No stranger to the P45 - Dan W.Griffin (the mitten read aloud .TXT) 📗

evening I set off for the Carlton Bar to meet her. I walked with considerable doubt in my mind that she would actually turn up. It surprised no one more than it did me, when she actually did.
Now, as a man I have little willpower when it comes to women. I can, I guess, at times be quite shallow, too... although at least I’m deep enough to admit it. On this occasion however, I had high hopes that the evening would go well: that it would be one of scintillating conversation and laughter; dough-eyed gazings (eyes filled with dough) into each other’s eyes as we strolled hand-in-hand along a moonlit path, shared a tender kiss goodnight at her door and then planned to spend the next day picking out curtains. Alas, some hours later and we were in bed.
I discovered a number of things about Emma over the next few hours. None were quite so troubling as the things I discovered after that.
First, I discovered that my ideas of romantic intimacy were not ideas shared by Emma because she immediately set-about demanding that I bite her in places far too disturbing to mention. Second, I learned that she was rather thick. Not long after arriving back at my room in Ashbrooke she looked at me and asked, ‘What’s your name again?’
Now, if I’m honest I was a little hurt, but I determined to figure out whether or not she was joking and therefore in possession of a sense of humour almost as twisted as my own, or whether she was simply forgetful or actually very dumb. ‘I’ll give you a clue’ I said, ‘It begins with ‘D’ and ends with ‘N’.’
‘Err... David?’ she asked.
‘Uh… no. It begins with ‘D’ and ends with ‘N’. And there’s three letters.’
She thought for a moment.
‘Err... Darren?’
‘No. Three letters: beginning with ‘D’, ending in ‘N’. And there’s an ‘A’ in the middle.’ I was becoming a little irritated.
‘Damien?’
I gave up and told her my name. The situation then really began to deteriorate.
Emma had already decided that we were now going out with each other, despite the fact that I had determined otherwise. In as polite a way as possible I tried to convince her that I was not the man for her. I hadn’t slept with her, literally or otherwise, but things had intensified at a rather uncomfortable rate. In fact, she all but terrified me. I felt it best to end things before they had even begun and decided to do so as gently and as sympathetically as possible. I used the line, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’... even though it was. It just made things worse. She looked very angry indeed as I lied (again) and told her ‘I’m sorry, but I have a girlfriend back home’. And that didn’t work either. I made a number of further attempts to be subtle about not wanting her there anymore but I shouldn’t have bothered; getting rid of her was like trying to get chewing gum out of a carpet.
Dawn was soon breaking and the birds outside were beginning their morning chirp. It was the end of May and on my bedroom wall, adjacent to a display of Poll Tax demands (the precursor to the Council Tax) a variety of court summons and other bills in red I had fixed a sheet of A4. On this sheet I had written ‘3rd June’ in huge letters to remind me of my father’s upcoming birthday. I had eventually managed to manoeuvre the situation to the point that both Emma and I were now dressed so that I could walk her home, but as I wrapped her coat across her shoulders she paused with her arm half-way into her sleeve. She took a long look at this sheet of paper, thought for a moment and said slowly, ‘3... R... D... June. Who’s June? Is she your girlfriend?’
I gave a brief explanation that I had forgotten my father’s birthday these last two years and did not wish to do so again, before I realised the futility of it, opened the door and walked out. A half-hour later, as I left her at her door and turned the corner at the end of her street I thought that was the end of it and let out a sigh of relief. It wasn’t.
As I walked back to Ashbrooke I carried this inexplicable feeling that I was going to see her very soon indeed. I actually had a feeling that I was being followed, but that could have simply been common paranoia. Nevertheless, as I entered the hall I caught my friend Tim returning from his girlfriend’s house. I explained my activities of the previous evening and my inexplicable fear that Emma would probably return later that morning. He suggested that we spend the day in Newcastle and we set off in his car. ‘That her?’ he asked, noticing that I had just discovered something interesting in the glove compartment as we passed a girl striding along the pavement towards Ashbrooke Hall.
‘Yup!’
Tim and I had a thoroughly pleasant day in and around Newcastle. We visited the Metro Centre in Gateshead and had lunch somewhere else, returning to Ashbrooke Hall at about four. As we pulled into the driveway another friend named Olie was standing in the door. He looked very angry indeed.
As it turned out, Emma had been in Ashbrooke all day awaiting my return. She had met many of my friends and at various points shared her joy at being my girlfriend and at others her devastation about my supposedly having another back home. Latterly she had expressed her desire to ask her brothers, one of whom had recently been released from prison, to visit me and tear off my face. Learning of this I did what any man in such a position would do: I went to the pub.
I rolled home at about three the following morning to a Post-it note attached to my bedroom door with a telephone number and the message ‘CALL ME’ followed by a particularly-chilling number of exclamation marks. And so, drunk, I did just that.
I made the call solely to apologise for upsetting her for not telling her sooner about ‘June’ and, of course, to avoid meeting her brothers and experiencing their propensity for extreme physical violence. I never heard from her again.
I quit driving soon after but not because of Emma. I had had a brainwave and decided that I was going to make my fortune by setting up a nightclub in seven days flat... and giving all the money away to charity.


Bluebells, graffiti and Twiglets. And the questionably-photogenic dead pig

And so I had to leave Sunderland rather swiftly; Phil and his merry band of thugs’ fervent desire to snap my legs like Twiglets being somewhat less than appealing. There really wasn’t anything left for me anyway, and I was tired of being a student... not that I’d ever been a very good one.
I was fed-up with the area too; tired of the broken, graffitied and industrialised hell that I’d long since generalised as the entirety of the North East of England.
I was bored of the Cash Converters and of the ping of fruit machines in the amusement arcades on every corner, bored of the masses of tracksuit-wearing idiots fighting all over the place. I was done with the tedium of the broken and boarded-up windows on the high streets and of the lager cans and the burnt-out cars strewn all along the beach. I needed to experience civilisation again; to relax in a place where football shirts or alcopops weren’t sold in every other shop and where I could see endless fields and lush green meadows without a factory or a power station plonked somewhere along the skyline.
I needed to be free of the grey; free of the stifling smog of despair and lack of hope. I needed to be in a place where the sun occasionally shone and where people could converse without having to mention the Premiership or punch each other in the face. I yearned for cafés with decent coffee and soft, inoffensive music in the background - cafés on the opposite end of the spectrum to those serving tea in chipped mugs accompanied by the melancholic cacophony of eggs spluttering in shallow pans of fat, by the rustle of copies of the Racing Post and the Daily Star, by the distant sirens of police cars pursuing teenage fuckwits joyriding in stolen cars about the city, and by the white noise cum foghorn yell of Radio One.
I needed bars that didn’t compete for the paycheques of jeering oiks with ‘happy hours’ or ‘curry and a pint’... weren’t crammed to the ceiling with slip-on shoes and white socks and ugly-striped shirts... weren’t desperate to attract the shrieks and cackles of full-figured women on hen-nights clicking along the pavements in stilettos, their excessive perfume causing discarded Styrofoam cups to melt into the floor as a billion sequins reflected the glare of passing traffic, focusing it into a dazzling lightshow capable of downing aircraft or sending a distress call far out into the deepest reaches of space. I guess I just needed out.
I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. I had no plans for the future (see Book), and no ideas of what to do next. Even if I did I had no money to do them with anyway. I was stuck and I was skint and I just thought, Zoiks! It was as good a thing to think as any other.
Given the absence of reasoning at any level (see Book again), that very same day I did what any man with a similar lack of foresight and responsibility would do: I hired a car and drove to Scotland. That, too, seemed as good a thing to do as any other.
With my sister having recently begun a PhD studying bees and things at St Andrews University I thought I’d go there for a bit. I hadn’t seen her in a while and I arrived planning to spend a couple of days with her drinking tea in charming cafés and sneering my vastly-misplaced sense of superiority and self-importance at Hooray Henrys masquerading as students. I’d then head back down south to Bath to get myself a job. Pootling through Fife however: chugging along the coast in a rented Peugeot the colour of toasted snot, past RAF Leuchars and into the town I thought, ‘This is nice, maybe I’ll stay.’ And so I did. It was a far more agreeable option than having my limbs mistaken for bar snacks.
Anyhoo...
As you may recall