mir wur harwen?’ asked Simon politely.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Teller,’ said the nurse. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’ She reached over and extracted the thermometer from Simon’s mouth and scrutinized it. She pulled a face. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘your temperature seems fine. May I see your hand, please?’
Gingerly Simon pulled his right hand from beneath the covers and presented it for inspection. The nurse examined the binding. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You sprained it quite badly. You’ll need to keep the pressure off the wrist for a while. Does it itch?’
‘No,’ said Simon. ‘It just hurts a lot.’
‘That’s all right, then,’ said the nurse. ‘That’ll wear off soon enough. How is your foot?’
‘Painful. Especially when I move.’
The nurse nodded. She walked to the end of the bed and picked up the chart which hung there. ‘I’ll arrange for you to have an X-ray so we can find out what sort of damage you did to yourself. In the meantime, I suggest you try and keep as still as possible so you don’t aggravate things.’ She smiled, without humour. ‘Here are two aspirins for your headache.’
Simon took the pills. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Please make sure you stay in bed and don’t get into any more trouble,’ said the nurse.
‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Simon, who was ransacking what was left of his brain for some small snippet of information, some undeleted detail, about what had happened the previous evening. He could remember nothing after the game of Twister in Angus and Fergus’s flat. After that there was a great, depressing, black hole of nothingness. What had the nurse meant about preparing a report?
Unable to ponder more recent events, Simon’s mind turned back to the dinner party itself. The brain being the playful organ that it is, he could remember in agonisingly clear detail Joe’s story about the magic coin, and shuddered at the embarrassment of it all. He remembered his anguish when he saw Delphine laughing at him along with everyone else. Cruelly, Simon’s brain was able to reconstruct Delphine’s exquisite face in photographic detail. His spirits spiralled still lower.
What was it with women? Simon wondered. They were a confusing breed. He really couldn’t understand why he had been single so long. He had read all the right books and magazines. He knew what women wanted. He could tick every box on the Ideal Man wish-lists that cropped up regularly in Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. He had read Crime and Punishment, twice. He had Grade 6 piano (with Merit). He was an excellent cook. He liked Jean-Jacques Beineix films, and owned several on video.
Years of gazing critically at himself in the mirror had persuaded him that physically he wasn’t too bad, either. He had dark, curly hair, and green eyes that he suspected might be his best feature. (He had been told this one evening, by his first girlfriend, in between tongue-heavy snogs, and had clung on to the belief ever since. After all, it was quite something even to have a best feature.) Overall his face had a pleasing look to it: decent skin, middling cheek-bones, good teeth. His chin had in the past been described as ‘strong’; Simon wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but had concluded that it had to be better than having a weak one.
There was no doubt: in the eligibility stakes, Simon was up there with the best of them. He had the lot.
What was more, Simon didn’t just regard females as members of another, alien race. He was not an Angus or a Fergus, for whom women were either cooks or sex objects. Women, he knew, wanted to be respected as people, to be liked and admired for their minds and not just their bodies or domestic skills. Simon understood this, and behaved accordingly.
And yet they stayed away in droves. It was all very perplexing.
Simon had never had any trouble making friends with women. It stood as testimony to his sensitivity and emotional candour. Women felt able to talk to him openly. They loved him for it. It was just that they loved him like a brother. It would have been nice to find one who would love him like a randy hot-blooded sex machine.
Despite the number of female friends that Simon had had, they never stayed friends for very long. There were two principal reasons for this.
The first problem was his respect for women generally. This meant that he wasn’t interested in trying to sleep with a girl before he got to know her properly. The difficulty with this approach was that, by the time Simon felt that they knew each other well enough to progress to the next, more interesting, stage, the girl had either got bored and had given up hope, or they had become such good friends that neither of them wanted to risk the friendship by sleeping together.
Eventually of course the girl would meet someone else and start sleeping with him immediately. She would then gradually see less and less of Simon, until disappearing completely in a frenzy of loved-up happiness.
Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, Simon had an embarrassing habit of falling hopelessly in love with his platonic girlfriends at wholly inappropriate moments. This usually happened just as they had begun to go out with someone else. It was only then, seeing them breathless and giddy with the excitement of new-found romance, that it would occur to Simon that, actually, it should be him that they should be getting so breathless and giddy about. There then followed excruciating confrontations, bewildered accusations, sheepish (but hopeful) admissions, scornful rejections, and (if he was lucky) cautious reconciliations coupled with stern warnings that nothing like this must ever happen again, ever. It was all rather humiliating.
The few fully functioning romantic relationships that Simon had managed also followed a predictable pattern. Simon was hopelessly, cripplingly, romantic. At the beginning of every relationship he would bombard his new paramour with letters, poems and flowers. He would spend hours composing his wedding speech in his head, and would moon about, unable to concentrate on anything. This clumsy, romantic streak, this desire to fall in love the way they say you should, was beguiling to the girl in question, usually for about a week. After that, the constant attention would begin to unnerve her somewhat, and before long Simon would be treated to the usual, hand-holding chat about slowing down, taking things easy, and giving each other a bit more space, which Simon now recognized as the inevitable precursor to the girl disappearing off the face of the planet. There would then follow a period of intense and histrionic mourning, after which came the hyper-critical self-analysis phase. This would leave him none the wiser, and primed to make all the same mistakes again next time around.
After contemplating this situation for some time and trying not to think about Delphine, Simon sighed, and closed his eyes. He tried to sleep, without success. Sometime later he heard a nearby cough. Simon opened his eyes. Standing at the end of the bed, clutching a brown paper bag, was Joe.
Simon struggled to sit up. ‘Hello,’ he said.
Joe proffered the bag. ‘Grapes,’ he explained.
‘Oh. Thanks very much.’
There was a pause as the two men looked at each other uncertainly.
‘I wanted to see how you were,’ said Joe.
Simon shrugged, slightly nonplussed. ‘Well, that’s thoughtful of you. Thanks.’
‘How’s your hand?’
‘Don’t know, to be honest,’ said Simon. ‘It’s all bandaged up so tightly that I can’t feel much.’
Joe pulled a face.
