"Student Union" - SJ Bottomley (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

back to the car, in preparation for us going home. I didn’t say much, if anything, as we did this and I was so in my own thoughts at that moment, that anything that I might have said, wouldn’t have been of any significance. I can be forgiven for this, I think. I had just been witness to a conversation that I had never hoped to hear. Kathryn had just told me herself, in her own words, that in a couple of hours time, she would be clocking out of Tesco for the last time, hanging up her uniform or handing it back in, whatever the procedure for departing staff is now and that would be it. Off she would go, into the sunset and I would never know the sheer joy of simply seeing her. I would never know that again. Six years, she had been there. Six whole years. Once she had started, you felt that she couldn’t stop. This had been a release for her. It was as though she had been dying to tell someone. Waiting for one of the customers that she had served that day to do that godforsaken Peter Kay thing with her and then she could tell them, in full detail, what was happening to her. I get the feeling, from what we saw and heard, that none of the people that had been through her till before we had had asked her those two questions and that, she was hoping that at least one of them would. Because she knew, she had planned, what she was going to say. Her moment. Fortunately or unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure which, even now; it had been Dad who was the first to ask her and he had got Kathryn in full flow. Like this had been building up inside her as the day wore on and she was thinking, “I have to tell somebody or else I’ll burst!”. Very much like Georgina in that sense, I think, but not like her in another. If that had have been Georgina, she wouldn’t have waited for anyone to ask her, she would have just told them. And not only one. All of them. Every single person that went through her checkout that day would have got the same story. I’m smiling and laughing to myself as I write this because I don’t mean any harm by it, it’s simply how she is and also, I can see her so clearly in that situation. “Hi, this is me. It’s my last day and I’m leaving to go to university. Etc, etc.” Like it or not, whether you had asked her or not, she was going to tell you. Kathryn, in keeping with her nature, was more sensible. She had chosen to wait for the moment when she was asked, then she would go into it all. Yes, one of the things that she had told us, once she had been given the opportunity by Dad to get going; one of the things that she had said to us is that she had been working there for the last six years. “Wow...”, I thought, “That’s a long time”. And, it is. It’s a very long time. I didn’t realise it was that long. Though, on reflection, she was probably about right. With me starting work there some time after her and having never spoken to her about it, either, I never did find out how long she had been employed there before me. It wasn’t something that ever particularly concerned me or interested me, for that matter. I hadn’t thought about it that much. But, as she had told us, it had been six years. This is obviously discarding the six months that she spent on the other side of the world. This didn’t make me feel any better about it though. The fact still remained, she was now gone from my life, most likely for good and even though nothing would have ever come of it if she had stayed where she was, I was still unbearably sad at the prospect of a life without Kathryn as we drove away and made the short journey home.
She was one of a kind. Yes, there have been other women in my life and with a lot of them, I have felt the dizzying highs and the terrible lows that come with being so hopelessly in love with someone. And, I’m also confident that I will feel something similar for someone else at some point in the future. But, although these instances are and will be similar, they could never be the same. No-one else could feel like Kathryn. No-one else could make me feel the way that I did whenever I saw her. This is, literally, indescribable. It’s not possible for me to put into words exactly how she made me feel. It was something unique, something that simply didn’t happen when I saw or was with somebody else. Whoever that might be. This is why it was such a bad thing for me to hear that she was leaving and also why I have missed her so much. I miss her a lot. But, at the same time, I am pleased to know that she is now doing something that- One- Hopefully, she is enjoying doing and Two- Hopefully, will lead her on to bigger and better things. I wasn’t angry at her at the time and I’m still not now. I have no reason to be. She never did anything to me that could possibly make me feel that way about her. A couple of years ago, yes, maybe. I could see me having a different attitude to all of this then, but not now. I have, I am glad to say, learned from my mistakes. Not only did I not lose the plot when the thought entered my head that one day she might leave, but, as well as this, I didn’t lose it either when, finally, that day arrived. I’m not going to lie and say that it wouldn’t have been nice to have been able to see her for just a little bit longer. It would have been. Of course, it would. I would have liked it to have gone on forever, if that would have been possible. But, sadly, it wasn’t. However, I can now look at this situation, knowing and remembering very well how I have felt and reacted in such instances in the past and say that this time, I haven’t behaved nearly as childishly or immaturely as I used to. I took it for what it was. A decision that had nothing to do with me, whatsoever. I’ll bet I was a million miles away from Kathryn’s thoughts when she was weighing up her options and deciding what to do with her life. And, at the end of it all, that is what it comes down to. It’s her life, not mine. If I really, truly love her, as I say I do; then, yes, I’m allowed to miss her, as I have been doing, but I should be happy for her, be pleased for her and hope for her sake that what she has done will turn out to be the best option. Which, I have no doubt, over time, it will prove to be. Jolly good luck to the girl, that’s what I say. I mean it, too.
There is one final thing that I would like to say and that I should have probably pointed out earlier and that’s this. I was saying before that when I saw all those Tesco people standing in that one aisle, the Halloween aisle, I got a funny feeling that something was going on, perhaps a visit by an important person or a stocktake or something. And, also, the fact that Kathryn was on a till had something to do with whatever was going on. At one point, I was absolutely convinced that this was so. As it happened, I’m now sure that this wasn’t the case and that I was simply reading too much into a situation as is quite the norm with me, as I am certain you are well aware by now. To my way of thinking, the reason that Kathryn was where she was and not where I expected her to be had to be due to it being her last day and nothing more. I think one of two things happened for her to be in that position. An agreement has to have been made, I think, at some point. But, as to whose idea it was, I really don’t know. Either, Kathryn had requested that she was put there or someone has asked her or told her to do it. Whichever it was, as I say, I believe that this was because she would be leaving at the end of that day and had nothing whatsoever to do with what her fellow employees might or might not have been doing at the same time.

Four
Two months later and all of a sudden, somehow, it was mid-November. It was a Saturday and I was round at Mum and Dad's house doing my duty as any good son would. To be exact, I was helping out with the decorating that they were doing at the time. This was something that had been going on for a couple of weeks and over the past two weekends, I had been assisting Dad with the job of lining the walls in the dining room and lounge. Despite the fact that this might seem quite easy and straight-forward, trust me when I say that it wasn't. If nothing else, it was extremely time consuming and took a lot longer than I had anticipated that it would do. I figured that it
would be done in virtually no time at all. In reality, it was nothing like that. This was why, come the second weekend, we were still doing it. As opposed to say...painting or something. Which I thought we would have progressed comfortably to by this point. Anyway, by two-thirty, three o'clock on this particular day, finally, at last, it was done. And the painting was next. However, because we had to wait for the paste to dry, before we painted, this meant that we were forced to down tools and instead begin prepping for a fresh start the following morning. Midway through the tidying up process, I was asked by Dad to take a box of some description back to the Taylor's, across
the road. I hadn't the first idea what was in it. But, it was green, fairly heavy and it had "Bosch" written on the side, in big, red letters. I guessed from these clues that it was some kind of power tool. He asked me to return it, so I did. Big green box in hand, I rang the doorbell and waited for someone to answer it. Twenty or so seconds later, Trudi came to the door and let me in. She emerged from the kitchen and invited me into the hall, after telling me how good it was to see me. After what must have been a good few months since we had last spoken. Perhaps the last time we had conversed with one another was at my housewarming, all the way back in June. Once the opening pleasantries were out of the way, she asked me why I had come round. Clearly, she hadn't spotted the box that I was carrying. I explained to her what it was...Or rather, what I thought it was. She then took it off me and put it on the floor further down the hall. By the side of some other stuff that according to her, David needed to take outside to the garage. With the job done, I was about to walk back out of the door and make my way