‘C’mon, Cooper. You’ll be fine. Just knock him dead with your sparkling wit and charm,’ he humours me.
‘I’m more worried about him knocking me dead. The way he feels about me, I’m likely to be under the wheels of a new Mercedes within five minutes.’
‘You’ll be fine, sweetheart. Claus and I are right behind you.’
‘Mmm. At a safe distance of hundreds of miles.’
Joe laughs and the irony of this situation isn’t lost on me – my gay ex-boyfriend is trying to give me confidence to face the man I left him for in the first place. This could keep a therapist in fees for years.
I call Sarah on my mobile as the taxi heads for Wimbledon. I had to hand back my work phone when I left my job, so I invested in a brand new Nokia. I feel very high tech.
She sounds so bright and breezy, it’s a huge relief. Maybe the break in St Andrews reset things for her and she’s found her old optimism again. I hang up as I arrive at the garage.
Okay, deep breaths. I can do this. I can do this.
I’m so busy concentrating on my opening line that I forget to look where I’m going. Three seconds later, I’m lying sprawled on the floor after tripping over the welcome mat on the way in. I’m just glad I wore trousers, otherwise the world would have had a bird’s eye view of my tartan knickers.
As I mentally check my limbs for broken bones, a hand takes my arm and pulls me up.
‘Are you okay?’ It’s male, it’s Scottish and before I even look up, I know it’s him.
‘I’m fine, I think, Doug. And you?’
He stares at me for what seems like an hour but is probably about three and a half seconds. I do the top-to-toe scan. The blond hair is now short and swept back, the eyes even greener than I remembered. His body still looks like a Calvin Klein mannequin. He’s wearing a navy suit, the Versace buttons giving a clue to its origin and a gold tie over a white shirt. He is perfection. I don’t know whether to talk to him or just stare for a while longer.
‘You always did like to make a big entrance.’
‘Yes, well, there’s nothing like indoor gymnastics to get a girl noticed.’
He doesn’t even smile and I feel a distinct frost forming around us.
‘What can I do for you, Carly?’
‘I’d, em, like a Mercedes.’
He folds his arms and raises his eyebrows. ‘Really, what model?’
‘Em, a kind of, well, one of those, em, blue ones.’
He raises an eyebrow and I crumble.
‘Okay, Doug,’ I confess, ‘I don’t want a sodding car. Callum told me you worked here and I came to talk to you.’
‘Why? Running out of men to be unfaithful to?’
Point taken.
I turn to leave. There’s only so much humiliation I can take in one morning and this can only go downhill from here. A swift exit seems like a better plan.
But, to my surprise, he puts out his arm to stop me.
‘Okay, Carly, we’ll go to the coffee bar across the road. You’ve got half an hour.’ Maybe that’s just how long it will take him to round up enough passers-by to witness my public flogging.
A few minutes later, he’s sitting across the table, still staring at me. How do I start? Somehow, asking ‘how have you been’ seems totally insufficient.
‘First of all, I’m so sorry about what happened, Doug. I know I’ve got no right to ask you to forgive me.’ I am so crap at grovelling, but I keep it succinct. I know for sure there’s no point in rehashing it all. “I’m sorry I slept with Mark Barwick behind your back and crushed our plans for the future,” would just be twisting the knife.
‘Correct.’ At least he’s speaking. This could be a breakthrough.
‘Look, Doug, what else can I say? I was a pathetic, horrible cow and I don’t blame you for hating me, but I am sorry.’
‘Okay, so you’re sorry. What do you want now?’
Since when was he so direct? This is the same guy who took five weeks to snog me. Has he been on an assertiveness course?
‘I guess I just wanted to see you. It’s been a long time.’
The look on his face tells me that it hasn’t been long enough. Perhaps I should have waited another, oh, I don’t know, fifty years?
‘What happened next?’ Kate interrogates me when she arrives back from work.
I tell her how it took half an hour before he would even utter a whole sentence, and then another half hour before he deigned to enter into a proper conversation. He finally returned to the garage two hours, eight coffees (ours), a chocolate fudge cake (mine) and two paracetamol (also mine) later.
‘And?’ she persists.
‘And I’m meeting him tonight for dinner,’ I squeal, doing an impersonation of a pogo stick. She’s incredulous and I don’t blame her. I could hardly believe the turnaround myself. To start with, he was absolutely hating me and then it was like a switch flicked and he suggested we carry on the conversation tonight at some trendy restaurant.
She bangs a drum roll on the kitchen counter. The kids flee for cover – Mummy and Auntie Carly have obviously had too much caffeine again.
That evening, I don my new Kookai dress, purchased on my return from Wimbledon. Yes, I know I’ve got the financial stability of a seesaw, but this could be one of the most important nights of my life. Anyway, I can always take it back for a refund tomorrow.
Doug takes me to Marco Pierre White’s Titanic. Not exactly quiet and romantic, but definitely my kind of place – it’s frantically busy, deafeningly noisy and unbelievably shallow and trendy. I catch sight of us in the
