The ABCs of Love Read online

  See also Captains; Imposter Syndrome; Zest

  telephone boxes (three true stories)

  The telephone box that John sometimes calls me from is being pulled down because, apparently, more and more people are using mobile phones. I can’t help feeling as if bits of our relationship are being cut off one by one. I’m scared that soon we will disappear completely, so I suggested John should buy it and keep it as a historic monument, like Tom Jones did for the one he used to ring his wife from in Wales, but he just laughed. Still, it has made me think more seriously about telephone boxes. I keep finding out stories about them to tell John.

  1. An engineer was out on his rounds in a very rural part of seaside Britain when he decided to stop for his sandwich lunch. He sat down by a telephone box perched on a cliff edge overlooking the sea. After about five minutes, the telephone started to ring, so he went into the box to answer it. It was the secretary from work, who started telling him about his next job.

  “How did you know I was here?” he asked.

  It turned out she had dialed him on his mobile but got the wrong number. The fact that she’d reached the telephone box he’d stopped to have his lunch next to was a complete coincidence.

  2. During the great storm of 1987, a man was driving to work early in the morning when he realized the hurricane was brewing. He decided to ring his wife from a telephone box to tell her to lock all the windows and doors, but as he was talking to her, the telephone box was lifted by the wind and transported into a nearby field, where he found himself in the middle of a herd of cows.

  The man’s wife wasn’t interested in this at all because she was still so cross about the fact that he’d woken her up and then hung up on her without saying good-bye.

  3. My first French kiss was in a telephone box during a school dance. My favorite teacher, Mr. Shepherd, pretended I had a call and then followed me into the box. I had to hold on to the sides in order to stop my knees shaking. In retrospect, it wasn’t the most private place to snog your teacher because of all the glass sides. When we went back into the dance, everybody started singing “The Lord Is My Shepherd.”

  See also Influences; Worst-Case Scenario

  thomas the tank engine

  John and I were in bed the other night, and he rolled me over on top of him and lifted me up and down.

  “Chuff, chuff,” he said. “This is hard work for the fat controller.”

  I wish he wouldn’t bring his children into everything.

  See also Toys

  thrush

  Recently when going to the loo, I have noticed a smell like freshly baked bread. I thought it was because I was getting ready to settle down. That I was finally becoming domesticated. It made me feel like nesting.

  But then John told me that he wondered whether I was infecting him. He said he hadn’t known how to tell me before but that he’d developed a rash that came up after we made love. I went to the doctor, and even though it was quickly cleared up, it was still possibly the most embarassing thing I’ve ever had to do. And then to cap it all, John was cross with me. He said he didn’t know how he was going to bring the subject up with Kate.

  I felt so guilty, I said I was sorry. But, of course, he doesn’t need to tell her anything. They haven’t had any relations like that for a long time.

  See also Friends; Horror Movies; Old; Reasons . . . ; Rude

  tornadoes

  John was supposed to be spending Sunday with me, but Kate was ill, so he had to take his children to the National History Museum. I was so cross about this that he bought me a pet tornado from the shop there as a joke.

  It’s just a little plastic tube filled with water and glitter, but if you turn it quickly backward and forward, you can watch your own little twister develop. John and I can’t stop playing with it. He says other people can keep their dogs, we have a tornado. He even got a book about them for me so we could find out more.

  He’s taken to calling me “F-5” as a nickname. This level of tornado reaches wind speeds of more than 300 miles per hour. The devastation is total. It causes homes to disintegrate, foundations to be left bare, possessions to be scattered. It has been known to wreak considerable damage even to steel-reinforced structures.

  When John’s not there, I hide the tornado in a drawer. It upsets me.

  See also Dogs; Names; Revenge; Vacuuming

  toys

  Apparently, vibrators have been around much longer than you would imagine. They were invented by doctors who were bored with men bringing their hysterical wives to them for treatment. To begin with, the doctors used to relieve the women by bringing them to climax manually, but then someone had the clever idea of inventing a machine to do the same job.

  Much less messy and healthier all round. How those men must have congratulated themselves. They didn’t realize what they had unleashed.

  Monica asked me whether I remembered Jean from the sex party, and I couldn’t think who she meant until she called her Cathy Come.

  Evidently, Cathy had bought some of those little balls you put up yourself at the party and decided to wear them the next time she went to the supermarket. It was fine at first, rather nice and tingly, but then the sensation got worse, and by the time she got to frozen foods, Cathy couldn’t stop coming. Eventually, she had to abandon her shopping cart at the checkout and try to walk home. She’d got only about a hundred yards when she found herself clinging to a lamppost, unable to move without groaning.

  The funny thing was that no one who walked past her gave her a second look. She had become invisible.

  See also Codes; Glenda G-spot; Glitter; Weight

  true romance

  I have just remembered one of my mother’s stories. At the time, I thought it was a disgusting tale and couldn’t think why she’d told it. Who wanted to hear about old people in love?

  My mother said she’d heard about a woman who had been married for forty years. Her husband loved her almost obsessively, and they had one of those particularly close relationships you’re supposed to get with couples who don’t have children.

  But this woman had a secret. When she was younger and first married, she had fallen in love with an architect. He begged her to leave her husband and move in with him, but she refused. This woman and the architect tried many times to leave each other, but they were always drawn back—sometimes by an argument; sometimes by a smell, a memory, that made it impossible not to get in contact; sometimes by a bit of good or bad luck that they could share only with each other. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that their connection was stronger than them, that to sever this would be at the cost of cutting out a bit of themselves that would make it impossible to live.

  However, the architect realized that if he forced the woman to leave her husband, she would come to him as a different person. All the soft edges he loved about her would have to be sawed off in order for her to survive the rift. She would have to want to come to him, leaving none of her heart with her husband. In the meantime, the lovers agreed that they would meet once a year and share a weekend of romance.

  After five years, the couple were still as much in love with each other as they ever had been. They shyly admitted that these weekends had become the center of their lives, but the last night was always spent with the woman in tears. How could she leave her husband? He needed her.

  The architect decided to spend the next year praying for a solution. After a few months, he felt a stirring within. One night he woke up and, in a half sleep, made his way to his drawing board. The lines he made on the plain paper were not coming from his brain, but direct from his heart.

  When the couple met up, he was ready. It was with a tender proudness, a certainty, that he unrolled the drawings he had tucked under his arm. He took her hand and traced the rooms, the lightness of the proportions, the sheer originality of the house spread in front of them, with her fingers. It was his hopes for the future he was parading in front of her. How could he fail?

  When the woma
n returned to her husband two days later, the architect sat alone and studied the abandoned drawings. The lines blurred with his tears, and he suddenly saw how he had gone wrong, how hopeless this shape had been—the clumsiness of the end wings meant it would never take flight. This was not the house she could ever want to live in with him. How right she had been. How right she always was. He found a pencil and started work again immediately.

  Each year, the architect would design another house for his love to live in with him. She never did, but he didn’t stop planning either. Sometimes a couple would come to his studio in order to have a house designed for them. The wife would get bored with discussions about budgets and work schedules and start to flick through the architect’s plans. Always, he noticed, it would be the drawings for his love that would capture the wife’s attention. There was something about them that called to the woman’s heart. Once, one wife had even pulled out a plan. Had called her husband over. Had demanded that the architect design something just like this for them too. Something as romantic.

  He refused, even when the couple threatened to leave and find another, more malleable architect. He realized something that night, however, as he pored over the drawings, wondering what it was that had attracted the strange woman so much, but not the one for whom he had intended this house. He realized that all the years of giving his heart on paper had had an effect. Somewhere along the line, he’d given up hope without realizing it. The drawings were without teeth now. They were pretty enough to attract those who had everything, but not daring or brave enough to be worth real risk and sacrifice.

  He kept going, though. The only difference was that his subsequent drawings became more fanciful. Less believable. The woman seemed to appreciate them more. She exclaimed over tree houses, perched high in the sky. Laughed over underground tunnels, as comfortable and as traditional as a badger’s set.

  He took her praise, her love, for what it was and tried to make it enough. Only after she’d gone would he go back into his studio and weep over the houses he’d dragged out from somewhere deep within his body. The maps of his heart. All leading back to nowhere.

  My mother had laughed after she’d told this story, but my father looked sad. He’d taken her hand and circled the center of her palm with his fingers. I remember feeling strangely angry. Why did I feel cold when I was with them, as if I were sitting in their shadow? It was partly to warm myself up that I told them how I wanted to find someone to love me like that architect. I wanted to be adored that much. My father looked at me as if he weren’t seeing me at first. Then he got angry. He said that I couldn’t understand anything. That the real love in the story was between the husband and wife.

  See also Endings; Illness; Utopia

  U

  ultimatum

  Sally has got so tough from all this independence business that she thought it would be a good idea to tell Colin that unless he left his wife for her, she would leave him.

  I could have told her this was a bad idea, but the situation is even worse than I suspected. Colin’s divorce actually came through six months ago. His ex-wife has been happily living in Wolverhampton with a dental technician all this time.

  I can’t blame Sally for refusing to have anything else to do with Colin, even though he says he was going to tell her. He just hadn’t found the right moment. The trouble is that now Colin agrees with Sally that she has to leave the flat straightaway. It seems he was more clever than her because he’d taken out only a short-term lease, whereas Sally’s lodgers have got six more months in her own flat before she can get rid of them.

  Still, Colin says Sally mustn’t give him any second chances. He doesn’t deserve them. Sally has devoted herself to him for too long.

  A situation like this is particularly hard because it isn’t just a romantic liaison for Sally; it’s like giving in your notice at work too.

  See also Ambition; Colin; Endings; Worst-Case Scenario; Yields

  underwear

  My mother took Sally and me together to buy our first bras. Afterward, she took us to the coffee shop as a treat and let us choose whichever cake we wanted. She watched us eat them, the cream oozing between our fingers, while she smoked. In my memories, my mother always seems to be circled with cigarette smoke, as if she were already fading away.

  Sally couldn’t wait to get to school to show her bra off, but mine felt itchy and uncomfortable. It was like that first week back to school in the autumn, when you crammed your feet into shoes after a summer of wearing open sandals. The leather was so creaky, pinch-tight, and solid all around your sole, constantly reminding you of timetables and rules.

  It’s become a habit of Sally’s and mine now to buy our underwear together. Whereas once we used to feel more successful the more material we needed for our bras, now we spend a month’s salary on garments designed to look as if we’re wearing nothing.

  The last time we went, Sally and I got the same set— purple silk with a silver ribbon woven through the edges. Sally said we looked like strippers. We were just walking over to the café to have our cream cakes when Sally suddenly turned to me and said, “I loved your mother.” I was so surprised, I nearly walked straight into the road, but then we couldn’t stop laughing, because we were both wearing the sort of lingerie that makes you long to be run over by a bus so you can make the ambulance man’s day. Just like our mothers always told us.

  See also Breasts; Mustache; The Queen; Velvet; Zzzz

  unfit

  Several clients have complained about Brian’s unreliability, so he was called in to see the managing director yesterday to be given an official warning. I have never seen anyone as angry as he was when he came out of that office. We all pretended to be busy with our work, trying not to catch his eye, but Brian was like one of those magnets attracting iron filings. All the hairs on his arms and even his beard seemed to be standing up, spiking out from him, forming a dark shadow.

  He just sat at his desk staring at the same piece of paper. At lunchtime, I asked whether he wanted me to get him a sandwich, but he shook his head.

  “Are you sure? You have to eat, you know.”

  He looked up. “Do I?” he said. The funny thing is that Brian has quite a nice face when he hasn’t been drinking.

  “There’s always your film,” I said. I was trying to make things better.

  “Christ, Verity, grow up, can’t you?” he said. “This isn’t a game, you know.” Then he stormed out and didn’t come back for the rest of the afternoon.

  We worked in silence until it was time to go home. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the office.

  See also Indecent Exposure; Star Quality; Wobbling

  utopia

  I’ve noticed that the way John talks about the time when he’ll leave Kate and we’ll live together has changed.

  It is now much more if-only-ish. And wonderful too. It seems that when John and I get together, we’re going to be surrounded by light and sun and birds singing and fairies fluttering and mermaids merring.

  I don’t know why, but I felt more comfortable when he was glooming around, saying how unhappy we were going to be. At least that was realistic.

  I suppose I should be looking for some way to get John’s feet back on the ground, but I’m worried about Brian. He hasn’t been in the office for two days. I’ve been covering for him with clients and have even managed to do some of the writing myself. Not even the managing director has noticed, and although I’m not sure how long I can do this, I feel a responsibility toward Brian.

  See also Marathons; True Romance; Unfit; Yellow

  V

  vacuuming

  John is much tidier than me. Sometimes he will come back to my flat after work, and before he even takes off his jacket, he starts cleaning up. I try not to say anything, but it drives me mad. He says it relaxes him, but I can’t help thinking it’s an insult. And boring.

  The other day he took out the vacuum cleaner and started doing the sitting-room floor. He kep
t having to bend down to pick things up, and after a while, I noticed that he was still crouched on the floor even though the machine was still on.

  I asked if he was all right. He lifted his head then, and his face looked as if he were bruised under the eyes.

  He told me that at home when he did this, his dog would always attack the Hoover. That he and it had fights that they both looked forward to. He said it seemed soulless, Hoovering just backward and forward on his own.

  I didn’t know what to say. I had expected John to be upset about the children. But animals? John knows I am allergic to them. At his family home, he has a dog, two guinea pigs, a rabbit, a three-legged cat, and two goldfish. I’ve noticed he has this maternal streak. He even pats our tornado in passing. I wonder how Kate puts up with it. It must be like living in a zoo.

  See also Dogs; Kitchen Equipment; Sex; Stationery; Tornadoes; Utopia

  velvet

  In my pocket, I keep a corner cut out from the velvet curtains that hang in the spare room of Sally’s parents’ house. Because I took it from the hem so no one would notice, it’s a rich red and not the faded, tea-stain color of the rest of the curtains.

  I run my thumbnail along the fabric when I get upset. It can go surprisingly deep, and when I rub against the grain, I get a feeling not unlike when you put your tongue on the metal bit of a pencil sharpener. It’s almost an electric shock but softer. I like it because it reminds me that there are other worlds out there. It’s a world Sally must have running through her veins.

  See also Fashion; Houses; Magazines; Money; Utopia; Zzzz

  vendetta

  It is strange to think that someone could actually hate me as much as Kate would do if she found out who I was. Hate is such an active emotion. I talked to Sally about it, and she said, rather too casually, that people hated me at school. I was shocked. I knew they’d rather not play with me, but to hate me? That was something different. I couldn’t think what I’d done to deserve that.