Читать книгу It’s Not What You Think - Chris Evans - Страница 24

Two days later, Karen II dumped me.

Not five, or four, or three but two! Two days!!

I suppose it could have been worse, like one or none. (I wonder if anyone has ever dumped anyone in no days.) Karen II said she’d made a dreadful mistake and that she was sorry and that she thought I should try to get back with Tina.

‘Well, thanks for that astute piece of advice, Karen, but I think you may just have ruined my life!’

For the record, I think the real reason she dumped me was more because she found me a terrible kisser.

I’m not bragging but the thing was, I knew I wasn’t. I couldn’t have been because Tina and myself had been getting off and on each other’s lips with great success for the best part of the last twelve months. I think it was more the case that Karen and I together were terrible kissers, dreadful in fact—just awful.

It takes two to tango and it takes two to play tonsil tennis, but preferably two tongues on the same wavelength.

I heard a great story about wavelength once from a man sat by a swimming pool in a hotel in Los Angeles. He claimed that we are all basically electric and that we operate on varying frequencies. He said it was completely natural for someone to literally be operating on a similar or very different wavelength to someone else, and that often when we meet others and feel an instant attraction to them it’s because their wavelength is similar to, or maybe even sometimes exactly the same as, our own. Adversely, when we feel an instant uneasiness towards someone and often for no apparent reason, the opposite may be true. It’s nothing either person may have done particularly, it’s simply that we are each operating on different frequencies too far apart to gel.

Well, whatever it was, Karen II and I were never going to get it together on any front, least of all when it came to kissing. I didn’t understand her method and she didn’t understand mine. Whereas Tina had teased and nibbled and tugged her way around my face, ears and eyes for the last year, Karen II kissed in a much more industrial manner. There was no journey, there was no gear change, it was foot down, full throttle and off we go.

Overnight, I had gone from a beautiful, perfectly balanced open-topped tourer on the Côte d’Azur straight to a stripped-down dragster at the Santapod raceway, exhausts flaring, tyres smoking, just desperate to get over the finish line.

I suppose that’s the difference between the darling of the drama group and the captain of the netball team. I had gone against type, always a mistake—opposites attract, my arse.

For the first time in my life, I felt like a total dick. During the last twelve months I had been walking on air and living the kind of life that good people live, the kind of life when you know deep down inside that what you’re doing is wholesome, the very foundation of decency. The kind of life all mums and dads wish for their children. The kind of life that makes you feel like you don’t need to do the lottery.

Tina and I were never going to set the world alight but that’s probably because we would have been too busy looking after and loving each other. How many great scientists, artists, musicians and writers have been lost to such happiness? And more power to them. The most deserving audience is always at home; anyone who saves their best performance for strangers is the most suspicious of characters.

So there I was, left feeling like the man who built his own private Idaho and then in a moment of typical male ego-fuelled madness, took a match to it and razed it to the ground.

Of course I made overtures to try to win back my lost love but Tina was having none of it—her mum even less. Mrs Y. even tracked me down to tell me what an idiot I had been for throwing away the chance to be with her wonderful daughter. She was entirely right.

Tina did agree to see me several weeks later and expressed her genuine desire to get back together, but in the end she decided ultimately for her own sake that this was not the most sensible approach to take in life towards the first man she had given her heart to. She had done so sincerely and fully and I had repayed her by scarpering at the mere sniff of a new testosterone-filled adventure. Oh if only all the girls of the world were half as wise. Tina was never going to be a loser and nor was she going to allow herself to be with one. She was made of far stronger stuff than her now ex boyfriend. She owed him nothing. He had told her that he would love her for ever and yet he had not been able to love her for little more than a year. He had lied, plain and simple.

From this moment school was still school but no longer as I’d known it: it was now Tina-less, the biggest reason yet to get it over and done with once and for all.