Cloudy with a Chance of Love (22 page)

‘Good. We did the hall. Looks lovely.'

‘Great,' she was nodding, a silly look on her face.

‘Don't you dare start,' I sighed. ‘Don't you
dare
start saying anything about anything being written in the stars! I am not insane enough to have a fling with my next door neighbour!'

‘Okay, okay,' she pleaded, holding her hands out. ‘I won't, I promise.' She really did look green. I noticed the full-fat bottle of Coke next to her in-tray. The ‘healthy eating plan' was definitely going out the window today. ‘Do you want some help with your outfit tonight though? Just in case.'

‘No!' I said. ‘There'll be no
outfit
!'

Peony came out of Studio Two. She looked cute in her Megadeth t-shirt and jeans. Sam called her over.

‘God, I'm so busy!' she proclaimed, sitting herself on Sam's desk with a big sigh. ‘It's going to be one of those days. Hey, how did it go last night? The roaring fires, the sexy men in aprons? I can see you're on the contraband Coke, Sam, so it must have been good!'

‘Daryl got propositioned and I met a new man.'

‘Good proposition or bad proposition?'

‘Bad,' I said. ‘He looked promising, but turned out to be a sleaze-ball. '

‘Oh dear,' tutted Peony. ‘It happens. And the new man?' she asked, turning to Sam.

‘Seeing him tomorrow night,' said Sam. ‘And Daryl's going round to her hunky new neighbour's for Halloween tonight.'

‘Hang on!' said Peony. ‘I don't know anything about a hunky new neighbour!'

‘Oh, Peony,' sighed Sam, placing her head in her hands. ‘You're so out of the loop. We need a
serious
catch-up.'

‘There is
not
a hunky new neighbour!' I exclaimed. ‘Well, there is, but there's nothing going on. For the love of god he's –'

‘– just a friend,' jumped in Sam.

‘He
is
,' I insisted.

‘I can't keep up,' said Peony, looking between the two of us. ‘I'm holding you to that major catch-up. Very soon. Right, sorry, I've got to get on. Bob's in a stew about the levels already. Keep me posted!' she shouted, as she walked away.

‘Keep me fully posted, too, Daryl,' said Sam. ‘I want to hear how it goes tonight. And I
know
he's just your neighbour and he doesn't fancy you and you don't fancy him and blah blah blah whatever…' She laid her head down on her desk, on crossed arms, and spoke to me through her elbow. ‘Ugh. I feel like crap. Can you get me that bacon sandwich now, please?'

Chapter Sixteen

When I turned up next door, at one minute past six, Will opened the door to me wearing a Batman costume.

‘If you can't beat ‘em, join ‘em!' he said.

I laughed. He looked great. A bit too great, actually… my ready laughter provided an effective smokescreen for how utterly taken aback I was. It was a full-on,
proper
Batman costume. Tight leggings and top bodysuit thing. Underpants as outer pants. Yellow belt. Cape. Mask with ears. He looked incredibly… sexy. I'd never really noticed how tall he was before and now that tallness was encased in Lycra… well,
wow
. If I thought he was good looking before, I now found that thought magnified by a thousand and leaping around on the roof of a tall building in Gotham City, waiting to be rescued. If that even made sense… I shouldn't be thinking of him this way, but with him looking like that, I couldn't help it.

‘Is it too much?' he asked, looking suddenly unsure and patting himself on his flat stomach. ‘I had it in the back of a cupboard. It's from some fancy dress party Angie and I went to, years ago.'

Angie
… His wife that had died…

‘No, it's great,' I said. ‘It's excellent. You… er… look fantastic.'

I, too, had decided to dress up a bit. It still wasn't an
outfit
– I was just wearing jeans, a black polo neck and a cardigan wrap thing – but I'd put on some velvet cat ears and had drawn some whiskers on my face with black eyeliner. It now seemed a pretty feeble token effort in the face of Will's superhuman one.

‘Catwoman to my Batman,' he said with a smile. ‘Cute.' Did he mean the situation – that we were both dressed up like a couple of plonkers? – or that
I
looked cute? Could I even
be
cute, at my age? I doubted it.

‘Do either of us look
scary
, though?' I asked.

‘No, not really,' he laughed, ‘but we might surprise a few kids. Come on in.'

I wondered, as I stepped into his hall, whether he'd have Halloween music on – ‘Monster Mash' or some other dreadful song – but the sound of Tracy Chapman was coming from the living room. Her one about the ‘Fast Car'. I loved that song. It was a song about escaping, the wind in your hair. Just driving, with someone's arm round your shoulder. Nice taste in music, I thought.

‘Would you like me to take my shoes off?'

I'd wanted to solve the shoes-off dilemma. You know, when you go round someone's house and you want to look nice, but then you have to take your shoes off because they've asked you to, and you realise you have your Simpsons socks on that you got last Christmas, and that your legs, without shoes
or boots on, and in skinny jeans, look like golf clubs. I'd thought ahead and solved that tonight by wearing straight cut jeans – that with any luck hugged my ample arse and didn't make it look like a runaway beach ball – Converse, and nice stripy socks. Shoes on or off, I'd hopefully look all right.

I also hoped my clothes said casual chic. My black polo knit was an oldie but a goodie. Not too try-hard; cleavage contained. My pale pink wrap blanket-y cardigan was soft and pretty. Now I'm getting on a bit I have to be careful with my colours. I wouldn't go so far as to visit a woman called Veronica in her home in Sidcup and have my
colours done
– where I pay ninety quid to have a rainbow of coloured scarves held up to my face – but I do make sure the colours next to my face are the right ones. If I wear black I try to layer a paler colour on top.

‘I've brought the stash,' I said, after I'd taken my Converse off, and I handed over a bulging Tesco carrier bag full of goodies. I'd popped there on my way home. The place had been full of orange and black and purple, with plenty of Halloween-over-kill themed
everything
. In a couple of weeks it would be Christmas stuff everywhere, and as soon as that was swept away, on December the twenty-sixth, it would be Cadbury Creme Eggs and Easter bunnies.

‘Great,' he said, taking it from me.

Will's house was warm, and everywhere was nicely lit with lamps. He had a lamp on the hall table and there was one on the sitting room tallboy – I could see into the room, from the hall. There were no hideous ‘big lights'. I had forever told Jeff to ‘turn the big light off', as he'd come home from work, whack it on, and it would completely over-ride all the good work of my carefully positioned side lamps. He did it in the morning, too, in the winter. Shoved the big light on in the bedroom and I'd scream. Everything looked cold and harsh. I hoped Gabby was currently enjoying Jeff's ‘big light'. She'd been like me – she'd loved what she called her ‘mood lighting.' It was funny that I'd never be stepping foot in her house again and Jeff was going home there every single night. I missed her house, sometimes, and those fab getting-ready-to-go-out times, when she'd put on Britney and be wild and vivacious and funny and I'd sit on the bed and laugh as she danced in her bedroom in her bra and knickers. Showing off. Being Gabby…

I shook her from my thoughts. Will was having a quick rummage through the carrier bag.

‘They had a BOGOF on Fun Size Snickers,' I said.

‘Excellent! I love those. We'll keep a few of those to one side, for us. What would you like to drink?'

‘Just a soft drink, please,' I said. ‘I over-did it a bit last night.'

‘I won't ask,' he said.

No, don't, I thought. I was still quite happy for Will to think I was out on another date with Ben last night. There was no way I was going to tell him about the singles cooking, and Dex who was really Derek, and that awful kiss. I couldn't bear to think about it myself.

I followed Will into the living room. Oh lord. His bum, clad in blue-grey synthetics, was quite large, chunky, and peachy. Tight and firm. I remembered Ben's – slim and boyish and disappointing. Will put my carrier bag on his coffee table, next to a bottle of red wine and two glasses. On the floor was a large wooden bowl, half-filled with sweets and wrapped chocolates.

‘I'll swap the wine for elderflower,' he said.

I was glad of the low lighting. I was sure I was blushing a little bit. I was also glad of my decision not to drink tonight. Staying sober would definitely be best in this situation, I thought.

‘Thank you for inviting me,' I said. ‘Last year I was still getting lanky teenagers in
Scream
masks at half eleven. Not that I'm saying I'll be here that long. I mean, I might only be here a couple of hours… You might get sick of me long before then. I…'

He didn't look bothered. He wasn't looking put out by my rambling. He was smiling. ‘Yep, it's a bit intimidating when they're taller than you. Then you realise to your horror that it's little Jimmy Tustian, from number thirty-seven, all
growed up
!'

I laughed. ‘I had a horrid Freddy Krueger last year. He kept brandishing his claw glove menacingly. Then he told me he didn't like my selection of sweets and did I have any Smirnoff Ice.'

‘Funny.'

‘Not really, when it's five past midnight and you have a slightly pissed, teenage serial killer on your doorstep.'

‘Ha, yeah, maybe not.'

We looked at each other and grinned. We made each other laugh. That was a really nice thing. Will's face was all animated; his eyes were all brown and luminous. I realised I'd been staring at them a little too long.

‘Right,' said Will, picking up the glasses and handing me the bottle of wine to carry. ‘Let's see about that elderflower.'

I trotted behind him to the kitchen. It was really nice. It had wooden units, green tiles and it was clean and tidy. He also had lots of gadgets on his worktops; breadmaker, food processor, spiralizer… Sam had told me all about those – courgettes were the new spaghetti, apparently (‘forty calories instead of two hundred – result!'). Plonked next to the kitchen sink was the most enormous pumpkin I'd ever seen, with a huge, completely non-scary, grinning face carved into it and a jaunty, jagged lid as a hat.

‘That's fabulous!' I said.

‘I'm quite proud of it, even though I say so myself,' said Will. ‘I've christened him George. He took me ages.'

‘I'm impressed. Clever boy,' I said. Oh god, that sounded flirty, and I hadn't meant it to – it was the sort of thing I used to say to Jeff, back in the early days of us living together, when he'd managed to make a bed, or put something in the bin.

Will didn't notice anything amiss. He turned to get a bottle of elderflower out of a cupboard. As he reached for the bottle I could see his muscles, rippling under grey-blue Lycra.

‘I won't drink either. As a very serious
doctor type
,' he said, in a comedy voice, ‘I shouldn't really be drinking on a school night anyway.' He poured half an inch of elderflower cordial into each glass, filled both with water from the tap and added a cube of ice from his freezer drawer in the fridge.

‘Cheers,' he said, and touched his glass against mine.

I giggled.

‘What are you giggling at?'

‘Batman drinking elderflower cordial! It's just struck me as incredibly funny.'

‘You see him more as a Scotch man? Bourbon?'

‘Yes, bourbon,' I said. ‘Batman drinks bourbon.'

‘Another time,' said Will. ‘Okay, let's light George,' he said. ‘Then we'll eat.'

Will had made a gorgeously hot chilli. It was all ready, in a huge pot, and he produced it from the fridge like a magician produces a rabbit from a hat.

‘Would you mind helping me chop some stuff for a salad?' he asked.

‘Yes, of course. I mean, no, of course I don't mind.'

‘Would you like a pinny? I know you're a bit of a mucky pup with getting stuff down yourself.'

I giggled. ‘No, I'm fine.'

We stood side by side at his kitchen worktop, Tracy Chapman now singing about ‘Words', and chopped in companionable silence. It felt weird. It had been well over a year since I'd cooked side by side with a man. And it hadn't happened very often. Occasionally, I'd recruited Jeff to come and help me in the kitchen and even more occasionally, he'd agreed. He hadn't minded doing something exciting, grinding up spices in a pestle and mortar, using an electronic
doo-dah
to dice tomato for a salsa, thumping a tied freezer bag of ginger biscuits for the base of a cheesecake – manly jobs that made a great noise and invited lots of praise. He'd always done it with a grumble and a bluster though. Will and I were different – we just got on with it. It was soothing; it was
nice.
It was really nice to have a man as a friend and do companionable things with him.

‘I haven't had a sous chef for a long time,' said Will. ‘It feels…
nice.
' He was thinking the same as me, and reminiscing about Angie, wasn't he? I bet she was beautiful. I bet he longed to look left and see her standing there, assisting him. Not his dumpy next door neighbour, ham-fistedly wielding a vegetable knife over a cucumber. I wondered what she
did
look like; I hadn't noticed any photos of her anywhere. I tried to sneak a look round the kitchen, without him noticing. No, nothing, though why would people have photos up in a kitchen, anyway? Then, I saw it, small square photo on the fridge. A smiling woman with long blonde hair. Wearing an apron and holding what looked like a mixing bowl. That was her; that was Angie, and she was a baker, like Will. That's why he baked in the middle of the night; it must comfort him.