Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
I t was Saturday. Tonight was ‘singles party night’, but I had to pop into Mum’s flower shop to help her with a delivery, as her Saturday person needed the afternoon off.
I arrived to see Mum leaning against the outside wall of her shop in the style of a Pink Lady from Grease, smiling at a tall man dressed in double-denim and a bloody Stetson, would you believe? There were distinct Marlboro man vibes about him.
As there was a huge lorry with a Dutch number plate parked alongside them, Colombo over here had deduced that this had to be the one and only Dutchman.
He wasn’t what I expected. He had chiselled cheeks that looked worked out from puffing away on too many Gitanes over the years.
That was actually the only European cigarette brand I’d heard of, so I was just guessing, of course.
He looked like a more muscular version of Bill Nighy.
“Here he is. This is my youngest, Danny. Danny, this is Wesley,” said Mum, proudly.
Wesley? Another surprise .
“Hi, Wes,” I said, with a bit of familiarity that had a sprinkling of protectiveness to it.
“Morning. It’s good to meet you, sir. I’ve heard a lot about you. Here, I heard you’re partial to a bit of Dutch horticulture, so I thought I’d bring you something…”
He reached into his lorry and grabbed a potted fern. Then he delved into the soil to produce a bag of what looked like at least a quarter ounce of the most gloriously smelling weed I’d ever smelt. This guy was all right.
“Wesley!” exclaimed Mum.
Wesley smiled a thin-lipped smile that wouldn't have looked out of place on a 14-year-old lad that’d just been caught smoking by the cool teacher at school.
“It’s okay, there’s enough for you to share,” said Wes.
“I was gonna say,” said Mum.
“Mum? Weed? Really?”
“It helps with all this nonsense I’ve got going on inside me. Live a little!”
How could I argue with that?
“Can you start moving the boxes out of the lorry? Bertie’s just in the back. Just tell him you’re taking over. He’s got to shoot off in a minute,” said Mum, without taking her eyes off the Dutch cowboy for a split-second.
I walked around to the back of the lorry and saw a guy dressed in what looked like stripy pyjama bottoms bending over a box of purple lilies. “Hi,” I said, alerting him to my presence.
He turned around, and the Maoam I was chewing on nearly dropped out of my mouth. Fuck, I knew this bloke. I’d been messaging him on one of my many apps and not in a clean, wholesome way, if you get my drift.
“All right, mate,” he said, smiling vacantly at me.
You have got to be shitting my melons, man. Please don’t recognise me, please don’t recognise me, please don’t recognise me.
“You Danny, yeah?” he said.
Oh, what’s this? He doesn't bloody well recognise me. If I say ‘Yeah’ and he says something along the lines of ‘Nice to meet you’ then my suspicions will be confirmed.
“Nice to meet you. Right, I gotta shoot off. Just move them boxes indoors, then you're done, mate.”
“Right,” I said, giving him a, ‘Don’t you actually recognise me?’ head tilt.
“You all right, mate?” he asked.
“Y-yeah. Fine. So, um… up to anything nice this afternoon?” I said.
“Nah, just a… date. Anyway, see you later.”
I nodded, slowly. That hesitation said it all. I knew exactly what kind of ‘date’ he was going on. Ah well, good luck to him.
He grabbed his kagoule from inside the shop and said his goodbyes. Well, Mum seemed to like him and he hadn’t messed her around as far as I could see either, so I guess he can stay.
“He seems nice,” I said.
“Oh, he’s lovely. Works so hard as well. Poor fella, he’s got this thing called Proso… something or other. It’s where you can’t recognise a person from their face. Confuses poor Wesley no end. Anyway, go and sort all those boxes out. Wes will give you a hand in a minute.”
She carried on doing whatever she was doing as I shifted the boxes of flowers into the shop, nodding to myself now that it made sense why Bertie didn’t recognise me. When I dropped off the last box, Wes peered around the lorry door.
“Oh, you’re done,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m done,” I grunted.
I flicked a layer of sweat from my brow.
“Sorry, I was just looking for your mother,” said Wes.
“Ha. I bet you were.” I offered a half-smile.
He laughed. “What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, come on. It’s obvious she likes you. I mean, if she had her hair, she’d be twiddling it left, right and centre.”
“What? Really? I thought she just felt sorry for me. She’s almost too nice to me.”
“Well, now you know. I know my mum and she’s always banging on about you. She can get deliveries locally for half the price, probably.”
“Well, actually I’m very competitive.”
“Anyway, I’ve said my piece. I don't wanna get involved.”
“She’s always talking about you as well, you know.”
“Is she?”
“Yeah. Can I tell you something?”
“Definitely.”
“She’s terrified of leaving you, you know, if you know what I…”
“Yeah, I know.”
“She just wants to make sure you're happy if that time should ever come. She was telling me that you were doing a lot of online dating, and as much as she would love to see you with someone, she’s scared you’re just going to settle for someone just for her.
She’d rather you were happy and on your own than trapped with someone that’s not right.
Don't just settle for anyone. Christ knows, I’ve been there.
I am there. And don’t do it for your mother.
Do it for yourself. She told me about your father and how he had to live a lie because of the pressure from his parents.
It’s only because of your mother that he had the freedom to be who he wanted.
He could be openly gay and he was happy before he went.
And you all loved him because your mother taught you that acceptance. She’s a wonderful woman, Danny.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I paused awkwardly. “Listen. Thanks for the weed.”
He looked sheepishly at the floor.
“And the talk. I really appreciate it,” I added.
He smiled at me somehow with just his eyes, and the way his thick crow’s feet became prominent showed that I’d made a new friend. He was a good guy. He was one of those guys that you immediately liked, because they look like good guys, and they clearly wanted you to win.
I cut the conversation short, because when he brought up Dad, it made me a bit teary.
He’d been gone over five years now, but I still missed him.
He simply radiated happiness, and we all loved him for that.
Happiness that had been bottled up for most of his life then released like an uncorked bottle of vigorously shaken champagne.
That last analogy wasn’t meant to sound like a euphemism, by the way. Okay, maybe a bit.
I shook Wes’s incredibly tanned hand and said goodbye to Mum. Wes tilted his hat brim at me as I left. He was one cool mo’fo’. Maybe literally, the jury was certainly out on that. Anyway, it was time for me to go back and tart myself up for tonight.
I was in a great mood after my conversation with Wes.
He spoke a lot of sense. The trouble with this online dating lark was that after a while, you just go through the motions with it.
You date for the sake of dating, and when you keep having disaster after disaster, you get frustrated and depressed about it.
So, what do you do? You find someone else, then someone else, becoming absorbed into this ‘numbers game’ mentality.
You end up putting so much pressure on yourself to find somebody that you siphon every drop of fun and joy out of the whole dating process.
So, I thought it was about time to enjoy the whole thing from now on. It was time to start having fun. Well, even more fun.
The ‘single’s party’ was a brand-new experience for me, and I was really looking forward to it.
By now, I had become one of the most prolific serial online daters in my weight class in the Greater London area, and there was a likelihood that many faces on that minibus would recognise me from my online presence.
This was a chance to exercise my skills in the real world and not hide behind a touchscreen.
It was actually terrifying. I hadn’t been out anywhere specifically to chat to guys for ages.
There was no need to these days. Online dating had made me incredibly lazy because it was just too easy to strike up a conversation from nothing.
Why the hell would I make the effort chatting someone up in a bar or club and risk making a prize plum of myself when I could just swipe my way through a few apps?
Midday, the minibus left from Finsbury Park station.
I was slightly fearful of the place because of my last experience in this neighbourhood with the manic Art.
I dove into the minibus as quickly as I could, and there was Ben sitting at the back of the bus with a couple of other people, waving me over to join them.
“All right, duderinos?” I said, causing him to frown in what looked like embarrassment.
Ben introduced me to his friends. I didn't actually fancy any of them, which instantly made me regret my decision to blow Harry out.
We stopped at Pease Pottage services, which was actually one of my least favourite service stations as it goes. Yes, I rank service stations… sad, but true.
Everyone unsheathed their phones and started to check out the lay of the land for matches—in a service station of all places.
I would have added the word ‘unbelievably’, but I myself joined in.
Well, you never know. Love was supposed to strike in the most unexpected of places, and the Pease Pottage Greggs couldn't be ruled out of this equation. Actually, scrub that.
We arrived in good time for the party. It had a strange vibe about it. It was full of all sorts of people. There were groups, lone soldiers and duos casing the joint for totty. Everyone was checking each other out.