My Legendary Girlfriend (3 page)

On top of my duvet lay a solitary brown manila envelope. Whenever post arrived addressed to me my dad would leave it there before going to work. I think he hoped the excitement of seeing it there would somehow galvanise me into action. It never did. Nothing could. At the time, I didn’t receive many letters because I was a hopeless correspondent. It wasn’t so much that I never wrote letters, I did frequently, I just never posted them. At any one time there were dozens of sheets of notepaper littered around my room with barely legible ‘Dear so and so’ scrawled across them. With nothing happening in my life I had very little to say beyond ‘How are you?’ and to have documented even the smallest slice of my mundane lifestyle (‘Today I got up, and had Frosties for breakfast . . .’) would have left me too depressed for words.

I was well aware of the contents of the envelope on my bed before I even opened it, as the day in question was Significant Wednesday, the bi-weekly religious festival that heralded my salvation – my Giro. My parents were, to say the least, not the happiest of bunnies when I, their first born, returned to the family nest to languish on the dole. Four years earlier they’d driven me – along with a suitcase, hi-fi, box of tapes and a
Betty Blue
poster – off to Manchester University, expecting me to gain a first-rate education, an ounce or two of common sense and a direction in life. ‘We don’t mind what you do, son, as long as you do it to the best of your ability,’ they’d said, not bothering to hide the extreme disappointment in their collective voices when I announced that I intended to study English and Film Studies. ‘Whatever for?’ asked the two-bodied, one-headed guardians of my soul. Neither were they impressed with my explanation which basically boiled down to the fact that I liked reading books and I liked watching films.

Three years later, I concluded my journey on the educational conveyor belt and quickly gained a realistic perspective of my position in the world at large: I was over-educated in two subjects that were of little use outside of university without further training. Having only just scraped a 2:2, and bored with the education process as a whole, I bundled ‘further training’ into the box marked ‘out of the question’. Instead, I applied myself to reading a few more books, watching a lot more films and signing on. I maintained this pattern for a year or so, until the bank got tough with me during a short-tenancy in a shared house in Hulme. In a two-pronged attack worthy of Rommel, my bank manager withdrew my overdraft facility and made me sign an agreement to pay £20 a week into my account to bring the overdraft down to ‘something a little more reasonable’. And so, like a homing pigeon, I returned to the parental home in Nottingham and holed up in my bedroom, contemplating the Future. Both parents pulled any number of favours to help me get on the career trail, while my Gran telephoned with regular monotony informing me of jobs she’d seen in the local paper. Needless to say all their hard work was wasted on me. I wasn’t interested in a career, I had a roof over my head and, I reasoned, as long as I had the love of a good woman being poor didn’t much bother me.

I say ‘much’, because occasionally my impoverished state did in fact work me up into a frenzy of bitterness. Fortunately, I learned to express my powerlessness by scoring as many points against Them – as in ‘Us and . . .’ – as I could. These minor acts of guerrilla warfare included the following:

•  Obtaining a NUS card under false pretences.

•  Using the aforesaid card to gain cheap admission to the cinema.

•  Altering out-of-date bus passes.

•  Damaging fruit in Tesco’s.

•  Driving a car without road tax or insurance.

•  Drinking complete strangers’ pints in night-clubs.

I did anything which, generally speaking, kept my mind alive and made me feel like I was chalking up another point on my side of the great scoreboard of life. But it was Aggi who kept me sane. Without her I would have dropped off The Edge.

Aggi really was quite brilliant, the most wonderful person I’d ever had the pleasure of meeting in my life. When we first started going out together I used to walk her home and while we were kissing and hugging good-bye on her door step, my favourite thing to do was to concentrate my whole mind on capturing the Moment – her smell, the taste of her mouth, the sensation of her body pressed against mine – I wanted to photograph it and keep it forever. But it never worked. Within minutes of walking through the damp streets of West Bridgford, with drizzle in my hair and an ache in my loins, she was gone. I could never recreate the Experience.

We met in a charity shop during the summer break. Aggi was eighteen then and had just finished her A levels, while I’d just completed the first year of my degree. She worked at an Oxfam shop in West Bridgford which I’d been frequenting on a twice weekly basis, because of its high turnover of quality junk. I’d been waiting patiently for the doors to open since 9.25 a.m., but as the shop didn’t officially open for another five minutes, I’d whiled away the time pressing my nose against the glass door pulling faces purely for my own amusement. Aggi had noticed one in particular – my impression of a gargoyle in mental distress – and had opened the doors two minutes early, laughing as she did so. We were alone apart from an old lady at the back of the shop listening to
Desert Island Discs
as she sorted clothes. That day Aggi wore a short-sleeved green dress with small yellow flowers on it and a pair of sky blue canvas baseball boots. The overall effect was, to be truthful, a little twee but somehow she made it look marvellous. I positioned myself in front of a few old Barry Manilow albums and pretended to look through them, because the rack that housed them was the ideal location for me to steal as many glances at this incredibly beautiful girl as I liked.

I was sure that she would feel my eyes watching her every move, because after a while I gave up all pretence of being interested in any of Barry’s greatest hits and just gazed at her longingly instead. I smiled as I approached the till with my sole purchase, an Elvis mirror, the type found only at fun fairs, where something skilful with an air gun, dart or hoop has to be done to win one. Thanks to Aggi, I’d cut out the middle man. Elvis was mine.

‘The King of Rock ’n’ Roll.’

Those were the first words she ever said to me. I went back every day that week and over the following months and subsequent conversations we got to know each other well.

Between the first question and the last was a period of about five months. We got together between ‘Do you believe in platonic friendship?’ and ‘Is Elvis really dead?’ which was the opening topic of conversation on our first proper date, in the brightly lit, overcrowded, not-in-the-least-bit-romantic lounge of the Royal Oak. Deep down, I always liked to believe that I knew things wouldn’t work out between us. Nothing could have been that perfect unless it had its première on terrestrial television. The thing that swung it for me, the one thing that made me so sure, was our first kiss. It wiped away my fears and insecurities in an instant.

At the end of our first date I’d been unsure about where we stood with the boy-girl relationship thing. Yes, we’d held hands occasionally and flirted a great deal, but we hadn’t kissed, at least not properly. At the end of the night I’d kissed her lightly on her left cheek, as I would my Gran, and made my way home after I’d made her promise to see me again. I’d spent the entire week prior to our next date in a tortured state of limbo. What had happened, exactly? We’d gone out together, yes, but had it only been a date for me? Perhaps for her it had been nothing more than a night out with a nice guy? Had I spent the last seven days dreaming of her unceasingly, while she could barely remember my name? I wanted an answer. I needed an answer. I even called her once to ask her, but my courage had faded and I’d put the phone down. I couldn’t think of how to say what I wanted to know, which was basically: Am I your boyfriend?

‘Am I your boyfriend?’ is the kind of question a nine-year-old asks another nine-year-old. It had no place in a sophisticated relationship. I knew the rules – I was meant to be cool and relaxed, laid back and casual. At first maybe we’d ‘see’ each other (which meant that she’d still ‘see’ other people), then maybe we’d date (which would mean that she wouldn’t see other people even though she might want to) and then finally we’d be boyfriend and girlfriend (by which time she wouldn’t want to see other people because she’d be happy with me).

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.