Chapter 8 #2
‘Totally,’ I agree. ‘I need that woman to fall in love.’ Although not, in fact, with a good friend of mine, as I have just realised.
‘Yeah, I don’t think she’s going to fall in love with me.
I think she liked me.’ He’s almost certainly right; everyone likes him.
‘And I think we could maybe date a little. But I didn’t get any I-could-fall-hard-for-you vibes.
And I feel like I’ve reached a stage in life where I don’t want to start anything that I know isn’t going anywhere. ’
I blink. This is not the Minuk I’ve known for eighteen years. ‘Mate.’
‘Yep. I know. Apparently it comes to us all. Thirty-six is a serious age, though. Like, blink and we’ll be forty.
I mean, obviously it’s four years away, but that isn’t long when you think about meeting someone, dating them for a while, then making a commitment, then having kids.
If that’s what you want. So there we go.
I don’t think I’m up any more for relationships that I know are going to be short term before I’ve even started them. ’
‘Wow,’ I say.
‘I know. I’m an adult.’
‘Well, congratulations. And also, dammit.’ I’m not sure whether I really mean dammit, because if Freya begins to date a good friend of mine I will obviously just be swapping one problem for another. I should probably actually be punching the air right now.
‘Yeah. Sorry. I mean, Freya’s a wonderful woman. Great company, beautiful. Just no spark.’
‘Okay. So.’ I’m still one-track. ‘Did you learn anything about her that would give me a clue about how to find the person she’s going to fall in love with?’
Minuk puts his elbow on the table and props his chin in his hand and spends a little time in a thinking pose.
Eventually, he comes up with: ‘Nope.’
‘Dammit,’ I say again.
‘Although… I’ve had an idea.’ He pauses for a moment and then nods. ‘Yep. I have it. You and she can’t stand each other.’
I nod.
‘So you need to find a man that you can’t stand and she’ll probably love them.’
‘That’s your idea? I find someone I really dislike and she’ll fall in love with them? That’s ridiculous. I mean, she really annoyed me but she isn’t weird. She isn’t going to like mass murderers or fascists, is she?’
‘You don’t know any mass murderers or fascists,’ Minuk points out, like we’re having an actual serious conversation.
‘And I don’t dislike any of my friends. No.
This is stupid. I think I need to find someone who shares a lot of her tastes and set them up together.
I’m thinking Tinder although I’d have to get her to agree to me putting her on there.
Did you find out anything useful about her? Hobbies? Music tastes?’
‘She is not a massive Swiftie even though she does really like some of Taylor Swift’s songs and did go to one of her concerts with a friend and had a great time.’ He says it like it’s really unusual and not entirely normal for an affluent British woman in her thirties.
‘Thanks. Anything else?’
‘She likes good food. All global cuisines. She likes playing tennis but hates running. She enjoys going to the cinema. Likes holidays.’
As in, like a significant proportion of the population.
Yeah, this is not going to work. Of course I’m not going to find someone she’s going to fall in love with.
Sonja tells Freya and me the next day on our Love Challenge WhatsApp chat that she and the production team adore the fact we went to the same venue for both our dates, and that’s what we’ll be doing going forward, and we’ll be taking it in turns to choose.
Since Freya chose the In The Dark venue, I’ll be choosing the next one.
And it can’t be a restaurant.
But it’s got to be real because we are essentially a reality show, Sonja says.
So real that we’re being told what to do, I think, not really knowing what she means by real.
Anyway.
I need to come up with a venue that I will not mind going to myself and that might be conducive to Freya falling in love.
My mind’s a blank, and I’m really busy with work, so it’s a good job that Sonja texts a few minutes later to say:
Scrap that, we’ll choose. Will revert.
When she comes back to us on the group chat she tells us they’d like us to have the choice because this is our challenge.
So for the next double-header I can choose between their shortlist of Russian banya baths or feeding alpacas.
And we’ll have to do a weekend day, whichever I choose. I’m a little speechless in horror.
Freya is not speechless. She shoots straight back on the chat with:
Out of those two I would choose the alpaca feeding.
A Russian banya sounds great but I’m not comfortable with getting into a swimming costume with a complete stranger.
However, I don’t have a lot of spare time at the weekends.
Are there evening alpaca-feeding options so we can stick to Tuesdays as planned?
Otherwise I think we will have to look at alternatives.
I have to acknowledge that that is punchy but fair. I can’t bring myself to agree in writing with anything Freya says, but I do thumbs-up her message. Sonja tells us to leave it with her.
Within an impressively short space of time, she gets back to us and tells us that the alpaca farm will open specially for us next Tuesday and that – brilliant idea! We’re switching things up even more! – we’re going to have our dates simultaneously from now on.
I just stare at my phone. Now I’m double-dating with Freya? While I try to set her up with the man of her dreams? And she tries to destroy my faith in happily-ever-afters?
For fuck’s sake.
I have a very busy week both work-wise and socially, so I don’t have a lot of time to think about who to ask to go on this next date with Freya, and – let’s face it – I have absolutely no idea who the right person would be so it would probably just be wasted thinking time anyway, so I basically do absolutely nothing about it.
Late on Sunday evening, though, when thinking about the week ahead, I realise that I do need to ask someone.
I have no time to try to find a stranger, so I text another good friend, Dan, explaining the situation and telling him I’ll owe him his body weight in beers if he will help me out, and he very kindly agrees.
And here we are, on Tuesday evening, having travelled for over an hour and a half to somewhere that Sonja pretended was a very short journey away but is in fact quite a long distance into Kent, to meet Freya and whoever my date is, standing at the gates of an alpaca farm.
As you do on a Tuesday evening in early March.
‘You know what,’ says Dan. ‘I’m pretty happy to get up close and personal with an alpaca. They look very cute from a distance.’
I nod. That’s the upside to this evening. I’m sure it will be cool to feed the alpacas and learn about them.
There are downsides though. And there’s the big one: Freya, just getting out of a taxi, followed by another woman, who is clearly my date.
She’s tall, slim and auburn-haired, with a very nice smile, which she is now directing towards Dan and me. She doesn’t really look like someone who’s going to convince me that I will never find love again.
Dan steps forward and sticks his hand out.
‘I’m Dan.’ He shakes Freya’s hand and then the other woman’s hand in turn. ‘I recognise you from the TV, Freya.’
‘Hi, Dan. It’s lovely to meet you.’ Freya bestows a big smile on him, and I see him slightly blossom under the full force of it.
Ridiculous. Yes, on the one hand it’s movie-star hot, but on the other, can he not tell that it’s totally fake?
She turns in the direction of her companion, and says, ‘This is Lizzie. Lizzie, this is Jake.’
Lizzie and I shake hands and then we all stand there and say that the journey was long but it’ll be great to meet the alpacas.
I push a buzzer on the gate post, and we’re led inside. Dan and Freya walk together, and so do Lizzie and I.
‘So how do you and Freya know each other?’ I ask Lizzie, more for something to say than because I’m particularly interested.
‘We were at uni together. We shared a kitchen and were also on the same course, and just kind of hit it off in the beginning.’
‘Oh, that’s nice. Dan’s a uni friend of mine too.
What did you study?’ I’m not exactly producing scintillating conversation, but in my defence I don’t like blind dates at the best of times, and knowing that this is designed by Freya to put me off dating for life, and doing it as a double date, is not making me happy.
‘Economics.’
That’s interesting, though.
‘And Freya did that too?’ I query.
‘Yep. The girl can do business stuff and write well. She’s a very impressive woman.’
‘Yeah.’ I’m annoyed with myself for being annoyed about the fact I cannot be anything other than impressed by what a great all-rounder Freya appears to be. Albeit an incredibly annoying all-rounder.
‘Is she bad at anything?’ I ask, because I can’t help it.
Lizzie laughs. ‘Not that I can think of. Apart from DIY. She can barely change a light bulb. And she wouldn’t mind me telling you that.’
We’re interrupted by Dan saying, ‘Lizzie. I’ve just been hearing about what you got up to on New Year’s Eve.’
‘Freya!’ Lizzie gasps.
‘Not everything,’ Freya says. ‘Obviously. Just our outfits.’
‘And the dancing on tables,’ Dan says.
Freya dismisses that with a wave of the hand, while Lizzie says, ‘Phew.’
‘I’m intrigued.’ Dan will now not let this go, and they will eventually tell us. Charming but steely tenacity is one of his most pronounced characteristics, which he uses to particularly good effect in his career (investigative journalism).
He’s thwarted for the time being, though, because our alpaca farm host has appeared.
The alpaca host does consent to doing a short ‘we’ve just arrived on our double date at the alpaca farm’ video for Sonja, commenting that no publicity is bad publicity.
Dan and Lizzie do not consent, which is a wise decision: in my brief experience any appearance on daytime television can lead to people recognising you in the street and, unless you actively want to be a celebrity, that is not fun.
A lot of alpaca facts are fired at us.
When we’re told that they are easily house-trained due to their tendency to use a communal dung pile, and therefore make very good pets, Freya breathes, ‘Oh my goodness, I want to get one.’ She smiles at me and says, ‘So much better than getting a man.’
‘They’re quite big for pets,’ Lizzie points out.
‘Not as big as a man, though,’ Freya returns.
‘No sex, though,’ Lizzie says.
Freya shrugs and says, ‘Yeah, no-one needs sex.’
Dan looks at me and shrugs too. And I shrug back.
Lizzie laughs at all of us, which makes me smile and Dan grin broadly.
Next, we glean a lot of facts about alpaca fleeces.
Freya is apparently fascinated.
‘So their fleeces are hypoallergenic? And non-flammable? And water-resistant?’
‘Are you having a business idea?’ asks Lizzie.
‘Totally.’ Freya’s looking the most animated I’ve seen her since she looked at me like she wanted to kill me in the TV studio. ‘I mean, it sounds like a no-brainer?’
Lizzie turns to Dan and me. ‘Not joking, she’ll probably own the most successful alpaca farm in the UK in a year’s time. The last time she got this excited about something, it was writing romance. And here we are.’
‘Have you had any failed businesses?’ I can’t help asking.
‘A couple,’ Freya says.
‘Not failures,’ Lizzie says. ‘Just you kind of lost interest.’
‘Some businesses are less viable than you think they’re going to be,’ Freya elaborates. ‘Like a vegan cake-making business is a tricky one. I ended up having to stay up all night baking a lot, and worked out that my profit was around one pound fifty an hour.’
‘This one won’t fail, though,’ Lizzie says.
‘Love a loyal friend,’ says Dan. ‘What other businesses have you tried?’
I very much like having a wingman to ask all the questions I’d like to ask.
Freya begins to speak but is interrupted by our alpaca farming host telling us that we are now ready to get to know the alpacas a little better.
It’s immediately obvious that Freya, Dan and I all like the alpacas but Lizzie adores them. Where Freya’s basically looking at them with dollars in her eyes, and Dan and I are looking at them with mild fondness in ours, Lizzie’s looking at them through hearts.
We feed them – I’ve got to say that you’d have to have a heart of stone not to fall a little in love with their big, long-eye-lashed eyes as they look at you when you hand them the food (grass, leaves, bark and some broccoli stalks as a treat) – and the way they hum is, as Lizzie says, several times, very cute.
‘I so much want you to set up an alpaca farm,’ she tells Freya after we’ve said our – reluctant – goodbyes to the alpacas. ‘So that I can come and cuddle them. And help you with them, obviously.’
‘You could offer alpaca-cuddling experiences,’ Dan says, very seriously.
‘Exactly.’
‘Fancy continuing the alpaca business development discussion over dinner and a drink?’ Dan suggests to all of us.
‘Definitely,’ Lizzie says immediately.
Which basically means that neither Freya nor I can say no.
‘Maybe somewhere nearby given that we’ve got a big journey home afterwards and it’s Tuesday and places might not stay open late?’ Lizzie sounds very keen for the evening to continue.
And so fifteen minutes later, the four of us are sitting in an Italian restaurant in Sevenoaks, and I’m surreptitiously googling what time the last train home is, while Dan and Lizzie talk nineteen to the dozen and Freya smiles at them both indulgently.
‘I have to congratulate you,’ she tells me while Dan and Lizzie exclaim loudly over the fact they’ve incredibly surprisingly found a mutual acquaintance.
(It is not surprising; they live round the corner from each other and go to the same gym.) ‘I think you might have genuinely engineered a lasting-love-at-first-sight situation.’ She smiles. ‘Not me, though.’
I’m tired and we’re miles from home and I need to be up very early in the morning and I don’t want to talk to the only companion available to me right now, Freya, but I really can’t actually pull my phone out and start going through my emails.
I mean, I would, but I don’t want to upset Dan and Lizzie.
I also can’t be bothered to try to think of anything sarcastic to say to Freya. She’s entirely right about this.
So I just nod and say, ‘So near and yet so far.’