The girl from WH Smiths

i

There are a lot of words people overuse or get wrong. They sit on lips and hover on pages like the person at the house party that nobody invited. “Literally” is one, “unique” is another. A third is “life-changing”. Life is full of changes, that’s a cliché, but very little can truly change your life. There are such a small number of events so significant that they deserve, that they have earned, that adjective.

My life has only really spun comprehensively on its axis once. It was completely changed on a Wednesday morning six and a half years ago when I was sitting at my desk and an email pinged into my inbox from her. I read it half a dozen times. I had imagined getting a mail like that more times than I cared to tell anyone, but it didn’t change the seismic shock of seeing it there. I looked at the last three sentences again. It’s somehow wrong that, to all outward appearances, the most significant and insignificant sentences can look exactly the same. They are made of the same letters, in the same font. No milk today is no different from I love you. Nothing flashes like a beacon or throbs like a stubbed toe.

I didn’t know what to do. Working was out of the question now. I had spent all my energy hoping against hope to get a mail like this, and now I had none left to know how to respond. I locked my computer and went to get a coffee. When I returned, the words were still there. They hadn’t burned holes in my monitor, though I half expected them to. My eyes didn’t burn a hole in it either, and they gave it their best shot.

“I still fancy the pants off you, and I can’t stop thinking about the Sunday. There, another blurt. Look what you made me do.”

I had been here before, had my dilapidated, thin and strained relationship tested in this way in the past. I couldn’t truthfully say on that occasion that my relationship had passed the test, it’s just that I had failed. That was a year ago, a year which itself could only be described as a failure. I wanted to be a different person now, but I didn’t want to be a person who cheated. I did the only thing I could do. My heart breaking with every keystroke, I said something to the effect of thanks but no thanks. Hitting send was one of the hardest things I had ever done. There was a deathly silence, and what felt like hours later the response came back - sad, rejected and deflated. I hated myself for my inaction, my so-called moral code, the paralysis of my ambition.

But two days later I had left my girlfriend.

ii

The summer after my first year at university everyone went home, and then a long time later everyone came back.

I imagine for everyone else there were parties, and travelling, maybe even some paid work of some description. For me, the weeks were a stressful boredom. I had just got the hang, I thought, of being a student when I was forced to go back to a small house in a small town in the confines of my small family. The world had suddenly shrunk to a thumbnail I didn’t like.

I had to catch up on all the work I hadn’t done in summer term when I was sitting by the river, or punting, or sleeping until one in the afternoon. I virtually lived in my hometown’s university library, a building so empty it was just me and the librarians. “Are you a postgrad?” asked one, an impossibly confusing combination of a young face, an old cricket sweater and a hearing aid. By the end of the summer I used to just sit there reading whatever I could find while outside everybody else outside that book-filled tower block was off having adventures.

I wrote a lot of letters, far more than were ever replied to. When I wasn’t doing that I was writing extensively in my diary about how bored I was, or how neglected I felt that I was receiving so few letters. In the evenings there were long walks across the park and pints in the pub with whoever was back in town, but the days went on for ever, and not in the way of summers when I was at school. I went to France to visit my girlfriend, a holiday which should have been so much more than it was. I travelled all the way across Paris on my own, terrified and shy, to see a girlfriend who wasn’t especially pleased to see me and a family that found me more than slightly ridiculous. I lost my virginity on the last night of my visit, and wondered if that was all there was to that.

I’m not sure I’ve ever worked out the answer to that one, and it’s been over fifteen years.

I had never had a summer like it, and somehow I filled it despite myself with an uneasy mixture of idleness and nervous energy. I longed to go back to university. I dreaded going back to university. And then I was back at university, and so was everybody else. Everybody had gone home, and everyone had come back. Everybody except one.

iii

The one in question was a friend of a friend of mine. She failed her exams, failed the re-sits and was invited to leave. And she ended up working in WH Smiths in the city centre for reasons I never quite figured out.

I didn’t know her well. I was sure we had been down the bar a few times with our mutual friend, and one time I had tea with her in her room. My diary didn’t record it, but I knew it had happened because I had a sneaking feeling she was flirting with me, though I couldn’t be sure. Or she might have been enjoying my obvious discomfort: I was so shy around girls back then, despite all the showing off, the spite and bluster, and I think she probably knew that.

Back then I had no idea how to flirt, nowadays I find it difficult not to. How things change.

I can’t remember whether I was told before I bumped into her in the shop, but either way the embarrassment was palpable. I believe she may have sold me an A4 pad a couple of times, me in my shabby t-shirt and jeans, her in her awful polyester uniform. The year before she had been in my world, and now she was in a world I couldn’t possibly understand and didn’t want to. Many years later I would understand so much better that feeling of being cleverer than your environment, but at the time it was totally beyond me. The initial conversations turned to smiles and pleasantries and then turned to nods and awkwardness. And then there was nothing to say at all. Finally, I was being served by somebody else and I never really found out what happened to her.

I only saw the girl from WH Smiths one more time after that, at a dinner party of a mutual friend a couple of years later. She had a job, and a fiancé and a mortgage, and I was trying to figure out what to do for a living. Again, there was no overlap between our two worlds and little to say. I didn’t like myself much back then and I had long since given up expecting anyone else to. A depressed, abrasive smoker, I spent most of the time leaning out on the balcony sucking the life out of a succession of Marlboro Lights. We may not even have spoken at all. It’s hardly surprising that, many years later, she would claim not to remember that meeting.

iv

It is Christmas Day. The girl from WH Smiths and I sit down after breakfast to open our presents. Because we have gone away, we limit ourselves to a couple of presents each. Mine to her has been long in the planning, the subject of secretive emails to a lovely woman in Wisconsin sent when the girl from WH Smiths wasn’t looking. She has made peg dolls of the two of us, based on photographs I have surreptitiously given her. I have seen pictures of the finished product, have shown them to my cooing friends and colleagues, but there has been an anxious wait for them to arrive. The box turns up on Christmas Eve, just in time for its precious cargo to be placed in the already-packed suitcase.

Unwisely, I have told the girl from WH Smiths that I have surpassed myself with this year’s present, and as she starts to open the box I wonder anxiously whether I might have over-hyped things. But I needn’t worry: she smiles and her eyes shine as she takes them out and turns them over in her hands. We will never have a little me or a little her, we agreed on that six and a half years ago, but now we have a little version of each of us and they are perfect. They look just like us at this moment, sharing this moment, but they won’t look like us forever.

But I want there to be a forever so I can be sure. I want to know what happens next.