Didn’t We Date? A Case of Mistaken Identity
I’m at Jungle Jim’s, one of my favourite soft play hangouts (I have two small children; otherwise going there for lunch would be creepy), when a woman I knew at school wanders up and starts to chat to me. She now has a sprog of her own, but she’s still cute, and I immediately remember why I found her so attractive at school. So, we start talking, and we get on really well: I’m a lot more confident than I was back then, and I have no trouble turning on the charm in polite conversation.
We chat, we eat lunch, we help our own tiny people up and down the slides....and then she really, REALLY annoys me. Bigtime. She says this:
“Thanks for hanging out with me: I totally forgot what a cool guy you are.”
I grin, give her a mock salute and pick up my daughter to leave, which is when she says: “I can never remember: did you break up with me or did I break up with you?”
I stop. I put down my daughter. I turn back to face her, only this time I’m not grinning.
“Say that again?”
“I just couldn’t remember if I broke up with you or if you broke up with me?”
I shake my head. “We never dated.”
“Yes, we did! In the last year of school!”
“No....we didn’t.”
“We totally did!”
“I didn’t date ANYONE at school, so I’m pretty sure I’d have remembered dating you.”
She stops, puts her head on one side and seems momentarily confused. “Oh, wait: it was the other ginger.”
“The OTHER ginger?”
“Yeah. Don’t you remember him?”
“Oh, I remember him. He had freckles: a LOT of freckles.” A face like a fucking pizza, in fact. “That’s right!”
“YOU.....dated HIM?”
“Yes! I thought it was you! It was so easy to get you two mixed up.”
“I don’t have a single freckle.”
“Oh yeah! You were always really pale at school: like Count Dracula....” ….but without the women, I think.
“That’s so weird. Why didn’t we date?”
I shrug. “Who knows? I didn’t get out much. I didn’t talk a lot.”
“Didn’t we sit in geography together?”
“No, that must have been him.”
“Music?”
“Him.”
“Yeah, but that time we-“
“HIM.”
“Oh.”
I’m deliberately making her feel uncomfortable now, but that’s because she just told me gingers were very much on the menu at St. George’s....and I didn’t even make it as a starter.
She smiles. “Ha! I so should have dated you, instead.”
Not a great idea, I tell myself. This woman canít tell gingers apart: I could have come home one night and found her spooning up with Rupert Grint.
“You coming here next week?”
I shrug and pick up my daughter. “There’s a chance I’ll be here, but – I tell you what – if I can’t make it, I’ll send out one of the others.”
When I get to the front door, I turn to see that she’s still working this out.
What a silly cow, I think. Then I start to feel really, really guilty...because I’ve just worked out that she ISN’T who I thought she was...
...she’s the OTHER girl with the mole on her face.
