The Eejit

The Eejit: Chapter 5: Strange Days Indeed

For the remainder of the year, unfamiliar things were beginning to happen to me.

I got off with Curvy Karen Curtis for a start. Karen lived next door to me in Eversleigh Road, Battersea. She lived in a tidy, well ordered house full of deliberately placed knickknacks, with her large boyfriend, Ian. She was smallish, with light brown hair, a pointy but not unpretty nose and green eyes that were both inquisitive and disarming. She worked for Yellowhammer Advertising, which I imagined us having in common, because I had worked on the floor below Yellowhammer when I was in the same building, working for Maxwell. She was a regular at the gym on Latchmere Road, (something we would never have in common), and kept herself in good shape (something else we would never have in common). She appeared thoughtful and men flocked round her. I, too, had always fancied her but I found the constant, gargantuan presence of the big but virtually monosyllabic boyfriend to be prohibitive in any ongoing courtship, plus the fact that I never thought for one moment that she actually fancied me. In fact, we only ever saw each other when she came over to complain about the noise I was making on my electric guitar.

Ian, however, had taken a job as a buyer for a major high street retailer of men's clothing and would be based up North during the week, where the heart of the rag trade is to be found. When I found out about this I would go round to see him, offering my congratulations and pretending that my days spent kipping amongst the horrible chequered sweaters at Burberrys had spawned a profound and life long interest in retail menswear. All of which, slightly worryingly, Ian seemed to accept without question. In truth I learned more about retail menswear during those nights than I had in nine months of working at Burberrys.

Like the Frankenstein monster, Ian had come alive and could talk.

Those few evenings spent next door listening to Ian talking so enthusiastically about cloth and cut whilst I nodded my head as if I had a missing vertebrae, begging him to for yet more crazy retail anecdotes just so as I could get a glimpse of his girlfriend, who I thought hated me anyway, will always be testament to how sad I really can be.

It seemed to do the trick though.

One evening, shortly after Ian had departed for his weekly stint in the North, there was a knock at the front door. I answered it and to my amazement there, standing on my doorstep, was Karen, looking as lovely as I had ever seen her look. She was with a friend of hers, Jo, who I had met a couple of times next door and also fancied, but not as much as I fancied Karen.

"We're going up the Tea Rooms for a drink, do want to come?" Karen asked me in a 'not that I really care, mind' type of way.

The Tea Rooms I should point out was a bar, not a tea room as the name might suggest, and a very good one too. It had always been what might be called alternative and had been originally owned by a ruddy cheeked anarchist called Laughlan who was a genuinely nice bloke but had more money than sense. Instead of charging people a set price for the (very nice) vegetarian food on offer, Laughlan simply asked people to make a donation of what ever they could afford. This, theoretically, could work in St Tropez, or certain select parts of Bel Air but everything is comparative and the Tea Rooms is on the Wandsworth Road, in Battersea not far from South Bank University. Very quickly the place became overrun with students who ate everything and, guess what, left nothing that could realistically be called a donation, unless you counted the stuff they left behind in the toilets. Laughlan went bust and sold out to the altogether less commercially inept Dave Atwater, who I also liked for many, many reasons but not least because of his willingness to give me and my band gigs there. I digress.

"Could do, I suppose" I replied staring past them both as if to see whether anyone else in my street was about to make me a better offer and, mustering all the nonchalance that I could, added "Yeah, why not".