‘Any cake going spare, Mum?’ Joe had clearly lost interest in our boy drama. ‘And what the fuck are those?’
Mum sighed, passing him her tin of cake offcuts that she saved for whenever we visited. ‘They’re rabbits, Joe. Dead rabbits.’
He almost choked on the chunk of vanilla sponge he’d shoved in his mouth. ‘I swear, this household gets more batshit every time I visit.’
5
As soon as Maeve’s face appeared in the frosted glass, I could tell she’d clocked my expression.
‘Oh no.’ She pulled open Isla and Joe’s front door to let me in. ‘Another one?’
Indeed. Another one. Another bad date. I just nodded, sighing as I threw down my bag next to their side table (a side table that I had knocked my hipbone against many a time).
‘Not today, Satan.’ I threw a finger up at the sideboard and made my way into the living room, where Isla was giving it her all on a dance mat.
‘How bad was it?’ She was breathless, not looking round and barely missing a beat.
‘Well, she’s speaking to the furniture’ – Maeve ignored the look I gave her as she grabbed a third wine glass from the kitchen cupboard – ‘so that should tell us everything we need to know, really.’
The closing beats of ‘I Kissed a Girl’ sounded, and Isla collapsed on the mat, huffing.
‘New dance mat?’ I gestured to where she was in a heap on the floor.
‘Yes. A present from me to me.’ She stretched forward, grabbing her wine and taking a glug. ‘You don’t date a doctor without learning the importance of “moving your body”, and there is quite frankly no way that anyone is getting me to go on a run to improve my cardiovascular health. We went running together a few weeks ago and it was almost the end of our relationship. I don’t know how you put up with him on your runs, Penny. I almost lobbed my water bottle at his head.’ I tried not to laugh. ‘So, I bought a dance mat on eBay instead. Was it really this hard when we were kids? I almost threw my back out during ‘Everytime We Touch’, but it’s the energy Cascada deserves.’
Maeve had joined me where I’d slumped onto the couch. ‘Definitely not, but she will test you like that.’ She waved at me to go on. ‘Well, what happened?’
I flopped my head back, staring at the ceiling. ‘It wasn’t quite as bad as the first one.’
Isla cheered. ‘See! That’s something.’
‘Isla. Date one literally ditched before chipping in on the bill. I paid for an ugly man’s steak. I’m not sure there is a bigger insult than that.’
It was true. Jake had been a complete and utter loser from the moment he sat down. And clearly not the sharpest tool in the box; everyone knew that ‘my boiler is broken and I need to leave immediately’ was an excuse. I was no hypocrite, and I stood by my principle that the bill should be split evenly down the middle. Not paid by one party. Especially if that party was me. He’d also clearly been threatened by the fact that I’d founded a company. Not hot.
‘I’m pretty sure it could have been worse. Yes, you paid for his steak. But he could have been a serial killer.’ Maeve rubbed my shoulder reassuringly, even though her words were anything but.
‘Because that’s the kind of talk that’ll get her on another date.’ Isla rolled her eyes.
Maeve was always on hand to scare us after she’d watched a new true crime documentary. Once, after she’d described one of them in detail at a girl’s night, Isla had woken Joe up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet with her, scared that a madman would be waiting when she got there. My brother had banned Maeve from sharing her crime obsession with us after that.
‘Yeah, thanks for that. The only thing worse than my date would have been getting slaughtered in the back of his car. Brilliant. I’ll remember to tear out a few strands of my hair just in case next time.’
Isla was scrolling through the list of old-school pop songs on the TV, finding her next target. She kept flitting between Nelly Furtado and Anastacia. ‘Have you ever thought that you might be manifesting bad energy on these dates?’
I blinked. ‘No.’
She turned at that. ‘Yeah, because you’re radiating positivity right now.’
The only bad thing about having a pseudo big sister was having a pseudo big sister.
‘Okay, so we’d already established that date one with Jake the Flake was a write-off.’ Maeve brought the conversation back round. ‘But what was bad about Sayanm?’
Sayanm. Match number four, and tonight’s date. His chat had seemed relatively normal (and he’d been the one to start it, a rare win, I was learning) and it wasn’t dry enough to make me want to slam my head against a wall. He was a basketball coach in his spare time, which made up for the fact that he was an accountant during the day. And when we’d unlocked our photos, his had been perfectly fine. Even if one of his photos had been with his Mum, which, in hindsight, set the tone.
I winced. ‘Okay, so this time I’m the dick. But he was a bit of a …’
Isla nodded. ‘A wet lettuce. It happens.’
Maeve snorted.
‘He told me that he doesn’t have much luck with “the ladies”. Which is fine! Every “nice guy” says that. But then he let it slip that his Mum vets the profiles of his matches.’
Both of them winced in sync.
‘It’s always the men who handle balls who don’t have any.’ Isla topped up my wine. ‘But the good news is that these stories are character-building.’
She was mocking Maeve’s new favourite phrase. It turned out that she liked to give us the same kind of motivational language as she gave her 12–18-year-olds. Rory had suggested a swear jar to stop her from saying it, but I wasn’t convinced it would work.
She threw a pillow at Isla. ‘Don’t be an idiot.’ Pause. ‘It is kind of character-building, if you think about it.’
I thought about the date – a bottle of wine in an old-fashioned pub. It had taken precisely twenty minutes for me to gather that cargo-short-wearing Sayanm, who had Star Wars fan art as his phone background (that he’d explained in great detail), was not going to make it to a second date. And he hadn’t ordered the gherkin on his burger. Sacrilege.
‘Oh yeah, people who don’t get the pickle’ – Isla shuddered – ‘are the same kind of people who say toothpaste is spicy.’
‘A definite ick.’ Maeve stabbed an olive with a toothpick. ‘Oh well, onwards and upwards.’
Between two bad first dates and two conversations that had been a waste of time, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to pursue the final two matches on my profile. It was hard being Level’s biggest cheerleader when it couldn’t even come up with the goods for me. I hadn’t even opened the final two profiles, scared that they would prompt an existential crisis about the app.
