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

one, last salvation. What you have to do, according to the theory, is listen once again to the song, just once and after that, all your problems should be solved. With this in mind, I suddenly remembered that when I had been searching for CD’s at Tesco in the past, I had noted that they had a classical music section. By no means was it extensive, but if I was fortunate, I thought, then they might just have what I was looking for. Maybe in preparation for the damn thing torturing me as it had gone on to do, when it had been playing on the radio that morning, I took the time to commit to memory the name of the piece in question, because I hadn’t known it beforehand. Arriving back in Irlam, rather than going straight home, I made the necessary diversion to get to Tesco, parked up and went inside.
Kathryn had been on earlier in the day, but I hadn’t known if she had been on an early or a late. Walking in now, I knew that she was on a late. She was stood behind her desk, as per usual and looking as lovely as always. Reluctantly walking away from her, I went up the escalator and headed on to the upper floor, where the clothing, electronic and entertainment products are. Forgetting about Kathryn, temporarily, my focus fell on the piece still in my head and finding the CD that would have it on. Mercifully, my luck was in this time. “The Best Of Prokofiev” was there, on the shelf and better still, “Montagues and Capulets” was on it. Realising that my nightmare was nearly over, I smiled, picked it up and stepped on to the down escalator. That was all I wanted. I didn’t need anything else. I had done all of shopping earlier that afternoon. The plan was simple. Buy the CD, get in the car, drive home as quickly as was legally possible, put the CD in the CD player and listen to it. Thus, hopefully, curing me. Easy. This was what I was pondering when, as I descended from the top floor of the store to the bottom, I saw Kathryn. She had moved from her station to the customer service/returns desk and was talking to the Tesco employee who was there. She seemed to be right in the middle of the conversation that she was having when, all of a sudden, she stopped and looked directly at me. I was pretty much at the bottom of the...thing, by this point, and not all that far away from her. It was as though she was staring right at my eyes. After what seemed like a mini-eternity, she looked away, said something very short and concise to her friend and then burst out laughing, followed soon after by the other person. Now, I could be completely wrong about this and I concede now, that most likely, if you were to speak to her, this would be the case. But, I still believe, wholeheartedly, in what I am about to say. Whether you agree with me...Well, that’s up to you, I guess. Immediately after I saw this, my initial thought was, “Oh, my God. She knows...She knows that I’m in love with her”. Thinking this, all I wanted to do was pay for my CD and get out, get away from her. I had been rumbled. She knew! Since then, now that I have had time to digest the incident, take everything in and assess it properly, I would like to amend this thought slightly. I still maintain that what she said to her friend was something like, “Look. There’s that lad that I was telling you about. The one that keeps coming in and staring at me with his mouth wide open...What a prat”. I think this is true. Maybe I overreacted a little with the her knowing that I was in love with her part. I don’t believe, now, that the insight that she had was that profound. But, overall, the impression that I got from that split second in time was that, she was aware of the fact that I was attracted to her. At the very least, she knew that much. I don’t know why I found this so disastrous. As with everything else that happened with Kathryn, none of it was really of any significance. Nothing ever changed. There was never the slightest hint that we would ever be a couple. Nothing of any relevance happened between us in all of the time that I knew her. So what if she did have a fairly good idea of how I felt? So what? Nobody, not even her, had the power to take that away from me. I write this, though, because this was the first time in five or six years that I got the very real feeling that she knew what was going on in my head and this, I think, is quite a big deal, even if the ramifications of it, aren’t all that life changing.

Three
By August, I knew that I was ready to write again. I was confident that I had enough material by this point to have a good stab at a third Kathryn essay, especially after the incident that I described above, all I needed was an idea. Or, not so much an idea, but a central theme. Although I knew that I could describe what I have just mentioned, as well as one or two other things, possibly, I felt that I needed something to base it all around. It was now two months that had passed since I put the finishing touches to the first and “Kathryn Goes To Glastonbury” was also well on the way to completion. But, these two, I felt, weren’t enough anymore. I knew that I had more in me than just those two. I was also fairly sure that it wouldn’t only be the “Oh, Kathryn, she’s so, so unbelievably amazing...” kind of nonsense that I feared “Avril Lavigne” could have quite easily have turned into had I not put an end to it. Things had happened in that period between June and August, maybe not vastly significant things, like the flashpoints that had formed the basis for “Avril Lavigne”, but more subtle things. Ironically, exactly what it needed, flying in the face of the subtlety, was a major flashpoint. Just one. That would be what I could base the rest of the piece on. Work everything else around that. Unfortunately, I would have to wait a little while longer for that to arrive and when it eventually did, it wasn’t the kind of thing that I was either expecting or wanted. But, I’ll get on to that in a moment or so. For now, I would just like to spend a moment or two going into something that is kind of relevant, but that also goes off on a little bit of a tangent. I’m talking about Rachel. If I had been clever enough, on the ball enough, to pick up a corkscrew that had a barcode on it, as opposed to one that didn’t, then I think that it’s fairly safe to say that the brief infatuation that I had over Rachel probably wouldn’t have happened. It was only the fact that I was stood there, at her till, for about ten minutes, that made her stick in my head and not go away. While the person went off to get another one, a real one that had the ability to be scanned through the system, she was apologising to me every two seconds for something that wasn’t even remotely her fault and I was stood there thinking, “Hmm. You’re quite attractive, aren’t you?”. Because she was, she is. Very attractive, in fact. Finally, after “Sorry about this” number 641, the correct sort of corkscrew magically turned up, coming from God knows how far away, and the lovely Rachel checked me out and I was on my way. This was the key moment, the key couple of hours and days, when having noticed a girl that I thought was attractive, I now had to work out if I liked her or not. Despite the fact that she looked to me to be very young, no older than eighteen, I didn’t think; despite this, at the end of my unforced deliberation, I decided that yes, I actually did like her. She was more than just attractive. I decided that I fancied her. This wasn’t exactly easy to take. I mean, this was the ultimate act of traitorism, wasn’t it? I couldn’t possibly think like this when I was so madly in love with Kathryn. Not only was it bad enough that there was now somebody else, what made it all the more worse was that this person was also Kathryn’s colleague. This just wasn’t on. Just what was I playing at? This was no two minute wonder either. Something that held all of my attention for a short while and then a little bit later, I was on to something else or back to what I had been on beforehand. It wasn’t even a little bit like this. After a couple of weeks, or however long it was in the end, I’m afraid that I can’t really remember the sort of time frame involved, with any kind of accuracy; after a certain amount of time had passed, though, I felt compelled to start writing about her, to put into words that particular story. If you can get this out of me then you must be doing something right, let me tell you. Many have been and gone and have not had an essay dedicated to them. Most notably, perhaps, Laura Farnworth. Though, in this case, I feel that I will have the compulsion to write something sooner or later. Many others, however, won’t ever get that. Rachel, then, had to mean at least something to me. I wouldn’t have even considered such a thing if I didn’t believe that it was justified. This was justified, alright. And, so I started. The only problem that I had was that no sooner had I started than she seemed to quite simply disappear. Chances are, I think, that she went back to education at some point in September. This would be as good an explanation as any as to why one minute she was there and then the next, she wasn’t. For that short period of a month or whatever it was, from that incident on the Friday evening with the unmarked corkscrew to me realising that she had left, it’s quite safe to assume that she was able to force out of me, at the very least, a passing interest. I’m fairly sure as well that if she had stayed there and I would have continued to see her, then my feelings for her would have only grown as time passed. However, having said that, let’s not over exaggerate this. Rachel was Rachel. What she was not, not by a long shot, was Kathryn. Despite what I might have been feeling for her, I never lost sight of the fact that Kathryn was still very much my number one. Not for a second. There was just no comparison. All of the time that I was thinking and writing about Rachel, I could never shake off the thought that Kathryn was simply so much better. This is unfair, I know and I wish, now, that it hadn’t have been that way. Even if I could have forgotten about Kathryn temporarily, while Rachel was there, and then gone back to her afterwards; that might have been alright. But, no. I wasn’t even able to do that. This only demonstrates, I believe, how much a hold Kathryn had on me at that time and how much...I’m trying desperately not to use the word