Chapter Four
Kate
My mother would love him.
That’s the first thought I have when I see Michael Dao-Chen waiting for me at a table in a busy Turkish restaurant on Islington High Street.
He’s tall, he’s handsome and he’s wearing a suit that suggests he knows not only how to dress but how to spend money on clothes.
My mother always said I should marry money because that’s what she didn’t do and my father left her with all the bills to pay when he decided he didn’t like the UK anymore.
My mother also said that I was an ungrateful whore who brought shame on our family, so I try to be selective about following her advice.
In fact, that was one of the very last things she said to me before I left her house and never returned.
“Xiao Hong.” He stands, bows ever so slightly and holds out his hand. His accent is pitch perfect. Oh, yes, she’d like that too, him calling me by my Chinese name. Heck, I like him calling me by my Chinese name.
“Nice to meet you.” I shake his hand and deliberately continue our conversation in English. My Mandarin is rusty to say the least, which is what happens when you deliberately don’t speak it for over ten years. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”
“Not at all.” He moves around to tuck my seat in as I sit. “I like to be early.”
I hope that doesn’t apply to the bedroom, my dirty, dirty ungrateful-whore-mind offers up, but I keep the words inside.
“Nice place,” I say, looking around. “Have you been before?”
“No, no,” he says, shaking his head with a little too much energy. He then dabs at his forehead with his hand. His fingers come back with a light sheen on them. He’s nervous and I can’t figure out how I feel about that. “But it got a great review in Time Out. And the Evening Standard.”
“Oh, good.” I offer him a close-lipped smile and then pick up the menu.
I imagine him sitting on the Tube on his way home from work, his suit a little crumpled but his mind already distracted by the top West End shows to see or Time Out’s most recommended films to catch before they stop showing at the cinema.
A bitter feeling stirs around the base of my stomach.
I can’t remember when I last had time to leisurely leaf through a magazine or the Evening Standard.
Apart from Lady Phantom. I will always make time for her.
“I’m so glad you replied to my listing,” he leans over the table to tell me, pulling my gaze back to him. “You’re very beautiful. Not everybody who replied has looked like you.”
I give him another tight smile, clueless as to how I’m supposed to reply to what was initially a compliment but then devolved into a sly dig at my fellow womankind.
“Have you chosen what you’re having?” I ask.
He shakes his head profusely again and then glances back at his menu. “I’ve never had Turkish food before. Can you recommend something?”
I sigh. I don’t mind taking the lead on a date, and it’s actually what I prefer in the bedroom, but I’m suddenly so exhausted I can’t even face suggesting dishes. I seem to only have the energy to question why I’m here.
I’ve worked six days in a row, a minimum of twelve hours a day, and one day I clocked up fifteen hours on my feet.
It’s Saturday night in Islington so it’s busy, it’s noisy, and I would hazard a guess that most people in my immediate vicinity are already drunk because the only time I could meet Michael was at nine o’clock after my shift ended.
Yes, I have a day off tomorrow – a light at the end of the tunnel – but I don’t want to spend the whole day in bed.
That’s a lie because yes, of course, all I want to do is spend the whole day in bed but I can’t.
I have laundry to do. A kitchen and bathroom to clean.
Groceries to shop for. A week’s worth of uniforms to iron.
I was really hoping I could come on this date, meet a confident, attractive man who didn’t need coaching through a menu because he was already imagining what I looked like naked.
Suddenly I regret not replying to the singles ad for ‘Short, butch dyke with Mummy issues from Tooting’.
She probably would have been a much better bet than ‘British-Chinese man looking for love and like-minded conversation’, but I also felt like I would have been playing with fire.
Of course I was imagining she had more than a striking resemblance to Sharon Goldblatt and if she hadn’t I would have been deeply disappointed.
And if she had looked like her, well, I probably would have eaten her alive…
“So,” Michael coughs. “Turkish food?”
“Oh, yeah,” my attention snaps back to the menu, “I hear the manti are good here. They’re like Turkish baked meat dumplings – lamb, usually, I think. And I went to Northern Cyprus on my honeymoon and really enjoyed the pirohu so that may be worth a try. It’s a bit like ravioli.”
Michael lowers his menu. “I’m sorry… your honeymoon?”
“Oh, I’m divorced.” I pour myself some water from the carafe already standing on the table. “Did I not say that when we spoke on the phone?”
“No.” He reaches for his glass of water and takes a long sip. “You didn’t mention it.”
“Probably because he isn’t worth mentioning.” I give him a smile that I suspect looks more like a grimace.
“But… how old are you? If you don’t mind me asking,” he says with a pinch of colour in his cheeks. Blushing isn’t going to take the edge off asking a very nosy question, I think, but I keep it to myself.
“I’m twenty-nine.”
His eyes widen. “And already divorced.”
“Yes,” I say through gritted teeth. “And you? Any long-term relationships to speak of?”
“Oh, well, no, not really,” he mumbles.
“And how old are you?” I don’t do him the honour of blushing. I give no shits about asking a personal question when I can sense he’s already made his mind up about my character.
“Thirty-one,” he says.
“Hmm.” When his eyes drop to his menu again, I’m right in thinking it’s all I needed to say.
A waiter appears and after we have given our orders, I draw in a breath, thinking how that interruption could act like an interval, a chance to start a fresh topic of conversation. But I am wrong.
“Why did you divorce? You and your husband?” His eyes are serious as they study me.
I contemplate my options. I could lie. It would be easy.
The chances of me seeing Michael again are already minimal and I don’t even imagine this evening will end with us in one of our beds because his handsomeness is fading at the same rate my libido is.
But perhaps that’s all the more reason to be honest?
“A lot of reasons, but there were two big ones. Firstly, my job.”
He frowns and I can almost hear the cogs whirring in his brain. “But you’re a nurse. How can somebody have a problem with that?”
“I work on an AIDS ward at Queen Street West,” I say as matter-of-factly as I can, but still the words push Michael back in his chair.
“An… AIDS ward?”
“Yes.” I take a sip of the red wine the waiter has just placed in front of me.
“With AIDS patients?” Michael is leaning forward again and keeping his voice low.
“Yes, with AIDS patients.” I mimic his tone and position, hoping it makes him see how ridiculous he’s being. It doesn’t.
“But… aren’t you… worried?” He straightens up, pulls back and blinks. “Or wait, are you…”
“No, I’m not HIV positive. And no, I’m not worried about becoming so. And neither would you be if you stopped reading the tabloids.”
He swallows and drops his gaze. I take another sip of wine. Well, at least he probably doesn’t even care about…
“And the other thing?” He hazards another quick look at me.
I clear my throat. I’ve come this far. “The other thing was my sexuality.”
“Your sexuality. What do you mean by that?”
“I’m bisexual,” I say, again very evenly.
He seems to freeze completely. No movement, no blinking, no reaction at all.
“It means I like woman as well as men,” I tell him.
“I… I know what it means.” He dabs at his forehead with the napkin. If he was slightly perspiring earlier, he’s sweating buckets now. “I just don’t understand…”
I sigh again. “It’s really very simple. You know how you’re attracted to women?”
He nods.
“Well, so am I.”
“But…”
“And I’m also attracted to men,” I continue, resisting the urge to add ‘for my sins’.
After scanning the room to see if, God forbid, we’ve been overheard, he clears his throat, his rolled-up fist at his mouth. “Look, I mean… even if you were attracted to both men and women…”
“Not if,” I say coolly and clearly. “I am.”
“Well, yes, but why are you telling me? I mean, I’m a man. I don’t need to know about you with women. Unless you’re planning on cheating on me?”
I’m not planning on doing anything with you that would mean I would end up cheating on you, I think to myself as I pin a – possibly slightly facetious – smile on Michael.
“Because it’s who I am. It’s important to me. And as I mentioned, I’ve had problems with partners accepting it as part of me before and so I don’t want to repeat that.”
Michael stares at me for a long moment. Long enough that I tune into other conversations at tables close to us. Long enough that I notice a waitress carrying a tray of drinks has the most beautiful long, black wavy hair and a silver nose ring that catches the light beaming down above her.
“This was a mistake.” I’m standing before I even realise I’m doing it.
He gawps up at me like I’m doing something much more outlandish than standing up.
“I’m sorry,” I offer. I’m not sure I really am, but I suspect this is embarrassing to him.
He says my Chinese name again, and it almost makes me sit back down and ask that he talk to me in the soft, lulling tones of Mandarin. So I can hear my mother’s voice, my father's tones, my grandparents’ words. So I can remember what my childhood was like before it all fell apart.
But I don’t. I smile at him. “I hope you meet a woman who can make you very happy.”
A silly, churlish part of me thinks how perfect it would be if he said exactly the same thing back to me. An even more stupid part of me immediately projects the pouting face of Sharon Goldblatt in my mind’s eye.
I blink it away. After placing a ten-pound note on the table – more than enough to cover my wine – I give Michael one last, almost sympathetic smile and I turn and leave.
*****
My bedsit feels extra empty when I return to it, which is quite an achievement for an apartment that has a grand total of thirty-two square metres of space.
The traffic rumbling along Bayswater Road rattles my windows in that annoying but familiar way and I choose to let it remind me that I’m not alone.
Not really. It’s impossible to be alone in London. So why do I feel lonely?
It was just a bad date.
I’ve had bad dates before.
There will be more bad dates.
I need to get over myself.
As I lock the three bolts on my door and dump my bag on the small kitchen table I could fold away if I wanted to, but never do, I come up with a plan of action.
As much as I’d like to fall into bed and let sleep take me into the next day, that’s not sensible.
I’m due to start night shifts from tomorrow night and so going to bed at – I glance at my watch – ten thirty-seven is not going to help me step into that rhythm.
Lucky for me I have the perfect activity to keep me awake until the early hours.
Fifteen minutes later I have that small rickety fold-out table in the centre of the space and my sewing machine on top of it, along with a cup of steaming jasmine tea and a mess of purple, black and grey fabric.
My mother taught me how to sew before I could tie shoelaces or do simple sums. It was, is, her job.
She does tailoring and adjustments in the back room of a laundrette in St. Albans.
As far as I know, she still works there six days a week, nine hours a day, and I dare say she still comes home and spends her evenings fixing holes in her own clothes or doing favours for neighbours. Maybe she still makes her own clothes.
My wardrobe is full of clothes she made me. I still feel like I’m betraying her when I buy something off a rack in a shop.
That’s why I always think about her as I thread the sewing machine’s needle, fill the bobbin with cotton and arrange the material so it’s in the right place.
But after a while, my thoughts – the ones that bring a dull ache with them – fade away and I can focus solely on the task in hand. Namely, making my Lady Phantom costume.
It’s not going as well as I would like. Which is to say, it’s a disaster. I suspect I no longer have the skills to make a pattern from scratch and even someone with absolutely no sewing experience would know that starting with a complex superhero costume made from elastane is a fool’s errand.
Just as well I have all night to try and fix the mistakes I’ve already made.
Just as well it will keep me busy and my mind off how terribly my date with Michael went.
Just as well it will keep my thoughts away from drifting to Sharon, and her spiky hair and her juicy thighs and that conversation we had at the bus stop about Lady Phantom and the Director.