I only half believed that.
CHAPTER35
The intense masculine energy that was oozing off this event was palpable. I could feel the thick, sticky masculinity in the air. From the moment I’d parked my car and begun the walk across the car park to the restaurant, I could feel it. I could hear it too, the big, loud ‘Bro’ talk, the backslaps, and what sounded like clapping high-fives, or something equally ridiculous. I could also hear women’s voices, high-pitched laughter, and lots of ‘Oh my God’s rang out. This event was my worst nightmare. If I thought my reunion was going to be bad, this, I could tell, was going to be worse. At least I’d known the people at the reunion. I didn’t know anyone here, apart from Andrew. Nerves made me physically itchy, and I tried not to scratch myself.
I walked up the stairs that led to the restaurant and stopped at the entrance. The noises were louder from here; not that they hadn’t been loud before, but now they were obscenely loud. Testosterone-infused. That was the only way to describe the beefy, buff laughter and voices I was hearing. Guys like this made me nervous. The very sound of them collecting together in groups like this gave me horrendous high-school flashbacks to dances I’d been to where the popular guys had looked at me like I was a weirdo. One to avoid. Maybe I was making assumptions though. Andrew wasn’t like that. And I’d judged him incorrectly at first, so perhaps – despite the hearty manly laughter coming from the restaurant – these guys were also like him. I took comfort in that thought.
I walked in tentatively and immediately scanned for Andrew. There were a lot of people. A lot of broad shoulders and muscular arms. Thick heads of hair, tight-fitting shirts, big belt buckles on equally fitted jeans. Lots of healthy, tanned skin. What the hell kind of school had Andrew been to? One where everyone worked out and had white teeth and clearly bench-pressed elephants. And then I finally saw him.
God, he was dazzling. Every time I saw him, a new synonym jumped to mind.
Striking.
Wondrous.
Splendid.
There didn’t seem to be enough synonyms for this man. The thesaurus was too small a book, despite the fact that the latestOxford Thesaurus, my thesaurus of choice, was over five hundred pages long. I began my walk towards him. He was surrounded by a group of these big-shouldered men, all clutching beers in one hand, the other hand in their jeans or stationed on their hips. They stood as if it was their objective to take up as much space as humanly possible. Man-spread legs. Elbows that jutted out, creating a kind of radius around their big bodies. I continued walking, and with each step I tried to muster courage for the inevitable introduction. But the other inevitable came too.Shit!
As I reached the group, as I reached out and tapped Andrew on the shoulder, as I stepped back to give him space to turn, I lost my footing. It wasn’t an elegant slip this time, if you could ever call a slip elegant. My entire body was involved. As I fell back I flapped my arms in the air and they connected with a table of beers. The beers fell and I was sure I was about to fall on top of the now broken glass when an arm came around my waist and stopped me. I hung there in the air, suspended by Andrew’s arm. And then slowly he pulled me back up.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
I nodded, but my face was burning with embarrassment as the entire group of men moved their eyes to me.
‘You sure?’ he asked.
I nodded, and then turned my attention to the beers on the floor. Well, they were no longer beers. They were shards of glass floating in a river of hops.
‘Sorry about the beers. I’ll pay for them, obviously,’ I said quickly into the silence that had fallen around us. ‘They broke. Well, I broke them. Not on purpose. I don’t fall on purpose. But they are broken. I would be careful with all the glass on the floor, though. Glass is actually sharper than a razor blade. Most people don’t know that, but it is. Injuries caused by glass can be much worse than injuries caused by a knife, and then of course you need to be careful of the infection – a floor is the most bacteria-ridden part of any building.’ I tried to smile at them. They did not smile back. Instead, they were all looking at me with something that resembled confusion, and I wished I hadn’t carried on, but I did. It was regrettable. ‘Especially when most people don’t clean the soles of their shoes often or well enough. The soles of your shoes can be filthy.’ I looked down at everyone’s feet. ‘Yours are probably all filthy.’ I stopped talking and flapped my fingers quickly by my sides. It felt like a physical energy was building up inside me, and that if I didn’t let it out I was going to explode like the bottles of beer.
‘Don’t worry about the beers,’ Andrew said, now rubbing small circles into my back.
‘Yeah, don’t worry about them,’ one of the men said, but he was still looking at me in that odd way that I didn’t like at all. In fact, I didn’t like the way that any of them were looking at me. I shuffled from side to side and clenched my fists.
‘Oh my God, what the hell happened here?’ the pack of lionesses – because that’s what they looked like, as they stalked across the floor towards us – said.
‘Jesus,’ another lioness said. ‘Looks like the party really got started.’
‘I broke their beers. Sorry. Not on purpose, obviously. I don’t break things on purpose,’ I said to the lionesses. ‘Well, except for that one time I had to break my car window because I locked my keys in – that was obviously before car immobilizers.’Stop talking, stop talking!I internally begged myself. ‘You can’t lock your keys in your car any more, not with modern technology, unless you drive an older one like me, when you still can.’Stop talking, stop talking.Two of the lionesses shot each other sideways glances. I did not miss them. Then they smiled at each other in that conspiratorial manner that I’d seen many, many times before.What is it about people like me and people like them?They always seemed to sense that I was different, before even having a conversation with me. Granted, I had knocked over an entire table of beers, rambled about floor bacteria and the modern car immobilizer, flapped my fingers and accused everyone of not cleaning the soles of their shoes regularly, or well enough. But even so, I recognized that familiar look in their eyes. It was that knowing I’d seen so many times before. That knowing that I was different from them.
‘Sorry, guys, I haven’t introduced you. This is my girlfriend Pippa. Pippa, these are all my old schoolfriends.’
His hand left my back and I felt its absence acutely. I wanted it back there, because so far, in these disastrous few minutes, it had felt like the only good thing. I tried to do what Andrew did, when he casually put his hand in the air and gave people an effortless wave accompanied with a slight head tilt and an understated ‘Hi’.
‘HI!’ My hand shot into the air. This was not a wave; this was the hand of an overly enthusiastic student who sat in the front of the class jumping in to answer all the questions first. This was not going well. No matter what I did, or said, I seemed to be stuck in a loop of disastrous happenings. It was probably best to take my hand out of the air – it was starting to feel like it had been there for too long – and keep my lips sealed.
CHAPTER36
‘That wasn’t good,’ I said to Andrew when I had him alone at the bar.
‘It wasn’t that bad,’ he said, ordering us drinks.
‘I knocked over a tray of beers and then spoke non-stop about stuff I don’t even quite remember now.’
‘You spoke about having to break into your car once,’ he said with a smile.
‘It’s not funny.’
