My Legendary Girlfriend Read Free Page B

born, returned to the family nest to languish on the dole. Four years earlier they’d driven me – along with a suitcase, hi-fi, box of tapes and a Betty Blue poster – off to Manchester University, expecting me to gain a first-rate education, an ounce or two of common sense and a direction in life. ‘We don’t mind what you do, son, as long as you do it to the best of your ability,’ they’d said, not bothering to hide the extreme disappointment in their collective voices when I announced that I intended to study English and Film Studies. ‘Whatever for?’ asked the two-bodied, one-headed guardians of my soul. Neither were they impressed with my explanation which basically boiled down to the fact that I liked reading books and I liked watching films.
    Three years later, I concluded my journey on the educational conveyor belt and quickly gained a realistic perspective of my position in the world at large: I was over-educated in two subjects that were of little use outside of university without further training. Having only just scraped a 2:2, and bored with the education process as a whole, I bundled ‘further training’ into the box marked ‘out of the question’. Instead, I applied myself to reading a few more books, watching a lot more films and signing on. I maintained this pattern for a year or so, until the bank got tough with me during a short-tenancy in a shared house in Hulme. In a two-pronged attack worthy of Rommel, my bank manager withdrew my overdraft facility and made me sign an agreement to pay £20 a week into my account to bring the overdraft down to ‘something a little more reasonable’. And so, like a homing pigeon, I returned to the parental home in Nottingham and holed up in my bedroom, contemplating the Future. Both parents pulled any number of favours to help me get on the career trail, while my Gran telephoned with regular monotony informing me of jobs she’d seen in the local paper. Needless to say all their hard work was wasted on me. I wasn’t interested in a career, I had a roof over my head and, I reasoned, as long as I had the love of a good woman being poor didn’t much bother me.
    I say ‘much’, because occasionally my impoverished state did in fact work me up into a frenzy of bitterness. Fortunately, I learned to express my powerlessness by scoring as many points against Them – as in ‘Us and . . .’ – as I could. These minor acts of guerrilla warfare included the following:

    •  Obtaining a NUS card under false pretences.
    •  Using the aforesaid card to gain cheap admission to the cinema.
    •  Altering out-of-date bus passes.
    •  Damaging fruit in Tesco’s.
    •  Driving a car without road tax or insurance.
    •  Drinking complete strangers’ pints in night-clubs.

    I did anything which, generally speaking, kept my mind alive and made me feel like I was chalking up another point on my side of the great scoreboard of life. But it was Aggi who kept me sane. Without her I would have dropped off The Edge.
    Aggi really was quite brilliant, the most wonderful person I’d ever had the pleasure of meeting in my life. When we first started going out together I used to walk her home and while we were kissing and hugging good-bye on her door step, my favourite thing to do was to concentrate my whole mind on capturing the Moment – her smell, the taste of her mouth, the sensation of her body pressed against mine – I wanted to photograph it and keep it forever. But it never worked. Within minutes of walking through the damp streets of West Bridgford, with drizzle in my hair and an ache in my loins, she was gone. I could never recreate the Experience.
    We met in a charity shop during the summer break. Aggi was eighteen then and had just finished her A levels, while I’d just completed the first year of my degree. She worked at an Oxfam shop in West Bridgford which I’d been frequenting on a twice weekly basis, because of its high turnover of quality