Blue Collar

by Danny King

  I met her on one of those stupid jeep safaris that drives you up into the mountains and takes you on a tour of the island’s accident black spots. She’d sat next to me in the back of the last jeep and we’d got on really well. Everything I’d said came out as funny and fascinating, at least to her it did, if not to the other passengers, who had to endure seven hours of merciless giggling and flirting – the poor bastards.

  Anyway, after our day in the mountains, me, my mates and the new love of my life’s mates all met up for dinner and a night on the slates. We had some lovely food, a few gallons of Harvey Wallbangers and danced into the wee small hours, jumping up and down and making up our own lyrics to ‘Come On Eileen’ when we gave up trying to work out what Kevin Rowland was singing. It was a really great night. Really really really. Then, at about four, the club closed and it was time to say goodnight.

  By this point, me and my sweetheart were all but inseparable. I know it sounds stupid but I’d grown genuinely close to her over the course of the evening. To me, this wasn’t just some silly holiday romance or a one-off knee-trembler, this was the start of something real. Something life-changing. Long after this holiday was over, I was going to see this girl again. And again. And again.

  And as luck would have it, she only lived in Hertfordshire, so this was more than just a pipe dream. That day, on that mountain, in that jeep, and under that sun, I’d met the girl I was going to spend the rest of my life with.

  So when my mates, her mates and her discussed the idea of going on to this little twenty-four-hour bar down by the beach to get in a few last drinks, I told them I was going home. Seriously, I said this.

  ‘It’s been a fantastic night but I’m dead on my feet and I’m going home. Have a couple for me and I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I promised my confused future wife, giving her the gentlest of little kisses before strolling off into the night like Sir Galahad with a particularly bad case of concussion.

  What an idiot!

  What a dick!

  So why had I done this? Simple – because I desperately wanted to see her again and I didn’t want to go ruining everything by getting really drunk and cheapening our love by trying to hang out the back of her on our first night together. I was more than happy to wait and utterly convinced that I was doing the right thing by her and that she would recognise my honourable intentions. Coming from a typically proud working-class family, I’d been brought up to believe this sort of nonsense.

  I reiterate, what a dick!

  Almost inevitably, both my mates banged her in the bog while I was tucked up in bed back at the hotel thinking noble thoughts and I never saw her again.

  Both of them? I mean, I could’ve just about understood one of them, but both of them? And in the bog?

  ‘She was well up for it,’ Paul and Andy had explained the next day. ‘I think you loosened her up a bit, know what I mean.’

  ‘How could you do that? You know I liked her.’

  ‘Well, you went home. She didn’t know why you did that and was all confused.’

  ‘What, so you both gave her one to clarify my position?’

  ‘You should’ve come along, then, mate, if you liked her an’ everything. You were well in there, you were.’

  ‘Oh, what, you think all three of us could’ve banged her, then, do you?’

  This was a real wake-up call for me, and from that day on I dropped my naively chivalrous gentlemanly tactics in favour of striking while the iron was hot. It’s unfortunate, but that’s just the way it is these days. Because if you’re not willing to take a girl to a twenty-four-hour bar when she wants to be taken to a twenty-four-hour bar, there’s no shortage of blokes who will.

  And so this was probably the reason I found myself waking up in the bed of a knee-knockingly attractive girl, whose name I didn’t know and whose life was a complete mystery to me, a dozen or so years later.

  All I knew about her in fact was that she slept in lilac sheets and didn’t have anything near my grandmother’s patience.

  2 What’s in a name?

  We both drifted off to sleep again after our headache tablets got to work. Even me, in spite of all the questions and excitement that naturally come from finding a beautiful blonde in bed with you on a Saturday morning instead of your work boots and half a kebab.

  I finally came around again at about ten, when I sensed someone moving about at the foot of the bed, and found I was no longer cheek-to-cheek with a mysterious blonde.

  She’d already made it into some grungy jogging bottoms, vest and T-shirt before I knew what was going on and looked apologetic about getting dressed.

  ‘Just my running gear,’ she explained sheepishly. I waited for her to demonstrate by running straight out of the house, but instead she asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee.

  ‘Do you have tea?’ I asked, not being one for coffee.

  ‘Er, yeah. Darjeeling? Earl Grey? English Breakfast?’

  ‘Have you got any Tetley’s?’

  The girl thought for a moment and told me the nearest thing she had was English breakfast tea.

  ‘Will that do?’ she asked.

  Failing a trip to the shops it was going to have to, so I told her to go easy on the milk and heavy on the sugar, but she disappeared off to the kitchen before I could tell her how many chocolate biscuits I wanted on the saucer.

  Sensing a little awkwardness on her part, I took the opportunity to search for my clothes and pulled on everything I could find, though my socks had a five-hour headstart on me and were nowhere to be seen.

  The girl returned with two cups and caught me pulling on my shoes.

  ‘Oh, er, here, I… did you still want your tea before you go or do you have to go now?’ she asked, stumping me with that one. I hated difficult questions.

  Now obviously – obviously – I wanted to stay, discover her name, get to know her, take her for dinner, dance with her through the night and spend the rest of my days doing everything I could to make her happy, but that wasn’t really the question, was it? The real question was, did I want tea before I went?

  I tried reading between the lines and working out what she meant but I’m hopeless at this sort of thing. I always have been.

  What did she mean? Did she mean, ‘Here, you can drink this tea if you like but then you have to go’? Or was she trying to say, ‘I’ve made you some tea as agreed, but to be honest I’d prefer it if you just went now to save us any further embarrassment’?

  I slowed my shoelace-tying down to a snail’s pace to buy myself precious seconds to pick apart each word and ended up having to flip a coin in my head. It came down tails, but that didn’t matter as I’d forgotten to pick a side and ended up reaching for a cup.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, then took one look at the lukewarm milky piss she’d brought me and kicked myself for not legging it when I had the chance.

  We sat next to each other on the bed and sipped our drinks against a backtrack of hanging silence. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, such as her name, who she was, what she did, how we’d met, how we’d ended up back here, what had happened once we’d got back and had she seen my socks, but ironically, she was the last person on earth I could ask these things. I mean, can you imagine it? All night long we’d been making sweet tender love and promising our hearts to one another then, mission accomplished, a few hours of kip and I was drinking her tea and asking her, ‘Er, sorry, who are you again?’ No, not tempting.

  I plumped for keeping my mouth shut, scouring the room for anything that would spark a memory and crawling along carefully with both feelers stretched way out in front of me.

  ‘So, how do you feel?’ I asked after a while. ‘A bit better?’

  ‘No, not really. I feel just awful,’ she replied.

  ‘Hangover or self-loathing?’ would’ve been the obvious follow-up question had we been either aliens, Americans or drugged up to the eyeballs on truth serum.

  ‘Yeah, I’m not feeling too clever myself,’ I settled for
volunteering. ‘What happened to the others?’ I eventually asked, figuring I was on safeish territory with that one as I’d been out with Jason and girls generally didn’t go out on a Friday night on their own unless they were lonely beyond desperation or undercover WPCs trying to catch serial killers.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ came the question I’d been dreading, a lot earlier than expected.

  ‘Er, yeah, no, it’s fine. No, no, of course I remember,’ I babbled, before asking. ‘Why, what happened?’

  The girl let that one go and filled in a few of the blanks for me. Me and Jason had apparently drunk ourselves into newborn wobbly antelopes off the back of my winnings (though she omitted to say where we’d been drinking or who we’d been drinking with) and a cab had come along and taken Jason away without me even noticing.

  ‘Don’t you remember, you kept buying him drinks and asking me where he was for ages after he’d gone?’

  I played that one out in my head but none of it looked like anything I’d seen before.

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s right,’ I replied so unconvincingly that I could’ve probably got a job on EastEnders had the casting director been sat on the bed with us.

  ‘You also kept on calling me Jo all night. Do you remember that?’ she then said.

  ‘Oh… bollocks. Sorry about that.’ I frowned, Jo being the name of my last girlfriend. How embarrassing, though it did narrow the field down slightly as far as my new blonde friend’s name went.

  ‘That’s all right. I was probably just as plastered as you by the end of the night,’ she said with a slight shrug. ‘I always get smashed on champagne,’ she confessed.

  I rarely did myself and remembered why the moment I stuck a hand into my pocket and pulled out nothing but the cotton lining and my bus fare home.

  ‘Oh, are you going, then?’ she asked when she saw me examining a handful of coins and fluff. I hadn’t intended to, but I could almost see the bottom of my cup and all of a sudden the girl seemed even more distant than ever.

  Only a few minutes earlier we’d been cuddled up in bed all nice and snug but suddenly there were clothes and clear daylight between us and we could barely look each other in the eye. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen at all. When I’d first woken up next to her it was like all my birthdays had come at once, or at least that the tooth fairy had finally delivered, but before I’d had a chance to spark up a big fat self-congratulatory cigar, the opportunity was suddenly sliding away from me and I didn’t have a clue how to slow it down.

  One thing was alarmingly clear, however. I was thirty seconds away from finding myself out on the street and once I was out there, I was out there for keeps. This girl, her bedroom and my socks would be gone for ever.

  But then, wasn’t that going to happen anyway? I mean, just look at her. Oh, you can’t, can you, it’s a book? Well, then allow me; she was as pretty a girl as any I’d ever known and she had a lovely quiet sort of way about her that made me want to bundle her up in cotton wool and reassure her that everything was going to be all right, although her demeanour could just as well have been down to the fact that there was some strange bloke in her bed who’d seen her arse and her bamboo mobile. She was athletic, well spoken and obviously a bit trendy. She knew what to wear, if not how to hang it up, and she lived in a spacious, pricey-looking flat that was decked out in ethnic chic-a-brac.

  And most unusually of all, she looked around about my age (early thirties) yet had no wedding ring or confused little kid peering out at me from the bedroom doorway to show for it.

  She was, in short, absolutely fantastic – which naturally meant she was way out of my league.

  If I’d seen her in the pub, I’m sure I would’ve glanced over at her from time to time and thought wishful thoughts, but I would never have gone up to her and introduced myself. There would’ve been no point. I would’ve stood no chance. Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t got four heads or an ant’s nest for a face or nothing but still, you have to have some sort of idea about the weight division you’re punching in otherwise you just end up picking yourself up off the canvas every Saturday night. And this girl was a first-round knockout if ever I saw one.

  Which made our imminent parting all the more inevitable, no matter how gut-wrenching.

  ‘I’d probably better shoot off,’ I finally replied, reluctantly setting my cup down on the chest of drawers next to the bed.

  The girl agreed and said that it was probably for the best, considering the catastrophic state we were both in, and I noticed her face softened a little as I rose to leave. Probably gratitude, which was something at least. Well, I had no desire to run her through the wringer squeezing excuses out of her, so I decided to let her off the hook and hoped that she would think better of me for it after I’d left. Not that that would do me any good, but then again you can’t spend your whole life dropping to your knees in tears that every day’s not Christmas, can you? No, you just have to get on with it and be a man. Take it on the chin. Turn the other cheek. One set all, God save the Queen and… oh, bollocks to this, let’s just get out of here, shall we?

  ‘Right, well, that’s me, I guess. Thanks very much for the tea. English breakfast, you say? I’ll have to look out for it. Right, have I got everything? Keys? Wallet? Mobile?’ I frowned, filling my pockets and suddenly looking forward to that lunchtime pint even more than ever.

  ‘I’ll see you to the door,’ she said, bolting out of the bedroom and skipping down the hallway towards the front door.

  I passed her at the front door and wondered if I should try to give her a kiss or not. I wanted to, of course. Who wouldn’t? She was beautiful and I was never going to see her again. Perhaps I could even nick a quick squeeze of her knockers while I was at it, or would that be pushing it? Probably, so I simply stopped just in front of her, held her gaze for the briefest of seconds then pressed my lips to hers.

  Remarkably, she didn’t stumble back or slog me around the chops with one of her wooden elephants or nothing, but instead responded to my kiss and slipped her arms around my waist. I couldn’t believe it. I was kissing her. I was kissing this beautiful girl. And she was kissing me back?

  I’ll tell you what else I couldn’t believe; I couldn’t believe I’d waited until we were both dressed and stood next to an open front door to try this, considering where I’d been only twenty minutes earlier. What a mug. I weighed up the situation and wondered if there was a realistic chance of getting her back inside and out of her jogging bottoms, but kicked myself when I realised I’d missed the boat again. Being one of life’s big cowards, I’d waited until the moment of ‘now or never’, like my mate Doug, who finally worked up the courage to ask out the girl he’d fancied for years the day before she moved up to Dundee, or my Uncle Brendan, who sent the old girl in the fish and chip shop dirty texts from his deathbed, and like the pair of them found there was no time to do anything about it when we came up trumps.

  ‘Thanks for putting me up for the night,’ I said, deciding against asking if there was anything else I needed to thank her for.

  ‘You’re welcome, it was fun,’ she told me, the guilty glint in her eye giving my guts one last punching, then all too soon I was outside.

  My inner voice screamed at me to ask her for her phone number. Ask her for her name. Ask to see her again. Ask her anything, anything at all, just don’t let her shut that door… …but in the end I did none of these things.

  I simply smiled manfully at her one last time, told her I’d see her around some time and sighed as the door closed between us.

  What a loser.

  I waited for a couple of seconds to see if it was going to reopen but it didn’t. It stayed right where it was and pursed its letterbox into a frown at my complete lack of resolve.

  I half thought about knocking again, but my odds were lengthening with every hesitation, taking me from an even-money favourite when I’d woken up next to her this morning to a fifty-to-one outsider. What
exactly I’d been waiting for was suddenly beyond me. I’d had nothing to lose by going for it – and I’m not talking about sex here, just human connection – but I’d decided not to risk it anyway. And now I was stood out here like a big chump with no chance of seeing her again, no different to if I’d made a ring out of an old discarded condom wrapper and asked her to marry me with it.

  Seriously, what a big fucking loser.

  I made a note of the number of her house, just on the off-chance

  I found my bottle several years from now and decided to pop round and ask her out for a drink, then turned and started making tracks.

  Talk about getting out of bed on the wrong side. This was going to annoy me all day, if not for the rest of my life.

  I’d reached the end of the road and was picking up the pace in an attempt to get to the pub (any pub) before my disappointment doubled me over into a crumpled heap, when all of a sudden my mobile rang. It had a different ring tone from the one I normally had it set to but I just figured I must’ve switched it to something different the previous evening – dicking around with phones being the nation’s favourite drunken pastime.

  No name came up to show who was calling, just a number. I checked the number to see if I recognised it and rather confusingly I did.

  It was mine.

  How the hell was I calling myself when I had my phone in my hand? It could’ve only been my own self-confidence phoning up to explain where he’d been this morning.

  As it turned out, it was a girl.

  ‘Hello. Hello, Terry, is that you?’

  ‘Yes. Hello, who’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s Charley,’ she told me.

  ‘Charley?’ I thought for a moment. ‘I’m sorry, who?’

  ‘Charley. You know, Charlotte?’