Me & Mel

It was when Melvin turned to one side and casually vomited on the floor of the pub that I realised the date wasn’t going to end as I had hoped. There was no way I wanted a first kiss after that.  

But maybe I should start at the beginning because actually, it all began rather well.

There had been rumblings of a future for me and Mel since we met at the ABC cinema in Lancaster a few weeks before the ill-fated, vomit-filled adventure of our first date. I had taken on (another) part-time job to help fund my extravagant student lifestyle (mainly drinking), and he had thought about going to Uni but had instead given in to the allure of having actual money in his bank account. This decision had made him a ‘Townie’, and some of my university friends thought I was stooping too low. But in his defense, he was tall and cute, and I was nothing if not shallow. He also had a small goatee-thing happening that I would be sure to change should the date go well.

We had only had a few shifts together in the weeks before the date, so Mel and I didn’t really know each other. With mobile phones being only just affordable for your average university student, texting was still a few years away from being the communication method of choice, and aside from that, there was only so much you could say when your character limit was 255.

Melvin had been assigned as my official ‘trainer’ at the cinema and it was his responsibility to show me the ropes. He had explained how to use the drinks machine (whilst standing far too close), and he let me in on the secret of how if you reused the popcorn boxes, you could eat as much as you wanted without the boss knowing. (I drew a firm line at re-using the cups). We had flirted, he’d made a few bad jokes, I’d made my red polo cinema t-shirt look as alluring as possible, and so he asked me out. Butterflies abounded.

My parents hadn’t liked my previous victim boyfriend, so when Melvin turned up at the house, he began to tick off a few boxes as a Potential. He arrived on time (tick), roses in hand, (half-tick… it was a bit cliché), and introduced himself to my Dad with a firm handshake (tick). He was smartly dressed (tick) and had his own car (tick). Despite not going to Uni, he had a steady job in the cinema (half-tick… was he lacking ambition?) and he was polite and friendly (tick) without over-sharing (double tick).

Mel drove us into town, because he didn’t drink (no tick… where’s the fun?) to an Italian restaurant that he had never been to, but he knew I liked (tick). The conversation was easy (tick), probably due to the enormous glass of wine I had consumed as I was getting ready to keep my nerves at bay. And so we ate, and we chatted, and we complained about our boss at the cinema who was too tight to buy me a name badge, so for the entirety of my time working there my name was Anne. (Which in all honesty I didn’t mind too much because it reminded me of a Buffy episode, and oh… how I wanted to be Buffy!) He paid for dinner (slightly awkward tick – my militant feminist side was warring with the fact that I am a hopeless romantic) and we moved on to a bar. Which, again, was fine, despite the sobriety of my companion.

But the dating world was new to me, at this point. I’d had a steady boyfriend throughout the whole of Sixth Form, and we had decided to go to the same University, not intending to break up after the first couple of weeks. Our parents were friends, and we had been to Majorca a few weeks before, a holiday that led to an unfortunate event involving breaking into an outdoor trampoline park after too much Sangria. (To this day, I still cannot drink it.) We were planning a forever romance, but alas, the collegiate system of Lancaster University did not work in our favour, and the long distance between our two colleges (about 250 yards) made it impossible for us to continue. Untenable, even.

After that, I bounced into a relationship with Ed (spit on the floor). Now, Ed (spit on the floor) was the boyfriend my parents did not approve of, and, as it turned out, rightly so. But at the time, with all the folly of youth, I was all-in, ignoring the fact that he clearly wasn’t. We broke up just before I began working at the cinema, and we were in a strange ‘are we/ aren’t we?’ phase that made my dalliance with Melvin feel somewhat illicit and exciting.

I had been cautiously excited for the date, and by the point in the evening when we had moved on to our final bar, I was feeling optimistic about buying a white dress and living happily ever after on a council estate in Morecambe. We ended the night in Oscar’s (you know, the bar that made the National press for serving a liquid nitrogen cocktail to a girl who ended up having to have her stomach removed). The bar was over three floors, and we took a table on the middle mezzanine. (I wasn’t posh enough to know that’s what it was, at the time, but I’m much posher now.) Mel had gone to get our drinks (triple tick… I was squiffy by now and wasn’t to be trusted with carrying anything) and I sat at the table, watching the various bar crawls and toga-wearing rugby teams from my elevated position.

Mel arrived (with a pint of beer for himself! Tick) and we watched the shenanigans of those below for a few moments in companionable silence. It was, then, without warning, that it happened. Calmly and casually, as though nothing was amiss, Melvin turned to his left and without a word, spewed the entire contents of his stomach onto the floor.

Now, I could tell that he was embarrassed.

As he excused himself to the bathroom, I was left on my own, with two drinks and an enormous pile of up-chuck by my feet. (I feel it is important to add that he narrowly missed my handbag, thank the Lord). I thought for a moment about what the best course of action would be, and after weighing up my options (could I leave? No, I couldn’t get home. Should I tell someone? Probably), I did the only sensible thing a girl could do.

I moved tables.

When he emerged from the basement bathrooms, Mel and I continued on our date as though nothing had happened. We finished our drinks, he drove me home and we never spoke of it again.

Twenty years later, we are still married.

I’m kidding.

The end of Me and Mel is a little hazy (it was over twenty years ago now), but the date itself and the lead-up to it is one of the stories that I remember most from my Uni days. I have delighted my children with the tale, and I often wonder what happened to the boy I almost loved. Do you think he remembers the date, too?