‘Ooooh, you look nice,’ Robbie said when I stuck my head round the kitchen door on my way out, just to check that he had everything under control. ‘Off on your date? Love the frock – it’s very fifties housewife.’
‘Oh God, is it that obvious?’ I looked down at my dress. I’d found it in a charity shop and bought it, thinking it ticked the feminine box, and besides, it was only a fiver. But now Robbie mentioned it, the sweetheart neckline, nipped-in waist and full skirt were a bit OTT. ‘Shit. I look like Betty Draper, don’t I?’
Robbie put his head on one side. ‘A bit. But it suits you. Demure. Not your usual style at all.’
‘Well, hopefully it’ll work for Mr Cancer. Get this – he’s called Sheldon.’
Robbie doubled over, almost sending a bottle of olive oil flying. ‘No way!’
‘Yep. It’s going to take some doing to keep a straight face. He’s from Chicago, and we’re meeting at a burger bar. Which seems like a bit of a cliché, but there you go.’
‘I hope they do a vegan option.’
‘They do, I checked. And about thirty different flavours of milkshake, which made me rethink my life choices a bit. But there’ll be a dairy-free one, I expect.’
‘Well, make sure you report back,’ Robbie said, and as the door closed behind me I heard him say, ‘Sheldon. Oh my word, you couldn’t make it up.’
On the train, I checked my phone to remind myself what my date looked like, and the exact location of Dexter’s. I was feeling nervous, but nothing like as jittery as I’d been the first time I went to meet a stranger for a date. Give it a couple more goes, I told myself, and I’d be taking all this in my stride. I’d survived so far – how bad could this home-loving, family-minded man actually be?
Dexter’s was in a chichi part of West London where I rarely ventured. The street was lined with the kind of boutique that displays just one cashmere jumper in the window, and you know that nothing in there – not even a pair of socks – will cost less than a hundred pounds. There was a florist, an artisan chocolate shop and a place that sold handmade stationery.
Sheldon lived nearby, he’d told me, and worked in finance. Clearly he was making shedloads of cash, to be able to afford a house in an area like this. As I walked, I let myself imagine briefly what his future wife’s life would be like – my life, if he turned out to be The One.
I’d have a massive car – one of those Chelsea tractors I disapproved of on environmental grounds – that I’d drop the children off at their private school in, even though I disapproved equally of fee-paying schools. Then I’d go to my barre exercise class in my Lululemon sportswear, before having a massage or a manicure and meeting a friend for lunch. In the afternoon I’d take the children to their activities – riding lessons, I supposed, or fencing or Japanese or something. I’d give them their tea and they’d be in bed by the time Sheldon got home from work, and I’d be freshly made up and smiling, with a chilled bottle of Chablis ready for us.
I’d have a massive fuck-off shoe collection and a massive fuck-off Valium habit.
Shaking my head at my own silliness, I pulled my mind back to the present. I hadn’t even met Sheldon yet, never mind married him, had his babies and developed a substance-abuse problem as a result. But I had arrived at our designated meeting spot.
Dexter’s was a diner-lover’s diner, that was for sure. It had bright red plastic benches in the booths, metal holders stuffed with paper napkins on the tables, and stripy red-and-white straws in the chunky glasses the customers were enthusiastically slurping milkshakes from. There were 1980s-style airbrushed prints of Coke bottles, fries, hot dogs and ice-cream sundaes on the walls, complete with photo-realistic drips of sauce and condensation that made me hungry just looking at them. The waitresses I could see were wearing ra-ra skirts in neon colours and tight cropped T-shirts with the restaurant’s name on them in a 3D typeface.
I paused outside, glancing faux-casually over my shoulder through the plate-glass windows. First prize was for spotting Sheldon before he spotted me, and not looking like a weirdo in the process. Only problem was, I couldn’t see anyone there who might be him. The restaurant wasn’t large – fifty covers, maybe – and it was full of groups of teenagers, families and one table of ultra-slim, heavily made-up women in designer clothes stuffing food into their faces in a kind of guilty frenzy.
But anyway, I was here even if he wasn’t. If he didn’t show up, I’d just have to front it out and enjoy a trash-tastic feast on my own. I pushed open the door and stepped in, then hesitated for a second looking for a free table.
‘Welcome to Dexter’s.’ A waitress approached me with an iPad secured to a clipboard. Authentic, I thought. ‘Do you have a reservation?’
‘No, I’m meeting someone but I’m not sure if he’s…’
I stopped, my attention caught by a waving hand across the room. That was Sheldon, I was pretty sure. The man I’d seen in his profile pictures, with crinkly brown hair, straight white teeth and bulky shoulders. I was fairly certain I even recognised the mint-green polo shirt he was wearing. But my first impression of the room had been correct: there were no single men there.
Because sitting opposite Sheldon, craning his neck round to have a good old open-mouthed gawp at me, was a little boy in a shirt just like his dad’s with an alligator on the pocket, only coral pink.
Shit. He’d only gone and brought his kid.
His. Kid. On. A. Date.
‘Of course, what I should have done is turned right around and left.’ Dani and I were conducting a post-date post-mortem in the gym, both of us flopped against the wall, sipping water and waiting for our heart rates to drop back to normal. Across the room from us, Fabian Flatley was doing handstand push-ups against the wall, shirtless, the muscles of his back bunching and rippling as he worked, sweat dripping off him onto the floor and rhythmic grunts issuing from him with every press.
‘Yeah, maybe. But you can’t just do that, can you?’
‘I could have. I’m kicking myself for not doing it. But at the time, it just feels so awkward and you don’t want to be rude.’
‘And you’re all invested in the idea of it and you’ve got dressed for it and everything.’
‘Exactly. He hadn’t even mentioned the kid, not in his profile or our messages or anything. Who does that? But then part of me was thinking, I didn’t want the kid to think it was something he’d done that had made me bail out, and be upset.’
‘Which is ridiculous if you think about it for more than about a nanosecond.’
I nodded. ‘If you don’t want your kid to be upset by how your date behaves, there’s a simple solution.’
‘Don’t bring your bloody kid on the date in the first place.’
‘Correct. But I didn’t even have a nanosecond to think about it, because I was already walking in through the door and he was waving at me and the kid was staring and it was like I lost the power of rational thought, so I just kept walking in and sat down. And it went downhill from there – fast.’
‘How so?’ Dani draped her towel over her neck and took a big gulp of water. Fabian had finished his press-ups and had strolled over to the weights rack where he was loading up the bar for deadlifts, making a lot more crashing sounds than were strictly necessary. Dani watched him admiringly, and I resisted the urge to ask her if he was this annoying and attention-seeking, like, all the time.