Meet Me In Manhattan. Claudia Carroll
‘… In fact, just for the laugh, I’d love you to show me where we keep our springform baking tin. And if you can tell me the difference between that and a Kugelhopf tin, then I’ll gladly hand you a tenner right now. Mother of God, you’ve even lied about your height! “Tall and slender?” Holly, you’re five foot three! You think you’re not going to get caught out in that one pretty quick? Suppose you ever meet up with this guy? What are you going to do, sprout an extra nine inches in the meantime?’
Thing was, I’d made the cardinal error of physically showing Joy all the backwards and forward messaging that went on between myself and Andy McCoy ever since that very first night and now she was reading it off my iPad and guffawing.
‘Oh and so now you’re a skydiver as well?’ she said dryly. ‘You, that has to take a Xanax and knock back a gin and tonic before you’ll even get on a Ryanair flight? And you also go mountaineering? Can this be the same Holly Johnson who gets vertigo even sitting on the top deck of a bus?’
‘And what’s so wrong about coming across as being an active type?’ I asked her in a small voice, flushing to my roots and wishing to God there was some other way to get off this deeply mortifying subject.
‘Nothing wrong with it, if it’s the truth,’ she said crisply, tossing geometrically sharp, jet-black bobbed hair over her shoulder. ‘But let’s face it, your idea of being active is to join a gym, pay a year’s subscription, then drop out after the first month.’
I was silenced here, mainly because this would be a fairly accurate assessment, but Joy still wasn’t done.
‘Come on, love,’ she said, waving her fork around with a lump of penne pasta wobbling dangerously on the edge of it, for added emphasis. ‘You’ve got to wise up a bit here. After all, you’re lying through your teeth here so how can you be certain that this Andy guy, whoever he is, isn’t doing exactly the same thing right back at you? And supposing he is? What’s your master plan then?’
‘Excuse me, for a start I’m always super-careful online,’ I told her stoutly, ‘and over time you just learn to develop an instinct for these things. OK, so maybe Andy is tweaking the odd minor detail about himself; so what? Everyone sexes their lives up a bit online, we’re all guilty of it. But it’s the big stuff that counts, and if Andy were lying through his teeth to me on that score, I’d know; I’d just feel it in the pit of my stomach.’
‘Oh you would, would you?’
‘Absolutely,’ I told her firmly. ‘And another thing; can I point out that he’s actually a widower with a little boy? So therefore, he’s been married before and isn’t afraid of commitment.’
‘Ha! Don’t make me laugh. There isn’t a man on this planet who isn’t afraid of commitment. And you can take that one to the bank.’
‘He’s a family man and that’s good enough for me,’ I told her, a bit primly. ‘After all, everyone knows that men who’ve committed before are by a mile the most likely to commit again. Plus, may I remind you he’s actually Captain Andy McCoy? Senior airline pilot with Delta, if you don’t mind. Now come on, even you have to admit; the job description alone is a serious turn-on.’
Then I drifted off a bit, just imagining what Andy looked like in that sexy uniform pilots wear, with the cap and the epaulets and the calm, authoritative voice saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking’. And of course, immediately blurring the image with that famous production still of Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, all gussied up as a Pan Am pilot.
Thing is, by then things had got pretty intense between Andy and me. There was a genuine connection between us that was actually starting to feel pretty special. And it wasn’t just superficial crap about liking the same movies and TV shows and music; it was so much deeper. It was almost like he and I just seemed to think exactly the same way about things.
Day and night at that stage, he was sending me the most gorgeous, heart-warming messages and what else could I say? Having spent so long on my own, he’d started to win me over scarily fast. This was intoxicating stuff. Addictive. Impossible to let go of.
‘Yeah but just remember, you’ve only got his word for everything he’s telling you,’ Joy cautioned, tearing off a big lump of ciabatta bread and soaking up the dregs of arrabbiata sauce from round the edge of her pasta bowl.
‘And in the meantime, here’s you sitting in front of a screen painting a ridiculous fantasy portrait of yourself to a complete and utter stranger, who could have served time in Guantanamo Bay for all you know.’
‘He’s not in Guantanamo Bay …’
‘He could be on death row …’
‘He’s not on death row.’
‘Or he could be a woman. Jesus, he could turn out to be a woman on death row.’
‘He’s a pilot, not a jailbird!’
‘Only according to himself,’ she said just a bit too triumphantly for my liking.
‘Look,’ I tell her placatingly, ‘I’ve met my fair share of idiots online and trust me, by now I’ve learned to filter out all the liars and chancers from the genuine article. Plus the big advantage of online dating is that at least this way I get to meet fellas from the comfort of home, with no make-up on and three-day-old manky hair, if I feel like it. Which you have to admit is a fairly major bonus.’
But then Joy and I had been over this ground many, many times before and she knew exactly where I stood on this particular issue. Problem is, as I’d spelled out to her time and again, work was so all encompassing and time-consuming that at the end of another long day, I was too exhausted, not to mention stoney broke, to shoehorn myself into an LBD, lash on the Mac Bronzer and start trawling the town on the lookout for someone available, thinking maybemaybemaybe.
I had the energy for all that in my twenties thanks very much, but I’m at the grand old age of thirty-one now and whether Joy liked it or not, the fact remains that internet dating sites are to our generation what a Saturday night dance hall was to our grannies, circa 1960.
‘All I’m saying,’ I said firmly, ‘is that I’ve spent so long on these sites, I could practically teach a course in what to look out for, and equally what to run a mile from.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You absolutely certain about that?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Like you did with that git Steve last summer?’
Shit. I’m temporarily silenced here, and what’s more, Joy knows it. Steve, you see, was a guy I met online who described himself as a ‘special needs teacher, hugely committed to his work’. A major turn-on, I figured, and all was progressing very nicely thanks until he told me he was ‘available to meet weekdays only, between nine and five’.
And the reason? Because of his loyal and long-suffering wife back home who, he explained, he had to get back to, ‘so he could help out with the kids’. I’ll spare you the rest.
Seems Joy’s not done with me though.
‘And let’s not forget that theatre director bloke, what’s-his-face …’
‘Elliot,’ I say crisply, finishing the sentence for her. Quicker by far, I reckon, to let her just get the bloody lecture over and done with.
‘Elliot, that’s the one. Who blatantly told you who he was single, whereas—’
I sigh here, knowing right well what’s coming next.
‘—He was simultaneously dating five other women at the same time,’ she says. ‘I distinctly remember you saying he made you feel like …’
‘Like I was almost auditioning for the part of his girlfriend,’ I finish the sentence for