Essay
“Student Union” by S.J. Bottomley
Monday, 17 September, 2007

“If you don’t like me for who I am, then you don’t like me for who I am. But all I’m gonna be...is who I am!”
Avril Lavigne

Prologue
Kathryn McKenna. Christ alive! Forget Beth, forget Hannah, even forget Georgina. The most interesting and exciting romantic story that I have been involved in so far this year is and has been focused around the girl at Tesco. I find it terrifying that the last five or six months or whatever it has been...four or five, sorry; it’s terrifying to consider that the last four or five months might not have happened if circumstances had been only a little bit different. To my way of thinking, if Georgina and I hadn’t have kissed, then I wouldn’t have wrote about her, or at least not in the way that I did. This wouldn’t have then led me to avrillavigne.com and consequently, my re-infatuation with Kathryn would probably never have happened. I’m so immensely thankful that on that dull morning in early April, as I walked into Tesco to buy the second Arctic Monkeys album; I’m so thankful that in that instance, I turned to my left at exactly the right moment and saw her, saw her looking completely amazing. The reason for this is that in the time that has passed since that day, I have enjoyed, delighted even, in being so madly in love with somebody. It has been an unbelievable time and an equally unbelievable feeling and one that has been a pleasure to experience. And now...it’s all over.
It couldn’t last forever. I knew that. I was never SO in love that I lost sight of this. I was always aware that the day would come when for one reason or another, Kathryn and I would no longer see each other. Sooner or later, this would be a fact of life, a reality that I would simply have to live with. Unfortunately, this has happened most definitely sooner that I had hoped. I was prepared for this. Or, at least as prepared as one can be in this kind of situation. I knew how I would feel when it ended. I’m not quite sure if I expected it to conclude this quickly. What I would like to do in this essay is not only assess what has occurred over the past few months, but also to look forward, if that is at all possible and try to reach some kind of an understanding as to what this might mean for what happens in the future.

One
The biggest thing that I had to get my head around was why this was even happening in the first place. I had dealt with Kathryn. As far as I was concerned, she was old news. Something that had happened a long time ago. Oh, nice to look back on from time to time, to be sure. But, equally, something that belonged in the past and that should, therefore, be left there. At the beginning of April 2007, Kathryn meant no more to me than a name that belonged in a list. Filed neatly somewhere between Sarah and Sonal. In fact, funnily enough, speaking of lists, one such list that I wrote at roughly this time will indicated perfectly how seldom I thought of Kathryn then. In “The Wildchild”, exactly that kind of thing exists. For reasons that I went in to in that particular piece of writing, I decided to make a note of all of the women that I have ever been infatuated with, for want of a better way of putting it. This was then split up into two distinct groups. The first detailed the ones that I have declared my love for and have rejected me and the second were the girls/women that I have been attracted to but that I chose not to inform of my feelings. Kathryn was in the second group. The point that I wish to make though is this. In that list, I made the most hideous of spelling mistakes. I spelt “Kathryn” as “Katherine”. Looking back, this was a terrible error to make. Still, it is a crude, but effective way, of proving what I’m trying to say. I always knew that it was “Kathryn”, this isn’t something that I have learnt about her since I have fallen in love with her again. As I say, I always knew this. The reasoning, I think, has to be that over the years that have passed since I left Tesco and subsequently fell out of love with her and I slowly forgot about her, I also, somehow, forgot how to spell her name properly. Funnily enough, though, the second that my feelings for her returned, so did the correct spelling of “Kathryn” and it was only then that I realised what I had done and how stupid how I had been. But, I will go into the whole falling out and then falling back in love with her again in a short moment. For now, I’ll continue...So, I started writing, typing about Georgina and all of a sudden that picture of Kathryn belonging in the past changed. I won’t waste time going through what happened, for a second time. If you’ve read “Avril Lavigne” by now, then you will know all about that. What I will re-emphasise, though, because I do think that it is important, is as I was saying above, as well as in the original piece that I wrote; is the shock and confusion that I felt when I realised what was going on. Yes, the connection had been made in my head between Kathryn and Lavigne, but, so what? This was hardly new in itself. When I had been infatuated with her first time around, I had come to the same conclusion. There was nothing whatsoever that was profound about this. It was simply a case of me remembering something that I used to think about several years ago. Besides, it wasn’t as though I was desperately searching for someone to fall in love with. Quite the contrary, in fact. They were all positively queuing for my attention, fighting one another off. There was, in no particular order- Beth, Georgina and coming up quickly on the outside, Bench. Not forgetting Jo. Who, after Valentine’s Day, a couple of months previously, was still hanging around, not really wanting to be forgotten. Counting her as well, I make that four. And knowing that only one of these was more than enough to be getting on with, thankyou very much, the last thing that I needed, if not wanted, was a fifth. Another name, another heartbreaker being added to that list. Unfortunately, though, this was exactly what happened and I knew from the moment that it started, that there was nothing I could do about it.
Assessing that moment in time now, four, five months later, I find myself asking a different question. It’s not, “Why was I falling in love with Kathryn again?” anymore, now it’s “Well, why did I ever fall out of love with her in the first place?”. This, I thought, was a much more relevant question to ponder. In the years that had passed, there was nothing amazing about the situation that had changed. Kathryn was still very much Kathryn. And I, as far as I could tell, at least, was still me. It wasn’t as though, just like that, out of nowhere, she was suddenly breathtakingly beautiful and drop dead gorgeous. She WAS breathtakingly beautiful and drop dead gorgeous, but then, she had always been that way. Right from the first time that I saw her. And from that instant, I had fallen for her immediately. It was impossible for me not to do this. I don’t believe any sane, straight man would find it easy to do this either. This continued while she was in Australia, was still there when she got back and remained right up to the time that I left and for a period afterwards, as well. I guess, then, slowly, over several months, maybe even as much as a year, who knows; then, the lights went out. This never happened purposefully. It wasn’t as though I consciously told myself, “I must fall out of love with Kathryn as soon as possible...”.Why should I think like that? I had no reason to. Things changed, that was what it was, essentially. My life, both of our lives moved on and were headed in different directions. I wrote towards the end of “Avril Lavigne” about the day that I saw her on the bus, looking as though she was on her way home from university. And at the same time, looking completely depressed. To me, it was Kathryn physically, that was there, but not Kathryn mentally or spiritually. I’d never seen her with that sort of expression on her face before, and I haven’t seen it on her since. Now, alright, Kathryn is never what you would call sprightly or enthusiastic or energetic. Let’s not be silly. She’s no Georgina, she’s not a tank of energy that’s forever bursting to get out. She’s more calm, laid back and altogether, a much cooler customer. So, being aware of this, I’m also aware that it means that she’s not likely to ever be overly smiley, overly elaborate with her facial expressions. Conversely, if she’s unhappy, she wouldn’t be too quick to reveal this to you either, through her general demeanour. Which is why, what I was witness to on that particular day didn’t quite compute. She didn’t appear angry, just really, genuinely...depressed. That’s the only way I can put it. Adding two and two together, I came to the conclusion that it must have been the education that was making her feel that way. It took me a while to figure this out but couple the fact that I never saw her in or around the university again, with the fact that she seemed to be at work a lot more frequently than previously, and this all equalled what looked suspiciously like the classic example of a “college dropout”. I don’t like to use such a term on someone who I like so much and whom I care for, but putting it bluntly, that is what she was. She must have had her reasons and I’m sure that it had to be an exceptionally difficult decision for her to make. That’s the truth of it, though. And it meant that afterwards, the two of us were no longer doing the same thing.
So, why did it happen? Why did I fall out of love with her? The above was a big reason for this. However, there were others that can be added, as well. Most notably, of course, other women came along. Being in a university, these days, is as much about being in a social setting as it is about being in an academic setting. More so, maybe. On a day to day basis, at university, I would see hundreds and hundreds of people. Some of whom I knew, most of whom, I didn’t. And, a fair proportion of these people that I was seeing were women. Ninety percent of them, my age too. Or thereabouts. Faced with these facts, then, it really was something of an inevitability. Eventually, a girl or women at university would come to my attention, via one means or another, and I would be heading down that all too familiar route again. Perhaps it’s as clear cut and easy as I thought it would be to actually identify just who it was who immediately replaced Kathryn and so, if you like, replaced her. There is Donna, she has to be considered as a strong candidate for this title. But, thinking about it now, several years after the event, I also feel inclined to remember Sookhi too and maybe she could have been the one. I don’t suppose that it matters all that much, who it was. The important thing to make clear is that eventually, it did happen. Someone, whoever, replaced Kathryn. Someone at university. And then, later on, having finally finished full time education, this shifted back again to the workplace. As a consequence of this, unfortunately, poor Kathryn became little more than a distant memory from what was, by this point, a somewhat forgotten time, forgotten period of my life. Part of the past and consigned to that part of my brain. Someone who should be revered and who around a whole raft of positive and happy memories there was. But not really worth indulging much more than that on.
And then, as you now know, that strange thing happened. And despite the initial amazement that I felt, as described above, that this was actually occurring, and the misgivings that I was experiencing when considering that she was now the fifth person that I was rather infatuated with all at the same time, it was the most unbelievable thing. The reason why it was just so unbelievable was purely down to who it was. You see, what Jo, Beth, Bench and Georgina all had in common with one another was that I was that this was only the first time that I had been interested in them. As good as it was being attracted to them and thinking about them as frequently as I was doing at that point, what none of them could possibly give me was the sheer, indescribable joy of it being the second time that this had taken place. With Kathryn, this was apparent in abundance. When I realised exactly what was going on, what was happening to me, it was made all the better, all the much more exciting knowing that I had been there before. It’s hard for me to say just what I mean because I can’t explain it with any kind of logic myself. But, if you imagine that the first time that I had fallen in love with Kathryn four, five years ago had been so good. Well, now, it was twice as good as this, ten times as good as this maybe. It was like this, I believe, because of what had gone on when I worked with her. That’s my theory, at least. I’m not entirely confident that there isn’t something more behind it than that. Whatever it was that made it feel that fantastic, I certainly wasn’t complaining about it. Soon enough, in fact, I had forgotten all about the reservations that I had felt at that initial stage, when everything was first happening. Instead, I chose to revel in what I was experiencing. And why not? Why shouldn’t enjoy it? Okay, fair enough. It was that same old trap that I fall in all too often. That is to say me thinking that something magnificent has happened and that the whole world has changed overnight, when actually it hasn’t. Nothing had changed. Apart from me. It was only me that was feeling this way again, all of a sudden. Not anybody else and certainly not Kathryn. It didn’t matter though. Whether the world had suddenly turned on its head or not, it couldn’t stop me feeling brilliant. Because I had been through the eight step process, or however many steps it was, that I outlined in “Avril Lavigne”; because I had already been through that once before, I was well aware of the situation and what I was faced with, if I can put it like that. I knew that Kathryn was with someone, that for all I knew, she was very happy with what she had and she wasn’t very likely, any time soon, to come knocking at my door. This was fine. I could deal with that because, as I say, this was something that I had been forced to do when I worked with her. Also, on top of this, because we no longer worked together, there wasn’t now that apprehension that I naturally felt when I came into work on any given day and saw that she was also in and realised that we would be around each other for the rest of that day. While this was, in itself, an unbelievable delight and I would happily go back to those days in an instant; it was also a bit nerve shredding at times. Like I would be around any woman that I was attracted to, not just Kathryn, I was always ever so slightly nervous when I was with her. Although it was a hopeless situation, for the reason that I have stated above, I did try my best to impress her, as much as I possibly could and so, I was forever scared of making a complete fool of myself, when I was in her company. This would have been a disaster, if it ever did happen. With the situation as it was now, it was much easier to enjoy it and to enjoy her for who she was. Now when I saw her, still in Tesco, where she had been for as long as I had known her, I wasn’t a co-worker, a colleague, I was just a shopper, a customer. One of God knows how many she saw from day to day. I was free. I could walk around the shop and do pretty much what I wanted. Kathryn being Kathryn probably wouldn’t have noticed if I started shouting and screaming and running around the place, like a lunatic. I doubt, and I’m being serious about this now; I really do doubt that when I went in to do my shopping and I passed her and she looked at me and I looked at her; I doubt that she even recognised me. I mean that. Maybe it’s just that good old Kathryn eyes glazed over look that tricked me into thinking that, but even knowing this, that’s still the impression that I got. If this was indeed how it was, then it only further demonstrates my point that it was easier for me now and therefore, it was also better.
I stopped “Avril Lavigne” at some point in June. The day before my birthday, I think it was, if I remember correctly. The reason why I did it at that exact point was purely down to what I wrote at the end of that piece. That was that I felt that if I was ever to complete it, I needed some kind of closure, any kind. Because being madly in love with someone does some weird and wonderful things to a man and over quite an extended period of time in most cases. I knew right from the very start, then, that this wouldn’t be merely a two week thing. A flight of fancy. No, once I was in love again, I was in love and that was that. Nothing short of the Third World War or nuclear winter would shake me out of this. And I didn’t want it to. I didn’t want to be shaken out of it. I loved being in love with her. It was the most incredible thing in the world, as I have said already. As well, I think, I was a little bit ashamed of what had happened the first time when I had been stupid enough to forget about her. That, now, seemed like an unforgivable thing to do and I was absolutely determined, that I wasn’t going to do the same thing for a second time. She was too good for that. Far, far too good. She didn’t deserve to have that done to her...Well, not even once, never mind twice. So, I was most definitely in this for the long haul and so the closure that I so desired would never come from me conveniently falling back out of love with her at the right moment. Apart from being insincere to the story, it would also have been completely impossible. I need something else then. Another instance or event that I felt would justify me drawing a line under the piece of writing and saying to myself, “Right, that’s that. Done and dusted.”. This came on 5 June. I bought the new...or newish, by then, Avril Lavigne record, I forget what it’s called right now. I bought it on the evening before my birthday, with Kathryn working at the time, which I felt was another important thing that I had to get right in order for this little scheme of mine to work and finished the work shortly after this. A fortnight or so later, whatever it was. And that’s where I always planned this one to start from. Initially, once I had finished “Avril Lavigne”, I quite rightly, I think, assumed that that would be that. I had no reason to write anything else about her. In the aforementioned piece, I had clearly outlined all of the important things- that initial fairly short period of time when I had fallen for her before she went away, her going to Australia for six months and me in the meantime going through the motions with Sonal, her coming back and me being more infatuated with her than ever and then me leaving and subsequently moving on to other women. Then, finally, at the very end, the typing up of the first Georgina essay, the finding of the Avril Lavigne website and YouTube and the re-infatuation with Kathryn. I mean, what else was I expecting to happen? Repeating what I was saying above, the chances of her turning to me while I was going in for bread and milk and saying, “Hey, Steven. Me and you, how about it?”; the chances of that actually occurring were slim to none, pretty much. So, if I would have chosen to carry on, just what would I have said? Would it have been like a diary, with endless entries saying “Well, I went in to Tesco today and I saw her and she looked and acted completely amazing and I’m so, so in love with her. So in love...”. Yes, probably. I’m guessing that it would have been something very much along those lines. And I’m also guessing that that sort of thing would have got very boring, very quickly. It was enough as it was and I was happy with it. However, things, quite a few things have gone on since that day, since 5 June and I feel that now is the time for me to begin my second piece of writing on Kathryn McKenna. This starts sometime later on in June...

Two
There was something like a forty-five percent chance of Kathryn being on whenever I went into Tesco. That’s what my fiercely non-mathematical brain worked it out to be, anyway. I was happy with those odds. I have to say. Now, you, like many other people, I suppose, as well, would find this entire concept as somewhat stalkerish. I have to say that I disagree with this completely. I disagree with it because the way that I see it, I never went there when I didn’t need to. You know, it wasn’t as though I was in there all day, every day, hoping to see as much of her as I could. Yes, I did want to see as much of her as I could, I’ll admit that, I’ll go that far. I was in love with her! I’d have been daft if I didn’t feel that way. That’s kind of one of the fundamental things about being in love with someone. However...
So, there I was, happy enough with the way that things were. I’d finished what I set out to do and I was pleased with the outcome. I didn’t expect anything else to come up when it came to Kathryn anytime soon, nothing significant anyway, and so I was content to carry on with whatever else I might have been writing about at the time. Beth or Georgina or something. Then what happens? Kathryn goes and swans off down to Somerset for the weekend, to live in a tent and listen to some music and I get wind of it and am left thinking, “Oh, my God. Here we go again...”. I make it sound like I didn’t want to write “Kathryn Meets The Chemical Brothers”, but of course, I did. Very much so. When I first found out about it, I knew that this was something that was too good to miss. I couldn’t not create something out of this. The reason why I was so enthusiastic about it was because to me, it seemed so gloriously unlikely. I couldn’t, and still can’t, imagine anyone that I would think less likely to do that kind of thing than Kathryn. But, then again, I have always been a very poor judge of character. Maybe, despite the fact that I loved her tremendously, I had got Kathryn all wrong. Perhaps she was, after all, the type who really enjoyed the life of outward bound pursuits and all that kind of stuff. Still, I couldn’t see it myself. I couldn’t see Kathryn loving the fact that she had to wear wellies twenty-four hours a day for three or four days and sleep on grass and have to walk everywhere being knee-deep or deeper in mud. Not Kathryn. Anybody but Kathryn. This was why I strongly believed that it had to be done. It just had to be written. Simple as that. Now, allow me to make one thing absolutely clear. It was never intended as a mickey take. That wasn’t the point. Furthermore, I don’t believe, having now written it and read it back myself; I don’t believe that it turned out that way either. Yes, it was an amusing thing to hear at the time and I hold my hands up and admit that I did have a little smile and a chuckle at the very thought of it but still...I couldn’t rip Kathryn to shreds, even if my life depended on it. She means too much to me for me to ever do something as callous as that. And I just wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I knew that I had done anything like that to someone that I loved as much as Kathryn. I couldn’t sleep at night if I knew that. It would be a horrible thing to do. What I wanted to do, what I wanted to produce was a real, serious piece of writing. Alright, I didn’t know any more than that she had gone to Glastonbury and who she had gone with, but I felt that if I gave it enough thought and put enough work into it, the end result would be something that I would be fairly pleased with and happy enough for anyone to read, if they so desired. As you will know if you have read it, I wanted it to be about more than just what I knew. I wanted to expand on that and make it better than that. The point that I tried to make throughout the piece, aside from what you might call the obvious, was something that I had only experienced twice in my life. This was being mad at Kathryn. This is quite hard to explain and as I have already tried to do it once before in said piece, this may take a bit of time for me to do the same now, whilst also attempting to make it sound somewhat original and not just that, verbatim. If I start repeating myself at any point and you therefore get bored or frustrated, then please, stop reading and go on to the next paragraph. I’ll begin this with something that I know that I have written before. On at least one occasion and most probably, more. What made Kathryn so unique, I think, from my perspective, was that I never lost my temper with her. Well, hardly ever lost my temper with her. I say this was unique because without question, I think, at some point I have become upset with every girl or woman that I have liked. This is an unfortunate, but usual reaction than I have experienced many times in the past. The reason behind it is always the same. Things aren’t happening the way that I want them to happen, I am not in the position that I want to be, desire to be, with the individual in question and it gets to me. I wish that I could stop it, believe me, I do, but I can’t. Anyway, this happens and I then get annoyed with myself for letting it happen and in the end, I feel awful. Fine. Now, for reasons that I am no closer to explaining, to this day, I didn’t experience this with Kathryn. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m not complaining about it. I just think it’s more than a bit weird that I found this with someone that I cared so much about, loved so much, as I did Kathryn and not someone who perhaps, I didn’t have quite as strong feelings for. And this is both times that I am talking about. The first time that I fell in love with her and the second. There were, though, I have to say, exceptions to this. Two of them, to be exact. As you will read/have already read in “Kathryn Meets The Chemical Brothers”, these were New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago and Glastonbury 2007. I’m tempted to say that even in these instances, I wasn’t genuinely angry, just a little bit irritated. The things that made me feel this way, both times, were events that Kathryn was at and that I wasn’t. I won’t say any more than that in case- A- You haven’t read the essay yet and I may spoil it for you or B- You have and again, all I’m doing is repeating myself. The main point that I want to make now, is this. This was what that piece of writing was about, the rare occasions that I was mad at Kathryn and the circumstances in which these occurred. This had really sprung up from out of nothing. As I said above, I was happy with what I had written on the subject of Kathryn McKenna and I couldn’t realistically envisage anything else happening that would mean me writing about her again. That this was exactly the opposite to the way things turned out is just typical, I think.
On her return from the south west and fully showered and cleaned up after her weekend of fun and frolics in the rain and the mud, Kathryn went back to work and subsequently, arrived back in my life. Although I was, without doubt, more in love with her than ever, I have to say that the next few months passed by with little incident. I continued the same routine of going in there, whenever I needed to, and seeing her when she was working, missing her when she wasn’t. But, with us no longer acknowledging one another, never mind speaking, there isn’t much that I can say about what took place during the summer months. Except for one thing that I would just like to go into briefly, if I may. This took place on a Saturday evening, sometime in August. At around this time, I got into something of a routine. With Mum, Dad and Craig away, enjoying the sun in France for the best part of a couple of months, this left only Granny and myself back at home. Because of this, most weekends played out a little bit like this. On a Saturday morning, I would pick Granny up and we would go shopping somewhere, at one of the supermarkets in the local area. More often than not, this would end up being the Tesco near me. Not that I had a problem with this, of course. Always a pleasure seeing Kathryn, as I’m sure you’ve already managed to work out. Anyway, this was what we would do and then afterwards, we would travel back to mine for tea and then Granny would stay the night, with me taking her home at some point the following day. This happened on almost, if not all, of the weekends that the folks were away. And, it was good fun. I enjoyed it. One of these Saturday’s began very much like all of those that had come before it. I had gone to Granny’s taken her shopping and by late afternoon, we were enjoying a drink at my house. However, at that moment, Granny decided that she wasn’t feeling very well and asked me if I minded taking her home. This was the first time that we had deviated from the agenda in the whole time that they had been on their summer holiday. After my initial concern for her wellbeing, I complied with Granny’s wishes and drove her home. Meanwhile, something that I should probably explain is that for the past four or five months or so, I had changed the radio station in my car from Radio One/Radio Four to Classic FM. There was no exact reason for this, aside from me wanting a change. So, in my car, there was now a new radio station and I listened to this, obviously, whenever I drove anywhere. I found, fairly quickly, that listening to a station that played classical music, rather than popular music, as I was used to; listening to this kind of radio station was no different in the sense that the music that was played on it still managed to find its way into my head and stick there. Consequently, I would then spend the rest of the day, doing whatever I was doing, working or whatever it was, with a piece of music going round and round in my brain. This happened just the other day when I spent several hours humming and tapping the theme to “The Magnificent Seven”, which I had heard on the radio earlier that morning. Depending on what kind of mood I’m in, this is either really good or absolutely infuriating. It can go either way, I can never be sure which. So, on this particular day, the day that I had to take Granny home because she wasn’t feeling well; that morning, I had been driving to Granny’s and on my way, I had heard Prokofiev’s “Montagues and Capulets” from his ballet “Romeo and Juliet”. This is a brilliant piece of music, fantastic and on this occasion, it had got lodged in my head. All day, I had been walking round with this unmistakable sound, endless repeating in my mind. Unfortunately, this had been an instance where it had gone the negative way, rather than the positive way. If I hadn’t been with company, I would have ended up banging my head very hard against a wall, in an attempt to make myself forget it. Though, I doubt that if I was able to do this, it would have worked. By eight o’clock or whatever time it was when I had dropped Granny off and was on my way back home, the tune was still there and by now, it was driving me loopy. If there is a remedy for this then somebody please tell it to me, because it would really help at times like this. Some time ago, someone much wiser than myself, had told me that if you have a song in your head and you can’t possibly get rid of it, there is one, last salvation. What you have to do, according to the theory, is listen once again to the song, just once and after that, all your problems should be solved. With this in mind, I suddenly remembered that when I had been searching for CD’s at Tesco in the past, I had noted that they had a classical music section. By no means was it extensive, but if I was fortunate, I thought, then they might just have what I was looking for. Maybe in preparation for the damn thing torturing me as it had gone on to do, when it had been playing on the radio that morning, I took the time to commit to memory the name of the piece in question, because I hadn’t known it beforehand. Arriving back in Irlam, rather than going straight home, I made the necessary diversion to get to Tesco, parked up and went inside.
Kathryn had been on earlier in the day, but I hadn’t known if she had been on an early or a late. Walking in now, I knew that she was on a late. She was stood behind her desk, as per usual and looking as lovely as always. Reluctantly walking away from her, I went up the escalator and headed on to the upper floor, where the clothing, electronic and entertainment products are. Forgetting about Kathryn, temporarily, my focus fell on the piece still in my head and finding the CD that would have it on. Mercifully, my luck was in this time. “The Best Of Prokofiev” was there, on the shelf and better still, “Montagues and Capulets” was on it. Realising that my nightmare was nearly over, I smiled, picked it up and stepped on to the down escalator. That was all I wanted. I didn’t need anything else. I had done all of shopping earlier that afternoon. The plan was simple. Buy the CD, get in the car, drive home as quickly as was legally possible, put the CD in the CD player and listen to it. Thus, hopefully, curing me. Easy. This was what I was pondering when, as I descended from the top floor of the store to the bottom, I saw Kathryn. She had moved from her station to the customer service/returns desk and was talking to the Tesco employee who was there. She seemed to be right in the middle of the conversation that she was having when, all of a sudden, she stopped and looked directly at me. I was pretty much at the bottom of the...thing, by this point, and not all that far away from her. It was as though she was staring right at my eyes. After what seemed like a mini-eternity, she looked away, said something very short and concise to her friend and then burst out laughing, followed soon after by the other person. Now, I could be completely wrong about this and I concede now, that most likely, if you were to speak to her, this would be the case. But, I still believe, wholeheartedly, in what I am about to say. Whether you agree with me...Well, that’s up to you, I guess. Immediately after I saw this, my initial thought was, “Oh, my God. She knows...She knows that I’m in love with her”. Thinking this, all I wanted to do was pay for my CD and get out, get away from her. I had been rumbled. She knew! Since then, now that I have had time to digest the incident, take everything in and assess it properly, I would like to amend this thought slightly. I still maintain that what she said to her friend was something like, “Look. There’s that lad that I was telling you about. The one that keeps coming in and staring at me with his mouth wide open...What a prat”. I think this is true. Maybe I overreacted a little with the her knowing that I was in love with her part. I don’t believe, now, that the insight that she had was that profound. But, overall, the impression that I got from that split second in time was that, she was aware of the fact that I was attracted to her. At the very least, she knew that much. I don’t know why I found this so disastrous. As with everything else that happened with Kathryn, none of it was really of any significance. Nothing ever changed. There was never the slightest hint that we would ever be a couple. Nothing of any relevance happened between us in all of the time that I knew her. So what if she did have a fairly good idea of how I felt? So what? Nobody, not even her, had the power to take that away from me. I write this, though, because this was the first time in five or six years that I got the very real feeling that she knew what was going on in my head and this, I think, is quite a big deal, even if the ramifications of it, aren’t all that life changing.

Three
By August, I knew that I was ready to write again. I was confident that I had enough material by this point to have a good stab at a third Kathryn essay, especially after the incident that I described above, all I needed was an idea. Or, not so much an idea, but a central theme. Although I knew that I could describe what I have just mentioned, as well as one or two other things, possibly, I felt that I needed something to base it all around. It was now two months that had passed since I put the finishing touches to the first and “Kathryn Goes To Glastonbury” was also well on the way to completion. But, these two, I felt, weren’t enough anymore. I knew that I had more in me than just those two. I was also fairly sure that it wouldn’t only be the “Oh, Kathryn, she’s so, so unbelievably amazing...” kind of nonsense that I feared “Avril Lavigne” could have quite easily have turned into had I not put an end to it. Things had happened in that period between June and August, maybe not vastly significant things, like the flashpoints that had formed the basis for “Avril Lavigne”, but more subtle things. Ironically, exactly what it needed, flying in the face of the subtlety, was a major flashpoint. Just one. That would be what I could base the rest of the piece on. Work everything else around that. Unfortunately, I would have to wait a little while longer for that to arrive and when it eventually did, it wasn’t the kind of thing that I was either expecting or wanted. But, I’ll get on to that in a moment or so. For now, I would just like to spend a moment or two going into something that is kind of relevant, but that also goes off on a little bit of a tangent. I’m talking about Rachel. If I had been clever enough, on the ball enough, to pick up a corkscrew that had a barcode on it, as opposed to one that didn’t, then I think that it’s fairly safe to say that the brief infatuation that I had over Rachel probably wouldn’t have happened. It was only the fact that I was stood there, at her till, for about ten minutes, that made her stick in my head and not go away. While the person went off to get another one, a real one that had the ability to be scanned through the system, she was apologising to me every two seconds for something that wasn’t even remotely her fault and I was stood there thinking, “Hmm. You’re quite attractive, aren’t you?”. Because she was, she is. Very attractive, in fact. Finally, after “Sorry about this” number 641, the correct sort of corkscrew magically turned up, coming from God knows how far away, and the lovely Rachel checked me out and I was on my way. This was the key moment, the key couple of hours and days, when having noticed a girl that I thought was attractive, I now had to work out if I liked her or not. Despite the fact that she looked to me to be very young, no older than eighteen, I didn’t think; despite this, at the end of my unforced deliberation, I decided that yes, I actually did like her. She was more than just attractive. I decided that I fancied her. This wasn’t exactly easy to take. I mean, this was the ultimate act of traitorism, wasn’t it? I couldn’t possibly think like this when I was so madly in love with Kathryn. Not only was it bad enough that there was now somebody else, what made it all the more worse was that this person was also Kathryn’s colleague. This just wasn’t on. Just what was I playing at? This was no two minute wonder either. Something that held all of my attention for a short while and then a little bit later, I was on to something else or back to what I had been on beforehand. It wasn’t even a little bit like this. After a couple of weeks, or however long it was in the end, I’m afraid that I can’t really remember the sort of time frame involved, with any kind of accuracy; after a certain amount of time had passed, though, I felt compelled to start writing about her, to put into words that particular story. If you can get this out of me then you must be doing something right, let me tell you. Many have been and gone and have not had an essay dedicated to them. Most notably, perhaps, Laura Farnworth. Though, in this case, I feel that I will have the compulsion to write something sooner or later. Many others, however, won’t ever get that. Rachel, then, had to mean at least something to me. I wouldn’t have even considered such a thing if I didn’t believe that it was justified. This was justified, alright. And, so I started. The only problem that I had was that no sooner had I started than she seemed to quite simply disappear. Chances are, I think, that she went back to education at some point in September. This would be as good an explanation as any as to why one minute she was there and then the next, she wasn’t. For that short period of a month or whatever it was, from that incident on the Friday evening with the unmarked corkscrew to me realising that she had left, it’s quite safe to assume that she was able to force out of me, at the very least, a passing interest. I’m fairly sure as well that if she had stayed there and I would have continued to see her, then my feelings for her would have only grown as time passed. However, having said that, let’s not over exaggerate this. Rachel was Rachel. What she was not, not by a long shot, was Kathryn. Despite what I might have been feeling for her, I never lost sight of the fact that Kathryn was still very much my number one. Not for a second. There was just no comparison. All of the time that I was thinking and writing about Rachel, I could never shake off the thought that Kathryn was simply so much better. This is unfair, I know and I wish, now, that it hadn’t have been that way. Even if I could have forgotten about Kathryn temporarily, while Rachel was there, and then gone back to her afterwards; that might have been alright. But, no. I wasn’t even able to do that. This only demonstrates, I believe, how much a hold Kathryn had on me at that time and how much...I’m trying desperately not to use the word “obsessed”, but I guess that that’s the best way that I can describe it...and how obsessed I was with her.
It wouldn’t last forever, but surely I still had it for a while, didn’t I? I mean, what could possibly happen that would change the way things were at that moment? Well, there was one thing, obviously. She could leave. That was always a possibility. And it was one that I was constantly aware of. I went through a period, during the middle of July, I think it was, when I was going into Tesco, but she never seemed to be there. The first couple of times, I hadn’t thought anything about it, didn’t read much into it. It was, I figured, simply the law of averages working itself out. There had been periods previously where I had gone in time after time and she had been there for all of them. That had been great but there hadn’t been anything behind it. Just my sheer good luck, nothing more than that. When the opposite of this then came round some time afterwards, I took at as being the reverse of that good luck. Then, when this seemed to keep on happening, for more than a week or so, perhaps even stretching to two weeks, I started to get more than a little concerned. Could it be, could it really be that she had left? I was seriously starting to think that way when logic began to kick in all of a sudden. Something that had sadly deserted me up to that point. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that the reason that she wasn’t there might be because she was on holiday. Possibly, I’m tempted to say, in an attempt to save myself from total embarrassment, I had taken on board that she had gone to Glastonbury a month earlier and that, somehow, that meant that she wasn’t then allowed another holiday in July. I know, it’s weak and it still makes me sound stupid, but that’s the best I can do, I’m afraid. Sure enough, after this unnecessary panic attack, the next time I went in, some days later, there she was. Blissfully unaware of the pain and torture that she had been putting me through, while she sunned herself in a beach somewhere and/or getting very drunk. This incident, though, if nothing else, highlighted to me, exactly how fragile this thing that I was holding up and trying very hard to maintain, was. It could be over in an instant, at any time. In the click of a finger. And the worst thing about it, the absolute worst, was that if it did happen, I wouldn’t know about it. That was always the benefit, if you want to call it that, of the situation that I found myself in with Toni. Because we worked in the same office and were pretty much in each other’s, and everyone else’s, for that matter, pockets and so, if she was looking to move on and leave the business for something else, then it wouldn’t be long before I got wind of it. Be it from one source or another. It wasn’t nice, but it was handy, I suppose. Compared to this, the thing with Kathryn was a nightmare. I had no idea about anything. I had no idea what was going on in her head, what her plans were or if she was staying or going. But that wasn’t going to happen. I had convinced myself of that. Don’t ask me how or why, but I had. It’s radically un-Steven like, radically uncharacteristic, I know, but there you have it. This was something that never would have occurred six, twelve months earlier. I would have had that feeling of impending doom and “Oh, no my life is over!” kind of thing. Now, though, I was nothing but positive. Completely upbeat. Everything was going to be okay. The wonderful irony of this, of course, was that everything was far from okay and in no time at all, what I had with Kathryn would come to an abrupt end.
Looking back on it now, I laugh that I was so cool and calm about how I saw what I perceived to be going on. I remember, extremely vividly, how bad I was with Toni. There were times, days and nights, when I was bordering on tearing my hair out at the was she/wasn’t she leaving subject. In those moments, I was so in love with her, so blinded by how beautiful she was and how much she meant to me; that it just became too much for me to take. I was paranoid beyond belief. Super, super paranoid. I mean, it used to keep me awake at night. Fairly frequently, too. I don’t know, I can’t say how close she was to leaving at any given time. There could well have been instances where she applied for other jobs and there was, as well, all that talk about her department, the Visa department, going back to the offices at Skelmersdale. This, in the end, was probably how things ended up. That’s my educated guess, anyway. I could very easily be wrong, though. It could be that she is still in that office now, today. The point that I want to make, though, is this. All that time that I spent worrying, losing sleep and everything else that I did; in the end, all this was completely pointless. Why? Well, because I managed to get out before she did. This, absurdly, makes it sound like a race between the two of us. Which, obviously, it wasn’t. What I mean is that, despite what I might or might not think, if it was true that something was going on and it was firmly in the motions that she, either on her own or accompanied by the rest of her department; then I succeeded in leaving the company while she was still there. This was something that I wanted to do. That was the way that I wanted things to happen. Going back to what I was saying originally, though, I did get into a real mess whenever I addressed the possibility of Toni leaving. The reason being that it always seemed to be something that, for one reason or another, was distinctly possible. The idea of Kathryn doing something similar, while equally possible, you might argue, didn’t seem quite as threatening as it had been with Toni. So, I didn’t worry about it. As I say, however, history has proven this to be something of a mistake.
The day was Thursday, 13 September, 2007 and for the past two weeks, my life had taken quite an unusual turn. A fortnight before this Thursday, I had suddenly found myself out of a job when my nine month tenure at Adidas came to a sudden and nasty end. I have chosen not to go into specifics here for two reasons. One- I don’t much feel in the mood for talking about such a thing and Two- I really don’t believe that it will add anything to this particular story. That was the facts of it, though. I had lost my job and there was no getting away from that. So, in the two weeks that had passed between me being sacked and the Thursday in question, a large proportion of my time had been taken up by applying for jobs. Be it online or through the post. My preferred method for doing such a thing was to send out my CV to any potential employer that had caught my eye. This was much quicker, less time consuming than the other way of doing it, the application form. Some of those, as I found out to my annoyance and frustration, could take hours at a time. Not much fun when it wasn’t only one that I had to do but several. In the end, I have to admit, that they sent me a little round the twist. Whether I liked them or not, they still had to be done. With no computer, not to mention, internet connection, at home, I found myself over at my parent’s house on a daily basis, working out out of the jobs that I had seen, which ones were worth going for and which weren’t. Fairly soon, I got into something of a routine with it all. I would arrive at their house at somewhere around half nine in the morning, Dad and I would then spend a good five or six hours everyday doing this and then we would knock off at three-ish, tidy everything away and have it ready again for the next onslaught the following day. Then, when all this was done, I would go home and spend the rest of the day doing not very much, one thing or another, before going to bed, waking up and starting again from the beginning. This Thursday, however, was slightly different. Half two, three o’clock arrived and between the two of us, we made the collective decision to call it quits for the day. Some more work had been done and at the very least, we were able to say that we were a little further on than we had been at the same point the previous day. So, we stopped. It was at this juncture that I tended to go home. But, Dad had said that he needed to go to Tesco and with Mum at work in their car, it had been arranged that we go in mine, while she was out. Well, he was hardly going to get any argument from me on the matter. Even if I had been slogging it for the past five hours, getting lost in a seemingly endless jungle of masses of paper and pens, rulers and tippex; even if this was the case, as it certainly had been, I wasn’t going to pass up a possible opportunity to see Kathryn, never in a million years. If anything, it would come as a welcome relief to see her. If she was, indeed, working when we turned up.
In my car, then, we left the house, shopping list in hand and headed in the direction of Tesco. In five minutes, we were there and walking inside, Dad and myself. Craig, because he was still on holiday from university at that particular point in time, was offered the chance to join the fun, but he had declined. Clearly, he had no idea what he might be in for if he had said “Yes”, the poor, misguided fool, but we did. Or, I did. I doubt if Dad was all that aware, either, of the strange and mysterious powers of a certain Kathryn McKenna. It was probably just me, actually. No matter, I would enjoy her all for myself and leave the others, whether there, with me or back at home; leave them to bask in the blissfulness of their ignorance. Inside, right away, I knew that something was amiss. I say this because Kathryn was there, alright, on full view, for the world to see, but she wasn’t where she almost always was. What would normally happen in that sort of a situation is that I would walk in, through the big front doors and immediately look to my left as I walked through the security barriers; I would look at the little desk thing that Kathryn often stood behind in her role as assister to the people on the tills. If she was, at that moment, unoccupied, not attending to the needs of a member of the checkout staff, then she would be stood waiting, at that desk. If she was not in this position, then she would be either walking from one checkout to another or stood at a particular checkout, resolving a particular problem. If she was not to be seen in any of these places, then one would have to assume that the likelihood of it was, that she wasn’t in. There was, even now, though, one last salvation. One last possible explanation. She could, after all that, still be in, but on a trek round the store, possibly putting an item that hadn’t been sold, back where it belonged. As she had been that day when she passed Stuart and I talking, said “Hi” to him and completely blanked me, while I had an Avril Lavigne CD in my basket. She had been taking something back to its proper home on that occasion and purely by chance, had bumped into us two, chatting away to each other. If, on any given day, this was the case, this was where she was, then I would either see her going back to her post or I might even pass her as she made her way back. It would go without saying that if we did brush shoulders as we headed in different directions, I would get nothing more than that wonderful glazed over look on her face. No acknowledgement, no “Hi Steven”, no nothing. But, then, I really wouldn’t have had it any other way. Anyway, those were all the options. If it turned out that none of those applied then there was a strong possibility that she was off duty. Okay, but, as I say, something wasn’t right, something was going on. Because, Dad and I entered the store and none of these things applied. She was there, but she wasn’t doing any of the above. No, for some very bizarre reason, I looked around and saw that she was on a till. And I don’t mean she was helping someone out with a problem. No, she was physically on a till, sat down, passing items through, underneath the laser scanner thing and smiling away and asking customers if they needed help with their packing as she went along. This was odd. I couldn’t recall the last time that I had seen her do anything like this. Because of the unfortunate and infuriating haze that I seem to have when it comes to trying to remember anything significant about Kathryn in the last couple of years, before I found myself falling in love with her again, as I think I pointed out in “Avril Lavigne”, I really can’t recall when it was that she moved over to doing what she did, seeing to the needs of the employees on the tills. I simply don’t know when this happened. I know that when we worked together, when the store got busy on Saturday afternoons or in the early evenings of certain weekdays, she would often be asked over the bing-bong to go on a till, while the rush was dealt with. Then, I think, I think, that at some point in time after this, after I had left, she left the fresh food department and moved over to the tills full time. Whether it was then that she switched to where she ended up or whether that came later is something, as I’ve said, that falls into that haze, I’m afraid. I couldn’t possibly say, one way or the other. The point is, however, that certainly since the re-infatuation occurred in April, certainly since then, up to this day, I hadn’t seen her sat at a till, checking people out. Not once. That doesn’t mean that she didn’t do it, of course. Simply that I hadn’t witnessed it. That’s what made what I was seeing now so very odd. My first thought was that it must have been busy, even though it was just gone three or something on a Thursday afternoon and it didn’t appear to be all that busy, from what I could see. But, it must just be busy, one or two might be on their lunch or break or whatever and she was covering for the loss of work for a short time, until they returned or it got quiet again or whatever. Then, she would go back to doing what she normally did. That was my natural train of thought as I searched for some kind of an explanation to what I was witnessing. Not that I was bothered by it in the slightest. Don’t forget, this was the new, non-paranoid me. Why would the sight of Kathryn sat on a till suddenly indicate to me that it was her last day and that she was leaving? It wouldn’t. At my suspicious best, at the very pinnacle of my Toni madness, I wouldn’t have been able to derive such an elaborate reasoning for Kathryn being where she was and doing what she was doing. As far as I was ever likely to tell, it was completely innocent and the explanation for it, if even there was one, was perfectly simple.
This wasn’t the only strange thing, though. Leaving the wonderful and beautiful sight of Kathryn behind was never easy, but I was reassured by the fact that I knew that I would see her again when we came to checkout. By then, of course, I was fully confident, that things would have returned to normal and everything would be calm on peaceful. Reluctantly leaving her behind, then, we walked further into the store. With items on the list not being in any kind of order, we knew that we would have to go from one place to another and then, most likely, back to where we started, to get everything that we had been asked to get. And with no set plan of attack, we sort of aimlessly meandered our way in and walked up the aisle that was directly ahead of us. This was taking us, not to the food, where we really needed to go, but more towards the non-food stuff and in particular, the electronic and white goods section. Irons, kettles, that sort of thing. If we carried on in the direction that we were going then that would be our eventual destination. As I did this, with Dad walking beside me and my mind still very much on Kathryn and what I had just seen, I looked to my right, down one of the aisles that we were passing and I saw an absolute raft of Tesco people. There was a load of them. Oh, at least thirty, maybe more, all packed into this one aisle. They didn’t seem to be doing very much. All stood around, some with clipboards in hand, some talking, some walking slowly up and down. And from what I could tell, it was a good mix of both management and normal worker. The aisle that they were down was the one that had been recently transformed into the Halloween aisle, in preparation for that event, which was still a good six weeks or so away. And even though it was quite a wide aisle, much wider than a normal one, it appeared to struggle to fit all of the bodies within it. But, still, there they were. Looking as though they were all waiting there for something to happen. I didn’t care how daft it sounded now, something was going on. I was convinced of that. Add this bizarre sight to the equally strange one that I had seen Kathryn in and you can maybe understand why I was seriously considering that some kind of conspiracy was afoot. As for what that conspiracy might possibly be, well, that was anyone’s guess. Leaving the group of people behind, still in the Halloween section and us now moving on to another part of the store, my mind was boggling with what could be going on. It had to be something. It had to be. But, I’d be amazed if anything that I could come up with would turn out to be even remotely accurate. The best that I could think was that there might be some kind of visit about to take place in the very near future. That might explain why that one aisle was full of Tesco employees. Some important visitor or visitors could soon be arriving and those stood there were coming up with a plan of action, when they turned up. They could be addressing the finishing touches of who would be doing what and where everyone was going to be at given times. Planned, of course, in an attempt to make the store look as good and as positive as possible. The alternative, which I also came up with as Dad and I began to get further and further away from where the ruckus was, was that it was the preparation for a stock take. All those clipboards, all those people. It was a possibility, I suppose, if albeit an unlikely one. But, the question was, if it was either of these things, what did it have to do with Kathryn and the fact that she was on a till? This was the conclusion that I had come to...and quite quickly too. That these two strange events, somehow and for some reason, were linked. That what Kathryn was up to was in some way, due to what those other people were planning.
Whatever it was that was happening, it was nothing to do with us and now that we had moved on to do our shopping, I could now forget about it. Except, I couldn’t. I don’t know why, there was no rational, logical explanation for me to think like this. Conspiracy theories were no longer what I was about and when it came to Kathryn, especially, I had decided not to go along that road this time. Despite this, though, I couldn’t help myself. It’s hard for me to say what I was thinking, really, while we walked round the store, getting the things that we needed, going from one part of the shop to another. It was a fairly big shop that we were doing, most likely their weekly one and it took us a fair while to get all the way round. In this time, we had not been back to the till area, we had stayed more towards the back of the supermarket and so, I wasn’t aware, one way or another, whether Kathryn was still where she had been when we had walked in or if she had returned to her normal role. I could only guess which of these it would be when we were finally ready to checkout. Even though I was sure that something was up and that, as unlikely as it might seem, Kathryn was involved in whatever was going on, I was also sure that when the time came, she would be behind the desk again and everything would be alright.
Once we were done, once we had got everything that they needed, we did make our way to the checkouts. As I said, by now, in the half an hour or however long it had been, that had passed since we had first arrived in the store, I was confident that Kathryn would be where she always was. But, she wasn’t. She was still sat on the till and still very much looking as though she was checking people out. I don’t know what it was in my head that made me walk over to her till, but it was something and that was exactly what I did. Seconds before I had laid my eyes on Kathryn again, Dad had instructed me to go to a till and start going through while he went back for something that he had, up to that moment, forgotten. So, whilst registering what I was seeing and once more believing it to be somewhat odd, almost without even thinking, I went directly to the till that Kathryn was stationed at and immediately started putting the items that were in the trolley onto the conveyor belt, in preparation for Kathryn scanning them through. It was now that I did something quite childish and again did it without really considering or thinking about what I was doing or how it might look. Especially to her. The one that I loved. It was as though, all of a sudden and without warning, I was on autopilot or something. Just doing things because my body and my muscles were telling my brain to do them. Not the other way around, as it should have been. Anyway, the immature act that I mentioned and that I am quite embarrassed about now was turning my back to her. I actually turned my back to her. Why on earth was I doing that? What ever possessed me to do such a thing? It doesn’t matter now, of course, and I doubt that Kathryn being Kathryn noticed it, but still...I shouldn’t have done it, I don’t think. If there was one person that I could get away with doing such a thing to then it was her, without question. Being in her own, little wonderful world of Kathryn, I doubt she even noticed that it was me putting the shopping on the belt, let alone what I was up to. You’re probably wondering why I am making a big deal out of this because it might not seem like such a bad thing, but allow me a second or two to explain. Here I was, finding myself in a situation which brought me ridiculously close to the woman that I loved so dearly and the best that I could do, the best that I could offer her was the sight of my back. It was, the way I see it now, as the ultimate act of chickening out. I was behaving like someone with a guilty conscience or someone who didn’t deserve to be where he was, interacting with who he was interacting with. As though he were unworthy. This is, I know, a load of rubbish. In its most basic sense, I was simply a customer who had decided to choose this particular checkout that she happened to be on for any number of reasons. Not necessarily because I was madly in love with the person sat behind it. It could have been that that checkout had been the first one that I had seen. Or, it may have been the one that appeared to be the least busy. Or, even, the one that was nearest from the aisle that I had come out from, once I had completed my shopping. Kathryn couldn’t possibly have guessed where I had come from, even if she did recognise straight away, who I was. Also, she couldn’t possibly have worked out that my motive for going to her, above any of the others that were available to me, was that I was deeply and passionately in love with her. I didn’t have a sign stuck to my head that said that. She had no clue of knowing this. As far as she was concerned, I had come to her, most likely, because she had been the easiest to get to. That was, naturally, assuming that she knew it was me. Which I seriously doubt, now, that she didn’t. Not to begin with, at least.
However, whether she had noticed me or not, another problem was now emerging from the horizon and it was...my father. The worst present that we ever bought my Dad for Christmas was the DVD of Peter Kay’s stand up routine at the Bolton Albert Halls. I presume that you have seen this. I presume that most people have seen it by now. What you have to understand about my Dad is that he isn’t very in touch with contemporary culture. This is most certainly not a bad thing and it is often quite amusing when I am watching television with the family and a famous celebrity comes on the screen and the rest of us know instantly who it is but Dad doesn’t have a clue. Many times this has happened and it never stops being funny. “Who are they and what do they do?” is what he often says. I like the fact that not only does he not know who the person is, their name, he also wouldn’t be able to tell you what they are famous for. It’s wonderful and I love it. This was how it used to be with Peter Kay. Before we got him the DVD, if he had seen the bloke on the television or in the newspaper or heard him on the radio or whatever, he wouldn’t have known who he was. Then, it was some bright spark’s idea to get him the aforementioned DVD as a Christmas present, one year. “Yeah, that would be a good idea”, the individual in question, who shall remain nameless, said, “I think he’ll like that...”. Well, they were right. It went on either Christmas Day or Boxing Day night and he hasn’t stopped watching it since. He must know all the words, all the jokes, by now, but he still dies with laughter every time that he sees it. Later, he branched out onto “Phoenix Nights” and that was exactly the same. He lapped that one up, as well. Both series. This did, unfortunately, though, create something of an issue. As I’m sure you will be aware, having no doubt seen it for yourself, a lot of what Peter Kay’s routine is about is the actions and mannerisms and sayings of Northern people. In particular, I think, people from the north west. And that’s fine. He’s no Eddie Izzard. He wouldn’t be able, I don’t think, to go through a whole section of his act in completely fluent French, for example. As Eddie Izzard does. To great effect, as well, I might add. Nor is he a Ross Noble. He couldn’t spend half the gig simply making up funny stuff on the spot. This is what Ross Noble is good at. Interacting with his audience, having conversations with them, attaining information from them regardless of how random or inane it might seem and then making something exceptionally funny out of it. Peter Kay’s act is nothing like either of those. It’s completely different. It is a study of people from the north west of England and it is a study used for the purpose of comedy, for the purpose of making people laugh. You might say that what he writes and performs is an accurate portrayal of people’s lives. You might also say that that is what makes it funny. Particularly to people of the area, who can understand it and therefore, laugh at it, more than someone who isn’t from the area might. What I have found, though, since the release of all of his material into the consumer market, where people can buy it and then watch it as frequently as they like; what I have found since this has happened is that now, in everyday life, people who have seen him and his work, are now repeating it for reasons of entertainment and again, to amuse others. They are, in essence, mimicking what he does. While this can be funny in itself, sometimes, most of the time, it is very unfunny and above all else, annoying. Unfortunately for me, Dad, having seen it, is one of those people. And even more unfortunately, in this instance when I was now with Kathryn, with the woman that I loved most dearly, he had decided that now might be a good time to regurgitate Peter Kay, for his own amusement. If only he knew what he was doing and who he was doing it to. Oh, God, if only he knew...
I was about halfway through the unloading of the trolley, when Dad joined me at the till. It looked as though, with relative ease, he had found the one thing in the list that he had missed and he was soon helping me out with the task in hand. Between the two of us, it didn’t take nearly as long to unpack the second half as it had done me to do the first. There had been one or two people, one or two customers, in front of me while I did this, but by the time Dad and I had finished, Kathryn was just about ready to start on us. The person immediately in front had paid and we were good to go. It was at this moment, I reckon, that she realised who her next customer was. I didn’t see anything noticeable change in her facial expression. It didn’t look as though she thought, “Oh, Christ! What’s this clown up to now? As if it weren’t bad enough that he’s been stalking me all summer...Coming in here every other day, sometimes more than once. Geez! Doesn’t he ever go away?”. I couldn’t detect anything like that. But, as I remind you again that this is Kathryn that we are talking about, Miss cool as a cucumber, Miss robotic “I am Bender, please insert girder...”; Kathryn who was never fazed or moved or shaken by anything, never mind me. I think that upon realising that her next customer was “...that Steven bloke that I used to work with once, a long, long time ago..”; upon realising this, she just looked to her left, found the first item on the conveyor belt, picked it up and began scanning that and the rest of them through. What she hadn’t accounted for was my father. I’m sure that if he even knew that the girl he was about to pull the stunt on was someone that his son used to work with, not even that she was the girl of his dreams; if he’d known this then I don’t think that he would have done it. He was only doing it for a laugh and perhaps to make himself look daft. The last thing on his mind was that his actions could and would also embarrass his son. One of the most popular gags in Peter Kay’s Albert Hall’s routine is the conversation that he plays out between the taxi driver and his customer. This, if memory serves, comes quite near the beginning of the set. At least, it does on the DVD, I think. He notes, with or without accuracy, I’m not sure which, that there are two questions that a passenger will always ask a taxi driver. These are, “ ‘been busy?” and “What time you on ‘til?”. Of course, on the recording, he gets lots of laughs from the audience as well as more than a few nods of acknowledgement and understanding. What I have found, from my own experience, is that when mimicking this in everyday life, it is not solely restricted to the environment that he chooses to display it in. It can be used anywhere, anywhere that a customer is interacting with an employee. These questions, for better or worse, are universal. Not just for taxi drivers. Even if Peter Kay only demonstrated it in this way. As soon as Dad opened his mouth to talk to Kathryn, I knew what was coming and I almost shielded my eyes, covered my face with my hands and whispered, “Oh, God, no. Please...” as he did it. With that one action, Dad had sent me rapidly in the direction of hell. I was hoping, right to the very last second, pleading for some assistance from upstairs, that he might somehow be stopped from doing it. But, I was out of luck. Kathryn, hats off to her, for her part, took it very well, completely in her stride. She just chuckled slightly and answered his questions. While, at the same time, there was something of a look in her eye that just quietly said, “Shut up, you tit”.
It was the answer to her second question that brought about the end. This was it. After today, I wouldn’t be seeing her anymore. She had just confirmed that. I had heard it with my own ears. It’s funny how in life, when you look back at the important moments that you go through at various stages, various points in time, all of them seem to take place in slow motion. This sounds totally cornball, I know; but, I think it’s true. “Life in slow motion”. How many times has that been said? How much of a cliché is that? Doesn’t make it any less right though, does it? There was a definite swing in emotions as she said those words. Yes, it was cringe-worthy watching Dad and Kathryn going through this completely stupid set conversation and I did feel sorry for her, that he was putting her through this. She must have been through this act many times before with many other people like my father, who think they are being funny when they aren’t. Alright, she may have looked okay, from the outside, but I’m sure she wasn’t feeling any less uncomfortable than I was. I don’t know. What might have made it even worse than it would have been otherwise for her was that I was there. Because we look fairly like each other, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to realise that Dad and I were father and son and on seeing me, she has to have come to the correct conclusion as to who he was. So, not only has she got to deal with what he is saying to her, asking her, should I say, she also had to deal with the fact that this mad individual is the father of someone that she used to know. That couldn’t have been easy, I don’t think. Kathryn, was though, as unflappable as ever. So, it wasn’t easy to watch, from my point of view, but deep down, I understood that it was nothing more than a bit of fun and I knew that after it, she may well be of the impression that my Dad was ever so slightly off his rocker, and if she did, you couldn’t really blame her, but it wasn’t all that disastrous. As I believe I have pointed out on at least one instance, so far, in this, Kathryn and I would never be together. Not unless something strange, something very, very strange happened and everything unexpectedly turned on its head. I knew that and I had accepted it. From that point of view, then, it wasn’t really all that relevant. It didn’t stop me from coming into the store, every so often, looking to see if she was in and then realising that she was, taking a moment or two out to take a step back and admire her for what she was. That is to say an extremely beautiful, funny and clever young woman. All that would remain. Nothing had changed. At least not for the moment.
Things were still moving in real time, at the proper speed. We hadn’t got to the freeze frame bit just yet. No doubt twigging instantaneously to what was going on and the “gag” that Dad was delivering, Kathryn smiled at him and answered his first question about whether she had been busy or not. I was stood at the end of the till, quite a distance from the two of them, carrier bag in hand, waiting for her to start scanning the stuff into the computer and then pushing on to the other conveyor belt so that it got to me and I could then start putting it into the bags and ultimately, back in the trolley. Watching this scenario unravel between the two of them, I decided that I know wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere but here. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t good. It was about to get a whole lot worse, though. Having responded to the first of Dad’s two questions, Kathryn had to have been more than aware that it wasn’t going to stop there and that the second one was soon to follow. And already, I’m sure, she was planning what she was going to say to him. This was her moment now. It wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about me. It was her moment and we were all completely powerless to stop her. What she has in her armoury is the old curve ball. Because this is a routine and because both of them know that this is a routine, they also know what the stock answers are going to be, as well as the questions. “Have you been busy?”, “Yes/No”, “What time are you on ‘til?”, “Four/Six/Ten/Whatever”. Conversation over. The customer pays for their shopping and everyone lives happily ever after. Kathryn knows, even before he has asked the question about what time she is finishing, that Dad is expecting her to give a set time. That is the stock answer and that is what he always gets. As does anyone else who is daft enough to ask it. And, on a normal day, she would give it. Only, this isn’t a normal day. Anything but. And our Kathryn has something of a surprise up her sleeve. Something that she knows will make Dad go “Oh!” when he hears her say it. So, the second question is asked. Time began to slow down at this exact moment. Sadly and maddeningly, I can’t recall the precise words that she chose to use, as I can’t for her answer to the first question, that’s because I was busy having a heart attack...Or, maybe it was a heart break. Who knows? Whatever. I don’t remember word for word what she said, but I will never forget the basic gist of it. Apparently, and she decided not to go into detail about how this was worked out, but it was...Apparently, she was on an earlier or later shift than she would usually be on that day, a Thursday it was, because it turned out that this was her last day and the company had decided beforehand that because of that, that shift was the one that she had to work. I had come to the firm conclusion that it was best if I didn’t worry about the future when it came to Kathryn and that I would live solely for the moment. I had done all that worrying and fretting about Toni and when it came to it, it had all been for nothing, I had left before she did. I could have got all bent out of shape about the same thing with Kathryn and I hadn’t done. That was my initial concern, my initial reaction. Before anything else had time to get through to my nervous system, I was berating myself for my lack of concern over the situation. Not that it would have done any good of course. What Kathryn did was up to her and completely independent and unaffected by anything that I could have said or done. It didn’t matter, though. I had to blame something, I had to be angry at something and right away, it was that fact that I got angry about. This was, I think, looking back, quite refreshing. What I mean by this is that in the past, if this instance had have occurred a couple of years ago, say, my first thought would not have been about me, it would have been about her. How could she possibly do this to me? Did she not know how I felt and how I would react to this news? Oh, she was so selfish, doing this...and on and on. That sort of theme. What I like, thinking about it now, later on, after the event, is that there was no way that I could have planned what I could have thought had I found myself in that kind of situation. As I mentioned earlier, I had worked out that if Kathryn were to leave at some point in the future, and it was bound to happen eventually, then it was very, exceptionally likely that she would depart without my knowledge. And, as I said, it would be some time, days, weeks, months, whatever it might turn out to be, before I finally worked out what had happened. I didn’t consider, never in a million years did I consider that not only would I be there, in the store on her last day; but, on top of that, I would be one of the last people that she served and what is most important of all, she would actually tell me herself, I would be physically able to hear it from Kathryn herself, not through some insignificant third party, that she was leaving. Because I couldn’t possibly predict that I would find myself hearing this, as I was doing now, then I couldn’t also predict what I would be thinking at that time, if by some small miracle, it did turn out that way. Well, it had turned out that way, the small miracle had happened and all I was thinking was how annoyed I was at me, not her, me for being such a damned fool in not losing sleep and not worrying myself sick that she could soon be leaving. It felt like she had slipped through the net or under the radar or something like that. That’s what it felt like. If I had paid more attention then, somehow, this might not have happened, she might not have decided to do this and she might not have been leaving her job. This, as I said, was a complete fallacy.
But, she couldn’t leave it there. She couldn’t tell Dad that she was leaving and then turned to him and said, “Well, thankyou for shopping at Tesco and have a nice day...”. That would be downright unfair! I didn’t deserve that. Not after loving her for all those years. Okay, some of all those years, with a bit of a gap in the middle. Still, though, I thought it only right that I got something of an explanation. Thankfully, she was up for giving us one. Earlier, I referred to this as her “moment”. I think she saw it as that to. She could very easily have told us that she was soon to be off and nothing else, she didn’t have to divulge anymore, no matter how much I was begging her to, but she did. It felt, at the time, as though she was talking to me almost directly and not Dad. Despite the fact that it was obviously him that she was having the conversation with. Up to now, I had stayed completely silent and that would be the way that it would remain, throughout. However, I still thought that it was more me than him, that she was addressing. Since then, I have changed my view on this. I was completely caught up in the moment, not really knowing where I was or what was going on. I, as I’m sure you can understand and appreciate, have thought a lot about this conversation and what she said in the time that has passed and it was almost as though whatever she was saying and whoever she was saying it to; it was almost as though she was angry. This is probably a little hard to believe and it’s hard for me to take in, I must admit. Kathryn and anger are two things that don’t sound as though they belong together, at all, and here I am saying exactly that. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Perhaps “anger” isn’t the right word, perhaps that’s not really what I mean. It could have been defiance or confidence or something else...Thinking about it now, I don’t really know what to call it. Whatever it was, it didn’t quite fit. I know, or, I like to think that I know Kathryn fairly well by now. I believe that the period of time that I worked with her was long enough for me to get a pretty decent gauge of what kind of person she was and not least, how she spoke. How she spoke, when I knew her, was very much the same as how she acted, her personality in general. Being a laid back, relatively emotionless, on an even keel sort of person; all of this was reflected in her speech and the tone of her voice. Most of the time it was effortless and, this may appear to be a rather negative kind of thing for me to say...But, sometimes it was effortless and lacking purpose or passion. That sort of, “Yes, I’m having a conversation with you but, it’s taking up quite a bit of my energy and I’d rather not converse, if I didn’t have to” kind of mindset. Think about Georgina. Think about the energy and the enthusiasm that came out of every word that she said. If it was physically possible for her to talk to someone all day without stopping once, if she was capable of doing it, then I think she would do it. I really do. She was drunk on words and intoxicated everyone else around her whenever she spoke. Kathryn, not so. Seldom did she show the animation that was so inherent within Georgina. Seldom, very seldom, but not quite never. Now was one of those times. She was leaving, this was what she was doing and these were the reasons why she was doing it. From nowhere, Kathryn had found a goal, something that she wanted to attain, something that she wanted to achieve. This, despite what I was feeling inside, was extremely interesting to hear. When I had heard her initial response to Dad’s question, I had automatically assumed that her reasoning behind her imminent departure were that she had found another job with either better pay or a better position or both. Not so, it would seem. I know I keep going on about it, this will be the third time now, I think, but that day when I saw Kathryn coming home from university on the bus, she looked thoroughly miserable. More miserable than I could ever imagine such a calm and collected human being to be. She looked awful. And for someone so naturally physically attractive, so naturally beautiful, that took some doing. Things must have been not at all well with her that day. Therefore, after some tough decision making, she had decided to jack the whole university thing in. Because that had been the reason for her bad mood, university. Not anything else. Not anything in her personal life or her work life. Not her boyfriend or anything of that sort. I had never forgotten this. Never forgot that look on her face and her overall negative demeanour. Mostly because it was so very, very un-Kathryn like. So, now, to be hearing that she was leaving her job, not because she had found a better one, but because she had chosen to go back to university, I was shocked to say the least. Not that I don’t believe her to be bright enough to succeed in that kind of environment, not at all. Kathryn has to be one of the most intelligent people that I have ever met, have ever known and I am convinced that having gone down that path, she will now make the most of it and come out of it, at the end, with the kind of result that she wants and that she knows she can achieve. No, the reason I was shocked was because having already given it one go and not liked it, it seemed more than a little strange that she was planning to go back to it. Her head clearly hadn’t been in it when she had tried it four or five years ago and I couldn’t see what had changed in that time that made her now believe that she was ready. I suppose what she might say in response to that is that in that time, that four, five years, she has developed a maturity that was not present when she was...nineteen, she would have been. Wouldn't she? Yes, nineteen. When she had been nineteen, her priorities may well have been on other things. Earning money, getting ridiculously drunk on a Friday or Saturday or both, spending time with her boyfriend. Those kinds of things. Now, though, this could be a more mature Kathryn that I was listening to. A fitter, happier, more productive Kathryn. One that understood that, with a little hard work over the three or four year period of a university education, she was now able to improve on what she had in life. To, in the long run, make things better for herself. That could well have been the kind of thing that she was thinking. She was ready now to try again. To do something that, for reasons known only to her and maybe one or two others, she had stopped doing first time around.
I was experiencing so many differing emotions currently, whilst also trying not to look bothered in the slightest by what I was hearing. Due to this, I can’t really say if what I am about to tell you is accurate or if I have since made it up. I think it is, though. What I want to describe is what I believe was a feeling of relief. She had told us that the reason that she was leaving was to go to university. She hadn’t said “again”, she hadn’t explained to Dad that this would be the second time around for her; so, I knew that and he didn’t. Anyway, that is what she had said to him. This, as I wrote above, contradicts what I had assumed would be her reasoning of finding another job. Now, please bear with me as I go off the trial slightly. If I did genuinely feel relief, then this has to have been from the fact that it was further education and not a new job that she was leaving for. Why? Well, in my Steven-centred mind, where everything revolves around me, the whole world and everything in it, Kathryn included, I was thinking that there was a possibility that she may well be doing what she was doing because of me. In “Two”, I went into detail about how at a particular point in time, I became sure that Kathryn knew how I felt about her, knew that I was in love with her. Let’s suppose for a second that this is true. She was under the impression, and rightly so, you have to say; she was under the impression that I liked her. Alright. There are one or two ways that she can deal with this. Firstly, she can ignore it. She can ignore me, as she had been doing for the last few years, ignore what she suspected I felt towards her and ignore the thought that she might also have which told her that I could do something stupid. She might well assume that unless I actually walk up to her while she is working and profess my undying love for her, then it doesn’t really matter, one way or another, how I feel. She obviously isn’t in love with me, doesn’t feel the same way towards me, so she isn’t exactly thankful, overly delighted with this discovery that she has made. She could do this. Or, she could take it differently. She might think, “Oh, my God! That weird bloke, who’s always in here and always looking at me, staring at me, is actually in love with me. I can’t do this. I can’t stay here and watch him, watching me, knowing what’s probably going on in that dirty, little mind of his. I have to get out of this place. As quickly as possible...”. What I’m saying is that the fact that she had explained that why she was leaving was down to her going to university, suggested to me that she wasn’t unhappy with the job that she was in. There wasn’t a problem with where she worked, what she was doing or the people that were around her. Her problem was that she wanted to improve her education, improve her prospects for the future and it wasn’t feasible for her to do this and keep her full time job at Tesco, too. She wasn’t even able to change her full time job to a part time one and do that and university at the same time. This would suggest, I think, that she must be going away to study. This, as we were about to find out, was exactly right. All this information. It was so unlike Kathryn. Anger, enthusiasm, purpose, call it what you want, it was intriguing to see. Not only did she tell us that she was leaving to go to university. She also went further and said that she was going to Liverpool to study, I don’t know whether it was Liverpool University itself or John Moore’s. Perhaps she wasn’t that enthusiastic. But, still, that was where she was going, geographically and, she went on to say, that what she would be reading would be sociology. Hmm. You know, I never considered what Kathryn might read if she went to university. Even when I saw her looking so sad on the bus and coming to the conclusion that it was what she was doing that was making her feel like that; even then, I never stopped to think exactly what it was that she might be studying. Kathryn being Catholic, you see, and me otherwise, naturally, we went to different schools. Different primary schools, different high schools, different colleges. I think I’ve mentioned this before but Kathryn went to school and was in or around the same kind of years as my cousin Rebecca and Sarah. Rebecca’s sister Ruth would have been some years in front of all of them and so probably wouldn’t have known Kathryn. But, I’m sure that both Rebecca and Sarah do. Anyway, not going to school with Kathryn and only coming to know her after this part of both of our lives, I would never have been able to tell you what she was good at at school and what she wasn’t good at. What subjects she excelled in and which she found more difficult. I had thought, noticing that she was very clever; when I did think about it, I had thought that she must have been good at everything. A useful “all-rounder”, I think they call them nowadays. So, if I had have been put on the spot by someone wanting to know what course Kathryn might take if she went to university, I wouldn’t have been able to say. Therefore, I couldn’t comment on whether I think that she is making the right decision doing what she has chosen to do. I don’t know. It’s as simple as that. Knowing Kathryn, though, there is more going on in that head of hers than meets the eye and more than I often give her credit for, so if I’m sure of anything, it’s that on choosing sociology, she has done so not in an instant, she hasn’t done the first thing that has come to her head. This can’t have been any sort of spontaneous decision, it has to have been planned quite rigorously. I really do believe that she has sat down, knowing that she wants to give university a second go and has thought long and hard about what she wants to do when she gets there, what subject is best suited to her and the answer that she has eventually come up with is sociology and she has then put into motion the process that would result in her doing that.
Dad might have noticed that something was wrong with me as we left Kathryn for the last time and walked out of the store and back to the car, in preparation for us going home. I didn’t say much, if anything, as we did this and I was so in my own thoughts at that moment, that anything that I might have said, wouldn’t have been of any significance. I can be forgiven for this, I think. I had just been witness to a conversation that I had never hoped to hear. Kathryn had just told me herself, in her own words, that in a couple of hours time, she would be clocking out of Tesco for the last time, hanging up her uniform or handing it back in, whatever the procedure for departing staff is now and that would be it. Off she would go, into the sunset and I would never know the sheer joy of simply seeing her. I would never know that again. Six years, she had been there. Six whole years. Once she had started, you felt that she couldn’t stop. This had been a release for her. It was as though she had been dying to tell someone. Waiting for one of the customers that she had served that day to do that godforsaken Peter Kay thing with her and then she could tell them, in full detail, what was happening to her. I get the feeling, from what we saw and heard, that none of the people that had been through her till before we had had asked her those two questions and that, she was hoping that at least one of them would. Because she knew, she had planned, what she was going to say. Her moment. Fortunately or unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure which, even now; it had been Dad who was the first to ask her and he had got Kathryn in full flow. Like this had been building up inside her as the day wore on and she was thinking, “I have to tell somebody or else I’ll burst!”. Very much like Georgina in that sense, I think, but not like her in another. If that had have been Georgina, she wouldn’t have waited for anyone to ask her, she would have just told them. And not only one. All of them. Every single person that went through her checkout that day would have got the same story. I’m smiling and laughing to myself as I write this because I don’t mean any harm by it, it’s simply how she is and also, I can see her so clearly in that situation. “Hi, this is me. It’s my last day and I’m leaving to go to university. Etc, etc.” Like it or not, whether you had asked her or not, she was going to tell you. Kathryn, in keeping with her nature, was more sensible. She had chosen to wait for the moment when she was asked, then she would go into it all. Yes, one of the things that she had told us, once she had been given the opportunity by Dad to get going; one of the things that she had said to us is that she had been working there for the last six years. “Wow...”, I thought, “That’s a long time”. And, it is. It’s a very long time. I didn’t realise it was that long. Though, on reflection, she was probably about right. With me starting work there some time after her and having never spoken to her about it, either, I never did find out how long she had been employed there before me. It wasn’t something that ever particularly concerned me or interested me, for that matter. I hadn’t thought about it that much. But, as she had told us, it had been six years. This is obviously discarding the six months that she spent on the other side of the world. This didn’t make me feel any better about it though. The fact still remained, she was now gone from my life, most likely for good and even though nothing would have ever come of it if she had stayed where she was, I was still unbearably sad at the prospect of a life without Kathryn as we drove away and made the short journey home.
She was one of a kind. Yes, there have been other women in my life and with a lot of them, I have felt the dizzying highs and the terrible lows that come with being so hopelessly in love with someone. And, I’m also confident that I will feel something similar for someone else at some point in the future. But, although these instances are and will be similar, they could never be the same. No-one else could feel like Kathryn. No-one else could make me feel the way that I did whenever I saw her. This is, literally, indescribable. It’s not possible for me to put into words exactly how she made me feel. It was something unique, something that simply didn’t happen when I saw or was with somebody else. Whoever that might be. This is why it was such a bad thing for me to hear that she was leaving and also why I have missed her so much. I miss her a lot. But, at the same time, I am pleased to know that she is now doing something that- One- Hopefully, she is enjoying doing and Two- Hopefully, will lead her on to bigger and better things. I wasn’t angry at her at the time and I’m still not now. I have no reason to be. She never did anything to me that could possibly make me feel that way about her. A couple of years ago, yes, maybe. I could see me having a different attitude to all of this then, but not now. I have, I am glad to say, learned from my mistakes. Not only did I not lose the plot when the thought entered my head that one day she might leave, but, as well as this, I didn’t lose it either when, finally, that day arrived. I’m not going to lie and say that it wouldn’t have been nice to have been able to see her for just a little bit longer. It would have been. Of course, it would. I would have liked it to have gone on forever, if that would have been possible. But, sadly, it wasn’t. However, I can now look at this situation, knowing and remembering very well how I have felt and reacted in such instances in the past and say that this time, I haven’t behaved nearly as childishly or immaturely as I used to. I took it for what it was. A decision that had nothing to do with me, whatsoever. I’ll bet I was a million miles away from Kathryn’s thoughts when she was weighing up her options and deciding what to do with her life. And, at the end of it all, that is what it comes down to. It’s her life, not mine. If I really, truly love her, as I say I do; then, yes, I’m allowed to miss her, as I have been doing, but I should be happy for her, be pleased for her and hope for her sake that what she has done will turn out to be the best option. Which, I have no doubt, over time, it will prove to be. Jolly good luck to the girl, that’s what I say. I mean it, too.
There is one final thing that I would like to say and that I should have probably pointed out earlier and that’s this. I was saying before that when I saw all those Tesco people standing in that one aisle, the Halloween aisle, I got a funny feeling that something was going on, perhaps a visit by an important person or a stocktake or something. And, also, the fact that Kathryn was on a till had something to do with whatever was going on. At one point, I was absolutely convinced that this was so. As it happened, I’m now sure that this wasn’t the case and that I was simply reading too much into a situation as is quite the norm with me, as I am certain you are well aware by now. To my way of thinking, the reason that Kathryn was where she was and not where I expected her to be had to be due to it being her last day and nothing more. I think one of two things happened for her to be in that position. An agreement has to have been made, I think, at some point. But, as to whose idea it was, I really don’t know. Either, Kathryn had requested that she was put there or someone has asked her or told her to do it. Whichever it was, as I say, I believe that this was because she would be leaving at the end of that day and had nothing whatsoever to do with what her fellow employees might or might not have been doing at the same time.

Four
Two months later and all of a sudden, somehow, it was mid-November. It was a Saturday and I was round at Mum and Dad's house doing my duty as any good son would. To be exact, I was helping out with the decorating that they were doing at the time. This was something that had been going on for a couple of weeks and over the past two weekends, I had been assisting Dad with the job of lining the walls in the dining room and lounge. Despite the fact that this might seem quite easy and straight-forward, trust me when I say that it wasn't. If nothing else, it was extremely time consuming and took a lot longer than I had anticipated that it would do. I figured that it
would be done in virtually no time at all. In reality, it was nothing like that. This was why, come the second weekend, we were still doing it. As opposed to say...painting or something. Which I thought we would have progressed comfortably to by this point. Anyway, by two-thirty, three o'clock on this particular day, finally, at last, it was done. And the painting was next. However, because we had to wait for the paste to dry, before we painted, this meant that we were forced to down tools and instead begin prepping for a fresh start the following morning. Midway through the tidying up process, I was asked by Dad to take a box of some description back to the Taylor's, across
the road. I hadn't the first idea what was in it. But, it was green, fairly heavy and it had "Bosch" written on the side, in big, red letters. I guessed from these clues that it was some kind of power tool. He asked me to return it, so I did. Big green box in hand, I rang the doorbell and waited for someone to answer it. Twenty or so seconds later, Trudi came to the door and let me in. She emerged from the kitchen and invited me into the hall, after telling me how good it was to see me. After what must have been a good few months since we had last spoken. Perhaps the last time we had conversed with one another was at my housewarming, all the way back in June. Once the opening pleasantries were out of the way, she asked me why I had come round. Clearly, she hadn't spotted the box that I was carrying. I explained to her what it was...Or rather, what I thought it was. She then took it off me and put it on the floor further down the hall. By the side of some other stuff that according to her, David needed to take outside to the garage. With the job done, I was about to walk back out of the door and make my way home, when she asked me what was going on at the house. I told her, briefly, because I wanted to get back and carry on with the tidying up. And although talking with Trudi is never anything less than a pleasure and a delight, and I would gladly do such a thing on almost every possible occasion, my mind was more focused on events back at the house and getting stuck in with that again and subsequently, finishing things off for the day. Trudi, however, appeared exceedingly interested in what I was saying and soon it became clear that it might, in fact, be some time before I left.
Being the courteous and all around nice person that I am(!), it was only right of me, having answered her question, to ask her how things were going with her and her family. It was obvious, almost as soon as I had entered the house, that before I had arrived, Trudi had been on her own. This was easy to spot. Not only from the quietness of the house, but also due to the fact that no one else had stuck their head around a door or come into the hall, to see who it was that had rang the doorbell and who Trudi was now talking to. With this being the case, Trudi found it necessary to explain to me the current movements of everyone else who lived there. She chose to start with James. And told me that he and his girlfriend, Gemma, were spending the afternoon at the Trafford Centre. Apparently, it was heaving. Not really surprising for a Saturday afternoon in November, with five weeks or so to go before Christmas, you might say. I don't know how she knew this and with my mindset as it was at that moment, I decided not to ask. Speculating now, the only explanation...logical explanation, that I can think of is that for one reason or another, James had rang her or she had rang him and it was then that he had informed her of this. This, in itself, is hardly remarkable and certainly not worth any kind of documentation. But, saying that, I liked the way that this conversation was now going and with every sentence, every word that passed between the two of us, I was warming to it and was also, sensing an opportunity. All of a sudden, my desire to get back to moving cupboards and lamps and things from one room to another and then back again was diminishing quickly.
What you must understand and what I am trying to explain to you is that the link between Kathryn and the Taylor family, in my brain, is quite a strong one. This is, of course, due to what I wrote in "Kathryn Meets The Chemical Brothers". Basically, it all comes down to Gemma. Repeating what I said in that earlier piece, Kathryn and Gemma are best friends, or at the very least, extremely good friends. Gemma is James's girlfriend, add to that, Trudi being James's mum and you can see that there aren't that many degrees of separation between Kathryn and the person that I was now talking to. This "link" is something that has been in my thoughts ever since that New Year's Eve a couple of years ago. And since that night, it hasn't gone away. This is why, whenever I am either in the company of the Taylor's, or know that I am soon to be in the company of the Taylor's, I think of Kathryn. Perhaps this might not seem all that logical to an outsider reading this. Then again, it may make perfect sense. I don't know. It's not something that I have ever really spoken to anyone about, so I can't be sure. Continuing with what I was saying earlier though, speaking to Trudi about decorating and Bosch power tools might not have been how I wanted to spend this, particular, Saturday afternoon, but this was now slowly, gradually, becoming interesting. With my ears pricking up at this talk of Gemma and James, I realised that if I was clever enough, on the ball enough, then I could shape the discussion in such a way that it landed on one of my favourite subjects. Kathryn McKenna.
We were getting closer, certainly we were, yes. However, there was still some work to do if we were to get there. I doubted highly that Trudi would all of a sudden jump from her son to a girl that, despite the connection that I outlined above, she mustn't know all that well. She had no reason to and it would take a certain amount of persuasion on my part, if it was to happen. And to be honest, I'm not interested in the slightest in either James or Gemma. I'm not in love with either of them. It's Kathryn that I care about. Faced with this, there was a little bit of thinking needed if that shift could be made. I also had to be patient, too. I had to bide my time. For the immediate future, I just had to let her get on with it and wait for the right moment to arrive. Which I was pretty confident would eventually. Trudi continued. The bit about the two of them being at the Trafford Centre was now over. And she had moved on to the topic of Gemma walking out of her job the previous afternoon. It should probably be said at this juncture that the feeling that I got from Trudi was that she, nor the rest of the family for that matter didn't like Gemma all that much, weren't really keen on her. Now, this is none of my business, of course, I know that. But, from what I know of her, which admittedly, isn't all that much; from what I know of her, working with her...or more accurately, in the same place as her, she always seemed alright to me. Then again, I haven't been witness to the same kind of frequency of seeing her and being in her company as they have, being James's immediate family. As I said, though, none of my business, any of that. Nothing to do with me. As, you might well argue, and you'd have something of a point if you chose to, I must say, neither is the Kathryn situation. Still, this is infinitely more interesting, I think. Okay, so Gemma had left her job 24 hours earlier. To the best of my knowledge, up to that Saturday afternoon, she was still working in the Irlam store, exactly where Kathryn had been, up until only a couple of months previously. This was wrong, however. If I'd actually thought about it, I would have been able to recall not seeing her in there for ages. As you are probably well aware now, though, my primary concern whenever entering Tesco in the five months or so between April and September of this year, was Kathryn McKenna. Gemma didn't even begin to come into my thoughts. But, if she wasn't where I believed her to be, if and when I did think about it, then where was she? The answer to that question came from Trudi, and without any prompting from me whatsoever. I was simply stood there, listening...and still waiting for that aforementioned opportunity. Explaining that Gemma had always been a "cocky, confident girl", the job that she had indeed jacked in was a graduate management scheme that was situated in Northwich...or Middlewich or some other "wich", somewhere. Nantwich, possibly. I'm not entirely sure. Fair enough. I suppose you have to say. She must have had her reasons. Either that or she's daft. I wish that I was "cocky" and "confident" enough to walk away from a £23,000 a year job. Put it that way. Having done this, having abandoned ship, according to the reliable source in front of me, at least, she now had to find another job. And from what Trudi was telling me, she...Gemma, that is, had an interview that very afternoon, at Birthday's, the card shop. Putting two and two together, because she didn't quite spell it out, this seemed to be the primary reason for Gemma and James being where they were. Not shopping, as I had naturally assumed. And understandably so, I think. Presumably, there is some kind of a Birthday's outlet there. I'm not sure. I haven't noticed. How remiss. All very interesting to everyone concerned, I'm sure, but it wasn't really getting me anywhere. With my darling Kathryn by now raging at the very forefront of my mind, I was quite pleased, finally, when it became evident that this particular section of the conversation was coming to an end. But, where would it go next? Thank the Lord that it went in the right direction. We were still travelling slowly along the James/Gemma highway, but it wouldn't be long before I saw the turnoff for Kathryn City Centre straight ahead...
It was firmly established now that that was where they were. We were both happy with that. What came next was the happenings of the happy couple during the previous night. I'm just going to digress for a short moment while I explain something to you. I mentioned at the beginning of this part of the essay that when I realised that I was about to get collared by Trudi, I wasn't overly chuffed at the thought. I also mentioned that this was much more down to a desire to go back home and get back to work, more than anything to do with Trudi, personally. Then, I went on to say that I began to forget about this as the topics of discussion started to evolve and I saw where things were going. At this point, unfortunately, when it became clear to me that it was still Gemma and James and not Kathryn, that initial feeling returned. We were on the way, no doubt about that. It was simply a question of how long it would take us to get there. I almost felt like stopping her in mid-flow and shouting, "Alright! Enough! I can't take another word of this Gemma/James nonsense. Either you talk about Kathryn right now or I'm walking straight out of that door...". Almost. I needed someone to whisper, "Patience Anakin" in my ear. For the time being, it was Friday night in the worlds of James and Gemma. “Woohoo! I can't wait for this” (!) The story went something like this. Last night, James had gone to town, to Manchester, with his mates. For a Chinese, I think it was, she said. If he was with "the lads" as it were, this must therefore mean that he was Gemma-less. Well, oh yes, he was. Because she, it was revealed to me, wait for it, went to Liverpool for the evening. To visit a friend.
It hadn't been a long day, as such, but putting wallpaper up isn't exactly the most stimulating activity in the world. Add this to the fact that I had gone to bed late-ish the night before and that the conversation that I was having, well, up to this point, that was; this wasn't doing much for the old grey cells either. Because of these things, I could be forgiven I think, for not getting there as quickly as I might have done in slightly more favourable circumstances. Tick, tick, tick. "Come on Steven...Here's that "opportunity" that you've been screaming for for the last five or ten minutes..." Gemma, Liverpool, friend, visiting. Tick...tick...tick. "Hold on a minute...Kathryn!". "Ah, at last. You've got there. Well done.". It was Kathryn that she was talking about. There was no doubt about that. None whatsoever. I knew that the second that things eventually fell into place in my mind. It may have taken me an excruciatingly long time to get there, but once I did, it was absolutely certain to me that there couldn't be anyone else that she was referring to. I didn't even need to ask her to clarify the situation any. Just in case. Okay, let's look into this a little. I'll hold my hands up. I hardly know anything about Gemma. I don't. Why should I? I've only spoken to her a handful of times and the last of these must have occurred years ago. And because I don't. I also don't know anything about any of her friends...Except one. Kathryn. Obviously. For all I know, Gemma could be the most popular person in the world and she may well have a million or more friends. Any one of these could quite easily be currently residing in Liverpool. I have nothing to prove the contrary. However, for some reason, I find this a little unlikely. Not knowing, it's hardly right either, that I make a character analysis. But, I will anyway. And from what I do know, I find it hard to come to this kind of conclusion. I mean, I'm sure that she's very nice. But come on, let's be realistic. If it wasn't Kathryn, then it would have to be something of a coincidence that not one but two of Gemma's friends were in Liverpool at the very same time. It's possible, of course it is. I'm not denying that. Perfectly possible. Just not very likely, I don't think. As far as I could see, it just had to be Kathryn. There was no other explanation.
So, I was sure that it was Kathryn. Still, though, I had to ask. There were two reasons for this. The first is down to my self-confidence. Yeah, I was sure. As I've said. For me, unfortunately, this is not enough. Speculating, if I had walked out at that very moment, saying, "Well, it's been grand, Trudi. Let's do it again sometime...". If I had said that, or words to that effect, and just left, right then, I would have been convinced that the "friend" that Trudi had referred to had been Kathryn and I would have been happy with that. Very happy. Later on, though, when I was back at home. Possibly, not doing very much. Just sitting there, watching television or listening to music. At this point, I know that my mind would be ticking over, reviewing what I had experienced during the day, the things that I had done, the conversations that I had had. And through this process, sooner or later, I would reach that discussion with Trudi and as I would think about it, remember it, I would replay it in my brain, as accurately and as detailed as was possible, it could suddenly strike me that maybe, just maybe, it might not be Kathryn. It might just be someone else. "What if?". That's what I would start pondering. Yes, the chances were that it was Kathryn, I would still be able to recognise that, understand that. But, that element of doubt, no matter how small, would begin to creep in. That absolute certainty that I had felt earlier would all of a sudden disappear. And gradually, over time, over quite a long period of time...By that, I mean weeks, months, whatever. Slowly, the certainty would change to a probably, then to a possibly and so on and so on until, in the end, it would become nothing more than an enormous question mark. What if? What if it wasn't Kathryn that Trudi was talking about?
That was the first reason that I decided to ask. The second was that, as I was saying earlier, this was my opportunity. I couldn't let it pass now. If I did, I didn't know when it would come round again. Or, if it would ever come round again. With me not living there anymore, I was seeing the family a lot less frequently than I used to. Plus, it would be a completely wasted journey. I may as well have just rang the bell, waited for her to open the door, handed over the green box, turned my heels and then legged it back to the house. Clearly, I would be something of an idiot if I did this and I knew that if I did, I would never forgive myself for letting this gift go. Being in love with someone that you once knew is a weird experience to have to go through and live with every day. I can tell you that, first hand. When you are there, in the thick of it, with them, communicating with them, interacting with them on a daily basis...Or in this particular case, almost a daily basis, as good as. When you are in that kind of situation, you almost take for granted the fact that you are getting a constant stream of information from them. And the reason that you practically take it for granted is because at the time, it doesn't really seem like anything. Not anything particularly relevant anyway. So, you take it in, listen to it and then almost instantly, forget what you have heard. This, of course, goes completely against the grain of you being totally in love with this individual, whoever it might be. I don't know. It might possibly be because you are so in love with them, that this occurs, rather than in spite of it. Being blinded or something...Sort of, "Yes, Kathryn. No, Kathryn. Three bags full, Kathryn". Nodding, smiling and just being wowed generally by her sheer presence. Thinking, "Oh, my God! I can't believe that someone so achingly beautiful is standing three feet away from me and what's more, she's actually talking to me. Unbelievable...". As a consequence of this, whichever way it might be, any information about Kathryn, apart from the really important things, IE- Australia, boyfriend, etc. Those things stuck, but the little stuff, the day to day stuff, that kind of information, I just forgot. However, when you leave that, when that isn't in your life anymore, when the girl herself isn't in your life anymore; strangely, it might be said, thought it's 100% true, that is the first thing that you miss. I remember that in the days that followed me leaving Tesco, I was curious, fascinated even, to know, what she was up to. What she had done the previous weekend, for instance. Or how university was going. I never got a chance to ask her that. And these were things that I was genuinely interested in. Of course I was, I was in love with the girl. After Kathryn herself, that was the second biggest thing that I missed. The problem was that I had no possible way of knowing, aside from constantly going up to her, whenever I happened to be in there, and asking her how things were. But, that would have been a touch weird, I think. Plus, as I discussed in "Avril Lavigne", there was that "understanding" that silently seemed to develop between us that ended up with both of us not acknowledging one another any longer, whenever we passed in the store. As though we were total strangers. As though we had never worked with each other, never had a discussion about anything. This was just the way things happened to turn out. Fair enough. I said it in "Avril Lavigne", I know, and I'm merely repeating myself now, but this was never really a big deal to me. For some absolutely, completely, mind-bogglingly unfathomable reason. Anyway, a consequence of this occurrence is that, as mentioned above, I stopped learning things about her. A very good example of this, is her dropping out of university. I was never certain of this being true or not until that final day and that unexpectedly and thoroughly shocking conversation that she had with Dad. It might even be said, and it's probably true in fact, that this was the first time that I had heard anything to do with Kathryn, from Kathryn herself, since I left. However many years ago. As you can hopefully see then, information on her has been at a premium in recent years. And this, now, stood in the neighbour’s hall, with Trudi, was another of those rare chances. This, as I mentioned above, might not happen again.
And so, taking a deep breath, I asked the question. Because it was, to an extent, I suppose, on the spur of the moment, I hadn’t exactly had time to plan what I was going to ask, down to the last word. I knew basically what I wanted to say in order to get an answer one way or another; but as to how it would come out, that was purely down to fate. Thinking about it now, with as much planning as I could get in the short time that was allowed to me in that situation, I wanted the feeling of what I was asking to be as relaxed as I could make it. The last thing that I wished to happen was for me to come across as some psychotic nutter who was desperate to find out any scrap of information that he could about the woman that he was obsessed with. Even if this was probably the truth of it, it was hardly the impression that I wanted to put across to the person stood in front of me who was not only once my next door neighbour, but also someone who, in a kind of indirect and obscure sort of way, could still get information to Kathryn. Imagine the conversation across the dinner table that night, if I had got things wrong and made a divvy of myself. Trudi- “Oh, you’ll never believe what happened today”, James- “What? What happened today?”, Trudi- “Well, I had Steven round this afternoon, bringing back one of your Dad’s tools and he asked me a question about Kathryn McKenna in a tone that strongly indicated that he was...Well, how can I put it? Madly in love with her...? Yes, that’s about right...”, James- “Oh, really. How interesting.” James tells Gemma. Gemma tells Kathryn. Game over. This, understandably, I think, was not how I wanted things to work out. If I could keep calm, keep my cool, try to sound relaxed and ultimately, as if this was no big deal to me at all; if I could do that, then I just might be able to get away with it. So, I thought. It must have been my lucky day because when I came to open my mouth, this was precisely how it happened. Trudi had told me that last night Gemma had gone to Liverpool to visit one of her friends and my exact words in response to this were...”Oh, you mean Kathryn?”. Brilliant. Perfect. If I had sat down for a week or more, with a pencil and paper and tried to plan what I was going to say until I was on the verge of passing out or going insane, I couldn’t have worked it out any better than that. It was...a natural response. That’s the best way that I can describe it to you. It sounded one hundred percent like a natural thing to say. Of course, it wasn’t. But, she didn’t know any better. However, despite the pride that I felt in my behaviour and what I had said, the way that I had phrased the question, at that moment, everything seemed to grind to a halt. It was as though we were both suspended in thin air or something as the fraction of a second between me asking the question and Trudi answering it passed by. It felt like an eternity, like something that would never end but eventually it did and I got an answer. And it was good. Oh, boy, was it good. When time decided that it was alright to continue, Trudi gave me a positive response to what I had asked. Hallelujah! This was it. Almost out of nowhere, you might say, we were on to the subject that I had been wanting to talk about since I had been let in and had walked through the door.
There was no way that I was letting this go now. The good thing was that there was clearly more to come. And what made it even better was that I wasn’t even required to open my mouth in order to get this information from her. It came for free. I had survived asking the question. I had been lucky. But, there was always the danger, I felt, that if I said anything else, I may then go into the infatuated loser/psycho killer mode that I was trying hard to avoid. I had been successful so far, yes. Still, I wasn’t out of the woods yet. At any moment, I could slip up and make myself look foolish or worse. But, with Trudi talking and me doing nothing more than listening and occasionally either nodding or smiling, or both, I was safe. Trudi could have easily have given a “Yes” or a “Yes, it was Kathryn that Gemma went to see”. That was the problem with the nature of the closed question that I had asked. For whatever reason, though, probably because it isn’t in her nature to be so guarded or untalkative, she didn’t. She gave me the most detailed answer that spat out all sorts of valuable information in a million different directions. It turned out that not only had Gemma gone to see Kathryn. When she had got there, to Kathryn’s digs or wherever it was, they had gone out, into Liverpool and had gone to a club to see a band play. “Wonderful” I thought, this was all gold. There was more than this, but in all of the excitement that was around me at this time, that was the only thing that I managed to pick up. Once she had finished, eventually, I realised that I had the option to stick or twist. What I said/asked next would determine if the conversation stayed on the subject of Kathryn or moved onto something completely different. I don’t know what it was, maybe it was all that hard work that I had done earlier in the day (!) or perhaps, it could have been the sheer giddy thrill that comes with being so much in love with someone as brilliant and as beautiful as Kathryn, the recklessness...Whatever it was, I made the bold decision and twisted. Twisted as though my life depended on it. I didn’t even care too much about what I said and how I said it, I was far too much in the moment, enjoying myself to such a degree that I didn’t care how I sounded anymore. That, or having passed the first test, I was now confident in my ability to ask a decent, seemingly unbiased and lackadaisical question, that I knew that everything would somehow be alright. Anyway, what I wanted to find out the answer to now wasn’t nearly as potentially dramatic as that first one. What I was intrigued about knowing now was how Kathryn was adjusting to her new life. There is no need for me to go over that incident on the bus for yet another time as it is already so extensively documented in not only this piece of work on Kathryn but also in “Avril Lavigne”, the first essay that I wrote on her. In case you have forgotten, which is highly unlikely, I know, but on the slim chance that you have, I will just remind you in passing that when I saw her that day, she looked very, very sad indeed. That was why it had seemed like such a strange thing for her to be doing when I had overheard her telling Dad on her last day at Tesco. It appeared to me, as an outsider, slightly strange that someone who had hated university the first time that she had tried it, four or five years ago now, it must have been; it simply sounded like a very odd thing for her to be saying. But, say it she did and back at university she most certainly was. Much to my sadness, from my very selfish point of view, at least. Fantastic for her, not so fantastic for me. So, how was she doing? Well, according to the mother of the boyfriend of one of Kathryn’s best friends, she was doing alright, she was enjoying it. I must admit that I was struck by how quickly and assuredly Trudi answered my second question. I had thought, at the very point when I was actually asking the question; I had thought to myself, “There’s no way on earth she’s going to know the answer to this...”. If I hadn’t have been so relaxed and confident now, I would have believed that she would think me mad for asking her that sort of a question. How would she possibly know that? But, I was on a roll now and I put it to her, none the less. Remarkably, she did know the answer. Who knows? Maybe she was just as interested in Kathryn as I was. Okay, maybe not. But, still...Kathryn loved it. That was the word that she used. She said, without the merest hint of hesitation in her voice that she loved what she was doing. Surprisingly, I was almost overcome with joy on hearing this. You see, I might not be quite as cynical and selfish as you...or, I, for that matter, might think. I thought it was fantastic, absolutely fantastic, that she was enjoying herself. Especially considering what had happened when she had tried to do the same thing at Salford and it had all gone desperately, sadly wrong for her.
The questions, for the time being, at least, were over. Now, it was my turn to talk. My turn to show Trudi that I knew some things about Kathryn McKenna as well. I mentioned openings before and how I was looking for one. This, now, as the conversation between us developed, was another. Now that she had told me that Kathryn was really enjoying herself, “loved” what she was doing and all the rest of it, it seemed to me like as good a time as any to reel out the old tale of seeing her coming home from university that autumn night. It might be boring and repetitive to both you and I now, hence my desire to not spell it out again above. However, for the purposes of my current audience and the way that this discussion seemed to be going, it now looked and felt like the perfect thing to say. I told her how pleased I was to hear that Kathryn was happy because...And then I went into it. Telling it to her in the finest detail that my memory would allow me to. What I wanted to get across if I could, what I wanted to emphasise to her as much as possible, was exactly what I have tried to emphasise in these essays about Kathryn, when I have discussed that particular subject, that particular evening. That is to say how thoroughly, completely, unbelievably unimpressed with life and all of its various aspects the poor girl appeared to look when I saw her, as I got on the same bus as her. Immediately, I noticed that Trudi was nodding ferociously in agreement with what I was saying. Not as though she had heard this one, rather specific, I thought, story before, but more that she understood, was aware of Kathryn’s overall mindset at around that time. This was confirmed with what she said once I had finished, a short time later. She had used the extreme word “loves” when describing how Kathryn felt at the present time and in her present situation. Now she would choose the opposite and equally extreme word “hated” to indicate what Kathryn had felt like while she was at Salford. According to her, she had hated Salford University, hence the reason why she had walked out and had gone back to working full time at Tesco. This was a subtle but nevertheless, extremely important moment. An important thing for her to say and an important thing for me to hear. I had never known for sure that Kathryn had actually dropped out. Yes, alright, I had suspected and I was 99.9% sure that this was how it had eventually turned out, but I had never known it for certain. This, you may think, isn’t all that relevant at all, all she was doing was confirming something that I pretty much knew anyway. After all, that was the conclusion that I had reached on my own, without any other knowledge or information than that what I saw with my own eyes. Fair enough, I can see that, but at the time, it did mean a lot...and still does, I think. No time to stop and think, though, about whether this was significant or not, Trudi was off again and it was taking everything I had just to keep up with her. If only I could stop her in mid-flow, ask her if it would be okay if I went home to get a pen and a pad so that I could then come back and take notes, while she chatted on at will about Kathryn.
It was much more an open, to-and-fro sort of exchange now, rather than me asking a short question and she going into a long and very detailed answer. When it came back to my turn to talk, I thought that it would be right if I mentioned that Dad and I had seen Kathryn on her last day at Tesco, gone to her till and had spoken to her. I briefly explained that this was how I had come to discover what Kathryn was up to and what her plans for the future, just on the off chance that she was wondering about such a thing. Trudi, that is. I told her that she had mentioned to me what subject she was going to university to read, but that I couldn’t remember. This was true. I said that I knew that it was either psychology or sociology, one of those two. However, it escaped me as to which of these it was. Trudi responded by saying that as far as she knew, because she was stuck between the two of them herself; but, as far as she knew, it was sociology. This was more than good enough for me. If sociology was what she said it was, then that was what it must be. Case closed. Then, something quite unusual happened. I lost control of what I was thinking and therefore, what I was saying also. I hadn’t been thinking about this particular part of Kathryn’s life, at all, during the conversation so far and I can’t say why it entered my head at this juncture, but it did and all of a sudden, the question came out of my mouth and I was powerless to stop it. I asked Trudi what was happening with Kathryn and her boyfriend. This was bizarre. I say that I hadn’t been thinking about this part of Kathryn’s life during the conversation...It was more than that. I hadn’t thought about this part of Kathryn’s life since I had last seen her, since that final day. Why on earth should that sort of a question come to me now? I was on a roll, as I have said, I was daring, I was care free but this didn’t matter to me anymore. With Kathryn out of my life, as far as I could tell, for good, now, I had no reason to think, worry about what was going on between Kathryn and her boyfriend. But, it had been asked and it was too late now. I couldn’t take it back, I couldn’t un-ask it. I had no choice but to deal with the consequences of my actions. Besides, what I was about to hear was fascinating, to say the very least.
I may have been on a roll but this was nothing compared to the streak that the fountain of knowledge that I was stood opposite was experiencing. Looking back now, I should have asked her who she thought would be first in the race for the Premiership, the Grand National and the Boat Race, doubtless she would have give me the three winners and I could then make a killing at the bookies. Oh, and the lottery too, I guess. Seriously, though, she was on fire. Ask her anything and she’d give you the correct answer, as quick as that. In spite of the strangeness of what I had just asked, Trudi didn’t bat an eyelid. She continued, unperturbed. As though what I had asked had been as normal a question as all of the others that I had asked previously. To me, it wasn’t, but to her, obviously, it was. Realising that I had rather gotten away with one, I sighed with relief and turned my attention away from cacking myself and back onto the matter in hand. Listening to what she had to say. Her answer was remarkable and in a way, not at all what I wanted to hear. You’d think that on becoming aware that Kathryn had split up with her boyfriend, I would be ecstatic. That would be the expected reaction, I think. Being in love with her, as I was, this would be exactly what I would want to hear. Erm, wrong. Such a multitude of different and conflicting emotions were going through my head at this time. I was flicking from one feeling to the next and then to another and then back to where I had been to begin with, every five seconds and as a result, it was hard to know quite where I was at any given time. However, when Trudi said this to me, I knew exactly how I felt. There was no mistaking heartbreak. That clarified things as sharply and as quickly as anything. When I had asked what I asked, I was thinking along the lines of what was happening with them in terms of her being at university in Liverpool and him being, I presumed, still here in Salford, in Irlam or Cadishead. Never for a second was I trying to discover if they were still together or not. That wasn’t the object of the exercise, as it were. Anyway, having registered the question in her brain, Trudi answered by saying that Kathryn and Mike – that was his name after all – had split up. What? When? When did this happen? I was stunned. And probably looked like I was, too. Before I go on, I think that it’s important that I take a second or two to explain why this upset me. I guess that you are thinking along the same lines as I expected to be thinking, should I ever hear such a thing. Well, I wasn’t and here’s why. Despite it seeming as though dear Kathryn was in her own world, most of the time, I’d wager that she wasn’t. Either this was nothing more than an impression that she wanted to project for whatever reason or, more likely, she looked like this, acted like this, but was totally unaware that this was how she came across. Now, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing. It isn’t. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. For God’s sake, aside from her being completely gorgeous also, this was the main reason that I loved her as much as I did. What she did, what she was able to do was...It’s hard to describe, actually, just how good it was. It was brilliant. Anyway, despite her looking like this, I don’t think she was. I think that she was perfectly in tune with her surroundings, I think that she was absolutely on the ball and knew what was going on equally as much as anybody else, if not more so probably. Therefore, as I said in “Two”, particularly after that Saturday evening in August, I am now certain that she knew how I felt about her. She may not have been able to say just how much I was in love with her, I don’t think the magnitude of my feelings for her was ever something that she was able to get her head around, or was even that concerned about, frankly. But, having seen that knowing smile that she gave to her colleague once she had seen me, that told me that she knew at that point, that I was attracted to her. So, she knew. What she also knew was that it was me, the person that she used to work with. This was why I was more than a little upset when Trudi told me that Kathryn had split up with her boyfriend. She and Mike are no longer together and she knows that I like her, alright, she can do one of two things, depending on how she feels about me. If she feels the same way, if she is attracted to me, as I am to her, then she can come up to me whenever she sees me in the store and ask me if I wanted to go for a drink with her or something. Or, if she isn’t attracted to me, she can do nothing. Which is exactly what she did. That was why I was upset and that was why I felt as though my heart was broken. While she had been with Mike, it didn’t matter how I felt about her or how she felt about me. As long as they were together, she and I would never be a couple. I knew that and to an extent, I was happy with it. Not delighted, not by any means, but happy enough, all the same. Now, to hear that, I knew that that wasn’t quite how it was, that things had changed and that Kathryn and her boyfriend had, at a particular point in time, split up. To hear this and know that she hadn’t felt compelled to come up to me and ask me how about it, that was difficult to take.
It was about to get better...or worse. Depending on how you choose to look at it. So, at an unknown, point in time, the deed had been done and Kathryn was suddenly single again. For the first time in...Oh, God knows how long. Years, I’m guessing. Must be. She then handed in her notice at Tesco having decided that the time was right for her to make a second attempt at the whole university lark. How hard could it be, right? Fine. Packing up her stuff, she headed off for Liverpool in late September and started the first year of her sociology degree. Fine. But, what Trudi now went on to say was that her new boyfriend just so happened to be in the band that Kathryn and Gemma had gone to see the night before. Oh, no. Surely I was going to pass out in a minute. Not only had I been overlooked, which had been bad enough, now I was being told that Kathryn was with someone else and that this mysterious individual that she was now with, was in a band. Not that this last little nugget of truth matter one iota to me. I couldn’t care less what he did. He could have been in the space programme or the Prime Minister or a Premiership footballer or a homeless person living on the street for all that it mattered. The fact remained. She had broken up with this Mike character and was with someone else and that someone wasn’t me. I felt like crying. I really did. This was unreal. I had been pretty much in heaven five minutes ago and now, thanks in no small part to my big, overconfident mouth, I had since descended into some kind of surrealistic, Kathryn related nightmare. I wanted out. Right then. I’d had enough and I couldn’t deal with it anymore. This, from the very beginning, had been something of a delicate line that I had been treading. Trying, as I had been doing, to shape the conversation between Trudi and I in the direction that I wanted it to go in was great, a wonderful idea. But, only if what we were talking about went down well with my fragile and unstable mind. Alright, seldom had I felt upset or angry about Kathryn, almost never, as it happened. I wasn’t even that bothered about her leaving, once I had gotten over the shock that had come to me initially. Afterwards, I had been fairly calm and philosophical about the whole thing. This didn’t mean, however, that any more information that I may learn about her in the future would go down the same way as this had. Don’t forget, this was someone that I was hopelessly in love with. This, for better or worse, is an emotional thing that any individual in a similar position or situation has to deal with, not just me. To hear this, to be told that she and Mike had broken up and that since then, she had met and was going out with someone else...That was terrible.
Fortunately, or else Trudi would have twigged what was going on and why I was asking all these questions about Kathryn for definite; fortunately, I was wearing my pokerface. While on the inside, I was experiencing something very close to utter turmoil, from what she could see, I was perfectly fine. I was still doing my nodding dog routine and the old, “Oh, yes...Hmm...Oh, that’s interesting” kind of stuff and she was absolutely none the wiser, I don’t think, to exactly how awful and sick I was feeling. I literally was feeling sick. It was as though someone had kicked me in the stomach and the physical impact of the blow had left me winded and queasy. However, there was no time to stop and take a second or two out while I recovered and started to feel sorry for myself. Oh, no. Trudi was once again in unstoppable talking form and my memory had to be switched back on so that I could take in all of the stuff that she was coming out with. According to her, whenever it had ended between Kathryn and Mike and for whatever reason, it had ended very badly. I wouldn’t be surprised, frankly. Not that I know a single thing about being in a relationship, of course, I’m not going to start pretending that I do, I don’t and that’s that. However, what I do know is that if you’ve been with someone for that length of time, five, six, seven years, whatever it was; after that length of time, she must have been seriously in love with the guy and I doubt that she would have been able to brush off such a thing as a break up after that long. Even Kathryn, the world’s most unflappable person wouldn’t have the ability to keep herself calm and composed during and immediately after something like that. I don’t know why, but I got the feeling, probably mostly from the way that Trudi was talking; I got the feeling that it happened quite a while ago. I couldn’t say when, exactly, because I didn’t know...But, my point is this. My next question to Trudi was, “Well, didn’t she go to Glastonbury with him?”. Meaning that I was under the impression that from the way that she was talking, this break up had happened before the middle of June. Anyway, cue the strangest answer of them all. “Ah, yes” she said, triumphantly, “...but separately”. Excuse me? Say that again for me please. See, I misheard you, I thought that you just said that they went separately. The funny thing was that this was precisely what she’d said. I hadn’t misheard at all. They had gone separately. Me being silly old me...ignorant, silly old me, I should say; me being ignorant, silly old me, because I didn’t know, until about two minutes earlier, that Kathryn and Mike were no longer together; I had always assumed that they had gone together. Firstly, when I was told by...whoever it was that told me, I really can’t remember, infuriatingly...when I was told by whoever, that James and Gemma had gone to Glastonbury and I had then put two and two together and come to the correct conclusion that Kathryn had also gone; I also came to the incorrect conclusion that Mike had gone and it had been a happy little foursome. Then, twenty-four hours later, when I had it confirmed to me, by Richard, that Kathryn was where she was, I again assumed that Mike was with them. Not so, it would appear. So, what happened? How did it work? Obviously I’m being thick here, there’s something blindingly obvious that’s staring me in the face that I can’t see, isn’t there? You’re going to have to help me out here, I think. I mean, the image that I have in my mind, is one of Kathryn sharing a tent with Gemma and James, on top of a hill and then pitched about six feet away from them, is another tent, a smaller tent, with Mike in it, on his own. I also imagine a conversation that goes something like this. Mike – getting out of his tent, early one morning, and seeing Kathryn doing the same – “I was just going to the Pyramid Stage to see Arctic Monkeys. You coming?”, Kathryn- “Well, I was going to see B*Witched...”, Mike- “Alright then. Suit yourself”, Kathryn- “I will do, thanks”. This probably wasn’t quite the way that it happened, in reality, but I really can’t see how else it could have worked. I’m basing this, as you have probably already worked out, on the premise that the four of them would have applied for and got their tickets months and months in advance, while Kathryn and Mike were still together and then, once they had broken up, having both spent a ridiculous amount of their hard earned cash on them, neither of them was willing to give it up or sell it on, they were going to go and too bad if the other was there. Correct me if I’m wrong with this, but when you buy tickets for Glastonbury, what you’re buying, in essence, is a patch of land, a square or rectangle of a certain field within the confines of the Glastonbury site, the Glastonbury area and so, when you get there, you give it to the person at the gate and they say that you’re in field 1A or whatever. That’s how I think it works. I could well be wrong and I hold my hands up if this turns out to be the case. It could be that you buy a ticket and you’re allowed to stay wherever you want. If so, there isn’t an issue, is there? Kathryn could stay with Gemma and James and Mike could share a tent with his mates, if they were going as well. Say, for the sake of argument, that they were. That way they would be apart and free to enjoy the festival and the music and everything that came with these things, away from the burden of one another. Lovely...I don’t know, though. It’s all very odd, I think.
Trying to get my head around the logistics of this had, for the time being at least, taken my thought process off what it had been on before this new and very confusing revelation. Which was pleasing. I would take the time out to deal with that later. My squinting and scratching of forehead, though, was interrupted by what Trudi had to say next. This afternoon was turning into one that was full of surprises. As I believe I said earlier, I never knew Mike. Thankfully. I never met him, didn’t...still don’t know, what he looks like, what colour hair he’s got, whether he’s fat, thin, tall short, don’t know how old he is, don’t know anything about him. However, it turned out that apparently, I should. Because...Are you ready for this...he works at Tesco. And, apparently, he also worked there when I worked there. This was news to me. I never had any idea of this. But, according to Trudi, it was true. She was, for her part, shocked that I didn’t know him. But, I didn’t. Kathryn never had the decency to introduce us. That would have been fun, I think. Kathryn- “Steven, this is Mike, my boyfriend. Mike, this is Steven, you know, the loser that I was telling you about. The one that’s pathetically in love with me...”. Oh, yeah. I would have really enjoyed that(!). “Hi. How are you doing? Nice to meet you...”. Yeah. No, thanks. I’ll pass, if that’s okay with you. Once Trudi had finished explaining the circumstances of this arrangement to me, I told her that once I left, I fell out of the loop. This is exactly what I was talking about earlier. I stopped knowing things about Kathryn. Whether I was in love with her or not, it didn’t matter either way. Even if I had, somehow, known that Mike worked in the same building as both Kathryn and myself, once I was no longer in that building, I had no possible way of knowing what was happening to Kathryn or anyone that she was involved with. Unless something physically changed with her, example- the changing of the colour of her hair, unless it was something like that, something tangible, something that I could see; it was impossible. Just impossible. You understand that I didn’t quite go into this depth with Trudi, I explained to her, simply, that I had fallen out of the loop. Which she nodded at, indicating that she knew what I was talking about. She then said that Kathryn was a nice girl, which I couldn’t help but agree with.
Once this particular topic had been covered off, by the two of us; finally, the discussion on Kathryn, which had been going on for God only knows how long now, came to an end. I was relieved. Fair enough, I had wanted so desperately to talk about Kathryn when I had got there and it was my own fault that we had done this and done it to the extent that we had. I could have easily have stopped it at any time. But, I hadn’t. And I had suffered the consequences of my adventure. We had got onto parts of Kathryn’s life, things about her, that I had no right knowing. What business was it of mine to know who she was or wasn’t romantically entangled with at the present moment? I hadn’t spoken to her in years, not even let on to her, I didn’t deserve to know so much about her life. In truth, then, I got what was coming to me. I was asking for trouble, I was asking for heartbreak and that’s exactly what I got. I shouldn’t have gone as far as I did. I know that now and I appreciate it. I was glad, then, when Trudi skilfully drew the chat back towards James and Gemma. She asked me about my house and how things were going with it, if I was enjoying living on my own and that kind of thing. Mundane, definitely, but not nearly as exciting as the life and loves of Kathryn McKenna, but also, safer and much less painful. I replied positively, saying that it was good and that I loved it. I loved the freedom, being able to do things when I wanted, being able to eat when I wanted, go to bed when I wanted, to watch what I wanted and all the rest of it. It was brilliant, I said. This was all true. It is brilliant and I do love living on my own. Thinking about this, it suddenly occurred to me that James still lived with his parents. Being only a year younger than me, not even that, I don’t think, surely it was about time that he considered moving out. Especially seeing as how he had been with Gemma for quite a while now, it must be coming up to four years or something like that. So, I asked her. In response, she told me that the two of them had been looking to do that a couple of months earlier, they had been seriously considering doing it and had gone as far as getting an offer of a mortgage on a property. The problem was that the bank/building society that had given them the offer had been Northern Rock and days...It was literally days, I think, before they were to sign on the dotted line, of course, the company folded. Not great news for them, I shouldn’t think, while they wait on a mortgage. Luckily, I suppose, they got out before everything happened. I guess that it would have been a lot worse if they had signed their lives away and then it had gone under. I wouldn’t envy anyone in that situation. Certainly not. After this debacle, quite understandably, they lost confidence in the housing market as a whole and other lenders and subsequently, shelved the idea. They were, though, looking to rent instead. You can’t blame them, I suppose.
Now seemed like a pretty good time to attempt to make my getaway. The talk of Kathryn was over and we were back onto the wonderful subject of James and Gemma. I didn’t know if I had the strength to keep myself standing, while my body fought the urge to fall asleep. How embarrassing that would have been to suddenly fall to the floor and start snoring, in front of an ex-neighbour. I would have to do something to avoid that happening. So, I made a polite, and not altogether untrue, excuse of having to get back to carry on helping Dad with whatever he was doing now. Surely there was still some carpet that needed rolling up or a set of cupboards that required taking out to the garage for safe keeping while Dad continued his decorative rampage through the house. Something must need doing somewhere, I thought. After a final, brief chat about something and nothing, plans for Christmas, probably, Trudi led me to the door and I left, waving goodbye to her as I walked out of the drive and back in the direction of Mum and Dad’s house, licking my emotional wounds as I went. I guess the moral of this story is beware of wishing for your heart’s true desire, lest you end by getting it. Having said that, I was still pleased that it had happened. Alright, I had heard some bad things, some not very nice things; but, I had also learnt a lot too. I now knew that Kathryn was enjoying herself which was pleasing and I knew as well, after many years of wondering, not only was Kathryn’s boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend, called Mike, but on top of this, that she had dropped out of Salford University, as I had always suspected. From this aspect, from the aspect of it giving me the opportunity to talk to someone who knows Kathryn reasonably well and to get one or two bits of information from her, it was pleasing and I’m glad, now, that it happened. Even if it hadn’t been so pleasing to hear at the time. One thing that I have considered since that day, something that didn’t come to me at the time, not surprisingly, I think, due to how much I was forced to take in...One thing that I have considered since that day is a possible reasoning behind Kathryn’s decision. I think that it is a very real possibility that her choice was made, in part, at least, by the fact that things ended with Mike. With him out of the picture, from whatever point in time, she was free to do what she did. In a way, and I don’t mean for this to sound negative or anything like that, but, in a way, I think that he was holding her back from perhaps doing what she wanted to do. This, like many of the things that I have suggested in this piece of writing so far, may well be completely wrong and if that is so, then I apologise for my inaccuracy. Still, I think that it’s something to think about, maybe. One final thing that I wish to add to this before I move on is just a quick word or two on what I wrote in “Avril Lavigne”. It might seem almost prophetic now, looking back at the last few lines of that piece of work. I assure you that when I wrote that, back at the end of last June, I had no idea that such a thing would happen. At the time of writing that, I didn’t know anything about Kathryn and her boyfriend. Really, the only true thing that I said in that part of the essay was that if it was to happen, he would be an idiot and I maintain that perspective to this day. I think he is an idiot. Again, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about what went on and therefore, I’m only going on what I suppose happened. But, if it was him that ended it and not her, then he genuinely needs his head looking at. Once more...What an idiot.

Five
There was no plan for a part five, originally. As, it might be said, there wasn't one for a part four, either. However, as with the above, things have now advanced somewhat and it’s necessary, if this is to be a complete and accurate account of what has happened and what I know; it is necessary that this is documented, also. It was now mid to late December and Kathryn was long gone from my life. On that day in September, when I heard the terrible news, directly from the horse's mouth, I strongly suspected that I would never see her again. Yes, this is a deeply pessimistic view to take, I understand that and I accept it, but it is, at the same time, a realistic one as well. The girl of my dreams was telling me herself that at the end of that very day, she would be leaving her job, where she had been for the past six years and instead, starting a new life, away from home, at university. Alright, Liverpool isn't a million miles away, hardly the other end of the universe, but it was still far enough for me not to get my hopes too high on the off chance that I might bump into her anytime soon. This was unfortunate and I was quite put out about it for a while, as you are no doubt aware, having already read what I had to say earlier. But, then, over time, over the weeks and months that passed between then and the week before Christmas, I accepted it. There was nothing else that I could do. I didn't really have a choice. While this was going on and I was most of the way through this realisation, if you can call it that, the conversation with Trudi took place and I learned the things that I learned. This, pretty much, sealed it. If I didn't know it already, that hammered it home that I should probably just give up at that moment and move on to something else, somebody else. This, though, as it turned out, might have been a mindset that I reached just a shade too hastily.
It was eight days before Christmas. Monday, 17 December. And at about a quarter past six, I found myself walking into Tesco. Surprise! Surprise! One thing that I had learnt since Kathryn's departure in the autumn was that the whole Tesco experience for me had all of a sudden become much less fun than it had been previously. This had been expected, of course and as a result, didn't come as too much of a shock to me when it turned out to be a pretty accurate prediction. Spot on, in fact. There were still some perks, however, that made the experience more pleasing than it might have been otherwise. I am talking, chiefly, about Linzi. There was a gap that had to be filled about Kathryn’s untimely departure and Linzi, it turned out was the one that was there to fill it. Now, please don’t misunderstand me. Linzi is no Kathryn. But then, no-one is Kathryn. No one alive could make me feel the way that I did on the occasions that I saw her. She was, in that sense, completely unique. And, as a consequence, Linzi, or whoever it would have turned out to be if it wouldn’t have been her, could never fill my mind as much or as frequently as Kathryn did. I don’t think I was ever obsessed obsessed about Kathryn, not in the way that I was with say Toni, for example. Kathryn wasn’t an individual that I thought about every minute of the day. Nevertheless, she did occupy a large part of my thinking and when she told me...or rather, when I heard her tell Dad, that that day was to be her last, in the days that immediately followed that, there was a sense, within me, that I had lost something. Whatever you might like to call it. This, as I’ve said, is something that can not be replaced, at least not entirely, and if someone did come along, then she wouldn’t be quite as good as Kathryn, no matter how good she might be. Still with me? Good. So, back to Linzi. She was someone that I had noticed while Kathryn was still working at Tesco. And, in fact, it was probably Kathryn herself, indirectly perhaps, that got me thinking about Linzi in the first place. The way that it worked was this. As I outlined in “Avril Lavigne”, towards the end of her time at Tesco, maybe for the last year of it, how long exactly it was, I’m not sure...Towards the end of her time at Tesco, Kathryn moved from where she had been working previously, be it the Provisions department, where she had been with me or the tills; she moved from there and went to work as a Checkout Control Person...I’m not sure of the exact job title, so I will use this instead. This meant that she patrolled the checkouts, looking to see if any of the workers on the tills had their light flashing, indicating that they required some kind of assistance. Seeing this light, she would then duly go and assist, to the very best of her ability. She also, as I noted, wore one of those humorous headsets that made her look like an air traffic controller or something, as well as outstandingly gorgeous at the same time. Anyway, one day, when I was in, doing my usual “Is Kathryn on today or off today?” routine, I saw her, Kathryn, and also saw, for the first time, this other girl, stood next to her. Rare it was, rare it is, that two of these checkout control people are stood behind their desk at the same time. Normally, either or both of them are out, walking up and down, in front of the row of tills, looking for that all important flashing light. In this instance, however, for whatever reason, both Kathryn and this mysterious other were, as I said, not pacing around, but waiting for something to happen behind that desk. They were also, understandably I suppose, talking to one another. Kathryn was my sole source of attention, to begin with, obviously. But, as I got closer to her, closer to the two of them, it became clear that this girl that Kathryn was having a conversation with wasn’t entirely unattractive in her own right. In fact, more than that, she was bloody good looking. Short, tiny even, no bigger than your thumb, but good looking all the same. Definitely. Her height, or lack of therein, was only magnified by the fact that the person that she was stood next to was so tall. If I’ve not already said it in any of my works about her, then Kathryn has to be 5’8”/5’9” easily. She is very, very tall and poor Linzi looked miniscule stood next to her. I’ve no idea when this was. Certainly it could have been no longer ago than late spring/early summer, simply for the fact that it wasn’t until April that I started to fall in love with Kathryn again. Sadly, I can’t say either when I first found out her name, but I must have passed her one day and my eyes wondered on to her name badge and it was then that I discovered that she was called Linzi. At whichever point in time it happened to be, when I witnessed Little and Large together, I saw her and she has been in my mind off and on ever since. When Kathryn left in September, because Rachel no longer seemed to be around either, she seemed to me to be the natural choice. Again, let me reiterate that this was not a crush or another instance of me falling in love in the blink of an eye or anything like that. I don’t feel that way about her and I never will. She is, simply, as I said above, someone that when I walk into Tesco now, with no Kathryn, or Rachel even, there anymore to keep me quiet; she is someone that I look out for and when she is there, the experience is enhanced. Not as much as it was with Kathryn, but enhanced to a certain extent, it is.
Anyway, coming back from that tangent that I appeared to go on rather arbitrarily there, despite Linzi being there now, walking into Tesco was no longer quite the same as it had been with Kathryn there. Just a fact of life, I suppose. Not much I could do about that. But, there I was, with a week or so left before Christmas, I was walking in to get one or two more things, a couple of last minute presents for people before we were due to go away on the Thursday. Now, one thing you should know, I think, at this point is that our Tesco is quite unusual. Despite the fact that it is absolutely enormous, a massive building, it is called a Tesco “Extra”. What I think this means, though I never did find out for sure, despite me working in the place for over a year; I think this means that instead of the usual design of store that you see with the roof like a house and the small doors at the front, ours has a glass front that goes all the way from one end of the store to another. Across this, in enormous white letters is the company slogan “Every little helps...”. This is fine, it’s alright and at nights, with the lights shining down on it, it looks very beautiful. What it also does, though, is when your walking past it, along it, coming from your car to the big opening at the front, if you are so inclined, it does allow you to look in. And, as luck would have it, as far as I’m concerned, the bit that you can see, the bit that you can look in at is the checkout area. When Kathryn worked there, this is exactly what I used to do. Having parked and begun to make my way into the store, I would have a quick look to my left, through the glass facade, to see if my darling Kathryn was working or not. Sometimes I saw her and sometimes I didn’t, even if she was working. It wasn’t always a hundred percent accurate. Saying that, though, it was still good fun. It was also something that I stuck to once Kathryn had left. Force of habit, you might call it. Now I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular, Linzi perhaps, but not with the same intensity that I was with Kathryn. On this particular evening, the Monday in December, I performed this usual act and to my amazement I saw...or thought I saw, someone that looked suspiciously like Rachel. With the view that I had of her, that is to say, me only able to see her left hand side and from quite far away; with this kind of view, I couldn’t be certain at all that it was her, but if I was to be shot, I would say that it was more likely to be her than not. If it was, if when I eventually got in there and got a better look, and it turned out that it was indeed her, then that, I figured, would be excellent. I hadn’t seen her since September, I think it was. I was halfway through writing what I wrote about her and she went and disappeared. Marvellous(!). What this did, however, was further fuel my theory that she was, at that point in time, in some sort of full time education, be it college, university or whatever it was. Working at the local supermarket for the duration of the summer, while she wasn’t studying for exams and didn’t have much else to do and then going back when the year started again in mid to late September, seemed like a quite logical strategy to adopt. Now, in December, if the girl that I had seen the side of was Rachel, then this would all but confirm it. Education finishing for the Christmas break and while she was out of action, as it were, she may as well earn a few quid, as she had done a couple of months or so previously.
Going through the security barriers with my trolley or basket, I was curious and excited now, to discover if my inkling had either been correct or complete nonsense. Because this person, Rachel or otherwise, was situated by one of the checkouts closest to the door, it wasn’t long before I found out. Funnily enough, I was right. It was her. First time for everything, I guess. She was, naturally, as beautiful as ever. This pleased me quite a lot, actually. I think it’s pretty much the same thing as it is with Linzi. It’s quite hard to explain without sounding strange or slightly unhinged. Attempting to justify this for you, I have to go back to what I was saying earlier in that it simply makes the whole concept of going shopping just that little bit better. I’m not in love with either. Not nearly as much as I was with Kathryn, not even slightly. But, if they make me feel good whenever I see them, then is this necessarily a bad thing? I wouldn’t say so. So, Rachel was there. Unfortunately, Linzi wasn’t. No matter, really. One out of the two wasn’t bad and considering that I wasn’t in the slightest bit expecting to see her, it was a very nice surprise. Right, with that little question answered, I carried on and started what I went there to do, some shopping. Even though it was early evening, with only eight days left to the big day, the place was expectedly heaving. It was so busy. I had had the misfortune to be in the same place two days earlier, on the Saturday morning and it was just biblically busy. That was at eleven on a Saturday morning, with not that long left to go before Christmas, so fair enough, I thought. Now, although not quite as jam packed as it was then, it was still probably ten times busier than it would be at the same time on a normal Monday night. What are you going to do? It doesn’t bother me, necessarily, when it’s busy, it’s just that it takes quite a bit longer to do what you need to do. Anyway, walking away from Rachel, I headed for the chocolate and sweets aisle because one of the things on my list was a couple of Toblerones. After some time, I found what I was looking for and carried on with my journey. There were still one or two things that I needed before I got out and with as much speed as I could muster, given the crowds, I systematically went round the store and picked up the rest of my remaining items. Purely because of the way things worked out, once I had got the last thing on the list, I found myself coming out of an aisle at the far end of the store, near the soft drinks. This meant that I would have to walk past some of the deserted tills down that end to get to one that I was able to pay at, one with a person manning it. Immediately, as soon as I saw that it was her, in fact, I had decided against going to Rachel’s till when the time came to pay up and go home. This was due to something that I went into briefly in the essay that I wrote about her. Allow me to indulge myself while I again, leave the main story for a moment or so. During the period that Rachel was there in summer, I visited her twice. The first time happened completely by chance, while the second was slightly more planned. As I mentioned in the piece, that second time hadn’t been as good as the first. The explanation for this is something that defies and confuses me still to this day. I thought, knowing that she was now back, presumably just for the Christmas period and no longer, at least not until the following summer; I thought that it was probably best if I avoided her, if that was possible. I was happy with the way things were, happy with how I felt about her and my mindset with her in general. I saw no reason to rock the boat by doing what I had done in the past. Just leave it as it was and go to someone else. There was plenty to choose from, especially seeing as how it was so busy at that particular time. As far as I could tell, the experience, if I did chose to do, could just as easily be negative as it could be positive. No point in taking that chance, I didn’t think. So, with my mind not focusing on anything in particular, drifting away from the situation if anything, I started to walk past the tills. First the empty ones at the end and slowly getting towards the busier ones, the ones that were in use. Naturally, I was looking solely for the one that appeared to be the least busy. Other than that, I had no preference. It could have been a little green man from Mars that I got served by. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to me. As I looked in that direction, though, away from the aisles were my eyes had been diverted momentarily; as I looked towards the tills, I was greeted by a sight that I thought was about as likely as seeing a Martian sat there, passing barcodes under the laser. And at the same time my heart skipped a little beat...
Well, not so much a little beat, quite a big beat, actually. A massive one. There she was. What else can I say? It was her! It was only Kathryn McKenna! Someone that I was absolutely convinced that I would never see again. She was sat at a till, one of the ones towards the far end where I was, one of the last populated ones and sure enough, she was checking people out. Also, it has to be said, with the skill, calmness and precision that must only come from doing that particular job for a considerable length of time, I would have thought. What in the name of all that was holy was going on? She was supposed to be at university. She was supposed to be living in Liverpool. She was supposed to be as far away from Tesco and therefore, as far away from me, as possible. But, she wasn’t. She wasn’t any of those things. She was there! About ten feet in front of me, getting on with her job and blissfully unaware that she had an idiot staring at her, legs shaking, with his mouth open and a look on his face that suggested he’d just seen something amazing. The problem was, that’s exactly what he had seen. Because it was amazing. Unbelievable. Clearly, the same thing that had happened with Rachel, had also happened with Kathryn. She had started at university in late September, left her job to do so, and had worked straight through to a couple of weeks or so before Christmas. Then, she had left her digs, come back to Manchester, to Irlam and was working at Tesco through Christmas while she presumably stayed with her parents or her friends or whoever. Right away, as I was still walking, walking closer towards her, my mind was working. It was out of it’s idle state and was all of a sudden, sharply focused. And, for some reason, it was concentrating on something totally unimportant. I was wondering about the way this kind of thing worked. I’m guessing that in order to leave her job, Kathryn would have had to have handed in her notice. She would have said something like, “Look, I really love my job but I feel that the time is right now for me to do something different. I’m leaving so that I can go back to university...” or whatever. Fine. She would then have gone to university and done that for three months. Also, fine. But then what happened? Was there some kind of pre-arranged agreement with the powers that be that allowed her to do that but also gave her the opportunity, if she wanted, to come back for a couple of weeks at Christmas and help out with the rush? Or, was it compulsory? She had to come back, no matter what...Or, was it simply that on her return, she rang them up on the off chance and said, “Hey, any jobs going?”. I’ve no idea. I doubt that it would be compulsory. Once she had left, she had left and that was that. Surely. As for which of the other two it was, answers on a postcard for that one, please. This is, I suppose, irrelevant. What was important was that she was there and that I was seeing her again. This was excellent.
Something to note, though. As I got increasingly closer to her, I noticed something. Kathryn always looked like Avril Lavigne, I thought. As I think I said earlier, this wasn’t something that suddenly came to me when I fell in love with her that second time. I’d thought that pretty much from the start. This was when both Kathryn and Lavigne had brown hair. Then, by what must have been an amazing coincidence and nothing more, Lavigne came back with her “Girlfriend” single and in the video, she had blonde hair. Shortly afterwards, I go into Tesco and the amazing coincidence, Kathryn also had blonde hair. It couldn’t have been planned. That would have been unreal. Surely it was only me that saw the likeness. Surely nobody else made that connection between the two of them. It would appear, on the face of it, that maybe I wasn’t. Having not spoken to Kathryn for years now, I never found out but I did let myself entertain the thought that she might, just might have twigged that she looked a little bit like her and recognising this as well as that her doppelganger now had blonde hair, not brown, made the decision to change the colour of her hair as well. Whether it was done on purpose or not, I’m sure she’s the only one that could answer that. The point is that that was now the colour of her hair and from April, when the feelings for her started again, all the way through to that last day in September, her hair had stayed the same colour. I guess that she must have continued dying it throughout that period and that was the colour it was the last time that I had seen her. Now, however, it wasn’t. It was light brown again. A sort of chestnutty colour. Her natural colour. All the time that I had worked with her, it had been that colour and at some point during September and December, she had made the choice to go back to that. The dye had come out and it was brown. This, to me, didn’t make any difference whatsoever. Yes, it had been a blonde Kathryn that I had fallen in love with most recently but originally, she had been brown. Either way, as far as I could see, she was still absolutely gorgeous. Blonde or brown. It didn’t matter in the slightest. I couldn’t care if her hair was dark blue or any colour, I would still feel exactly the same way about her. I would still love her to death. I suppose you could ask if I was absolutely sure that it was her and not just someone, with brown hair, that looked a little bit like her. It was her, alright. As soon as I saw her, despite the fact that I was quite a way away from her, I could tell in an instant who it was. It was Kathryn. I’d recognise her anywhere. Something else that I thought was a bit odd, all of these thoughts going through my head in the matter of a millisecond or less, you understand. Another slightly funny thing, to my mind, was that she was working on a till. As I have already said, more than once, aside from her last day, when she had served us, at the same time as telling me that awful news; aside from then, she wore one of those headsets and her job was to respond to the flashing lights. One would assume, knowing this, that if she was to come back at any point, she would pick up from where she left off and resume the role that she had when she worked there. What I was seeing now would disagree with this theory slightly. I guess that there is a reasonable, plausible explanation for this. Since her departure in the autumn, the position that she had held and subsequently left, had been filled by someone else and so when she came back for Christmas, they already had enough people to do that particular job, Linzi included, obviously, but what they needed was people to man the tills. With the increase in the number of people shopping there prior to Christmas, the demand for open checkouts would also rise and the more people that they had in to do that job, the more tills they could open at any given time. This makes pretty good sense, I think. Back to the situation that was emerging and that I now found myself in, a question now arose. What was I to do?
I had already agreed that it would be best if I didn’t go to Rachel’s checkout. This, though, was a lot different. This wasn’t just anybody, this was Kathryn McKenna. Kathryn McKenna! The woman of my dreams. Goddammit! There were, I thought, obvious benefits to going to her till to checkout. Alright, it might not have been me that was asking the questions that day, but if I hadn’t have chosen Kathryn’s till back in September then I wouldn’t have ever found out that she was leaving. And having not seen her in there for a while, for weeks, maybe even months, afterwards, I would be wondering when she would be coming back, if at all. Eventually, after a fairly long period of time, I would come to the realisation that it was most likely that she had left and had gone on to do something else. University or another job somewhere. I wouldn’t be able to say with any confidence which one of these it was. It had, looking at it that way, been a good thing, that we had gone to her till that day. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known. Not for sure. I might have even come to the conclusion that she had died or something ridiculous like that. Who knows? That’s what had happened when I had gone to her till last time. It had been a productive experience, if nothing else. Who could say that if I did the same now, it wouldn’t be equally if not more productive? That was one side of the coin. The other side, the side telling me not to go was saying things like how weird it would look. Yes, it would look weird. Very weird. As well as this, going back to the beginning of this, when I was talking about what I went through when I wrote “Avril Lavigne” and the desire that I had for some sort of closure. It was necessary in that instance for me to do what I did. Clearly, I wouldn’t have been able to finish that particular piece of work if I hadn’t done it. Things would have just gone on forever, I suspect. I would probably still be writing it now. That, the buying of that CD, signalled the end, signalled a suitable place for me to stop. Closure for this piece of work was never an issue. As far as I was concerned, I got that the day that Kathryn left. That was it. The end of everything. Nothing was going to happen from that moment on. I was confident that with the material that I had, I could form a beginning, a middle and an end and make a decent job of writing out my final thoughts on Kathryn. This theory, as grand and as wonderful as it was, was then shot down from upon high by that conversation with Trudi in November. Luckily, I wasn’t anywhere near finishing this by then and it would be quite simple and straight-forward for me to tack this on to the end. Not a problem. I was happy with that. It would give the work a bit more emphasis. A bit more oomph. Alright. Now, however, unable to take my eyes off her, I knew that there wasn’t a hope in hell of me dying with a sane mind if I didn’t include this little incident as well. I just wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I allowed myself to finish this without including what I was currently witnessing. That wouldn’t be possible. I would forever be nagged by this feeling in the back of my head that meant that I had missed something important out. This was important, it was significant. However, there was the danger that it could be too important. If you get my meaning. As it was, she was there, I had seen her and I was ready to walk on. Imagine, though, what would have happened if I had immediately decided that yep, I was going to do it. I was going to go to her till and see what happened. That, I firmly believe, would have been just a little bit too much. Okay, there’s no doubt in my mind that if I had done that, we wouldn’t have had the kind of conversation that she ended up having with Dad. Actually, I don’t think that we would have had any kind of conversation at all. With us doing the whole ignoring one another /total stranger routine over the past couple of years, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to me at all if the whole thing would have turned out to be done in total silence. Fair enough, she might well have gone through the usual routine of asking me if I wanted help with my packing and to put my PIN number in the card machine at the correct moment. All the usual stuff. But nothing special. Nothing special because it was me. Even so, it would still have been too much, I think. Why? Well, I think that if I had have done such a thing, afterwards, I would have been left with a barrage of ideas. A raft of things to write about. That’s what I mean when I say that it probably would have been too much. As it was, I had seen her, she was back for Christmas, and that, I figured, was enough for me to be getting on with. In the end, this was what decided it for me. It was quite a hard thing to do, but I decided against checking out at her till. Instead, I just walked on by and went looking for another one, a less interesting one.
However, pretty much as soon as I had passed her, I knew that I had to get another look at her before I left. Just a quick glance. I was going away in three days time, for the best part of the next three weeks. If she was here for the Christmas period, which it definitely seemed that she was, and no longer, then by the time that I got back at the beginning of the second week in January, she would, by then, I supposed, be back in Liverpool. The Christmas madness would be long over and as a result her services would probably no longer be necessary. As, I imagine, Rachel’s wouldn’t either. Both of them would be gone when I got back to this green and pleasant land and it would be impossible to determine if and when I saw either of them again. Kathryn in particular. Sure, she was here now, but would she be back in the summer? Of course, I didn’t know the answer to that. I may love her, but it doesn’t mean that I have the ability to read her mind, sadly. So, this really could be the last time that I ever saw her and if it was to turn out that way, I wasn’t satisfied with what I had seen. Yes, it was amazing, incredible, it wasn’t that. I was greedy, that was all. I wanted more. One more look would do it. Now that I knew she was there, I figured that I wouldn’t be overcome by shock. I would be able to enjoy it, savour it. Rather than having a million and one things going through me head while I whizzed passed her. I could take my time, go passed her and take one last look at her before she disappeared out of my life again. Possibly for good this time. I had to go round again in order to do this. This meant that I was forced to go down one of the aisles and attempt to come out at the same place as I had done a couple of minutes earlier. Off I went, then. After a short while, I was going by the fruit and veg section on my right and heading in the direction of the freezers and the bit with the chillers, where Kathryn and I had worked, all those years ago. I’d had more than enough surprises for one day, thankyou very much. I mean, seeing Rachel to begin with was quite a shock in itself, I hadn’t expected that. But to then see Kathryn shortly afterwards, that had sent me spinning, well and truly. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you wish to read the situation, I was about to receive another one.
I hadn’t seen Laura Farnworth in years. I’m thinking really hard now and I can’t recall with any kind of certainty exactly when the last time was that I saw her. I’m guessing that it could have been at college, because I think that she did go for a while before she decided to drop out, but I am by no means a hundred percent sure about that. It could have been since then or it might even be longer ago. Whenever it was, it was a long time ago now, I know that. The last that I heard of her, or rather saw something that related to her was a strange instance that I had in the estate agents one day. I was in the middle of the exceptionally long and drawn out and tedious process of buying a house. It’s not nearly as exciting as it might seem from the outside. I know that now. Anyway, I was in there one Saturday, for some sort of meeting or other and while I was waiting to be seen, my eyes fell upon a pile of papers on one of the desks in the office. I think it might have been in one of the trays that you frequently see on desks in that kind of office environment. “In” trays and “Out” trays and all that sort of thing. On the face of it, if you were walking passed it and just happened to spot it out of the corner of your eye as you continued on in the direction that you were going, it would probably seem like a fairly inconspicuous pile of papers. Nothing worth getting excited about, I wouldn’t have thought. So, I was sat there and I saw it and because I was fairly close to it and looking for something to do while I waited, I started reading it. Hey, if it was confidential, then it should have been properly stored away, not left on a desk where me or anybody else could get a hold of it. Reading it, to begin with, I could make out that it was some kind of letter, but I had no idea what it was about and if I was honest, I wasn’t that interested, either. Until, that was, I saw whose name was on it. In the middle of one of the sentences of this letter was the name “Laura Jane Farnworth”. This immediately caught my attention. Well, it would do. There’s only one person that I know with that name in the local area and it just so happens to be the girl that I was infatuated with for all of five years at high school. I’ll hazard a guess and say that she decided to drop the “Sophie” part of her name at some point. Having not seen for a long, long time and with so much other stuff going on in my life, I hadn’t thought about her, really thought about her for ages. I read on and the basic gist of the letter, I think, was that it was informing someone of the fact that Laura was after buying a house or some kind of property and that she was putting a deposit down on it. £10,000 it might have been. What also caught my eye, at the same time, was the date of the letter. It had on it “August 2006”. This got my brain ticking over slightly. The question was, why would an estate agents have a letter on a desk that was eight or nine months old? And especially if it was only about a deposit that was supposed to be being paid at around that time...The only assumption that I could make was that something might have gone wrong with the deposit at some point but again, why would that still be relevant so long afterwards? I mean, if it was going to go wrong, surely it would have gone wrong in August, or shortly after that. Yes/No? I don’t know. Still, there it was. The name of the girl that I had once loved, staring right at me as I sat and waited to see someone in an estate agents. Not really what I was expecting to see at that particular time. After that day, I quickly forgot about her again. I had much more important things to think about than what she may or may not have been up to in the property market. Or any other part of her life, for that matter. That sounds utterly horrible, I know. As though I don’t care about her anymore. I do. Of course, I do. I just haven’t had much time to think about her recently, that’s all. And she was probably the last thing that I was thinking about as I was dashing through Tesco, wanting to get back to see Kathryn, as quickly as possible. In the next instant, though, she was all that I was thinking about.
Out of the corner of my eye, coming from my right and going virtually straight across my path, seemingly in something of a hurry herself, was the one and only, Laura Jane Sophie Farnworth. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me...” I thought to myself as I instantly recognised who it was. If the thought of going to Kathryn’s till had seemed to me at the time to be too much, then this definitely was. And as Kathryn had been earlier, even with the new/old hair colour, Laura was equally as unmistakable. Her hair was different now, too. Not in colour, like Kathryn’s had been, but more in style. When we used to know each other, when we had both been sixteen, her dark hair had been long and frizzy. Now it was short and straight. Because I’m not much of a hairdresser and I don’t know the correct terminology, I’ll just have to show my ignorance and improvise. It was sort of brushed or combed over to one side at the front, with a little bit of a fringe as well. There is, no doubt, an official hairdressing term for that kind of a cut, but I’m afraid that it just escapes me at the present moment. You get the idea, though, I think. But, it was her, no question about that. And I was stood there, again, for the second time in a matter of minutes, looking and feeling absolutely staggered. What was going to happen next? Who was I going to see now? When I popped to the gents on the way out, would I pass Georgina coming out of the ladies or something? This was just getting silly. I couldn’t cope with much more. With Laura was a man. Put two and two together and you would reach the same sort of conclusion that I did. That is to say that this bloke was her boyfriend...or even her husband, maybe. After what I’d witnessed since coming in, it was evident that we were in la la land now and that anything that I might see and hear from now on in shouldn’t really be shocking me anymore. So, if she was married, that wouldn’t come as a surprise to me now. The only thing that I noticed about him, or the only thing that I remember, at any rate, was that he had long hair. The reason why this stuck in my head, I think, was that he hardly seemed to me like the kind of bloke that Laura would ever go for. To me, Laura liked the bad boys. I say this with some conviction, because Laura was quite a bad girl, herself. But, I’ll save all that for another day, I think. It seemed slightly odd then, that the person that she was apparently with didn’t have a shaved head or tattoos everywhere or a mean look on his face. Maybe this only indicates that I didn’t know Laura quite as well as I thought I did. I guess that I froze for a while. Literally froze. Not going anywhere. Because as soon as it seemed Laura had passed me from right to left, she was then passing me again, going back the way she had come. Still trying to do everything at a thousand miles an hour. This time, somehow, don’t ask me how, we managed to look eye to eye at each other. Hard you might think when one of us is stood totally still and the other is rushing passed like its the beginning of the end of the world. But, nevertheless, we did look one another in the eye. Considering that we were together, educationally speaking, for a good eight or nine years, sat next to each other in class for almost all of one of those, you would think it common sensical, I believe, if I assumed that she would recognise me, just as I had recognised her. Well, common sensical or not, she didn’t. Or, at least, she didn’t seem to. She may have been playing it extremely cool but if she was, she was doing it well. Kathryn glazing me over is one thing. That’s her personality, the way that she is and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Being in her own little world most of the time. It’s a brilliant thing and I admire it. Laura, on the other hand, there’s no way she would ever be able to do anything like that. Laura was always far too cold and clinical and with it to be able to get away with anything like that. Which leads me to think that she genuinely didn’t realise that it was me that she was looking at. Fair enough, I guess you have to say. If she didn’t know it was me, then she didn’t know it was me. That’s something I have no control over, sadly. Because she was going so quickly, after the momentary eye contact, she was gone again in a second. Boyfriend/husband left tagging along behind her. And I was left, still stood there, wondering what dimension I’d suddenly stepped into without knowing about it.
The thing with Laura was pretty incidental. I was utterly staggered to see her, absolutely, but in a relatively small town, seeing someone that you used to go to school with in the only supermarket in the area is hardly that big of a deal. To demonstrate this, I would like to refer back to the time that I also saw Karen Turner in the very same place. Again, with that, I was taken aback by it in the moment. In time, though, I came to see it for what it was. It was a chance meeting, nothing more. Seeing Laura in there, was exactly the same. It could have been anybody that I knew, any of the people that I used to go to school with. As it was, it turned out to be Laura and it was only this fact that got me slightly bent out of shape for a while. I’m sure that seeing another person that I knew or used to know in there wouldn’t have resulted in that kind of reaction. I would have just said to myself, “Oh, there’s so and so...” and carried straight on with what I was doing. Purely because it was Laura and no one else, that was the thing. Also, on top of this, it was obviously intensified by my seeing both Rachel and Kathryn at the same time. It was a fluke, a quirk of fate, nothing more and I have learnt since then, to take it as that, to take it on face value.
Once Laura had departed the scene, to go rapidly chasing after the next thing that she was looking for, I quickly regained my focus. This was about Kathryn, not her. What I had managed to notice in all the hustle and the bustle and the looking into her eyes and everything else, was that there was a significant difference in the way I felt when I first saw the two women. Because I wasn’t in the slightest bit aware that I was going to see either of them, I feel that then feelings that I had were absolutely genuine. They weren’t forced. I wasn’t preparing myself to see them and so I wasn’t in any way telling myself how I should or shouldn’t feel. They were, as I say, genuine. I’d like to talk about Kathryn first, if I may. Walking round the corner of the aisle and towards the tills, I wasn’t thinking about anything. Just going along, really. Then...There she was. And I saw her. Immediately, probably even before the surprise got to me, the overwhelming feeling that I got was of love. It’s hard to put into words and probably sounds a bit daft to you now, reading this, but that is what I felt. It was, near enough, the kind of thing that I felt whenever I saw her when she used to work there. When I used to go in to do some shopping and I realised that she was working, my heart would skip and I would feel all warm and fuzzy inside and I would also probably smile a little as well. This was what usually, if not always happened, when my eyes found her in the store. This time, it was very much like that, except that it was about a thousand times more intensified than it was normally. I hadn’t seen her in over three months, I thought I’d never see her again and here she was, in the flesh, only a short distance away from me. It was an unbelievable feeling. Just brilliant. Now, you would expect, or I would have expected, anyway, to experience a similar kind of thing when I knew that it was Laura that was racing past me. For whatever reason, though, I didn’t. I just didn’t. As much as I would have liked to feel love for her, I wasn’t able to do that. Instead, I felt...Well, nothing. Nothing at all. It was weird. I’m not sure why this was and I would really like to know. I was under the impression that deep down, I still loved her. Even after...seven, nearly eight years. That is a long time, I know. But I sincerely thought that something like that didn’t ever go away. That it lasted forever. I was wrong. She was just Laura, someone that I was once madly infatuated with, but not anymore. Unfortunately.
I still had one thing that I needed to do. I had to pay for my stuff and get out of this place before anymore weird things happened. I still wasn’t convinced that if I went to the gents, Georgina wouldn’t brush past me. After what I’d seen, all things were possible, I thought. So, I had to leave as quickly as possible and try, somehow, to get back on planet Earth. Quickly recomposing myself, I made sure that my feet weren’t stuck to the floor, as they had seemed to be for the past two or three minutes. When I discovered that they weren’t, with something of a wave of relief rushing through me, I moved on. I was back in Kathryn mode now, after that temporary and troublesome distraction that had been brought on by our friend Laura. I knew what I had to do and I was setting off to do it. I headed back to where I had been earlier and after a short while, I emerged from around that corner again, and in that instant, Kathryn came into my sight again. Now, as expected, came that usual reaction that I was referring to above. I knew that she was here now. I knew that when I walked past the corner, unless she had gone on a break in the meantime, she would still be there. She was still there. It had only been three or four minutes, at the most, so this was as I thought that it would be. Upon seeing her again, I felt the warm, fuzzy, loving feeling as always, and it was at that normal level. Nothing overly extreme, as it had been before, just normal, just even, just nice. And it was nice. It was very nice indeed. She looked wonderful. What else can I say? Completely gorgeous. At that moment, I realised exactly what I had missed. This was something that didn’t happen anymore. I didn’t have the means to feel like that now. As I was saying earlier, Linzi was great, she was, but what she most certainly wasn’t, was Kathryn. There is nobody else quite like Kathryn. At that moment, I knew that more than ever before. I think that in the period since she left and this instance now; in this time, I think that I’ve coped pretty well. To me, it really could have gone one way or another after she had left. Very easily, I believe, I could have taken the news the wrong way and go into a funk or whatever you want to call it, thinking melodramatically that the whole world was about to come to an end and that nothing would ever be the same again. Well, nothing would probably be the same again, but the world certainly was not coming to an end. I was, instead, and unusually for me, you might argue, was realistic about what was happening. Yes, I loved Kathryn. Unquestionably I loved her. I still do love her. This, I hope, is something that will never fade, like it evidently has done with Laura. I want to feel that way about her for the rest of my life, forever. I accept that and I am happy to have this kind of mindset about it. On the other hand, though, there has to be a certain amount of pragmatism involved. I knew right from the very start, you’d have to say, that Kathryn and I were never going to be anymore than work colleagues, maybe friends at the very, very most. What we were definitely not going to be, at any point in time, were lovers. This was something that I got my head around reasonably quickly. And, as I said in “Avril Lavigne”, this was what probably helped me most when it came to never getting into a tizzy about her. Knowing that she didn’t feel the same way about me as I felt about her meant that I never got to travel down that slippery and very painful slope that leads ultimately to rejection. I was spared this with Kathryn and I have to be thankful for that, I think. The same can be said for when it happened the second time. Even though I might have been in love with her again, the same sort of thing still applied. Nothing was ever going to happen. I knew that and had to accept it. This was where the necessity for me to be realistic comes in. She had left. Alright, I now had a choice to make. I chose what was the more sensible option. I have learnt a lot from what has happened to me in the past and those experiences have taught me that things like this, instances like the one that I found myself in with Kathryn, aren’t worth getting that bothered about. It’s not a justification of how much I might love someone if I mope about them after they have gone from my life. That really doesn’t achieve anything and I understand that now. That was why, with Kathryn, it made a lot of sense for me to not forget about her, as such, because that wouldn’t really have been possible, I don’t think. But, more like just getting on with things. It was sad and I would have much preferred if it hadn’t have happened. In an ideal world, if Kathryn and I could never be together, then the next best thing would have been for the situation to stay exactly the same as it was for as long as possible. For the foreseeable future, I would have been nothing short of ecstatic if she would have stayed where she was and that I was able to see her on some of the occasions that I went in there. She didn’t have to be there every time, but more often than not, that would have been very acceptable. As it was, things sadly didn’t turn out that way. I had to cope with what I had. So, what I decided to do was firstly, try my best to keep calm and not let the bad news get to me. This wasn’t, by any means, the end of the world. Nobody had died or anything close to that kind of extreme. Simply, I wasn’t able to see somebody that I cared for, anymore. That was all. Then, after that, just take things as they came. I missed her. Of course I did. It would have been downright bizarre if I didn’t, frankly. But, surely there would be new opportunities that would come at some point in the future. If you like, you might go as far as saying, looking at it in a startlingly positive way, it might even be better for me that this happened, rather than the whole thing with Kathryn dragging on month after month and eventually, year after year. Alright, I could love her from afar, but what good was that doing me, really? Not much, I suppose. Now, with Kathryn out of the way for good, save the odd sighting in Tesco, if she were to come back again in the future; I was, in a way, free from her. This might, I guess, sound a little contradictory and chances are that it is. I adored her and was absolutely besotted with her, so in that sense, it was a bit rich of me to then turn round and say that it was good that we were now separated. But, I don’t know. That is kind of the way that I feel. Of course, I have no idea what is coming next, what is in store for me in the coming weeks and months. It could well be nothing. However, if something is to come up, through whatever channel, I will now be able to embrace it without the thought of Kathryn. I like to think of it, almost, as a monkey off my back. A nice monkey, an attractive, sexy as hell monkey, but a monkey all the same. This may, in the long run, turn out to be completely wrong. Still, this is the attitude that I had at the time, the attitude that I had when I saw her in Tesco before Christmas and the attitude that I still have now. Ask me again in six months or so time, if I feel the same then and it will be interesting, I think, to see what kind of an answer I come out with, when we are that further on down the line.
Walking as slowly as I could without being spotted as doing something strange, either from Kathryn herself or anyone else, I got closer and closer to her and then in the end, I had to pass her by and continue going in the direction that I was heading. I was severely tempted to look over my shoulder to see the back of her, but I just about managed to stop myself from doing that. It took a lot of power and concentration, all of the power and concentration that I had, in fact, but I achieved it. The last view that I had of Kathryn was the head on one that I had received as I walked towards her. Still with her in the front of my mind, it was now important that I carried on with what I was doing, left her behind, paid for what I wanted to buy and then get out and go home. I wasn’t upset or on the verge of being upset. It wasn’t about that. Quite the contrary, actually. More than anything, I was enormously happy to see her again, as I had been at the beginning. However, I knew that this was now a chance to consign her to the past for good. In a way, if I had have gone with my instincts, given in to them and looked back at her as I had so wanted to, then that would have signified that it maybe wasn’t the end. The way I had done it, though, I think, told me. Convinced me that it was. I hope that that makes sense to you and that you understand what it is that I am trying to say. Anyway, that’s what I did and I was looking now for the least busy checkout. I found one, a moment or two later and got in the queue. The temptation to look at her was still there as I stood and waited, but I combated this by deliberately facing the other direction and trying to think of something, anything to get my mind off Kathryn as quickly as I could. This wasn’t easy, but I did my best and after what seemed in the end like an eternity, it got to my turn to be seen and I went through. Leaving Kathryn behind, I think, for good this time.
A couple of days later, I left everything behind and went to France for two and a half weeks to spend Christmas with the family. I didn’t know what to expect when it came to thinking about her and how I would feel when I did so. In essence, nothing was different now from what had gone on in September. When I got back, she would be gone again and I would be back where I was before Christmas. Not that this was necessarily, a bad thing. So, from that way of looking at the situation, if it hadn’t bothered me that much first time, and it hadn’t, then it was likely that it wouldn’t matter that much to me now, either. However, there was one slight change. Seeing her again, I don’t know...I guess what I’m trying to say is that maybe I had forgotten her, in spite of what I wrote above. You see, something that I have failed to divulge to you, up to this point, and this has probably been a mistake and I apologise for that; is that since Kathryn’s departure, someone else has been more on my mind than she has. This might well come as a shock to you, because it certainly came as a shock to me when I realised exactly what was happening, but in the time after Kathryn went back to university, it wasn’t her that I was think about the most, it was Georgina. Cue the dramatic music, I think. Because this is something that I want to go into in “The Aftermath And The Photograph” in due course, I will only skim over the major details here and address the matter in more depth in that one. This was strange. The best way that I can explain it is this. Immediately after the wedding and the days that came after it, I was completely buzzing. Of course I was, this was the single greatest thing that had ever happened to me. Then, over a relatively short period of time, Beth came back into the picture for a little while until eventually, I reached Kathryn. And then, because things weren’t developing in the ways that I wished them to develop with both Georgina and Beth, Kathryn kind of took over and in the end, she became my number one. I hadn’t seen Georgina since March and I hadn’t heard anything from her since not longer after that, maybe mid-April or somewhere around there. As for Beth, well after what seemed initially like a good start, things kind of ground to a halt with her. So, by a process of elimination, for want of a better way of putting it, with those two gradually disappearing from the picture, I was left with Kathryn. This was completely fine by me. I had no problem at all with it. This was how I spent the summer. With Georgina forgotten about since Easter and Beth, the same from about mid-June, I was free to spend the whole summer thinking about Kathryn. She was so much easier to love than either of them, anyway. Mostly because I saw her much more frequently. With Georgina two hundred plus miles away in London or wherever she might be now and me no longer going to the meetings with Beth, due to my unforeseen change of department, Kathryn was the one that I was around the most. And, as I say, this went on for the entirety of the summer. Aside from a brief interruption from Hannah, the months from June through to the middle of September were spent focusing on and thinking about Kathryn much more than any other individual. Then, she left. This put a real spanner in the works. Who could I think about now? I didn’t ask for it to happen and deep down I didn’t really want it to happen, for that matter, either. But, it did and I was stuck with it. There was nothing I could do. With Kathryn gone, all of a sudden and without any kind of warning, Georgina popped back into my head. Immediately, I knew that this could only be bad news. It didn’t do well to obsess about your cousin at the best of times but after we had kissed, this became doubly horrific. Alright, I knew that I had to be obsessed by someone, that was the nature of things, the nature of my life and me as an individual, but why did it have to be her? Anyone but her. That was how it was, however, and I was completely powerless to feel or think anything else. As much as I would have liked to, believe me. I still thought about Kathryn, occasionally...Well, more than occasionally, actually, quite a lot, if I’m to be totally honest. Still, it wasn’t quite as much as I was thinking about Georgina. Aside from it not making any sense, because it had been over, really, ever since the morning after the night before, even if I hadn’t been aware of that at the time; aside from this, aside from it not making a single bit of sense, it was also really, really annoying. Plus, to make it yet more infuriating and just generally difficult to live with, I soon found that this wasn’t going to go away. I had hoped so much that it would simply be a flash in the pan. I had lost Kathryn and this was just me asserting some kind of damage limitation. She, Kathryn, had gone and it hurt, but I could console myself with the thought of what I had shared with Georgina. Even if, ultimately, it had been amazingly short lived. This rehash of old times, I was praying, would be equally as short lived. Only, it turned out to be anything but. It went on and on, day after day, month after month. Then, quite unexpectedly, Kathryn turned up in Tesco, a week before Christmas and just like that, she was very much back in my thoughts. So, which way would it go? Would I spend my Christmas thinking about Kathryn or would I spend it thinking about Georgina? I knew which of these I wanted and which I didn’t want, but I was unsure which way it would go.
It went the way of Georgina. Don’t ask me why this was, because I won’t be able to explain it to you. I’ve long since given up trying to work out why I might feel one way, when I should probably and want to feel the other. To me, it didn’t make any sense. But, there you have it, I suppose. I thought that having seen Kathryn again, she would re-enter my head and over the two, two and a half weeks that I would be away for, and in that time, because of this, I would forget about Georgina. I had wanted this because, obviously, Christmas is a time for family, a time for seeing and being with the people that you love and in particular, members of your family. I’m not usually one for Christmas, I can never seem to get what all the fuss is about and why people tend to make such a big deal out of what is only one day out of the whole year. Yes, I enjoy the time off and I enjoy being with my family but, apart from that, I could take it or leave it really. This year, however, it was a little bit different. Although I love all the members of my family dearly, every single one of them, when I talk about Christmas being a time for family, in previous years, this has more or less meant, to me at least, more my immediate family, rather than anything overly extended. My Mum, Dad, brother and also grandparents, whenever and wherever possible. In the past, that has been enough for me. The December just gone, though, I was thinking slightly further afield. I wondered how nice it would be for all of the relatives on my Dad’s side to get together over the Christmas period. The reasoning behind this is, I hope, fairly obvious to work out. I had had such a good time at the wedding. Not solely with Georgina, but with everybody. It had been brilliant. I loved it. To me, it indicated that on the extremely rare occasions that this happens, that we have a full house at a family event; it can actually be a good thing and good fun can be had by all those present at the time. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one that had enjoyed myself over the course of that day and night. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s such a bloody shame that that kind of thing almost never happens. No matter how nice I considered another family reunion to be, it probably wasn’t going to happen. More chance of hell freezing over than that kind of thing being set up, I reckon. So, with it not happening, all this did was further highlight to me how much I actually missed Georgina. Because, let’s not be silly about this. If the impossible did happen, while I would be pleased to see everyone again, my prime concern would be her. Of course it would. I would be a filthy, rotten liar if I tried to convince anyone otherwise. Again, this is something that I would prefer to go into more detail about in the actual essay on Georgina and not this one. Suffice to say then, that for this reason, the reason that I missed her so much and especially at this particular time, I was rather wishing that the little cameo appearance by Kathryn that I had been witness to eight days before the big one was something that would have had a bigger impression on me than it did, in the end. My expectation had been that on seeing Kathryn again, as unexpected as it had most definitely been, it would allow my head to be filled and therefore, push out all the stuff that was in there at the time about Georgina. This, I’m afraid to say, wasn’t how it was. I wouldn’t say that she disappeared entirely, because she didn’t. Just as I sincerely hope that she never will. However, she didn’t by any means have the impact on me and my way of thinking that I had been desiring.
We are now in a new year and Christmas is nothing more than a memory now, getting ever more distant by the day. On my return from holiday, I chose this piece of work above all of the others that I have open and unfinished at the moment, as the one that I wanted to complete first of all. Having made the conscious decision not to do anything to any of them while I was away. The reason why I have decided to do this and not any of the other ones is because, I think, right now, it seems the one that is most relevant to me. Even though I know that Kathryn is herself, like Christmas, now a memory and nothing else, she is still something, someone that has a bearing on my life. As you might imagine, throwing myself back into this essay has done what I had been wanting to do at Christmas. That is to say, get rid of Georgina from my mind and replace her with Kathryn. Oh, if only I had had my laptop with me in France. With a goal of completing this as quickly as possible, whist still, of course, making sure that I describe events and thoughts as accurately and detailed as I can; by setting this objective, it has been so easy for me to sharpen my focus and concentration on to that one, singular thing. Kathryn. Once this is complete, though, and hopefully, very soon it will be; once it is done and I move on to whichever one it will be that I do next, I pray that finally, then, that will be it. It’s time for me to move on now, I feel. I am thinking about her a lot at the present time because I have to. If I wasn’t doing then I wouldn’t be able to finish this. I have to concentrate hard on her now but after this...That’s it. It’s time to let her go, once and for all. Not only are we two very different people, as we have always been. On top of this, we are also now, in two very different places and doing very different things. It was fantastic, magical, during the time when our two paths crossed but eventually, all good things must come to an end. Unless something out of the ordinary happens at some point in the future, something as yet unknown and unforeseen, then these will be the very last words that I ever write about Kathryn McKenna. There is an undoubted sadness that is attached with this. In a perfect world, I would have loved to have continued doing this kind of thing forever. But, as I say, the time seems right now for me to draw a line underneath the whole idea of Kathryn and finally say to myself, “Hey, enough is enough. Just leave things as they are..”. I once saw a video of Avril Lavigne on YouTube and at the end of it she said, “If you don’t like me for who I am, then you don’t like me for who I am. But all I’m gonna be...is who I am!”. My one, final thought about Kathryn is that while this is something that pretty much summed her up perfectly during the time that I knew her. I hope that in years to come, this is something that she doesn’t change about herself. Forget the fact that she was gorgeous, forget the fact that she was clever, funny, good to talk to and all the rest of it. The one thing that I think will be most enduring about Kathryn McKenna was that she was so very, very Kathryn McKenna. No one else could possibly stand there, letting someone talk to them and look as though they were understanding it all and taking it all in and then once the person had finished talking to them, open their mouth and say, “What?” as if they hadn’t heard a single word that had been said and still manage to get away with it, without being thought a total nutcase. Brilliant. I’m telling you, the girl was a genius.

S.J.Bottomley
Started- Monday, 17 September, 2007
Completed- Wednesday, 30 January, 2008

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 16.11.2009

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