My Legendary Girlfriend by Mike Gayle Read Free Book Online

films.’
    ‘. . . special . . .’
    I ran out of things to hate.
    ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said Alice.
    I tutted softly and told her I didn’t. She refused to elaborate on what ‘something special’ would entail, said good-bye, and promised to call me on my birthday. As I replaced the phone I whispered a small prayer of thanks to whoever was responsible for introducing this angel into my life.
    10.01 P.M.
    Peak time Friday night. Office workers, labourers, cleaners, architects and all, wash themselves free of the fetid stench of Work. This was the moment they were finally allowed to forget they were office workers, labourers, cleaners, architects or whatever, and remember, perhaps for the first time in five days, that first and foremost, they were people.
    All week I’d been a Teacher. But what I wanted now was to be a Human Being.
    I should’ve been out there with the office workers, labourers, cleaners and architects.

    I should’ve been getting my round in.
    I should’ve been making jokes about my boss.
    I should’ve been onto my sixth bottle of Molson Dry.
    I should’ve been dancing somewhere.
    I should’ve been out on the pull.
    But I wasn’t. . .
    While everyone in the Western hemisphere was out having a great time, I was in having a crap time. This of course explained why none of the second-division friends in my sodding address book – people whom I only ever contacted when really, really desperate – were in. Of the six calls made I got one no answer, two requests to enter into dialogue with answering machines and for the rest, I got the unobtainable tone. I refused to leave any messages on the grounds that there was no way I was letting anyone – least of all friends I rarely spoke to – know I was in on a Friday night and desperate for their company, while they were out starting their weekends with a bang.
    I looked at my watch and wondered optimistically if it was telling the wrong time. I called the speaking clock:
    At the third stroke it will be Ten-o-six-and-fifty-seconds .
    Not altogether dissimilar to the time on my watch.
    At moments like this, when loneliness seemed like my only friend, the only place safe to hide from the world at large was under the sheets. It was time to get out the sofa-bed.
    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