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

“obsessed”, but I guess that that’s the best way that I can describe it...and how obsessed I was with her.
It wouldn’t last forever, but surely I still had it for a while, didn’t I? I mean, what could possibly happen that would change the way things were at that moment? Well, there was one thing, obviously. She could leave. That was always a possibility. And it was one that I was constantly aware of. I went through a period, during the middle of July, I think it was, when I was going into Tesco, but she never seemed to be there. The first couple of times, I hadn’t thought anything about it, didn’t read much into it. It was, I figured, simply the law of averages working itself out. There had been periods previously where I had gone in time after time and she had been there for all of them. That had been great but there hadn’t been anything behind it. Just my sheer good luck, nothing more than that. When the opposite of this then came round some time afterwards, I took at as being the reverse of that good luck. Then, when this seemed to keep on happening, for more than a week or so, perhaps even stretching to two weeks, I started to get more than a little concerned. Could it be, could it really be that she had left? I was seriously starting to think that way when logic began to kick in all of a sudden. Something that had sadly deserted me up to that point. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that the reason that she wasn’t there might be because she was on holiday. Possibly, I’m tempted to say, in an attempt to save myself from total embarrassment, I had taken on board that she had gone to Glastonbury a month earlier and that, somehow, that meant that she wasn’t then allowed another holiday in July. I know, it’s weak and it still makes me sound stupid, but that’s the best I can do, I’m afraid. Sure enough, after this unnecessary panic attack, the next time I went in, some days later, there she was. Blissfully unaware of the pain and torture that she had been putting me through, while she sunned herself in a beach somewhere and/or getting very drunk. This incident, though, if nothing else, highlighted to me, exactly how fragile this thing that I was holding up and trying very hard to maintain, was. It could be over in an instant, at any time. In the click of a finger. And the worst thing about it, the absolute worst, was that if it did happen, I wouldn’t know about it. That was always the benefit, if you want to call it that, of the situation that I found myself in with Toni. Because we worked in the same office and were pretty much in each other’s, and everyone else’s, for that matter, pockets and so, if she was looking to move on and leave the business for something else, then it wouldn’t be long before I got wind of it. Be it from one source or another. It wasn’t nice, but it was handy, I suppose. Compared to this, the thing with Kathryn was a nightmare. I had no idea about anything. I had no idea what was going on in her head, what her plans were or if she was staying or going. But that wasn’t going to happen. I had convinced myself of that. Don’t ask me how or why, but I had. It’s radically un-Steven like, radically uncharacteristic, I know, but there you have it. This was something that never would have occurred six, twelve months earlier. I would have had that feeling of impending doom and “Oh, no my life is over!” kind of thing. Now, though, I was nothing but positive. Completely upbeat. Everything was going to be okay. The wonderful irony of this, of course, was that everything was far from okay and in no time at all, what I had with Kathryn would come to an abrupt end.
Looking back on it now, I laugh that I was so cool and calm about how I saw what I perceived to be going on. I remember, extremely vividly, how bad I was with Toni. There were times, days and nights, when I was bordering on tearing my hair out at the was she/wasn’t she leaving subject. In those moments, I was so in love with her, so blinded by how beautiful she was and how much she meant to me; that it just became too much for me to take. I was paranoid beyond belief. Super, super paranoid. I mean, it used to keep me awake at night. Fairly frequently, too. I don’t know, I can’t say how close she was to leaving at any given time. There could well have been instances where she applied for other jobs and there was, as well, all that talk about her department, the Visa department, going back to the offices at Skelmersdale. This, in the end, was probably how things ended up. That’s my educated guess, anyway. I could very easily be wrong, though. It could be that she is still in that office now, today. The point that I want to make, though, is this. All that time that I spent worrying, losing sleep and everything else that I did; in the end, all this was completely pointless. Why? Well, because I managed to get out before she did. This, absurdly, makes it sound like a race between the two of us. Which, obviously, it wasn’t. What I mean is that, despite what I might or might not think, if it was true that something was going on and it was firmly in the motions that she, either on her own or accompanied by the rest of her department; then I succeeded in leaving the company while she was still there. This was something that I wanted to do. That was the way that I wanted things to happen. Going back to what I was saying originally, though, I did get into a real mess whenever I addressed the possibility of Toni leaving. The reason being that it always seemed to be something that, for one reason or another, was distinctly possible. The idea of Kathryn doing something similar, while equally possible, you might argue, didn’t seem quite as threatening as it had been with Toni. So, I didn’t worry about it. As I say, however, history has proven this to be something of a mistake.
The day was Thursday, 13 September, 2007 and for the past two weeks, my life had taken quite an unusual turn. A fortnight before this Thursday, I had suddenly found myself out of a job when my nine month tenure at Adidas came to a sudden and nasty end. I have chosen not to go into specifics here for two reasons. One- I don’t much feel in the mood for talking about such a thing and Two- I really don’t believe that it will add anything to this particular story. That was the facts of it, though. I had lost my job and there was no getting away from that. So, in the two weeks that had passed between me being sacked and the Thursday in question, a large proportion of my time had been taken up by applying for jobs. Be it online or through the post. My preferred method for doing such a thing was to send out my CV to any potential employer that had caught my eye. This was much quicker, less time consuming than the other way of doing it, the application form. Some of those, as I found out to my annoyance and frustration, could take hours at a time. Not much fun when it wasn’t only one that I had to do but several. In the end, I have to admit, that they sent me a little round the twist. Whether I liked them or not, they still had to be done. With no computer, not to mention, internet connection, at home, I found myself over at my parent’s house on a daily basis, working out out of the jobs that I had seen, which ones were worth going for and which weren’t. Fairly soon, I got into something of a routine with it all. I would arrive at their house at somewhere around half nine in the morning, Dad and I would then spend a good five or six hours everyday doing this and then we would knock off at three-ish, tidy everything away and have it ready again for the next onslaught the following day. Then, when all this was done, I would go home and spend the rest of the day doing not very much, one thing or another, before going to bed, waking up and starting again from the beginning. This Thursday, however, was slightly different. Half two, three o’clock arrived and between the two of us, we made the collective decision to call it quits for the day. Some more work had been done and at the very least, we were able to say that we were a little further on than we had been at the same point the previous day. So, we stopped. It was at this juncture that I tended to go home. But, Dad had said that he needed to go to Tesco and with Mum at work in their car, it had been arranged that we go in mine, while she was out. Well, he was hardly going to get any argument from me on the matter. Even if I had been slogging it for the past five hours, getting lost in a seemingly endless jungle of masses of paper and pens, rulers and tippex; even if this was the case, as it certainly had been, I wasn’t going to pass up a possible opportunity to see Kathryn, never in a million years. If anything, it would come as a welcome relief to see her. If she was, indeed, working when we turned up.
In my car, then, we left the house, shopping list in hand and headed in the direction of Tesco. In five minutes, we were there and walking inside, Dad and myself. Craig, because he was still on holiday from university at that particular point in time, was offered the chance to join the fun, but he had declined. Clearly, he had no idea what he might be in for if he had said “Yes”, the poor, misguided fool, but we did. Or, I did. I doubt if Dad was all that aware, either, of the strange and mysterious powers of a certain Kathryn McKenna. It was probably just me, actually. No matter, I would enjoy her all for myself and leave the others, whether there, with me or back at home; leave them to bask in the blissfulness of their ignorance. Inside, right away, I knew that something was amiss. I say this because Kathryn was there, alright, on full view, for the world to see, but she wasn’t where she almost always was. What would normally happen in that sort of a situation is that I would walk in, through the big front doors and immediately look to my left as I walked through the security barriers; I would look at the little desk thing that Kathryn often stood behind in her role as assister to the people on the tills. If she was, at that moment, unoccupied, not attending to the needs of a member of the checkout staff, then she would be stood waiting, at that desk. If she was not in this position, then she would be either walking from one checkout to another or stood at a particular checkout, resolving a particular problem. If she was not to be seen in any of