‘Dominic Carter . . . and like I told you before, there’s no way I’m doing that. No way in hell.’
I take an enormous swig of my own pint of Carling and regard Wimsy through an expertly furrowed brow.
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes!’
Wimsy sits back and folds his thin arms over the old Fat Face jumper I gave him last week. ‘Oh yeah. That’s right. You’re a chicken.’
‘I am not a chicken!’
Wimsy nods. ‘Yeah, you are.’ He points a finger at me. ‘Mr Chicken, that’s you. Oliver Chicken. You live at No. 1 Chicken Street, in Chicken Town, Chickensville.’
‘Stop saying chicken.’
Wimsy just stares at me for a moment with a grin on his face, before raising both elbows to his side. ‘Bwak buck buck buck,’ he intones as he waves his elbows up and down slowly.
I grit my teeth for a moment. ‘Why do I bother hanging out with you, again?’ I ask him as I grip my pint glass.
‘You enjoy my refreshing honesty and candour,’ he replies, still continuing to slowly wag his elbows up and down.
‘Stop doing that.’
‘Alright, but my point bleedin’ stands. You should go grow a pair and go see your bloody Samantha. You might get some answers – and it might stop you being such a grumpy bastard.’
‘I’m a grumpy bastard?’ I say to him in disbelief.
‘Yes. You are. I am thoroughly and comprehensively depressed. This is a very different thing. You are just a grumpy bastard. And you need to talk to Samantha!’
‘I can’t! It’s just too damn hard!’
Wimsy waves a dismissive bony hand. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. It won’t be that bad.’
‘Yes, it will!’
Wimsy leans forward. ‘You don’t know that, you hairy brass pillock!’ He points a rigid finger at me. ‘That’s your whole problem, Ollie. You build things up in your head way too much.’
‘No, I don’t!’
‘Yes, you do! Just go and see her! It might make you feel better!’
‘No, it won’t!’
‘Won’t it?’ He shrugs. ‘I don’t know . . . maybe it won’t. But tell me this’ – Wimsy leans forward even more, so much so that his head now hovers over my pint – ‘would it make you feel any worse?’
Which is an extremely good point.
I rub my hands across my face. ‘I just don’t think I’ve got it in me to confront her like that, Wims.’
He sits back in his chair and folds his arms again. ‘Then I don’t reckon you’ll ever move on, chief.’
Oh Christ.
He’s probably right.
This is why I hang out with Wimsy. Having his life comprehensively ruined has given him a blunt attitude towards the entire universe that I find very refreshing – even if his advice does make me nauseous.
The idea of confronting Samantha makes me want to vomit up my kidneys, but it might be something I have to do, so I can move on with my life.
I’m angry at her – and what’s more, I’m confused.
Confused as to why she ended our relationship – and why she chose to do it in such a humiliating way.
The frustration and agony of not knowing why Samantha dumped me has eaten away at my very soul. I’ve tried to ignore it, I’ve tried to suppress it – but it’s clear I can’t do that any more. If I am ever to move past this, I need to know why it happened.
Which brings us bang up to date, with me stood outside a garden centre, my anus quivering like a scolded dog.
I look back over my shoulder at my car. Wimsy is sat in the passenger seat giving me a huge thumbs-up. I offer him a watery smile and stare back towards the garden centre entrance.
With a final, long drawn-out breath, I gird what loins I do possess, and start walking towards Griston’s Garden Centre, with a look of bleak determination on my face.
This look drops off like the pound did after Brexit as soon as I’m actually in the garden centre, though. As I move from the large undercover shopping area, and out into the broad expansive courtyard, where they keep all the actual plants, I am swamped by happy memories of strolling through this very same set of doors, on the way to surprise my lovely girlfriend at lunchtime.
The intoxicating smell of plants assails my nostrils, sparking off flashbacks to far happier times. Over there, by the hanging plants, is where I gave her a box of her favourite Monty Bojangles chocolates. Way over at the back there, by the ponds, is where I stole a secret kiss when nobody else was looking. That big trestle table covered in lavender? That’s where I told Samantha I had tickets to the opening of Thorn Manor.
All of this batters me in the face in a split second, and all of the determination and strength I had outside dribbles out of my body, and down the nearest drain.
I have to leave. I have to get out of here. I have to save myself!
I turn on my heel, fully intent on getting out of Dodge as fast as my legs will carry me, when I see her.
Samantha is walking through the big undercover shop, just past one of the enormous standees selling Resolva weedkiller. This is somehow quite apt, as I am a weed, and if she sees me, I will be instantly killed.
I actually let out an audible gasp of terror.
Samantha is deep in conversation with one of the other staff members – an older lady who I recall as being a Jan. Or a Jane. Or something else beginning with J. It was definitely a J – without a doubt.
Who cares what her bloody name is! We have to get out of here!
But now Samantha and JanJane are walking directly along the aisle that leads through the shop, to the exit. If I go that way, I will definitely be seen.
Hide!
Hide, you fool!
Letting out another gasp of horror, I scuttle sideways like a crab, in search of a large rock I can crawl under. Griston’s isn’t known for its rock selling, though – unless you count the decorative pebbles – so I have to find something else to shield myself behind, before my ex-girlfriend sees me, and the world ends.
I could duck under that trestle table full of lavender, which I mentioned earlier. But this would leave me far too exposed, so I immediately rule it out.
There’s some definite merit to secreting myself behind the box hedges. They should certainly be large enough to conceal me – but then they are in a high-traffic area of the garden centre, and I might be spotted by someone else, who might then inform a staff member that there’s a man secreted about the box hedges. I will instantly be dubbed a pervert and arrested.
The only other area I can reach before Samantha and JanJane see me is the one that contains the garden sheds. This is, of course, the perfect place to go, and I really should have put it at the top of the list. What can I say? I’m not functioning with high mental efficiency right now.
The sideways scuttle brings me to a selection of three sheds large enough for me to hide myself in. I then go through a hasty game of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in my head.
The one on the left is too small to get into. It’s more one of those storage bin things you throw the shears and gardening gloves into after you’ve had a hack at the buddleia. The second is a Wendy house, and is therefore not appropriate in the slightest. If hiding behind a box hedge might make me look like a pervert, what would hiding in a Wendy house do for my reputation?
Don’t answer that.
The third shed is perfect, though. It’s a bog-standard job, complete with shingle roof and solid-looking pine walls. It should do the trick, no problem. I can pop myself in there and wait it out.
Or at least, I could, if the bloody thing wasn’t locked with a padlock!
Who padlocks a sodding shed in a sodding garden centre?! What possible purpose could it serve? Are they perhaps afraid that someone may try to steal something from the probably empty shed? A cubic metre of pine-smelling air, for instance? Or have they had a lot of desperate men trying to hide from their ex-girlfriends over th
e course of the last few months, and have decided that enough is enough?
Regardless, that option is not open to me, so off I go into the bloody Wendy house, and the risk of a possible future reputation as a bit of a Rolf Harris.
And it’s just in the nick of time too. If I had dawdled a second longer, I would have been seen by Samantha and JanJane, of that there is no doubt. It’s a miracle I manage to get away with it at all.
I crouch down, hastily squeeze myself through the small front door of the Wendy house, and immediately spin around to look out of one of the tiny windows. I stare up and out of it as the person I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with – and JanJane – go walking past, talking about the shipment of garden gnomes they are expecting in an hour.
My heart pines openly as I look at her in the flesh for the first time in way too long.
Samantha, that is, not JanJane.
I’m sure JanJane is a very nice person, but if I can’t actually remember her name, I’m not really going to be that in awe of her, am I?
Samantha looks beautiful, of course. This was as inevitable as death, taxes and the lies of politicians.
She’s wearing her dark-green Griston’s Garden Centre polo shirt like it’s something from a catwalk, and the way her hair is tied back in a rushed ponytail is a study in effortless style.
This is what my eyes see, anyway. For anyone else on planet earth, she probably looks like an attractive blonde girl in a dowdy work shirt, who would rather be talking about anything other than garden gnomes with her assistant JanJane.
But to me – as I gaze up at her from my crouched hiding place – she looks like a million dollars.
Oh bloody hell, I think I’m about to start crying in a Wendy house. This must be some kind of new personal low for me. It even tops grasping my erect penis in front of a baby deer. If not by much.
As my emotions roil and bubble away inside my chest, I watch Samantha and JanJane come to a halt right in front of my Wendy house, as they are joined by another person – a tall young man wearing a pair of green combat trousers, big black work boots and a Griston’s polo shirt, much like Samantha and JanJane’s.
‘Hi guys!’ he says as he joins them. ‘Sam? Can I speak to you about that problem we were having with the main fish tank? If we don’t get the filtration sorted out soon, we’re going to lose some of the tetras.’
‘Yes, of course, Riley,’ she replies.
‘I’ll go see if I can find out when the delivery’s coming, Samantha,’ JanJane says. ‘See you later.’
‘Thanks,’ Samantha replies, and watches JanJane disappear back where she came from, before turning her attention back to Riley the fish tank man.
‘Is there anything wrong with the fish tank?’ she asks him in an amused voice.
Riley grins and shakes his head. ‘Nah. Course not. I just wanted to get you alone, so I could do this.’
All the universes collapse in on themselves as Riley leans forward and kisses Samantha square on the lips.
‘No,’ I say to myself, in the smallest voice imaginable. It’s probably the same way a tiny shrew would say ‘no’ in the confines of its mammalian brain, as it sees the hawk descending from above.
‘No, no, no,’ I repeat, tears sprouting from my eyes. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no,’ I continue to babble as I watch my beloved swap spit with another man.
Samantha giggles and puts one arm around Riley’s waist. ‘You’ll get us both into trouble, you know,’ she tells him.
Riley looks around. ‘Who with? The place is almost empty! And Jeff is off today, so there’s nobody stopping me.’
Riley kisses Samantha again, this time passionately – and probably with tongues.
No! No! I kiss her with tongues, you bastard! It’s my tongue that should be in her mouth!
‘It should be . . . my tongue. It should be my tongue. It should be my tongue,’ I moan as quietly as I can – obviously now in the midst of a huge emotional breakdown. ‘It should be my tongue. It should be my tongue. It should be my bloody to—’
‘I’m sorry I wiped bogies on you, mister.’
‘Mb.’
Now, then.
If somewhere in this broad and exciting universe of ours (the bits that didn’t collapse when Riley kissed Samantha) there is some race of aliens, far away in the vastness of existence, who have taken it upon themselves to catalogue every single word ever uttered by any sentient creature across the cosmos, then surely they would have catalogued the word ‘mb’ by now.
Quite why they would be constructing such a gigantic tome of knowledge is beyond me. Perhaps in their huge, alien intellect, they have become bored with the trivialities of Euclidean geometry, and the search for a unifying theory for the atomic and subatomic worlds, and have instead turned their attention to writing a really, really bloody good dictionary. The kind that contains every single word ever uttered, including the one I’ve just said – which is ‘mb’.
Now, you can’t just have a list of words in a dictionary. You also require a description of their meaning. And our alien friends – being the creatures of vast and unknowable intellect that they surely are – would no doubt have made sure that they had an appropriate description for what the word ‘mb’ means.
I therefore have no doubt that the entry into the Dictionary Galactica would read something like this:
Mb (pronounced mb) – the sound a human male makes when he hears a small child’s voice right behind him, while trapped in a Wendy house watching his ex-girlfriend play tonsil hockey with a new man.
A strained noise escapes my vocal cords. I have to slap a hand over my mouth to prevent the scream that’s rising up from the recesses of my soul erupting into the world, and giving away my hiding position.
Slowly – ever so slowly – I turn my head to see a small girl, parked in the gloomy corner of the Wendy house, staring at me with wide, innocent eyes.
She has obviously recognised me, but it takes me a few moments to register who she is.
‘Lauren?’ I venture.
‘Yeah?’ Lauren replies, one finger starting to probe the inner workings of her left nostril.
‘You’re here,’ I say in disbelief. Lauren does not reply. ‘You’re here . . . now.’
Lauren continues to stay quiet and rummage around inside her olfactory cavity.
‘How?’ I mutter – not to Lauren this time, but to whatever deity or supernatural monster is out there. The one who has contrived to place me in the middle of the single most awful and unlikely coincidence in the history of mankind.
I am trapped in a Wendy house, with my ex-girlfriend right outside kissing her new boyfriend. In the self-same Wendy house is the tiny girl who wiped bogies down my face, just after that ex-girlfriend had broken up with me, in front of a Bavarian oompah band.
Can I go insane now? Is that okay with everyone?
‘What are you doing?’ Lauren asks me, squeezing into the corner a bit more. ‘Why are you in here?’
‘Er . . .’ Oh my God, what exactly am I meant to say to her?
I’m in here, Lauren, because I don’t have the guts to confront my ex-girlfriend, due to a crippling lack of self-esteem?
Will Lauren understand that? Or would I have to try to explain to a six-year-old what self-esteem means? That could take some time, as she’s lucky not to be old enough to need self-esteem yet, and will therefore have no idea what I’m on about.
I instead elect to lie, because lying to small children is always the best approach.
‘I’m playing a special game of hide-and-seek with my friends,’ I tell her.
‘Are they your friends outside?’ Lauren asks, pointing at Samantha and Riley. I can’t bear to look, just in case they’re still going at it hammer and tongs.
I swallow a large ball of bile. ‘Yes. Those are . . . my friends.’
‘You must not be very good at hide-and-seek, then.’
‘Why’s that?’
Lauren points again. ‘They�
�ve found you.’
I spin around to see the worst possible thing imaginable. Samantha and Riley are both bending down outside the Wendy house and are looking at me through the tiny windows.
‘Prb,’ I say.
Prb (pronounced prb) – the sound a human male makes when he’s been discovered hiding in a Wendy house with a small girl he isn’t related to, by his ex-girlfriend and her hunky new lover.
‘Ollie?!’ Samantha exclaims in horror.
Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod.
‘Hi Samantha!’ I say in a voice full of manic cheeriness. ‘Fancy seeing you here!’
Then another voice pipes up. ‘Sam? Have you seen Lauren anywhere? I can’t find her. Is she in there again? She is, isn’t she! Lauren Grosvenor, you come out of that Wendy house right— Oh Jesus Christ, she’s in there with a pervert!!’
I shake my head vociferously and start to gesticulate wildly. ‘No! No! I’m not a pervert! I’m not a bloody pervert!’
Riley’s face falls in horror. ‘Aren’t you that bloke who wanks off in front of baby deer?’
‘What? No! That was just . . . That was just . . . Oh bloody hell!’
I have to get out of this Wendy house before I’m arrested for accidental Rolf Harrising.
Samantha, Riley and the angry-looking mother of Lauren the bogey monster all step back, allowing me to squeeze myself out of my impromptu hiding place. Lauren follows me out, and immediately runs into the arms of her mother.
I stand straight and hold out both hands. ‘Look, there’s been a massive misunderstanding here.’ I am no longer terrified of confronting Samantha. That has been comprehensively eclipsed by the terror of being arrested for Rolf Harrising.
‘What are you doing here, Ollie?’ Samantha asks. ‘Why were you hiding in there?’
‘Because . . . Because . . .’ It’s probably time I just told the truth. It may be embarrassing, but at least it’ll stop them calling the police. ‘Because I came here to talk to you, and then I bottled it, so I hid in there, hoping you’d go by without seeing me, so I could get out of here.’
Dumped, Actually Page 18
