My Legendary Girlfriend by Mike Gayle

Author:Mike Gayle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2009-06-10T14:00:00+00:00

Me: Aggi, let’s get married. I mean, will you marry me?

Aggi: [Firmly] No.

Me: Why not?

Aggi: I wouldn’t like it. It’d be too constraining.

Me: How do you know? You’ve never been married.

Aggi: No, but I did live with a lover for a while.

Me: You did what? You had a . . . you lived with a . . .

Aggi: I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you’d be uptight about this.

Me: [Angrily] Uptight? Uptight? I think I’ve every right to be ‘uptight’ since discovering that my girlfriend has in fact been ‘shacked up’ with some bloke. Who was it? Have I met him?

Aggi: No . . . well, yes.

Me: Who? Come on. Which one of them was it?

Aggi: Martin.

Me: [Ranting] Martin? Martin! But his eyes are too close together. You can’t have lived with a man whose eyes are too close together! You’ve obviously made some mistake.

Aggi: Will, you’re being hysterical.

Me: I’m not being hysterical. I’m being me. You ought to try it some time.

I knew about all her ex-boyfriends because I’d made her tell me about them after our fourth date. Out of all seven of them, Martin was the one I liked least. Aggi was only seventeen when she met him at a night-club in Nottingham. Three weeks later she moved into a room in his student house, and eventually into his bedroom. He was twenty and was studying Politics at the poly. He was a walking tragedy, the best reason to Eat The Rich I’d ever seen. He’d spent the ages between zero and eighteen at boarding school where he collected stamps, rowed and played Dungeons and Dragons. Rejected by Oxford after dismal A-level results, he ended up at what was then the Polytechnic. Realising that he was liable to be beaten to death by the mob of Socialist Workers who stood guard outside the student union selling Militant every day, Martin – posh, useless, waste of space Martin – decided to reinvent himself as the Ultimate Smiths Fan. Out went his chinos, V-necked jumpers, button-down shirts and nondescript haircut, and in came all things Mozzer-like. He had the stupid Morrissey quiff, the stupid Morrissey overcoat, the stupid Morrissey shoes but how he ever found a pair of stupid Morrissey glasses to fit his beady, too-close-together eyes I’ll never know.

The reason I knew so much about Martin was that on my third coach trip to London in search of accommodation, the gods of misfortune allocated me a seat next to the git. We’d met once before, about four years earlier in the Royal Oak, when Aggi had been forced to introduce us because, unbeknown to Aggi and me, his Smiths’ tribute band, The Charming Men, were playing a gig there. For the entire journey to London (five sodding hours!), all he talked about was Aggi and how much she’d changed his life.

What really offended me about Aggi’s ‘shacking up’ experience was the fact that she didn’t think it was a big deal. She’d lived with him for three

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