Novel Project 2010 - Chapter Two

The first date I arranged on this expedition d'amour was with a girl by the name of Lauren. We'd exchanged a few e-mails and agreed to meet based on a mutual appreciation of certain 1980s films about spectre extermination.
    Living on opposite ends of London, we met at the closest location that both of us knew. Which happened to be a Tapas restaurant in the centre. Granted, it wasn't the best restaurant on Earth. Its most defining features were the tacky plastic tablecloths, fake vines, and the odd waiter who didn't suffer from chronic eczema. The effect walking in was slightly jarring: going from an icy February evening into a room that seemed to be desperately trying to convey a mediterranean summer, and yet still wasn't much warmer than the street outside. But we tried to make the most of it, although initially, conversation wasn't the easiest thing to come by.
    Lauren was a good three inches taller than me, and was slim in a way that seemed only to exaggerate her height. This served only to make me nervous, being of precisely average height and just overweight enough that I'm aware of it, but people always pretend it isn't the case to be polite, so I never really get around to doing anything about it. The height issue has always been one that confused me. For some reason, there was this strange cultural insistence that the male of a couple be taller than the female. This left me automatically unsuitable to 50% of the population, and online, the number of profiles I found demanding a partner taller than they are was significant. I resolved this problem in the only way I knew how: I exaggerated my height by a couple of inches. Lauren was already compromising, but more than she expected. The resulting slightly peeved expression was ever heightened by the shockingly professional manner in which she was dressed: dark brown hair in a bob, immaculately white blouse and matching skirt/jacket combo that suggested the person in the office everyone else is afraid of.
    The net result of all this, was that I had absolutely no idea what to say beyond hello. After we sat down, I began rehearsing openers in my head, between glancing at the menu and avoiding looking at the waiter playing pocket snooker by the door.
    How about this weather? Was the first opener I considered, sadly both dull and unlikely to spark stimulating conversation. Unless she happened to have a secret interest in meteorology, or spoke the Aleut language and knew all of the nouns relating to snow.
    What A-Levels did you do? Was the next one that came to mind, which surprised me somewhat, as I hadn't asked anyone that question since I started uni, and at this point in our lives, might be an insulting question akin to When did you stop being educated?
    If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it? God knows what made me think of that. Perhaps the stress of having realised just how long it had been since we had spoken was turning me suicidal.    Aside from ordering a bottle of wine to share, we had barely said a word, nor looked up from our menus. Luckily Lauren eventually struck on something we somehow hadn't managed to discuss before, just as I was trying to think of a line that didn't make me seem boring or suicidal.
    "So what do you do?" Lauren asked, leaving me surprised that we hadn't even mentioned our work before.
    "Its not very interesting." I replied, full of the shame of my chosen profession. Going on past experience, describing oneself as a "computer programmer" tends to  make people's eyes glaze over in the way your eyes glaze over when someone tells you they're suffering leprosy.
    "Oh, I'm sure it is." She countered, unaware of her level of wrongness.
    "I work with computers." My best attempt at being vague but still answering.
    "Oh."
    That was it, a single, solitary "oh". One syllable as response to learning the career I'd worked towards for five years - including a largely superfluous year of travelling yet going nowhere in particular. The best I could come back with was silence. A cooler person might have moved things on with by asking Lauren what she did, but I think we've already established that I'm not a cool person.
    "What's wrong with that?" Finally stumbled out of my mouth. Desperate to downplay the social awkwardness stereotypical of my career.
    "Nothing." Shattering my defences.
    "The 'oh' can't have meant there was nothing wrong."
    "Umm, just a natural reaction."
    "What's the different?"
    "Inflection."
    "What inflection?"
    "I went up, not down, meaning I was interested." Were I to ask what she did now, I was expecting to hear she was a linguist. This was an argument I wasn't entirely prepared for.
    "What would down mean?"
    "That I was disappointed."
    "Oh."
    "Yes, like that."
    At this stage I had to win at least one point. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a committee of neurons had come to the rather sensible conclusion that this was a bad idea. But stubbornness can be a pretty darn stubborn creature and I pressed on like a workaholic homemaker with a pile of ironing to do.
    "Well, what exactly is your opinion?"
    "I don't know, computers are all a bit foreign to me. They're so technical and dull." Her eyes immediately went wide as she realised what she'd said.
    The joy at being right, combined with slight annoyance at having my profession lambasted left me only one all-purpose remark to utter.
    "A-ha" I exclaimed like a cartoon villain, gesticulating forcefully as if the motion might add meaning to otherwise hollow non-words.
    The only meaning this conveyed, however, was a demonstration of gravity, as my unguided hand struck a bottle of wine and knocked it on its side. Pointed straight at Lauren's blouse.
    She screamed. I froze. The entire restaurant turned to see red wine gluggling one swig at a time directly onto my horrified and now heavily stained date. The plastic tablecloth only served to direct the wine to a location it might be better absorbed, namely the remainder of Lauren's clothes that weren't already drenched in the third least-expensive red in the establishment.
    I was so shocked and embarrassed that I went into a form of rigor mortis, as if somehow mimicking the after effects of death might make it come more swiftly, and ideally painlessly. My inaction was spotted by a passing waiter, who did what I should have done at the first glug: righted the bottle. This served both to save an almost insignificant amount of wine, prevent an even less significant amount of damage, and further highlight my failure in a most significant way.
    In a few seconds, I had proved conclusively my shortcomings as a date, a person, and possibly as world wine juggling champion. A career that ironically might have proved more interesting to the woman sat opposite me. A woman no doubt now feeling mortified and murderous. Her heavy breathing implying a desire to either break the now almost empty bottle of wine over my head, or make mad, passionate love to me on the table in a whirl of alcohol-fueled public indecency usually reserved for Saturday nights in town centres. I assumed it was the former.
    "Shall we call it a night?"

    My first foray into internet dating didn't exactly fill me with confidence, having not even progressed as far as ordering any food. So I headed home shockingly early for the inevitable debriefing with my flatmates.
    I was sharing a flat with two old uni friends, Nick and Dave. Nick was the eternal man child, the kind of guy who still delights in practical jokes, usually involving precariously balanced buckets or surprise rearrangement of furniture. Dave, on the other hand, was ever eager to progress to the next stage of his life, and his girlfriend Carla had become a de-facto fourth flatmate. They were a perfect example of a yuppy couple, from Dave's year round shirt-and-jumper combo, to Carla's obsession with organic produce.
    I arrived home to find my flatmates in the living room watching TV. Dave and his other half Carla were curled up on the sofa, while Nick was sat on the floor leaning up against the base of the armchair.
    "You're back early." Nick said.
    "Yeah, didn't go so well."
    "What happened?" Dave and Carla asked in unison.
    I recounted the events of the evening, and suffice to say, all three were a little surprised.
    "You threw a bottle of wine at her?"
    "No! You make it sound like I was attacking her."
    "So, what? You threw it at her in a nice way?"
    "No, I knocked it over, it just happened to be pointing at her when it landed."
    "She still ended up covered in wine though?"
    "Well, yes."
    "Did you offer to pay for dry-cleaning?"
    "Was I supposed to?"
    "Can't really speak from experience, but would probably have been polite."
    "We didn't really say much afterwards."
    "You legged it, didn't you?" Nick was astute as ever.
    "Pretty much."
    "So not the best first date ever." Dave chipped in, stating the obvious.
    "Nah, not really."
    "Are you seeing her again?" Carla enquired, seemingly having missed the whole point of my story.
    "After that? Of course not."
    "Why not? It could have been worse."
    "True, I suppose we both got out more or less alive. But better first dates haven't resulted in a second."
    "Oh, you're being too negative." Carla countered, "On our first date, Dave threw up on me."
    We'd not heard this particular story before, but before either me or Nick could ask for some elaboration, Dave quickly changed the subject.
    "So…what's on the other side?"
    Thinking about it, Carla was probably right. The evening could have gone a whole lot worse, and I did manage to come out with a clean shirt. So technically I won.    Even better, the odds were that any future dates could be called a success with less insane leaps of logic. I signed back into the site, and filled in the "Profession" box on my profile.