The Love Market Read Online Free PDF Page A

about the masculinity that wrestles in his trousers. But it’s the way he talks about his passion for my mother, and his era as a painter in Paris that makes people recognize that men like my father don’t come around every day. And not only do they deserve you humouring their stories about their life, you do so willingly, for the chance that something they say will change the way you look at your own.
    ‘How is it relevant how old Anthea is?’ he plays with me now.
    ‘Oh God! Anthea!’ I have a chuckle. I’m picturing a thirty-year-old wannabe co-host of ‘Dancing With the Stars’, and he knows I am.
    When he was young, my father took himself way too seriously; now he uses our mutual ability to find him slightly funny as something that brings us closer.
    ‘Anyway, how is the Love Market these days?’ he asks, with scoffing emphasis on my company’s name. A romantic like my father finds it morally indefensible that anyone would actually pay someone to find them a partner. I look over and see him peering at a report from the University of St Andrews on “Face Values Applied to Love Game”—the latest research on what people believe your face says about your attitudes to sexual commitments. My bedtime reading.
    ‘It’s doing well. Thanks for asking.’
    ‘And how are you ?’ he exaggeratedly lets the paper float out of his hands, making sure I see, to emphasise his scathing regard for it.
    I stop clanking things on the bench. What is it about an innocent inquiry about your wellbeing that makes you realise you’re actually not doing well at all? ‘I’m all right, Dad.’
    ‘That doesn’t sound very convincing.’
    I shrug. Even though we’ve been largely absent from one another’s life, my father still has a way of knowing things without my having to tell him.
    ‘Remember, what Gwyneth Paltrow said. The best way to mend a broken heart is time and girlfriends. And from my experience it has always worked.’
    I smile at his joke. ‘’Why is your heart broken this time?’
    ‘I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about you.’
    I scan the table for my decree absolute. ‘Have you been reading my personal mail—my letters?’
    ‘No. Would I? But if you leave things lying around they become public property.’ Then he adds, ‘But this is a sad day.’ Because my dad always liked Mike.
    We meet eyes, and in that moment, all the things I want to say line up for me to speak them, only I can’t speak them, and he knows I can’t. So he stands up, because he knows we’re not going to have a big heart to heart. And inwardly, we will use the fact that Aimee is right here as the excuse to keep this uncrossable emotional bridge between us. He slips his raincoat on over his button-down-collared shirt—my father is always dapper, turned out like a lovable little pimp, as my half-sister Jacqui will say—then he goes and kisses ‘his favourite granddaughter.’ Aimee will usually remind him, disdainfully, that she’s his only granddaughter. Although, lately, Aimee seems to act as though she considers everything and everyone to be beneath her, not just her granddad and his tired jokes.
    ‘I better be off, diddle-doff,’ he says. ‘ Anthea will be waiting for me.’ He shoots me a prankish smile.
    I go over to him and give him a quick cheek-kiss, wishing I could cuddle him, but how do you suddenly start being huggy when you never really have? What you do is you hug your daughter all the more, when she’ll let you, to give her what you never had. ‘Don’t do anything you shouldn’t do,’ I tell him, affectionately, just glad that he’s alive and he’s got this much spirit left in him, and hoping I’m half as frisky as he is in my old age.
    ‘Oh, I’ll try,’ he says, with a wink.

Three
     
     
    ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask Aimee, as we sit in an empty Italian restaurant called The Godfather, down a Newcastle City Centre side-street, on Monday lunchtime. Three bored Italian waiters stand