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

be a charming wee bastard when appropriate; and the evidence suggested that women actually found him either quite cute or at the least too short to be threatening. However, it still required a steeply descending lack of subtlety in Annette’s overtures for him to grasp that she didn’t want them to be just good friends.
    The morning after they first slept together, she said that she had been one date away from asking if he was gay, as he had set a new heterosexual record time for not making a pass at her. He confessed he’d been slightly intimidated because of how inaccessible he’d regarded her in their youth. Fortunately, he drew short of sharing the Phoebe Cates and Victoria Principal comparisons, as Annette was finding it hilarious enough already. He decided then that their relationship might just have a chance, provided, of course, she at some point stopped laughing at him.
    Ally knew what her friends thought of the situation, mainly because early on he’d been wary of it himself: she was on the rebound. Not from her ex‐
partner, but from her ex‐
life, so Mr Down‐
Home Spark – the genial skilled tradesman who could read books
and
knew who Krzysztof Kieslowski was – would be both lap‐
dog and bit of rough until she’d sorted herself out; upon which he’d be humanely put down to make way for someone who read books and actually
liked
Krzysztof Kieslowski.
    There were some who still thought that way, or at least, in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, adapted to discreetly sympathise for poor Annette’s downfall. These tended to be – ironically or significantly, according to your individual regional prejudices – her Glasgow friends rather than those she knew from her London days. Perhaps this was because the former, being closer to the reality, were that bit more afraid of a similar disastrous fate befalling themselves.
    The others’ sympathies were often surrogately lavished upon Ally. They tended to be so pleasantly surprised by his literacy that they were always trying to suggest ways to unshackle his gifts from the chains of his workaday existence as an electrical contractor. The notions that he quite liked what he did and that he might be making more money than any of them were thoughts that he patiently resisted sharing. This was only fair, as he knew he was occasionally guilty of encouraging them. It hadn’t escaped Annette’s notice that company from the big smoke often provoked in him the familiar Scottish working‐
class ostentation of wearing your esoteric intellectualism on your sleeve. This worked best in conjunction with an uncompromising refusal to refine your accent for mainstream consumption, and often piqued an entertaining reaction in those who’d never heard the names Plato or Aristotle pronounced with a glottal stop.
    Not much escaped Annette’s notice, right enough. For instance, in company, Ally could no longer get away with showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of Woody Allen scripts or De Niro’s
oeuvre
, because she knew he also had an encyclopedic knowledge of
South Park
scripts and Van Damme’s
oeuvre
. That she didn’t consider either of these reason enough to dump him was, he considered, a true miracle of modern living.
    And in return for this saintly degree of tolerance, Ally provided … well, he wasn’t sure. He had to be doing something right, he knew, but he wasn’t aware of it being anything he consciously went out of his way to achieve. He would occasionally reason to himself that he must, on the whole, be a pleasant and considerate guy to have around, but this always led inevitably to the question of why none of his previous girlfriends had noticed this. One of his more observant (if admittedly unreconstructed) pals had reasoned back then that his girlfriends
did
find Ally pleasant and considerate: the problem was that having landed such a rare specimen, they very quickly decided he would do as a husband, then became frustrated when he didn’t,