"Why Did You Give Me Brown Hair?"

This is the entire email sent by an old girlfriend-of-sorts from university eleven years ago. We haven’t communicated for seven years. On that occasion, in a trough of heartbroken despair, I sent her a sprawling, drunken email, not in an effort to get back together, just for confirmation that she was unhappier than me. She wasn’t.

I met my wife shortly afterwards.

After reading this sparse information several times I realise that this girl, Linda (blonde), appears to be under the illusion that one of the characters in my novel is a thinly disguised version of her. This is slightly unnerving because the only character she can possibly be thinking of was modelled on Myra Hindley.

Nevertheless I reply out of courtesy and somehow end up with a lunch date at some Italian restaurant in Piccadilly. Mostly I am flattered because she is the only person not paid to do so who has intimated that she has read the book.

I tell Cheryl and the news registers with enough force to drag her eyes away from Facebook for a brief moment. Her fingers, however, remain poised over the keys, twitching. She makes a vague noise that expresses some disapproval.

I sit down. “Seriously,” I say. “This is purely just a sympathetic meeting. No need to worry.”

“Why go then?”

“Why does anybody do anything?” I say vaguely. Then, “We just had sex a few times over a few months. The truth is I was never really attracted to her even then.”

“Then why did you sleep with her?”

“Cheryl, I used to have sex twice a year if I was lucky. I had to jump at every opportunity because if I only did it with women I fancied then I never would.”

Cheryl laughs and snaps back into Facebook mode. The connection has been severed.



At twenty, Linda was a little plump. In the years intervening, her appetite has increased. My immediate thought as I enter the restaurant and spot her wedged into a booth is, ‘I hope we’re not splitting the bill in half.’

As I get closer she stands up and her full girth is revealed. (Later, when we leave, she goes into a newsagent for a packet of cigarettes. The shop has one of those sensors that beeps when someone enters and Linda sets it off three times in one passing).

She looks me up and down. “Wow! You look exactly the same,” she lies.

She stands awkwardly and I suspect that she is self-conscious about her weight, so I decide not to mention it. “You too,” I say instead after I have kissed her on the cheek.

“Oh, don’t fib,” she says, smiling and waving one hand as a shy dismissal. I say nothing and there is a silence that I fail to fill.

Her smile slowly fades and then she physically tires and squeezes back into the booth. I sit opposite her. The waiter comes and I order a beer. Linda already has a glass of wine.

I am relieved because I couldn’t shake the bizarre suspicion that Linda would awake some kind of attraction that I had either missed the first time around or beaten into denial in the years since I last saw her at the Graduation Ball, puking into a plant pot in the auditorium foyer. But there is nothing, and my memory, for once, is accurate. I was youngish and inexperienced and the opportunity of bedroom antics was still enough for me to overlook the fact that there was no sexual attraction on my part at all. Even when I started to feel a bit sick afterwards and guilty for taking advantage of a woman who clearly liked me very much, a friend (who I think was a virgin) convinced me that I should just use her for practise. And when that got old it was only when masturbation failed to hit the spot that I used her as a kind of luxury wank.

Again, I decide to keep this information to myself in case she finds it offensive.

“So, you remember Saul Peters on our course?”

“No.”

“Sure you do. Well, he’s big into sci-fi and he sent me a little interview you did for some website, and I was so excited! I’m so proud of you.”

“Thank you.”

“I ran out and bought the book the day it came out.”

“So you’re the one?” I say, smiling.

“Ha ha, still that sense of humour.”

“Well…”

“And it’s fantastic.”

The waiter interrupts us and I order a pepperoni pizza and another beer. Linda loudly orders a salad and keeps glancing at me for my reaction which makes me feel sad.

“And of course the more I read the more I identified with Sandra, and then it suddenly occurred to me. ‘Oh my God, it is me!’”

I shrug, embarrassed. “Well. You were…a major part of my life.”

She touches my hand, avoiding the gold ring on my finger. I brace myself for some kind of regrettable I-still-love-you confession. “That’s so nice to hear. To be honest I was worried that you wouldn’t want to meet me today.”

“Why would you…think that?”

“I know I hurt you.”

I blink a few times. “Sorry?”

“No, I’m sorry. I was young and I was confused and I really didn’t treat you very well. Sometimes I feel guilty for the way I behaved.”

“Right.”

“But you’ve managed to get over it,” she says with a merciful degree of self-deprecation. “Somehow!”

“It was…a struggle.”

“I bet your wife’s lovely.”

“She’s alright.”

“It was just such a relief when I heard about your novel.”

“A relief?”

“You were just so fucked up at university. All that booze and drugs and emotional avoidance. Pretending to be so aloof. So insular and immature. And then it turns out that you’re an artist and it all makes sense.”

“Right.”

“I was like, ‘Why did I not realise? God!”

“Yeah. So I should have been given special allowances. Like having an unruly child that you punish for not doing well at school and slapping girls in the playground or whatever and then he’s diagnosed with mild autism and you want to go back and replace all the beatings and cupboard lock-ins with hugs.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“And then after a few months the guilt and sympathy wears off and you just get annoyed and want to lock him away again.”

“Yeah.” She smiles uncertainly. “You’re so creative.”

“Cheryl think I’m fucked up because of Death Wish.”

“How come?”

“We all sat down to watch it as a family when I was about nine. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, my parents turned it off during the rape scene and sent me to bed and finished it. The next day they said I could watch it from after that scene. So I missed the motivation and just watched someone walking around shooting people for no reason for ninety minutes. Maybe you could talk to Cheryl and win me some understanding.”

“I’d love that!” she shouts, beaming, and I look away and eventually the food arrives. Linda surveys her salad with something approaching depression. I blow gently at my steaming pizza to send the delicious aroma of melting cheese over to her and her nose twitches involuntarily.

“So, you haven’t got married yet?”

She shakes her head vigorously. “No. Not this girl. Footloose and fancy free!”

“Party girl, hey?”

“Yeah, you got it!”

We eat for awhile.

“There was someone serious once,” she says finally.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” She looks out of the window. “It didn’t work out.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah.”

“Still,” I say. “Single and free, right?”

She looks back at me. “Right.”



Afterwards, outside the newsagent, she hugs me and doesn’t let go. “Would you like to do this again?” she asks me, her voice muffled against my jacket.

“Yes…definitely. I have a small book tour to do, but then…”

“I’d love that.”

She still doesn’t let go. People are watching us as they pass on the street and I gently, then forcefully, pry us apart.

She looks tearful. “So good to see you,” she says.

I stick both my thumbs up in an absurd gesture of…I don’t know what, and then she heads into the shop and I walk and then jog towards the tube stop, clawing for my iPod, cursing the always-tangled earphones, desperate to kill thought with loud music.