Page 14 of The Late Bloomer’s Playlist

Al Green

TIRED OF BEING ALONE

I’d been afforded the quiet joy of having the apartment to myself for the evening. David had wandered into the living room three hours ago, held his arms out and given me a twirl, which I took to be my cue for giving him approval. I glanced up from my book and nodded before going back to what I was reading.

‘You’re such a man sometimes, Patti,’ he’d snapped and I’d treated the comment with the contempt I thought it deserved, given that he was obviously off out and we likely didn’t have time for a friendly debate about gender performativity.

Still, he’d kissed me on the crown of the head – then Fred, then Lucy, who did her level best to swipe him away – before saying he was off out. I didn’t ask where. If it wound up being a good night then I wagered I’d meet the woman in the bathroom tomorrow morning.

Ten minutes into the evening and I tried to plan how the night might look, but found that I couldn’t get beyond dinner for one, which at least gave me a starting point. I made cheese sauce from scratch, boiled pasta, diced ham and onions, and unceremoniously threw everything together in a pan on the hob to heat through. I swapped from reading a book to playing low music, poured red wine without waiting for it to breathe – ‘The horror!’ David would say – and I let Fred and Lucy have their respective dinners in the living room with me when everything was ready. David had always relegated them to the kitchen, but if we were allowed to be slobs on the sofa while we filled our faces then I’d never seen reason why the pets shouldn’t either. Lucy took small and measured nips at her food while Fred inhaled his own, and I landed somewhere between the two of them, pinning together pasta, ham, and onion in single mouthfuls, careful to take measured bites. It was something David had always mocked me for, albeit playfully.

I was just in the process of wiping my finger around the bowl, lapping up the last of the sauce, when Al Green’s vocals started to croon through the speaker system. While there were many things that David and I hadn’t got on board with as we’d aged – tops that show your midriff in the middle of winter; Snapchat, and Twitter – one of the few things we had kept a working knowledge of was music. We mightn’t know who was in the charts anymore – or even if the charts existed, still – but we knew our way around Spotify. I took a long sip of wine, tipped my head against the back of the sofa, and sang along to our empty living room about how tired I was of being alone. I was two choruses in when I felt the distinct sensation of someone slapping me round the face – metaphorically, that is – and my head shot up.

‘Am I tired of being alone?’

I looked between Fred and Lucy, both of whom looked back at me with such disinterest that I thought they were probably hankering after being left alone themselves.

Before I knew it, Al Green was on repeat and I was nearing the end of my second glass of red. I wasn’t sure how long the song had been playing; it became white noise, almost, while I curled up in one of our armchairs and angled myself to look out on the city. We couldn’t see much of it, admittedly, but there was enough action there to distract me until the second glass was empty. After that…

I leaned forward to grab my phone from the table and thumbed into The App, capitalised in my head to underscore its importance and because I hadn’t taken the time to learn its name. I only recognised it by the logo: a giant L, for subtlety.

Elinda, 39, Redditch.

Caitlin, 41, Cardiff.

Florrie, 67, Glasgow.

‘No, no, no.’

I hit X so many times that I started to wonder how quickly repetitive strain injury can develop. Still, I carried my phone into the kitchen with me for another refill and continued to “browse”, which made the action feel more like looking through the Marks and Spencer online sale than it did looking for a life partner.

‘Ha!’ I belched the noise into the room, realising at once that I should have had a bigger portion of pasta – or less wine. ‘But it’s too late for that,’ I said when the glass was three inches full from a fresh pour, ‘and it’s too late for finding a life partner, isn’t it, Fred?’

He’d followed me in on the misguided assumption that there might be more food on the other side of his journey. When he realised there wasn’t, he flopped down on the cool of the tiles as though he didn’t have the energy to carry himself any further. He got his dramatics from David. Lucy, meanwhile, got her general disinterest in everything from me. When I walked back into the room she didn’t even look around; she was too busy staring out of the window, no doubt scheming for the death of local birds, even though she’d been a house cat since we’d got her.

‘Right.’ I tucked myself into the armchair, my legs folded beneath me and my wine close at hand. ‘Let’s see who else we’ve… Oh.’

There it was again, that same slapping sensation from earlier.

Sheila, 42, Hereford.

I took great care to click into her profile but not click the button clearly marked as “match”. The location tracker narrowed down Sheila’s area to–

‘Christ, nine kilometres away? What the fuck even is…’ I keyed into my search engine and input the numbers. ‘Five and a half miles… Good grief.’

I carried on thumbing through her profile, moving box by box. She was a former music teacher who had taken up furniture renovation. She listed herself as “having a passion for breathing life into old things”, which I thought was a note in my favour. Sheila enjoyed pottery, painting, walks in the rain and on the beach, at the same time, even. She had no children, was an only child, non-smoker, occasional drinker, and I felt every bit the voyeur for knowing these things about her without her actually telling me.

‘This, this is why I hate the idea of online dating,’ I said to no one in particular before taking another thirsty mouthful. It crossed my mind that I didn’t actually know what David had written about me on here, and I wondered whether I was better off not knowing. Letting David fill out the relevant boxes felt a little like letting an agent negotiate a deal for you; they were likely to be much better at both selling a product and closing a sale. So instead, I stayed with Sheila. And for the first time since this app started to take up storage that might otherwise be used for pictures of my pets, I truly, deeply considered hitting “match”.

‘Wife!’

The noise came as such an abrupt intrusion, I thought I pulled a muscle with the head raise. ‘David?’

‘Do you have another husband?’

‘Yes,’ I unfolded my legs from the chair, ‘but I always tell him to call first.’

‘Funny, funny lady.’ He sounded much drunker than I expected him to be. ‘Do you have Al bloody Green on?’