My Legendary Girlfriend (25 page)

‘Anything else take your fancy?’

‘Oh, there’s a pair of black Katherine Hamnet trousers that he used to jokingly call his “pulling strides” and a limited edition Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt he adores that he got on a work trip to the States. Come to think of it, Angela was on that trip too. Bitch. What are we going to do to them?’

‘Head for the kitchen.’

‘I’m running through the hallway,’ said Alice, unaware that this was the longest she’d gone without crying since our call began. ‘Hang on, I’ve dropped the T-shirt. I’m going through the living room. I’ve just spotted his vinyl copy of the
Enter The Dragon
soundtrack. It cost him a fortune.’

‘Good, bring that along too.’
Enter The Dragon
was Lalo Schifrin at his very best. A loser like Bruce didn’t deserve it. ‘Right, are you in the kitchen yet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Find the biggest pots and pans you can. Throw in some water and bring Bruce’s stuff to the boil. Anything left over, toss it in the washing machine with some bleach.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Alice, genuinely elated.

‘Feel any better?’

‘I feel ecstatic!’

Next door’s dog began barking again. A man’s voice shouted, ‘Will you be quiet, Sultan?’ I laughed, because for a few seconds I thought he’d said Satan.

‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Alice.

It wasn’t worth explaining, so I didn’t. ‘Take the rest of his belongings and chuck them in a black bin bag and leave them by the front door.’

‘Front door? What about the rubbish chute?’

‘Nice one. Oh, and if you’ve got any paint throw that in too.’ Over the next hour we painted Bruce’s black Patrick Cox shoes in the white emulsion meant for the kitchen walls (Alice’s idea); cut the toes out of all his socks (Alice’s idea again); cut his face out of every photo in the flat and burnt them while I played the soundtrack to
South Pacific
down the phone (my idea); rubbed his toothbrush in the cat crap in the kitchen (my idea, obviously); and threw his leather briefcase, including all of the work-related documents within, off the bedroom balcony (a joint effort).

Alice let out an exultant yell once she had frisbeed Bruce’s briefcase out of the window. I listened to her fall to the floor and let out a heavy sigh of exhaustion and though I’d barely exerted myself I distinctly felt in need of rest and recuperation too.

‘Do you ever wish you’d done this to Aggi?’ said Alice, her voice muffled, as if she were lying face down on a sofa.

‘No.’ I immediately paused and reconsidered the question. ‘Well, yes. I suppose sometimes I do but then I still kind of hope that one day we’ll get back together. Thing is, Aggi always took her clothes very seriously. If I’d ever messed with them I guarantee she would’ve had a lobotomy rather than take me back.’

‘Do you really think you’ll still get back together?’

‘I dunno,’ I lied.

‘That’s it for me and Bruce. I never want to see him again.’

‘Do you mean that?’ I glanced over at Aggi’s photo on the wall next to me, resisting the temptation to see if the marker pen would wipe off. ‘Do you
really
mean that?’

‘Yeah, I do.’

‘Well, you’re a braver man than me.’

There was an awkward silence in which neither of us knew what to say next. It was Alice who spoke first.

‘Work. I’m fed up of it. I’ve been working so hard for so long and it’s not worth it. I’ve made a decision. I’m booking a flight – one of those three month round the world things – as soon as possible. Bruce and I used to talk about it all the time . . .’

She started to cry again.

I imagined not being able to talk to her for a quarter of a year. I imagined trying to cope with life without her. I imagined telling my television how much I hated my job. It was really too depressing for words. I stopped imagining.

‘You can’t go,’ I said only half joking. ‘It’s my birthday.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Alice perking up. ‘Happy birthday!’

I thanked her for the card and the presents and told her about the episode with the postman. She laughed and said that she didn’t trust the Royal Mail either.

‘I’m glad you liked the presents,’ she said warmly. ‘My favourite thing was the donkey. It reminds me of you.’

I laughed. ‘Cheers.’

‘I think it’s important that you’ve got this donkey,’ said Alice thoughtfully. ‘You’ve got a lot of love inside you, Will, and it’s got nowhere to go. Maybe you can love and care for this donkey. You’ve both been neglected.’

I eyed Sandy’s picture suspiciously. I was fond of my mange-ridden donkey but I wasn’t about to fall in love with it, at least not quite yet, though I appreciated the thought. I told Alice that she’d given me the best birthday I’d had in a long time and that without her I would be lost. She accepted my thanks silently and then said: ‘What are you going to do today? Anything special?’

‘Well,’ I said, wondering whether to tell the truth, construct a plausible lie or make a joke out of it. ‘I thought I’d throw myself a surprise party, the surprise being the fact that I won’t bother going.’ Alice laughed. ‘No, I think I’ll just be staying at home enjoying the day with my favourite people: Mel and Choly. Ho ho.’

‘Will, let me come to London,’ said Alice seriously. ‘Please. I can get the next train. We could go and celebrate your birthday in style, have a laugh and forget what a “load of old arse” life is.’

Of course I wanted to say yes, but we both knew it was a recipe for disaster: take two consenting adults, add a dash of vulnerability, a bottle of wine or two and a few ‘just hold me’s’ and before we knew it Plato would take the night off and leave us to deal with the disastrous consequences of two friends settling for second best.

‘Thanks for the offer but I’d rather not today,’ I said, strongly believing that I’d probably live to regret this decision. ‘Next weekend maybe, at least then we’d have more time together. If you came now and went Monday morning I’d be more depressed than if you hadn’t shown up at all.’

‘Okay,’ she said, obviously disappointed, but probably nowhere near as disappointed as I was. ‘Have a great day, won’t you, Will?’ Almost under her breath she added, ‘I love you.’

‘I love you, too,’ I replied.

There was a world of difference between Alice’s ‘I love you’ and Martina’s. Alice had only wanted to say ‘I love you’ because when you had someone to say ‘I love you’ to, you miss saying it when they’re gone. I knew that and Alice knew it too. It didn’t mean that anything special was going on here. It was just the sound of two desperate people being desperate.

Alice made ready to say good-bye. ‘Look, thanks for . . .’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘No problem. What else are friends for?’

11.57 A.M.

As I sat flicking backwards and forwards between a gardening programme, a repeat of
Grange Hill
and
The Waltons
, a speckled grey and white pigeon momentarily sat on my window sill, spread its wings and cooed before disappearing into the late morning sky. It had stopped raining, and the sun was shining brightly off the hundreds of raindrops on the window pane, making them sparkle like stars. I opened the window and got back into bed.

This was quite possibly the worst and best birthday I’d ever had. On the one hand, if I actually cared about birthdays this could have been the depressing episode which broke this particular dromedary’s back. After all, I was now twenty-six, still recovering from the fallout of a pregnancy scare, the focus of a mad woman’s unrequited love, in an awful excuse for a flat, in a less than salubrious area of London and all alone on the anniversary of the date I was born and the day I was dumped. But it was this fact – the fact that I was on my own – which I considered the silver lining in my otherwise dismal dark cloud. I’d spent my twenty-fifth birthday with Simon and Tammy in the Royal Oak. It had been awful. There I was immersed in my own private tragedy, deeply lamenting the passing of youth and my failure in life, while my companions’ sole topic of conversation was how Ray and Sophie, the couple they shared a house with, hadn’t bought a communal toilet roll for over a fortnight.

The phone rang.

My brain was alert to the call a split second after it had rung, but my body wasn’t interested in speedy responses. The distance between myself and the phone, which had been abandoned under a pile of clothes near the wardrobe, seemed so utterly overwhelming that I never thought I’d make it. In fact, my movement was so sloth-like that the answering machine had turned on before I even got there.

‘Hi, you’re through to me,’ said my machine, in its flat East Midlands accent. ‘Leave whatever you want after the beep.’

It beeped accordingly.

‘Hi, Will,’ said Kate’s voice. ‘I was just phoning for a chat really. I’ll probably try you later.’

I ceased all effort to get to the phone, and lay on my stomach on the carpet, my legs resting uncomfortably against the side of the bed.
Should I pick up the phone?
I wondered.
If I answer I’ll have to talk to her and as much as I like her, I’m not sure I want to communicate with the world today. Today – my birthday. Today – the third anniversary of my being dumped. Today – today. I still like Kate, I just need a breather. I can always phone her later. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll call later.

I picked up the phone and apologised. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘I thought you weren’t in for a minute,’ said Kate. ‘That would have really spoilt my Sunday.’

‘Well, we can’t have your Sunday spoilt, can we?’ I said, wondering if I’d ever learn to control my guilt. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m okay, I suppose,’ she sighed. ‘After I got off the phone with you last night I did my washing down at the launderette. I was going to stay in like I told you, but then Paula and a bunch of her mates persuaded me into town for a drink. I ended up going to a club and then we finished up the night back here with four bottles of Martini, watching the end of
An Officer and a Gentleman
. Richard Gere can whisk me away on his motorcycle any time he wants.’

I attempted to laugh, but it came out halfway between a snort of derision and a clearing of the throat – I was already regretting picking up the phone. Kate wasn’t cheering me up, she was depressing me beyond belief. I should have listened to my instincts. I wasn’t feeling very talkative, and recognising this mood from previous encounters, I soon realised that unless this conversation was brought to an end quickly, I’d become more obnoxious than usual, which could only lead to trouble.

‘What did you do last night?’ asked Kate.

‘Oh nothing much.’ I licked my lips and scratched my head. ‘A couple of mates came over and we went for a drink in the West End. Bar Rumba. Do you know it?’ She said she did. ‘It was good. I ended up with some girl called Annabel.’

‘I take it she’s not with you now,’ said Kate. ‘What was she like?’

I tried to detect any trace of emotion – there wasn’t even the palest shade of jealousy.

‘How do you know she’s not still here?’ I asked.

‘The flat’s not really big enough for you to refer to a woman you’ve just slept with as “some girl called Annabel” is it?’ said Kate. ‘I used to live there, remember?’

I laughed. ‘No, she went early this morning.’

I expected Kate to put the phone down.

‘I said, what was she like?’ repeated Kate not quite aggressively, but not all that far off either.

I answered her question. ‘Not really my type. She was a bit stupid. I asked her who was her favourite out of
Starsky and Hutch
and she said, Hutch, when everybody knows that Starsky was far cooler because he had a better car, better jumpers and, anyway, Hutch was a tosser.’

‘I think you’re the one being a tosser here, Will.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Unequivocally.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Incontrovertibly.’

‘So what do we do now?’ I asked.

‘I put down the phone,’ she replied resolutely. ‘And we never speak again.’

‘Good-bye then.’

‘Have a nice life.’

She slammed the phone down.

I got out of bed and closed the window. The sun had stopped shining, and next door’s dog was going berserk at a squirrel in a tree. I thought about getting dressed or eating breakfast, anything apart from the subject of Kate and what an idiot I’d been. I got back into bed and pulled the duvet over my head.

On the surface, the ambiguity of our peculiar relationship might have allowed my conscience to remain untroubled, but that wasn’t to be. Just because what was happening between us didn’t have a name it didn’t mean that it could be ignored. My lies were bound to have hurt Kate, because I knew that had they been said to me I would have been devastated. So instead of nurturing our blossoming relationship, I’d simply rounded up all the worst clichés of my sex and thrown them in her face. I wanted Kate’s forgiveness, but more than that, I wanted her back as a friend. I had her phone number. I’d scribbled it on the back cover of one of my students’ exercise book, Liam Fennel’s, to be exact, during our mammoth conversation on death. I remember feeling at the time that her offering it to me represented a turning point: she was letting me in, making me part of her life; showing she trusted me in the only way she could. It was an action as intimate as any kiss.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Kate, it’s me,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m sorry. Look, I’m really sorry. Please don’t put down the phone.’

‘Why not?’ said Kate angrily. ‘You don’t want to talk to me, do you? What do you want?’

‘I want things to be like they were,’ I said. ‘Can we do that?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Because.’

I understood her ‘because’ and she knew that I knew I understood it too. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I lied. I lied about going to the West End last night. I lied about having friends to go to the West End with last night. And I lied about meeting a girl last night. I went to a local pub on my own. I got depressed and drunk (in that order), came home, made an abusive call to my former best mate and fell asleep.’ I paused. ‘I just wanted you to know.’