by Mike Gayle
The more I spoke, the more I realised that if I could get Simon – who had heard me moan about missing Aggi all this time – to believe I had never loved her, then maybe I could pull the wool over my own eyes too. And then I’d finally defeat Aggi and drive her from my head and my heart for good.
‘I never loved Aggi.’
The words cut dead the thread of our conversation. It sounded so unreal that I said them again.
‘I never loved Aggi. I just thought that I did. I think that at the end of the day I’d just grown used to her. It was nice having her around, and yeah, losing her and leaving university did kind of turn my world upside down for a while, but I’m over it. Those three years we had together meant nothing to me. Nothing at all.’
‘Nothing?’ asked Simon. The tone of his voice indicated that he didn’t believe me for a second.
‘Not a thing, mate.’
It felt good to lie.
Simon put on his agony uncle head and I wondered whether he’d been listening to The Barbara White Show too. ‘Are you sure that you’re not just saying that because you think that you’ve finally got to get over her?’
I hated the way he thought he could suss out a situation in seconds. He was the only person in the world allowed to be unfathomable. The thing was, everything he’d learnt about life had been culled from music. That was his biggest failing. He hadn’t realised that life couldn’t always be reduced to a three and a half minute pop song.
‘No,’ I lied again. ‘Not at all. Look, she was all right, I’ll give you that, and we did have some fun times.’ I looked at her photograph on the wall and considered tearing it up as a show of strength. ‘And, yes, I was distraught when we split up, but you’ve got to remember that I’m the man who went into mourning when I heard there wasn’t going to be another series of Blackadder.’ I chickened out of tearing up the photo and instead grabbed a marker pen, blacked out a tooth and drew a beard, a pair of glasses and bushy eyebrows on her face. ‘Me and Aggi, well, we had different agendas right from the start. She wanted to be ethereal and I wanted to be down to earth. She wanted to go out and experience life and I wanted to stay in and watch it happen on TV. We were doomed from the start. We had nothing in common.’
I gave myself a standing ovation.
Simon’s only response was, ‘Well I’m glad you’re over her.’
‘Over who?’ I joked.
We both laughed but Simon’s sounded forced, as if trying to bolster my spirits.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve told me all this.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, mellowing not only to Simon, but to the thought of being without Aggi. ‘It’s been good to get all this off my chest. You know how it is when you keep things bottled inside. It’s not good for you.’
‘No, you’re right, it isn’t,’ he admitted.
Simon paused theatrically. More theatrically in fact than the entire cast of a Harold Pinter play. His sense of drama was another extension of his rock ’n’ roll persona. Life to him was something that happened so that he’d have something to write songs about. He was always in search of an Experience he could dilute into a verse-chorus-verse structure. I was sure that was why he’d had so many different girlfriends and behaved like a git to all of them. There wasn’t a lot of song mileage to be had from successful relationships and a nice personality.
‘I’ve got to tell you something,’ he said. ‘It’s the reason I called last night.’
I wondered whether he was cheating on Tammy again; it wouldn’t have surprised me as he’d done it before. As far as I knew, he hadn’t been seeing anyone on the side, he’d been too busy working on his masterpiece in London to bother with women.
‘I’m sorry, mate,’ he continued, playing the scene for all he was worth. ‘I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just come out with it. I had a bit of a “thing” with Aggi.’
‘You did what?’
I’d heard exactly what he’d said and understood it all too clearly, but I needed to hear it again if only to torture myself more than was strictly necessary.
‘I had a bit of a“thing” with Aggi.’
His voice was throaty, like he needed a glass of water and a good cough to clear his air-passages.
I asked him, ‘What kind of a “thing” did you have with Aggi?’ My voice was emotionless, at least, that’s the way I remember it.
‘The kind of “thing” that you wouldn’t have been very happy about at one time,’ he replied.
Strangely, my emotions appeared to have gone AWOL. My brain was getting ready for a bit of a scene but there was nothing happening on an adrenal level. Maybe I’d got my wish. Maybe I was finally over her. I stared across at her graffitied photo and smiled weakly.
‘It’s no skin off my nose,’ I said. ‘What Aggi does with whomever is her business. I just thought . . .’ This time it was my turn for a dramatic pause, because I hadn’t got a clue what I thought. ‘I just thought that perhaps you could’ve been a bit more sensitive about it. I know it’s been three years since she and I split up but even so, it’s a bit much. You’re meant to be my mate. What are you going to do next? Jump in my grave before I get there? And what will you say, “Oh, sorry, Will, didn’t know you were going to use it”?’
‘It’s been and gone,’ he said, refusing to react to my sarcasm. ‘It’s all over. It happened a long time ago. I just wanted to tell you because it’s been weighing on my mind recently. I only wanted to be fair. We’ve been mates for too long to let a girl come between us.’
‘You should’ve thought about that before you started . . .’ I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Giving it a name would only have made it more real than I could handle.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Simon quietly. ‘Will, I really am sorry.’
‘Forget the apologies,’ I said, ejecting one of Left Bank’s early demos from my cassette deck and throwing it to the floor. ‘I told you, I’m over her. All I want to know is exactly how long ago was it?’
‘A while ago,’ he said, barely audibly.
My brain was in overdrive but my emotions were still nowhere to be seen.
‘Exactly how long ago is “a while ago”?’ I asked.
‘It was . . .’ He was loving every second of this. ‘It was while you were still going out with her.’
Suddenly, my emotions returned home from their package holiday. The pain was physical and emotional all at once, as if a huge invisible fist had sent me across the room like in the 1982 Spielberg-produced horror film, Poltergeist. I felt sick, I felt faint, my knees went weak. I couldn’t understand why he was telling me now after all this time. Ignorance wasn’t just bliss, it was the pillars that kept the roof of my sanity from crashing down.
Simon, meanwhile, was waiting for a response. I didn’t know what to say. He was right, a response was called for, something brutal that would cut him down to size, something that would make him feel as low as I felt, a guilt trip so far off the map he’d never find his way back. I drew a deep breath and put the phone down.
2.38 P.M.
When Simon had given me the copy of Left Bank’s demo tape which I now held in my hands, he’d described it as ‘a piece of rock ’n’ roll history’ that would one day be priceless. Clearing a space amongst the clothes, dirty crockery and exercise books, I placed the tape on the floor and looked feverishly around the flat for an instrument to aid me in my actions. In the kitchen I discovered a bread knife and a saucepan which had the remains of Thursday’s spaghetti hoop dinner encrusted to its non-stick surface. I smiled at them both maniacally like Jack Nicholson in full ‘Here’s Johnny’ mode.
Standing with Simon’s ‘priceless’ work of art positioned at the foot of the bed, I raised the saucepan over my head and brought it crashing down against the tape, repeating the blows until it shattered into a million pieces. On roughly the twentieth blow the saucepan and its handle parted company, at which point I fell to my knees panting heavily. Someone, presumably the bloke from downs
tairs, whose roof was my floor, knocked on my door loudly. Ignoring him I began bundling together what was left of the magnetic tape before attacking it with the bread knife – shredding it into three weddings-worth of confetti. This complicated procedure took ten minutes to complete because halfway through, my temporary dementia still raging, I had decided that no piece of magnetic tape should be longer than half an inch and forced myself to begin again. Once I’d finished, I gathered the bits into a pile and scooped them into an envelope – the one I’d stolen from the school stationery cupboard specifically to send to the bank with my begging letter – and, using the same marker pen I’d used to graffiti Aggi, I scrawled Simon’s address on it, sealed it with Sellotape, and added a first class stamp.
I got dressed and pulled on my heavy grey cashmere overcoat (bought from a jumble sale at Beeston Methodist church hall for £2.20, knocked down from £5.00) though I hadn’t a clue what the weather was like. In my head it was the harshest Siberian winter on record, and in my heart it was a rainy night in Georgia – it had to be heavy grey overcoat weather. I picked up the envelope from the floor, slipped my A–Z of London into my coat pocket and walked out of the flat.
I needed to walk. I had too much anger in me to sit and watch TV, which was the only other thing I could think of doing bar getting the train to Nottingham, borrowing my dad’s car and leaving tyre marks across Simon’s chest. As a rule I wasn’t a violent person, but I amazed even myself by the murderous thoughts rocketing around my head. Smashing the tape had helped to a degree, but I wanted something more, something that would bruise, bleed and make him beg for mercy. Simon was considerably bigger than me, but I felt invincible, like I was in full Jackie Chan Drunken Master II kick ass mode. I would’ve smashed his face in.
I wanted to know when it had happened.
I wanted to know how it had happened.
I wanted to know why it had happened.
I wanted to know everything.
But most of all I wanted Aggi back.
Simon’s news at least had an upside: I now knew how pointless it was trying to pretend that I didn’t still feel something for her. It didn’t make sense to love her. I’d weighed up the pros and cons a million times, and the results were always the same: I needed her. She was no good for me, she didn’t want me to be part of her life, but there was nothing I could do about how I felt. I loved her. I couldn’t lie to myself, though it was the one thing I wished I had the strength to do. I couldn’t forget about her. The passage of time had, if anything, made her more important to me now than ever. I couldn’t replace her with another girl without constantly comparing them to her and finding them lacking. I couldn’t move forward and I couldn’t reclaim the past. I was stuck in an ex-lover’s limbo with nothing but happy memories to keep me company.
Looking around me for the first time I realised my feet had taken me to the Italian newsagent’s near the top of Holloway Road. I put the envelope in the post box outside, decided against going into the shop to buy chocolate and continued up the road. My mission, petty as it was, had been accomplished, but I didn’t want to go home. That was why I’d brought the A–Z with me.
Simon thinks that all Archway’s got to offer is some café where George-bloody-Michael signed a record contract, I’d thought, while getting my coat on, ready to leave the flat. Well, Marx’s grave is near here somewhere. Now’s as good a time as any to find it.
With my A–Z open and my finger on Archway Road, I crossed the traffic lights at the tube station and navigated my way to Highgate Road. As I came to Whittington Hospital, an ambulance pulled out in front of me which led me into a long and protracted daydream:
Simon has contracted a rare blood disease. I’m the only person on earth that has the right blood type to save him. ‘Will, you’re the only one who can save me,’ he whispers weakly, clutching at my hand.
‘Should have thought of that before you started poking my girlfriend,’ I reply.
Five minutes and a fag-break later, I checked the A–Z again. It didn’t look too far now. Across the road I could see an old church marked on the map which had been converted into a set of yuppie apartments and a bit farther up was the entrance to Highgate Park. The park was empty apart from a middle-aged woman in green Wellingtons walking a Yorkshire Terrier. As I passed the pond in the middle of the rolling landscape, I walked into a swarm of midges, inhaling quite a few of their number. Normally this would’ve set me off on a tirade of abuse against the animal kingdom but even this didn’t phase me. I was a man with a mission and Marx’s grave was my holy grail. There everything would become crystal clear.
I came to the gates on the far side of the park and turned left. There it was – Highgate Cemetery. There was a small white hut positioned two yards past the gates, on which was pinned a small hand-written sign revealing that tickets were 50p per person.
What has the world come to when you can’t even visit deceased left-wing thinkers without having to pay for the privilege?
Disgruntled, I paid the far too chirpy elderly woman residing within her blood money. She asked me if I needed directions, I said no, in case she wanted to try and sell me a map.
The cemetery was peaceful and almost as silent as Archway had been the previous night except, if I strained really hard, I could hear the occasional lorry, so it kind of made sense to stop straining. Ridiculous as this might seem, it occurred to me that this was definitely a cemetery. All around me were graves. Marx was in the company of a lot of people whose deaths spanned over two hundred years. Time had caused the older gravestones to blend in with nature; ivy and erosion now made them seem at home. The newer headstones, though, looked depressingly incongruous, like shiny marble bookmarks stuck into the ground. I made a mental note to remind my mother that I wanted to be cremated. If I left my funeral arrangements up to her she’d get me the shiniest marble headstone money could buy, with the specific intention of embarrassing me for eternity.
Wandering aimlessly around the cemetery, occasionally stopping to read the odd inscription, I stumbled across the grave, or rather tomb, I was looking for. There was no mistaking it, a huge metal cast of a balding, bearded man’s head rested on top of the pale stone tomb. Even if I’d never seen a picture of Marx I would have known who it was; he looked exactly how I expected the father of modern Socialism to look: a little sad, a little world weary; sort of a cross between Father Christmas and Charlton Heston, but with a twinkle in his eye, as if he was constantly on the verge of working out the meaning of life. The inscription on the tomb in gold lettering read:
‘The philosophers have merely interpreted the world. The point is to change it.’
As expected, his tomb had become a Mecca for Marxists world-wide, just as Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris had become a home from home for half-arsed Euro-poets. Scattered around the edge of the marble base were a number of artificial roses and scraps of paper containing messages. I stood over one and read it:
‘Thank you, from those of us still fighting for freedom all around the world.’
It wasn’t signed.
I studied the inscription on the tomb again and felt ashamed. Marx had tried to change the world and make it a better place. He wanted workers to be able to study philosophy in the morning and go fishing in the afternoon. He wanted an end to tyranny, based on the belief that all men were equal. All I wanted was to get my ex-girlfriend back. It was a selfish pursuit benefiting no one but myself. Even as these self-chastising thoughts entered my head, I felt my shoulders automatically hunching up into a ‘so what’ shrug. I wondered if every man was like me. Give a man a noble cause and he would fight to the death for what he believed in, but get the woman he loves to leave him and his once honourable principles would cease to be quite so important.
I was standing so quietly, wrapped up tightly in my thoughts, that a robin flew down from the branches of the oak above Karl’s head and landed on the ground right beside my feet. Straight away it began tugging at a twig over twice its own body le
ngth. For over five minutes it struggled, lines of determination etched onto its beaky little face, before it gave up and flew off to a silver birch branch four trees to the left to recuperate. That robin was me. I was that robin. And Aggi was that twig. Those five minutes the robin had spent tugging at that twig, well, those were the three years I’d spent trying to get her back. Like God and McDonalds, Aggi was everywhere.
3.00 P.M.
I decided it was time to go when huge raindrops fell from the sky in their thousands, drenching me in seconds. My hair was soaked through and small rivulets of water ran down the back of my head, along my neck and into my shirt. I turned the collar on my overcoat up and pulled my head into its protection as far as I could, which didn’t really help because now I couldn’t see anything as my glasses had completely steamed up. To make matters worse, for the last few minutes I’d been monitoring a distinct rise in the smell of old men coming from my coat. Too cheap to bother getting it dry-cleaned when I’d bought it, I was now paying for the tightness of my wallet as the essence of the coat’s previous owner came back to haunt me; it was sweet and musty, like stale urine mixed with the contents of a cat’s litter tray.
I was wet, cold and smelling like the tramp from my late-night 7-Eleven trip. It was the rain that depressed me most of all. A walk in the rain might possibly have been fun if I’d had somebody to get wet with. I could’ve splashed gaily in puddles, swung on lamp-posts and sung a song or two, but I was alone. Drowning in torrential downpours on my own had no romance about it whatsoever. Gene Kelly wouldn’t have been quite so annoyingly smug if he’d just found out his best mate had been sleeping with his girlfriend.
By the time I reached the house I felt lower than I’d done all week. Oblivious to the elements, I waited shivering by the garden gate, unsure about what to do next. It was still only Saturday afternoon, roughly speaking there were another thirty-six hours to fill until Monday. Even if I slept for as much of it as possible, there was still too much time, time I would spend imagining Aggi and Simon together: having sex; exchanging secret glances; laughing conspiratorially. Once I opened the front door the outside world would be locked out, leaving just me and my thoughts.