Here's Looking at You Read Free Page B

relief. Swings and roundabouts. What appealed about this Neil’s profile, before you met him?’
    ‘Uhm. He seemed sane and pleasant enough,’ Anna shrugged.
    Michelle flicked her fag into the Illy coffee cup that was performing ashtray duties. She was constantly giving up, then falling off the wagon.
    Anna and Michelle had met in their early twenties at WeightWatchers. Anna had passed with flying colours, Michelle had flunked. One day, their bouncy cult leader was barking: ‘Strong minds need healthy bodies!’ and Michelle had said loudly, in her West Country lilt: ‘That’s Stephen Hawking told, by Jet from Gladiators,’ and then, into the shocked silence, ‘Fuck this, I’m off for a boneless bucket.’ That week, Anna missed her weigh-in and made a best mate.
    ‘“Sane and pleasant enough” is aiming a bit low? I’ve hired staff that had more going for them than that.’
    ‘I dunno. I just spent an evening with a man who talked about weeing on people as a leisure activity and demanded to know what I like in bed. So in the face of that, I’ll take sane and pleasant. Try internet dating, and your expectations would tumble too.’
    Michelle had people she called when she fancied a tumble. She’d had her heart broken by a married man and insisted she was not interested in looking for further disappointment.
    ‘But you make my point for me, my love. That was someone “safe”, so why not take a risk on Mr Exciting?’
    ‘Even if they agreed to a date, I don’t want to handle Mr Exciting’s disappointment when he turns up and meets
me
.’
    There was a brief pause while Frank Sinatra bellowed his way through ‘Strangers in the Night’,
from the stereo held together with duct tape underneath the till.
    ‘Are we going to say it?’ Michelle said, looking to Daniel. ‘Fuck it, I’m going to say it. Anna, there’s modesty, which is a lovely quality. Then there’s underrating yourself to a self-harming degree. You are bloody brilliant. What disappointment are you talking about?’
    Anna sighed and leaned back against the sofa.
    ‘Hah, well. I’m not though, am I? Or I wouldn’t have been single forever.’
    Anna’s British gran Maude had a dreadful saying about the lonely folly of romantic ideas above your station:
‘She
wouldn’t have a walker and the riders didn’t stop’.
    It had given eleven-year-old Anna the chills. ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘Some women think they’re too good for those who want them, but when they’re not good enough for the men
they
want, they end up alone.’
    Maude had been an utter misery-tits about everything. But a misery-tits could be right, several times a day.
    ‘When did you get this idea you’re in some way not good enough?’ Michelle said.
    ‘That’d be school.’
    A pause. Michelle and Daniel knew the stories of course, right up to the Mock Rock. And they knew about The Thing That Happened After. There was a tense pause, as much as anything could be tense when they were supine with alcohol at knocking one in the morning.
    Michelle sensitively turned the focus, for a moment.
    ‘I’m not sure hanging round with us two does you good. We’re no help. I’m perma-single and Dan’s … settled down.’
    There was another pause as Michelle used the phrase ‘settled down’ with some sceptical reluctance.
    Daniel had been with the somewhat droopy Penny for nearly a year. She was a singer in fiddle-folk band The Unsaid Things and sufferer of ME. Michelle was deeply sceptical of the ME, and claimed Penny was in fact a sufferer of POOR ME syndrome. Daniel met Penny when she’d waitressed at The Pantry and been sacked for being useless, so Michelle felt she had some rights to an opinion. An unflattering one.
    ‘You are a help. you’re helping right now,’ Anna said.
    ‘By the way,’ Michelle waved at a bowl on the table, ‘you’ve heard of Omelette Arnold Bennett. Well these are Homemade Scotch Eggs from Arnold’s buffet. Dig in.’
    For all her