Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [79]
Scarred by my previous disastrous ‘phoning a girl the next day’ experience, I felt sick with worry when I dialled her number. I typed it into my new BT phone with caller ID. Caller ID had just come out, and it was genuinely quite thrilling to know who was calling before you picked up.
It was ringing. I was nervous. I cleared my throat. After taking advice from my sister, my plan was to ask her out for coffee.
‘Hello, it’s Michael,’ I said, jovially, ‘we met last night.’
‘Who?’ she said.
I couldn’t believe it. Exactly the same as before. Why am I so forgettable?
‘Michael, you gave me your number last night,’ I said, like I did to the girl in Edinburgh.
My heart sank. I thought we had connected. She was definitely flirting. There were signs. How could this happen? Why was this always happening?
‘I’m joking,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
She was joking. Funny. I nearly killed myself; but funny.
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘So shall we go out then for dinner and talk about your script and stuff?’ she asked.
Wow. Things had really turned around here. She sort of just asked ME out; to dinner. Not a coffee; dinner! The big one. The most romantic meal of the day, there’s wine and candlelight. Wine relaxes you, gives you confidence and helps you lose your inhibitions. Coffee makes you tense, uptight and talk too quickly, and gives you bad breath. Dinner was great news as was the other thing she said: ‘To talk about the script and stuff.’ ‘Stuff’! That’s good, that’s a good word. This wasn’t just about the script, it was about stuff too. Stuff could mean anything.
‘Yes, that’s a great idea, when are you free?’ I asked, revealing too much eagerness. I was hoping for that night, maybe the next day, certainly that week.
‘Let me see, I can do two weeks on Friday,’ she said, leafing through a diary.
Two weeks on Friday? What? How can anybody be busy that many nights in a row? The only things I had in my diary were the things already printed in it, like St George’s Day, First Day of Spring and Christmas.
So we arranged to meet in over a fortnight at PizzaExpress in West Hampstead, at 8 p.m. People who are having a dinner in a restaurant always book for 8 p.m. if they can. 8 p.m. is ‘dinner in a restaurant time’, although at home you never eat dinner at 8 p.m. Odd.
In the two weeks leading up to our date, I thought only of her. I’d only just met her. A few days previously I didn’t know who she was, but now I was consumed by her. During this painful wait, I found out that I wasn’t the only one with these feelings for her. It seemed she had several suitors with much the same level of infatuation as me. On one level the news was good, she didn’t officially have a boyfriend. Men were in love with her, but she wasn’t in love with them. They are not me. I have a date booked in, for dinner, to talk about ‘stuff’. But then I panicked. Is that what she’s doing every night? Is she having dinner with different men every night? Is that why she couldn’t squeeze me in? Am I in some kind of auditioning process, like The X-Factor?
When the night finally arrived, I put on my cashmere coat and walked to PizzaExpress just around the corner. She wasn’t in the restaurant, so I decided to wait outside for her, to greet her, and there she was jiggling to a halt in her sky-blue Mini Mayfair, looking stunning in a camel coat. ‘Get in!’ she shouted across the road.
I was standing in front of PizzaExpress. Why does she want me to get in the car? ‘The restaurant is here,’ I said, motioning towards it like a model revealing a prize on The Price is Right.
‘Get in!’ she repeated.
I crossed the road and squeezed into the smallest car on the road. We kissed on the