‘Mm-hmm…’ I quicken my pace. Maybe if we walk faster, we can get to Leicester Square in one minute, rather than two. Chris carries on talking about tube station geography as I pound the street with my heels. It feels like an hour has passed by the time we finally get there.

‘Thanks for a lovely evening,’ I mumble half-heartedly. It’s just one of those things you say, isn’t it?

‘I’ll text you,’ I add, edging towards the escalator.

Chris looks at me with an expression I can’t quite read. Surprise? Cynicism? Dread? Perhaps the date was as bad for him as it was for me.

‘Okay, take care,’ he replies.

He smiles politely and I smile politely and we politely go our separate ways.

Chapter Two

‘He can’t really have been that boring?’ Kate tops up my glass of wine.

‘Trust me, he was.’ I take a glug.

‘But he seemed so sweet, with all those photos of him and his Labrador. So cute,’ she says wistfully.

‘Yeah, well, apparently a love of dogs doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good date,’ I sigh, thinking back to all those misleading pictures of Chris smiling with his family’s pet.

‘Oh well, you’ll find someone soon.’ Kate sounds reassuring as she opens a message on her phone, but even she must be beginning to doubt it. As my flatmate and best friend, Kate’s witnessed all my dating disasters: the Hugh Grant lookalike who turned out to be an ex-con; the creepy chartered surveyor who kept referring to himself in the third person (‘Isaac would like to take Sophia out.’ For the record, Sophia said no); the gorgeous photographer who seemed like a great catch until he requested foot photographs to masturbate over; the geeky journalist who drank too much fizzy water and then burped in my mouth as he kissed me goodnight… The list goes on and that’s just my dates, don’t even get me started on my exes.

First there was my university boyfriend, Sam. Six foot two with curly blond hair and an IQ of 130, what more could I want, right? Well, a healthy disregard for vermin would have been nice. Sam ended up getting so wrapped up in his studies that he stopped cleaning his flat; carpets went unhoovered, bins went unemptied, pizza boxes piled up and eventually a couple of rats moved in. Not even mice – I can just about handle mice – I’m talking rats, big dirty rats! I might have been able to forgive him if he’d got rid of them, but when he simply named them Itchy and Scratchy and carried on studying, enough was enough.

So, I thought I’d go for the polar opposite after that (as you do when you rebound) and what could be more different to a vermin-loving, geeky Aberystwyth student, than a bisexual Italian hairdresser who’d probably need one-to-one tuition to get his head around Spot the Dog? Paulo was so ditzy that my friends dubbed him ‘the himbo’ – the male bimbo. But still, he was great fun. Even though it did get quite annoying how he’d always bang on about how ‘bellissima’ I’d look with shorter hair. He simply refused to accept that I wanted to keep it long so one night, he took it upon himself to gently chop it off in my sleep. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a few weeks later he left me for a man. A man with short hair.

‘I reckon it’s a matter of perseverance. You just need to keep looking.’ Kate’s voice snaps me back to the present. I realise I’m twirling a lock of my hair around my finger, as if to console myself that it’s there, all grown back. Nice and long. Kate places her phone on the table.

‘Just Max saying goodnight,’ she says.

She takes a sip of her wine and looks at me with a sweet, hopeful smile. Poor Kate. She really wants me to find love. It must be hard when you’ve been with your boyfriend for four and a half years to see your flatmate so romantically destitute. She probably feels the same sense of guilty awkwardness witnessing my love life (or lack thereof) that rich people get when they scurry past homeless people on the streets.

But it was just so easy for Kate; meeting Max was effortless. We’d only been living in London a few weeks when we went to see the play where Kate first laid eyes on him. It was a production of A Streetcar Named Desire and Max was playing Stanley Kowalski. He wasn’t a far cry from Marlon Brando himself, with his wife-beater vest and muscles, and Kate was practically drooling the entire show. The second it ended, she hurried over to the stage door and hung about waiting to introduce herself, swapping numbers with him on the pretence that she was an actress and might need tips on getting into the London scene (even though, at that point, she already had a role lined up at the Globe). A couple of weeks later, she and Max were an item and they’ve been smitten with each other ever since.

‘Seriously, you just have to keep looking,’ Kate insists.

I wind my hair up into a bun, wincing at the platitude that I must have heard a million and one times before.

‘Do you know what? Maybe it’s just not meant to be,’ I suggest. ‘Maybe I’m meant to be alone. Some people just are, aren’t they? I should probably stop fighting it.’

‘Nah, it’s only a bit of bad luck.’ Kate bats the thought away. ‘I’m sure he’s just around the corner. One day, you’ll look back on all this stuff and laugh.’

‘You said that six months ago,’ I remind her.

Kate pulls an awkward expression and plucks at a loose thread on her leggings.

‘Well, at least it’s all good material for your novel,’ she chirps.

‘Yeah s’pose,’ I grumble. One of the perks of wanting to be a writer is that you can view all your crazy experiences as material, except now I’ve got enough for a trilogy.

‘Maybe you’re just looking in the wrong places.’ Kate takes a sip of her wine.

I roll my eyes.

‘Kate, I’ve tried Match.com, eHarmony, PlentyOfFish, Guardian Soulmates, Tinder.’ I rap my fingernails against the table, trying to recall the full list. ‘OkCupid, Bumble, Happn, MySingleFriend, even Single bloody Booklovers. I’ve tried speed-dating, I’ve tried singles nights, I’ve tried—’

‘Oh, what about Dream Dates?’ Kate interjects, her eyes lighting up.

‘What’s Dream Dates?’

‘Saw it advertised today. Massive poster on the tube. It’s a new dating site. It had this really hot guy on the ad,’ Kate gushes.

‘Well, he was clearly a model,’ I point out. ‘It’s not like they’re going to use photos of the actual people that use it. The big, fat, hairy, hunchbacked…’

Kate sighs. ‘Come on, if you take that attitude, you’re never going to find anyone. You should try Dream—’

‘Leave it, Kate,’ I cut her off. ‘I can’t face any more.’

I get up to open the kitchen cupboard and pull out a bag of nachos. I shove a handful into my mouth and feel the delicious saltiness spread over my tongue. So good. I shove in another handful. At least food never lets you down. You open a bag of crisps and you know exactly what you’re getting. Predictable, satisfying, dependable crisps.

Kate eyes me warily. ‘Just one more site.’

I shake my head and crunch through another mouthful.

‘One more won’t hurt!’ she insists.

Ignoring her, I open up the fridge and retrieve a block of cheddar. I’ll just grate some cheese over these crisps and then pop them in the microwave. It’ll be even tastier. I find the cheese grater and start grating the cheddar onto the chopping board. I can hear Kate shuffling about behind me, but I don’t turn around. I’m going to focus on grating my nice little mound of cheese instead. A sing-song tone chimes through the kitchen — the familiar sound of Kate’s laptop firing up. I grab a bowl, fill it with nachos and sprinkle the cheese over them, but as I turn to pop them in the microwave, I spot a dating site – Dream Dates – open on Kate’s computer. She looks at me guiltily as I snap the microwave door shut.

‘One more site and I’ll be off your case, I promise. I know you’ve tried them all and I know how crap they’ve been but I don’t think you should chuck the towel in just yet. Think of everyone we know who’s met their partner online. I reckon it’s just a matter of perseverance. Just give Dream Dates a try and if it doesn’t work out, then fine—’ Kate throws up her hands in mock surrender ‘—I’ll back off and you can stay home and eat all the nachos you want.’

The microwave pings. I reach inside. The cheese bubbles enticingly. I lean against the kitchen counter and give the bowl a few seconds to cool down.

‘It looks really good,’ Kate notes, gazing at the homepage. ‘According to the slogan, “Your dream date is just a few clicks away.”’

I scoff. ‘And the slogan of Match is, “If you don’t like your imperfections, someone else will.” And Guardian Soulmates promised I’d “Meet someone worth meeting” but look at me.’ I reach into the bowl, peel apart two gooey nachos and dangle one into my mouth.

‘It’ll take five minutes,’ Kate says pleadingly. ‘Okay, I’m entering your details. Female, twenty-eight, looking for man, between the ages of twenty and forty?’

‘Twenty to forty?’ I practically spit out a nacho. ‘I’m not dating a twenty-year-old! And I’m not dating a forty-year-old either for that matter. Twenty-five is the youngest I’ll go to and thirty-five tops.’

‘Okay, so twenty-five to thirty-five.’ Kate grins as she enters the age range.

‘I can’t believe you’re making me do this,’ I groan before munching another handful of crisps.

‘So, what do you want your username to be?’ Kate asks.

‘Something simple. Sophia and then my initials.’

‘Okay, so Sophialj.’ Kate types it in. ‘It’s available!’

‘Seriously?’ I raise an eyebrow. ‘It’s hardly ever available. How new is this site?’

Kate shrugs. ‘Headline?’

I sit back down and take a sip of wine. I can feel it flushing my cheeks, making me a little light-headed.

‘Would like to meet the perfect man,’ I blurt out.

Kate scoffs. ‘Come on, Sophia. Be serious.’

‘I am being serious! That’s what I want, I want the perfect man,’ I insist. ‘I’m sick of dating noodle-obsessed weirdos and crazy ex-cons. I just want to meet someone decent for once, is that really too much to ask?’

Kate thinks for a moment. ‘But that’s not the same as perfect,’ she says.

‘It would be perfect for me.’

‘But saying you want to meet the perfect man makes you sound really high-maintenance.’ She pointedly raises an eyebrow, her fingers poised over the keyboard.

I shrug. ‘You asked what I want my headline to be.’

‘Fine! Well, let’s hope there’s a guy out there who’s put, “Would like to meet high-maintenance woman.”’ Kate types it in.

‘Do you know what?’ I declare, gesticulating with my wine glass. ‘Maybe it’s about time I start being a bit more high-maintenance. Raise the bar. No more loserish guys. Let’s go back to the age range.’

‘Why?’ Kate questions.

‘Because, do you know what? Twenty-five is too young. If the guy’s twenty-five then he’s probably got the mentality of a twenty-year-old. If he’s too young then he’s probably not done playing the field, he’s not going to want to settle down and it’ll just be a case of wham bam thank you ma’am.’

Kate smiles as she reaches for her wine glass. ‘Well, an older guy then?’ she suggests.

‘Maybe, but thirty-five is too old,’ I tell her. ‘If he’s thirty-five, he’ll probably be some creepy bachelor that no one’s wanted to take off the shelf or divorced, which is way too much baggage.’

‘Okay… So what age do you want?’ Kate presses, a hint of impatience in her voice.

‘Twenty-eight? Actually no,’ I think aloud. ‘Men mature slower than us, don’t they? So at twenty-eight, he might still not have caught up. Maybe thirty or thirty-one? No, a hot guy would have been snapped up by thirty. Okay, twenty-nine. Yeah, twenty-nine. He’s spent his twenties focusing on his career, he’s got his own home and everything’s sorted and now he’s beginning to realise that something’s missing…’

‘You?’ Kate suggests.

‘Exactly. Me!’

Kate laughs and clicks back to the age range. ‘Okay, so twenty-nine to… twenty-nine.’ She clicks enter. ‘Right, so your personal ad.’

I sigh. I could just use my standard one and paste it in. I’ve tried so many dating sites that in the end, I just created a folder on my desktop with the inconspicuous title of ‘Admin’, which actually contains all my best photos, my personal ad spiel, a list of my interests, likes and dislikes and all that jazz. It takes so long writing a good profile that there’s no point redoing it every time.

‘One second, I’ll get it. It’s on my computer.’ I put my wine glass down and get up to fetch my laptop from my bedroom.

‘Sophia,’ Kate calls me back. ‘What are you doing?’

‘My personal ad… It’s on my laptop.’

‘You’ve already written it?’ She looks confused.

‘It’s in my dating file,’ I tell her. ‘It’s a copy and paste job.’

Kate snorts with laughter. ‘Your dating file! Hah! What next? A spreadsheet for all the men you’ve ever dated?’

‘Shut up!’ I give her a little push.

‘Dating file! Hahahaha!’ Her eyes tear up as she falls about laughing.

‘Not all of us meet our ideal man the minute we move to London,’ I tut. ‘Some of us actually have to work at finding someone! And anyway, if you were dating, I think you’d find that having a dating file is actually quite efficient,’ I add, but Kate just roars with laughter and I can’t help cracking up too.

She wheezes, wiping the tears from her eyes.

‘Sorry, Sophia, but that was just…’ She shakes her head, turning her attention back to Dream Dates.

‘Okay, so, personal ad!’ she says.

I stand up to make a second attempt at going to get my laptop but Kate tugs my arm, pulling me back down.

‘Not from the file!’ Her mouth twitches.

I look at her blankly. ‘Why not?’

Kate clears her throat and glances down awkwardly.

‘Well something’s clearly not working if you’re not meeting any decent guys the way you’re going about things at the moment. I’m not saying it’s you. It could be the sites but don’t you think it would be good to just start this profile completely from scratch? You said it yourself – no more loserish guys, seeing as this is the final attempt?’

I shrug. ‘Suppose.’

‘Just freestyle it.’

‘Freestyle it…’ I groan as I take a sip of wine.

‘Yeah!’ Kate replies, the light from the laptop screen illuminating the look of hopeful determination on her face.

I really can’t be bothered to create a whole new profile from scratch on yet another site just to attract yet another bunch of weirdos and fuck-boys, but Kate is so keen to help that I’d feel bad letting her down now. Suddenly an idea hits me. I’ve tried to find love – a genuine, open, honest connection – again and again. All I’ve wanted is to meet someone nice, kind, intelligent and fun, but that’s proven completely and utterly impossible. I’ve put myself out there, with my best photos and a smart, witty (and not to mention properly punctuated) profile, and all I’ve gotten in return is dates with creeps and bores, and unsolicited dick pics. Kate’s right, what I’ve been doing so far clearly hasn’t been working. Maybe being sincere gets you nowhere, maybe now it’s time to play the players at their own game, to fuck with the fuck-boys and dick around with the dick pic dudes. I’m done being nice sweet Sophia; my new profile is going to be a little different. I’m not going to look for love this time, I’m going to look for man candy with the most crass, superficial and crude profile I can imagine. It’s time to meet my ‘perfect’ man.

‘Why are you smiling like that?’ Kate asks.

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know… mischievously.’ She narrows her eyes.

‘Oh, no reason.’ I shrug innocently.

‘Hmmm…’ Kate raises an eyebrow. ‘So, what are you looking for?’

‘I’m looking for someone who’s a cut above the rest,’ I tell her. ‘He’s cool, he’s confident. He’s suave and sexy. He’s smart and super successful, he’s got an incredible job.’

Oh! What does Mr Perfect do for work? My gaze wanders over to the well-thumbed copy of The Stage on the kitchen counter. Maybe he could be an actor like Kate? I never get bored of hearing her talk about work. But then again, dating an actor as well as having one for a best friend might be a bit much.

‘Right, okay.’ Kate finishes typing and looks up from the keyboard. ‘Carry on.’

‘I’m thinking…’

Voices from the street outside drift through the open window, distracting me.

‘Pass dat ting, bruv,’ someone says.

I get up to close it and spot a group of teenagers huddled outside the council estate opposite, passing around a joint. A few of them are lounging on an old mattress someone dumped on the pavement a couple of days ago. No doubt too broke to pay Lewisham Council to come and pick it up. I fasten the window shut. I never used to mind living down this shabby old street; if I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve always had the cringe-worthily romantic notion that it doesn’t matter where you live, it doesn’t matter if it’s a little shabby around the edges, as long as you have love. I mean, look at Kate. She’s head over heels for Max and she’s happy with her lot – she doesn’t mind living in crummy old Lewisham. I sort of imagined that when I found someone, I’d stop noticing the rubbish on the streets and the loitering teens, too. But when you find yourself alone at twenty-eight sitting in a cramped flat, with the closest thing you have to love being a softly lit dick pic on your phone, your romanticism starts to wear off. Since love isn’t softening the edges of my existence, why not just look for a stinking rich guy instead? Someone who lives in a beautiful part of London with big wide streets lined with tall spacious houses. The wealthy yang to my impoverished yin. Perhaps a banker. No, a banker would be too dull. Maybe he could be an entrepreneur. Yes! That’s it. A wildly original self-made millionaire.

‘He’s an entrepreneur,’ I announce to Kate as I turn from the window and sit back down.

‘He’s not some boring Etonian who’s just climbed through the ranks in law or finance, he’s done something original instead. He’s started his own business, but not just some crappy business, a multimillion-pound business, obviously.’

‘Multimillion-pound business?!’ Kate scoffs. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes! Just write it!’

She gives me a weird look.

‘Just do it!’ I insist.

‘Fine,’ she sighs, shaking her head as she types.

I take another sip of wine, even though I’m already feeling pretty merry.

Okay, so I’ve figured out that I’m looking for a self-made millionaire, but what does he look like? Obviously, I have my preferences, I definitely prefer tall guys, for example, though I’ve never considered myself particularly superficial when it comes to looks; after all, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, right? But, of course, this profile isn’t about what’s on the inside.

‘He’s good-looking, like, really good-looking… He’s got dark hair, blue eyes, maybe a bit of stubble… Actually, he has the face of Robert Pattinson but he’s more muscular. Yeah, he has the face of Robert Pattinson but with the body of Daniel Craig. He—’