My Legendary Girlfriend (19 page)

The reason I knew so much about Martin was that on my third coach trip to London in search of accommodation, the gods of misfortune allocated me a seat next to the git. We’d met once before, about four years earlier in the Royal Oak, when Aggi had been forced to introduce us because, unbeknown to Aggi and me, his Smiths’ tribute band, The Charming Men, were playing a gig there. For the entire journey to London (five sodding hours!), all he talked about was Aggi and how much she’d changed his life.

What really offended me about Aggi’s ‘shacking up’ experience was the fact that she didn’t think it was a big deal. She’d lived with him for three months before she dumped him for another student, at a different night-club, and moved back to her mum’s. I saw the whole episode as a threat to everything we had. When all you have is ‘you’, to give ‘you’, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, so casually,
is
a big deal. She’d been prepared to do that for three months with beady Martin, so why wasn’t she prepared to have a go at spending the rest of her life with me?

If I had known that one day I’d be in a flat with Aggi for the rest of my life I could have relaxed – I’d have been happy. I’d have taken up a hobby. Maybe even tried and liked football. I’d have been NORMAL. But Aggi wasn’t here and chances were she never would be. She was the one I wanted. The only one. She was made for me. I was made for her. She was my Legendary Girlfriend and I’d miss her for as long as I lived.

I got up from the bed, opened the window and sat on the ledge with my legs hanging outside. Lighting a cigarette I gently let out a silent fart. Chuckling heartily I sucked in some of the cold, damp air with my nicotine, causing me to cough and gurgle phlegm. It felt good to open up the window. I hadn’t realised it, but the air in the flat had grown so stale I could almost see it trying to escape. The glowing end of my ciggy looked warm and inviting. A long column of ash fell onto my jeans. I brushed it away and after a while I thought about food again. Stubbing out my cigarette, I left my perch and went into the kitchen. Opening a can of spaghetti hoops and dropping them into a pan I turned the heat on the cooker up to maximum. I was just about to light another fag when the phone rang.

6.08 P.M.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ said Gran.

‘Not too bad,’ I replied. ‘Can’t complain. Are you all right, Gran?’

‘Yes, thank you, dear. And you?’

‘Not too bad. And you?’

‘Fine. And you?’

‘Dandy. And you?’

‘Lovely!’

My Gran wasn’t senile, and neither was I. This was just our little joke, although I wasn’t all that sure whether Gran was quite up on the concept of irony. As far as I was concerned, this was our way of defusing tension caused by the fact that we had nothing in common, other than Francesca Kelly (my mother). We could talk to each other perfectly well face-to-face for hours on end, but on the phone, the importance of words always got blown out of proportion. I like to believe we spoke in clichés because it was much safer that way, but if my Gran wasn’t entirely in on the joke, all it probably meant was that I was an evil grandson with a crap sense of humour.

‘Your mother’s not in,’ said Gran.

‘Isn’t she?’

‘So where is she then?’

‘I don’t know, Gran. She’s probably out or something.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh.’

I introduced a new topic. ‘Nice weather we’re having, aren’t we?’

‘Not particularly,’ said Gran. ‘It’s raining cats and dogs here. Mrs Staff across the road says it’s the coldest September on record.’

‘Is it really?’

‘Coldest on record.’

‘Well I never.’

‘Happy Birthday for tomorrow,’ said Gran. ‘I would’ve phoned you tomorrow dear, but Mrs Baxter has managed to persuade her husband to take a couple of us up to the Lake District. I hope you’re not offended, my love.’

‘Of course not, Gran, don’t you worry. Have a great time. Bring me back some Kendal Mint Cake, eh?’

Gran got excited. ‘Oooh, you like Kendal Mint Cake? I shall have to get you a job lot!’

‘Yeah. That’d be nice.’

‘Well, I’d better be going, son. Take care and have a lovely birthday.’

‘Yes, Gran, I will.’

‘Oooh, before I forget I must tell you that your card will be late. I was trying to phone your mother all day yesterday to get your address. I’ve missed last post now anyway. It’ll get there by Tuesday. Never mind, eh? Better late than never.’

‘Yes, Gran. Better late than never.’ I glanced across the room at the card she had sent which was perched on top of my hi-fi. Perhaps she was going senile after all.

As I put the phone down wondering what exactly to do with the lifetime’s supply of Kendal Mint Cake she was sure to purchase, I realised that my spaghetti hoops were burning. The reason why I’d suddenly recalled my dinner was that the smoke currently working its way under the kitchen door had already reached the smoke alarm, which was now belting out the mother of all high-pitched screams. I’d been in the flat five days and already heard it six times. It was far too sensitive; let toast crispen a little too much and on came the siren. Once this happened, the whole household played the I’d-rather-burn-to-death-than-leave-my-poxy-studio-flat-and-turn-off-the-alarm game of endurance. The rules were simple, if a little cavalier: see how long you can stand the alarm before you’re compelled to get out of bed and turn it off at the control box on the ground floor. There were six residents in the house – I’d done it once, the residents of the two ground floor flats had done it twice each and the old man on the top floor had done it once. The man at number four on my landing, and the woman at number six on the top floor, hadn’t done it at all, which to my mind either meant that they were deaf or took the playing of bloody-minded Russian Roulette-style games very seriously.

In spite of the noise, the problem at hand still had to be dealt with – the burning spaghetti hoops. Opening the door to the kitchen fully, I half expected to be faced by a scene from
The Towering Inferno
and was pleasantly surprised merely to choke violently on thick black smoke. My eyes began to water almost immediately; I shut them tightly, reached out to the cooker controls and turned off the ring. Using a souvenir Bournemouth tea towel of my mother’s, I carefully manoeuvred the saucepan out of the kitchen, opened the window in the main room and laid it to rest on the sill outside, closing the window behind it. There was nowhere for the smoke to escape to now, it lingered in the flat like one of those ridiculously foggy evenings in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films. It was time for another walk.

As I reached the front door, the woman from downstairs came out of her flat, dressed in a white towelling dressing gown and huge Garfield slippers, a black cloud of pure annoyance hanging over her head like a garland of hateful intent. Standing on the tips of her toes – poor Garfield’s head squished unhappily against the grime-laden carpet – she attempted to press the reset button on the control box. I smiled at her in a neighbourly fashion. She scowled back. Within seconds of reaching the garden gate, the alarm stopped.

It was raining again. Archway looked more miserable than usual, all its colour had drained away, leaving only shades of grey and dog poo brown. I pulled my neck as far as I could into the collar of my coat (which still smelt) and headed in the direction of the newsagent’s up the road.

The newsagent’s on Holloway Road was owned by an old Italian woman with white hair and skin like a barbecued chicken. According to the sign on the door her sons were also involved in the operation, but as I’d never seen them, I couldn’t exactly confirm this. My problem with her, and the reason she was on my mental hit-list (sandwiched in the lower ranks between my bank manager and Foster menswear) was that she had the kind of attitude problem Mussolini would’ve been proud of. Every morning that I’d gone into her shop she’d been umbilically attached to a pay-phone on the counter, wilfully ignoring customers until an appropriate pause in her conversation, which as I’d found on Tuesday could be anything up to six minutes. I hated that woman, and still fuelled with Simon-inspired bitterness, reasoned that now was a particularly good time to exact revenge.

As usual, she was behind the counter, and as usual she was talking very loudly into the pay-phone, every now and again repeating the same word in Italian, while shaking her head emphatically. No one else was in the shop. It was just the two of us.
Italian Granny Vs William The English Teacher. Ding! Ding! Round one
. I don’t know what came over me but I secreted two Yorkie bars, a pack of Rolos and a copy of
Cosmopolitan
into my overcoat pocket and walked out without paying, not even bothering to pretend that I couldn’t see the item I’d wanted to purchase. Though she didn’t look up from her perch as I made my way to the door, this didn’t stop me, once outside, from running like the proverbial clappers all the way to the flat, imagining that she’d suddenly realised my crime and stopped her conversation mid-sentence, in order to summon her sons to stab me to death because the honour of their family name was at stake.

I hadn’t shop-lifted sweets in over sixteen years. Not since Simon and I had grabbed a handful of fizz bombs each from the newsagent’s around the corner from our junior school, and stuffed them down the front of our trousers, reasoning that should we ever get caught, the police would never think of looking there. It felt good to have a bit of raw excitement in my life again, a bit of cut and thrust, a bit of living life by the seat of my pants. Stealing a pack of Rolos wasn’t quite Raffles’ standard, but I was happy nonetheless. The important thing was that I’d got one up on Crusty Old Italian Woman. 1–0 to me.

Back at the flat most of the smoke had managed to escape to the place where smoke goes to die. I checked the answering machine (no messages), and took a look at the spaghetti hoops on the window ledge. The saucepan had stopped smoking now. Not all the spaghetti hoops had died in the fire, there were a number of survivors floating on a sea of ruby sludge. I dipped my fingers in to taste a mouthful. They were cold and wet with rain rather than tomato sauce, but as long as the carbonised seam of hoops underneath remained undisturbed, they didn’t taste too horrific. The saucepan on the other hand was knackered, which was unfortunate, as I’d ‘borrowed’ it from a set of three, against my mother’s express wishes. I ate the Rolos and Yorkie too and then felt sick and sorry for myself.

I searched for the phone, called Alice’s number again and left another message telling her to call me as soon as she got back in even if it was 3.00 a.m. because it was an emergency.

I turned on the TV, an action which I’d been trying my very best to avoid all week. As much as I loved to watch TV, the very thought of wasting hours doing it made me feel sadder and even more desperate, as if I were giving in to becoming a total loser without a fight. My mum had bought the portable TV for me as an early birthday present before I went to university. She’d said, and I quote: ‘It’ll be like a friend. Something on in the background in case things seem a bit empty.’ It was a nice thing for her to say but ever since I’d been terrified that, if I wasn’t careful, the day would come when I really would consider the TV to be my friend.

There was nothing on anyway. I flicked across the channels waiting for something good to happen. Sport, something about art history, news, horse racing and a nappy ad. Desperate, I decided to look for amusement elsewhere, but left it on in the background while I composed another letter to the bank:

As I put the full stop after the ‘y’ in Kelly, and wondered if it actually warranted a full stop, I glanced up at the TV and then scanned the room searching for confirmation of what I was feeling. I returned my eyes to the page, having found my answer. I was bored. When I was small and I used to tell my dad I was bored, he’d tell me that one day I’d find out what boredom was really about and then I’d be sorry. At that moment, sitting there in the flat, with the will to do anything at all almost crushed out of my body, I realised that I’d finally found out what it was like to be bored and I
was
really sorry. When I was bored as a kid, I had a whole lifetime ahead of me. I could easily afford to spend a few years here or there doing Nothing. But now, with a twenty-sixth birthday looming in the background, I no longer had time to waste that wouldn’t come back to haunt me, as those two years on the dole did every time I heard about someone from my degree course getting a job writing on
Empire
, earning over £30,000 pa, or simply getting a life.

I changed channels. The walls of the flat were far more interesting than what was happening on screen, so it was there my eyes lingered, soaking up the years of desperation caked on to the wallpaper, before finally coming to rest on Aggi’s defaced photograph. Crawling underneath the duvet, shedding trousers and socks on my journey to the pillow, I settled in bed. And there I lay, not thinking about anything at all, for quite a long time.

6.34 P.M.

In the right-hand corner of the room, just above the curtains, a cobweb caught my attention as a steady draught whistling its way through the poorly-constructed window frame tried its best to dislodge it from the wall. It looked a bit flimsy, as though it existed for decorative rather than practical purposes. Whichever spider had created this silken trap I decided was going to go hungry because no self-respecting house fly was going to be caught in a web as crap as this one. Even Mother Nature it seemed was capable of creating creatures as lazy, apathetic and half-hearted as me.