My Legendary Girlfriend (6 page)

The sofa-bed was pretty diabolical as a sofa and not that much better as a bed; the fact that these two nouns were joined together by a single hyphen failed to make the object they described any more comfortable than Dralon-covered paving stones. I threw its two cushions to the floor to reveal the depressing sight of the bed’s underside. It always required more strength than I thought I had to pull the bed frame out. I took a deep breath and pulled. It slowly creaked into action, unfolding stubbornly.

Leaving my socks and shirt on, and pulling the duvet off the floor, I lay on the bed and tried desperately to forget the cold and the reason I’d retired there in the first place. The need to hear another human voice became paramount in my mind.

I turned on the radio on my hi-fi, hoping that
The Barbara White Show
would be on. I’d been listening to her show on Central FM all week. Barbara White was the ‘larger-than-life’ host of a phone-in show where assorted nutters, losers, weirdos and plain helpless cases called in with their problems. Barbara – a woman about as qualified to advise as I was to teach – listened, made the appropriate sympathetic noises and then came up with answers so facile she honestly had to be heard to be believed. The fact that she was American was probably the only reason she got away with giving such screamingly obvious advice.

Barbara was talking to Peter, a student from Newcastle-under-Lyme, who had just finished his A levels and had got into his local university to study Engineering. He wasn’t happy, though. His girlfriend of seven months was going to university in Aberdeen and he was worried that the huge distance would drive a wedge between them.

It occurred to me as I listened to his pitiful story that Peter was being naive in the extreme. He’d been in a relationship for less time than it takes to make a baby and here he was wanting to make commitments. If I’d been his age I would have been over the moon at the prospect of hitting university as a single man – able to do what I want, when I want, with thousands of like-minded individuals who also think they’ve just invented sex, alcohol and staying up past 2.00 a.m.; people who’d want to party, party, party ’til they were sick and then party some more. Peter was guaranteed to have three years more exciting than my next ten.

I was so entrenched in my bitter attack against Barbara’s caller I managed to miss most of her solution. All I heard her ask was, ‘Do you love this girl?’ and he replied he didn’t know – he thought he did but probably wouldn’t be sure until it was too late. As Barbara announced she was going to a commercial break, the phone rang.

I knew it wouldn’t be Simon – his gig didn’t finish until eleven; it was too late for either of my parents; I’d just spoken to Alice and as far as I knew no one else had my number. The odds were, of course, that it was Martina, because my life was like that: too much of what I didn’t want and a permanent drought of the things my heart desired most. I hoped with all my strength that it wasn’t Martina, because as well as not feeling up to listening to her complain about how terrible her life was, I especially didn’t want to dump her, at least not right now.

I answered the phone.

‘Hello?’ I held my breath and waited for the first sounds of Martina’s placid yet disturbing voice.

‘Hello,’ said the female voice on the other end of the phone, which clearly wasn’t Martina’s. There was a school-girlish enthusiasm about it that would’ve been refreshing had it not been me she was talking to.
Whoever this person is
, I thought,
this call is going to disappoint her
.

‘Can I help you?’ I asked politely.

‘You can indeed,’ she replied. ‘I’m sorry to call so late but I thought if you’re anything like me it’s better to have a call late at night rather than early in the morning. My mum tries to ring me at seven in the morning sometimes just to tell me I’ve got a letter from the bank. Mind you, I’m never in at that time these days because I’m on my way to work, but if someone rang me on say, my day off, then boy, would they be in big trouble.’

She was rambling. The more she rambled the more adorable she sounded.

‘I was wondering,’ she continued, ‘whether you could help me. I used to live in your flat up until a week ago . . .’ She paused as if reaching the punch-line. I suddenly recognised her voice. She was Crying Girl from my answering machine. ‘I was wondering . . . has there been any post for me? I’m expecting a cheque to arrive. I was doing a bit of casual office work for a temp agency and they’ve sent my cheque to my old address, even though I’d told them a million times that I was moving to Brighton.’

‘Mmmm,’ I said, thinking it sounded sympathetic.

There was a long pause.

I was about to offer another ‘Mmmm’ to fill the gap in the conversation when she spoke again. ‘Well . . . is there any post?’

Instead of answering her question I deconstructed her voice. It was quite pleasant, really. The sort of voice that made me feel at ease; it was a bit well spoken at the edges but far from aloof. No, this girl sounded like she was definitely worth investigating, especially as there was the small point of her tearful message. I wanted to ask about it but couldn’t quite work out how to do it.

‘Sorry?’ I said.

‘Is there any post?’ she repeated. ‘I’m sorry for phoning so late but the cheque’s quite important. I need it to pay this month’s rent.’

I finally woke up. ‘Oh, sorry. No, there’s no mail for you. There’s a big pile of stuff downstairs that no one’s touched all week. People who used to live here ages ago, I think. But I’ve been through it and I didn’t see any addressed to this flat.’

‘Really?’ she said disappointedly.

‘Really. Tell me, what’s your name?’ I asked, quickly adding: ‘So I can check again, if you like,’ so that it didn’t sound like a chat-up line.

‘Katie,’ she said. ‘Or Kate rather.’ She laughed. ‘No, that’s Kate Freemans, not Kate Rather!’

‘As in the catalogue,’ I quipped and then desperately wished I hadn’t.

She laughed.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll just be a second while I nip downstairs and check them again.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ she said gratefully. ‘It’s nice of you to go to all this trouble.’

I put the phone on the bed and raced down the stairs in my boxer shorts, socks and shirt ensemble. Picking up the discarded post, I shot back upstairs, slamming the door behind me.

‘There’s loads for Mr G. Peckham,’ I said, breathlessly shuffling through the letters. ‘He’s got a lot of stuff from the AA.’ This was small talk of the tiniest variety, but I didn’t have any other choice if I wanted to keep talking to her. ‘There are two letters for a K. D. Sharpe, all with New Zealand stamps, and the rest is boring junk mail stuff. Sorry, nothing for a Kate Freemans.’

‘Well, thanks for looking,’ she said stoically.

‘Maybe it’ll turn up tomorrow,’ I replied in a cheery tone which was very un-me. ‘The post’s pretty crap around here. It’s my birthday on Sunday and I haven’t received a single card yet. If they don’t arrive tomorrow I won’t have any on the day.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ she said, her disappointment at being cashless seemingly evaporated. ‘How old will you be?’

‘Do you really want to know?’ I knew it was a stupid question the moment it slipped off my tongue and into the conversation. She wasn’t going to say no, but it wouldn’t be a truthful yes, either. She wasn’t honestly going to give a toss about how old I was.

‘Yes,’ she said, so clearly, so confidently, so joyfully, that I was totally convinced she’d told the truth. ‘But don’t tell me. I’ll guess. Are you thirty-one?’

‘No.’

‘Older or younger?’

‘Younger.’

‘Twenty-nine?’

‘Lower.’

‘Twenty-six?’

‘Got it in one! Well, three actually. But well done anyhow. How did you guess? Do I sound twenty-six?’

This, of course, was stupid question number two. Where all this inanity was coming from I couldn’t begin to guess, perhaps, I mused, I’d become a portal between Earth and Planet Stupid.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘How does a twenty-six-year-old sound?’

‘Although technically speaking,’ I explained, ‘I’m not actually twenty-six until Sunday, they do happen to sound a lot like me. The male variety, of which I consider myself to be a prime specimen, tend to whinge a lot about receding hair lines, loss of physique, life, work, love-life (or lack of love in their life) while constantly harking back to some golden age, usually their university days. It’s quite a monotonous sound but comforting all the same.’

Kate laughed. With my hand on my heart, and a finger hovering over the self-destruct button marked, ‘Cheesy Similes’, I swear that her laughter perfectly captured summertime – the sun on my neck, birds singing in trees and cloudless skies – all at once.

‘And what about you?’ I asked. ‘How old are you?’

She didn’t speak.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You’re twenty-one or twenty-two?’

‘Nope.’

‘Higher or lower?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Lower.’

‘You’re right.’

‘Twenty?’

‘Er, nope.’

‘Nineteen?’

‘Yup,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be twenty in November.’

There was a long pause.

The long pause grew longer.

The long pause grew so long that unless one of us said something soon, the only thing left to say would be good-bye. I panicked and said the first thing that came into my head.

‘Ahhhhh.’

There was another long pause.

‘What does “Ahhhhh” mean?’ enquired Kate, mimicking my ‘Ahhhhh’ note perfectly.

I hadn’t a clue what to say next and was running out of plausible ideas at an alarming rate. ‘Nothing really. Well not much anyhow. It’s just that . . . I used to know a Katie at junior school. She was the fastest runner in the whole of our year until she was ten. It was amazing. I’ve never seen a girl go so fast. I’ve often wondered whether she ever made it to the Olympics or anything like that. You’re not that Kate, are you?’

‘’Fraid not, Mr Spaceman,’ said Kate.

‘Spaceman?’ I repeated.

‘I don’t know your name.’

‘No, you don’t, do you?’ I thought of making one up purely for my own amusement, but somehow the honesty and the purity of her voice shamed me into not being so pathetic. ‘Names are irrelevant. They’re just labels. I mean, how can you tell what a child should be called before they’ve even had a chance to do anything?’

I was well aware of how pompous it sounded, because I’d thought exactly the same thing when I heard Simon say it to a girl at a party. The reason I was employing its use now was that I desperately wanted to ape the fantastic results he’d got using it.

‘Don’t you like your name?’ asked Kate.

‘It’s all right,’ I said nonchalantly. ‘But it’s not the name I would have chosen.’

She laughed, which wasn’t exactly the reaction I’d been looking for. I asked her what she found amusing and she said something about boys being all the same and then asked me what name I would’ve chosen, which proved unfortunate as I couldn’t remember which name Simon had used.

‘I . . . I don’t know,’ I said nervously. I jammed the phone up against my ear with my shoulder, leaving my hands free to frantically tear the letter I’d written to the bank into little pieces.

‘I think I’d call you James,’ she said playfully.

I was intrigued. James? I listed all of the cool Jameses I could think of: James Bond (shaken but not stirred cool), James Brown (‘soul power’ cool) and James Hunt (daredevil motor racing cool) – in spite of my list and the fact that the odds were a million to one against, I couldn’t help feeling she had a different James in mind. James Baker, to be exact, a small lad in the year below me in junior school who perpetually had scabs around the edge of his lips.

‘Why James?’ I asked defensively.

‘I don’t know,’ she said whimsically. ‘You just sound like a James. But if names are irrelevant why did you ask me what mine was?’

‘Because I wanted to know how wrong your parents were.’

‘And how wrong were they?’ asked Kate guardedly.

‘Only quite wrong,’ I answered. ‘Not far off the mark, I suppose. Three out of ten for effort.’

The rude streak that dwelled within me had risen to the surface. I’d like to pretend that my obnoxiousness was part of my seduction technique but it wasn’t. It was sheer blatant crapness. My mouth always ran away with itself, intoxicated by the power it wielded. It happened any time I came face to face with genuine niceness, as if scientifically testing the limitations of my chosen subject’s pleasant nature – to see how far was too far.

‘Are you trying to be offensive?’ she asked, more stunned than hurt.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said, apologising profusely. ‘Forgive me, I’m stupid. It’s just . . . it’s just that I’m just having a bit of a rough time at the moment.’

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Kate, genuinely concerned.

I tried to stop myself but couldn’t.

‘It’s my girlfriend,’ I said. ‘She dumped me.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I know how you feel. It’s terrible when things like that happen. I feel terrible. Your girlfriend’s just dumped you and here I am wittering on about cheques.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I said cheerfully, momentarily forgetting my grief. ‘It’s not like she’s just done it.’

‘So when did it happen?’

‘Three years ago.’

The whole story came out. During the appropriate breaks in my narrative, Kate made supportive ‘uh-huh’ noises which made me feel even worse. Here I was wasting the time of an interesting, velvet-voiced and quite possibly good-looking girl, telling her about my ex, when any man with any sense would’ve been trying their best to chat her up.