My Legendary Girlfriend Read online

  When the day of our second date finally arrived, we met outside a record shop, Selectadisc, as arranged. The plan, such as it was, revolved around spending the afternoon in the square outside the town hall feeding the pigeons (her idea). Only it didn’t happen like that. The first thing she did on seeing me was to wrap her arms around me tightly and kiss me so fervently that I literally went weak at the knees. I’d never felt passion like it before. And this was the best bit: she looked straight into my eyes and asked me if she was my girlfriend. I said, ‘Yes, you are my Legendary Girlfriend.’

  The end of everything we had, everything we were and everything I’d hoped we’d be, also arrived with a kiss, one which I found myself reliving two or three times a day years later. It was my birthday and I’d only been back in Nottingham for a couple of weeks, while Aggi had been there all summer since graduating and was waitressing in a restaurant in town. We’d arranged to meet outside Shoe Express in Broad Marsh Shopping Centre. Aggi had got there before me, which should’ve set alarm bells ringing as she was frequently punctual but never early. She was empty-handed but the significance of this didn’t occur to me until much later.

  We had a glorious afternoon celebrating my twenty-third – maybe a a little too glorious – wandering in and out of stores pretending to be a recently married couple furnishing our love nest. The conversation and humour made me feel alive, really alive. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a job, future or money – I felt at peace with the world. I was happy.

  Driving home I sat next to Aggi in her mum’s Fiat Uno as we made our way through the city centre. Ten minutes before we should’ve been at her mum’s house she pulled into Rilstone Road, a cul-de-sac near Crestfield Park, and stopped the car. Undoing her seat-belt, she turned her body towards mine and kissed me. There was no mistaking it – it was a ‘good-bye’ kiss.

  It was a ‘this isn’t working’ kiss.

  It was a ‘this is hurting me more than it’s hurting you’ kiss.

  All I could think was: ‘This is The Last Kiss.’

  She said that for a long time she’d felt that I wanted more from her than she had to give.

  She said I needed someone who could guarantee to be around forever.

  She said that, while she did love me, she didn’t think that was enough any more.

  She said that she was twenty-one and I was twenty-three and that we should both be living our lives to the full but instead we’d got stuck in a rut.

  She said that for a long time she’d had the feeling that we weren’t going anywhere.

  I said nothing.

  At 5.15 p.m. I’d been a perfectly happy young man with everything to look forward to. By 5.27 p.m. my life was over. It took twelve minutes to dismantle three years of love.

  I got out of the car, slamming the door behind me, walked to the nearest cashpoint, took out £50 and headed for the Royal Oak. There, despite my embarrassingly low threshold for alcohol, I drank three double Jack Daniels, a Malibu and Coke (out of curiosity) and a double gin and tonic (because it was the first drink I had ever bought Aggi).

  On a whim, I got a taxi back into town and continued drinking, despite throwing up twice. Around midnight I ended up in a club called Toots, with a group of people whom I vaguely knew. Much of what then happened is hazy, although I do recall stealing at least three strangers’ pints. Some weeks later, while bruising peaches in Tesco’s, I was pounced upon by a fat, angry Irish girl who filled in the rest of the details. She claimed to have been at the club that night and said that I’d danced with her, shirt unbuttoned to the waist, to Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. According to her version of events, half an hour later she discovered me in a stall in the Ladies’, lying curled at the side of a toilet bowl, crying desperately. My good Samaritan, worried that an earlier refusal to kiss me had had this effect, put me in the back of a taxi, but not before I’d thrown up over her shirt and told her that I loved her.

  7.45 P.M.

  It’s a soul-destroyingly depressing fact that when you live in a place on your own, nothing moves. When I’d left the flat on Friday morning it had resembled Dresden after a flying visit from the RAF. Suitcases lay open, their contents spilled out across the floor. Cardboard boxes full of junk occupied valuable floor space. Soiled underwear lay abandoned in the oddest of places – the window sill, on top of the wardrobe, underneath the phone – while dirty crockery bred rapidly all around. And now, some twelve hours later, things were still pretty much the same. Maybe the air was a little staler or the dust on the TV a bit deeper, but on the whole nothing had changed. Back home in Nottingham, however, if I left my room – sometimes for as little as an hour – something always changed. Usually it was because my mother had kidnapped the dirty clothes off the floor, or sometimes because of my kid brother’s general snooping; once, even my Gran got in on the act – playing detective. Inspired by a report on Young People and Drugs on This Morning with Richard and Judy, Gran had decided my sleeping in late and general lack of motivation was a result of drug abuse. In search of hard evidence she set about my room, but the nearest she got to crack was a yellow and blue tin that said Myoxil, and even then she still insisted on taking it to Boots to check it really was athlete’s foot powder.

  Dumping my bag on the sofa, I contemplated cleaning the flat. It was the sort of idea – along with ironing, visits to the launderette and letters to friends whom I hadn’t seen since university – which I was inclined to conjure up when I had nothing better to do. The idea, however, was taken no further because I spotted a novel in one of the boxes which I’d given up on months ago, and decided that now was as good a time as any to finish what I’d started. I was about to pull out the sofa-bed – in order to delude myself that I was going to recline and read, rather than recline and sleep – when I decided that I might be hungry. There was nothing that my mother, or for that matter a dietician, would’ve construed as ‘proper food’ in the kitchen, but I lit up a cigarette from the emergency pack stashed in my suitcase to stave off immediate hunger pangs, and checked out the fridge for the sheer hell of it.

  The yellowing refrigerator in the corner of the kitchen gurgling vociferously, as if suffering from a heavy bout of indigestion was, at a guess, probably a decade older than myself, as was virtually everything in the flat. The cooker, wardrobes, sofa-bed, carpet – the rigours of age had consumed them all to such an extent that it had rendered them useless unless you had the know-how. For instance, to get a ring on the cooker to work, the control knob had to be turned on and off twice; to open the wardrobe door, pressure had to be applied to the top right-hand corner. Had I noticed all that was wrong when I first saw the flat, I wouldn’t have taken it, but at the time getting a roof over my head had seemed more important than checking wardrobe doors, and my landlord, Mr F. Jamal (at least that was the name I wrote on the rent cheques) had known this. His skills in interior design were so shoddy that he must have graduated with honours from the Rachman school of landlords. Every surface in the flat had been painted in cheap cheerless white emulsion some time in the last fifty years, which the passing of time and countless smokers had managed to downgrade to a pale orangey-brown. The only furniture in the room was a sofa-bed in fawn velvety material pitted haphazardly with cigarette burns; a tile-surfaced coffee table against the far wall which had the TV perched on it; and two small white Formica wardrobes along the wall opposite the window. To try and cheer the place up – an impossibly futile task – I had stuck my favourite photo of Aggi on the wall near the sofa-bed and an Audrey Hepburn poster on the wall in the bathroom.

  I’d spent two solid weeks searching for accommodation. They were the second most depressing weeks of my life, requiring me to get the 07.15 National Express coach from Nottingham to London four times, in order to traipse around the slum districts of the capital. In this time I learned the two laws of looking for accommodation in London:

  Never trust a landlord while he’s still breathing.

  The only good landlords are four de
ad landlords.

  The only place I saw, could afford and which didn’t have drug dealers in the vicinity was Flat 3, 64 Cumbria Avenue

  – aka – N6. A luxurious self-contained studio flat with own kitchenette, bathroom/shower

  – aka – a glorified studio flat, minus the glory, on the second floor of a decrepit Edwardian house in crappy Archway.

  To be truthful, Mr F. Jamal hadn’t advertised my abode in Loot or any other free ad newspaper. He hadn’t needed to. He had a kind of word of mouth thing going amongst people in the know in the lower end of the accommodation food chain, so much so that his many properties were consistently snapped up within seconds of becoming available. I, however, became aware of his legendary status not by being in the know – but through Tammy, my friend Simon’s girlfriend. She’d told him about Mr F. Jamal after I’d been moaning to Simon about the difficulty I was having. I’d looked at nine places, all complete and utter toilets ‘five minutes’ from the tube, the worst of which was a place in Kentish Town. The landlord arrived half an hour late for our appointment, by which time five other people had turned up to view the place he’d promised me first refusal on. It wasn’t anything to shout about, just a double room with a shared toilet and kitchen. He told the assembled crowd that the man living there had changed his mind and wanted to stay, but he was going to put an extra bed in the room and did anyone want it. At this point I’d walked off in disgust but three of my fellow house-hunters were desperate enough to stay behind. Tammy gave Simon Mr F. Jamal’s phone number. One call later and I was signing the lease. I had thought about thanking her for her effort, but as Tammy and I couldn’t stand each other I hadn’t bothered. I’d assumed her assistance was some kind of perverse tactic to get one over on me.

  I opened the fridge door and peered in. The light didn’t come on. I suspected it probably hadn’t done so since the Apollo Moon landings. Peering amongst the abandoned items within: marmalade, margarine, tomato ketchup, a five-day-old can of beans and an onion – I spied a jar of olives and smiled heartily to myself.

  Lying on the sofa in the main room, I lanced an olive while attempting to write my name on the cushion with my index finger – all the down strokes followed the flow of the material so half of it was missing. Time flowed by. I ate another olive and stared at the ceiling. More time flowed by. I ate another olive and tried to read my book. Yet more time flowed by. I ate another olive and let the brine drip off the end of the fork onto my chin and dribble down to my neck. At this point I decided it was time for action. I considered all the things that needed doing and chose the least painful: a begging letter to the bank. On a page of notepaper using a green Berol marker pen I’d stolen from school, I wrote:

  Dear student banking advisor,

  Having recently qualified from a teacher training course I’m now ready, at the age of twenty-five (nearly twenty-six) to take my place as a fully functioning member of society. I have a job but am living in London, and it is so ridiculously expensive to live here that I’m not sure why I bother. To this end please would you extend my already extended overdraft a bit more, because otherwise I may faint from starvation in front of a class of fourteen-year-olds.

  Yours forever,

  William Kelly

  I chuckled aloud. I was just about to add ‘PS and don’t think that I’ve forgotten that you stitched me up when I needed you most’, when I noticed the red light of the answering machine blinking away.

  Next to the Walkman, I considered the answering machine to be one of man’s truly great achievements. It allowed you to keep abreast of the latest developments in your social life and screen calls. Brilliant. My love for this particular piece of technology was inspired by a message Aggi left on my Aunt Susan’s when I was house-sitting for her in Primrose Hill during the summer vacation of my second year. At the time, Aunt Susan lived in London, where she was beauty editor on Woman’s Realm or some other similar magazine that had knitting patterns.

  Aunt Susan, it must be said, was more unlike my mother than I thought possible for people who had shared the same womb. Twelve years younger than my mother – almost a generation apart – she had more in common with me. She hated work, was one of the first in her road to have cable television, and adored the third series of Blackadder. She used to tell me that she’d never get married because then she’d have to grow up. The summer after I came to house-sit, however, she got hitched, had my cousin Georgia, gave up journalism and moved back to Nottingham. On the occasion in question, she’d gone on holiday with Uncle-Bill-to-be, and said I could do whatever I wanted with the house as long as the police weren’t involved. Fortunately for her all I did was watch videos, eat crisp sandwiches and walk her dog, Seabohm – hardly activities worthy of the scrutiny of the local constabulary. I’d been out walking the dog on this particular day, when I returned to the house to discover there was a message for me from Aggi:

  You’re not in! This is not how it was supposed to be. All I wanted to say was that I dreamt about you last night. We were in a field and the soundtrack to ‘Singin’ in The Rain’ was playing in the background. We lay on our backs just staring at the moon. I want you to know I won’t stop loving you. I promise you, I won’t.

  I listened to it over and over again. I wanted to keep it forever but it was sandwiched between a call from a PR called Madeline inviting Aunt Susan to the launch of a new range of Boots nail varnishes, and one from my mother checking to see if I was eating properly. When my aunt heard Aggi’s message she said, and I remember this quite clearly: ‘That sounds like Ms Right to me.’ When I got back to Nottingham, I asked Aggi about the message but she refused to discuss it. That was just her way.

  I played the messages back:

  Venus calling Mars. Come in, Mars! Why are men so bloody competitive? Discuss. Hi, Will, Alice here. If you have an answer to this eternal conundrum, or indeed just fancy a chat with your best friend in the whole wide world – call me now!

  Er, hi. This is Kate Freemans here. [Voice falters] I used to live in your flat. [Starts crying] I was just wondering if there was any mail for me. [Attempts to stop crying, instead snuffles loudly] The temp agency I was working for posted my cheque to the wrong address. I’ll try and ring later. [Begins crying again] Thanks.

  Listen, I’ve got something really important to tell you. Call me as soon as you can. It’s urgent. Really urgent . . . oh, it’s Simon by the way.

  Will, it’s Martina. I don’t know why I’m leaving this message, I think your machine is broken, this is the third one I’ve left this week. Assuming that you’ve got it fixed, hello for the first time since Saturday night! Er, ring me, please. We need to talk. Bye.

  Hello. This is Kate Freemans again. I’m just ringing to say sorry about my message. Just ignore it, okay? I’m really sorry.

  My first thoughts were about the girl who used to live in my flat. It felt weird hearing a stranger’s message on my answering machine, let alone one in which she was crying. As she hadn’t left a number there was little I could do bar sit and wonder why my answering machine had reduced her to tears. Next up, I thought about Martina, even though I didn’t want to. There was no way on earth I was going to return her call because she, as far as I was concerned, was a first rate nutter of the Fatal Attraction variety and I had no intention of playing Michael Douglas to her Glenn Close in her sordid little fantasy. I checked my watch. It was too late to catch Simon now, as I knew for a fact that his band would be on stage at the Royal Oak. Anyway, the message was so typically Simon – overblown and melodramatic – that it completely failed to pique even an iota of interest. And so by process of elimination, Alice’s was the only message left worth returning, qualifying on the grounds that it was the only one that made me feel better.

  8.47 P.M.

  I’d first met Alice on my sixteenth birthday. I’d been standing in the Royal Oak, discussing the finer points of the British soap opera compared to its weaker, less attractive Australian cousin, with two attractive fourteen-ye
ar-old girls who had taken it upon themselves to follow Simon’s first band, Reverb. The girls had got it into their heads that Simon was good-looking and interesting, and I was busily trying to persuade them that I was a far better option, when I felt myself slipping away from the conversation. While my body gibbered away on terra firma, the important bit that made all the decisions focused its attention on a girl who looked like the French foreign exchange student of my dreams – dark-red hennaed hair, a beguiling smile and beautifully tanned skin – standing alone at the end of the bar observing Reverb’s exceptionally abysmal cover of The Buzzcocks’ Ever Fallen In Love. My brain alerted my body to its new discovery and both made their excuses to their captive teenage audience.

  Chatting up girls had never been one of my strong points. Some people had that certain something needed not to look like a pillock while doing it. Simon, for instance, had it in abundance. I, however, didn’t. On most occasions I would’ve resigned myself to this fact, content to gaze longingly at her rather than take up my desires and run, but this time was different. In a matter of half an hour I was convinced that this girl was the person I’d been looking for all my life – there was no way I was going to give up without trying.

  At the end of the gig I approached her, using Reverb’s performance to open up the conversation. She told me she thought they were terrible but the singer was quite cute – I was devastated. Right on cue, Simon, guitar in hand, strode across the room and introduced himself. ‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked me ‘casually’. I told him I didn’t know and she smiled, offered her hand to him and introduced herself: ‘My name’s Alice. Alice Chabrol.’ And that was that. I wasn’t so much edged out as completely ignored. Admittedly I did receive compensation by way of a birthday kiss, 2.2 seconds of red-lipped perfection pressed against my cheek with the delicate touch of an angel’s wing.