My Legendary Girlfriend (18 page)

Hours went by as I filed them all in chronological order, even though some of them weren’t dated. I amazed myself by working out when she’d written them by the kinds of things they mentioned. For example two letters were signed, ‘Love, Mary Jane’. At the time that she’d sent them to me (March, roughly two-and-a-half years ago) I’d had a real thing for
Spiderman
comics and Mary Jane was the web-slinger’s girlfriend. This and thousands of other tiny details sparked off so many wide-screen Technicolor memories that I felt like they’d only been written yesterday. By the time I’d re-read them all, I’d finished both bottles of wine and floods of tears were silently streaming down my face. I went for a walk to get some fresh air and ended up on Aggi’s front door-step.

Mrs Peters opened the door, ushered me into the front room she kept for best and offered me a cup of tea. She told me that Aggi wasn’t in but that she’d be back in half an hour as she’d only nipped out to the library down the road. She chatted at me (rather than to me) for every minute of that excruciatingly long half-hour, while I barely spoke a word in return, the Lambrusco having wreaked havoc with my ability to form simple sentences. She asked if Aggi had invited me over for Christmas dinner, which told me at least that Aggi had been too scared to tell her mum she’d dumped me. Her mum thought the world of me, and I of her. It took all the strength I had to stop myself accepting the invitation on the spot.

The scratch of key finding keyhole signalled Aggi’s return, and in what felt like an instant we were standing in front of each other. She looked as beautiful as ever. She was wearing jeans, a checked shirt and a wine-coloured corduroy jacket that used to be mine. She was so shocked when she saw me that she almost dropped the books she was carrying. Mrs Peters slipped out of the room, sensing that we’d had some sort of tiff and were in the process of making up. Before leaving the room she said, ‘Do you want another cup of tea, love?’ I told her I didn’t.

‘You’re drunk,’ said Aggi aggressively. ‘I can smell it all over you. How dare you come to my house in this state.’

I motioned drunkenly to her to sit down, which only served to infuriate her even more. I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. The floor was spinning so wildly that I was desperately searching with my eyes for something solid to hang on to.

‘You’re beautiful,’ I slurred eventually, gripping onto the arm of the sofa, ‘but at least I’ll be sober in the morning.’ I thought I was so funny that the resultant fit of hysterics caused me to fall back into the sofa.

She moved towards the sofa until she was standing over me. I looked down into my lap to avoid her gaze, ashamed that we’d come to this. She told me I’d got to go and tried to pull me up by my arm. The sulky five-year-old that dwells within every melancholy drunkard freaked out and told her that she wasn’t allowed to touch me any more. I think that scared her, she sat down in the armchair opposite me and did her best to hold back her tears.

‘What do you want from me, Will?’ she asked, taking her turn to avoid making eye contact. I searched her face for signs that she recognised me – the man she used to love – and found none. ‘What can you possibly want to say to me? It’s over and there’s nothing that you can say to change my mind.’

‘Nothing at all?’ I asked, still trying to catch her gaze.

I told her that I wanted answers, I needed to know what I’d done to make her stop loving me.

These were her exact words:

‘It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve changed. I thought I could be the person that you wanted me to be. For a while it was what I wanted too. I wanted to feel love like it is in the movies and you gave that to me and for that I’ll be grateful forever.’

It didn’t make sense. She was saying all these wonderful things about me but the message she was sending added up to little more than, ‘Cheers, I had a really nice time.’

‘But what did I do wrong?’

‘You didn’t let me grow, Will. I’ve been going out with you since I was nineteen. I’m not the same girl! You’ve stayed the same though, you haven’t changed at all – you didn’t grow with me – that’s why we’re different people. And now I can’t breathe. I feel stifled. I feel like you’re trying to trap me.’

I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t trying to trap her. I told her that whatever freedom she wanted she could have. But she told me it was too late. She wanted a new beginning.

One thing she said really cracked me up though. ‘It’s like that song,’ she said, completely straight-faced, ‘“If You Love Someone, Set Them Free.”’ I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t enough that she was wrecking my whole life. She was quoting Sting to me too.

To be crueller than was strictly necessary I began singing in what I thought was a close approximation to the former Police star’s vocal style. She wasn’t amused. I knew our conversation would draw to a permanent close unless I could do something, anything, to make her see what a huge mistake she was making. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of anything. Worst of all, I was beginning to sober up when all I wanted was to be drunk again, if only to give me an excuse for crying in her sitting room.

She stood up as if to say that she’d had enough. I stood up too and walked to the front door and opened it. She followed me into the hallway. Standing outside on the door-step, with eyes full of tears I said to her, ‘Aggi, what do you want? And why aren’t I it?’

She looked at me blankly and closed the door.

I flushed the toilet and pulled my trousers back up. Back in the kitchen, the toast had long since popped up and gone cold.

I hate cold toast.

5.47 P.M.

In my reckoning if Aggi and I hadn’t split up when we did, we probably would’ve remained together. At least I hoped so. With the combined income from two professional jobs maybe we’d even have had the London equivalent of Alice and Bruce’s place, a smart flat in nearby Highgate, instead of a poorly decorated shoe box in Archway. Of course, I didn’t know this for a fact, but I often liked to imagine that somewhere out there existed a parallel universe where things had turned out okay.

I’d always longed to take my turn at playing house. At the age of thirteen (although, looking back, I could well have been fourteen) I was deeply besotted by Vicki Hollingsworth, to such an extent that I felt ready to make a huge commitment to her and I told her as much. It was a Tuesday dinner-time, I was in the canteen watching, mesmerised, as one by one, she consumed the jam sandwiches that constituted her lunch. A smear of strawberry preserve adorned her top lip and I remember feeling an overwhelming urge to lick it off. Instead, keeping my adolescent awakening in check, I got up from my table and strode across the room until I was standing in front of her. Emma Golden, Vicki’s best friend, had just got up to scrape the remains of her dinner into the huge bin by the main door, leaving the two of us alone. With my eyes to the ground, I spoke to her. ‘Vicki,’ said the teenage me, ‘I don’t know if you realise this but we were made for each other.’

I’d heard those very words spoken, less than twenty-four hours earlier, on the Monday evening episode of
Crossroads
. The second they’d come out of our Pye television set and into my world, they seemed to me the most magical, beautiful words ever spoken. Momentarily looking up from my shoes, I studied her face as she mulled over my proposition. I could almost see my words tumbling from one ear, past the back of her hazel eyes, to the other ear and back again, as she vacantly tipped her head from side to side. After a minute of this she met my gaze briefly, before running off in the direction of the main exit. My eyes remained fixed on the chair where the buttocks of this vision of loveliness had once been. I sat down in Emma Golden’s chair and surreptitiously placed my hand on the seat Vicki had vacated. It was still warm.

In any one of the thousand times I’d played this scene over in my head, Vicki had been so overcome with emotion at my line that she’d clutched me to that region of her chest that would one day become her bosom and whispered, ‘I love you.’ I’d imagined happy teenage years, safe and secure in the knowledge that I had someone to love who loved me in return.

When, minutes later, I saw Vicki walking back across the canteen I snatched my hand away from her seat guiltily and stood up. Gary Thompson, a confirmed head-case from the year above, and unfortunately the nearest thing Vicki had to a boyfriend, was by her side. He was a whole twelve inches taller than me, never smiled and had small marks on the back of his hands where, rumour had it, he’d stabbed himself with an HB pencil trying to give himself lead poisoning. As Gary took a step towards me, I shuffled backwards to accommodate him.

‘I’ll count to ten,’ said Thompson menacingly.

‘Okay,’ said the teenage me, resisting the urge to tell him it was lucky he wasn’t wearing mittens.

‘And if you’re still here, you’re a dead man.’

I didn’t need to be told twice.

I didn’t say another word to Vicki for the rest of my school career. When I saw her in the Royal Oak, two years ago, I still half expected Gary Thompson to pop up from nowhere and give me a Chinese burn for being in the same pub as she was. After a protracted period of exchanged glances she came over and spoke to me. She asked me what I was doing with my life. At the time I was very much on the dole, so I told her that I was a surgeon at a teaching hospital in Edinburgh. She was impressed. When I asked her how she was doing, she told me she was married to a forty-six-year-old lorry driver called Clive and had three kids, one of whom wasn’t Clive’s but he didn’t know that. I asked her if she’d got what she wanted from life. She looked at the gin and tonic in her hand, raised her glass and said, ‘Yes.’

Gary Thompson, I thank you
.

The thing is, I never learned my lesson. Even after Vicki, all I ever wanted from a girl was stability. My sole aim in life was to find a girlfriend who would make me feel so secure that I’d never have to worry about relationships again. But it was always my fault that it never worked out with the girls I dated. I always underestimated the depths of my insecurity. It had nothing to do with poor self-image – I actually considered myself quite a catch – the problem was, I never trusted the women I was involved with to tell the Truth, because the Truth never changes, but as I knew so well, people did. I knew it wasn’t everyone, some women did have Staying Power, but it was impossible to tell which ones they were. Women should come labelled – it would make life so much simpler.

If Aggi and I had still been together, I would’ve asked her to marry me. She would’ve turned me down, of course, because in our final year together she’d told me that she didn’t believe in marriage any more. I was informed of her decision while sitting in the middle row of screen two at the Cornerhouse cinema, right in the middle of a screening of a new print of
The Seven Year Itch
.

‘Will,’ she whispered into my ear, ‘marriage is a stupid idea. It’ll never catch on.’

‘It already has,’ I told her.

‘Not with me, it hasn’t.’

And that was that. I like to think she said it to stop us from drifting into matrimony by accident, as so many couples do after university, but it was probably more of a built-in escape clause, a bar-code on our relationship which, while giving me the impression that our love was open-ended to eternity, was in fact doing the opposite, stamping a coded sell-by date on our love that only she could read.

After I graduated, I actually did ask her to marry me anyway. The conversation went a little like this:

I knew about all her ex-boyfriends because I’d made her tell me about them after our fourth date. Out of all seven of them, Martin was the one I liked least. Aggi was only seventeen when she met him at a night-club in Nottingham. Three weeks later she moved into a room in his student house, and eventually into his bedroom. He was twenty and was studying Politics at the poly. He was a walking tragedy, the best reason to Eat The Rich I’d ever seen. He’d spent the ages between zero and eighteen at boarding school where he collected stamps, rowed and played Dungeons and Dragons. Rejected by Oxford after dismal A-level results, he ended up at what was then the Polytechnic. Realising that he was liable to be beaten to death by the mob of Socialist Workers who stood guard outside the student union selling
Militant
every day, Martin – posh, useless, waste of space Martin – decided to reinvent himself as the Ultimate Smiths Fan. Out went his chinos, V-necked jumpers, button-down shirts and nondescript haircut, and in came all things Mozzer-like. He had the stupid Morrissey quiff, the stupid Morrissey overcoat, the stupid Morrissey shoes but how he ever found a pair of stupid Morrissey glasses to fit his beady, too-close-together eyes I’ll never know.