by Mike Gayle
‘You smoke Benson and Hedges?’ I asked needlessly, taking one from her outstretched hand.
‘Yeah, since I was twelve,’ she replied, her face half hidden by her handbag, as she searched for a lighter. ‘What do you smoke, sir?’
‘Sir probably smokes Woodbines,’ joked Sonya.
‘Marlboro Lights, actually,’ I replied tersely.
Pulavi discovered her lighter and lit my cigarette.
‘I had a Marlboro Light once,’ chipped in Emma. ‘It was like sucking on air. You wanna smoke proper fags, sir. Only poofs smoke Marlboro Lights.’
Once again they all dissolved into fits of laughter. I thanked them and attempted to leave their company but they insisted they were going in my direction. Linking arms, they trailed by my side. I felt like a dog owner taking three poodles for a walk.
‘We’re going up the West End, sir,’ said Emma bustling with energy.
‘Yeah, we’re off on the pull,’ added Pulavi, smiling the kind of filthy grin that would have put Sid James to shame.
‘Yeah, we’re going to the Hippodrome, sir,’ said Sonya. ‘D’you fancy coming with us?’
Their question made me think about going out, not with them of course – that would’ve been unthinkable – but going out in general. I didn’t know a single soul in London, and had nothing planned for the weekend, so it was still some wonder to me why, when a few of the younger teachers in the staff room had asked me if I was free for a drink after work, I’d told them I was busy.
‘You’ve got no chance of getting in there,’ I said, shaking my head knowingly, partly for their benefit but mostly because I was still reflecting on the sorry excuse of a weekend I had in store for myself.
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ squealed Sonya. ‘We go there every week.’
‘Don’t you think we look eighteen, sir?’ asked Emma.
For the first time during the conversation I recalled what had alarmed me so much in the first moments of our encounter. I knew them to be fourteen-year-olds, but the girls trailing after me were far more worldly than their biological years indicated. Emma had squeezed her frankly over-developed chest into a bra top, barely large enough to cover her modesty, matched with a short silver skirt. Sonya wore a lime green velvet cropped top, combined with an incredibly short blue satin skirt that, whenever she moved her upper body, raised itself an inch higher, instantly revealing more thigh than was strictly necessary. Pulavi had opted for a pair of leopard-print hot pants and a sheer orange blouse, through which her black Wonderbra was clearly visible to the world at large. I was truly mortified.
I thanked them again for the cigarette and rapidly conjured up a girlfriend I was in a rush to get home to. This was exactly the kind of moment which Fate liked to introduce into my life, to let me know there was still plenty of room for things to get worse before they got better. The girls began giggling and in a matter of seconds reduced my self-confidence to zero.
As I entered Wood Green tube station I checked my back pocket for my travel card. It wasn’t there. Neither was it in any of my other pockets. Trying not to panic I rapidly developed Plan B:
Try not to dwell on how much it will cost to replace travel card.
Buy one-way ticket to Archway.
Do not even consider worrying until 7.00 a.m. Monday morning.
It was some moments before it occurred to me that Plan B was flawed by the fact that I had only sweet wrappers and pocket fluff to my name.
It began to rain as I put my card into the cash machine and punched in my Pin number: 1411 (the date and month of my ex-girlfriend’s birthday). I checked my balance – £770 overdrawn. The machine asked me how much money I wanted. I requested five pounds and crossed my fingers. It made a number of rapid clicking noises and for a moment I was convinced it was going to call the police, make a citizens’ arrest and eat my card. Instead it gave me the money and asked me in quite a friendly manner – as if I was a valued customer – whether I required any other services.
On the way back to the tube, I passed Burger King on Wood Green High Street. Emma, Sonya and Pulavi were inside, waving at me animatedly from their window seats. I put my head down and did my best to give the impression that I hadn’t seen them.
At the station I bought a single to Archway and placed the ticket in the top pocket of my jacket for safe-keeping. As I did so, my fingers brushed against something: I’d found my travel card.
I reached the southbound platform of the Piccadilly Line just in time to see the back of a tube train flying out of the station. I looked up at the station clock to see how long it would be until the next one. Ten more sodding minutes. When it finally arrived, I sat down in the end carriage, put my travel card and ticket on the seat next to me where I could keep an eye on them and promptly fell asleep.
The train lurched into a station with a jolt, awakening me from an incredibly gymnastic dream about my ex-girlfriend. While mentally cursing the train driver for cutting short my reverie I looked up in time to realise I was at King’s Cross – my stop. I grabbed my bag and managed to squeeze through the gap in the closing doors.
The second part of my journey on the Northern Line, as always, was uncomfortable. All the carriages were so littered with burger wrappers, newspapers and crisp packets that it was like riding home in a rubbish tip on wheels. The only pleasant event that occurred was the appearance of a group of exquisite looking Spanish girls getting on at Euston. They chattered intensely in their mother tongue – probably about why the Northern Line was so dirty – all the way to Camden, where they alighted. This seemed to be the law as far as the north branch of the Northern Line was concerned – beautiful people got off at Camden; interesting people got off at Kentish Town; students and musicians got off at Tufnell Park; leaving only the dull, ugly or desperate to get off at Archway or thank their lucky stars they could afford to live in High Barnet.
Halfway up the escalators at Archway, I searched around in my top pocket for my ticket and travel card. They weren’t there. My hugely expensive one-year travel card was now stopping at all stations to Uxbridge on the Piccadilly Line. I shut my eyes in defeat. When I opened them seconds later, I was at the top and thankfully no one was checking tickets at the barrier. I let out a sigh of relief and thought to myself: Sometimes, life can be unusually kind.
Opening the front door to the house, a depressing atmosphere of familiarity overwhelmed me. For five days this had been home. Five days, but it felt like a decade. I pressed the timer switch for the hallway light and checked the mail on top of the pay-phone. As I put the key in the door to my flat the lights went out.
7.20 P.M.
‘Ahhh! You’ve been burgled!’
These were the words my ex-girlfriend, Aggi, used to turn and say to me every time she saw the state of my bedroom. It was our favourite running gag which, in spite of its asthmatic tendencies, used to have us in stitches every time.
Aggi and I split up exactly three years ago, not that I’d been counting the days or anything. I was aware of precisely how long it had been because she dumped me on my twenty-third birthday. And despite everything I’d done to forget the day I was born and the occasion of her dumping me, the date remained locked in a brain cell that refused to die.
I was woken that fateful day by the sound of silence; Simon and Garfunkel got that spot on: silence had a sound. Back then at my parents’ house, if anyone was in and not comatose, silence never got a look in. Every action of the occupants was pursued without regard for the sleeping: washing machines at six in the morning, clinking cutlery, breakfast television, ‘Have you seen my shoes, Mum?’, shouting, and occasionally laughter. Living in the aural equivalent of Angola, I quickly learned to filter out the white noise of lower-middle-class family life.
Later, when my parents had gone to their respective places of work (he: Nottingham City Council; she: Meadow Hall Retirement Lodge) and my kid brother, Tom, to school, the house was allowed to drift back into a restful peace. My brain, no longe
r filtering out anything more threatening than the occasional starling chirping in the garden, woke me up – silence was my alarm clock.
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.
Me: Hi, what’s your name?
Her: Agnes Elizabeth Peters. But it’s Aggi to you.
Me: Why do you work here?
Her: My mum works here sometimes. I’m bored of staying at home so I help out sometimes, it’s my contribution to helping humanity evolve. [Laughs] Plus it looks good on CVs.
Me: What do you do?
Her: I’m about to go to the Salford University to do Social Science.
Me: Why?
Her: [Looks slightly embarrassed] Because I care about people rather than money. I think it’s wrong that people in this day and age should be homeless. Call me old-fashioned but I’m a socialist.
Me: Do you believe in platonic friendship?
Her: No. ‘Platonic friendship is the moment between when you meet and your first kiss’. Don’t applaud, I didn’t say it first.
Me: Do you think Elvis really is dead?
Her: [Laughs] Yes. But his memory lives on in the hearts of the young, the brave and the free.
Me: What’s your favourite film?
Her: This might sound a bit pretentious but I think film as a medium is nowhere near as expressive as the novel. Having said that I must admit a distinct liking for Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Me: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever thought?
Her: If there are an infinite number of parallel universes, containing all the alternate decisions I could’ve made, how would my life have turned out if I’d accepted Asim Ali’s proposal of marriage when we were six?
Me: When was the last time you cried?
Her: Probably when
I was six, after turning down Asim Ali. I don’t know – I don’t really do emotional histrionics that often.
Me: Do you love me?
Her: I love you so much that when I think about how I feel about you my brain can’t begin to comprehend it. It’s exactly like infinity. I don’t understand it, but those are the limitations of my love.
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).