My Legendary Girlfriend Page 4

  Simon and Alice went out for a total of two weeks before she came to her senses and realised that he could never be as interested in anyone as he was in himself. ‘I hadn’t thought it was possible,’ she’d told me over coffee the day after she’d dumped him. ‘Everything he says is me me me.’ Alice and I, however, became best friends. Over the following years I fell in love with her several times but never felt compelled to tell her, there was no reason to – she never seemed the slightest bit interested in being anything more than friends. If I’d seen the faintest glimmer of hope I would’ve gone for it, but faced with Alice’s lack of interest and the memory of her choosing Simon over me I gave up, thus cultivating the following theory:

  Kelly’s First Law of Relationships:

  No woman who finds Simon attractive will ever be interested in me.

  As if to prove this as fact, when Alice went to university at Oxford she fell for Bruce (a surrogate Simon if ever I saw one), a Maths postgraduate who bore more than a passing resemblance to Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. With the exception of his total expertise in every field known to impress man, his most annoying trait was his ability to make me feel like a eunuch without even trying. He wasn’t so much a man as a hyper-man, masculinity dripping from his every pore. He worked out three times a week. He knew what an exhaust manifold was. He owned an autographed photograph of Bruce Lee. Honestly, even Sean Connery would’ve felt like a bit of a girl around Bruce.

  Fortunately my blossoming inferiority complex began to fade once I came to see Bruce as my best friend’s boyfriend instead of six feet four inches of tosspot, and Alice as my best friend rather than the woman I most wanted to see naked. I adapted so well to my new role that my earlier mini-infatuations – which at the time had seemed more important than life itself – now felt like boyish crushes from a bygone age. I still didn’t like Bruce, but it was no longer personal. When you have a friend of Alice’s calibre, you come to realise there’s no way anyone in ownership of a penis will ever be worthy of her.

  After Alice got a job as marketing manager for British Telecom, she and Bruce moved to Bristol and led the kind of life that involved expensive restaurants, shopping trips to Bond Street and weekend breaks in Prague. I considered being jealous of her quite a few times but I couldn’t. Though she earned more in an hour than I used to get in my entire fortnight’s Giro, she was still the same person inside: kind, patient and understanding. As a rule, I disapproved of successful people, especially those of my generation, but I couldn’t resent her. Success not only suited her, it appeared to be made for her.

  ‘Hello?’ said Alice.

  ‘It’s me,’ I replied.

  ‘Will! How are you?’ she said, genuinely excited. ‘How’s the job?’

  ‘Oh it’s crap. Kind of just what I expected only worse.’ I felt a yawn rise up from deep inside me. I attempted to stifle it by gritting my teeth. ‘Much worse.’

  ‘Is that possible? I thought your motto was “Think of the worst thing possible and multiply it by ten”.’

  ‘Obviously I didn’t think things could be worse than even I could possibly imagine them,’ I replied, reflecting on how, since Aggi, it had become my personal philosophy to look on the dark, half-empty, who’s-nicked-my-silver-lining side of Life.

  ‘It’s horrible,’ I said, noticing that the photo of Aggi had fallen down. ‘A total nightmare. I can’t coast or take it easy for a second, otherwise they’ll skin me alive. I can’t show any weakness. The kids, they can smell weakness from a mile off. Once they catch a whiff it sends them wild. They’re like a pack of hyenas pouncing on a wounded antelope. Sarah, another newly-qualified teacher, broke down in tears in front of a class on Thursday.’ I fiddled with the Blu-tac on Aggi’s photo and put it back up. ‘I give her another week before she’s looking at other career options.’

  Alice laughed.

  ‘It’s not funny, you know.’

  ‘No, of course it’s not funny.’

  It wasn’t the least bit amusing because I’d had some bitter experiences of my own during the past week. On Monday three year-eleven boys had walked out of my class; Wednesday I’d returned to the staff room to discover that one of the little gits had spat a huge ‘greenie’ on the back of my jacket; and Thursday I’d left my bottom year-eleven set’s English books back at the flat.

  ‘It can be like that,’ said Alice adopting a tone of voice reminiscent of a reassuring rub on the small of the back.

  I wasn’t comforted. I wasn’t happy. I was fed up. And Alice would never understand this. She had a ‘career’, whereas I had a ‘job’ and that was the difference between us. ‘Careers’ are about personal challenges, whereas ‘jobs’ are about survival. Granted, Alice’s chosen occupation might have been stressful at times, but her targets were realistic and she had the grand resources of a multi-national at her disposal. As a teacher, I had to deal with ludicrously ambitious targets, zero resources, school inspections and sociopaths who thought spitting on a teacher’s back was right up there with Monty Python’s parrot sketch.

  ‘How do you do it?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘How do I do what?’

  ‘You know,’ I said, searching for the right word. ‘That . . . work stuff. How do you cope with it all?’

  ‘Experience, Will, experience,’ said Alice warmly. ‘I don’t want to seem patronising but come on, Will, you put a lot of this pressure on yourself by expecting results too fast. I’ve been working four years now, but this is the first job you’ve ever had.’

  Alice, to be frank, was being more than a bit of a cheeky cow, as she was well aware that I’d spent an entire summer working in the Royal Oak. I knew what hard work was: I’d shifted barrels of beer, brought up huge crates of mixers from the cellar and worked twelve-hour shifts, all of which I reminded her.

  ‘It wasn’t the whole summer,’ said Alice, sniggering. ‘It was four weeks, and you got sacked for continually being late, if I remember correctly.’

  She was right, not just about my employment history but about my attitude to work. I wanted everything to be perfect straight away, because the thought of it taking time and patience to learn how to control these animals made me feel sick.

  During the course of this part of the conversation I’d become aware that something about Aggi’s picture didn’t look right. It was only as Alice told me some gossip about a mutual acquaintance who had been caught shoplifting, that I realised the photo was sloping a little to the right. I took it down to readjust it but creased it in the process. This was my favourite picture of her – taken before she’d had her bob; her long ringlets of auburn hair, which at times overwhelmed the delicate features of her face, were tied back leaving her beautiful green eyes, kissable lips and delicate nose on full display. She was leaning against a wall outside the university library, reading The Beauty Myth. She looked perfect.

  My feet began to itch. I took off my sock and gave my toes a rub.

  ‘Do you think you’ll stick it out?’ asked Alice. ‘I mean, you sound pretty stressed out.’

  I told her I didn’t know and explained the crux of my problem – teaching in the training year was nothing like teaching was now. This was For Real. The kids were depending on me to help them pass their exams. The ramifications of my being a crap teacher were terrifyingly immense.

  ‘Imagine thirty kids fail their English GCSE because of me – thirty kids who will get a rubbish job or no job at all sucked into the poverty trap. Five years later, half of them will have kids and be living off social security. Multiply that by a couple more years of me teaching, and before you know it I’ll be responsible for increasing unemployment in the UK more than any government, Conservative or Labour, since the war.’

  ‘You’re overreacting,’ said Alice. ‘You’ve got to face facts, Will. You’re a grown-up. Grown-ups have responsibilities.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I said, while pulling off my other sock and rubbing between the toes on my now naked foot. ‘These kids won’t
know anything unless I teach it to them. What if I’m a crap teacher?’

  I sensed Alice was having problems seeing my perspective. Too tired to continue making my point, I changed discussion topics. Over the next half hour – in which time I’d put my socks back on but taken my trousers off and draped the duvet around me – Alice told me how she was working out of the Peterborough office for a month and living in a Novotel in the city centre because of a project she was overseeing. The only time I’d ever been to a hotel was when Aggi and I had saved fourteen coupons from the Daily Telegraph, which had got us a half price night at the Nottingham Holiday Inn. We stole the shampoos, shower caps and even the miniature kettle before vacating the room the next day. It had been brilliant. I was about to remark how cool it must be to live in a hotel at someone else’s expense when it occurred to me that Alice probably saw things a bit differently.

  ‘What about Bruce?’ I asked, remembering the times I’d really missed Aggi, like when she went on holiday to Austria for two weeks with her mum, or when she had her wisdom teeth out and had to stay in hospital on my twenty-first birthday. Both times I’d missed her so much I literally thought I’d die. ‘Isn’t he missing you?’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ she said sadly. ‘At least I think he is. That’s what my message on your machine was about. I think he feels threatened by the fact that things are going so well at work for me at the moment. He’s been throwing himself into his work as if he’s got something to prove to me – I don’t know – that he’s the main bread winner. As if I cared! He’s been working late most nights, even some weekends. Once this project is over I’m going to ask for a transfer to a less frantic department. Maybe then he won’t feel the need to compete and we can just be happy.’

  I got the impression that Alice was unsettled for the rest of our conversation – I wished I hadn’t reminded her of Bruce’s absence. Hiding her sadness under the guise of a merry gossip she told me about the gym she’d joined and how her friend at work, Tina, was having an affair with her supervisor, and how she and Bruce were planning to go to New York over Christmas.

  Before she finished the call she brought up the subject of my birthday.

  ‘I know you hate birthdays, Will.’

  ‘And Walkers prawn cocktail crisps . . .’

  ‘But I . . .’

  ‘And totalitarian governments . . .’

  ‘. . . really wanted to . . .’

  ‘And sticky-outty belly buttons . . .’

  ‘. . . do something . . .’

  ‘And Alfred Hitchcock films.’

  ‘. . . special . . .’

  I ran out of things to hate.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said Alice.

  I tutted softly and told her I didn’t. She refused to elaborate on what ‘something special’ would entail, said good-bye, and promised to call me on my birthday. As I replaced the phone I whispered a small prayer of thanks to whoever was responsible for introducing this angel into my life.

  10.01 P.M.

  Peak time Friday night. Office workers, labourers, cleaners, architects and all, wash themselves free of the fetid stench of Work. This was the moment they were finally allowed to forget they were office workers, labourers, cleaners, architects or whatever, and remember, perhaps for the first time in five days, that first and foremost, they were people.

  All week I’d been a Teacher. But what I wanted now was to be a Human Being.

  I should’ve been out there with the office workers, labourers, cleaners and architects.

  I should’ve been getting my round in.

  I should’ve been making jokes about my boss.

  I should’ve been onto my sixth bottle of Molson Dry.

  I should’ve been dancing somewhere.

  I should’ve been out on the pull.

  But I wasn’t. . .

  While everyone in the Western hemisphere was out having a great time, I was in having a crap time. This of course explained why none of the second-division friends in my sodding address book – people whom I only ever contacted when really, really desperate – were in. Of the six calls made I got one no answer, two requests to enter into dialogue with answering machines and for the rest, I got the unobtainable tone. I refused to leave any messages on the grounds that there was no way I was letting anyone – least of all friends I rarely spoke to – know I was in on a Friday night and desperate for their company, while they were out starting their weekends with a bang.

  I looked at my watch and wondered optimistically if it was telling the wrong time. I called the speaking clock:

  At the third stroke it will be Ten-o-six-and-fifty-seconds.

  Not altogether dissimilar to the time on my watch.

  At moments like this, when loneliness seemed like my only friend, the only place safe to hide from the world at large was under the sheets. It was time to get out the sofa-bed.

  The sofa-bed was pretty diabolical as a sofa and not that much better as a bed; the fact that these two nouns were joined together by a single hyphen failed to make the object they described any more comfortable than Dralon-covered paving stones. I threw its two cushions to the floor to reveal the depressing sight of the bed’s underside. It always required more strength than I thought I had to pull the bed frame out. I took a deep breath and pulled. It slowly creaked into action, unfolding stubbornly.

  Leaving my socks and shirt on, and pulling the duvet off the floor, I lay on the bed and tried desperately to forget the cold and the reason I’d retired there in the first place. The need to hear another human voice became paramount in my mind.

  I turned on the radio on my hi-fi, hoping that The Barbara White Show would be on. I’d been listening to her show on Central FM all week. Barbara White was the ‘larger-than-life’ host of a phone-in show where assorted nutters, losers, weirdos and plain helpless cases called in with their problems. Barbara – a woman about as qualified to advise as I was to teach – listened, made the appropriate sympathetic noises and then came up with answers so facile she honestly had to be heard to be believed. The fact that she was American was probably the only reason she got away with giving such screamingly obvious advice.

  Barbara was talking to Peter, a student from Newcastle-under-Lyme, who had just finished his A levels and had got into his local university to study Engineering. He wasn’t happy, though. His girlfriend of seven months was going to university in Aberdeen and he was worried that the huge distance would drive a wedge between them.

  It occurred to me as I listened to his pitiful story that Peter was being naive in the extreme. He’d been in a relationship for less time than it takes to make a baby and here he was wanting to make commitments. If I’d been his age I would have been over the moon at the prospect of hitting university as a single man – able to do what I want, when I want, with thousands of like-minded individuals who also think they’ve just invented sex, alcohol and staying up past 2.00 a.m.; people who’d want to party, party, party ’til they were sick and then party some more. Peter was guaranteed to have three years more exciting than my next ten.

  I was so entrenched in my bitter attack against Barbara’s caller I managed to miss most of her solution. All I heard her ask was, ‘Do you love this girl?’ and he replied he didn’t know – he thought he did but probably wouldn’t be sure until it was too late. As Barbara announced she was going to a commercial break, the phone rang.

  I knew it wouldn’t be Simon – his gig didn’t finish until eleven; it was too late for either of my parents; I’d just spoken to Alice and as far as I knew no one else had my number. The odds were, of course, that it was Martina, because my life was like that: too much of what I didn’t want and a permanent drought of the things my heart desired most. I hoped with all my strength that it wasn’t Martina, because as well as not feeling up to listening to her complain about how terrible her life was, I especially didn’t want to dump her, at least not right now.

  Ring!

  Please don’t let it be Martina.


  Ring!

  Please don’t let it be Martina.

  Ring!

  Please.

  Ring!

  Please.

  Ring!

  Please. Please. Please.

  Ring!

  Please. Please. Please. Please!

  I answered the phone.

  ‘Hello?’ I held my breath and waited for the first sounds of Martina’s placid yet disturbing voice.

  ‘Hello,’ said the female voice on the other end of the phone, which clearly wasn’t Martina’s. There was a school-girlish enthusiasm about it that would’ve been refreshing had it not been me she was talking to. Whoever this person is, I thought, this call is going to disappoint her.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I asked politely.

  ‘You can indeed,’ she replied. ‘I’m sorry to call so late but I thought if you’re anything like me it’s better to have a call late at night rather than early in the morning. My mum tries to ring me at seven in the morning sometimes just to tell me I’ve got a letter from the bank. Mind you, I’m never in at that time these days because I’m on my way to work, but if someone rang me on say, my day off, then boy, would they be in big trouble.’

  She was rambling. The more she rambled the more adorable she sounded.

  ‘I was wondering,’ she continued, ‘whether you could help me. I used to live in your flat up until a week ago . . .’ She paused as if reaching the punch-line. I suddenly recognised her voice. She was Crying Girl from my answering machine. ‘I was wondering . . . has there been any post for me? I’m expecting a cheque to arrive. I was doing a bit of casual office work for a temp agency and they’ve sent my cheque to my old address, even though I’d told them a million times that I was moving to Brighton.’