The One You Really Want

Carmen was clearing the tables after lunch at the shelter, carrying piles of plates through to the kitchen where Nick and Annie were ploughing through a mountain of washing-up.

‘Carmen, stick up for me,’ Nick pleaded as Carmen began scraping left-over shepherd’s pie into the bin. ‘Annie’s making fun of my wardrobe again.’

Annie shook her head at him. ‘I’m not making fun of your wardrobe, I’m making fun of the clothes you keep in it. Carmen, he just doesn’t understand how embarrassing it is, being seen out with him in public. You’re on my side, aren’t you? Explain to Nick that real men don’t wear Mr Blobby T-shirts.’

Carmen smiled; she really liked Nick and Annie, and enjoyed their bickering arguments. Annie was short, bouncy and in her early twenties. Nick, tall and endlessly cheerful, sported lots of dark hair that seldom saw a hairbrush and had that cut-it-myself-without-looking-in-the-mirror air about it. He thought it was funny when strangers visiting the shelter mistook him for one of the homeless rather than a volunteer helper. He and Annie lived together in a flat just round the corner and had, over the course of the last year, invited Carmen along to several parties, each of which she had invented some spurious excuse or other not to attend.

‘Some of your T-shirts aren’t too bad,’ Carmen said diplomatically - actually this was a lie, they all were - ‘but maybe it’s time to let Mr Blobby go.’

‘But it’s a perfectly good T-shirt.’ Nick plucked at the front. ‘There’s months of wear in it yet. And it makes people smile.’

‘It’s got holes in it.’ Annie, who wasn’t troubled by the need for diplomacy, poked her finger through one of the offending holes. ‘And people aren’t smiling, they’re sniggering at you because you look such a dork.’

‘Ah well, everyone’s entitled to their opinions. It’s a free country. If anyone doesn’t want to speak to me because they don’t approve of the T-shirt I’m wearing, that’s their loss.’ Stacking up washed plates on the drainer, Nick added, ‘If Annie here decided not to speak to me, well, frankly that’d be a bonus.’

Carmen said, ‘My boyfriend’s got a pair of purple socks with goldfish on. He knows I hate them so he’ll deliberately wear them to embarrass me.’ Well, it had only happened once, but it was nice to be able to join in on the anecdote front. Just talking about Joe was enough to give her a warm glow.

‘Cut them up into tiny pieces,’ Annie stage-whispered to Carmen. ‘Chuck them in the bin. Nip it in the bud before things get completely out of control and he ends up like Nick.’

‘You know who she drools over when we’re at home watching TV?’ Nick raised his eyebrows. ‘The chap from Will and Grace. Mr Immaculate, I ask you. This girl’s a lost cause.’

‘It’s his eyes. Anyway, he’s not really gay.’ Annie looked dreamy for a moment, then turned to Carmen. ‘So, how long have you been seeing your chap?’

She’d said it ultra casually, but Carmen guessed they were curious. She had kept herself so much to herself over the course of the last year, it was practically the first personal detail she’d volunteered since coming to work at the shelter.

‘Oh, and could you write Tasmin Ferreira in the appointment book for four o’clock tomorrow afternoon? She’s coming in for a second fitting,’ Zac called through from the workroom. ‘Doreen, sweetie, if you sit there you’ll get your tail chopped off. Go and see Nancy. Tell her I’d love a cup of tea, white, two sugars.’

Nancy smiled as Doreen came trotting into the shop. It was only Wednesday, but already she knew she was going to enjoy working here. Zac was fun, gossipy and indiscreet, filling her in on all the background details of his clients. The website also brought in a fair amount of business and she was kept busy replying to emails, answering the phone and chasing up orders for new and original materials. Zac was extra chirpy this morning because a shop in Tokyo had placed an order for twenty of his studded suede skirts, evidently oblivious to the fact that while they looked great, the sharp-edged backs of the studs meant you couldn’t actually sit down in them.

‘You have to suffer to look fashionable,’ Zac had airily declared when Nancy had pointed this out to him. ‘Sitting is for wimps.’

A mixture of emotions crossed Zac’s face as he put down the taffeta bodice he was currently working on and came through to take the phone. Perching on the edge of the desk in his lemon-yellow trousers and pink V-neck merino wool sweater, he said, ‘Hi, Dad, how are you?’

Nancy, making the tea, was unable to avoid listening to Zac’s half of the conversation, which swung from carburettors to football, then to central heating systems and finally gardening.

‘OK, Dad, you look after yourself now,’ Zac said eventually, with genuine affection in his voice. ‘I’ll be down to see you next weekend. Take care. Bye.’

The tea was no longer as hot as it might have been, but Nancy gave it to him anyway. For the past ten minutes Zac had sounded so completely heterosexual that it almost came as a shock when he took a slurp and said, ‘Ooh, yum, just what I needed!’ in his normal voice.

Catching the look on her face, Zac waggled his free hand in embarrassment. ‘OK, you don’t have to say it, I know how pathetic I am. The thirty-five-year-old male who can’t tell his father he’s gay. I’m sorry, but if you start lecturing me, I shall have to sack you.’

‘I wasn’t going to. I’m the one who couldn’t tell her mother her husband was having an affair, remember?’ Pushing the biscuit tin towards him, Nancy said comfortingly, ‘Have a Hobnob.’

‘He’s retired now.’ Zac heaved a sigh. ‘But he worked on the docks for forty years. Mum died when I was twenty. I love my father, but he’s a man’s man. He wouldn’t understand. And I don’t want to upset him.’

‘Weston-super-Mare. I’m all the family he has. Every two or three weeks I go down there for the weekend. Put on my proper manly clothes,’ Zac said with a wry smile, ‘and my butch manly voice, and we spend our time together doing manly things like stripping car engines, fishing, gardening and watching hours of football on the TV.’

‘No. There’ve been a couple of lady friends. One lasted almost two years, but it fizzled out last summer. I asked him where Deirdre was and he just said, “Son, she couldn’t hold a candle to your mother.” I didn’t try and find out what had gone wrong. Well, we don’t really talk about those kind of things.’ With an elaborate shudder Zac said, ‘Which I’m quite happy about. Imagine if he’d started telling me about their sex life.’

‘Does he ever ask when you’re going to settle down and make him a grandfather?’ Nancy was curious; surely Zac’s father must suspect by now that something was amiss.

‘I invented a girlfriend.’ Zac bit into a biscuit. ‘Samantha, her name was. We had an on-off relationship for eight years. Long-distance too,’ he mumbled through a mouthful of Hobnob. ‘I told Dad she was working in Australia. Anyway, it did the trick. When Sam and I broke up a couple of years ago I was devastated. She was the love of my life. Going to take me a good long time to get over her - ooh, I’d say a decade at least.’

The things we do to protect our parents, thought Nancy as he crunched happily on his biscuit. She swung round on her chair as the bell above the door went ting, and saw Rennie enter the shop. Zac, spotting him too, promptly began to choke and spray crumbs all over the desk.

‘I used to be a big star. How the mighty are fallen.’ Rennie shrugged tragically. ‘These days I’m nothing but a lowly errand boy. Rose has finished her latest creation and she sent me down here with it.’ He handed the plastic carrier bag over to Zac and said, ‘Hi, I’m Rennie.’

Zac looked as if he’d forgotten how to breathe, let alone open a carrier bag and peer inside. ‘I know who you are. Good to meet you. Zac Parris.’

‘She’s out in the back garden cleaning the outsides of all the windows. I’m telling you, that house has never been so clean. She’s supposed to be down here on holiday,’ Rennie marvelled, ‘and she never stops. Is that a cup of tea?’

‘Good. So you won’t be cross when I tell you that he asked to speak to you and I said you were too exhausted to come to the phone because we’d been up all night shagging.’

‘Jonathan the jerk? Didn’t know whether or not to believe me. Sounded a bit taken aback.’ Rennie’s eyes glittered. ‘Asked me to tell you to give him a ring. I said presumably not a diamond one.’

Zac was gazing at him, lost in admiration. His eyes travelled speculatively over Rennie’s lean, hard body from the turned-up collar of his old leather jacket to the frayed hems of his jeans.

‘I’m working on something at the moment that would be perfect on you.’ Zac blurted the words out in a rush. ‘Double-breasted jacket, black and white stripes, leather-trimmed velvet lapels. If I make one up for you, would you wear it?’

Rennie hesitated. He looked at the supermarket carrier bag containing the green and gold cobwebby cardigan Rose had completed this morning.

‘It would not,’ Zac said very firmly indeed. ‘Look, let me whizz it up, then it’s yours to do what you want with.’ Nancy held her breath, praying Rennie wouldn’t suggest giving it to Rose to finish cleaning the windows. ‘If you hate it, fair enough. If you love it, just tell people where it came from. Can’t say fairer than that, can you?’

‘Absolutely not. Start measuring,’ said Rennie with a grin, because Zac’s fingers were already twitching towards his tape measure. ‘One more thing.’

‘What?’ From the look on Zac’s face, if Rennie suggested he licked the floor clean with his tongue, he’d be only too happy to oblige.