Love in the time of chip shops (slight return)

Lazy bastard that I am, I haven't written a word today, so, with apologies to anyone who's already read this, instead of something new, here's something from a couple of years ago. I have, however, written a postscript...

. A couple of quick thoughts on adultery before I start, though. It has become fashionable to refer to extra-marital shenanigans as ‘cheating’. Traditionally it was called ‘being unfaithful’. Well, it isn't cheating if you haven’t broken any of the rules of your marriage, and it isn't being unfaithful if there is no covenant of faith to stop you doing it. Any of you who want to express your views on my marriage are entitled to do so once you've lived through it. There’s stuff you don’t know, the relevant parts of which I will tell you about in due course. Two things I have learned from life though – one is that men’s faithfulness to their wives is generally in inverse ratio to their opportunities not to be, and, as someone who has slept with far, far too many married women, I can assure you that the only man a happily married woman has sex with is her husband. Anyway – to begin at the beginning – return with me, my friends, to 1989.... At that time, in a hot summer over twenty years ago, I was working as a driving instructor in Brixton. This meant covering the same few streets many times over in the course of the day, and naturally I came to know many of the locals by sight. Brixton being Brixton, some were eccentric or colourful, some outrageous, but nearly all interesting in some way. There was always one, though, who especially caught my eye. She was a stunning young woman who lived in the street where I parked my car. I always used to see with two small girls, who might have been her younger sisters or might have been her children, and sometimes with a surly-looking sour-faced chav too. She was very, very beautiful – far out of my league – slinky and sexy with an amazing full, sensual mouth and the most sensational body; slim and almost boyish, but at the same time incredibly feminine. What always struck me though, was that she always looked terribly sad. I often used to wonder why, and if she’d look even lovelier if she were happy, but this was academic. I’m not the worst looking bloke in the world, nor do I have the world’s worst personality, but I know my limits, and not only did this woman not know I existed, but she was always going to be way beyond my reach. A one day, a day much like any other, I was driving past the woman’s house when I had to stop and wait while she parked the great barge of a Cortina she drove back then. She actually parked it pretty well, getting a big car into a small space, and as she looked up I smiled and made a ‘not bad’ sort of gesture. Then she did something which changed my life forever. She smiled back... My friends, I have seen the sun rise through the clouds in the High Andes and seen it set over the lagoon at Venice. I have seen a flock of a million pink flamingos taking flight from Lake Victoria and I have flown above the Grand Canyon, seen the pleasure gardens of the Alhambra and the palaces of the Forbidden City, but I had never, ever in my life seen anything as stunningly beautiful as that smile, and twenty years on I still haven’t. From that moment, I was lost, utterly infatuated and helpless. Looking back, even I can’t quite explain the state I found myself in. All my life I had been confident around and assured with women. I don’t take much pride in this, but since adolescence I had been an inveterate serial shagger. The third time I ever had sex I was cheating on the girl who only a few days before had unburdened me of my virginity; I had wandered through the female population of South London like a kid locked overnight in a sweetshop, and one of my best friends, a former flatmate, had once said that he knew that I had finally grown up because I now only slept with women I was actually attracted to. One thing I certainly didn’t do was get schoolgirl crushes. This isn’t confessional and it isn’t bragging; I tell you this to establish some context for you to understand how out of character what happened next was. The first thing was that from that point on, every time I saw my mysterious beauty, she would smile and wave; cheerfully if she was with the kids, sexily if she was driving alone and, best of all, if she was with the surly-looking chav, ever so, ever so discreetly. So far, so good; in the waving and smiling departments all my needs were being met, no complaints there, we were w’ing and s’ing like champions, but how was I going to meet her? I tried everything I could think of. I spent ages tinkering meaninglessly at my car in the hope she’d pass by. Never did. I religiously drove past the school where the oldest child went in the hope of catching her alone and not with the other mums. No chance. The strange thing was that Brixton Hill was like a little village where everybody knew everybody else, but although everyone I asked about her knew who I meant, none of them had the foggiest idea who she was. It was though I was trying to catch a beautiful ghost. What was I going to do? I couldn’t just knock on her door in case the S-L C answered, but if I shadowed her movements any more closely I risked getting arrested for stalking. I thought about little else day and night (I must have given some rubbish driving lessons around that time) and so I was probably obsessing about it the day I walked over to my car and found a note stuck beneath the wiper... “Hello” it said “Hope you’re having a good day. Jane X” underneath there was a picture of a smile. It couldn’t be her, could it? It was, though, wasn’t it? And what do you do with a note with no phone number on it? Leave a note on her car for the surly-looking chav to find? I think not. So I did the only thing I could think of; namely I carried it with me as though it was a fragment of the Shroud of Turin and read it forty times a day to divine its hidden meaning. After much analysis - linguistic, semiotic and forensic - I concluded that it came from someone called Jane, who hoped I was having a nice day and signed off with a kiss (although I didn’t discount the possibility that her surname was ‘X’ and she had actually signed it rather formally ‘Jane X’. Perhaps the S-L-C was an S.A.S officer. They always seem to be called ‘Captain T’ or ‘Major P’) so, now what? Over the next days, we worked ourselves into a near-frenzy of smiling & waving until one afternoon I saw her and the children doing what can only be described as loitering by my car. The time had come for the great seducer to do what he did best. I straightened my tie, checked my reflection in a shop window, turned up the louche to 11 and sashayed over to where the mysterious lovely stood waiting. Mysterious Lovely: “Hello” Me: “Errrrrrrrrrr” ML: “How are you today?” Me: “Ummmmmm” She laughed a rich velvety laugh, and I composed myself enough to get out some actual words. Me: “I’m Mick. And you are?” ML (gamely managing not to start with ‘du-urrrrr!’ ): “I’m Jane” Me: “Umm. Right. Great. Well, stay in touch” BOLLOCKSBOLLOCKSBOLLOCKSBOLLLOCKSBOLLOCKS!!!!SHITSHITSHITSHIT!!!!!ARRRRGGGHH!! I mean, I was good in situations like that. I knew exactly how to render women defenceless with my wit and charm (not to mention the boyish good looks* and manly shoulders) and here I am behaving like a particularly sheltered eleven year old with a crush on his mate’s older sister. I had to face facts; it was over before it had begun. I’d had my chance and I’d blown it. Or so I thought... (*Only available on pre-1990 model Mickeyboys) Faint heart, as they say, ne’er won fair lady. Actually, for most of my childhood I had honestly believed that the saying was, as my father had told me “Faint heart never f*cked a pig”, but apparently it isn’t. As many of you know, I’ve done some scary things in my time, things that required courage, determination, focus and a cool head, and this would be no different. I would stalk my prey like a jungle tiger, albeit rather like a sweaty tiger with a nervous stammer and an embarrassing erection. She would not escape my clutches a second time. I vowed unceasing, unsleeping vigilance. I would not rest, no matter how long I had to wait, until I found a chance to speak to her again. I was a man with a dream. Days, weeks, months, even years would be no obstacle to my passion. However long it took, I would not be deterred. I would have another chance. Which, as it happened, came the following afternoon. You know those sudden summer rainstorms? The ones which come from nowhere and suddenly saturate everything and make the drains bubble up like fountains? Well, it was one of those days. I had come off lessons and put myself on reception, the better to keep a lookout for the lovely Jane, and was quietly grateful that I wasn’t out teaching in a storm like that when I saw her car pulling up outside the chip shop next door. Zooming out of the shop in a cloud of testosterone and desperation, I raced round to the chippie to see the object of my desire standing at the back of possibly the longest queue ever recorded in a takeaway establishment anywhere in the European Union. It took bloody hours. Seriously. I stood there in the bucketing rain for what seemed an age, getting soaked through to my socks and pants, gaining three stone in moisture whilst losing two inches in height due to shrinkage, my hair plastered onto my head like paint. It was not a good look. Eventually, though, she emerged, and the S-L C and the kids got cold chips that night as we finally met properly and arranged to meet for lunch later that week. Game on! We arranged to meet at a quiet restaurant, and the mysterious Jane became a little less enigmatic. She was ten years younger than me at 20, the two children were hers, and she was married to the surly-looking-chav. She was also funny, smart, charming and absolutely lovely. We got on brilliantly and were talking and laughing like old friends whilst the restaurant staff began pointedly yawning and stacking chairs onto tables around us. When we finally got the hint and left, we went to her car and snogged the faces off each other like hyperhormonal adolescents. This was definitely heading in the right direction. Gentle readers, I must now draw the veil of decency over what transpired over the succeeding weeks and months, except to discreetly hint that it consisted of a great deal of sweet, sweet loving, of the very highest calibre. It wasn't just that, though. I had never; have never met anyone with who I was happier with – anyone who made me happier to be who I am – and anyone who I've tried harder to be worthy of. We saw each other every chance we got, and, as is the way of such things, couldn’t keep our hands off each other. It wasn’t long though, before things started to go wrong; but not in the way you might think. There are rules about these kinds of relationships. No ties, no jealousy, no empty promises and everything is about both having fun. We both knew the rules, but didn’t even realize that we were breaking every one of them. It was about this time that I made the second biggest mistake of my life. Before we knew what was happening, Jane and I were head over heels in love with each other. This was not going to end well. Time went by, and we fell deeper and deeper in love. We knew it was wrong, but we couldn’t imagine not being together. We lived for the hours we could snatch together; but slowly reality dawned. We were worlds apart in age and life experience came from totally different backgrounds and, oh...what was it? – oh yes - we were married to other people. She had a husband and two children and I had a pregnant wife at home. It was never going to work out for us, and after a great deal of soul-searching, much agonising and some frankly sensational break-up sex we tearfully decided to say goodbye. We tearfully held each other one last time and went back to our other lives forever. Yeah, right After a while, the dust settled, and life returned to something like normal. I became a dad, the only job I’ve ever had that I was any good at, and I had a business to run (into the ground, as it turned out)my wife’s career went from strength to strength and we moved out of London to find a new life in the country. We grew ever closer as a family, and I never made the mistake of getting so emotionally involved with another woman again. Months turned into years and my affair with the mysterious lovely from Brixton should have become a distant memory. It should have, but it didn’t. As time went on I came to realize that if having fallen in love with her was the second greatest mistake of my life, then letting her go was the greatest. But what can you do? You can’t live in the past forever and eventually life must go on. We watched our daughter grow into a beautiful young woman, traveled the world together, had a seemingly endless procession of cats and made plans for our future; and, whatever gnawing disquiet may have been in the back of my mind, we were, for the most part, genuinely happy. Then, things got tricky. My wife, over the last years has had  battles with depression. Mine. I won’t detail them here, but suffice to say that for long periods of the last years she has effectively been my carer, and that the nature of our relationship has fundamentally changed. We are dear, dear friends, bound together by ties of trust, history and love that will never be broken; but dear friends are what we are, and although we have an amazing relationship, we stopped having a marriage years ago. That is why we decided some months ago, perfectly amicably, after twenty three years of marriage, to call it a day and I moved out. Now..... I don’t drink. Well, that may not be strictly true. I do drink, maybe once a year, maybe less, but when I do, I tear the arse right out of it. It was on one of those evenings, when I had been re-establishing my acquaintance with my good friends José Cuervo & Jim Beam, that, through an alcoholic haze I did one of the weirdest/smartest things I’ve ever done. We all know what a dangerous cocktail the internet makes when mixed with alcohol, and Facebook in particular is a minefield for the inebriated; which was, of course, exactly where I found myself. She wasn’t there. Her daughters were, though. This was before Facebook changed its privacy settings and you could still access the pages of people who hadn’t opted out. I looked at the photo galleries of her oldest daughter (who looks, incidentally, exactly like her mother did at that age – lucky girl) and there, on one of her graduation pictures were the dancing brown eyes and the dazzling smile that I had never, ever, forgotten. After nearly twenty years, I had found her. Finding her was one thing, but there didn’t seem to be much point in contacting her. She was hardly going to be single, and, if the truth be known, I was half afraid that she wouldn’t remember me. I’m not saying that I’d thought about her every day over all those years, but to be honest, I’d thought about her on most of them. She isn’t the only woman I’ve ever loved – I’ve been lucky enough to have had some incredible relationships with some amazing women – but she is the one I’ve loved the most. The thing was, I couldn’t believe that I could have meant as much to her as she did to me, so, for a couple of weeks I did what any red-blooded, passionate man would have done. Totally bottled it... The thing was, having not forgotten her in two decades apart; I was highly unlikely to forget her now. I tried, really I did, but every time I sat at a computer, which was, let’s face it, most of the time, I found myself looking at that photo on Facebook. In it, she’s looking straight down the camera, and her eyes seemed to follow me everywhere, like an infinitely sexier version of Lord Kitchener. Eventually, last September, I gave in to the inevitable. I spent about two days trying to make up a message which didn’t make me sound like a stalker and bunged it off into the ether. That was the easy part – the tough bit was going to be waiting for the reply, which, inevitably, didn’t come. Not for a month, anyway. After a few weeks of playing it cool, she sent me a text message saying of course she remembered me, she was single too now, and yes, she would love to see me again, if only to find out how fat and bald I’d become (the answer, btw ladies, is not very and not at all, in that order) Jumping out of aircraft thousands of feet in the air? Child’s play. Storming machinegun emplacements under mortar fire? A mere bagatelle. Phoning the woman I’d been thinking about for half my adult life? Scariest thing I’ve ever done. The moment she answered and I heard her voice again I knew I’d done the right thing, as the years fell away and we were as comfortable together as we always had been. When I saw her face to face, the old magic was there straight away. It turns out that she had missed me just as much as I her, and, like me, had never forgotten our time together. She’s still beautiful – the looks may have faded a little, but we’re neither of us kids anymore, and she’s still, unmistakably the woman I fancied so much from afar. She’s still got a great figure – but a great figure for a 41-year-old mother of three rather than a girl just out of her teens. The sweet, sweet loving may be a little less energetic these days, but it’s as sweet as ever it was, and my Great Folly has, after all these years, become my Great Love. At our ages, ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ sound rather silly, so we have opted for ‘fiancé’ and ‘fiancée’. Everything is out in the open with everybody concerned, we are together at last and we’re both happier than we have ever been. Wish me luck... Postscript: If I'd been hit by a bus the moment I finished writing this, I'd have died a happy man. I wasn't though, and I have to tell you that as most people who read this will have guessed, this didn't end well. It finished badly, and I was hurt more badly than I ever dreamed was possible. One day soon I'Il write that story too, but for now, I hope you enjoyed the happy part. Mick July 2014