My Legendary Girlfriend

by Mike Gayle

  ‘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.

  When I’d finished my story, roughly an hour later, without pausing she told me that I ought to be strong. She herself was recovering from a recent break-up of a relationship.

  ‘That’s why I was crying on your answering machine – thank you for not mentioning it, by the way – phoning the flat reminded me of living there, which reminded me of being there with my boyfriend, which reminded me of the fact that he had dumped me.’

  I thought she was going to start crying, but she didn’t. Instead she took her turn in what was quickly becoming a miniature self-help group for that small but vocal strata of society known as The Dumped. Her boyfriend – whom she refused to refer to as anything but ‘my ex’ or occasionally ‘that heartless bastard’ – had dumped her three weeks earlier, totally out of the blue. They’d been together for six perfect months.

  ‘I lost the plot for a while,’ said Kate, ‘I really did. I used to lie in bed just staring at the ceiling. I even unplugged the phone just in case he ever tried to call me again. I didn’t eat because I knew that I’d throw up. I didn’t see anyone – not even friends – for nearly two weeks. I just stayed in watching telly and eating Hobnobs.’ She laughed. ‘Talking of which . . .’ I listened to a packet rustle and the sound of an oat-based biscuit being delicately masticated. She made a satisfied kind of cat noise and continued: ‘That’s better. And then one day I just woke up. I said to myself, I can spend the rest of my life mourning his loss or I can get on with my life. Which is what I did.’

  I marvelled at her confidence. She’d managed to do the one thing I could never do – she’d moved on. But the more I thought about it the less impressed I was. There was no way she could have loved her ex the way I loved Aggi, otherwise she’d be as crippled by misery as I was. The two cases weren’t comparable.

  Kate continued: ‘I’ve never understood why people insist on saying things like, “There’s plenty of other fish in the sea.” My mum actually said that to me, you know, after I was dumped by the person formerly known as “my boyfriend”. There’s me crying my heart out and all she was offering me by way of consolation was a fish metaphor! She wouldn’t have said that if that heartless bastard had died horribly in a car crash. She wouldn’t have said, never mind Kate, there are plenty of other boyfriends out there who have the advantage over your ex of not being dead.’

  She had a good point.

  Just as I was wondering what to say next, out of the blue she said, ‘Between grief and nothing, which would you choose?’

  I recognised the quotation straight away. I knew it because me, Aggi, Simon and his then girlfriend, Gemma Walker (shelf-life three weeks, two days) had spent one Saturday afternoon, four years ago, watching Breathless, the Richard Gere version of Godard’s A Bout de Souffle as research for an essay I was writing on Hollywood adaptations of non-English speaking films. I’d chosen the title because it meant I got to watch The Magnificent Seven, too, although the downside of that was having to endure The Seven Samurai, as well, which, to put not too fine a point on it, was about as meaningful as my moderately flabby arse. In one scene, Gere’s girlfriend – played magnificently by Valerie Kaprisky – reads aloud a passage from a book and then drops it as she kisses him. Simon and I spent five minutes advancing that scene frame by frame to find out what the book was, because the passage made such a lasting impression on the both of us.

  ‘That’s from The Wild Palms,’ I said excitedly, as if Kate was in a position to award ten house points and a gold star. ‘William Faulkner.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Kate. ‘I didn’t know. That heartless bastard wrote it in a letter he sent after he finished with me.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said awkwardly.

  ‘Well, what’s your answer?’ she asked.

  I told her my answer would be nothing. She didn’t believe me. But it was true. If I had to do it all again I wouldn’t have gone out with Aggi. I would have walked straight out of Oxfam that day, albeit without my Elvis mirror, but thankful in the knowledge that at least my sanity and self-respect would be intact in years to come.

  ‘But what about the good times?’ probed Kate. ‘You must’ve had some good times, surely?’

  ‘Yeah, we had some good times,’ I said, quickly flicking through some of them in my head. ‘But at the end of the day what have I got? Nothing but memories. I’m twenty-six and I constantly live in the past. I’ve been without Aggi longer than I was with her and I still can’t get over her. Ignorance, compared to this, would be bliss.’

  Kate was beginning to tire of me. I could feel it. I wanted to tell her my whole life story. I wanted to tell her everything that was inside me. But I was convinced I was boring her.

  ‘Am I boring you?’ I asked, trying to make the question sound casual.

  ‘No, why should I be bored?’ Kate asked.

  ‘No, well, maybe just a little bit,’ I confessed. ‘It’s appalling that you have to listen to me droning on like this. Sometimes I’m so boring even I stop listening.’

  She laughed. It still sounded like summertime.

  ‘Kate, tell me about you,’ I said, lighting up a cigarette. ‘Tell me something I don’t know about you.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know, anything you want.’

  ‘I can’t think what to tell you,’ said Kate. She paused. I took a deep drag on my cigarette. ‘Okay, I’ve got it. Ask me three questions that you want answers to and I’ll ask you three.’

  I agreed. My mind was racing, trying to think of questions that would be intriguing, sexy and yet devastatingly witty.

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Good question,’ said Kate. I tried to detect the irony in her voice. There was none. ‘Let’s sort the geography out.’

  Kate lived in a flat in Brighton with her best friend Paula. Paula was out with her mates from work, which pleased me immensely because I liked the idea of the two of us being alone, talking conspiratorially late at night. Kate had stayed in because she had no money. She’d dropped out of her first year at the University of North London, where she’d been reading East European Studies (‘We were known as the “Euro Studs”’).

  ‘So why did you leave?’

  ‘Because I was going to get kicked out anyway,’ said Kate, sighing. ‘I hardly went to any lectures. I was in love. It seemed more important to be with my ex than learn about the history of the European trade agreements or have a social life. He was always having to g
o away and then I’d miss him so much that . . .’ Her voice began to falter. She took a deep breath and the tone of her voice changed, as if she’d made a conscious decision to try and never think about him again. ‘He’s history.’

  ‘Do you miss London?’ I asked, adding: ‘This is my second “official” question, by the way.’

  She laughed and said: ‘I don’t miss London at all. It’s too expensive, it’s grimy, it’s dirty and it’s unfriendly. It reminds me of him. I like Brighton. My flat’s only five minutes from the sea. And I love the sea.’

  I thought long and hard about my third question. I thought of funny things to ask, I thought of poignant things too, but there was only one thing that I wanted, almost needed, to know. It was about her boyfriend. A subject that was now clearly off limits. As usual I succumbed to my compulsion.

  ‘What was your ex like?’

  ‘He was just a guy,’ replied Kate without hesitation. ‘Just a guy who thought he meant the world to me and was right. But between grief and nothing, I’d take grief.’

  She refused to say anything more.

  ‘I know you only said three,’ I said, almost, but not quite, shyly, ‘but I’ve got another question.’

  ‘Ask away,’ said Kate.

  ‘Will you phone me again soon?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘We’ll have to see.’

  11.45 P.M.

  When she’d put the phone down I tried to dismiss her from my mind but I couldn’t – she wouldn’t go. Instead I went over the answers I’d given to her three questions.

  Her: Who was the first girl you ever fancied?

  Me: Vicki Hollingsworth. I was in my early teens. It didn’t work out. Too many complications.

  Her: What’s your worst habit?

  Me: Making pot noodle sandwiches. [Pause] Smoking. [Pause] Lying. [Pause] Thinking about my ex-girlfriend.