Dinner for Two

CONTENTS

Mike Gayle

The To-Do List

The Life and Soul of the Party

Wish You Were Here

Brand New Friend

His ’n’ Hers

My Legendary Girlfriend

Mr Commitment

Turning Thirty

First published in Great Britain in 2002
by Hodder and Stoughton
A division of Hodder Headline

Copyright © 2002 by Mike Gayle

The right of Mike Gayle to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

The lines from
Heartbreak House
by George Bernard Shaw reproduced with permission of The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate

Quotation from
Self Made Mann
, an interview with Aimee Mann by Tom Shone for the
Telegraph Magazine
October 14 2001 with permission of Tom Shone, c/o Carlisle and Co.

The lines from
The Apartment
by Billy Wilder © 1960
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved

The
Cosmopolitan
article
After The Beep
by Mike Gayle is reproduced with permission of the National Magazine Company

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

EBook ISBN 978 1 848 94163 2
Book ISBN 978 0 340 76796 2

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
A division of Hodder Headline
338 Euston Road
London NWl 3BH

For monkey one

Thanks to: my wife, Mum, Dad, Phil, Sheila, Andy, Jackie, Jenny, Phil P, Jane BE, Euan, Georgina (I told you so), Cath, Nikki, Math, Mike, Elt, Vic, Ruth, Ange, James, Dave, Maz, Lisa, Chris/John, Helen, Arthur, Charlotte, John, Nadine, Rod, everyone @ Hodder, everyone @ Curtis Brown, everyone @ The Board, the guy I was talking to about MLG at the Astor Place Barnes and Noble event in New York, February 2001 (sorry I lost your e-mail), David Kitt for writing such a 10/10 album in
Small Moments
, nice Natalie at Natmags and finally the magazines and newspapers where some of these articles originally appeared:
Cosmopolitan
,
B magazine
,
Living Etc
,
Express
and
The Times
.

I do believe that the drinks are on me.

Apparently (at least, so she told me) it all happened because her best friend Keisha had to stay behind after school for hockey practice. Usually she hated going home on her own because it was lonely. But that day she didn’t even notice Keisha wasn’t there because of Brendan Casey. Her obsession with him had developed to the point where she’d begun to semi-stalk him, watching him at lunchtime in the canteen, or positioning herself next to the classroom windows during English with Mr Kelly on Tuesday afternoons when Brendan’s year had games because it was possible – if she squinted really hard – to just about make out his silhouette on the football pitch.

That day she’d determined that she was going to speak to him for the first time. Having thought about it a great deal she decided that the best way to do this was to be in his general proximity, smile at him a great deal and hope beyond hope that a conversation would spontaneously evolve out of nothing like some sort of conversational ‘Big Bang’ theory. The moment the end-of-school bell rang she’d raced out to the school’s main entrance and waited.

She followed Brendan and his friends to the gates without being detected – which was more difficult than she’d anticipated. Brendan and his friends didn’t walk anywhere fast, and each time they stopped she had to bend down and fiddle with her laces, or rummage in her bag, or sometimes she simply stood still and gazed into the mid-distance as if she were looking for inspiration. Eventually, her persistence paid off: the boys made it out of the gates and up the path to the bus stop. She positioned herself directly behind Brendan, a place that up until this moment she could only have ever imagined in her wildest dreams. Brendan, however, didn’t pay her the slightest bit of attention no matter how much she smiled in his direction.

As the number 23A arrived and the double-decker opened its doors, the orderly queue disintegrated into a free-for-all and she was pushed to the back. By the time she got on Brendan and his friends had disappeared upstairs. She followed them but by the time she got there the top deck was full. She sighed, and made her way back downstairs.

Ten minutes later when the bus reached her stop she was so angry as she got off that she wanted to scream. She didn’t, of course. As she stormed down the road she decided she wasn’t even going to look back for a last glance at Brendan. Her resolve however melted as she imagined his face pressed up against the window, his eyes searching for her. She turned, but couldn’t see him – and she hated herself for seeing hope where there was none. She hated herself for being so obviously devoid of self-respect.

It started to rain and she decided she was going to change – that she was going to take control of her life – and the first thing that she was going to do was change her mood by treating herself to something nice. She checked her Hello Kitty purse to see how much she had left – £2.70. Unsure exactly how she was going to treat herself, she wandered into the newsagent at the top of her road and found herself drawn towards the magazine racks. This was what she wanted.

She wanted a magazine that understood her feelings.

A magazine that understood her better than she understood herself.

A magazine that could simply make her feel better about being her.

She scanned the titles aimed at her age group:
Smash Hits
,
Mizz
,
19
,
TV Hits
,
Top of the Pops
,
Teen Scene
,
J17
,
Bliss
,
Sugar
and
Looks
and she immediately felt better. It was as if they were friends all desperately vying for her attention. She knew she had to choose carefully. She couldn’t afford to be disappointed. All of the covers looked the same: beautiful young girls or pop stars with flawless skin and perfectly proportioned features smiling serenely. As for the content, she could barely tell them apart: fashion, makeup, pop interviews, features about boys, features about friends.

After a few moments she made her choice.
Teen Scene
: ‘the magazine for girls with go’. It was 10p cheaper than the others; she liked the purple eye-shadow the cover girl was wearing and hoped that they might say which brand it was inside; it had cover-mounted stick-on tattoos which although she considered a little bit babyish she thought might be a laugh; and it had the best advice column, ‘Ask Adam’. Her friends laughed at the girls who wrote in to advice columns, but she knew that when it came to boys, she was as clueless as the girls in the letters. She loved problem pages: they made her feel she wasn’t alone in the world. That she wasn’t weird. That all the thoughts and fears that roamed around inside her head could be solved by ‘Dear Pam’, ‘Ask Adam’, ‘Getting Personal with Dr Mallory’, ‘Boy Talk with Stephen’, and ‘Crisis Confidential with Dear Anne’. The list was endless. But ‘Ask Adam’ was the best.

She picked up the magazine and went to pay for it. The man behind the counter scanned the barcode, the till beeped, she gave him the exact money and left.

Chaos theory states that something as simple as a butterfly flapping its wings millions of years ago could have changed world events. Well, if that’s so then for me, Dave Harding, a happily married music journalist, that was the moment at which a butterfly soared into the air and chaos theory became chaos practice.