CHAPTER ELEVEN

Pauline was bringing Amy back after lunch so I had the morning to myself. I sat out on the balcony and ate a breakfast of coffee and croissants, then, as the wind turned cooler, I went inside and flipped open my iPad. I couldn’t face opening my email in case there was a message from Terry, or worse – her sister.

I was still shocked at how rude I had been to Terry. Despite our lack of chemistry she didn’t deserve that and I wasn’t sure what had come over me. It was completely out of character. I had never behaved like that before but for some reason she had just annoyed me. All I could think of was that, due to stress, I had subconsciously decided to sabotage the date. I wasn’t even drunk and couldn’t blame alcohol. I tended to be a happy drunk anyway. I added it to my pile of stuff to feel guilty about, and made a mental note to try and find out where Terry lived and send her some flowers as an apology.

I clicked on to Google and instead searched around the Internet for dating advice to see if I could discover why I was behaving so weirdly. I had made the decision on waking that morning that I was not going to go on another date for a long time, but when I did, I wanted to avoid another Ellen or Terry. I wasn’t sure which was worse – probably Terry, as I was mostly to blame for that debacle.

I came across a website called Men Like Women and Women Like Shoes. I wasn’t exactly sure what the title was all about, but the information was interesting if not particularly useful. It seemed that early on in the dating process women liked their men to be cool and relaxed, keen but not too keen. I obviously needed to avoid being seen as desperate. They also liked them to be engaging but not over-emotional. That part I didn’t really understand, but I expect it meant don’t go telling them all about the fact that you miss your dead wife and how you’ll never get over her, and stuff like that.

The site also advised that both parties should try and keep some air of mystery around themselves for as long as possible and to hold back some secrets, as this helped keep the other person interested. I could do that. I could hold back the part about my dead wife setting me up on dates. That might be a good secret to hold back.

Then it got really confusing as at some point into the relationship, it advised that you need to switch from being ‘aloof and independent’ to ‘partner focused and co-dependent’. In other words: emotional, needy and maybe a little bit desperate.

I began to wonder how I’d ever managed to get married to Lindsay without knowing all this stuff. I must have been incredibly lucky. What would have happened had I become emotionally needy at the wrong time, or displayed desperateness when she was expecting aloofness? God forbid the consequences had I tried to become co-depen-dent when she was pre-menstrual. What a minefield.

The final piece of useful advice was ‘to make sure you pick the right time to display any overt emotion’.

Had I ever displayed overt emotion when I was with Lindsay? I remembered I was first to say ‘I love you’. It was just after we’d made love for the first time. In fact I can remember the exact moment – it was when I was lying beside her all sweaty and out of breath. It was only partly the exertion of sex that had made me that way, mostly I believed it was the fact that her heating was cranked up full. What is it with women and heating? Why are they always cold and why do they need the heating turned up to Brazilian Rainforest setting? Thankfully I didn’t need to enter the moment on to my Outlook calendar. I also remembered that it took another week before Lindsay reciprocated. Cheeky cow.

Maybe that was the secret for me then. I had to sleep with someone and that was the key time to switch over to the emotional needy thing. The three big rules therefore were:

Don’t appear too keen.

Don’t appear desperate.

Avoid needy and emotional.

So those three, along with not being an axe murderer, were what I needed to remember.

As interesting as the website was, it didn’t tell me how to avoid being an arse. I guess that was something I needed to work out for myself.

Pauline turned up just after one o’clock with some bacon rolls, and we munched them while she told me how clever Amy was at picking out her letters.

I knew that Amy was useless at picking out letters. I’d tried with her loads of times and she didn’t know the difference between a P and a Q. She knew what an X was as she said it was a kiss, but that was it. Maybe Pauline had asked her to pull out kisses all the time in which case she was probably brilliant at her letters. I wasn’t worried. Amy was great at her colours, so I reckoned everything else could wait. She was too young to be worrying about letters.

After Pauline left I took Amy down to Portobello Beach where we spent a busy afternoon building sandcastles.

Later we splashed about in the shallows and tried to avoid getting too wet by avoiding the bigger waves that rolled in. We put some small crabs in Amy’s yellow plastic bucket and made them the new residents of Amy’s sandcastle. The crabs didn’t appear to be very happy with the arrangement and kept trying to escape. Amy squealed and jumped into my arms as Colossal Colin (the biggest of the crabs) took a suicidal leap from the highest part of the sandcastle and landed on Amy’s bare foot. He then scampered away back towards the water. Colossal Colin was only about an inch and a half long, but that made him at least twice as big as the rest of the crustaceans we had captured – hence the name.

We let him go as I reckoned he’d earned his freedom with his daring leap. I bought two ice creams and we sat on our waterproof blanket gazing out across the water as we licked them. The summer was drawing to a close and this might be one of the last days warm enough to hang out on the beach and I wanted to make the most of it. The memories would keep me warm when the icy winds of winter whipped in from the North Sea and made the sand a no go area.

Later we had dinner in a small café near Ocean Terminal and afterwards pottered home. I carried Amy on my shoulders for most of the way as she was complaining that her legs were sore. I think she just wanted to go onto my shoulders and she knew how to get me to do that. God help me when she got older and really learned how to manipulate me.

After we got home I bathed Amy and jumped in the shower myself. I’d grown hot and sweaty after carrying her in the late afternoon which had turned dark and humid – perfect storm weather.

I towel dried my hair and pulled on my pyjamas – M&S called them lounge pants, but they looked like PJs to me – I then heard the unmistakable sound of thunder in the distance.

Amy and I rushed over and gazed out through the floor-to-ceiling windows. We saw a storm brewing out over the water.

I was distracted by my phone pinging and left Amy staring out through the window. I was half-expecting it to be another text from Lindsay, but instead it was from Amanda – the ‘little red-haired girl’ from my previous musings. I’d forgotten all about her, probably because I’d vowed never to go on another date. I regretted sending her my number now. I read her text which started out very like a postcard.

Glad she thought so too.

I might be mistaken, but given Amanda’s display of keenness, it was likely that she was not a subscriber to Men Like Women and Women Like Shoes. I didn’t text back, I wasn’t sure I wanted to speak to her, but probably would as being rude to both Terry and Amanda in one twenty-four-hour period would not be good, and maybe I could make up for the Terry incident by being nice to Amanda, but not too nice by following rule number one: don’t appear too keen.

I quite liked her text because she didn’t shorten her words. She said ‘love’, not ‘lv’ and didn’t substitute it for a heart shaped thingy, or, the worst I’d ever had – from Lindsay of all people – was a stupid animated pink ostrich waving. Since when were ostriches universally recognized as symbols of affection?

The storm broke just after Amy and I had finished eating the remaining Cornettos. Amy was covered in ice cream and chocolate, and was squirming while I tried to wipe her hands and face to avoid the sticky residue being spread around the room. The plan was to get her to bed early as she was tired, but the thunder and lightning changed that.

Amy, amazingly, was fascinated and not scared by the flashes of light and the huge booming cacophony of thunder. We watched the deluge of rain as it fell like a curtain across the seething waters churned up by the wind and tide. At one point the storm felt like it was directly overhead and the thunder made the whole building shake.

Being on the top floor made the whole spectacle even more impressive and the huge decked balcony beyond the French doors was streaming with rain water. These doors were never opened when Amy was in the flat as the safety rail around the balcony was too low and flimsy. She often pressed her nose longingly against the glass, eager to get outside, and she did that whilst the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled, fascinated by the deluge. Outside, the wooden patio furniture was being buffeted around in the wind.

The storm passed over quickly, leaving behind a cool drizzle that coated the windows with a film of briny water. Deprived of our spectacular view, I got Amy ready for bed and, after I read our usual selection of books, she drifted off to sleep.

Once Amy was asleep, she stayed asleep. I reckon not even a herd of stampeding horses rampaging through her bedroom would cause her to stir. Thinking about it, were the animals able to negotiate the lift two at a time and wait patiently for the rest of their number to gather before beginning their rampage, they would make quite a racket on the polished wooden floors of the apartment.

The point was that once Amy was asleep I didn’t need to worry about creeping around the apartment trying to be quiet. I could watch the TV at normal volume and I was free to drop stuff – being a bit of a klutz that was useful. Some mothers I chatted with at Amy’s nursery groups told me they couldn’t even sneeze without their kids waking up. Right on cue I sneezed explosively.

Occasionally Amy would wake up during the night – usually due to having a bad dream or because she was cold, having pushed her covers away. (I didn’t have the Brazilian Rainforest setting on my thermostat.) Most times, if I spent a few minutes lying with her holding her hand she would drift off back to sleep, but sometimes she would demand, ‘Go Daddy’s bed’. What happened then is, once she settled to sleep in my bed, I sneaked into hers and we’d both wake up confused in the morning.

The three bedrooms of the apartment were grouped together on the west side of the building. I had the first one nearest the kitchen diner, the spare room was in the middle and Amy had the one nearest the front door. When we moved from the house, I pushed the king-sized bed to one side and reconstructed her little cot-bed. However, once she saw the king-sized bed she never went near her cot-bed again, and that is now dismantled and stored in one of the bedroom closets. Each bedroom had closet space and shoe racks that would have kept Imelda Marcos happy. My feeble clothing and shoe collection barely registered.

Mine and Amy’s rooms had their own bathrooms and there was another bathroom near the front door which was hardly used. The spare room contained a fully made-up bed, but was also crammed with the remains of our furniture from the old house and other assorted junk.

All of the main windows in the apartment looked out over the sea in one direction or another, and it was a spectacular place to live. The downside was that many of the other flats in the building were still empty, which made the journey up from the basement car-park eerie at times, and the service fees were a hefty £1200 a year. I negotiated to only pay half of these. Amy and I rattled about in the apartment at times. When we walked with our shoes on or if we dropped anything, the sound would reverberate around the 3000 square foot space. (I wasn’t sure what it was in new money.) It wasn’t cosy like our old house, but it suited us for now. Lindsay would have hated it, but I wanted a complete change. One day, I’d leave open and opulent and return to cosy and compact – but not yet.