The final act of the whole sorry tale began with a secret note and talk of, ‘If you don’t tell anyone I won’t.’ Karen II wasn’t as backwards at coming forwards as I had first imagined. Her mum and dad were going away for the weekend and she had invited me to come round and check out their living room carpet in their absence. After a whole night of rolling around on some of the finest shagpile, there was no going back.
I was now with Karen II.
I had moved on and my first true love was over.
You only get one mum and you only get one first love and the passing of the relationship I had with Tina is a thing of gargantuan sadness. What can I say? I broke her heart and to this day I wish I never had.
Tina and Chris: The Epilogue
Two days later, Karen II dumped me.
Not five, or four, or three but two! Two days!!
I suppose it could have been worse, like one or none. (I wonder if anyone has ever dumped anyone in no days.) Karen II said she’d made a dreadful mistake and that she was sorry and that she thought I should try to get back with Tina.
‘Well, thanks for that astute piece of advice, Karen, but I think you may just have ruined my life!’
For the record, I think the real reason she dumped me was more because she found me a terrible kisser.
I’m not bragging but the thing was, I knew I wasn’t. I couldn’t have been because Tina and myself had been getting off and on each other’s lips with great success for the best part of the last twelve months. I think it was more the case that Karen and I together were terrible kissers, dreadful in fact—just awful.
It takes two to tango and it takes two to play tonsil tennis, but preferably two tongues on the same wavelength.
I heard a great story about wavelength once from a man sat by a swimming pool in a hotel in Los Angeles. He claimed that we are all basically electric and that we operate on varying frequencies. He said it was completely natural for someone to literally be operating on a similar or very different wavelength to someone else, and that often when we meet others and feel an instant attraction to them it’s because their wavelength is similar to, or maybe even sometimes exactly the same as, our own. Adversely, when we feel an instant uneasiness towards someone and often for no apparent reason, the opposite may be true. It’s nothing either person may have done particularly, it’s simply that we are each operating on different frequencies too far apart to gel.
Well, whatever it was, Karen II and I were never going to get it together on any front, least of all when it came to kissing. I didn’t understand her method and she didn’t understand mine. Whereas Tina had teased and nibbled and tugged her way around my face, ears and eyes for the last year, Karen II kissed in a much more industrial manner. There was no journey, there was no gear change, it was foot down, full throttle and off we go.
Overnight, I had gone from a beautiful, perfectly balanced open-topped tourer on the Côte d’Azur straight to a stripped-down dragster at the Santapod raceway, exhausts flaring, tyres smoking, just desperate to get over the finish line.
I suppose that’s the difference between the darling of the drama group and the captain of the netball team. I had gone against type, always a mistake—opposites attract, my arse.
For the first time in my life, I felt like a total dick. During the last twelve months I had been walking on air and living the kind of life that good people live, the kind of life when you know deep down inside that what you’re doing is wholesome, the very foundation of decency. The kind of life all mums and dads wish for their children. The kind of life that makes you feel like you don’t need to do the lottery.
Tina and I were never going to set the world alight but that’s probably because we would have been too busy looking after and loving each other. How many great scientists, artists, musicians and writers have been lost to such happiness? And more power to them. The most deserving audience is always at home; anyone who saves their best performance for strangers is the most suspicious of characters.
So there I was, left feeling like the man who built his own private Idaho and then in a moment of typical male ego-fuelled madness, took a match to it and razed it to the ground.
Of course I made overtures to try to win back my lost love but Tina was having none of it—her mum even less. Mrs Y. even tracked me down to tell me what an idiot I had been for throwing away the chance to be with her wonderful daughter. She was entirely right.
Tina did agree to see me several weeks later and expressed her genuine desire to get back together, but in the end she decided ultimately for her own sake that this was not the most sensible approach to take in life towards the first man she had given her heart to. She had done so sincerely and fully and I had repayed her by scarpering at the mere sniff of a new testosterone-filled adventure. Oh if only all the girls of the world were half as wise. Tina was never going to be a loser and nor was she going to allow herself to be with one. She was made of far stronger stuff than her now ex boyfriend. She owed him nothing. He had told her that he would love her for ever and yet he had not been able to love her for little more than a year. He had lied, plain and simple.
From this moment school was still school but no longer as I’d known it: it was now Tina-less, the biggest reason yet to get it over and done with once and for all.
10 Skiing (I have been over thirty times, had lessons, the lot: complete waste of time)
9 Snowboarding (even worse—if that’s possible)
8 Football (even though I have played at Wembley 12 times—a crime for such a bad footballer)*
7 Rugby (truly awful)
6 Motor mechanics (I don’t have the finger strength required)
5 Looking after money (more about that later)
4 Staying away from the wrong kind of people
3 Sleeping
2 Crying
1 Fighting
I have never been good at fighting but for years I was happy to get stuck in regardless. That is, until over time, I gradually came to realise that fighting was not a prerequisite for either getting on in life or being a man particularly—in short, it was neither big nor clever. It was also becoming patently obvious, due to the number of pastings I continually found myself on the receiving end of, that I was in fact rubbish at it.
Fighting is just one of the many things I am not cut out to do. I have little strength, never have had, my bones are thin and brittle and I also bruise easily.
So let’s face it, if you hit me I’m pretty much guaranteed to break and if I do manage to hit you back—well, don’t worry about having to call the medic as I was also at the back of the queue on the day God was dishing out the manly hands.
My hands are ridiculously little for a guy of my height, stature and weight. It’s almost as if The Lord was trying to tell me not to fight. I would have had no problem with this if he’d thought to make up for his ‘handy’ oversight in other areas of my physicality but alas no, there’s little to get excited about anywhere else either, I regret to say. Little hands mean little…knuckles and in my case they also meant smooth and round knuckles—almost completely useless for fighting with. Put them next to a half-decent man-sized set of ugly, gnarled, knobbly destroyers and it’s the equivalent of putting your grandma in the ring with