My Legendary Girlfriend (15 page)

Five minutes and a fag-break later, I checked the
A–Z
again. It didn’t look too far now. Across the road I could see an old church marked on the map which had been converted into a set of yuppie apartments and a bit farther up was the entrance to Highgate Park. The park was empty apart from a middle-aged woman in green Wellingtons walking a Yorkshire Terrier. As I passed the pond in the middle of the rolling landscape, I walked into a swarm of midges, inhaling quite a few of their number. Normally this would’ve set me off on a tirade of abuse against the animal kingdom but even this didn’t phase me. I was a man with a mission and Marx’s grave was my holy grail. There everything would become crystal clear.

I came to the gates on the far side of the park and turned left. There it was – Highgate Cemetery. There was a small white hut positioned two yards past the gates, on which was pinned a small hand-written sign revealing that tickets were 50p per person.

Disgruntled, I paid the far too chirpy elderly woman residing within her blood money. She asked me if I needed directions, I said no, in case she wanted to try and sell me a map.

The cemetery was peaceful and almost as silent as Archway had been the previous night except, if I strained really hard, I could hear the occasional lorry, so it kind of made sense to stop straining. Ridiculous as this might seem, it occurred to me that this was definitely a cemetery. All around me were graves. Marx was in the company of a lot of people whose deaths spanned over two hundred years. Time had caused the older gravestones to blend in with nature; ivy and erosion now made them seem at home. The newer headstones, though, looked depressingly incongruous, like shiny marble bookmarks stuck into the ground. I made a mental note to remind my mother that I wanted to be cremated. If I left my funeral arrangements up to her she’d get me the shiniest marble headstone money could buy, with the specific intention of embarrassing me for eternity.

Wandering aimlessly around the cemetery, occasionally stopping to read the odd inscription, I stumbled across the grave, or rather tomb, I was looking for. There was no mistaking it, a huge metal cast of a balding, bearded man’s head rested on top of the pale stone tomb. Even if I’d never seen a picture of Marx I would have known who it was; he looked exactly how I expected the father of modern Socialism to look: a little sad, a little world weary; sort of a cross between Father Christmas and Charlton Heston, but with a twinkle in his eye, as if he was constantly on the verge of working out the meaning of life. The inscription on the tomb in gold lettering read:

As expected, his tomb had become a Mecca for Marxists world-wide, just as Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris had become a home from home for half-arsed Euro-poets. Scattered around the edge of the marble base were a number of artificial roses and scraps of paper containing messages. I stood over one and read it:

It wasn’t signed.

I studied the inscription on the tomb again and felt ashamed. Marx had tried to change the world and make it a better place. He wanted workers to be able to study philosophy in the morning and go fishing in the afternoon. He wanted an end to tyranny, based on the belief that all men were equal. All I wanted was to get my ex-girlfriend back. It was a selfish pursuit benefiting no one but myself. Even as these self-chastising thoughts entered my head, I felt my shoulders automatically hunching up into a ‘so what’ shrug. I wondered if every man was like me. Give a man a noble cause and he would fight to the death for what he believed in, but get the woman he loves to leave him and his once honourable principles would cease to be quite so important.

I was standing so quietly, wrapped up tightly in my thoughts, that a robin flew down from the branches of the oak above Karl’s head and landed on the ground right beside my feet. Straight away it began tugging at a twig over twice its own body length. For over five minutes it struggled, lines of determination etched onto its beaky little face, before it gave up and flew off to a silver birch branch four trees to the left to recuperate. That robin was me. I was that robin. And Aggi was that twig. Those five minutes the robin had spent tugging at that twig, well, those were the three years I’d spent trying to get her back. Like God and McDonalds, Aggi was everywhere.

3.00 P.M.

I decided it was time to go when huge raindrops fell from the sky in their thousands, drenching me in seconds. My hair was soaked through and small rivulets of water ran down the back of my head, along my neck and into my shirt. I turned the collar on my overcoat up and pulled my head into its protection as far as I could, which didn’t really help because now I couldn’t see anything as my glasses had completely steamed up. To make matters worse, for the last few minutes I’d been monitoring a distinct rise in the smell of old men coming from my coat. Too cheap to bother getting it dry-cleaned when I’d bought it, I was now paying for the tightness of my wallet as the essence of the coat’s previous owner came back to haunt me; it was sweet and musty, like stale urine mixed with the contents of a cat’s litter tray.

I was wet, cold and smelling like the tramp from my late-night 7-Eleven trip. It was the rain that depressed me most of all. A walk in the rain might possibly have been fun if I’d had somebody to get wet with. I could’ve splashed gaily in puddles, swung on lamp-posts and sung a song or two, but I was alone. Drowning in torrential downpours on my own had no romance about it whatsoever. Gene Kelly wouldn’t have been quite so annoyingly smug if he’d just found out his best mate had been sleeping with
his
girlfriend.

By the time I reached the house I felt lower than I’d done all week. Oblivious to the elements, I waited shivering by the garden gate, unsure about what to do next. It was still only Saturday afternoon, roughly speaking there were another thirty-six hours to fill until Monday. Even if I slept for as much of it as possible, there was still too much time, time I would spend imagining Aggi and Simon together: having sex; exchanging secret glances; laughing conspiratorially. Once I opened the front door the outside world would be locked out, leaving just me and my thoughts.

The hallway was depressingly dusty. Mr F. Jamal had promised me all communal spaces would be cleaned every Friday. I eyed a scrap of silver paper from a pack of Polos that had fallen out of my pocket onto the carpet yesterday morning, and shook my head sadly. Walking up the stairs I strained my ears, listening out for evidence of life in the other flats – people alone like me – people who might like to talk. The house was silent. Dead. When eventually I reached my door I fished around in my soggy overcoat pockets for my keys and also discovered the following:

I scattered the crumbs on the threadbare carpet outside my door. A year ago I’d carried a solitary Bakewell tart in my coat pocket for less than a minute and since then I’d been removing crumbs by the thousand like modern day loaves and fishes.

I looked around the flat. Nothing had changed. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. I wasn’t sure what I had expected to happen (someone to have fixed the kitchen tap? A miracle? A message from Aggi?) but I’d desperately wanted something, anything to have changed. Instead, time had stood still and waited for my return.

To keep my brain ticking over I tried to work out who the last human being I’d spoken to in person was. There was one proviso, I could only count people whom I’d choose to go for a drink with. I’d left Nottingham the previous Sunday from my mum’s house. Technically speaking, my mum and my brother had been the last human beings I’d spoken to. But while I liked them both, I didn’t know whether I’d go as far as to say that I’d go for a drink with either of them. Next in line was Martina on Saturday night, but as I was trying to erase that encounter from my memory, she didn’t meet the requirements. Casting my mind back further I recalled that on Friday I’d gone for a quick one in the Royal Oak with Simon, but as he officially no longer existed as far as I was concerned he didn’t count either.

I pulled the emergency cord on this particular depressing train of thought and turned my attention to the phone. There were no messages on the answering machine. It wasn’t even on, I’d forgotten to set it. After dialling 1471 – the number that tells you the last person that called – I wished I hadn’t. At 2.42 p.m. precisely, Martina had phoned. She had to be pregnant. I called her parents’ house but she wasn’t in. They asked me if I wanted to leave a message and I said no. Shifting a pile of clothes and books aside, I made myself comfortable on the carpet, lying stomach downwards, and concentrated on the phone, willing it to ring.

For a while Aggi and I had lived under the delusion that we were psychic, after one occasion when we tried to phone each other at exactly the same time. The thought of our separate electrical impulses simultaneously hurtling down a fibre optic cable towards each other had meant so much that we spent a whole afternoon trying, quite seriously, to project images into each other’s minds. It never worked.

I emptied the pockets of my jeans onto the floor because my keys were jabbing into my groin. After two minutes of intense concentration the phone still hadn’t rung. I thought perhaps it was because I was being too general, trying to get anyone (bar Simon) to call.

Minutes passed and nothing really happened. Next door’s dog, for some unknown reason, began howling like a wolf, but with the exception of that minor interruption life continued to pass me by. More minutes passed uneventfully. I considered calling Martina again and maybe leaving a message like ‘Tell her everything’s going to be okay’ – something that would bolster her spirits if she was feeling scared or lonely, something that would imply that I cared without going overboard. It was wrong of course. I couldn’t give her hope where there was none. If she thought she’d found true love after a drunken sexual encounter seven days ago, her warped mind would turn a message of solidarity into a proposal of marriage.

The telephone that I had in my hand was one I’d bought in Argos during my final year at university. It had come in three colours: grey, cream and white and I’d chosen grey because I thought it wouldn’t show up the dirt as much as the others (although the grubby mouthpiece caked in minuscule deposits of dried saliva was testament to the fact that most things show up dirt if you don’t clean them). Everyone in the house I shared had chipped in to buy it, but I’d got to take it home when we graduated because I won it in the house lottery. Tony (whom I hadn’t seen or heard from since we all moved out) won the toaster, Sharon (whom I hadn’t seen or heard from since graduation) won the plug-in TV aerial, and Harpreet (whom I hadn’t seen or heard from since I left Manchester) won the electric kettle. I was really chuffed to win that phone; the hours I’d clocked up on it talking to Aggi probably ran into months. Some of our best conversations had been on that phone, like the one when she’d told me I was the kind of man that she wanted to marry one day. That phone had made me very happy.

It rang.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello.’

It was Kate.

‘Hi, Kate. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. I hope you don’t mind me calling.’

‘No, not at all,’ I replied, happy that it was Kate and not Simon seeking forgiveness.

‘Are you sure I’m not disturbing you?’ she asked. ‘You answered the phone very quickly. You must’ve been sitting on it. Were you expecting a call from someone else?’

‘No, I was just passing,’ I lied. ‘I’ve only just got in. I went to Highgate Cemetery with some friends to see Marx’s grave. Very cool. Definitely worth seeing.’

I wished I hadn’t described Marx’s grave as ‘cool’. I was sounding too nerd-like for words.

‘Do you know I lived in that flat for over a year and never got around to going there? It’s a shame, I’ll probably never get to see it now.’

‘Maybe I’ll let you visit me some day,’ I replied, only half joking.

She laughed.

I laughed too, but only because I was wondering whether I was stretching the point to describe her laugh as ‘flirtatious’.

‘You’d better be careful what you say,’ she said wistfully. ‘I might take you up on that.’

Simultaneously I ran out of saliva and witty come-backs. I changed the subject. ‘So, what’ve you been up to today?’

‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘I watched kids’ TV this morning and then went into town. I managed to get an extension on my overdraft, so I spent most of it on a pair of trainers and a skirt. I shouldn’t be spending money like I do but it cheered me up.’

‘I think your cheque came today,’ I told her, spying her letter on top of the TV. ‘Well, there’s a letter for you anyway.’

‘Brilliant. That’s fantastic news. Oh, what time is it? Quarter past three? I’ve missed last post then. Oh well, at least it’ll get here on Tuesday. Better than it not coming at all, I suppose.’

She sounded happy.

‘So would you like to talk some more?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘How many times did I beg you to call back yesterday?’

‘What do you want to talk about?’

‘Anything,’ I said happily. ‘Anything at all.’

I actually had a topic that I wanted to discuss if she couldn’t come up with one. It was a question I’d been mulling over on the journey from the cemetery. I wanted to know whether she thought the most beautiful people in the world (Cindy Crawford, Mel Gibson
et al
) ever got dumped. And if so, did this mean that no one, no matter who they were, was safe from getting dumped? I was thankful when she said she’d got a question, because I was sure mine would’ve eventually ended up about Aggi.