Here’s Looking At You

‘Right, I’ve got Inspector Google on this Shaved Gorilla bullshit,’ Michelle said, squinting at her iPhone screen, Marlboro Light aloft in the other hand, smoke curling upwards in the empty dining room.

Anna couldn’t have coped with so many bad dates without the prospect of her friends to flee to at the end of the evening. Fortunately they worked hours that made them ideally suited to nightcaps rather than nights out.

Michelle’s ‘traditional British cooking with a twist’ was served at The Pantry, just off Upper Street in Islington. It was Grade II listed, with antique chandeliers, potted palms and buttercream wooden panelling. The kind of place where you have wartime affairs with men called Freddy in BBC dramas, and use phrases like ‘it was a horrid business’.

Daniel, Michelle’s long-standing front of house, was one of those semi-famous maître d’s who got mentioned in Time Out for being a ‘character’. The word character could be a euphemism for ‘tiresome git’, but Daniel had genuine charm and authentic eccentricity.

It was partly his appearance: a sweep of thick sandy hair, a bushy beard and high-magnification glasses which gave him cartoon eyes. He looked like a Looney Tunes lion crossed with an Open University professor. He dressed like Toad of Toad Hall in vintage tweed suits and spoke with an arch, old-fashioned cadence, like a junior Alan Bennett.

The three of them often met for drinks once Michelle had closed up, draped across the waiting area sofas, as the stubby candles guttered on the tables. Michelle was businesslike in her chef’s whites and kitchen-only Crocs. Her short, shiny bob, dyed exactly the same red you found in curry houses on tandoori chicken, was worn tucked behind her ears. She had ginormous hazelnut-coloured eyes, a generous painterly mouth, and a statuesque figure that flowed from a prow of a bosom. A supermodel, but out of time. She was instead stuck in an era where people would call her a beauty but a ‘big girl’.

‘Maybe it’s not deviant,’ Daniel said from across the room, where he was sweeping up. ‘Maybe everyone else but us is doing the shaved gorilla and the funky chicken and the … jugged hare.’

‘I’ve had jugged hare on the menu and I can assure you it’s nothing you want to be a sexual euphemism, given the amount of blood involved,’ Michelle said, still peering at her phone.

Daniel set his broom down and joined them.

‘Someone asked me why I wasn’t wearing a hair net today,’ he said vaguely, as he poured out a port from the cluster of bottles on the low-slung table.

‘What? Who? Did you say “Do you think you’re in Pork Farms”?’ Michelle asked.

‘Your head hair, but not your beard?’ Anna asked.

‘No, they said that was unhygienic too.’

‘A beard net? Because there’d be nothing more reassuring than someone serving you food in a surgeon’s mask,’ Michelle said. ‘Hang on. Who asked you this? Was it table five who had the vegan, the wheat intolerant and the one who subbed the cheese for more salad in the Stilton and walnut salad?’

‘Yep.’

‘How did I know? A band of pleasure dodgers.’

‘Subbed the cheese?’ Anna asked. She could’ve applied her brain to it, but she was by now pretty drunk.

‘Americanism. Infuriating trend. Act as if they’re in a sandwich bar saying hold the mayo, extra pickle,’ Michelle said.

‘We’re firmly in the era of the fussy fuck I’m afraid and there’s nothing we can do about it,’ Daniel said.

His Yorkshire-accented lisp pronounced it more as futhy fug, so it sounded like it could safely be uttered on a Radio 4 panel show. This was Daniel’s secret in defusing problems, Anna thought: whatever the words, the expression was gentle.

Michelle ran her index finger up her phone screen.

‘Gotcha! The Shaved Gorilla … oh my,’ she said, as she read. ‘I’m not sure our grandfathers died for this.’

‘He did say this is what he isn’t into?’ Daniel said.

‘Dan, get with it. Classic grooming technique to float it as a joke first,’ Michelle said, shaking her head. ‘Brace yourself, it’s something gruesome with jism.’ She turned her phone screen to Anna, who squinted, read it and grimaced.

‘Want me to try figging?’ Michelle asked.

‘No! I never want to try figging! I want to meet a nice man who wants to have standard sex with just me. Has that really gone so far out of fashion?’

‘If something’s never been in fashion it can never go out,’ Daniel said, tweaking his own lapels, as Anna weakly shoulder-punched him.

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‘I mean, where’s the romance and mystery?’ Anna continued, holding up her glass for a refill. ‘Mr Darcy said you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. Not, you must allow me to tell you I’m into this spunk-throwing thing.’

‘We don’t live in the right era for an Anna,’ Michelle agreed. ‘Not much formality and wooing. But, you know. If you lived in Jane Austen time you’d have teeth like Sugar Puffs and seven kids with no pain relief. Swings and roundabouts. What appealed about this Neil’s profile, before you met him?’

‘Uhm. He seemed sane and pleasant enough,’ Anna shrugged.

Michelle flicked her fag into the Illy coffee cup that was performing ashtray duties. She was constantly giving up, then falling off the wagon.

Anna and Michelle had met in their early twenties at WeightWatchers. Anna had passed with flying colours, Michelle had flunked. One day, their bouncy cult leader was barking: ‘Strong minds need healthy bodies!’ and Michelle had said loudly, in her West Country lilt: ‘That’s Stephen Hawking told, by Jet from Gladiators,’ and then, into the shocked silence, ‘Fuck this, I’m off for a boneless bucket.’ That week, Anna missed her weigh-in and made a best mate.

‘“Sane and pleasant enough” is aiming a bit low? I’ve hired staff that had more going for them than that.’

‘I dunno. I just spent an evening with a man who talked about weeing on people as a leisure activity and demanded to know what I like in bed. So in the face of that, I’ll take sane and pleasant. Try internet dating, and your expectations would tumble too.’

Michelle had people she called when she fancied a tumble. She’d had her heart broken by a married man and insisted she was not interested in looking for further disappointment.

‘But you make my point for me, my love. That was someone “safe”, so why not take a risk on Mr Exciting?’

‘Even if they agreed to a date, I don’t want to handle Mr Exciting’s disappointment when he turns up and meets me.’

There was a brief pause while Frank Sinatra bellowed his way through ‘Strangers in the Night’, from the stereo held together with duct tape underneath the till.

‘Are we going to say it?’ Michelle said, looking to Daniel. ‘Fuck it, I’m going to say it. Anna, there’s modesty, which is a lovely quality. Then there’s underrating yourself to a self-harming degree. You are bloody brilliant. What disappointment are you talking about?’

Anna sighed and leaned back against the sofa.

‘Hah, well. I’m not though, am I? Or I wouldn’t have been single forever.’

Anna’s British gran Maude had a dreadful saying about the lonely folly of romantic ideas above your station: ‘Shewouldn’t have a walker and the riders didn’t stop’.

It had given eleven-year-old Anna the chills. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Some women think they’re too good for those who want them, but when they’re not good enough for the men they want, they end up alone.’

Maude had been an utter misery-tits about everything. But a misery-tits could be right, several times a day.

‘When did you get this idea you’re in some way not good enough?’ Michelle said.

‘That’d be school.’

A pause. Michelle and Daniel knew the stories of course, right up to the Mock Rock. And they knew about The Thing That Happened After. There was a tense pause, as much as anything could be tense when they were supine with alcohol at knocking one in the morning.

Michelle sensitively turned the focus, for a moment.