My Legendary Girlfriend (7 page)

When I’d finished my story, roughly an hour later, without pausing she told me that I ought to be strong. She herself was recovering from a recent break-up of a relationship.

‘That’s why I was crying on your answering machine – thank you for not mentioning it, by the way – phoning the flat reminded me of living there, which reminded me of being there with my boyfriend, which reminded me of the fact that he had dumped me.’

I thought she was going to start crying, but she didn’t. Instead she took her turn in what was quickly becoming a miniature self-help group for that small but vocal strata of society known as The Dumped. Her boyfriend – whom she refused to refer to as anything but ‘my ex’ or occasionally ‘that heartless bastard’ – had dumped her three weeks earlier, totally out of the blue. They’d been together for six perfect months.

‘I lost the plot for a while,’ said Kate, ‘I really did. I used to lie in bed just staring at the ceiling. I even unplugged the phone just in case he ever tried to call me again. I didn’t eat because I knew that I’d throw up. I didn’t see anyone – not even friends – for nearly two weeks. I just stayed in watching telly and eating Hobnobs.’ She laughed. ‘Talking of which . . .’ I listened to a packet rustle and the sound of an oat-based biscuit being delicately masticated. She made a satisfied kind of cat noise and continued: ‘That’s better. And then one day I just woke up. I said to myself, I can spend the rest of my life mourning his loss or I can get on with my life. Which is what I did.’

I marvelled at her confidence. She’d managed to do the one thing I could never do – she’d moved on. But the more I thought about it the less impressed I was. There was no way she could have loved her ex the way I loved Aggi, otherwise she’d be as crippled by misery as I was. The two cases weren’t comparable.

Kate continued: ‘I’ve never understood why people insist on saying things like, “There’s plenty of other fish in the sea.” My mum actually said that to me, you know, after I was dumped by the person formerly known as “my boyfriend”. There’s me crying my heart out and all she was offering me by way of consolation was a fish metaphor! She wouldn’t have said that if that heartless bastard had died horribly in a car crash. She wouldn’t have said, never mind Kate, there are plenty of other boyfriends out there who have the advantage over your ex of not being dead.’

She had a good point.

Just as I was wondering what to say next, out of the blue she said, ‘Between grief and nothing, which would you choose?’

I recognised the quotation straight away. I knew it because me, Aggi, Simon and his then girlfriend, Gemma Walker (shelf-life three weeks, two days) had spent one Saturday afternoon, four years ago, watching
Breathless
, the Richard Gere version of Godard’s
A Bout de Souffle
as research for an essay I was writing on Hollywood adaptations of non-English speaking films. I’d chosen the title because it meant I got to watch
The Magnificent Seven
, too, although the downside of that was having to endure
The Seven Samurai
, as well, which, to put not too fine a point on it, was about as meaningful as my moderately flabby arse. In one scene, Gere’s girlfriend – played magnificently by Valerie Kaprisky – reads aloud a passage from a book and then drops it as she kisses him. Simon and I spent five minutes advancing that scene frame by frame to find out what the book was, because the passage made such a lasting impression on the both of us.

‘That’s from
The Wild Palms
,’ I said excitedly, as if Kate was in a position to award ten house points
and
a gold star. ‘William Faulkner.’

‘Is it?’ said Kate. ‘I didn’t know. That heartless bastard wrote it in a letter he sent after he finished with me.’

‘Oh,’ I said awkwardly.

‘Well, what’s your answer?’ she asked.

I told her my answer would be nothing. She didn’t believe me. But it was true. If I had to do it all again I wouldn’t have gone out with Aggi. I would have walked straight out of Oxfam that day, albeit without my Elvis mirror, but thankful in the knowledge that at least my sanity and self-respect would be intact in years to come.

‘But what about the good times?’ probed Kate. ‘You must’ve had some good times, surely?’

‘Yeah, we had some good times,’ I said, quickly flicking through some of them in my head. ‘But at the end of the day what have I got? Nothing but memories. I’m twenty-six and I constantly live in the past. I’ve been without Aggi longer than I was with her and I still can’t get over her. Ignorance, compared to this, would be bliss.’

Kate was beginning to tire of me. I could feel it. I wanted to tell her my whole life story. I wanted to tell her everything that was inside me. But I was convinced I was boring her.

‘Am I boring you?’ I asked, trying to make the question sound casual.

‘No, why should I be bored?’ Kate asked.

‘No, well, maybe just a little bit,’ I confessed. ‘It’s appalling that you have to listen to me droning on like this. Sometimes I’m so boring even I stop listening.’

She laughed. It still sounded like summertime.

‘Kate, tell me about you,’ I said, lighting up a cigarette. ‘Tell me something I don’t know about you.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know, anything you want.’

‘I can’t think what to tell you,’ said Kate. She paused. I took a deep drag on my cigarette. ‘Okay, I’ve got it. Ask me three questions that you want answers to and I’ll ask you three.’

I agreed. My mind was racing, trying to think of questions that would be intriguing, sexy and yet devastatingly witty.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Good question,’ said Kate. I tried to detect the irony in her voice. There was none. ‘Let’s sort the geography out.’

Kate lived in a flat in Brighton with her best friend Paula. Paula was out with her mates from work, which pleased me immensely because I liked the idea of the two of us being alone, talking conspiratorially late at night. Kate had stayed in because she had no money. She’d dropped out of her first year at the University of North London, where she’d been reading East European Studies (‘We were known as the “Euro Studs”’).

‘So why did you leave?’

‘Because I was going to get kicked out anyway,’ said Kate, sighing. ‘I hardly went to any lectures. I was in love. It seemed more important to be with my ex than learn about the history of the European trade agreements or have a social life. He was always having to go away and then I’d miss him so much that . . .’ Her voice began to falter. She took a deep breath and the tone of her voice changed, as if she’d made a conscious decision to try and never think about him again. ‘He’s history.’

‘Do you miss London?’ I asked, adding: ‘This is my second “official” question, by the way.’

She laughed and said: ‘I don’t miss London at all. It’s too expensive, it’s grimy, it’s dirty and it’s unfriendly. It reminds me of him. I like Brighton. My flat’s only five minutes from the sea. And I love the sea.’

I thought long and hard about my third question. I thought of funny things to ask, I thought of poignant things too, but there was only one thing that I wanted, almost needed, to know. It was about her boyfriend. A subject that was now clearly off limits. As usual I succumbed to my compulsion.

‘What was your ex like?’

‘He was just a guy,’ replied Kate without hesitation. ‘Just a guy who thought he meant the world to me and was right. But between grief and nothing, I’d take grief.’

She refused to say anything more.

‘I know you only said three,’ I said, almost, but not quite, shyly, ‘but I’ve got another question.’

‘Ask away,’ said Kate.

‘Will you phone me again soon?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘We’ll have to see.’

11.45 P.M.

When she’d put the phone down I tried to dismiss her from my mind but I couldn’t – she wouldn’t go. Instead I went over the answers I’d given to her three questions.

I considered returning to the entertainment of
The Barbara White Show
, but the early morning rise to work – still something of a shock to a body that preferred to run on dole time – was beginning to take its toll. It took roughly an hour, door-to-door, to get to school in the mornings. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have strolled in at the same time as the kids, but it was frowned upon by Mr Tucker if members of staff weren’t on site by 8.15. So unless I wanted his miserable, wart-ridden, beardy face chastising me on a daily basis, I had to leave the flat at 7.15 – requiring me to get up at 6.45! It was a killer. I tried a variety of methods to cut my getting-ready-to-go-to-work time down and thus lengthen the time spent in bed. I stopped brushing my teeth and instead squirted the toothpaste directly into my mouth; I showered in the evening instead of morning; and wore my trainers on the journey to work in case I had to sprint at any point. Somehow, no matter what I did, I always ended up leaving a half-eaten bowl of Honey Nut Loops in the kitchen sink and chewing a piece of toast while jogging up Holloway Road.

Off went my shirt and socks as I got back into bed. They landed in a crumpled pile next to my trousers. These clothes, my School Clothes, were completely alien to the real me. Until I started on my teacher training course, I’d managed to avoid going into branches of Burton’s, Next or Top Man for over a decade. There was something about High Street men’s shops that I despised more than fascism, landlords and neighbours who parked their cars outside my house. The combination of half-wit YTS trainees, terrible decor and the clientele – adolescent boys with clothing allowances, engineering students, and girlfriends with Zero Taste looking for a ‘nice’ jumper for their boyfriends – was all too much for me. All my clothes were second-hand, purchased from Imperial Cancer Research shops and the like. I had two wardrobes full of what Simon and I referred to as ‘Dead Men’s Clothes’ – the sort of items only widows and bitter divorcees throw away. My whole wardrobe – consisting of literally dozens of items – had cost less than fifty quid in total, but it wasn’t the money that mattered, what really counted was that it added to my sense of individuality. The look I was working towards was a cross between Clint Eastwood in
Magnum Force
and Richard Rowntree in
Shaft
. While I freely admit I wasn’t exactly there, I was close enough to feel different from the rest of the crowd. Teaching, unfortunately, was about conformity, and even I could see that a complete fashion rethink was in order if I was ever going to get a job.

The trousers were from Burton’s. They were black and had turn-ups. Looking down at them from the bed, I noticed that the seat was going shiny. The shirt was from Top Man (urrgh!) and was one of five purchased one size too small. As I handed over my money, the youth at the till had asked me if I was sure they were the right size. I said yes, because he was a seventeen-year-old with acne and I was a graduate in English Literature and Film Studies which, I considered, made me infinitely more qualified in the intricacies of shirt sizes than he was.

I got out of bed and turned off the light. Light from the street lamps in Friar Avenue, which ran along the end of the garden, made the curtains glow spookily, casting shadows around the room. As I put my head down I lifted it back up immediately and picked up the clothes off the floor to put underneath my head. One of the items I’d forgotten to pack was a pillow, and as I wasn’t entirely sure which sort of shops sold pillows I’d managed without. I made a mental note to ask Kate about it if she ever phoned again.

Kate is definitely an interesting girl
, I thought, hoping I might dream about her.
She sounds like she’d be fun to be with. She seems different from other girls. Not like . . .

The phone rang.

‘Hi, Will, it’s me,’ said a voice I knew only too well belonged to Martina. All things considered she sounded reasonably chirpy.

‘I hope you don’t mind me phoning so late,’ she said meekly. ‘It’s just that . . . well . . . you haven’t returned any of my calls this week. I thought perhaps it might be your phone playing up but I got the operator to check that the line was working properly.’

It was time for some quick thinking:

‘I didn’t know you’d phoned earlier,’ I lied, trying with all my strength to sound surprised. ‘I don’t think the answering machine is working. I’m really sorry.’

‘It’s okay,’ she said hushing my apologies, ‘it’s not your fault, I’m sure you’ll have been too busy making new friends to call me back until the weekend. It must be so exciting, Will. More exciting than anything I could offer you.’

Martina had got into the habit of speaking to me like that – putting herself down in order, I think, to elevate me even higher in her esteem – from the moment I’d kissed her. It was a manipulative trick which pathetic people, myself included, used to make the object of their affections say something nice about them. Martina wasn’t fishing for compliments – her earnestness was such that I just knew she was one of those people who meant every word they said and never said anything they didn’t mean.