My Legendary Girlfriend

by Mike Gayle

  An Action Man.

  An anthology of poetry by e. e. cummings.

  22nd Birthday

  Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones.

  The Greatest Hits of Burt Bacharach.

  A packet of Liquorice Allsorts.

  A pair of boxer shorts from M&S.

  23rd Birthday

  She dumped me.

  I made another list of all of the things I’d bought her on her birthdays:

  19th Birthday

  Fame annual (1982).

  England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage.

  It’s a Wonderful Life.

  20th Birthday

  Star Wars.

  A dress she wanted from a second-hand stall in Afflecks

  Palace in Manchester.

  The Greatest Hits of The Smiths Vol. 2.

  21st Birthday

  A bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream.

  The Empire Strikes Back.

  Oliver Stone’s The Doors.

  A plain silver ring from Argos.

  22nd Birthday

  The Best of Scott Walker and The Walker Brothers.

  Betty Blue.

  The Best of Hancock Galton and Simpson.

  I never gave her the twenty-second birthday presents. By then she’d already dumped me and wasn’t returning my calls. I still had them at the bottom of my wardrobe under a pile of clothes that I didn’t wear any more. They were still wrapped up in the gift paper designed by a female artist Aggi liked. Once, in a maniacally depressed mood, I considered ceremonially burning all the presents Aggi had given me, but I really would’ve been cutting off my nose to spite my face. The only thing I couldn’t look at were the books, as she used to write messages in them; things about the book or how much she loved me. When it all ended I took them off my bookshelf and gave them to the Oxfam shop in West Bridgford.

  Bizarrely, Aggi and I had never got around to doing The Exchange of the Carrier Bags – that curious post-splitting-up ceremony, where former lovers attempt to behave like mature adults as they return each other’s belongings; records, hair brushes, books, etc., in a plastic carrier bag – it’s always a plastic carrier bag – without falling apart. One of the parties, of course, always fouls up the genteel nature of proceedings by being totally devastated that the relationship is over. Aggi knew I would be that party. I tried to force her hand and arrange it through her mum, saying that I’d left some important stuff relating to a job I was after in her daughter’s room, but after The Calling Round The House Drunk Episode her mum said she’d have to check with Aggi first and she, of course, said no. And so, in our great love war, these were the items belonging to me that went Missing In Action:

  • A compilation tape of sixties music Simon had made for me.

  • The spare key for the lock on my mountain bike.

  • Nevermind, Nirvana.

  • 1 black T-shirt.

  • The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf.

  • A pair of red baseball boots.

  • An Action Man.

  • A first-year essay from History module one, entitled: Discuss the Origins of the Second World War (52%. Well structured but would have benefited from more original research.).

  • Dad’s watch.

  • A videotape with four episodes of the third series of Blackadder and an episode of The A Team recorded on it.

  • My copy of Catcher in the Rye.

  • Unreliable Memoirs, Clive James.

  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera.

  On the other side of the coin, the following were my prisoners of war:

  • Star Wars.

  • The Empire Strikes Back.

  • Three pairs of earrings.

  • Fame annual (1982).

  • The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie.

  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson.

  • Riders, Jilly Cooper.

  • Her copy of Catcher in the Rye.

  • The Greatest Hits of The Pretenders.

  • New Order, Technique.

  • Four editions of Marie Claire.

  • A calculator.

  • 25 A4 envelopes.

  • A pair of Marks and Spencer 60 denier black tights (unworn).

  2.42 P.M.

  I wanted to call Kate back straight away. I missed her more than I’d missed anyone since Aggi. The more I thought about her the more relaxed I felt. If I concentrated, I could recreate the comforting nuances of her voice in my head as she talked to me about life, films, funerals, careers and love – it was almost too wonderful for words, which led me to think that perhaps the outer reaches of my brain were beginning to obsess. I had to stop my head from taking over my life and learn to take things one day at a time. As an exercise in willpower and something of a diversionary tactic, I promised myself that before calling Kate, I would sort out the mess in the flat once and for all. It was disheartening not being able to locate anything I needed. I had all but run out of clean crockery and the smell of festering food – melted ice-cream on the carpet, half eaten sandwiches curling before my eyes, spaghetti-hoop-encrusted plates simply crying out to be put out of their misery – was as low as I could go. I cleared the dirty crockery into the kitchen and got down on my hands and knees and tried to scrub the ice-cream out of the carpet – it wouldn’t budge, it had bonded to the fibres. Moving on, I put all of the kids’ exercise books in neat piles against the wall, and emptied the contents of my suitcase into the wardrobe, which required me to push the doors shut with both hands and lock them, as if the clothes inside were lunatic hordes trying to escape their asylum. The room was now beginning to resemble the flat that I had signed a six-month lease for only a fortnight ago. I filled the empty plastic Asda carrier bag that doubled as my bin with all manner of detritus: a half eaten Mars bar, crushed Hula Hoops, invitations from Barclays to receive a credit card and much more. I was about to add a letter from the TV licence people that had arrived on Wednesday when I thought the better of it. It was addressed to The Occupier. Instinctively I reached for my marker pen and wrote ‘Not Known Here’ and crammed it in my overcoat pocket ready to be posted back to them – the name in my passport did not say The Occupier, and I wasn’t about to start responding to it now just to satisfy lazy TV Licensing Authority bureaucrats. It was a stroppy, mean-spirited and more than a little pathetic thing to do, but I must say, I really did enjoy it.

  All week I had been freezing in bed because Mr F. Jamal had made the mistake of positioning the sofa-bed underneath the windows, which wasn’t a good idea, particularly as the windows were in such a state of disrepair that the draughts coming through them could have filled the sails of a small yacht. To rectify this situation, I dragged the sofa-bed across the room and positioned it against the opposite wall, stopping every now and again whenever the carpet snagged itself under the bed’s wheels. Although its new location meant that I couldn’t open the bathroom door to its full extent – the only other alternative meant blocking the sole exit out of this tiny hell hole – I decided to leave it in its new home. Sweating profusely after this brief exertion, I considered it time for a fag break, but my conscience would have none of it. Instead, I continued my rearranging frenzy while my momentum was up. The room’s two wardrobes, I decided, would look far more pleasing to the eye, on the wall opposite the kitchen door, as where they currently stood made them look too imposing. After a short debate as to whether it was worth emptying their contents first (it wasn’t), I began struggling with the smaller of the two wardrobes.

  At first I rocked it from side to side, but disturbing creaking noises emanating from the joints indicated that this wasn’t the way forward. Instead, lowering my shoulder against one side, I pushed hard, as if in a rugby scrum. It took a great deal of exertion before it moved, but as it finally did so something fell, scraping against the wallpaper. Leaving the wardrobe where it was, my fertile imagination took hold, suggesting that it might be a rotti
ng hand, which would of course have accounted in some part for the smell of my room. Although only half joking, at the back of my mind it had occurred to me that it would be typical of the kind of misfortune which had dogged me this last twenty-six years, that Kate, the Kate whom I was obsessed about to the point of possibly falling in love, would turn out to be a serial killer. I was relieved and yet a little disappointed to discover not one, but two objects, neither of which was a severed limb. Lying at the base of the wardrobe were an envelope of pictures from SupaSnaps and a hairbrush.

  The object in my hand (the photos, not the hairbrush) took my breath away. I felt dizzy and nauseous and so sat down clutching them to my chest. I could feel the adrenaline caused by my excitement whizzing its way around my body. Somehow I knew that these photographs would contain pictures of Kate, my Kate, the Kate of my dreams – the Kate I’d never seen. A hand-delivered argument from my conscience lodged itself in my head.

  ‘Looking through someone else’s photographs,’ it said, ‘without their consent constitutes an infringement of a person’s moral rights and is tantamount to the deplorable act of reading a diary, or private letters. I strongly recommend that you leave these photos well alone – especially as I know you’re hoping she might be naked in some of them.’

  ‘What a load of old arse,’ said my brain, in an alarming show of bravado. ‘We want to look. And we want to look now!’

  I had neither the will nor the inclination to leave the photos unseen. These weren’t just photos – they were photos of the person in the world I most wanted to see.

  This must be what it’s like when blind people have operations to give them sight, I thought . . . For the first time in their lives, they can just see and believe.

  The photos were holiday snaps which, as far as I could tell, had been taken one summer in Paris. The majority of them featured either one of two girls in their late teens or early twenties, although there were a few bottom halves of the Eiffel Tower and shots of the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre thrown in too. There were two good head shots of the girls, which I separated from the pile to study closer. One girl had long dark brown ringleted hair which, though tied back away from her face, still appeared unruly and untamed. She wore no make-up though her skin was quite pale. Her lips, however, were a healthy pinkish colour and she had small silver studs in her ears. In some of the other photos she was wearing a plain white T-shirt and jeans and it was clear that she was taller than the other girl. The only other detail I noted was that she had a nice smile.

  The other girl, as far as I could tell, had naturally blonde hair (or a very good hairdresser) which was cut into a sharp bob. Despite the fact she was pushing out her tongue, which screwed up her face, it was obvious she was very attractive – more attractive, in fact, than her brown-haired companion. Her skin was tanned and her eyes were the bluey-green of tropical oceans. A white chiffon scarf adorned her neck and she too had small silver studs in her ears. She was wearing a yellow halter-neck top with a short royal blue checked skirt. The only other detail I noted was that she had legs to die for.

  If I had to choose one of them just on looks, I said to myself, then I’d like Kate to be the blonde.

  I phoned Kate.

  ‘Hi, Kate? It’s me, Will.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Kate cheerily. ‘How was your brother?’

  ‘Okay,’ I replied, fingering the corner of the blonde girl’s photograph. ‘He’s trying to work out which university to go to.’

  I was impatient to find out which of the girls she was, but I didn’t want to bring the subject up out of the blue. I don’t know why. I suspect my conscience had a great deal to do with my unease.

  ‘Tell him not to bother,’ said Kate. ‘Look at me.’

  I did. Well, at least I looked at the photos of the two girls in my hands. Kate began talking about how a lot could be learned about life from just living but I tuned out, concentrating on the photos instead. I moved off the bed, over to the wall where Aggi’s photo was. I positioned the two possible Kates on either side of Aggi and wondered if, one day, I’d be compelled to deface one of these photos too.

  I couldn’t wait any longer.

  ‘What colour’s your hair?’

  ‘My hair?’ said Kate quizzically. ‘I don’t get you. What’s that got to do with Keynesian economics?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ I replied sheepishly. ‘But please, tell me what colour your hair is.’

  ‘My hair?’

  ‘Yes, your hair.’

  ‘It’s a reddish colour,’ said Kate. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s not brown?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And it’s not blonde?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not brown or blonde?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Neither of the girls in the photo was Kate. As always I had let myself run headlong into disappointment. I tossed the photos into my carrier bag bin and made ready to cut this conversation short as I felt the black clouds of my sullen nature descending.

  ‘It’s not naturally red, of course,’ announced Kate after some time. ‘It’s a dour brownish colour by nature. I inherited it from my dad.’

  ‘I thought you said it wasn’t brown,’ I snapped.

  ‘It’s not brown,’ said Kate, her voice revealing a distinct edge of worry that I should consider her hair colour to be so important. ‘It was brown. But now it’s red. It’s quite simple, you know.’

  Reaching into the carrier bag I plucked both photos from the rubbish and examined them closely. Instantly the scales fell from my eyes. The brown-haired girl was, to me, the most gorgeous creature that had ever existed. I returned the blonde girl to the bin and lay back on the bed, holding the real Kate’s photo above my head, staring in wonderment.

  ‘I have a confession to make.’

  ‘Sounds juicy,’ said Kate. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘I think I found some of your holiday snaps,’ I announced, still gushing.

  ‘The ones where I’m in Paris?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘I wondered what happened to those,’ said Kate ponderingly. ‘Were they behind the wardrobe?’

  ‘Wow.’ For a nano-second I imagined hidden cameras. ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘It’s not that big a flat,’ replied Kate. ‘I checked everywhere except there. I couldn’t be bothered to move the wardrobes. You’ll probably find my favourite hairbrush there too. Weird things backs of wardrobes, things always drop behind them.’ She paused. ‘So what do you think? Are you disappointed?’

  ‘No. Not at all. Who’s the blonde girl?’ I asked, immediately regretting having opened my mouth.

  ‘That’s my flat mate, Paula. It’s okay, most lads fancy her. She’s very pretty.’

  ‘She’s all right, I suppose,’ I said casually. ‘Not really my type. To make things even, do you want to know what I look like?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Kate. ‘I think you’re nice whatever you look like. I’m trying to imagine that you look totally hideous. That way I can only be impressed.’

  ‘I’ll send the photos back to you, shall I?’ I said, even though I was desperate to keep them.

  ‘Nah. You keep them,’ said Kate. ‘It was a terrible holiday anyway. We spent two weeks getting chatted up by loads of really slimy blokes. One guy even told me that I looked like his mother. Now is that pervy or what?’

  We spoke for at least an hour, in which time she told me all about the holiday to Paris which she’d actually taken this summer. In return I told her about the holiday to Tenerife I’d taken back in July with Simon and Tammy. We’d rented a one bedroom apartment on the agreement that the living room would be my bedroom. Instead, I ended up sharing it with Simon three nights in a row after Tammy had thrown him out simply for being a git. And when they weren’t arguing, the living room, with its paper thin walls, wasn’t nearly far enough away for me to be saved from hearing them thrashing about in the throes of passion.
It was a very depressing holiday.

  I was beginning to get hungry as I drew my holiday narrative to a close and on top of that a niggling worry about the cost of all these phone calls had wormed its way into my head. I’d been on the phone for hours. As it was, I already owed the bank millions, my dad £300 which I’d borrowed for the holiday and Tom £30, and he hadn’t even got a job. I rounded things up and said good-bye, telling Kate that I’d give her a ring at the end of the day to tell her how the rest of my birthday had gone.

  I plucked my beautiful lilies from the kettle and placed them on the bed as I was in need of hot water to make a Spicy Tomato Pot Noodle (discovered hidden behind the Honey Nut Loops). Brown water was still on the menu so I used my initiative and filled the kettle with the sparkling mineral water I’d purchased the previous night. While waiting for the water to boil, I flicked through the photos in the main room again, separating them into two piles: ‘Kate’ and ‘Not Kate’. I took the pile of ‘Kates’ with me into the kitchen, which was now full of steam, and poured the hot water up to the marked level on the Pot Noodle and then added a touch more for good luck. Usually I hated the three minutes it took for the noodles to soften, but time flew, engrossed as I was in flicking through my ‘Kate’ pile again and again, studying each one for clues about her personality.

  With half the Pot Noodle I made a sandwich, adding some of the soy sauce from the sachet and then wiping the Pot Noodle dust from my hands onto the seat of my jeans, I made my way to the bed but not before returning my flowers to their ‘vase’. Between mouthfuls, it slowly occurred to me that there was a high probability that in spite of myself, I might actually be happy. In the last hour or so I hadn’t thought a single negative thought. Maybe this is what happiness is, I wondered. Part of me reasoned that I should sit back and relax and enjoy this sensation, fleeting as it was bound to be. The rest of me – that part of me that tried to touch the grille on the front of the gas fire when I was three, despite the fact that I’d been burnt by it before – wanted to investigate this feeling. Would it, could it, stand the test?