15. Ari
Ari
Apparently the bank loan will take fourteen days to process, so we won’t know for a while if we’ve been successful. I hate waiting for things, it makes me anxious and too prone to imagining the worst.
“We need to keep busy,” Brody tells me in that overly enthusiastic way of his.
“But what’s the point if we don’t know what they’ll say?” We’re in my living room and I’m extra salty because I turned down a pain au chocolate – vampires metabolise human food differently but we still need to think about sugar content and not being too gluttonous – and now I’m hungry.
Brody finishes chewing his own pastry and part of me wants to kill him for eating in front of me even though I know that’s unfair and this situation is entirely of my own making. “Think about it like this,” he says. “If we work on Only Fangs and then we don’t get the funding, what have we lost?”
I open my mouth to speak but it was a rhetorical question so I let him carry on.
“Nothing.” He gives me this little shrug as if to say oops, but no harm. “But if we don’t work on Only Fangs and then we do get the funding? Well then we’ll be weeks behind and we’ll never catch up.”
“So we just carry on with blind hope that the bank will give us the loan?” I know I sound whiny but I can’t help myself.
Brody beams at me as if he can’t see my own reluctance. “Exactly.”
And so Brody and I spend the next week working hard on the app. My main focus is the marketing side, pulling together a whole load of research on who the target market is, how many vampires might be interested in the service, and how we can entice them to try it.
“Dating apps live or die on how many members you have,” Brody tells me when I declare myself bored of looking at spreadsheets. “You’re doing the most important bit.”
He’s right. We need to prove we can find a way to get critical mass and have enough people signing up at launch so everyone can find at least one match.
After all, a dating app with no-one you can date on it is a pointless waste of everyone’s time.
And even though vampires have all the time in the world, they’re still reluctant to squander it.
In fact, the most impatient people I know are vampires.
“Can we take a break though?” I ask him. “Or at least work on something else for a bit?”
“You could help me with some of the functionality ideas,” he suggests.
“That sounds a lot more interesting.” I close the lid of my laptop quickly and he laughs softly.
“Right then. So, the main UX is off the shelf, we can customise bits of it and change the colours and things, but on the whole it will work the same way most of these apps do. But I’ve been trying to think of things we can add that might be a little more fun.”
“Sounds like a good plan. Any ideas so far?”
He bites his lip He obviously has an idea and he’s desperate to share it. “We could create a ‘pick your date’ function,” he says, eyes shining like he’s had the very best idea in the world. There’s something super endearing about how enthusiastic he is.
“How do you mean?”
“Like a poll or something that you and your potential date can fill in so it will suggest the perfect date. Avoid all the weirdness of having to decide on a place and a time and an activity.” He’s evidently warming to the theme.
“Activity?” I ask.
“Yeah, like ice skating or going to the cinema or a hike. Some kind of activity to break the ice.”
“Oh. Is that a thing?”
He gives me this look.
“I haven’t actually been on a date for a while,” I say in my defence.
“How long is a while?”
“A while.” I put a heavy emphasis on the “while”.
“Like a few months? A year?” He narrows his eyes as he looks at me.
“Longer.” I’m not sure I want to be more accurate. “By choice though,” I add quickly. Not that it matters, but I don’t want him to think I couldn’t date if I wanted to.
“Years?”
“I’m a hundred and seventy-two. You say years like it’s a long time.”
“Fair.” He pauses for a moment. “So, how about I take you out?”
“On a date?” If I could blush I would.
“Just to show you what modern dating actually looks like.”
“Of course.” Is it wrong that I’m almost disappointed it isn’t a real date?
In the end he takes me to a place just off Friar’s Walk. “I’ve been here before,” I say as we stand outside a wooden door recessed into a very old stone wall.
“Oh,” Brody says, the disappointment evident in his tone. “Sorry, I thought this could be fun. Something a bit new for both of us.”
“I don’t mean recently,” I turn and smile at him and his whole demeanour changes back to the excited puppy I’m more used to. “It was decades ago. No actually, it was well over a century.” I reach out to touch the stone wall, the bricks crumbling slightly beneath my fingers.
The first time I came here it was summer, I remember the wide brimmed hat I was wearing to stop the sun from burning my skin.
There wasn’t any Clarins magic lotion back then.
My heart had raced and I thought I was going to be sick as I knocked on the door and whispered the password to the woman waiting on the other side.
“Are you OK?” Brody asks and snaps me from my reverie.
“Yeah. Just…” I trail off. “Nothing.” I shake my head to chase the memory away. We need to remember our history, but at the same time it isn’t good to spend too much time thinking about what was. The past is a place full of the ghosts of people I used to know, long dead and turned to dust.
Brody rings the bell and a few moments later a large man appears in the entrance and invites us in. “Shall we?” Brody asks as he motions to the open door and allows me to be the first through it. He does have very good manners.
“So what are we doing here?” I ask, desperate to distract myself from my thoughts of 1906.
“It’s an escape room. Basically a big puzzle we have to try to solve.”
“And then what?”
“And then we get to leave.”
I spin round to look at him. “What do you mean ‘and then we get to leave’?”
“Well, we’re locked in the room until we solve the puzzle.” He’s so nonchalant it almost hurts.
“Are you actually insane?”
“It’s fun. I promise.”
“But what if we can’t solve the puzzle?”
“If we can’t figure it out within an hour then they just let us out.
” He grins at me. “It isn’t like they lock us up forever.
” He says it like the very idea is funny.
He’s obviously never been to the dungeons of Hele House; the horror stories of what used to happen there are the stuff of vampire nightmares.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but a room full of 80s paraphernalia was not it.
The walls are covered in posters of Madonna and Kate Bush and the ceiling has a hideous swirled Artex pattern to it.
The TV is an enormous box that looks like it weighs as much as an elephant, even though the screen itself is tiny.
There’s a three piece suite, all upholstered in the same floral pattern that almost hurts my eyes to look at.
A vintage Rainbow Brite doll balances on a stack of Just Seventeen magazines.
On a table are two items: a cassette tape and a pencil. “What is this?” Brody asks, almost to himself as he stands and looks at them. He reaches out to pick up the cassette. “This just says Mix Tape on it.” He turns to look at me. “This is for music, right? Can we play it?”
“I haven’t seen a tape player.”
“Hmm.” He puts it down and continues to walk around aimlessly.
“You’re too young to remember these, aren’t you?” I ask softly. It feels utterly insane to be around someone who doesn’t understand the concept of the cassette. I remember how excited we were when we could carry a handful of tapes around instead of lugging a pile of records. Vinyl is heavy.
I pick up the pencil and the cassette. “You know the link between these two things?”
He shakes his head.
I place the pencil in one of the spools and turn it. “Sometimes the tape would get chewed up in the machine and we’d have to wind it back in. Or sometimes I’d use it to rewind the tape to save the batteries in my Walkman.”
For a moment confusion flashes across his features. but then his brain kicks into gear. “There could be a message on the tape.”
He’s right. There’s a four digit code: 3569. “But what’s it for?”
We begin to search the room, looking for anything you could put a code into. Eventually Brody strikes gold and finds a little metal box with a small padlock on it. The padlock unlocks with 3569 and inside is a whole collection of magnets, each one a single word.
There’s an ugly looking avocado fridge in the corner. “There’s questions on it,” Brody shouts and I go to join him. “These must be the answers.” He’s bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet as if he can’t contain his excitement. “This is so cool.”
I’m not quite convinced. The whole escape room thing feels more than a little pointless. But he’s obviously enjoying himself and so I decide to just go with it, to relax and allow myself to have fun, however trivial the activity itself is.
In the end it is fun. And we finally make it out of the room, giggling like school children. Brody picks me up and swings me round. “We did it.” He smiles and I can’t help but smile back.