Friday, 20 March 2020

I awoke the next day, mouth dry and make-up stains on the pillow evidence of last night's sloppy removal job.

Rules broken last night:

· More than two drinks on a school night.

· Consumption of crisps (three bags) AND a kebab from a shop that looked as if it disregarded every hygiene rule in the book.

· Another public display of affection—at the taxi rank where this time I used my hands to push his crotch as close to mine as possible, the pressure making him break off and groan.

Rules not broken last night:

· The six-date one.

I threw back the covers and leapt up, the sudden movement too much on a fragile stomach. The whole house stank of that kebab, even though I'd eaten the rest of it in the kitchen.

Seven am. My 'new' working from home life meant I no longer had the 15-minute walk to work, but I'd wanted to get up earlier and prepare the house ahead of Tom's arrival. Gin oozed from every pore and I stumbled into the shower, blasting myself with hot water and turning it to freezing for five minutes.

As the cold water pounded against my head and chest, I replayed the end of the night. We'd stumbled, laughing, into a kebab shop three doors down from the Arlington. "I've never had a kebab," I announced, my voice at cringe-worthy loud level. The other punter in the shop shot me daggers looks. Something along the lines of, "You posh twat!"

"Have you not?" Tom said, amused and incredulous at the same time. "Ah, you've missed out all these years!"

Then, he insisted on buying me a 'hoagie'—kebab meat carved off a revolting looking slab of meat rotating on a spike and piled into a chapati with chips, cheese and a spicy sauce. "I can't possibly..." I said, when the Turkish owner shoved the boxes across to us, mind slipping into the automatic calorie totaliser thing it always did.

"Oh, you can. Tomorrow you'll thank me."

Outside, we wandered the streets, kebab boxes clutched tightly and greasy fingers pulling off chunks to eat. (He was right—I could.) Glasgow had been quiet earlier but now people clogged the streets, crowded into the few bars and restaurants still open. All of us doing the same thing—packing in the little that was left of life where we could.

At the taxi rank, the drivers eyed us warily. Occupational hazard in Scotland's biggest city—the inebriated state of the clients you pick up. Too drunk and you risk them vomiting in your cab, meaning the taxi needed to be off the road for a precious hour while it was cleaned clean it. But a lockdown was on its way. Taxi drivers needed whatever business they could get before people stopped going out altogether.

I put my polystyrene box on the bench. Tom did the same, moving forward and enveloping me in a hug, his smell familiar but something I couldn't name. We kissed. This, the headiness of living in the moment... my new 'normal', I decided.

Tom stepped away from me. "I better be going," he said, as he stood back, my hand still in his.

"Or how about you...?"

Hop into the taxi with me, where we'll snog and embarrass the hell out of the taxi driver, turn up at my house and...

He smiled, regret lingering there. "Awful tempting, Sophie, but we should wait... and, you see there's..."

He pulled me back towards him, so our faces were only inches apart. A girl might drown in those eyes. "Number 7 Woodland Avenue, right?"

I recited the postcode back.

"Are we mad?" he asked.

No matter that the idea of moving in sent alternate glows to my belly and shivers down my spine. My drink-fuelled brain wanted him to move in more than anything. For the time being, it overrode the doubts.

He kissed me again—the one mentioned in the rules broken above. My tongue exploring the insides of his mouth, which tasted of chilli sauce and processed meat. As I must, too. The taxi driver at the front of the rank stuck his head out. "Are you looking for a ride home? I cannae wait here all night."

"Yes! We're stark raving bonkers. But these are mad times. I'll see you Sunday, right?"

He insisted on opening the door for me and waved until the taxi pulled out of sight. The driver wanted to talk about the virus, asking me what I thought of the chances of catching it and if the Chinese students had disappeared from the university where I worked.

Questions answered, I settled back on the seat and replayed every second of that kiss.

*****

Coffee and muesli done post the shower the next morning, I switched on my iMac and started the first of three video conferencing calls where we wasted at least five minutes on each one trying to explain to different techno fuds how to connect the video and audio.

"Bottom left," I bleated for what felt like the hundredth time that day during the final call. "Look for the camera icon and make sure there isn't a red line through it."

In between, I spent the day getting the house ready. Just as you choose your profile picture on a dating site carefully, so too is how you decide to present your home the first time another person sees it.

Most people's preparation differs from mine—me 'messing' up my home to change it from pristine to merely tidy. I jumbled up the cans and jars in my kitchen and ruffled the sheets—typically hotel smooth—in the bedrooms. Left out a few toiletries in the bathrooms instead of confining them to cabinets, height arranged.

Bookshelves cleared of anything embarrassing—the self-help books (Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now and one that promised to teach you to accept your past and move on), the Catherine Cookson novels that had belonged to my mother—and everything else incriminating banished to the attic, I sat at the desk in my study to call Arlene.

When I had phoned her at lunchtime to asked if we could bring our usual weekly appointment forward by one day, she had been upbeat.

"Sure—though you caught me at the right moment as a lot of clients have contacted me these last two days. Can we make it six-thirty?"

A global pandemic must create substantial business for a counsellor. Arlene ran her clinics from her home in London. I'd been doing them via Skype since the beginning, putting me ahead of the curve. But now all her clients would be doing the same thing. Would she be tempted to mute them, allowing them to ramble on and on before jumping in with the odd soothing word as she did something much more worthwhile—her hands out of view?

I'd been seeing her for almost a year. Josie's insistence—well, partly. On my last birthday, I decided that counselling would be useful, sick of feeling trapped within the personality aspects I was powerless to change. Terrified, too, that guilt would haunt me for the rest of my life.

"Try Marion McAllister," Josie said. "She's excellent. I used her a few years ago."

The admission she'd used counselling services astonished me. If there was anyone more assured than Josie, I was yet to meet them. But I said no to Marion. I'd known Arlene in another life. At least I would not have to explain that to her.

"Today has been informative," Arlene said now as she peered at the screen. "I've learned so much more about my clients simply by being able to see their homes."

"What did mine tell you about me when we started counselling?" I asked. The study was one of the extra bedrooms. A large piece of tasteful modern art hung behind me. The décor matched—curtains, wallpaper, and carpet complementing each other. The window let the light flood in.

"Nothing I didn't know already," Arlene said, waving her fingers at the screen. "Now, what do you want to talk about?"

Talking over your worries and insecurities with someone you pay is a lot easier than doing it for free with family or friends. Especially my family. Even so—and I recognised this as truly mad—while I had discussed the borderline cleanliness OCD, my feelings about my father and what had happened there, I hadn't told Arlene everything.

Shame made me fearful. What if she failed to hide her instinctive reaction—drawing back from me in horror before that bland professionalism took over once more? Stupid, given what I knew of Arlene, but then aren't our fears always illogical?

"I've asked—well, agreed—to moving in with a man. We've only been on three dates."

Arlene pursed her lips. She wasn't, I told myself, my sister and bound to react in an overly protective way. The lip pursing meant something else. Someone mulling information over.

"May be a recent phenomenon or even an old one," she said, seconds later. "Decades ago, people didn't do long courtships. They married after very few dates. List for me what worries you about moving in with someone."

Counselling is hard work. When I started it, I assumed Arlene would give me answers. That's what she had done with me in a previous life. At an official counselling session, I had expected to report aspects of my behaviour. She'd do a bit of digging and voila! A prescription for changes that I would make that would 'cure' me.

No such luck. Most of the time, she made me think out loud and then explore the way my mind worked.

I outlined the Tom moving in worries. She nodded as I told her everything, apart from the biggies.

My home was my sanctuary. The fear I couldn't cope with sharing it. Appearing sans make-up in front of a guy. Horrors such as needing to use the ensuite bathroom to go for a shit when someone else lay in the bed (the soundproofing wasn't great)—an aspect of living together that made me shudder.

Coping with someone whose hygiene standards might not match my own. Not being able to clean up as much.

Arlene's counselling vocabulary wasn't broad. It seemed to consist mostly of why, as in, 'Why is this a worry?' Where she expected me to talk about what bothered me, my answer petering out after a while as I tuned into how ridiculous I sounded.

She changed tack. "Why do you like Tom so much?"

Excellent point. "So many things! He's incredibly attractive. He makes me laugh. I... I find myself not caring so much about all my 'rules' when I'm with him. He's kind.

"Tom, er, doesn't know how old I am," I admitted. Tom knew he was younger than me. Only he thought the age difference was four years.

"Why?" That word again.

"Because... because when my niece put my profile up, I let her do it," I muttered. "Oh, all right then... I wanted more choice! Men my age are so awful! They let themselves go. Or they have entrenched views. Or they're bitter about an ex and bang on about her all the time. So I thought if I made myself younger then I'd attract younger men in turn. Men that don't come with so much baggage."

Arlene had this trick where she glanced at her watch. At first, I thought it was an accidental breach of counsellor/client etiquette. The watch glance, once I'd experienced it numerous times, was a reminder I might want to mull over my own entrenched opinions.

Dim-witted mutterings about baggage from the woman grabbing all the suitcases off life's luggage carousel as it went round and round.

"I would have confessed," I bleated. "When we got to the fourth or fifth date. I'd say, 'Tom, I'm so sorry about this, but I lied about my age. I hope you don't mind'."

"He's twenty-seven?" she butted in. "Same age as my oldest."

I wasn't sure what that meant. But the rest of the hour continued the same way. Me working through my worries and Arlene repeating why, why, why.

She varied it at last. "What do you want from this, Sophie?"

"I..."

Oh. It sounded ridiculous but in the whirl of excitement then panic and everything I'd done on the house to make myself look 'normal' I'd only thought about the immediate. "Tom's moving in!", and imagining him in each room, especially the bedroom. I'd pictured us in front of the TV and me calling out sleepy goodbyes and take cares as he left at super early o'clock every morning to start work.

What did I want?

"To be happy," I burst out. "To have a relationship that's not..."

Self-destructive? Selfish? Going nowhere?

All the above.

"To be in a long-term, successful relationship. The loneliness. It's always been there, but it's been much, much worse since... well, you know. I hate, hate, hate..."

And with that, I burst into tears, surprising myself. This being an online counselling session, Arlene couldn't nudge a box of tissues towards me the way they do on TV. Instead, I excused myself, ripped off sheets from the neatly folded toilet roll in the bathroom and returned.

To more bloody why's as she prodded the loneliness and queried what I wanted.

"Same time next week?" Arlene asked once we'd got the hour-mark. Tom's postie job would take him out of the house for six hours a day. I would be able to squeeze in the appointment without him realising would be easy enough.

"Good luck and stay safe!" she sang out, pressing 'the end meeting for all' button just as my phone rang.

Josie.

"Sophie," she said, tone brusque as always. "I've been thinking about the lockdown. We won't be allowed to leave our houses soon. Move in with us. We have the space and I don't want to have to think about you all on your own."

Behind her, I heard Darla cheer. "Yeah, go on, Aunt Sophs. We can room together."

Much as I loved my niece, the prospect of holing up with a 16-year-old for weeks on end did not appeal. And living under Josie's roof would be appalling. Non-stop nagging, me treated like one of her brood and told off for everything.

"I'm not going to be on my own."

It all came out. In best teenage girl 'I tell my mother nothing' fashion, Darla hadn't said a word about Tom and the part she had played in setting us up to her mother. No, I admitted, we hadn't been dating that long—me adding three other dates to the total to make it sound more respectable.

The short timeline still appalled Josie and resulted in the social distancing argument on the Sunday, Darla along for the ride, her expression mirthful.

My phone beeped as soon as they'd left, mother and daughter simultaneously contacting me to send contrary advice. I stuffed my phone into my jeans pocket the minute Tom got out of the car, eyes rounded with wonder at the house and the street.

I hadn't warned him about the house.

"That grand", he'd described it. Space is a premium in cities. I lived by myself in a Georgian-style townhouse built in the late 19th century surrounded by wrought-iron railings and its garden lovingly manicured by a gardener who appreciated the flowers and shrubs far more than I did.

I had neighbours, but their houses and gardens were big enough for us not to intrude on each other. Nevertheless, Mrs Whittaker next door paused as she headed back towards her own house, snappy dog barking at her heels.

Tom stood at the gate.

"How on earth do you afford this?" he asked, face wrinkled up in a frown. I sensed disapproval under the awe. Welcome to the reason few people—friends, colleagues—ever got an invitation to my home.

"Did you win the lottery or something?"

"The something," I said. "I'll tell you later. Come on in. I'll show you around. Er... do you like coffee, by the way? And I was going to make pasta for dinner. Is that okay?"

He nodded. "Grand."

Mrs Whittaker still hadn't gone in. I battled the urge to flick her two fingers.

Tom didn't move, hovering at the bottom of the garden as he shifted from foot to foot. "There's something I need to tell you, though. Dunno how it'll make you feel."

Oh. And, oh... Was my sister about to be proved right and I was on the verge of letting a convicted criminal into my home?

Older sister able to say, I told you so.

Damn it.

AUTHOR'S NOTES - anyone else ever cleared their bookshelves ahead of inviting a man to the house for the first time?! The hiding all the self-help books is something I think a lot of people do... :)