As he set about the complicated task of forming words, the man straddling my bench, breathing alcoholic fumes, introduced himself. For the sake of ease, let’s just call him Liar. His accent was somewhere between Somerset and Swindon. Untraceable and unimportant, as brown eyes often have a memory erase function in my experience.
(But then blue eyes do too, if attached to a dark haired man. The only blonde that ever did it for me was David Soul from the original Starsky and Hutch.
-DAVID SOUL AND PAUL MICHAEL GLASER 1975
But he had to go and blow it by releasing a single. And I don’t care if it reached number one in the US singles chart!):
Liar had recognized me from God-Only-Knows-Where. Since popping out two kids I hadn’t been working much, and am always surprised when anyone knows who I am: ‘The Daughter of Joan Collins’ is an auspicious moniker, but it won’t buy you a decent guy. On the contrary, in my experience. However, I am willing to believe that this is down to the fact that I am a bad judge of character, gullible, or senseless in the face of brown/blue eyes (or any eyes at all attached to a male).
The art of seduction used by Liar was far more outlandish than usual, in fact a hammer would have sufficed to impress with equal measure. He claimed to be…..wait for it…..the son of Oliver Reed, the notorious actor and drunkard, perhaps in reverse order.
-Oliver Reed at home/the Bar
Like women before me, and women to come, I fell for his line in reasoning, as he tortured my soul with tales of boarding school, and unrequited fatherhood. Surely this tormented soul was somebody who could understand my gypsy upbringing, my equally unusual life? As he wound himself in to my affections and confidence I found myself believing more and more of his outlandish lies.
We have to ask ourselves ladies, is it really such a wasteland out there that we will let ourselves believe the most outlandish porkies and accept the basest behavior? Because I know I am not alone in letting a legendary lothario pull the wool over my eyes.
As sense battled with sensibility, I found Jane Austen’s valiant voice charging ahead with her sound reasoning, “Forsooth, surely this man has a stable of mares better suited to his wiles?” Whereas my Kim Kardashian state of mind was amply behooved to believe a million and one lies as long as she could break off the’ engagement’ the next day.
-JANE VS KIM: who would you listen to?!
Jane Austen was soon put to bed with a coco laced with cyanide, while Kim complemented me on my spray tan, and told me that this guy was surely a keeper as he had family connections—imagine the Hello! Magazine shoot with his folks and yours—no matter that his dear papa was ten foot under, the name alone was enough to secure a few extra zeros on the end of the pay check!
So who was this woman willing to believe the lies of a complete stranger? As stranger, dear reader, is what in fact he was. And here I digress for the purposes of education. Surely the old fashioned, out dated notions of dating with a chaperone are not such a bad idea when you consider the fact that when we meet an intended on such a night as this we know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THEM?!
At least in days gone by when you were introduced through family members you usually knew if they were a serial killer, rapist, or drunkard, and would adopt the ‘better the devil you know’ attitude that represents the best of the British-Stiff-Upper- Lip-Mentality.
Every week end all over this country, and all over the ‘civilized world’ women take their lives in their hands when they totter out in their nine inch heels, get bladdered up to the eyeballs and engage in hanky panky with total strangers. It really is Russian roulette on a Friday night.
Is it this excitement of the unknown, and the potentially fatal that propels young maidens into the night air? Balancing on towering heels that alone could kill them? Or is it some faith in the God of Love that makes them believe that tonight of all nights they might just meet and fall in love with Mr wonderful? God bless innocence.
It is perhaps worth noting that before we left the first watering hole, Ba-Ha, that night I actually prayed to my God in the toilet cubicle of the ladies to find me a wonderful man. (Not my normal toilet ablutions I might add). Not only did my God not deliver, but He laughed in my face. However, I do not hold this against Him; any God with a sense of humour is worth my vote. After all if you can’t laugh what have you got? Just a handful of hope and a lot of baggage.
By this point, my paramour and I had somehow moved from the tables surrounding the little pub in a quiet Somerset lane to a low wall across the way where we could canoodle in increasing solitude. Jessica, however, kept throwing me knowing looks, as she attempted to bond with her underling who, it was becoming increasingly clear, would not survive into tomorrow as her latest boyfriend. She seemed to be spending more time looking over at us.
It was somewhere between the first snog, as it is dispassionately called, and the last that he told me the story of his near death experience. Always up there with stories bound to get the ladies on board, on site, and on your appendage of choice.
The story went something like this: Liar was rooming with another man who, in the course of their roommate agreement, found him utterly annoying to the point of stabbing Liar with a kitchen knife. Now I don’t know about you, but in retrospect, which is in itself a terrible thing, anybody who gets stabbed by their roommate is either incredibly unlucky or a total bastard deserving of stabbing. To have shared enough time under the same roof with this guy to decide that he didn’t deserve to live is a terrible indictment of Liar’s personality. I surely needed no further proof of his guilt?
Ah, but dear reader I did. I needed a lot of proof. I needed the kind of proof you only get in a court of law because I was lip locked and liking it.
Should, heaven forbid, a meteor have hit the earth at that moment, I would have been seriously bummed out. However, the car ride home was to prove more dangerous than an intergalactic asteroid.
…….to be continued……..
