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

asked. Hallelujah! This was it. Almost out of nowhere, you might say, we were on to the subject that I had been wanting to talk about since I had been let in and had walked through the door.
There was no way that I was letting this go now. The good thing was that there was clearly more to come. And what made it even better was that I wasn’t even required to open my mouth in order to get this information from her. It came for free. I had survived asking the question. I had been lucky. But, there was always the danger, I felt, that if I said anything else, I may then go into the infatuated loser/psycho killer mode that I was trying hard to avoid. I had been successful so far, yes. Still, I wasn’t out of the woods yet. At any moment, I could slip up and make myself look foolish or worse. But, with Trudi talking and me doing nothing more than listening and occasionally either nodding or smiling, or both, I was safe. Trudi could have easily have given a “Yes” or a “Yes, it was Kathryn that Gemma went to see”. That was the problem with the nature of the closed question that I had asked. For whatever reason, though, probably because it isn’t in her nature to be so guarded or untalkative, she didn’t. She gave me the most detailed answer that spat out all sorts of valuable information in a million different directions. It turned out that not only had Gemma gone to see Kathryn. When she had got there, to Kathryn’s digs or wherever it was, they had gone out, into Liverpool and had gone to a club to see a band play. “Wonderful” I thought, this was all gold. There was more than this, but in all of the excitement that was around me at this time, that was the only thing that I managed to pick up. Once she had finished, eventually, I realised that I had the option to stick or twist. What I said/asked next would determine if the conversation stayed on the subject of Kathryn or moved onto something completely different. I don’t know what it was, maybe it was all that hard work that I had done earlier in the day (!) or perhaps, it could have been the sheer giddy thrill that comes with being so much in love with someone as brilliant and as beautiful as Kathryn, the recklessness...Whatever it was, I made the bold decision and twisted. Twisted as though my life depended on it. I didn’t even care too much about what I said and how I said it, I was far too much in the moment, enjoying myself to such a degree that I didn’t care how I sounded anymore. That, or having passed the first test, I was now confident in my ability to ask a decent, seemingly unbiased and lackadaisical question, that I knew that everything would somehow be alright. Anyway, what I wanted to find out the answer to now wasn’t nearly as potentially dramatic as that first one. What I was intrigued about knowing now was how Kathryn was adjusting to her new life. There is no need for me to go over that incident on the bus for yet another time as it is already so extensively documented in not only this piece of work on Kathryn but also in “Avril Lavigne”, the first essay that I wrote on her. In case you have forgotten, which is highly unlikely, I know, but on the slim chance that you have, I will just remind you in passing that when I saw her that day, she looked very, very sad indeed. That was why it had seemed like such a strange thing for her to be doing when I had overheard her telling Dad on her last day at Tesco. It appeared to me, as an outsider, slightly strange that someone who had hated university the first time that she had tried it, four or five years ago now, it must have been; it simply sounded like a very odd thing for her to be saying. But, say it she did and back at university she most certainly was. Much to my sadness, from my very selfish point of view, at least. Fantastic for her, not so fantastic for me. So, how was she doing? Well, according to the mother of the boyfriend of one of Kathryn’s best friends, she was doing alright, she was enjoying it. I must admit that I was struck by how quickly and assuredly Trudi answered my second question. I had thought, at the very point when I was actually asking the question; I had thought to myself, “There’s no way on earth she’s going to know the answer to this...”. If I hadn’t have been so relaxed and confident now, I would have believed that she would think me mad for asking her that sort of a question. How would she possibly know that? But, I was on a roll now and I put it to her, none the less. Remarkably, she did know the answer. Who knows? Maybe she was just as interested in Kathryn as I was. Okay, maybe not. But, still...Kathryn loved it. That was the word that she used. She said, without the merest hint of hesitation in her voice that she loved what she was doing. Surprisingly, I was almost overcome with joy on hearing this. You see, I might not be quite as cynical and selfish as you...or, I, for that matter, might think. I thought it was fantastic, absolutely fantastic, that she was enjoying herself. Especially considering what had happened when she had tried to do the same thing at Salford and it had all gone desperately, sadly wrong for her.
The questions, for the time being, at least, were over. Now, it was my turn to talk. My turn to show Trudi that I knew some things about Kathryn McKenna as well. I mentioned openings before and how I was looking for one. This, now, as the conversation between us developed, was another. Now that she had told me that Kathryn was really enjoying herself, “loved” what she was doing and all the rest of it, it seemed to me like as good a time as any to reel out the old tale of seeing her coming home from university that autumn night. It might be boring and repetitive to both you and I now, hence my desire to not spell it out again above. However, for the purposes of my current audience and the way that this discussion seemed to be going, it now looked and felt like the perfect thing to say. I told her how pleased I was to hear that Kathryn was happy because...And then I went into it. Telling it to her in the finest detail that my memory would allow me to. What I wanted to get across if I could, what I wanted to emphasise to her as much as possible, was exactly what I have tried to emphasise in these essays about Kathryn, when I have discussed that particular subject, that particular evening. That is to say how thoroughly, completely, unbelievably unimpressed with life and all of its various aspects the poor girl appeared to look when I saw her, as I got on the same bus as her. Immediately, I noticed that Trudi was nodding ferociously in agreement with what I was saying. Not as though she had heard this one, rather specific, I thought, story before, but more that she understood, was aware of Kathryn’s overall mindset at around that time. This was confirmed with what she said once I had finished, a short time later. She had used the extreme word “loves” when describing how Kathryn felt at the present time and in her present situation. Now she would choose the opposite and equally extreme word “hated” to indicate what Kathryn had felt like while she was at Salford. According to her, she had hated Salford University, hence the reason why she had walked out and had gone back to working full time at Tesco. This was a subtle but nevertheless, extremely important moment. An important thing for her to say and an important thing for me to hear. I had never known for sure that Kathryn had actually dropped out. Yes, alright, I had suspected and I was 99.9% sure that this was how it had eventually turned out, but I had never known it for certain. This, you may think, isn’t all that relevant at all, all she was doing was confirming something that I pretty much knew anyway. After all, that was the conclusion that I had reached on my own, without any other knowledge or information than that what I saw with my own eyes. Fair enough, I can see that, but at the time, it did mean a lot...and still does, I think. No time to stop and think, though, about whether this was significant or not, Trudi was off again and it was taking everything I had just to keep up with her. If only I could stop her in mid-flow, ask her if it would be okay if I went home to get a pen and a pad so that I could then come back and take notes, while she chatted on at will about Kathryn.
It was much more an open, to-and-fro sort of exchange now, rather than me asking a short question and she going into a long and very detailed answer. When it came back to my turn to talk, I thought that it would be right if I mentioned that Dad and I had seen Kathryn on her last day at Tesco, gone to her till and had spoken to her. I briefly explained that this was how I had come to discover what Kathryn was up to and what her plans for the future, just on the off chance that she was wondering about such a thing. Trudi, that is. I told her that she had mentioned to me what subject she was going to university to read, but that I couldn’t remember. This was true. I said that I knew that it was either psychology or sociology, one of those two. However, it escaped me as to which of these it was. Trudi responded by saying that as far as she knew, because she was stuck between the two of them herself; but, as far as she knew, it was sociology. This was more than good enough for me. If sociology was what she said it was, then that was what it must be. Case closed. Then, something quite unusual happened. I lost control of what I was thinking and therefore, what I was saying also. I hadn’t been thinking about this particular part of Kathryn’s life, at all, during the conversation so far and I can’t say why it entered my head at this juncture, but it did and all of a sudden, the question came out of my mouth and I was powerless to stop it. I asked Trudi what was happening with Kathryn and her boyfriend. This was bizarre. I say that I hadn’t been thinking about this part of Kathryn’s life during the conversation...It was more than that. I hadn’t thought about this part of Kathryn’s life since I had last seen her, since that final day. Why on earth should that sort of a question come to me now? I was on a roll, as I have said, I was daring, I was care free but this didn’t matter to me anymore. With Kathryn out of my life, as far as I could tell, for good, now, I had no reason to think, worry about what was going on between Kathryn and her boyfriend. But, it had been asked and