Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely - Gail Honeyman Page 0,48
musician and I were going to be a couple, our first encounter needed to be a memorable one.
I nodded to myself, having made up my mind. I’d go to the shops straight after work, buy a new outfit and wear it to the concert. Oh, Eleanor, it couldn’t be that easy, could it? I knew from experience that life was never this straightforward, so I tried to anticipate any potential problems and how best I might address them. What would I do with the clothes I was currently wearing? The answer came to me easily: my shopper was big enough to hold them. What about dinner? I am not a woman who functions well on an empty stomach, and it would be embarrassing to faint at his feet for any reason other than an excess of emotion. Well, couldn’t I purchase some food from a café after work, and still manage to arrive at The Cuttings for 7:45 p.m.? Yes, I could. That would allow me plenty of time to select a seat near the front for the best possible view. My view of him, and his view of me, of course. All of the problems solved.
I couldn’t resist a quick look online to see if he was as excited as I was about tonight. Ah, thank you,
johnnieLrocks
Soundcheck: done. Haircut: done. Get your fat backsides down to Cuttings tonight, mofos.
#nextbigthing #handsomebastard
A man of few words. I had to google “mofo” and must confess to being slightly alarmed by the result. Still, what did I know of the wild ways of rock stars? They used an unfamiliar argot that he’d teach me in due course, no doubt. Could the lessons start tonight? It was hard to believe that, in a matter of a few hours, I’d be in his presence. Ah, the thrill of anticipation!
I had a missive for him in my shopper which I hadn’t sent yet. Another sign that fate was smiling on me today. Earlier in the week, I’d copied out a verse for him, one I’d always loved, using a Bic Biro. What a cost-effective miracle of engineering this instrument is! I’d selected the card with care: it was blank, and the front displayed an etching of a most endearing hare—long ears, powerful legs and a surprisingly assertive face. It was gazing upward at the moon and stars, its expression impossible to fathom.
Greeting cards are preposterously expensive, given that they are fabricated from a small piece of printed cardboard. You get an envelope with it, I suppose, but still. You would have to work for almost half an hour in a minimum-wage occupation in order to earn enough to purchase a nice greeting card and a second-class stamp. This was a revelation; I’d never actually sent a card to anyone before. Now that I would be seeing him tonight, however, I had no need to attach a postage stamp. I could present my humble gift in person.
Emily Dickinson’s beautiful poem is called “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” and combines two elements of which I am inordinately fond: punctuation, and the theme of finding, at long last, a soul mate.
Lovely. I read the poem over again, licked the glue of the envelope with care—it was deliciously bitter—and then wrote his name on the front in my best handwriting. I hesitated as I put it back in my shopper. Was tonight really the best night for poetry? My reluctance was strange; the card was bought and paid for, after all. I wondered, however, whether I might be better off waiting to see what happened at the gig before taking things to an epistolary level. There was no need to be reckless.
Five o’clock took forever to arrive. I traveled on the underground into town for speed, and went into the closest department store to the station, the same one where I’d purchased my laptop. It was 5:20 p.m., and the store would close in less than an hour. Womenswear was on the first floor (when did Ladieswear become Womenswear? I wondered) and I took the escalator, being unable to find the stairs. The shop floor was vast, and I decided to request assistance. The first woman I saw was matronly, and did not seem well placed to dispense fashion advice. The second was in her late teens or early twenties, and therefore too callow to advise me. The third, in the manner of Goldilocks, was just right—around my age, well groomed, sensible-looking. I approached with caution.