Four New Words for Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

the rest of your life.’ But I didn’t say any of that. I felt dowdy, surrounded by all these multi-coloured, high-octane girls. He’s very handsome.
Wherever we went he was the focus of attention, girls always looking at him and now girls looking at us, obviously wondering what he saw in me. Because it was me he’d crossed the room of all
those glances to talk to, and not just for old times’ sake. And I stood basking in his gaze, wanting to believe in its sincerity, because for the length of time it was focused on me it
didn’t seem to matter that I looked as if my clothes were held together with safety pins. I wanted to be wanted, and he wanted me, and although these ambitions weren’t a perfect fit I
was prepared to live with the overlap because, like the song says, he made me feel like a natural woman.
    ‘Friends,’ he said, offering his hand. I took it. I’d never shaken his hand before. I’d held it. Touching it again I felt a surge of hormones at the memory of his
handling me that made me want to lean into him.
    ‘Friends,’ I said.
    ‘Live and let live,’ he said.
    ‘Forgive and forget,’ I said.
    ‘Let the good times roll,’ he said.
    So we let them roll in the back of his work’s van, parked fifty yards from the gangplank, suspiciously furnished with a roll-out carpet, and in my flat, his parents’ house, the
cinema, on top of the after-hours fabrication bench at his work and anywhere else that the mood took us. Once you got the first one out the way he developed the staying power that didn’t
deserve his nickname. When he looked into my eyes I wanted to believe what I saw, although I knew he was only watching me watching him. When I think back I believe that people were only real to him
to the extent that they reflected him to himself.
    And we did forgive and forget. I once forgave him six times in a single night. I forgave him standing against the wall till the radiator burnt my arse, on top of the Ikea bureau that threatened
collapse, in the shower, on the floor and I can’t remember where else. And in all that forgiveness, although I thought I was diligent on forcing reluctant condoms, there was something that
gave, or I simply forgot. Lolly was in the flat when I came out the toilet with the reading. I told her not to say anything. Within two days everyone who was anyone knew.
    And then Nick forgot me.
    Lolly said that although I might be the brains of the outfit, when it came to men I didn’t have the sense of a dog. I began an inventory of her past men characterised by the only thing
that distinguished them from one another: bad feet, bad teeth, bad hair, bad breath, socially bad, psychotically bad. She stopped me with one of her flat-footed pronouncements: ‘All I ever do
is fuck them.’ And I realised the depth of my stupidity. She saw people for what they were and didn’t care. I wanted to invent Nick to justify to myself I wasn’t just a fuck, when
deep down I knew he wasn’t even likeable.
    I’d done enough crying for the rest of my life. I was calm. I’m only twenty, I told myself, and I’m in this for the long haul. I went to the shop and found out that given the
length of my official employment, rather than the time I’d worked there, my ‘statutory rights’ as the manager called them amounted to fuck all. Then there was another meeting with
the Social, which I immediately escalated by demanding to see a man, not the hatchet-faced cow from the last time. I didn’t throw a crying jag, I was all silent tears, Madonna-like suffering,
patience of a monument, the full nine yards. It worked.
    I left Nick a voice message saying now was the time to prove he didn’t walk away from his mistakes, and to make me an offer. I left another message in case he didn’t understand the
first. I said I didn’t expect a white wedding, or any kind of wedding at all, or even for him to stick around, but that he had to provide some kind of financial support for his kid.