Page 25 of Playing the Field
‘I’m not planning on working my way through all of them!’
‘I know that, I just mean I want to get in there before anyone else decides to. I don’t want to miss out on all the fun.’
I warned her I don’t know which, if any of them, are single. But she came back with: ‘Leave that to me. I’ll soon find out.’
And it’s not long before she’s mingling with all the players after Bailey, the top run-scorer of the afternoon, declares himself too tipsy to continue with the rounders. Phoebs immediately volunteers to jump in– and starts flirting with Craig as she stands in front of him in the batting square.
‘He’s definitely in the running,’ she tells me, when she makes it to first base where I’m fielding. ‘You didn’t tell me how hot he is when you said he likes getting his kit off.’
‘For work,’ I remind her.
‘We’ll see,’ she says with a grin.
Jason is next to withdraw from the game, followed by Scott then Dad, after Bob decides that penalty drinks should also be awarded to anyone who is caught out or who hits the ball further than the back fielder. Barbour steps in to fill one of the gaps and at one point even Nathan has the bat in his hand. But luckily he doesn’t manage to connect with the ball– no one wants to give vodka shots to a four-year-old.
By mid-afternoon, it’s fair to say the majority of our players are looking the worse for wear. Time, then, to call it quits on the rounders and bring everyone back together for our second game– a modified life-size version ofCraniumthat Dad and I invented yesterday, with a circle of cones rather than a board for the teams to work their way around.
Our four categories are karaoke, dance move, act it out and animal alliterations, and we’ve drawn a coloured football on each cone to show which is which. When a team lands on a blue ball, one of the members has to sing a song and the first person, out of everyone, to identify it and shout out the name of the artist gets to move their team on one cone. For a yellow ball, the entire team has to perform a dance move, and Marge gets to judge whether it’s good or not, and consequently whether the team gets to advance one cone or move back two.
Green signifies speed charades, where the team has just twenty seconds for one of its members to use another as a puppet to mime whatever film or TV show is on the card that’s handed to them. If the remaining two guess it, on they go to the next cone. And in the final category– red, my favourite– the team member who’s selected to play must come up with an animal and an adjective that start with the same letter, for instance an elegant elephant, then do an impression of it so the others can try to guess what it is, a correct guess again moving the team one cone forward.
We have six teams of four, including Bob and Marge this time, with Cassie sitting out so she can hand out the activity cards and me so I can film some of the silliness that follows. And it starts straight away with Levi’s team landing an animal alliteration and Jacob choosing to act out a sexy squirrel. As he floofs his pretend tail and nibbles coquettishly on an invisible nut, his teammates get the giggles so badly they can’t even speak.
‘Don’t guess anything, just make him keep doing it,’ Levi gasps through tears of laughter. ‘You are never going to live this down, Jacob. This is going straight on TikTok.’
Jacob rolls his eyes then lays it on even thicker, wiggling his tail and mock stroking tufty ears.
‘Oh God, make it stop, it’s giving me the creeps,’ Elliot snorts. ‘It’s a squirrel, right? A seductive squirrel? I mean, I want to say a somewhat disturbing squirrel but I don’t think that’s how it works.’
‘A sexy squirrel,’ Jacob corrects, ‘but that’s close enough. And when my TikTok followers double, you’ll be wishing you’d done it yourself. I might just put a new one up every day.’
It probably isn’t his worst idea if he wants to grow his following.
Phoebs, who is quick to stand in on Craig’s team when Adio has to dash off for a toilet break, just as speedily volunteers to be the puppet when Craig is tasked with acting out a movie. He raises her arms up in front of her, thumbs up, forefingers pointing forward, then moves in behind her and jiggles her arms up and down to make it look like she’s shooting guns.
‘Shooter?’ Bailey suggests, to which Craig shakes his head. ‘Then can you narrow it down a bit?’
Craig reaches round Phoebs and makes rings with his fingers and thumbs in front of her eyes.
‘Binoculars?’ Bailey asks with a frown.
‘Glasses,’ Scott guesses.
Craig nods then moves Phoebs’ hands down to waist height, revs her wrists and swings her body like she’s riding a motorbike before moving her back into the shooting arms position.
‘Five seconds,’ Cassie calls out.
‘Oh jeez,’ Bailey mutters, just as Scott shouts, ‘I’ve got it! It’s theTerminator.’
Craig punches the air then holds his hands up to Phoebs for a double high five. And I can’t help laughing as she shamelessly ignores them and goes in for a hug instead. Her ballsiness is one of the reasons I love her. Once he’s recovered from his surprise, Craig puts his arms round her and hugs her back.
While all this is going on, Dad gets a barbecue going and the game comes to a natural end at the point where the smell of homemade burgers cooking becomes too good to ignore. It’s time to flop on to the grass with a loaded paper plate and a can of beer, and that’s where Ben finds us, chatting and laughing. It gives me butterflies when he makes a beeline straight for me.
‘Have I missed all the fun?’ he asks, as I shuffle to the side so he can sit between me and Bailey. ‘You’re looking a bit bleary-eyed there, bro.’
‘Cassie and Lily don’t mess around on the drinking games,’ Bailey says. ‘I can’t remember the last time I felt this giddy at this time of day.’
‘I’m not going to have to escort you home and tuck you up in bed, am I?’ Ben asks. He turns to me and shields his mouth as if he’s about to tell me a secret, but says, loud enough for Bailey to hear, ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
