The Wrong Time

By the time I met Phil, I felt like I had spent the past ten years fighting a war. 

It was very much The Wrong Time to meet someone. I had recently brought a house I didn't like on a street I didn't like with Ted the Pseudonym and I had two moggie kittens and a wedding planned for the winter. I had paid for a white dress and green versions for three bridesmaids. So when I unexpectedly fell in love with Phil within minutes of seeing him, it seemed strange that rather than panic, I instead felt like I had finally laid down my arms. 

It was easy- or as easy as anything is when you've got a house and some cats to dispose of along with a fiancé- but despite all of that it was not hard. He was an easy person to love immediately, giving and immediate and interesting. 

That was why I was shocked when he left the pub for the first time after meeting Jenna, and she stated baldly and drunkly that he looked like you. He was so the opposite from you. He was peace and you were conflict. He was light where you were darkness. What he put inside me grew and what you put inside me rotted me away. I couldn't see it. "You've got a type" she said and I wondered at that. If I had had a type at all previously, it was simply men who didn't love me or that I didn't love. It was always limerant: unrequited by someone. This wasn't that. I was terrified. 

I left my fiancé and the cats on the Tuesday night and knew by Wednesday that I would marry Phil. 

The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps

I have never known another person with your name. I have met perhaps two others, but never known intimately anybody else with the same name as you. 

That is a blessing and a curse. I don't often have to say your name out loud, but because I only ever say it out loud to mean you, that gives your name a kind of mystical quality that it doesn't really deserve. If you had been called Dave or Steve would you have been easier to forget? Your face blending in to all the other Daves and Steves so that you were more quickly forgotten? Perhaps not. 

Your name is not uncommon as such, just uncommon in the culture and religion here. You don't need a surname, like Madonna or Prince. There's only one of you. Oh, there is only one of you, you fucker.

Like Lolita, you had several monikers: she was Delores on paper and plain Lo in the morning with sleep in her eyes. I had several names for you, and the first thing I ever called you was "Sir" which is just weird when you think that I ended up with your cock in my mouth along with your name. Certainly I struggled to call you by your Christian name at first, after years of calling you "Mister Surname". And then as the years wore on I would call you Pudding as an homage to your shape, short and round. A harmless nickname for a harmless man. Your two syllable name was shortened to one short and lyrical syllable when I liked you and two snappy little sounds when I didn't. In my head I always think of you as the shortening, but aloud to others I refer to you as the shattered glass of the legal and official. 

Your name wasn't unique, but it was unusual and that pretty much sums you up. There are others out there that have done what you did, but you're the only one that I ever knew. 

If you had 15 minutes to tell someone who you are, what would you tell them?

I would start with that I am never as tall as in peoples memories. I am not short- a sturdy 5ft 7", but not tall like Clare from my form was tall or tall like my sister-in-law; both girls who skim 6ft in bare feet. I have always worn heels so maybe that is why people remember me taller, or maybe it is because I seem like the kind of woman who would be tall, not all that feminine, kind of gravelly voiced, not mannish but not dainty.

I had a really ordinary childhood on the surface and it wasn't really so bizarre if you scratched a bit deeper, but there were dysfunctions there. I don't think that either sets of my grandparents really loved one another and that seems to have left a strange scar on the family and in me somehow. On the surface the two sides of the family tree couldn't have been more different: mother born into a solidly working class family but with parents keen to better themselves and who moved, first to the nicer end of Dagenham and then to a garden suburb in a nicer borough. They remained married for more than 59 years, until my Grandfathers death when I was 25, but they didn't like each other and that was clear to anybody who met them even briefly. My Grandfather was a kind and gentle man, who a few years before his death told me of a pining for a girl called Elsie sixty years before, a pining that never left him I don't think. My Grandmother this strange, depressed and angry woman who I can see echoes of in myself sometimes, even though I do not much care to admit that.  Their elder daughter became my mother later on.

On the other side there was much more obvious catastrophe: a teenager pregnant by a boy that I suspect she did not know very well and who went on to leave before my father could know him at all. She went quite mad, I think, and ended up institutionalised at some point on the timeline, although I am not sure when as I never knew her. My father brought up by his maternal grandparents who were classic almost underclass, what we in the family would call- not unkindly- pikies. They were in and out of sketchy paid employment and gambled the little money they had on dogs and horses and spent what they won or what remained after they had lost on drink and cigarettes. There was not much food. 

I think that my parents saw that little bit of dysfunction in one another- the bad mothering and the strange atmospheres they had each grown up in- and identified with it. My father needed a mother and my mother needed to be a mother, even before she had children. I think that was what stuck them together. Anyway, some of what transpired was me.

And what's to know about me? I am not that tall. I like a drink. I have read a lot of books in the 23 years since I learnt to read. I have always felt fat despite not being especially so. I fell in love for the first time when I was five years old, and had love affair after love affair in my head each year from then on: with unobtainable men on posters, with my teachers, with boys in my class at primary school, with men on the news, and then with my English teacher who later fucked me and fucked me and fucked me until I nearly died. I am a teacher now myself and I am married to teacher too, but not the same one who tried to kill me with sex. I have a daughter and I would like another one. I love The Smiths and drinking Coke with sugar in and red nail polish. I love the man I married more than I have ever loved anyone, but I know that if I had met him ten years before I would not have done. I wasn't ready then and so you have to wonder about fate or the stars aligning or something, don't you? Well I do, anyway, I don't believe in God but I do believe there must something out there that sometimes puts the dominoes in the right formation to fall down in such a way as to do you a favour- or to cause action and reaction, anyway. It may all just be random, but if it is then I think I am glad of the random way that I came to be anyway, and looking out into the dark night sky there does seem to be some sense to those grandparents of mine who did not love each other, or know each other, and to the way it all fell into place to create me. 

Phil

Finally then, the point of this speech is this: today we are married, Phil, and I would like to take this opportunity, to tell you publicly that you are the most wonderful person I have ever known. You are funny, clever, beautiful and unique. Before I met you I had loved other boyfriends, but I had never been truly loved back before. That is the difference: I feel your love surrounding me. Your love makes me stronger and our love is a truly wonderful foundation in life. I hope that you feel my love surrounding you. Ever since I first heard Plato’s fable about true lovers being one being cut in half, wandering the earth searching for their missing half, I hoped to find it my partner. Those I tried in the past didn’t fit, I hoped they were the one I was looking for, but they weren’t. And then unexpectedly you walked into my world and I knew you were the one I had been looking for all my life. To quote from the fable, “when a person meets the half that is his very own, ….. then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.” That is me and you, Phil. I love you so very much. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for making me your wife. Thank you. 

Stockholm Syndrome

I just think she’s a big young, you say out of the corner of your mouth as I lean in towards you at the bar. Are you fucking kidding? I say, or something to that effect. I bunch my long hair up in a ponytail on top of my head and let it drop. When are you getting your hair cut? You ask. I’m growing it. I like you with short hair. I like growing it. That’s university for you, you reply in your wise old sage voice. Experimentation. If only you knew how much experimentation. Since I moved to a halls of residence across the Thames six months ago it’s been one nonstop drink, drugs and sex and me and you have split up and gotten back together about twenty times. Ironic as you are still with your wife, so I guess we aren’t really breaking up and getting back together at all. We aren’t doing anything. We’re just fucking with less and less passion in single beds when I’m not fucking someone else. Sometimes I don’t even want to have sex with you anymore. It’s a marriage within a marriage. I still think she is a bit young though, you say again. I glance over my shoulder at the girl, who is about 22 and accompanying a friend of yours to this gig. She looks about 22, I say blank faced. And he’s 30 odd! You exclaim. I proffer a tenner to the barman and say, stinging words in my mouth, well I’m 19. You shake your head. Not the same, you say gulping down your lager. This is a love job.

If it ever was a love job it has stopped feeling like one, to be frank. You’re the boyfriend from back home with none of the benefits that insinuates. We hang out in dingy boozers, I cry when I sit in my room and listen to Marillion and I get high before I ring you because talking to you sober just highlights that we have nothing to say to one another. This isn’t really working out for me. This isn’t really working out for me. I practice saying it in my head, I fantasise and worry about saying it to you. I give myself deadlines that come and go: after that thing we’ve got tickets to, after your birthday. I have lost all hope for the future. I kind of want to say all this as we walk from the bar, but no point. It’s a grubby routine for both of us now and I don’t know how to get out of it. Your mate, a new one, another teacher at your new school, leans in to say something to you and you smirk. I find out later that what he said was basically that he’d have a go on me if you ever got bored. Thanks for the offer there, but I think I’m okay. The girl, the 22 year old, is called Katy and seems quite nice but we aren’t going to be friends. She’s all piercings and black hair dye and I’m more Lolita-slut-English-Student than that. We talk unis and plans for after degrees and I am bored witless until the band come on and do The Riverboat Song.

Luckily the rest of the night is a bit of a blur, albeit a boring one. At one point they’re playing some new material and I tell you I’m going to the loo, when in fact I am going to the bar. I spend 20 minutes in the foyer area where the bar is, drink three double Vodka and lemonades and suddenly feel a lot more positive about going back to you, your dull mate and dull slut-goth. You shoot me a quizzical look when I find you in the crowd, and I shrug. There was a queue. No there wasn’t. You reply. You’re hammered. I shrug again and then ignore you in favour of what’s going on, on stage. Just for a second I remember the grungy excitement of that gig in the Astoria two years ago where we snogged in secret and giggled before Pete came back from the bar. Those days seem far behind us now, it seems hard to believe that was even me. Maybe it was just because it was all new to me. The lyrics to a song, I can’t remember which one though echo in my head: the thrill of touching and being touched. Was that all it was? It wasn’t about you at all? It was just animal, just endorphins.

I feel Fucked Up with everything, with the tissue of lies, with the lack of respect either of us have for each other or your wife. The harder the alcohol hits my blood and organs and the more I am thinking to hell with all of this, let’s just end this tonight, put a fucking rocket under it. But the truth is that I don’t know how to exist without you now and not in the nice way you aren’t supposed to know how to live without someone you love, but in a horrible Stockholm Syndrome way, of being a prisoner and so shackled by your lies that I can’t find a way to escape.

We don’t touch once throughout the gig, although dull mate and Katy are all over one another. You are standing just behind me and I can see your hairy arm from the corner of my eye and I shudder at the idea that I might have to have sex with you later. Officially we are, I think, not fucking at the moment. Things have got “too complicated” you say and so we are “easing off” but to be honest it’s been off again and on again so much lately that I can’t remember where we are. And we probably will have sex either tonight or in the morning because the wife’s away and we both see that time as money in the bank that needs spending quickly. Besides I definitely think on some level that if I fuck you tonight or in the morning it will make you love me somehow. I don’t say it out loud, Jesus, I don’t even think it aloud in my head, but I know really that this is now my motivation for copulation with you. Besides, you’re the only man I have sex with and don’t use condoms, so who says romance is dead? 

Liar

Why write it all down? Because if I don’t I worry I will get cancer. That the truth only you and I know and that I can share with no one else will rot my organs one by one, shut down my heart, seep in between the cracks of my brain and make me mad. You are the only other person who was there in the middle of the night, who was party to the soft words and hard blows that those years together meant. Others observed it; Jenna, Pete, Dave and Laurie keeping our secrets and knowing the code, but they did not see it eyeball to eyeball, they weren’t there were you smacked me so hard that I fell over or when I hit you over the head with a table lamp. They didn’t hear the gasp of your orgasm or the breathy sobs of my tears under a pillow as I tried not to wake you up. They did not hear the promises, only I heard those.

Yours will not be the name I don’t say, you will not be the truth I do not tell. I don’t care what you do, how your skin reacts at the name Laura, how your stomach drops at the mention of me. I don’t care if you never speak of me ever again because my face is still in your head. But I will not be you; I will not pretend it never happened. It happened. It happened and it doesn’t matter what you do now, it still will always have happened. I have nothing of yours anymore, I burnt all of it, but I have your past and I will continue to keep it as long as I live.

I will always tell the story when people ask, I will always be honest about how a man who should have taken care of me didn’t. You were In Loco Parentis but you were not very parental. It might make me feel better if I didn’t say, if I were not honest, but that wouldn’t be the truth my lovely little pudding; my one and only first love; my tarnished, filthy bastard. I will not lie anymore; you made me a liar long enough.  

The Pharmacy Monologues 2

This booklet tells you about oral contraceptives in general and about Microgynon 30 in detail. Alas you are just a teenage girl and you are risking cervical cancer from being exposed to semen at this age, but the man you love told you that you should go on the pill. And let’s face it, you’re so stupid that you would start smoking crack if he told you to. Please read it carefully to get the best from Microgynon 30. If you are in any doubt about these instructions contact your doctor, pharmacist or Family Planning clinic. You think you’re smart and sexy and sassy but you’re an idiot and a little girl who shouldn’t be having sex. I am telling you that as a friend. You and the pill How your body gets ready for pregnancy (the menstrual cycle) You can usually become pregnant (conceive) from when you start to have periods, up until you are in your late 40s. Every menstrual cycle takes about 28 days. About halfway through this cycle an egg is released from one of your ovaries into a fallopian tube. This is called ovulation. The other flaw in this plan, my youthful friend, is that if you get pregnant he is definitely going to be fucking off out of it. His dad fucked off at the first sign of this kind of trouble. It is in the genes. At least use a condom as well. The egg travels down the fallopian tube towards your womb. When you make love, your partner's penis releases millions of sperm into your vagina. Some of these sperm travel up through your womb into your fallopian tubes. If there is an egg in one of these tubes, and a sperm reaches it, you can become pregnant. This is called 'conception'. And get any ideas you have of a happy ending out of your head. If you get pregnant then there are two options for you here: the abortion clinic and bringing up a myopic baby on your own listening to your mum moaning about how you could have got some A Levels. A fertilised egg gets embedded in the lining of your womb and takes 9 months to grow into a baby. As an egg can live for up to 2 days, and sperm for up to 5 days, you can become pregnant if you have made love up to 5 days before ovulation and for some time afterwards. If a sperm does not fertilise an egg, the egg is lost at the end of the menstrual cycle with the lining of your womb. This is called a 'period'. Look kid. I am advising you to be careful in this situation. I don’t know you very well but I think it would be fair to say that when they say “take precautions” they mean over your heart as well as your cunt. That’s all.

What was your excuse?

It was a hot night in July and you were drunk. 

“Promise me you will never leave.” You mumbled, voice thick with tears and regret. 

“I won’t ever leave.” Jenna was sitting on my bed and rolled her eyes. She poured me some more wine and I stuck my thumb up to say thanks. I drank the wine.

“I will marry you.” You said, earnestly. “If you stick around for me, after everything, I will marry you.”  I made an affirmative noise and you continued. “No I mean it. I haven’t ever loved anybody like I love you. I will marry you.” 

“You’re already married.” I said, my tone light, trying to inject something into this conversation that wasn’t apologies and sadness and alcoholism. Jenna rolled her eyes and again and said, at a volume which must have been audible to you, 

“Tell him I will murder him if he doesn’t hang the phone up now.” She turned the CD up and then made a face at the terrible quality of the wine and the music. “Are we really listening to Phil Collins?” She turned the CD off and fumbled around on the floor of my bedroom for something else. I smiled and turned my attention back to my mobile. I looked at the clock radio next to the bed. It was two in the morning. 

“I do love you.” You said. I knew you did. I knew you loved me. But it was too hard. And I had said that to you earlier in the night, walking out of my mum and dads road to go and get wine I had seen you and your wife and a friend in the car and I couldn’t face seeing you together or knowing that you were together. It was too terrible. This has been going on for months now. “If you can just stick it out a bit longer. I will marry you.” I sighed,

“I’ve got to go.” 

“Don’t go. I’m not at home. I’m just wandering the streets. Promise this isn’t it, Laura. Promise you won’t leave me. I’ll be on my own. You keep me going.”

“I’ve got to go. It’s after two. I’m worried about waking people up.” There was silence. “I love you.” More silence. I tried again. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” I closed my mobile and picked up my wine.

“You just got proposed to,” Jenna smirked, her wine glass already back to her mouth. 

“By my lover.” I smiled. “By my married lover.” We both laughed. We were such children, we didn’t have a clue. 

What was your excuse? 

"I'll take you home"

I was drunk. Slurring my words drunk. I downed another pint and swayed, partly to the music, partly with unsteadiness from the drink. You had turned on me, halfway through the night, which happened often when we drank. Or I had turned on you. What had, twenty minutes before, been a cordial, funny night had become a bitter argument, a list of recriminations. I had been sleeping with you for three and half years on and off and your wife had just kicked you out. Or so you said. I was twenty now, this was meant to be the start of us being together properly, but once again we were staging our own private production of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ with you blaming me for everything that was wrong with your life, and me blaming you in return. 

I don't remember what did it, what was the straw that broke the camels back but at about ten past eleven I threw down my plastic pint glass, spilling beer on my shoes and ran. I had well and truly had enough of you. 

When you found me, half an hour later, I was sitting on the steps of a town house on the road leading to Chalk Farm, smoking a roll-up with a man called Simon.

“Who the fuck is this?” you said, breathless, gesturing to the man.

“This is Simon.” I replied, taking another drag on the barely lit little fag, sucking out every possible bit of weed and inhaling. “He’s my mate.” Truth be told, I had only met Simon ten minutes before, but he was high and as such he seemed good company. Especially as I was stuck on the wrong side of London, having missed the last tube, and hating you. 

“What are you smoking?” You asked. I ignored you and stubbed the cigarette out on the steps. 

“Thanks for that, Simon.” I said, stooping to kiss the stranger, my large breasts spilling out of the dress I was wearing and giving him an eyeful. You noticed and spat angrily at my new friend.

“Had a good look?” Simon smiled and just continued to smoke. 

"Mate," he said in a thick Scouse accent, "Whatever is going on with you and her is absolutely nothing to do with me." I turned in the opposite direction to the one that you were facing and flounced off, fast despite four inch heels. Clip-clop, clip-clop on the empty street. You followed me, matching my pace.

“How are you going to get home?” Silence. “Laura?” Silence. “Are you ignoring me?” Just the sound of my shoes on the pavement. “Stupid cow.” I quickened my pace. “Fine. Stay on your own.” You stopped dead. I carried on walking. “You’re twenty years old!” You shouted after me. “You’ll be raped and murdered!” You voice grew faint as I continued trotting down towards Chalk Farm. 

Minutes passed and my feet grew sore. I was looking for a bus stop. High on adrenaline and actually high, until now I hadn’t noticed the pain of the high stilletos and the angry blisters forming on my heels. I stepped out of them and picked them up, continuing my trudge down the long road, a brightly lit bus stop now in sight. After maybe six or seven minutes I reached it and sat down angrily on the plastic seat, studying the Perspex-covered bus timetable, with one eye closed to help me focus. I heard your voice suddenly from across the road.

“You’re on the wrong side of the bloody road!” The other people at the bus stop with me turned to look at you. I ignored you. “Tell HER she needs to be on this side of the road!” I heard you shout. I spun round, incensed. 

“You need to leave me alone!” My fellow late-night travellers were clearly listening now, and a group of lads about my age started laughing. “Just go HOME and leave me alone.”

“Laura.” You shouted back, your voice weary. “Just come over here. People are going to think I’m beating you.” The boys laughed again. Like a sulky kid I got up and walked, with as much dignity as I could muster in bare feet, across the road. You looked relieved, but I knew the row had barely begun. I sat down next to you and placed my shoes on the floor next to my feet on the pavement. “Put your shoes on.” You said, in a voice that sounded not unlike my dad’s. Blood rushed to my head and I picked one of the stilletos up and waved it in your face.

“You don’t talk to me.” You put your hands up in defence. “You leave me alone or I will smack you with this!” An elderly man who was our only companion on this side of the street stepped back behind the bus stop pole, eager to not be a part of this. He was probably rehearsing what he would say in court. 

“Calm down!” you shouted. I threw down the shoe and folded my arms. You sighed. “You’re fucking mad.” I shook my head bitterly. 

“You’ve got no idea. No fucking idea.” You laughed, my bitterness matched suddenly. “Oh you’re fed up?” I added, turning to face you. “You’re fed up? Right, try this for size,” I began to cry suddenly, and you rolled your eyes as if I was doing it on purpose, “three years I’ve done this. Not known what was going on. Been strung along and second best and heard constantly that you’re leaving her because the marriage is so bad and it’s been on again and off again and you’ve shagged me and left me and told me you love me and sabotaged everything, every time I’ve met a nice boy my own age or tried to get away you’ve sabotaged it so you tell me what you’ve got to be fed up about? What? You had a fucked childhood? Like we haven’t all had fuck-ups to deal with. All you’re fucking doing is making my life a fuck up as well.” You had started crying halfway through my tirade of abuse, but I wasn’t done with you. “You leave me alone. I am done with this. I don’t even know if I love you anymore.”

“Don’t say that.” You interrupted, quietly. 

“No. fuck off," I muttered, my fiftieth "fuck" of the last five minutes, "It’s okay for you to say what you want, but I can’t?” 

“It’s not true though, is it?” I had found your weak spot. Well good, hope this hurts. 

“I don’t know anymore. I don’t think I do.” I did though. I really did. It was just that it had become something else after all this time, like the way hot metal twists to become something altogether sharper and more terrifying: all of this heat had warped what I felt for you. All the years of broken promises and rows and crying on my own at night. I did still love you, more than I could fathom at times, but whatever deep-seated belief I had felt that we were meant to be together was gone. I no longer saw the future with you: or a future at all. Some nights I would lie in bed, terrified that somehow I knew I would be dead soon, that somehow my body and mind were shutting down for death. When people spoke about the future, of growing older and having children, I didn’t know how they envisaged those things anymore. I couldn’t see anything positive to come anymore, just years and years more of this, the constant circle of arguing and hating and torture. I knew really that we couldn’t be together, that you would never leave the marriage for long enough to achieve any kind of transition from her to me, that you didn’t know what you wanted. This couldn’t run for much longer, not realistically, not this power-struggle between parent and child that we’d become. I wasn’t sleeping, I was always drunk, I was hating you, hating myself, hating this. When we had sex it was brutal; you threw me from one side of the room to the other and I scratched your skin to make you bleed. 

We both sat in silence, crying and staring at the wall next to the pavement. The night grew quiet. You took my hand and I squeezed it. I didn’t understand why we were doing this anymore. 

“I’ll take you home.” You said. 

An Anthrax gig

“You’ve got about three minutes before Pete gets back with the drinks. Are you going to snog me or what?” Your eyes glint in the dim light and I laugh, drunk and thin.

I have given up eating in favour of drinking, and at the moment, it is working out pretty well, I think. I am constantly nauseous but I only weigh seven stone, which as a sturdy girl with big shoulders and tits which are each the size of a grown mans head, hasn’t been the case since I was about nine. I perch on your knee and move in to kiss you, holding the back of your head, hair clipped in short with a barbers electric shaver, savouring the taste of beer and adultery on you.

“That do you?” I ask, all Essex girl eyebrows and innuendo, it’s all very Lolita. You slap my arse. 

“For now, anyway.” You reply.

I am wearing new, pointy, brown suede shoes and I feel very grown up in them. They hurt like hell, and rub my feet and they are visibly bleeding when I take them off, but if these weeks snogging you in darkened corners have taught me nothing else it is that sometimes things hurt and that’s just how it is now, all very metaphorical. Pete returns with the drinks and I happily gulp down Vodka that I am not actually legally old enough to drink. I peek over the lip of the balcony and ask you if you think they’re breaking fire safety laws, people are crammed in here like sardines in a tin. “If a fire starts in here,” you reply earnestly, “we’re toast.” Not just if there’s a fire, I think with an eyebrow ever raised to my imaginary audience.

Pete actually doesn’t know about this whole sex thing. He think we’re just mates with a flirtation. A flirtation and a 13 year age gap. A flirtation and a 13 year age gap and a love of flouting the law. In the week you teach me A Level English Literature, at the weekend we fuck like rabbits. It is a Friday night, so we are in the fucking like rabbits part of the schedule. You squeeze my bum clandestinely and I smile, thinking it’s actually pretty funny that Pete doesn’t know, but then I am pissed so everything seems pretty funny. Not least that we are in love. You and me. In love with each other. Fancy that.

I have been in love with you for probably about five years now, but I don’t tell you that. I just pretend like this is all cool. You have a wife? That’s cool. You’re breaking about fifteen child protection laws every day of your life now? Yeah, whatever. We’re having risky sex at every opportunity in darkened corners? That’s just how I roll. This is so not how I roll. I was actually a virgin until only something like twelve weeks ago. I have only kissed two people with tongues, and you’re the second. I write your surname after mine in the back of my rough book on Wednesday afternoons when I should be having a study lesson and testing my friend Dave on his Italian verbs. I am the least cool person I know. My hair isn’t cool, my dress sense isn’t cool, I don’t like cool music and my favourite television programme is Brookside. I know that being anywhere near you is going to hurt me in the long term. I know it, but I can’t keep away from you either. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. It is like we have no choice. It is like you are a missing part of me. It is like nobody else exists when you are in the room. Even when you aren’t. I think of you insistently.  You are the motivation for every decision I make and everything I do. I am crazy about you. Maybe I am just fucking crazy.

Anthrax are terrible. Truly dire. I genuinely think at one point in the evening that I may have gone deaf because the music, if you can call it music, is so loud. I can feel the bass in my teeth. My gig-going until this point hasn’t been extensive, mind you. I saw Boyzone live at Wembley twice and I went and saw Sum 41 a few weeks ago with some cooler kids. But this is only my fourth gig, and I am starting to think, a bit like losing your virginity: painful and fucking horrible. But you are here and I would go anywhere you were. I would follow you to the ends of the earth. After only six weeks of kissing and twenty-seven shags I know, unequivocally, that I would move to Australia with you tomorrow if you asked. This is what it is all about. Life up until this point has been a rehearsal, a nothing, pointless, it has belonged to somebody else. But now. Now it all begins.

I stare hard at you in the gloom of the darkened room, which seems darker in contrast to the strobe lights which flash every seven seconds and threaten to make me epileptic. You are hopelessly beautiful, short and a product of breeding based on drunken one night stands rather than genes. Your hair isn’t quite blonde but isn’t quite brown and it lays flat and unstyled against your forehead in a way which doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that it’s receding. Your eyes blink behind unfashionable glasses and your lips are newly-bitten pink, wet with overpriced Astoria beer. You are, as Diana Ross sang, everything. Marvin Gaye replies in my head, as I think it, oh everything is you. 

Without actually knowing him at all

You, sullen, dark, grey. All of London laid out before us, from the top of the hill at Alexandra Palace. The weather was hot but the sky was like you; lost and moody. I am sitting on a wall watching you as you watch the capital.

I never liked these blokes when I was 16. You say sourly. Why am I having to rub shoulders with them now? I don’t answer. I drink my wine in silence. I mean look at that one, you say, gesturing to a bloke who looks like a taller version of you. Look at his stupid, trendy glasses. 

You have stupid trendy glasses. I say. And you layer short sleeved teeshirts over long sleeved ones. It’s the look of your generation. I mean, it’s fucking dreadful, but it’s a look you’re also wearing. So….  I trail off and drink some more wine. 

I don’t look like that. I’m cooler than that, you say, bitterly. 

You’re not cooler than that. I respond. I mean, you’re a Marillion fan. Even Marillion’s mums aren’t listening to Marillion anymore. Morrissey is a legend. 

We’re on opposite sides of a war. You say, shaking your head. 

What war? I exclaim, angry now but it isn't about the music. Indie vs Prog Rock? Manchester vs Aylesbury? I put a sneering emphasis on the word Aylesbury to make it sound more ridiculous than it already does. Indie won, Manchester won, like…. Twenty years ago. Let it go. You cross your arms and continue to try and stare out Bow Bells. I roll my eyes and finish the wine. I’m going to the bar. I say. What do you want?

I make my way, headshakingly, through throngs of 30 and 40 something men with receding quiffs and trendy glasses on. I don’t see why you aren’t getting this. This isn’t about, as you so often enjoy telling me it is, getting high at a festival and latching on to the first pretentious singer who walked on stage. I genuinely enjoy songs about The Moors Murders. What’s wrong with a bit of pretention? I order your ale and my wine and think yeah, come on, drinking ale at a Morrissey gig, now that’s pretentious.

It is a hot, dry evening in the city but up on this hill there is a nice breeze. 

So what was the name of this new album? you ask, joining me on my wall. 

Ringleader of the Tormenters. I say. 

What so he is like, the ringleader, is he? You smirk. I want to say several things to this. I want to say, you know what, I listened to those Marillion albums and all those bloody compilation CDs you made me; I want to say, I wasn’t actually born until 1985 so listening to a megamix you made me of your favourite progressive rock tracks from 1983 was a bit of a chore; No, I do not like electric guitars, I want to shout, as I throw my wine at you, I do not like twenty minute solos in the middle of songs played by blokes with big hair and big egos. It is a form of torture. I don’t say any of those things though. I just smile sweetly.

Things have been better between us lately. You promise me faithfully that your marriage is in a winding-down period and you foresee us being able to even live together by the time I graduate. This is more or less how you put it: a business proposal. Exciting times. We have been on several trips together which have involved overnight stays and it’s been really nice. I got drunk on Guinness in Dublin. I brought a pink suitcase for our trips and we’ve hardly been drunk and screaming at each other in months. We have considered and pleasant sex, and I have laid off the other people, although I’ve still to get round to telling you about that whole chapter. Yes, things are feeling pretty fucking civilised I just turn the outrage and bitterness back into myself now rather than out at you, and cutting myself is probably the next stage. It’s not ideal but it keeps you nearby, I think, drinking at twice my usual rate just to keep calm enough not to scream.

Perhaps you realise how difficult it is for me to stay being this nice. Or perhaps you sense that I feel I am auditioning for the role I really want and which you say is just around the corner: full time girlfriend. I don’t know. But certainly you are kinder to me after I don’t kick off about you making fun of this whole gig, and even get into it a bit. When I buy a teeshirt which shows my tits off quite a lot you don’t even say I look like a slut so we are definitely making progress.

When Morrissey comes on stage and the lights go down, you chuckle in quite a fond way and comment that I am entranced. I think, strangely, through the buzz of alcohol and music that I love him like I used to love you- without actually knowing him at all. The thought it shaken from my head with the thump of percussion and soon even you are jumping around and looking a bit daft and there is a glimpse of what we used to have before we got to know one another. I kiss you, closed mouthed, and say 

You’re alright, you are and you look like a kid who’s had his mum tell him he’s been good.