Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [78]
We arranged to meet Lucy and Joe in a pub in Belsize Park called the Sir Richard Steele. I wore my grandfather’s cashmere coat, even though it was the height of summer. I walked into the pub in work mode, pretending to be an up-and-coming screenwriter, but as soon as I saw her I completely forgot about my film. There she was. I’d sat in my smoke-filled flat in Edinburgh and created her, and now my dream girl had come to life.
The last time we’d been in the same room as each other had been the Arnold House disco.
Her name was Kitty Ward. She was the girl I had been looking for. My girl.
In the romantic comedy that was my life, this would have made a good ending. We would fall madly in love and live happily ever after. Within moments of seeing her and chatting to her, I was totally up for that ending. Unfortunately, she wasn’t. It turned out we were actually at the beginning of a romantic comedy that might or might not have a happy ending.
I may have written a story about a fictional hot young blonde bombshell who came to life, but she didn’t write one where she falls in love with a bouffant-haired university dropout with one sexual experience. As had been the theme of my youth, I just didn’t do myself any favours. My cashmere coat may have been exquisite and expensive, but it was also several sizes too big for me. It dragged behind me. When I sat down on the stool in the pub, it draped on the ground like a rug. When I saw other people with my hairstyle I would say, ‘What a twat!’ but for some reason continued to have it myself. And I was never myself, never relaxed, when I was attracted to someone. I always tried to do an impression of the kind of man I thought girls would be interested in, but as previous results had indicated, it wasn’t working.
But I had one thing on my side. Destiny. When I asked for Kitty’s phone number, she gave it to me; I’m not sure she even knew why. This was only the second time a girl had given me her number. The first had been very recent. The night after I met Mark Cousins, I hooked up with my friends at a bar. I was feeling very confident after my high-powered showbiz tête-à-tête, so when I got chatting to a psychology student, I asked for her phone number, and she handed over her digits no problem.
The following day I telephoned. ‘Hello, it’s Michael,’ I said, jovially, ‘we met last night.’
‘Who?’ she said.
‘Michael, you gave me your number last night,’ I said, realizing she hadn’t exactly been waiting by the phone.
‘Did I?’ she said, hardly engaged in the conversation at all.
‘Yes, that’s how I called you,’ I explained, and then there was silence.
She said nothing, so I said, ‘OK then, bye,’ and hung up.
This was actually the most success I had with women during my stint at university. The condom from my university ‘starter pack’ was still in my wallet when I met Kitty in the Steeles pub. My prospects of using it were so slim, I thought I might have to leave it to someone in my will.
The only thing that made me feel better about not having a girlfriend at university was my friend Robbie. Robbie had also never had a girlfriend. Like myself, he never pulled. Robbie was a virgin; it was common knowledge. At least I had some sexual experience. I always felt better about my situation because of Robbie. It eventually transpired, however, that Robbie was having more sex than anybody at university. He was a closet homosexual who was shagging every Tom, Dick and Harry and Sebastian and Craig and Jerome and Alfredo and then Tom again and then Sebastian with Alfredo … you get the point.
So that just left me with my appalling record. But here I was in London holding the phone number of a girl I had connected with, a girl I had fallen for instantly. We had talked and joked in the pub about trivial things, but I could see what my sister meant. She was a real character. She was confident, opinionated, but her most noticeable characteristic