It's Got to Be Perfect: the memoirs of a modern-day matchmaker (28 page)

I sneered at her. ‘We can’t all afford…’

‘Puligny Montrachet?’ She opened her bag to reveal three bottles.

By 7.30pm, the first bottle was empty and by 8.30pm, the other two bottles were also empty and lined up beside it. Victoria was now wearing my apron and we were working our way through an ancient curdled bottle of Baileys that I’d taken out to the bins earlier.

‘I’m a drunk alcoholic spinster,’ she slurred as she refilled her tumbler.

‘You can’t be a drunk alcoholic can you? Isn’t that an oxy-thingy?’

‘Moron.’

‘I’m not a moron.’

‘An oxymoron, I meant. But sometimes you are a moron.’ She hauled herself up in front of the mirror in the lounge. ‘An alcoholic isn’t always drunk.’ She pulled at the skin on her face. ‘So it’s not any oxymoron.’ She lifted her jowls. ‘I need a face lift. No wonder Patrick didn’t want me.’

‘Patrick loves you.’

‘Patrick loves women.’

‘He didn’t, doesn’t want anyone else. You were just being paranoid. And what are you worried about, you’re gorgeous.’ I stood behind her in the mirror, hunched my shoulders and stuck out my rabbit teeth. ‘Look at me.’

She laughed. ‘My therapist says I’m a narcissist.’

I dropped back down on the sofa. ‘Therapist?’

‘Yes.’

‘Since when do you have a therapist?’

She spun round from the mirror, lifting her skin up in an improvised facelift.

‘Since I was five.’

I sloshed some Baileys into my mouth and the rest down my chin.

‘My parents wanted me to be perfect.’ She pulled her ponytail up tighter. ‘Is that better? Have my jowls gone now?’

I laughed. ‘Your parents thought a therapist would make you perfect?’

When we’d drained the rest of the Baileys, we sat slumped on the sofa next to each other, the apron tied around both of us.

‘So did you?’ I asked, slipping off the cushion towards the floor.

‘Did I what?’

Tied to me, she too began to slide towards the ground.

‘Have sex?’

‘Sex?’ She clung to the arm of the sofa.

I hit the floor. ‘With Nick?’

Her grip was stronger than I’d anticipated and eventually she hoisted me back up.

‘No silly.’ She giggled. ‘Nick loves you.’

Chapter Twenty

Straining and creaking with complaint, the train seemed to pull away from the station with the same reluctance with which I had left my bed that morning. I was on my way to meet Mia, to discuss her negative attitude and the numerous complaints it had elicited from clients. The most recent one having been prompted by her instruction to a twentysomething idealist to “go get a life”.

She was waiting for me outside the club.

‘Good morning.’ I greeted her with my best cheery smile, relieved to see she had just finished her cigarette.

‘Is it?’ she replied and stamped it out on the pavement. ‘Let’s get this over with then.’

She strode down the stairs, looking like a very beautiful military commander wearing skintight jeans. If I hadn’t have known otherwise, I would have thought she owned the club, though I suppose in a way she did. As I followed her, I tried to copy the way she walked, but the result was more camp Royal Guard than supermodel strut. As we passed the reception desk, Marie bowed her head. When we reached the bar, Steve put his hands behind his back and stood upright as though he were awaiting orders.

As we sat down, her dark eyes narrowed.

‘So?’ She asked.

‘So …’ I replied.

It was as though we were in a relationship that we both knew must end, yet neither of us could muster the courage to make the first move.

I met her gaze. ‘It’s not working, is it?’

She shook her head, and for the first time since I’d known her, she broke eye contact first, then looked down into her lap.

‘So, what’s changed?’

She looked up. ‘People. I can’t work with them anymore. They’re a nightmare.’

I frowned. ‘I don’t think there’s a market for matchmaking any other species.’

She smiled. ‘Other animals don’t have our issues though, do they? They just find a mate, do a little dance and that’s it. Job done.’

‘Well yes, we’re a bit more sophisticated than that.’

Her eyes narrowed further. ‘The only difference between us and other mammals is that we have free will. Well, at least we’re supposed to have free will, but we don’t.’

I frowned, wondering if she and Matthew had been having clandestine meetings to discuss the fate of the human race.

She looked up to the ceiling. ‘We’re all clones. We all want the same things. We want to date the same men or the same women. Have the same house, the same car, the same clothes, the same holidays. Even the same fucking kitchens. We don’t know how to think for ourselves anymore.’

I shuffled in my seat, inwardly trying to justify the Poggenpohl catalogue I’d snaffled away in my bedside drawer.

‘Marriage is a dying concept. Year on year, the numbers drop,’ she continued. ‘Finally people are catching on that it doesn’t make them happy. But we’re angry because we were lied to. We were told that it would make us happy. That happiness was something we were entitled to. That we deserved it. It’s all bullshit.’

She looked at me. Her face was flushed and her jaw seemed tensed.

‘Mia. Breathe,’ I said quietly.

‘And now we’ve created a self-serving, narcissistic and spoiled society. People expect to get everything, yet they’re not prepared to give anything. No wonder relationships are doomed to fail.’

‘We’re not all that naïve, Mia. Some find fulfilling relationships.’

‘And what exactly is a fulfilling relationship?’ She looked at me, eyebrows raised. ‘Relationships are either sado-masochistic dependencies or idealised projections which, at best, fizzle into the bland, mutually irritating interaction that people call friendship.’

I sat back in my seat. ‘So what if they are? So what if no one actually achieves the idealised happy ever after? If people find happiness along the way, in whatever form it takes, then surely that’s something?’

Straight away, I realised that was, in essence, what Caro was trying to tell me the day before.

She laughed. ‘People don’t find happiness. It’s not lying on the ground somewhere waiting to be snatched up or handed to you by your friendly matchmaker. Happiness comes and goes. And with it comes pain. Equal measures of both. The perfect match.’

I stared at her for a minute, wondering whether she was right. ‘But you can’t go through life without feeling anything. You may as well give up now.’

Her expression was blank. ‘I gave up a long time ago,’ she said, ‘but this job is like lining up cows for the slaughterhouse.’

I laughed.

‘But especially stupid cows, that have a choice, yet still want to join the queue.’

The first rumblings of laughter echoed down the staircase, like the warning tremor before an earthquake.

‘Talking of stupid cows,’ Mia said, ‘here’s a herd now.’ The laughter spilled into the lounge bar followed by the five Mandi clones charging down the staircase.

I smirked at Mia.

‘Actually, I think a more appropriate collective noun would be a murder,’ Mia said.

‘Or a gaggle?’ I suggested.

‘More like a giggle,’ Steve said as he cleared away the coffee cups.

The new recruits sat around our table, each modelling a different shade of pink like a Mr Marbella nipple colour chart. With their pens poised, and their blonde hair styled in perfect flicks, they looked at me expectantly.

‘Where’s Mandi?’ one of them asked.

I had given up trying to guess who was who. I shrugged my shoulders and turned to Mia, who looked equally baffled.

‘She’s supposed to be training us today,’ another one said.

‘On what?’ Mia asked.

They all raised their hands as though it were a test. Mia pointed to the nearest one.

‘Transactional relationships,’ she said.

Mia smiled drolly. ‘Might stay for this one.’

When we were seated in the meeting room, the door swung open and Mandi burst in to a collective gasp. Her hair was scraped back in a black scrunchie, and she was wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt with the words “Fuck Love” emblazoned across it. Her skin was lacking its usual pink blush and gloss, and under her eyes were co-ordinating black circles.

She marched towards to the whiteboard, scrawled the letters “T” and “R” in black marker and then turned to face us.

‘Transactional Relationships,’ she began. ‘Or Tits and Rich as Mia says.’

The new recruits gasped.

Mandi continued. ‘Trading something you have for something you want, that is valued equally by both parties. What’s the oldest transactional relationship in history?’

One of the recruit’s hands shot up.

‘Prostitution,’ she said and then looked up to the heavens as though she had committed blasphemy.

‘Yes,’ Mandi said, nodding. ‘Sex for money. What else can sex be exchanged for?’

The recruits looked puzzled.

‘Gucci handbags?’ Mia suggested. ‘A Cartier watch, Michelin star dining, a new pair of boobs, luxury holidays, a mock Tudor house in Essex.’

Mandi mimed a stop sign. ‘They’re just other variations of sex for money. What else can sex be exchanged for?’

The collective frown of the recruits deepened.

‘Why would one hundred and three girls have sex with a barman? What are they getting out of it?’

In the corner of my eye, I saw what looked like Steve’s shadow loitering outside the meeting room. One of the recruit’s hands shot up and blocked my view.

‘Pleasure,’ she said.

Mia sneered.

‘Intimacy?’ Another one suggested.

Mandi rolled her eyes. ‘From a one-night stand?’

‘She means pseudo intimacy,’ Mia chipped in.

Mandi’s eyes were still rolling. ‘Anything else?’

‘Self-esteem?’ one of the recruits suggested.

‘Comfort?’ another said.

‘Fun?’ another added and then blushed.

Mandi walked towards the board and began writing: “fun, comfort, self-esteem, pleasure.” Then she stood back.

‘It is widely recognised that one-night stands erode self-esteem,’ she said, drawing a black line through the words. ‘As for fun, I doubt there’s much fun from being banged senseless and then asked to leave.’ She drew another line through that one. ‘Ditto for comfort.’ Another line. ‘And as for pleasure, well, a recent survey reported that over ninety percent of women fail to orgasm during a one-night stand.’

She spun around and waved her marker in the air. ‘The real reason women have one-night stands is because they’re drunk and think they’ll be empowered by acting like men. Or because they secretly hope it will lead to more. But it won’t. Sex cannot be exchanged for love.’

The recruits looked on, dumbfounded.

‘Nothing except
love
can be exchanged for love. Not beauty, not wealth, not intelligence, not power, not lies, not manipulation. Nothing. For a relationship to last, the only transaction possible is love for love.’ Mandi wiped away the list. ‘But for that to happen, love must be equally valued by both people.’

Brandishing the marker again, she slowly wrote out the words “The End” on the whiteboard. Then she gave one more glare to the recruits, then threw down her pen and stormed out of the room.

Chapter Twenty-One

The sky was indigo with streaks of magenta and the balmy air sent a shiver down my spine like hot breath on my neck. In front of me, the pool glowed turquoise, its surface rippling like a satin sheet, and beyond, office windows glowed like eyes in the night. Tonight, we were hosting a White Party on the roof terrace of Shoreditch House.

Tables cloaked with pristine white tablecloths were nestled in the corners. Beside each were two chairs, and on top, suspended in oversized crystal vases were a pair of flickering candles. A glossy white grand piano stretched out next to the pool with the nonchalance of a lazy cat, while jazz bounced into the air with predictable irregularity, the faint hum of traffic providing a comforting base note.

‘If people can’t fall in love here, then there’s no hope for them.’

I turned around and then stepped back, narrowly missing the edge of the pool.

‘Mia?’

She smiled. ‘Thought you might need some help tonight.’

I frowned.

‘Seeing as Mandi’s lost the plot,’ she finished.

Wearing a plain white slip, with her hair loosely tied up, Mia’s sharp edges seemed to have softened. Her face looked rounder, younger even. I smiled at her.

‘I haven’t changed my mind, though,’ she said, pulling a cigarette out of her bag.

Sighing and gasping, the five recruits swept in and began twirling around the roof terrace, their near-identical dresses spinning up and out. I almost expected fluffy white wings to sprout from their shoulder blades. I turned to Mia, anticipating frenetic eye rolling, but instead, I saw her darting from table to table, decanting chocolates into heart-shaped bowls. I was about to say something but my attention was diverted by Mr Marbella swaggering across the terrace with enough confidence for all the single men in London. Teamed with white linen trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, his fake tan and highlights for once looked almost appropriate for the setting, albeit overshadowed by his watch, which snatched the light at every opportunity like a wannabe at an X-Factor audition.

‘Evening ladies,’ he greeted us all, but focused most of his attention on the larger breasted of the recruits, who I think was Minky, although the identical white dresses weren’t helping.

‘Can you stop looking at her tits please?’ Mandi seemed to appear from nowhere. She pushed past me and then glared at Mr Marbella.

With re-glossed lips and the return of her perky flicks, she appeared to have shaken off last week’s blackness, but, as she turned to face me, her eyes looked misty as though a cloud had drifted over her corneas.

Mr Marbella turned away from her and towards me

‘We need to talk,’ he said, nodding towards some chairs alongside the pool.

Once we’d sat down, I wondered if, finally, he was prepared to have a serious conversation.