Read by Claire Louise Amias
When I returned home on that Friday evening, the day after our first date, and I found the bunch of tulips behind the recycling bin, I was thrilled. Let me be clear, I’m not the kind of girl who’s particularly impressed by romantic gestures, and I’m pretty much ambivalent when it comes to flowers in general, but honestly it made my day. It had been a bastard of a week; my year nine bottom set had been behaving like absolute monsters, the head of department had been whining at me about the reports for my GCSE class which were now a full week late, and some total bellend had stolen my World’s Best Teacher mug. To be fair, there are a few of them floating around the staffroom, but still, you don’t touch a colleague’s mug - that’s the first thing they teach you on your PGCE for fuck’s sake.
To be honest I didn’t think the date had even gone all that well. You looked nothing like your profile picture, which is standard operating procedure so fair enough. I was using a picture that was definitely a few years old and taken on a rare occasion when my skin seemed to be glowing and my hair looked like I’d really made some effort; a previous date had said it made me look like a cross between Adele and Ariana Grande, although I was never sure if he’d been taking the piss. You were also a little cagey about your job, which you said rather cryptically was working as “a trouble shooter,” which sounded like obvious bullshit to me but I was willing to let it slide. Dinner had been slightly awkward too; ramen cannot be eaten in a sophisticated or sexy fashion – fact.
The hipster bar in Dalston was a good call though, as were the shots of Mezcal you insisted on buying, a drink I was unfamiliar with before that evening, and one to which I shall only be returning when I’m in a mood to fully sever ties with the troublesome weight of reality. Considering the state I was in when we left the bar I think I did a good job of resisting the urge to invite you back to my flat. It certainly crossed my mind. But I could feel the hangover already starting to kick in, and with school the next day it was the grown-up call to make. And you seemed to take it well.
So all in all it had the makings of a potential second date. And then with the tulips, things were looking promising.
I didn’t call you on Friday to thank you for the flowers obviously; no-one in their right mind messes with the three-day rule. I didn’t even call on the Saturday when I got home from the gym to find that you’d left another little gift. Lucky me, I thought. I’d almost missed it. It was about the size of a miniature bottle of spirits, beautifully wrapped and left at the foot of the door to my flat. I tore the wrapping off to find a miniature bottle of spirits. Mezcal. Nice touch.
On Sunday, the day I’d been thinking I might call to say thanks, I got back from Sainsbury’s to find the third gift. Three days, three gifts. My first thought was that I really didn’t deserve this. Maybe the date had gone better than I’d thought. When I opened the package to find a pair of Lululemon leggings, in the correct size, I thought, I really don’t deserve this. I’ve never bought anything from Lululemon (Primark is more my speed when it comes to gym wear) but I knew they’d have cost north of a hundred quid. This was way too much. Although… they were lovely. And once I’d put them on I had to admit that expensive as they were for what is basically a fancy pair of tights, they were absolutely worth the money. Besides, with sports wear I’m fairly sure the rule is that after you’ve tried it on you can’t return it, for perfectly understandable hygiene reasons.
So of course I was going to call and say thank you on the Sunday evening, but now I was starting to feel a bit weird about the whole deal. Was this just a slightly misjudged attempt to show a genuine interest, or was it all a bit much and a potential red flag? I thought I’d better sleep on the matter.
On the Monday, when I got back from work after the interminable weekly faculty meeting my head of department insists I attend, even though it could all be communicated in email, I felt I was a little closer to an answer. I heard them before I saw them. Outside my flat was a trio of bearded men in their twenties and a woman a few years older, all dressed in the sort of clothes that made them look as though they’d escaped from a fourteenth century fable about wandering minstrels. There was a lot of taffeta and chiffon and felt. They were singing a kind of song-slash-poem which even though I wasn’t sure what the word meant, was exactly what I imagined when people talked about madrigals. The bearded dudes were all playing instruments. One of them even had a lute. A fucking lute!
I stood in front of them while they warbled away, not knowing which way to look. After what felt like far longer than it probably was, they stopped singing and all bowed with an elaborate flourish. I gave a half-hearted clap and mumbled something about having exam papers to mark before pushing past them and running into my flat. It seemed I had my answer - not a slightly misjudged attempt to show interest, it was becoming clear that I was being gift-bombed by a stone cold three-sigma lunatic.
On Tuesday evening I’d already begun to feel anxious as I turned into my road. I strained to listen for the tell-tale signs of another musical assault, but thankfully it was all quiet. When I got to the front door to my flat I breathed a sigh of relief. I couldn’t see any flowers, bottles of alcohol, packages or medieval idiots of any kind. I’d got as far as putting my key in the lock before I saw them. As I peered through the glass panel on the door I could see that the communal hallway on the other side was filled with boxes and boxes stacked on top of each other, reaching up to the ceiling. I fumbled with the lock and pushed at the door but it only opened about a foot, barely enough for me to squeeze through the gap. The smell hit me like a full-on punch in the face. Lactic and sour and unmistakably cheesy. Inside the hallway there must have been more than a hundred identical Styrofoam boxes of the sort used for sending perishable items by post. They were blocking the doors to the other flats. There was no chance Jerry in flat 2 was going to be able to get his bike in now. I was pretty confident that Jerry, not a small man, would now not even be able to fit himself into the hall.
I pulled the lid off the box nearest to me. The smell, already forceful, became overpowering. Inside the box were a dozen square, washed-rind cheeses. I knew they were washed-rind cheeses because when I was eight my dad had taken the family on a tour of the Pont l’Évêque cheese factory during a holiday to Normandy. Both me and my little brother had thrown up as a result of the unbelievably vicious ambiance. And that was when the cheeses were fresh. These had to be several weeks old. This was all becoming quite an inconvenience.
On Wednesday I returned home to find a donkey with a giant red bow around its neck tethered to my wheelie bin.
On Thursday, getting home late after a parents’ evening, I found a queue of people stretching half way down the street from my front garden, where a man had set up a barbeque and was making fresh arepas for anyone willing to wait, accompanied by a friend in full Rio carnival attire, dancing the samba to music pounding out from an enormous stack of speakers. Which would all have been lovely if I hadn’t had a splitting headache, and if it had been at a festival and not right in front of my fucking house. On a school night.
On Friday I came home to find a slightly embarrassed Chesney Hawkes waiting for me outside my flat, saying he’d been paid to read to me from The Waste Land. He was good for half an hour, he said. I let him get to the end of The Burial of The Dead and sent him on his way.
It was when I saw Chesney that it all suddenly made sense.
I’d thought this bizarre collection of gifts were simply the random whims of a raving madman, but then I remembered how on our date I’d mentioned that The One and Only was the first single I ever bought. And I’d probably talked about going to the gym, and that I’d always wanted to go on holiday to Brazil, and I must have told you about the ill-fated trip to Normandy when I was a kid. I have absolutely no idea what nonsense I’d said about donkeys or lutes. Maybe you got me mixed up with a different date. I’d been so hammered that night I’d completely forgotten all the shit we’d talked about and it was only when I saw Chesney that it all came flooding back. Lunatic or not, at least it suggested you’d been listening to me.
So anyway, the answer is yes. I feel a second date might be worth a shot.
You can buy another round of Mezcal and I can tell you all about how for my eighteenth birthday my dad had promised to buy me a Porsche and take me shopping in New York, but then he ran away with some woman from his office and I never got my presents. Poor little me.
And …
I can tell you all about this pain in the arse head of department at work who’s making my life an absolute misery. I sometimes think about how much easier everything would be if she just … wasn’t around any more. You know what I mean?
(c) Callum Jacobs, 2022
Callum Jacobs is a writer, psychology teacher, sightrunning tour guide, and a fourth-level stone balancer. When not doing these things he can be found lying diagonally on his bed listening to a podcast. He lives with his wife and two children, all smarter than he is.
Claire Louise Amias received an Off-West End ‘OnComm’ Award for her play Oranges & Ink which she both wrote and starred in, about Aphra Behn and Nell Gwyn. Other roles include Mags in Handbagged, Sheila in Relatively Speaking, Liz in Present Laughter and Maggie in Hobson's Choice at Windsor Theatre Royal and Chesterfield Pomegranate. www.clairelouiseamias.com
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