One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

return.
    Admittedly, this wasn’t exactly the manifestation of a crippling inferiority complex that stood in the way of their mutual emotional development. And that. It was just a thought Ally had from time to time, to remind himself of his status on the shortlist of the world’s jammiest men. All the reasons and all the scenarios by which it would become obvious why the two of them could not possibly work out had serially presented themselves and inexplicably failed to produce the logical result. Even at the beginning, their relationship had been founded on enough misunderstandings, misconceptions and misapprehensions to fuel a dozen ugly break‐
ups and as many straight‐
to‐
video Jennifer Aniston vehicles.
    They met at the opening ‘reception’ for a new art gallery just off Great Western Road. It was a champagne and canape’s affair, attended by local journos, PR smile‐
a‐
whiles and a populous delegation of the effetely pretentious goatee‐
and‐
navel‐
ring types who gave rise to an indigenously Glaswegian application of the word ‘poof’ that was entirely indifferent towards sexual orientation. Ally was standing before (according to the card) a ‘post‐
cubist’ triptych entitled
Love, Honour and Obey
, which he decided had less to say to him about marriage than it had about the artist’s unspoken sufferings at the hands of a deranged geometrist. He was bursting to say something crude, ignorant and uninformed, but he didn’t know the gallery owner well enough for it to be worth embarrassing him.
    That was when Annette appeared at his elbow, attracting his attention with a wave of her fingers and saying: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name, but we’ve met before, haven’t we?’
    Recognising her now that she was separate from the throng, Ally put her unguardedly warm approach down to her inability to recollect also
where
they had met before, which was St Michael’s RC Secondary, Auchenlea, Renfrewshire. Geographically, it was only a few miles from an art gallery on Great Western Road, but sociologically, it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
    Her name was Annette Strachan. Ally could have rhymed off the names of everyone who was ever in one of his classes, but even had he not been what Annette referred to as ‘the human database’, it was unlikely he’d have forgotten hers. Every year‐
group had its beauties, and in his, Annette Strachan and a girl called Catherine O’Rourke walked head and shoulders above female‐
kind. Not that thoughts of them kept Ally awake at night in those days: Annette and Catherine existed in a different dimension, so the notion of a crush on either was as hopelessly abstract as fancying Phoebe Cates or Victoria Principal.
    It was a slight relief, if hardly a surprise, that she did not so vividly remember him, as his distinguishing characteristics throughout the awkward age had amounted to little more than a smart mouth and a weak stomach. Memories of an irritating wee bastard who puked when he got nervous would hardly have proven an enticement to the sort of informal approach she had just made.
    He came clean on their previous connection, which had roughly the opposite effect to the undignified retreat he’d anticipated. Maybe that was actually what hooked them together: if you did traverse the galaxy and you met someone from your home town, you were likely to find them twice as fascinating as all the punters with three heads and eight tits, if only because they’d made the same epic journey. Arthur Dent travelled not just the universe but to either end of time, and three books on he was still fixated by Tricia McMillan – but then Londoners always were very parochial that way.
    They got blethering, small‐
talk and smiles, with maybe even a hint of mutual flirting, and soon blew the gallery for a pub round the corner. Ally was just placing the first round of drinks on the table when Annette casually asked what he was doing at the