Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop

‘And, I’m not married and have no plans to,’ Verity added.

‘Alcohol?’ said a heavily-accented voice from the archway on the right and Nina turned gratefully towards Paloma, the tearoom’s barista who was standing there with a hopeful expression on her face. ‘Alcohol? Nina? Alcohol?’

‘Alcohol!’ Nina gratefully confirmed. ‘Si! Alcohol!’

Paloma was Spanish, from Barcelona, and hadn’t been in London for long. Her English was rather basic, though she said that coffee was pretty much a universal language, and she had more piercings than Nina (who had seven holes in one ear, eight in the other and a metal bolt through her tongue) or even Nina’s friend Claude, and he pierced people for a living. Paloma also had an on/off Cuban boyfriend called Jesus, who wasn’t as godly as his name suggested. It often sounded to Nina like they were having the most tempestuous rows, as it did ten minutes later, once they were settled round the table in a tapas bar just off the Grays Inn Road.

As usual, Paloma and Jesus were shouting at each other and gesticulating wildly as Nina sat there nursing a vodka and tonic to chase away the last dregs of her hangover. ‘Guys,’ she said eventually when there was a pause in the argument. ‘Really guys, I’m a big believer in passion, but can we just dial it down a notch?’

‘Que?’ Jesus shrugged.

‘We just talk about if we need the … the papel de baño …’

‘The papel de whato?’ Nina asked.

‘How do you say …’ Paloma swiped her hand in the region of her crotch where she apparently had quite a few piercings too. ‘For after when you pee.’

‘Oh, you mean loo roll.’

‘Si! Loo roll.’

Just as Nina was starting to despair of her Wednesday night, the door opened, letting in a gust of wind and a group of Paloma and Jesus’s friends. There was much hugging and kissing and shouting and gesticulating. It was a sea of unfamiliar, though smiling, faces.

The friends commandeered two extra tables, ordered what seemed like hundreds of tiny plates of delicious food and shouted at each other in Spanish. They tried to include Nina, to pull her into the conversation with halting English, but in the end she was left to her own devices and a bowl of patatas bravas. This was how Paloma must feel a lot of the time; everyone chattering away in another language, so Nina took it as her due. She also took the lingering looks from one of Jesus’s friends, Javier, and returned them with interest.

Javier had tousled black hair, the kind of hair that was designed solely to be rumpled by a lover’s hand. He had dark eyes that a girl could lose herself in. He also had a smile that was pure sex and seated as he was across the table from Nina, she was pretty sure that it was Javier’s leg that was rubbing against hers.

Nina glanced at Javier from under her lashes, her fingers trailing provocatively along her neckline to highlight her cleavage displayed to best advantage in the tight black vintage dress she’d quickly changed into before they left the shop.

But when Javier’s tongue did something quite obscene with his bottle of lager, Nina began to wonder how they were going progress things when she only spoke five words of Spanish. And when he did it again, this time with added and very unsexy slurping at the bottle neck, she found herself go suddenly cold.

Nina knew precisely nothing about Javier, except that he was from Spain (though she wasn’t completely sure about that, he could just be from a Spanish-speaking country), he was Paloma’s friend and, judging from what he was doing to his poor lager bottle, he was angling for a hook-up.

Oh God, she was so tired of this merry-go-round. It was time for Nina to make her excuses and leave because she had a three-date minimum before hooking up. And how could you have three dates with someone when you only understood a few words they were saying? Also, if she and Javier did get past three dates, got intimate with each other, only for things to fizzle out (after all, intimacy was no guarantee of a happy ever after), then things could get awkward between Nina and Paloma. Paloma did make a stellar cup of coffee and Nina would hate it if Paloma started spitting in hers or worse, withholding coffee altogether. This was why dear, beloved Lavinia had been fond of saying, ‘Don’t get your bread from the same place that you get your eggs,’ or as Nina’s father would say more brusquely, ‘Don’t shit where you sleep.’

What Javier was doing now with his tongue was actually starting to make her feel a bit nauseous and weary with it all. Since when had hooking up become so … boring? If there was one thing that Nina didn’t do, it was boring. ‘Boring’ wasn’t the reason why she’d upgraded her daytime make-up to an evening look, which involved yet another lorryload of eyeliner, a more strongly defined brow and industrial amounts of red lipstick. ‘Boring’ wasn’t why Nina had poured herself into a black satin wiggle dress and teetered to the tapas bar in five-inch heels.

Nina had gone to all this effort because she wanted to bewitch and beguile the man of her dreams and she had a very clear idea of just who that man was. Some ten years before, Nina had read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and it had changed her life forever. Heathcliff and Cathy were star-crossed lovers who couldn’t live with each other and couldn’t live without each other. It was all passion and angst and rugged Yorkshire moorland. And though in his worst moments, Heathcliff was one hundred per cent toxic masculinity, in his best moments, Nina had glimpsed the kind of man who would make her happy. A man who was her soulmate. Her one true love. A restless heart to match her own. A man who’d try to beat her at her own game but would only succeed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and alternate Sundays. A man who’d share all the highs and lows of a love that was too great to be contained. A man who loved with everything he was and wouldn’t settle for second best, so why should Nina? And that was why she was holding out for a Heathcliff and would accept no substitutes.

But it turned out that in real life, Heathcliffs were pretty thin on the ground and Nina knew without a shadow of a doubt that a Heathcliff would not be passionately tonguing a cheap bottle of euro-lager on a Tuesday night.

Nina smiled regretfully, tucked her legs under her chair before Javier gave her friction burns, and pulled out her phone.

The night was still young, she thought as she logged into HookUpp – maybe her romantic hero would be lurking in its algorithms tonight. HookUpp was a dating app designed and owned by Sebastian’s company ZingerMedia, so Nina was always slightly terrified that he had access to her login details and might share classified information with Posy over dinner.

‘Wouldn’t expect Tattoo Girl to be on time tomorrow,’ he’d say, poring over Nina’s metadata. ‘She’s just up-swiped on a graphic designer who up-swipes a different woman every evening and never gets less than a four-star rating from any of them.’

Still, Nina wasn’t fearful enough to delete the app. Not when there was every chance of love lurking around the next corner. Or rather Steven, 31, writer, who was apparently 0.3 km away and had already up-swiped Nina and sent her a message: Fancy a drink?

It was quite dimly lit in the tapas bar and Nina had to peer quite closely at her screen to get a good look at Steven’s picture. Not that she was shallow, but she didn’t want to go for a drink with someone who looked like they’d buried their last four HookUpps in shallow graves.

Steven looked all right. He was posed with a Labrador, who was absolutely gorgeous. How bad could Steven be if he was friendly with a dog? Dogs were great judges of character.

Nina up-swiped Steve and sent a message back. Thornton Arms, ten minutes?

Steven messaged back. I’ll be waiting outside.

It wasn’t very romantic, but looking for love, even looking for a Heathcliff, was a numbers game. A girl had to manoeuvre around a lot of frogs to find her prince. In Nina’s experience, which was vast, it was best to get the meet and greet out of the way ASAP and then, hopefully, she and Steven, 31, could get on with the falling in love.

With a renewed sense of optimism, Nina scraped her chair back and stood up. ‘Guys! I have to go now,’ she said. There was a gratifying chorus of ‘No’s and many hand-wringing gestures. Javier, though, just shrugged and stopped making love to his lager bottle, so Nina knew she’d been right to trust her instincts. If Javier had the Heathcliff gene, he’d have thrown himself to the ground to prevent Nina from leaving or at the very least, he’d have offered to buy her a drink if she agreed to stay.

There was just time for a quick primp and spritz in the bathroom to ensure her hair was still immaculately set and that her lipstick was still where it should be.

All was well. Watch out, Steven, 31, writer, get ready to fall madly in love.

Nina left the bar and walked round the corner, took a left, and even now, after years of blind dates and meeting men whose picture was a little avatar on her phone screen, she still got the same feeling in her stomach. A churny, tingly feeling of expectation, excitement and yes, a little bit of dread. It didn’t matter how many times Nina took a walk to meet a man, she never failed to have that colony of butterflies fluttering deep inside her, because she might be about to meet her destiny. This. Could. Be. The. One.

‘You Nina, then?’ asked the man in the suit stood outside the Thornton Arms. ‘You looked thinner in your picture.’

He’d looked at least ten years younger, five inches taller and had definitely had more hair. ‘Steven,’ Nina confirmed with a bright smile, even as the butterflies stopped fluttering and she wondered why she’d bothered to reapply her lipstick for this.

‘Shall we?’ Steven opened the door not for Nina but so he could enter the pub first, which was just bad manners. At least he didn’t let the door shut in Nina’s face, but he was already on one strike.

‘So, let’s find somewhere to sit,’ Nina suggested, but Steven was too busy giving her the once over to reply.

His eyes lingered on what Nina lovingly called her three b’s: boobs, belly, booty. Not with admiration or longing or lust, but with obvious distaste.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘you really should include a full-body shot on your HookUpp profile. Saves a lot of time. I don’t normally contact women who only have a headshot.’

Nina refrained from pointing out that he’d uploaded a picture from the dim and distant days when he’d had a full head of hair. ‘I’m sorry that my curves are too much for you to handle,’ she said icily, drawing herself up so those curves were displayed to their best advantage.

She was a size fourteen. Size sixteen. Size fourteen. OK, she was somewhere between a fourteen and sixteen depending on the time of the month, which shop she was in and how many of the tearoom’s delicious baked goods she’d scoffed that week. And Nina was OK with that. She liked her body. It looked good in her beloved vintage dresses. It looked good with no clothes on at all. It could walk great distances in high heels. It could walk even greater distances on the very rare occasions when she wore flats. If she wanted to feel bad about her body, then she could go and visit her mother. She certainly wasn’t going to let this Steven, with his cheap suit and sweaty upper lip, try to make her feel that she should be something less.

‘You know what, let’s call it quits,’ she said, which was very reasonable of her.

‘Why should we do that? I’ll get you a drink,’ Steven offered but it sounded very ungracious, like he was doing Nina a huge favour. ‘Then you can make it up to me.’

Make what up to him? For failing to have the words I’M NOT A SIZE EIGHT emblazoned on her profile? And how exactly did Steven think she was going to make amends for this dreadful oversight? Well, his eyes had barely left her boobs for the last five minutes so Nina had a pretty clear idea.

‘I’m very good at making up,’ she purred, fluttering her eyelashes at Steven, whose upper lip glistened even more. ‘You go and get me a vodka tonic, a large one, while I powder my nose.’

Steven had the nerve – the sheer nerve! – to pat Nina on the bottom and that was maybe his fifth strike, she’d lost count of just how many strikes, which was why she didn’t go through the door marked Ladies but carried on down the hall until she came to a door marked Private, which she knocked on.

It was opened by a burly, middle-aged man in a One Direction T-shirt who didn’t look surprised to see Nina. ‘Operation Frog?’ he asked.

‘Operation Frog,’ Nina confirmed. ‘I could kiss him from now until the end of eternity and he’d never be anything but a total arsehole.’

‘Say no more, my love,’ said Chris, landlord of the Thornton Arms and self-styled saviour of any customer on a bad date. ‘Follow me.’