My Legendary Girlfriend (21 page)

‘What if Paula comes back? She’ll think I’ve completely lost it!’

‘Don’t worry!’ I yelled at the receiver, still dancing and feeling the happiest I had in a long time. ‘Just go with the flow.’

7.39 P.M.

I was on a roll. My words couldn’t trip out fast enough. Kate made me feel like jabbering away until Monday morning. What was most impressive was the fact that she wasn’t bored, sitting there in her Brighton flat, listening to a complete stranger talk about his life. I wanted to confess everything: how I couldn’t swim but could bend my thumb back until it touched my wrist; and how, until my first day at Wood Green Comprehensive, I’d never bought a pre-packaged sandwich (I don’t know why, I just hadn’t). I wanted her to know everything.

‘Tell me some more,’ said Kate.

‘What?’

‘Tell me more about you.’

‘Er, well. No,’ I said uneasily. It was hard saying no to a girl who made me want to say yes to anything she suggested, but one of the cover lines on my ‘donated’ copy of
Cosmopolitan
kept flashing up in my head: ‘Why men love talking about themselves.’ Now, I decided, was my turn to listen.

‘Tell me about
you
,’ I said, smiling needlessly. ‘You’ve heard enough of me surely? Anyway, my mother always told me never to talk to strangers and until I know more about you, a stranger you will remain.’

‘It’s quite nice being a stranger,’ said Kate. ‘I could be anyone I want to be. Unfortunately I’m me. I work at Boots. I have to get there at 8.00 a.m. and I leave at 6.00 p.m. I work every other Saturday and get one day off during the week if I’ve worked a Saturday. That’s it really.’

‘I worked in a pub for a couple of months shifting crates of beer from the cellar. I hated every second of it. If it’s anything like that, I bet it’s soul-destroying.’

‘Not really,’ she said chirpily. ‘A mate of mine, Daniel, he works for a firm of accountants in Oxford, and his job is what I’d call soul-destroying. He’s constantly under pressure to produce results. Last week his doctor told him he’s got a stress-related ulcer. He’s only twenty-four. He earns quite a bit, mind. But no amount of money is worth all the rubbish he has to put up with. I’d never want a job like that. Boots wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to get up so early. Anyway, I told Daniel this and I’ll say it to you. There’s no point in getting stressed about work. If a job gets on your nerves then leave it. No one’s got a gun to your head.’ There was a knocking noise down the phone line followed by a loud click. Kate’s voice disappeared. I panicked. I thought she’d gone forever. ‘Sorry about that, Paula’s just come in. She took me by surprise. I dropped the phone! Where was I? Ah, yes. I used to want to have a high-powered job. I can’t remember what kind exactly; I mean, I had phases where I’ve wanted to be everything from a news reader to a Crown Court judge, but I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t really see the point. Do you know that I once got it into my head that I wanted to be a professional tennis player?’

‘Were you really good at tennis?’

‘No, I hated it,’ said Kate dolefully. ‘I just liked the skirts.’

We both laughed. I wondered what she looked like in a tennis skirt.

Kate continued. ‘My driving ambition now is to fall in love, be a nurse, and have babies. That’s all I want my life to be about now. Once I’ve got those three things in that order I’ll have everything I want. It’s true.’

I wasn’t convinced. ‘How are love and babies going to make everything all right? Aren’t you forgetting some key points here, like babies costing money, love being hard to find, people falling out of love as easily as they fall in?’

‘I know all these things,’ she said, testily. ‘But that’s my ambition. I didn’t say it was practical or even possible. We’ve all got our dreams.’

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said, by way of apology.

‘Do you think I’ll get what I want?’ asked Kate.

I couldn’t help looking at the photograph of Aggi’s bearded, bespectacled, scarred, toothless face on the wall. Even a defaced Aggi was better than no Aggi at all.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘The babies part is easy enough. The world’s crawling with sperm donors, as long as you’re not too choosy. And the job seems to be sorted. It’s the love part that I think might be problematic. In my opinion, you can only say that love truly is love once you’re both dead, because it’s only then, once you’ve managed to go your entire lives with each other and there’s nowhere for you to go off to or anyone to go off with, that it finally becomes real. Anything else is more or less just infatuation. I’m serious.’ The door to one of the neighbouring flats slammed shut, shaking my windows. I crawled into bed. ‘Everybody loves a lover but too many people lack Staying Power. Love should be fatal. You should never recover from it. If you can, then it wasn’t love.’

‘Really?’ said Kate, as though she had another question lined up. ‘So what about you and Aggi? Was what you had love?’

‘It was love. I loved her and I continue to love her, despite everything I do to make myself stop.’

‘
You
might love
her
, but what about the fact that
she
doesn’t love
you
? Is love really love if only one person stays true to the cause? That sounds more like infatuation to me. No offence intended.’

Kate was showing a side of her that I hadn’t noticed before. She was capable of seeing straight through my sweeping statements and had by now probably realised that my authoritative manner was as fake as everything else about me.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, lost for words. ‘I think you’ve actually made quite a good point there. This must mean that I’m as sad as every other loser out there.’

‘You made up the rules,’ she joked.

‘Yeah, I did.’ I was getting tired of this now. ‘He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. What goes around comes around. I’ve made my bed so I’d better lie in.’

‘It?’ prompted Kate.

‘No, just in.’

We both laughed.

‘I tell you what though,’ I said. ‘Aggi did love me.’

‘How do you know? Did she tell you?’

‘Yeah, she told me a million times but . . .’

I was going to tell Kate about something Aggi had done which proved beyond any reasonable doubt how much she felt about me, but I couldn’t get the words out. This was a private memory and neither time nor space had made it mean any less to me. What Aggi and I had done was ridiculous in a silly sort of way, but I had forgiven myself long ago on the grounds that we’re all allowed to be ‘silly’ once in a while, especially when in love. And I suppose it’s true that even the most ridiculous things can carry more poignancy than all of Shakespeare’s sonnets rolled together.

At the time of the event I was thinking of, I was twenty-one and Aggi was twenty, ideal ages to be hopelessly romantic. It was a Tuesday afternoon during the summer holidays, a year after we’d first met. Aggi had called around at my house. I was still in bed even though it was two in the afternoon. The sun was shining brightly through the chocolate fabric of my bedroom curtains, turning everything inside golden brown and warming up the air until it felt like a greenhouse. All the sounds coming in through my open bedroom window – birds chirping, next door neighbour’s kids playing Swingball; the far-off jingle of an ice-cream van – were surprisingly life-affirming. And yet, there I lay, sweating under the duvet flicking through a number of books looking for ideas for my dissertation.

Tom must have let Aggi in because I only realised she was there when she knocked on my door from inside the room. She must have been standing there for ages because she didn’t say anything for a minute or two and seemed a little embarrassed when I looked up from my book, completely avoiding all eye contact. She’d said, ‘Let’s go to the park.’ And after I’d put on some clothes and had a brief wash, that’s exactly what we did. On the way there she didn’t say much, as if going over something in her mind that she was trying not to forget. When we got to Crestfield Park by the large oak tree – the very same oak tree where I’d later scatter her imaginary ashes – she sat down on the freshly mown grass and tugged at my sleeve, signalling me to take a seat. And this is what she said:

‘I woke up this morning and knew that I loved you more than ever. Sometimes I get scared that this feeling will slip away into something less than the wonderfulness it is now. So I’ve got a plan. Let’s capture how we feel right now and keep it forever. I’ve got some scissors in my bag and I’m going to cut off a lock of my hair and then you’ll cut off a lock of your hair and we’ll twist them together. Then on a scrap of paper I’ll write down everything I feel about you and then you’ll do the same. Then we’ll put the lot in one of those plastic containers you put film in and we’ll bury it right here. What do you say?’

∗    ∗    ∗

What could I say? It didn’t seem a ‘silly’ thing to do at all. It seemed like the only thing that made sense. It’s easy to feel that everyday love isn’t like love in the movies because successions of mind-numbingly dismal, modern romantic comedies – stand up
French Kiss
,
Sleepless in Seattle
and
While You Were Sleeping
– have succeeded in turning everything that’s wonderful about love into cheese. People are too literal about love now and it’s all because, thanks to these films, there’s little space left for symbolism in real life. What Aggi and I did was slightly strange and the kind of thing that only lead characters in a Shakespearean tragedy could pull off convincingly, but I loved every second of it.

Aggi took her mum’s orange-handled scissors from her bag and chopped off a lock of hair, scribbled on a piece of paper and put it in the container. I cut off some of my hair from the back, wrote on my piece of paper and then twisted our hair together and dug into the dirt with my hands. The hole, as deep as my hand, was more than big enough for the container. Together we packed the leftover soil on top of it, then stood up and stared at the mound, not speaking. We kissed right there and then went back to Aggi’s.

I didn’t know what Aggi had written and she didn’t know what I had written, and that was what made the whole thing so mystical. Looking back, sometimes I like to joke with myself that the whole thing was some kind of voodoo trick, and that our messages and twisted hair were what was keeping me bound to Aggi all this time, but even I couldn’t take it that seriously.

Over the next few days I couldn’t get what we’d done off my mind. I had to know what Aggi had written about me. Nearly a week after we’d gone to the park, I returned, determined to dig up the container. I felt awful. I was betraying her trust. But I needed to do it. Because I needed to know.

When I reached the spot I immediately knew something was wrong because the mound had been disturbed. I clawed at the soil, but the container wasn’t there. Had Aggi dug it up because she’d changed her mind? Had she been afraid that I might do what she’d actually done herself? Had someone else dug it up? I didn’t know and I never found out. It was another of those questions that I never got to ask Aggi. Something inside me makes me think that she had second thoughts and just didn’t like the idea of our declaration being out there – because then I would’ve had evidence that I was as important to her as she was to me.

9.47 P.M.

We’d been talking for a long time. My lips were as close to the phone as humanly possible. A small but not insignificant pool of moisture had formed in the mouthpiece. I swear if I could’ve slipped into that pool and slid down the telephone line right into Kate’s flat I would’ve done. Gladly. To be with her, to be touched by her presence would’ve made my day. It would’ve made my decade. A huge wave of loneliness sprang up from nowhere, threatening to overwhelm me.
I think it’s time to go
.

‘I think it’s time to go,’ I said.

Kate was hurt. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘No, it’s not you,’ I said, desperately wanting her to believe me. ‘It’s not you at all. It’s me. I’ve enjoyed every second talking to you. You’re really . . .’ I couldn’t finish the sentence without saying something totally clichéd. ‘You’re really . . .’

‘I’m really . . .’

‘You’re really . . .’ I flicked through my lexicon of top quality compliments. Thanks to a world brimming over with cheesy films, cheesy books, cheesy music and cheesy TV – reducing the greatest human emotion to the lowest common denominator – they all sounded too jaded, too un-Kate, too, well, cheesy.

‘You’re special,’ I told her. ‘I think you’re special.’

She laughed.

‘And you’re wonderful. I think you’re wonderful, Will.’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Sleep tight.’

Back to reality.

The phone had never looked as lonely as it did when I ended that call. Lying there stiffly in its cradle, after it had had so much life flowing through it, it looked like it was dead rather than dormant. I picked it up and dialled Kate’s number to make sure it was still working but put it down before it had a chance to ring. I felt bleak and empty, as if it wasn’t quite worth the effort to take another breath. In these kinds of situations, I’m embarrassed to say, I often indulged myself in a little fantasy, believing myself to be a tortured poet rather than just a sad git with too much time on his hands. I once wrote fourteen volumes (i.e. fourteen W H Smith exercise books) of oh so very terrible poetry, entitled
To Aggi with Love
. I put them out for the bin men the week before I came to London as part of the first stage of my New Start policy, which I later abandoned when I realised it meant getting rid of my photo of Aggi too. Fortunately, the urge to conjure up a bit of blank verse for Vol. 15, was beaten to the finish line by the impulse to take a slash.

Before the house was turned into flats, my room had obviously been a large bedroom, part of which Mr Jamal had sectioned off to construct a plasterboard prison otherwise known as my bathroom, which was the reason it didn’t have any windows. So, in order to see what I was doing in the bathroom, I had to switch on a light, which automatically started an extractor fan. I wasn’t dead keen on stinky smells as such, but the extractor fan was the main cause of my flat-inspired frustration; it drove me up the wall. Every time it came on my heart sank. Something inside it was broken, so instead of a gentle hum like a far-off mosquito, I had to endure a sound similar to a tabby in a Moulinex liquidiser, and worse still, the fan continued to extract air – and my patience for that matter – for the next twenty minutes, even after I’d switched the light off. By Wednesday, I was so obsessed with never hearing it again that I attempted crapping in the dark. While it was nice to enjoy the silence, there was something disconcerting about sitting on the toilet, trousers and boxer shorts around ankles, in a darkened room. I once read a newspaper article that said the average rat was quite capable of swimming up a toilet U-bend from the sewer. The thought of coming cheek to cheek with a rodent depressed me so much that, in the end, I saved all bowel movements for the privacy and comfort of the school staff toilets which, I hasten to add, were virtually the same standard as the kids’, but with marginally better quality toilet paper.