Perfectly Ordinary People(49)

When I got outside, I stood beneath the awning to button up my coat. As I walked away, I glanced back and saw, to my fury, that he was not attempting to pay at all but was reaching over with his chopsticks, digging into my remaining dim sum. The cold-hearted bastard!



Because I’m very good at sulking and because Dan was too busy to do anything other than phone me – calls I obviously rejected – our silly, pointless crisis lasted almost a month.

Depending on the day of the week, I managed to convince myself that our relationship was over and he’d been my one true love and now I’d be single for ever, or he was a bastard and I was better off without him.

But then, mid-August, I got a text message from him. It said, ‘Are we merely sulking or has one of us met someone else?’

Then, a few seconds later: ‘That one of us being you, because I totally haven’t.’

I sat staring at the screen for a moment as I wondered how best to reply. But before I could even begin, another one arrived.

‘And by the way, the answers to your questions are Q1: No and Q2: Yes.’ Which gave me a non-committal way into the conversation.

‘Sorry, what were the questions again?’

Followed quickly by a softener: ‘Plus: hello you!!’

His answers arrived almost immediately, in fact, I was impressed with the speed of his texting.

‘Q1: Do you think we see enough of each other?’

‘Q2: Would living together be a good solution?’

I started to type a message to the effect that I felt I’d twisted his arm but my phone rang with his incoming call, so I said it out loud to him instead.

We met in the Red Lion, a pub halfway between his place and mine that we’d been to many times before. Despite the fact that it was fairly busy, we managed to get ourselves a booth where we sat opposite each other, nursing our drinks, sheepishly avoiding eye contact.

‘Well, that was quite a biggie,’ Dan finally said, and I was grateful he’d broken the silence. ‘What was that? A month?’

‘Almost,’ I said. ‘We’re still a couple of days short.’

‘I wasn’t expecting it to last that long. I was thinking ten or twenty minutes max.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘I didn’t think it would end up being quite so dramatic either.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just . . . past trauma, I guess you could call it. These things have a habit of sneaking up on you.’

‘Are we talking about the been there, done that?’

‘Yeah, and that was stupid of me. Because of course, I haven’t been there and done that with you, have I?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry too.’

‘For?’

‘Um. Well, for starters for telling you to fuck off.’

‘Gosh, you did say that, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten that.’

‘Should have kept my mouth shut.’

‘Yes,’ Dan said. ‘Maybe.’

‘But mainly I’m sorry for being such a sulker. I am a terrible sulker, sometimes. I hate that about myself.’

‘Yeah,’ Dan said again. ‘Yes, you can certainly sulk.’

‘Erm, so can you.’

‘I wasn’t sulking,’ Dan said. ‘I was just “working my tits off”.’ He’d made the quotes again, but this time they’d seemed to be quite friendly. ‘Plus I called you,’ he continued. ‘Not really my fault if you choose not to pick up.’

‘Totally true as well,’ I said. ‘And we don’t have to live together, by the way, Dan. We honestly don’t. It was just—’

‘But I want to. I’ve thought about it and I want to try.’

‘Oh, wow,’ I said. ‘OK. Could we perhaps talk about that another time, though? Let’s just get back on track first, can we?’ Going from not speaking for weeks to moving in together just seemed too much of a shift to be achieved within the space of a single conversation.

‘Sure,’ Dan said. ‘Whatever you want.’

‘In the meantime I do have another proposition for you,’ I said. ‘A holiday in Arcachon next month.’

‘That’s in France, yeah? On the Atlantic?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘The ocean’ll be freezing, but then you know that.’

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. ‘I remember.’

‘That’s where your grandfather is, right?’ Dan asked.

‘It is,’ I said. ‘So it could be weird. Dad says he’s a bit strange.’

‘Great,’ Dan said. ‘I love strange.’

‘Do you still have the first to the fourteenth free?’

‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Amazingly, I do.’

‘Me too. So those are our dates.’

I’d received Grandpa Chris’s second postcard – with an email address this time, but still no phone number – just a week earlier and had been toying with the idea of going to see him alone. But now Dan was back, I had an ally. And having an ally would make it fun no matter how weird my grandad turned out to be.

So that same evening, after make-up sex, I emailed him suggesting the 1st to the 14th of September.