Page 3 of Dancing Fools and All That Jazz

Ruby Anderson

My fingers hover over the keyboard of my laptop as I sit at the worktop in my kitchen. I stare at the screen, shaking my head as I read this year’s three-hundred-and-sixty-degree work appraisal task.

Present yourself as the latest new product. What are you? What do you do? How do you work? What is your unique selling point? How will you become an invaluable asset to the First Bite company?

The format is a variation on the same tedious theme repeated every year by the IT recruitment company I’ve worked for these last eight years.

Present myself as a product. Again? I groan. I’m not in the mood for this.

I’m scheduled to give my – as yet unwritten – presentation to my team via shared screens later today. I’ll be expected to use all the management lingo I can muster. Blue-sky thinking, cross-pollination, ideation… My boss and my peers will then give their feedback on my performance.

I realise the point of the process is to emerge from the appraisal with a new sense of self, intended to trigger change and improvement.

It’s the usual corporate exercise bollocks. Nothing but a stupid game.

I remember last year’s fiasco.

‘Ruby, you are giving the impression you are not taking your job seriously,’ Giles, my Eton-educated boss had remonstrated.

‘Comparing yourself to a new fertiliser spreading much-needed nutriment in the company served only to bring into question the calibre of your colleagues, let alone prompting a distasteful image in our minds.’

I could hardly say that was my whole point.

Since Giles took over the company, it’s all turned to chicken shit.

He got rid of all the decent workers, replacing them with his cronies.

How I’d love to shovel manure all over them.

I should’ve been made team leader long before it finally happened.

I mean, I brought in more frigging deals than the rest of them put together.

The gobshite even had the cheek to expect my gratitude when he alluded to operating positive discrimination when I finally got my promotion. Little toerag.

I snap the laptop shut and head into my handkerchief-sized garden. The welcome April sun warms my face as I sip my coffee and look at the clouds skittering across the sky.

Who am I? What does make me tick?

My colleagues would be shocked to know the real Ruby. I keep her well-hidden from most people, but especially when I’m at work. I close my eyes and smile as I imagine a true presentation of myself to my colleagues – one they will never see.

Hi. I’m Ruby Anderson. I’m forty-four, a single parent with a fourteen-year-old son, Will.

Yes, I know. My name matches my status, Ruby-and-her-son.

Glad you find that amusing. So, you want to know all about me?

Well, politically, I’m left of centre. I believe women rock, Black Lives Matter and plastic should be outlawed.

I hate dog poo, misogynists, and any kind of pastry.

I love music, dance, festivals – Glastonbury, Leeds, Creamfields…

basically anywhere where you can dance all night – and my tipples are gin or red wine.

Oh, and by the way, I’m a sex addict.

I imagine their mouths dropping open.

I refuse to apologise for my addiction. I love sex; it’s true. I love getting naked, I love the buzz, the intimacy, the orgasms. Hell, I like sex more than music and dance, but the music and dance of a good festival with sex thrown in is the dream combination.

Pardon?

Yes, I know nothing at work would indicate this side of my character. When I’m at work, I’m at work.

I can see from your faces you want to know more…

So, I prefer men to women, although I’ve been with both and sometimes both at the same time.

I picture Giles’s eyes so wide they’re nearly popping out. I’m enjoying this.

If I can’t have sex at least once a week, I have to turn to my appliances. Yes, I said appliances. Sex toys, dildos, vibrators. I have several. I picture the photos of each little beauty flying up on the PowerPoint screen in glorious technicolour .

My team’s reaction would, I’m sure, match Monica’s shock at my Ann Summers party a few years back. She’d never seen a vibrator, let alone used one. She’d had a glass too many when she confided in me. ‘I have never had an orgasm.’

‘You’re frigging kidding me? Never?’

She clammed up when Asha interrupted, wanting to know what we were talking about.

I never managed to get Monica to discuss it again.

So, I got her a Rampant Rabbit for her birthday.

She nearly died when she opened it. In fact, she was so embarrassed she told me she’d hidden it deep in her wardrobe so her husband and kids wouldn’t find it.

Mind, she didn’t throw it away. I smile.

Back to my presentation.

But my crazy sex life is now past tense. I’ve changed.

I can see you all sighing with relief. Oh, I’ll always be a sex addict.

Consternation.

However, I’m contemplating becoming a sex addict with one person. You may well ask, what’s caused this change? One word. Max.

Max. It all feels a bit surreal. I said I’d never go monogamous… The imaginary office scene melts away as Max’s face, Max’s body fills my mind. His beautiful, thick curly hair, his brown eyes, his toned stomach. He may be ex-army, but he still keeps ultra-fit.

I met Max through the dating app. We only dated the once. We barely spoke over our single drink before going back to his. Hell, I barely made it into work the next day. The memory makes me quiver.

Then the following week I checked the app to approach him for another date, but he’d disappeared without a trace.

I think back and picture Max’s genuine smile of surprise when we met by chance a few months later.

Monica and I had been to see a dance show at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

We walked to Piccadilly to catch the train home and there he was, all by himself.

He sat next to us on the train, and we talked all the way back to his stop, a few before ours.

We swapped numbers – that was a first – and he suggested we meet up again. I had to confess my name was not Scarlet.

‘I like Ruby better. Deeper shade of red,’ he’d muttered with a lascivious smile.

We’ve been seeing each other for almost a year now.

He said he’d acted completely out of character on that first date.

He made me agree we wouldn’t have sex for at least a month until we’d got to know each other better.

Going home after only one chaste kiss each time we dated – excruciating.

But the restraint thing, if I’m truthful, it made it even sexier.

He came to a weekend festival with me last autumn, us and a few mates. After dancing in the mud and the rain twenty-four-seven, I knew he was my kind of guy.

‘Ruby Anderson, you’re starting to turn my head.’ Those words still ring in my ears.

Heck, even Will likes him; I can tell. And I know Monica will like him when they meet properly. He’s like her, completely genuine.

I think back to Monica’s reaction that night on the train going home from Manchester.

Monica insisted on knowing how we’d met.

She could sense the chemistry sparking between us and was intrigued as to why Max thought I was called Scarlet.

Well, I’d had a few drinks and felt on a high after Max took my number, so I ended up confessing the whole meeting-others-for-sex thing.

Wow. Was Monica shocked. She didn’t believe me at first. I had to show her the app on my phone.

‘God, Monica, have you really not seen a dating app?’

‘Why on earth would I have seen one?’

‘Jeez, you have to get yourself on social media, woman.’ I told her. ‘You haven’t a clue what you’ve been missing.’

Her astonishment soon turned into an insatiable appetite to know everything. She wanted all the gory details.

I smile as I recall our conversation. Now that would have made some presentation.

We giggled all the way home as I told her about my spontaneous encounters. I deliberately kept it light. The good, the bad and the downright comical. And there was a fair variety of each. Snatches of our exchange replay in my head.

‘How do you choose which ones to meet? I mean they could make up any of that stuff they write.’

‘And believe me, they do. I send a tester email first. If I think they’re too serious or dull or creepy, I say thanks, but no thanks. Then I always ask certain questions.’

‘Like what?’

‘What’s your favourite food? No, seriously. You can tell a lot about a person by what they eat. And if they mention meat and two veg…’

‘Stop.’

‘Which brings Freddy to mind. Big on his roast dinners…’

‘Ruby.’

‘He was a sound engineer with a touring show performing in Manchester. Only here for a few months. Unusually, we met a second time. He’d rented out one of those Salford Quay apartments.

Had no conversation whatsoever. God, was he dull.

I was going to make excuses to leave early on our first date, but the minute he turned the lights down and put on tracks from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, he transformed into a gyrating, sexy beast. Wow, was he hot.

You do realise you are showing a very unhealthy interest in this, Mrs Thornton. Should I be worried?’

‘What? This is better than the erotic book I purchased on my kindle by mistake. Tell me more.’

‘OK. Well, at first, I thought I’d find my match, settle down and do the whole commitment thing.

But I soon got bored. I rarely went out with someone more than two or three times.

The serious ones scared me. I mean, Will and I are perfectly happy by ourselves – no one else to interfere with my parenting or disrupt our lives.

Besides, I love the thrill of being with someone for the first time.

Sadly, it soon wears off. I confess it, I’m an addict and why stick to one man when you can have loads? ’

‘I only had a couple of boyfriends before Vince.’

‘Honestly?’