Dan Taylor Is Giving Up on Women (17 page)

I said hello, and with a small yelp Janice jumped and landed in what looked a lot like a kung-fu pose, before identifying me, lurking behind a stack of Post-its®, as a friend not foe.

‘Dan, Dan Superman!’ she said cheerily. ‘You gave me a fright — I almost lacerated your windpipe because I thought you were a dangerous assailant.’

‘No, no, just me. Looking for pens,’ I reassured her.

‘You know, you could kill a man with the barrel of a disposable biro.’

‘Really? Right. That’s…good to know. Sorry to scare you. Client about, so I was sent into exile so I didn’t frighten them with my hideous Elephant Man features,’ I said, doing my best impression of John Hurt from the movie.

‘Poor love,’ she said, ‘and it sounds like you’ve got a cold too.’

‘No, that was just…’

‘I could see if one of the girls has got a Lemsip?’

‘Thanks, but it was only an impression.’

‘An impression?’

‘Of the Elephant Man? The movie? “I am not an animal!”?’

‘Is that Disney? It doesn’t sound much like an elephant to me.’

Janice started flicking switches on different bits of ominous-looking hardware, and tapping away at a laptop linked up to the server.

‘So are you all right, Superman Dan?’ she asked as she worked.

‘Me? Great. The eye doesn’t really hurt. It was just a trip.’

‘I mean more generally, are you all right? We’ve hardly seen you this year, and we’ve missed you in the Zetland.’

‘I’m fine. Fine.’

‘Are you sure? Because you’ve not been yourself. Just yesterday I’d been talking to Delph and she was saying the same thing. We’ve been worrying.’

It was her eyes that sometimes made Janice look a bit unhinged, the way they would dart around and narrow at the hint of a slight, or go overly wide with a new conspiracy theory. But they were also what could make her knuckle-bitingly attractive when she was being a bit soulful, big and deep brown against pale skin and hair the staff in my local Boots would have me believe was called sun-kissed summer blonde.

‘Oh, you know, the January blues,’ I said with a shrug.

I’m not saying I was playing it to get sympathy, but the ‘head down and look up’ move I used did remind me of those pictures you see of Princess Diana in the tabloids all the time.

‘And I know full well how it works when someone gets a black eye and has to convince everyone it was just an accident,’ she continued, ‘but it doesn’t help when people pry. I’m around if you want to talk.’

I felt terrible at right about that point for all the mad Janice thoughts I’d ever had, realising that there was probably a lot of stuff I didn’t know about that explained why she was like what she was like.

‘There we go,’ she said chirpily, ‘email upgrade finished. Now let’s just check into my account to see everything’s OK.’

Her voice took on an artificial tone. The cloud of crazy had descended again.

‘Oh. A message from Gary in Financial Services? It seems he’s accidentally forwarded everybody in the office some emails he was swapping with a lady at one of our clients. My goodness, that’s not the sort of imagery you’d expect to see in a workplace email. Doing that would certainly be in breach of corporate health and safety guidelines. And would probably break the photocopier.’

‘Gary?’ I said. ‘I thought he’d just started seeing Mandy on Reception?’

‘Yes, that’s what she’d thought too, until he mentions some other strumpet to the poor girl on, you know, the morning after… Still at least now she knows what kind of sleaze he is. I mean, this doesn’t make him look very respectful to women, does it? Especially if he’s thinking of doing
that
— it’d leave a nasty welt at the very least.’

I peered over Janice’s shoulder to read the email messages that had been plucked from the obscurity of the hundreds that poured out of here every day, and a shiver worked its way up to my shoulders. A distractedly smiling Janice nudged her head against my cheek, and stood up from the server monitor screen.

‘I’d better go and see him. He’ll probably want to see if I can get that message recalled. I hope it’s not too late and somebody hasn’t decided to forward it externally to all their friends. That would be embarrassing for him. You coming to Jamie’s party on Saturday?’

‘It looks like it, yes.’

‘Yay! Chris and Delph and me are going too, and we can hang out like in the pub but at somebody’s house!’

With a little finger wave she was gone, and shortly after I decided to follow her. I expected Gary was going to be in here getting a storage box to collect up all his personal effects. I didn’t fancy bumping into him in the
circumstances, especially considering the vivid plans he’d had for what he could get up to with the Accounts Receivables lady on top of a boxful of printer cartridges.

Back at my desk the office was humming with murmurs of Gary’s misdemeanours as I sat down to check my mail yet again. I didn’t know how often I’d sat there and pressed send/receive over the course of the morning and afternoon, but it must have been a number close to umpteen.

Nothing from Hannah still.

It’d seemed we’d been in nearly hourly contact since we started this dating experiment, and no texts, or calls, or messages for two days felt an eternity. Of course, I could have sent her something, but I just had no idea what to say.

There was a message from Delphine entitled ‘hey bruiser’ asking if I wanted to go for a drink after work, no doubt to try and get to the bottom of blackeye-gate again. Turning her down for drinks was getting to be a habit for me, but I had too many things on my mind. I’d have to admit that the extra attention being a little more mysterious was getting me was giving me a boost too. I rattled off a quick reply to her, citing prior commitments and, just as a PS, mentioned that I might be a bruiser, but she looked like a knockout today.

And with that I shut my computer down, grabbed my coat, and headed out into the street, to head for poker, sharing a lift with a shell-shocked ex-financial services analyst who had apparently been dismissed over alleged misuse of the office twelve-inch ruler.

‘I’ll bet a tenner,’ said Martin.

‘Call,’ said Angus.

‘Fold,’ I said.

‘Fold,’ said Jim.

‘I’ll see your ten, raise you one hundred,’ said Rob.

‘How much have you got in front of you there?’ replied Martin.

‘About three hundred and fifty.’

‘All right, I’m putting you all in.’

Gasps of shock went around the table as Rob and Martin squared off, putting unprecedented amounts of money on the table in bets. It had been a funny night already — the usual smooth ironic banter and joshing was minimally off kilter, like watching digital TV when the words that people were saying and the way their lips were moving were not quite syncing. And it had just got markedly tenser.

Angus, the only other player aside from Martin and Rob left in the hand, folded and for once he remained in his seat rather than springing up to refresh drinks and pass around little stuffed peppers. Jim even stopped his constant checking of the BBC News headlines on his phone to watch how things unfolded. Rob called the bet for all the money he had on the table.

The chips in front of the two last remaining players towered in the middle of the felt-covered table, brightly illuminated by the low shaded light in an otherwise darkly lit room. When we were playing poker it was easy to forget sometimes that each one of those chips had a cash value away from the game and we tossed them around gambling a bit more casually than we would if we considered their monetary worth. But seeing this many up for grabs in the centre brought that reality rushing back to the front of our minds.

‘Let’s get them on their backs,’ said Rob in his role as dealer as he and Martin turned their two cards face up ahead of the deal of the final two communal cards — there’d be no more betting now all their chips had been committed. The rest of us quickly analysed the two players’ hands against the shared cards on the table and, with some murmuring about potential for straights and flushes, could see that Rob was looking good with an Ace in his hand paired with another Ace on the board, and with the Jack of Clubs as a kicker, beating the pair of tens Martin was displaying in front of him.

‘OK, here comes the turn.’

He snapped off the top card and slid it onto a pile of discards before flipping over another and sliding it next to the three cards already dealt — a Jack of Diamonds. A small tortured squeak emitted from Angus suggesting that, not only had this card put Rob in an even stronger position against Martin in the hand, but that if Angus had stayed in, he would have had something better than both of them at this point.

‘And we’ll take it to the river,’ continued Rob, burning another card then turning over the final card to come into play.

The money on offer was huge, more than a thousand in chips just sitting there, waiting to be converted into cash at the end of the night — and a thousand in chips would be the most anyone had ever won in a single hand.

It was the ten of hearts — one of the only two cards in the entire pack that could win the hand for Martin. An enormous ‘oooh’ went around the table, followed by a round of applause for Martin as he hauled the chips towards him.

One thousand pennies in cash. Ten whole pounds.

‘You do realise what a terrible hand you played there, don’t you?’ asked Rob as Martin began sorting his chips into neat stacks.

‘I could afford to have a few more terrible hands like that,’ said Martin.

‘I was winning from the flop and you had two outs in the whole deck. Morally, I still feel like the winner.’

‘I’m not sure a cabbie’s going to accept a moral victory if you’re a tenner short on the fare home, though,’ pointed out Angus.

‘No, no, it’s fine, keep playing like that, fellas, and it’s all coming back to me in the long-term. You can’t beat the odds for ever. Here’s ten more.’

Rob pulled another note from his wallet, and Angus counted out more chips for him. OK, so it’sprobably clear by now that our Tuesday night game was not really one for high rollers, but it had been a monthly institution for years, going back to the time Rob and I first shared a flat together and fancied ourselves as The Odd Couple. The ten-quid buy-in usually lasted everyone all night, and it was pride and competitiveness that raised the stakes.

Martin and Jim rounded out the numbers, a former colleague of Rob’s and an old flatmate of Angus’s respectively. I couldn’t help but think of them as the grown-ups, maybe because I didn’t know them away from the poker table. Jim was a serious sort, who did something for some form of government-backed institute that did something we didn’t understand — or had just never asked about. We weren’t even sure if he was very important or just an anonymous minor cog, although every now and then he’d mention something that made us think he might be secretly running the country.

Martin, meanwhile, was the most settled of us all, an area manager for a retail chain, married with twin toddler daughters. He also seemed the most transformed of the poker gang over the years we’d been playing, a wideboy who’d worked in marketing with Rob and who, before he got married, used to joke about how he was going home to one of his girlfriends to ‘play with the twins’. These days the saying was no longer a smutty euphemism.

It was his turn to deal, but we had to wait for him to finish counting up his newly won chips first, the stacks forming one tall central column, flanked by a shorter stack on each side, making all the phallic posturing of the game just that little bit less understated. As the cards started flying out, landing somewhere in the vicinity of each of us, he started firing out questions too.

‘So, Dan, as the last single man standing, anything to report back from the frontline?’

‘He’s been a busy boy, haven’t you, sport?’ answered Rob instantly on my behalf. ‘H and I have been setting him up on dates left, right and centre, and have you seen the women in his office? Hff, he’s in a bachelor dreamland, I tell you.’

‘You don’t get a shiner like that unless you’ve been living it up a bit, I bet,’ agreed Martin.

‘And don’t forget last time he was here, he was dancing on this very table with a woman nearly young enough to be his daughter,’ added Angus. ‘I’ve only just got the scuff marks off.’

‘It’s always the quiet ones,’ said Martin.

‘The results of the Israeli vote are looking very iffy,’ tutted Jim, looking at his BlackBerry.

Everybody called the blinds, and Martin dealt out a flop of raggedy-looking middling-number cards. The kind of cards that used to make it difficult to know whether to shout ‘higher!’ or ‘lower!’ when watching
Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right
as a kid.

‘Check,’ said Angus.

‘Yep,’ I chipped in as my turn to bet came around, ‘as matchmakers go, Rob here’s up there with the best. The people who introduced Amy to Blake, Sid to Nancy, Antony to Cleopatra. Check.’

‘Check,’ said Jim.

‘Hey, don’t blame me — it’s H who’s finding these poor victims. I’m just doing my best Dan impression on the
phone to seal the deal. You know, it’s actually very difficult to convey perpetual blushing over the telephone,’ said Rob with a cold smile. ‘Raise.’

‘You’re pretending to be him? But you sound nothing like each other,’ Martin said.

‘They don’t notice. Probably because before he’s had a chance to speak he’s had to call in the coastguard to rescue them after taking a wrong turn,’ said Rob.

‘Up the creek without a paddle,’ said Martin. ‘Fold.’

‘They still haven’t found that solo round-the-world sailor since his GPS went faulty,’ murmured Jim.

‘You’d almost think with these catastrophes he’s doing it on purpose to get sympathy hugs from my missus,’ said Rob, winking at me. ‘You should see ‘em, gossiping away about body-language signals and outfits. She’s like a girl with a new gay best pal.’

‘I’m out,’ said Angus. ‘Anyone for mini hot dogs?’

‘Call,’ I said, with the closest I could manage to an indulgent smile as I tried not to rise to Rob’s baiting.

‘Call,’ Jim said.

Martin dealt out another card to the board.

‘What surprises me is, I would have thought Robbie here would be an excellent choice for finding hot-to-trot women,’ he said.

‘Yeah, but this is finding them for somebody else,’ I said, abandoning my position on the moral high ground. ‘Raise.’

‘Call,’ said Jim.

Rob looked at me for a long moment, rifling his chips between his hand and the table. He looked as if he was about to say something.

‘Call.’

‘Three left in,’ said Martin as he dealt out the final card, an Ace of Clubs. ‘When we were working together the place was heaving with totty you couldn’t help ending up talking to at some do or another.’

‘Like a leaving drink, or a client dinner, you mean?’ I asked. ‘Like you had last Friday, Rob, right?’

I picked up my cards to check my hand and put them back on the table, before repeating the process over and over, unable to remember what I’d just seen as the tension tightened around the small table.

‘It was a client dinner, going on to some leaving drinks,’ Rob said, slowly and deliberately, ‘and it’s your bet, sport.’

‘Check,’ I said.

‘Check,’ Jim said.

‘A call on the flop, then a raise, and just a check on the river. What are you up to?’ mused Rob, his eyes flicking back and forth between the cards on the table and me.

‘I…am not up to anything,’ I said, keeping my head down and sorting through my chips, ‘sport.’

The room went quiet for a while, with the only sound a distant song from Dire Straits on the AOR radio station playing in the background.

‘The Russians are still posturing at the UN over their nuclear-deterrent capabilities,’ reported Jim as his thumbs twiddled away at a message on his handset.

‘So what do I think you have?’ mused Rob. ‘Not a lot of help on that board, lot of hearts there, but I don’t think you’re holding any more. I reckon a couple of pairs, but nothing big enough to beat me,’ he concluded, smirking and engaging in his favourite poker pastime of needling. ‘Now I just need to work out how much I can get out of
you. You’ll go along for the ride, but how much can I make it cost before you get too scared?’

‘I wouldn’t assume you can take everything you want and get away with it,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t assume you have the nerve to call any bet if the stakes get too high.’

‘Do you think these two are aware of the metaphorical subtext of all this verbal jousting?’ Angus asked Martin loudly in the background.

‘I dunno. The simmering tension’s looking to reach boiling point though,’ Martin replied. ‘That or they’ve both got really shit hands.’

From the corner of my eye I could see Rob counting up the chips in front of him, snorting at the remarks. He was still looking straight at me, and I was still staring straight ahead, not looking at anyone.

‘I’ve got nothing to worry about,’ Rob said. ‘A fiver. Five hundred in chips. Do you think you should match that? Or do you need to phone a friend? Hannah should be home.’

I wasn’t going to be bullied, I resolved, and I wasn’t going to be bluffed by someone who thought they knew what I was thinking, but had no idea what I really knew or wanted.

‘Call,’ I said.

‘Call,’ said Jim.

Rob was the first to show his hand, a pocket pair of Aces, meaning he had three of a kind, more than enough to beat what I had, which, when I looked at my cards and remembered the game it was that we were actually playing, was absolutely nothing.

With a raised eyebrow Rob patiently waited for me to turn over my cards, his lips twitching with a wisecrack waiting to be released as he gathered the winnings to join the rest of his stack to reaffirm his alpha-male status.

‘Straight flush,’ said Jim unexpectedly, revealing his unbeatable cards before I had a chance to surrender my own. We sat and looked at him as he began plucking handfuls of chips and lining them up in small piles in front of him.

‘You had a three and a seven of hearts and you played that hand from an early position? And just called even when you’d got the absolute nuts on the turn?’ said Rob incredulously.

Jim shrugged and smiled, his fingers moving twitchily as if he were still holding his phone and writing a message.

‘Jesus Christ, the brains around here. It’s like playing with the Girls of the Playboy Mansion tonight,’ said Rob before stomping off with his cigarettes and phone to brave the cold and the potential for knife crime for a smoke outside.

‘So the Playmates have a reputation for not being much good at cards, then? Must have missed that bit of the show,’ Martin said.

‘And guess who thinks he’s Hugh Heffner,’ I replied.

‘What is
going on
with you two tonight anyway?’ asked Angus. ‘You realise that in that last hand “Baker Street” was on the radio, and neither of you even paused to play air sax, never mind miming duelling guitar solos. You had some sort of row?’

‘No, no, nothing going on. We’re fine, just long days, I bet.’

‘Must have been shitty days,’ he said. ‘You’re acting like you’re on the brink of a divorce. I just want to know who’s been cheating on who.’

On the table in front of me, my phone began to ring. I looked at it, slightly confused, as the name flashing on the screen jarred with my surroundings. My heart rate, only just slowing after the nervous last hand of cards, started racing upwards again. She never usually called me…

‘Delphine?’

At the mention of a woman’s name, the heads of the other guys at the table bobbed up. Glances, head bobs and
winks were exchanged with everyone looking in my direction. Jim started nudging me in the arm incessantly with his elbow, and Angus looked rapt waiting for my next move. I decided to go out to the hallway before Martin turned his back to me and pretended to do that kissy-huggy thing where you ran your fingers up and down your own back.

‘Hello, Danny! ‘Ow are you?’

‘Good, good. And you? You’re calling… Is everything OK?

‘Oh, yes. Yes. Everything is good. Well, you know, no worse than usual. I just thought I’d let you know — he has two grandmas.’

‘Sorry?’