My Legendary Girlfriend

by Mike Gayle

  ‘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.’

  ‘And now I know,’ said Kate as if she didn’t care.

  ‘I know it’s no excuse . . .’

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘I give new depth and meaning to the word “arsehole”.’

  ‘And the phrase “self-deprecation”,’ added Kate.

  The ice between us slowly melted and things eventually got back to their usual rhythm and energy. I told her about the previous evening in great detail – although skipping over any mention of Archway Kim Wilde – and she was highly entertained but, I think, more than a little disturbed.

  ‘Will,’ said Kate cautiously.

  ‘Yes?’ I responded.

  ‘You do know your behaviour’s pretty strange, don’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘I’m not that weird, am I?’

  ‘Well . . .’ she began.

  ‘Well . . .?’ I said expectantly.

  ‘I don’t mean to be insensitive, but somehow, I think that if I stopped one hundred members of the general public and told them that yesterday you smashed your best friend’s demo tape and mailed it back to him, called him up and left abusive messages on his answering machine, sat depressed in pubs on your own . . .’

  ‘Don’t forget being obsessed with my ex-girlfriend three years after she’s dumped me,’ I interjected.

  ‘Yes, that too. Added to the fact that you talk to strangers on the phone and give them fictional accounts of your evening’s activities – you lied about going to Marx’s grave with friends too. You went alone, didn’t you?’

  I said yes and added helpfully: ‘Don’t forget scribbling moustaches and thick eyebrows on a photograph of my ex-girlfriend and helping a friend destroy her cheating boyfriend’s possessions this morning.’

  ‘You helped a friend destroy her boyfriend’s possessions?’ asked Kate in genuine wonderment.

  I told her everything that had happened, missing out the part about the frisson of sexual tension in the air between Alice and me. She was especially shocked by the episode with the toothbrush and the cat crap.

  ‘You’re mad!’ exclaimed Kate. ‘You really are mad!’

  ‘Steady on,’ I joked. ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘Will,’ said Kate. ‘Can’t you see this isn’t normal behaviour? All one hundred members of my general public survey would’ve had you in a straitjacket quicker than you can say Mental Health Act.’

  I scratched my head and decided it was time to get out of bed. Kate, I thought to myself, as I pulled on my jeans, may have a point.

  ‘You know the Edge,’ I explained to her.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Edge,’ I repeated. ‘As in “close to the . . .”.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I think I’m about as close to it as it’s possible to get without going over. You don’t have to tell me about my behaviour, plenty of others have mentioned it, but none of them have told me a single thing I don’t already know.’ I stopped for a second, pulling a T-shirt on over my head. ‘I know I must seem weird to you, but believe me, it all makes sense from where I’m standing. It all stems from Aggi. It really does. She told me that she’d love me forever. I took her at her word. And now she doesn’t want to know.’ I picked out a shirt from the wardrobe and s
tarted putting it on. ‘Take Alice, for example. If she started bombarding Bruce and his new girlfriend with threatening phone calls he’d be able to get a court order to stop her. But where is her recourse? Society – I do hate that word – hasn’t provided any form of protection for her. His behaviour is deemed okay by their standards but her behaviour will just get labelled obsessive. But isn’t love obsessive? Isn’t that what it’s all about? It eats you up, controls your mind, takes you over and everybody says, “Oh, that’s so beautiful, they’re in love.” But when it’s over, and you start sending your ex-lover letters written in chicken blood, you’re suddenly labelled “insane” because you’re willing to do anything – absolutely anything you think will bring them back to you. Now tell me, is that fair?’

  There was a long pause. Kate coughed nervously. ‘You didn’t really send Aggi letters written in chicken blood, did you?’

  ‘What do you think I am?’ I joked. ‘A voodoo priest?’

  ‘Good,’ said Kate with a sigh of relief, ‘that would just be too weird.’

  2.15 P.M.

  I was about to confess to Kate how, at my most ‘insane’, I’d briefly entertained the thought of murdering Aggi, when the phone made a double beep, which broke my train of thought. I ignored it but it did it again seconds later. For a minute, my heart sank because I thought I’d broken the phone, until Kate pointed out that a double beep meant I had a call waiting. When I’d phoned BT to take over the line, the operator had asked me if I wanted the Call Waiting service. It was probably a bit decadent of me but as it cost nothing and was at a point in my life where I actually thought I might have more than one call at a time, I’d said yes. Following Kate’s instructions, I pressed the star button.

  ‘Hello? Is Will there?’

  It was my brother.

  ‘It’s me here, Tom,’ I replied, wondering what he wanted. ‘Who were you expecting?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tom in his monotone voice, which hadn’t just broken at fourteen, it had completely collapsed, losing all sense of expression along the way. ‘I thought you were sharing with someone.’

  I cast my mind back to the twenty-minute conversation I’d had with my brother where I’d told him I was getting a place on my own and he’d said, ‘Nice one, I’m gonna get me a bachelor pad some day,’ and I’d said the day he’d get a bachelor pad would be the day Mum and Dad died, and he’d moaned at me for making jokes about our parents’ mortality and I’d told him that there was no point in sticking his head in the ground because it was the same end waiting for us all, and he’d raced upstairs to his bedroom and played his Bob Dylan albums loud enough to disturb the neighbours.

  ‘I did tell you,’ I said. I remembered Kate. ‘Listen, I’m on another call at the moment. I’ll phone you back.’ I went to press the star button but changed my mind. I’d talked to Kate for a long time, and now I thought – especially after my earlier performance – was my chance to quit while ahead. ‘Hang on a second,’ I said to Tom. ‘I’ll be right with you.’ I pressed the star button and got Kate back on the line. ‘Hello, Kate? Sorry about that, it’s my kid brother. Can I phone you back later?’

  ‘No problemo, Mr Spaceman,’ said Kate. It was the second time she’d called me this. I was about to ask her what she meant by it when it clicked, it was an obscure reference to Gregory’s Girl. I felt like I’d just discovered the meaning of life.

  ‘No problemo, Mrs Spacewoman,’ I replied happily.

  ‘I’ll speak to you later.’ She giggled and added: ‘Oh, and Happy Birthday!’

  Tom and I weren’t exactly close. It was only in this last couple of years that I’d even considered him part of the human race. There were eight years separating us; what my parents had been thinking I don’t know. Maybe he was a mistake. Even so, recently he’d turned into a reasonably personable mistake. Yes, he was nosy, lazy and prone to borrowing things without asking, but there was something about him that was incredibly likeable. We rarely fought because he was just too laid-back to get uptight about anything. When he was born, I was determined to let him know who was boss and spent the next few years trying to discover more and more ingenious ways to make him cry, like stealing his dummy, pulling faces at his cot, telling him he had an allergy to ice-cream which would make him choke to death, but everything I did simply washed over him. My theory was that he’d received from my parents a double helping – that’s to say my helping – of the genes that control the ability to give a toss, which, I reasoned, explained without any loose ends, my complete inability to be carefree.

  ‘So, what can I do for you?’ I asked Tom.

  ‘Just wishing you a happy birthday and all that,’ he replied. ‘What’ve you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ I said casually. ‘I went out with a couple of people that I know down here. Nothing special. We just went up the pub, had a couple of pints, went back to a mate’s house and watched some Hong Kong action flicks: Drunken Master II, A Better Tomorrow II and Fist of Legend.’

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t learned the lesson that lying was neither big nor clever, I had. Very much so. But as Tom’s big brother, and quite possibly the only stabilising influence in a family that was falling apart around his ears, I felt a responsibility to be someone he could look up to; possibly even aspire to be, just as Simon’s older brother Trevor had been when Simon and I were growing up. For many years, even after Trevor had died in a car crash at the age of twenty-one, mine and Simon’s only ambition was to grow a moustache, drive a decrepit Mini Cooper and ‘score’ with ‘chicks’ in tan tights. I remember Simon once captured the essence of our admiration succinctly, when years later he described his brother to Tammy as: ‘Like the Fonz, only you could touch him.’ Trevor was cool. He made the world sound easy.

  ‘Where’s my card?’ I asked Tom.

  ‘The same place as my seventeenth birthday card,’ he retorted.

  I ignored him and set about finding a topic of conversation that he wouldn’t be quite so cheery about. ‘How are your A levels?’

  Tom tutted loudly. ‘Oh them,’ he said absent-mindedly. ‘They’re all right, I suppose.’

  He’d had his heart set on going to Oxford, I think, because Amanda, his hippy chick best friend/potential love interest, had applied there. My mother had called me up at the start of the week and told me the results of his mocks, which to put it kindly, weren’t exactly the kind of grades that got you into premier league educational establishments. I kind of felt sorry for him, and Mum said she thought he’d be really lost without Amanda.

  ‘Have you decided about which universities you’re applying to?’ I asked, in full big brother mode.

  ‘So Mum’s told you then?’ said Tom.

  ‘What is it I’m supposed to know?’

  ‘It doesn’t look like I’m going to Oxford,’ he said, not even revealing the slightest hint of emotion in his monotone voice.

  ‘Not if you carry on getting grades like that,’ I said. ‘What did your teachers predict?’

  ‘Three A’s.’

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘A B and two U’s.’

  On his behalf I tried to look on the bright side and told him the myth about Nottingham having the highest ratio of women to men in the country. He wasn’t impressed. Instead he began to list the pros and cons of his five places of study. It was tedious to listen to, truly painful. I diverted his attention. ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘She said that she’d call you this afternoon,’ said Tom, now mumbling.

  ‘Are you eating?’

  ‘Yeah, Sunday dinner,’ he explained, munching on another bite. Clearly I was boring him as much as he was boring me. ‘Roast chicken and fried egg sandwich,’ he added. Though I felt like throttling him for his lack of manners, I couldn’t help but find him amusing. ‘Mum’s gone to Aunt Susan’s,’ Tom continued, ‘and then she’s picking up Gran from her day out.’ I nodded pointlessly as I remembered the Kendal Mint Cake episode. ‘She won’t be back till about
four or five.’

  ‘Anything else to tell?’ I was going to ask him how Dad was, but I didn’t bother. Dad had apparently gone up the wall over Tom’s exam results. It wasn’t worth stirring.

  ‘I saw that girl you used to go out with a while ago,’ said Tom clearly. Either he’d put his sandwich down out of politeness – which wasn’t likely – or he’d finished it. ‘What was her name again . . .?’

  ‘Aggi,’ I said, feigning a lack of interest. ‘She was called Aggi. She’s probably still called Aggi.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw her last Saturday in Broadmarsh Shopping Centre coming out of the Index catalogue shop.’

  ‘Did she say anything about me?’

  ‘No. She asked me how I was and what I was up to and then went off.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was she on her own?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s quite good looking, you know,’ said Tom, as if he’d arrived at this fact using the latest scientific calibration techniques.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said impatiently, thinking to myself that if he was mentally undressing my ex-girlfriend I’d give him the punching of a lifetime when I came home for Christmas.

  I tried to resist the temptation, but I couldn’t keep my tongue still any longer. ‘So, you’re sure she didn’t ask about me?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ he sighed theatrically. ‘No messages, no secret handshakes and no mention of you.’ I sighed in return, although not loud enough for Tom to hear.

  ‘Well, that’s all my news,’ said Tom. ‘Happy birthday. I’ll see you next time you’re home maybe.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘See you later.’

  I thought about Aggi and birthdays. As an exercise in self-flagellation, I made a list of all the things she’d given me as presents in the past:

  20th Birthday

  Bottle of Polo after-shave.

  Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier.

  Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

  21st Birthday

  Best of Morecambe and Wise Vols. 1 and 2.

  The Edible Woman, Margaret Attwood.