My Legendary Girlfriend Read Free Page A

intensely in their mother tongue – probably about why the Northern Line was so dirty – all the way to Camden, where they alighted. This seemed to be the law as far as the north branch of the Northern Line was concerned – beautiful people got off at Camden; interesting people got off at Kentish Town; students and musicians got off at Tufnell Park; leaving only the dull, ugly or desperate to get off at Archway or thank their lucky stars they could afford to live in High Barnet.
    Halfway up the escalators at Archway, I searched around in my top pocket for my ticket and travel card. They weren’t there. My hugely expensive one-year travel card was now stopping at all stations to Uxbridge on the Piccadilly Line. I shut my eyes in defeat. When I opened them seconds later, I was at the top and thankfully no one was checking tickets at the barrier. I let out a sigh of relief and thought to myself: Sometimes, life can be unusually kind .
    Opening the front door to the house, a depressing atmosphere of familiarity overwhelmed me. For five days this had been home. Five days, but it felt like a decade. I pressed the timer switch for the hallway light and checked the mail on top of the pay-phone. As I put the key in the door to my flat the lights went out.
    7.20 P.M.
    ‘Ahhh! You’ve been burgled!’
    These were the words my ex-girlfriend, Aggi, used to turn and say to me every time she saw the state of my bedroom. It was our favourite running gag which, in spite of its asthmatic tendencies, used to have us in stitches every time.
    Aggi and I split up exactly three years ago, not that I’d been counting the days or anything. I was aware of precisely how long it had been because she dumped me on my twenty-third birthday. And despite everything I’d done to forget the day I was born and the occasion of her dumping me, the date remained locked in a brain cell that refused to die.
    I was woken that fateful day by the sound of silence; Simon and Garfunkel got that spot on: silence had a sound. Back then at my parents’ house, if anyone was in and not comatose, silence never got a look in. Every action of the occupants was pursued without regard for the sleeping: washing machines at six in the morning, clinking cutlery, breakfast television, ‘Have you seen my shoes, Mum?’, shouting, and occasionally laughter. Living in the aural equivalent of Angola, I quickly learned to filter out the white noise of lower-middle-class family life.
    Later, when my parents had gone to their respective places of work (he: Nottingham City Council; she: Meadow Hall Retirement Lodge) and my kid brother, Tom, to school, the house was allowed to drift back into a restful peace. My brain, no longer filtering out anything more threatening than the occasional starling chirping in the garden, woke me up – silence was my alarm clock.
    On top of my duvet lay a solitary brown manila envelope. Whenever post arrived addressed to me my dad would leave it there before going to work. I think he hoped the excitement of seeing it there would somehow galvanise me into action. It never did. Nothing could. At the time, I didn’t receive many letters because I was a hopeless correspondent. It wasn’t so much that I never wrote letters, I did frequently, I just never posted them. At any one time there were dozens of sheets of notepaper littered around my room with barely legible ‘Dear so and so’ scrawled across them. With nothing happening in my life I had very little to say beyond ‘How are you?’ and to have documented even the smallest slice of my mundane lifestyle (‘Today I got up, and had Frosties for breakfast . . .’) would have left me too depressed for words.
    I was well aware of the contents of the envelope on my bed before I even opened it, as the day in question was Significant Wednesday, the bi-weekly religious festival that heralded my salvation – my Giro. My parents were, to say the least, not the happiest of bunnies when I, their first