Old Friends in Paradise Ch. 02

"And what happened to the glasses?"

"It turned out I didn't need them as much as I thought and let's face it, they were broken and either in my pocket or being repaired so bloody often I expect my eyesight had to improve - believe it or not Gavin's Mum paid for my last pair after he broke them. They were only a minor correction in one eye, and it actually got better, I haven't had to wear them since college."

I sipped the very last of my wine and stared over the glass with narrowed eyes,

"And this body," I said appreciatively.

"That was all Simon Williams fault," he said with a sly grin. "you remember my Uncle Pete was in the police don't you." It wasn't a question.

"Of course," I remembered PC Finlay (his uncle) who was our larger-than-life local Bobby and always in Julie's kitchen or ours drinking tea, the last of the old-fashioned coppers and responsible for my desire to be in the police. It was said that the reason most of our district was crime-free was because no one wanted to upset PC Finlay or let him down, "still one of my heroes."

"Well after the glasses in the leg incident he picked me up from the hospital with Mum, with my broken and bloodstained glasses, a black eye, blood down my last good school shirt and grey trousers and a stabbed and stitched thigh.

Uncle Pete was old school enough to say while the police work was easy Simon and Gavin had no previous, it could be argued to be 'just an accident' especially with all his mates there." He looked at me with raised eyebrows, "and that Simon's Dad was a Freemason. He said he would write some warning letters to Brett, Simon and Gav's parents which at least got the incident on record.

Mum growled but Uncle Pete said that revenge was like good cheese and needed to be served cold and well matured. The next day he drove me to his gym and I started to work out and learn Aikido from a couple of the coppers there. Being my Uncle Pete's nephew and knowing Mum's situation they looked after me for free and I was into a fitness regime, three or four nights a week.

By then the divorce was done, Mum had gotten a much better job and with significant nagging from Mrs Pearce had sorted out some better benefits and we had a much-improved diet. Of course, it didn't really show until after I left school and went to the college with a view to being a PE teacher. Got my A' levels, got into Loughborough and graduated four years later looking like this."

He looked at me with some minor trepidation,

"I bumped into Simon," I leant forward, couldn't stop myself, "Don't worry I didn't hurt him!" he grinned, "I'd been the 'local boy' in the paper when I was presented with my medal from Afghan; The Royal Marines went mad for the PR and recruiting opportunity and I was photographed at the Reserve Detachment I was a member of in Nottingham, at the Phys Ed department at Loughborough, down on the estate where I used to live, then in and around the school with the Combined Cadet Force.

I had the green beret and the tan and what Mrs Reynolds called 'rugged good looks' and as we were finishing the photo's, Simon turned up to complain loudly about the photographer having formed the cadets up in three ranks on the Rugby Club's new all-weather training pitches that had been built on our old school grounds.

Mrs Reynolds smiled, and said we'd only be a few minutes and the pitches weren't his for another twenty minutes. I looked at him and him at me. Mrs Reynolds saw this and said that Simon had been in my class, and the journo asked if he remembered me.

I was taller than him, wider across the shoulders and in a tailored uniform being touted as the school wonder boy - MA BSc, Royal Marines Commando physical training instructor and sun-tanned war hero. Simon was dressed in paint and glue-splattered trackies with a protruding beer belly and a stupid haircut and just walked away, sweeeeeet."

I giggled.

"Revenge served cold!" I said, "what was the medal?"

"Queens Commendation for Bravery, a little silver quill on my Operational Service Medal," he said as if it was nothing, but I put my knife and fork down in surprise. "big ol' explosion..." he said, "I was at the front of our patrol when an ANP patrol up ahead of us was hit by an IED. I doubled forward and covered them, then crept forward with the Vallon and sniffed about, did first aid, just waiting for the bad guys to come for me."

A 'Vallon' was a mine detector used by UK troops and not the most popular job to carry it! Chris continued after a sip of his Coke,

"Sounds a lot worse than it was, honestly. The local paper made it sound proper John Rambo, but they were rag-tag and I was a Royal from 4-2, no contest." He smiled uncomfortably.

"Is that where you got the scar?" I said with a sigh looking at his cheek.

"This?" he affected an injured look and sniffed, then smiled that gorgeous smile at me again, "Nah, knocked off my bike by a Sunday driver on the hill just before the Lympstone gates eighteen months ago."

I pursed my lips just like my Mum would have, then grinned. We were baring our souls and I guessed it was my turn - I took a deep breath,

"I went out with Simon for almost a year after school. He was nice enough but over and above his looks, posh clothes and posh speech, he was actually pigshit thick."

"You noticed!" said Chris.

"Eventually!" I said with a wrinkled-nosed, slightly embarrassed grin, "outside of school we had nothing in common - we had been the big fish in the small pond, Prom King and Queen, head turners.

Outside of that pond we were 'just a couple of older teenagers and a bit up ourselves'. He really struggled with that and hated being back at the bottom of the pile again. To make it worse he started working for his Dad straight out of school and he insisted that he learn the construction business from the bottom up, just like he had.

He was sixteen and the boss's son and a bit up himself, so the blokes on his work gang called him 'the boy'. He complained to his Dad and he just laughed at him and told him they'd stop if he ignored them, yeah like Simon could ignore anyone. Having no one else below him he thought he'd try to boss me around, but I'm my mother's daughter and told him not to even think about that!"

"Ah well, fuck him," said Chris supportively, raising his wine glass in salute.

I raised my Coke, and thought of a way to get him even more on my side,

"Nope, never did." I looked out into the distance and thought of the best way to present this news. "The really strange thing was a week before we broke up, I had altogether decided to have sex with him. He used to go on and on and on about it. 'When are we going to have sex', 'are you ready to have sex yet'. It was never about love, it was 'sex' and obviously something he needed to get a tick on his sheet for, nothing to do with a development in our relationship.

I was waiting to see what romantic thing he was going to do for my seventeenth birthday and that was going to be the reason, so I asked him what he had planned. He just grinned and said that he'd 'do something nice'.

If he'd spent a few quid on some supermarket flowers and taken me to restaurant, a café would have done, and bought me a meal he would have ended up 'doing me'." I grimaced, "but no - it was a Tuesday, and the twat told me to meet him AFTER training in the recreation ground and we sat in the empty rugby club stand that stank of fag ends and urine, with him nodding and grinning, and waving his hand around as if we were sat in something between the coliseum and the best restaurant in the world, this shrine to the greatness that was his Rugby Club.

He'd brought five cans of lager and about half bottle of dark rum with the idea of us getting pissed in the park, even though he had work and I had college the next morning.

He got drunk really quickly and started getting stroppy and shouty with me because I wasn't impressed. I was really cold because I'd put on a nice 'going out' dress for the 'something nice' he'd told me about, not ideal for sitting in a windy park in March and I kept shivering and looking at my watch.

After an hour he was getting giggly and falling off of his plastic folding seat so I walked him home while he threw up every few hundred yards, leaving a dark stain on the side of my dress. His Dad was fuming when he saw me stood there after I knocked the door struggling to hold up his son.

"He took you WHERE for your birthday?" he said as he dragged his now distinctly wobbly and very pale son into the hallway looking at the obvious damp dark mark on my light coloured silky dress, "in that beautiful dress? Jesus Simon, what the hell is actually up with you?!" he roared in disappointed rebuke and his son five-finger spread beer, rum and bile down the wall and onto the parquet flooring.

His Dad really liked me, and once he'd woken his wife who appeared in her dressing gown with a mop and a bucket, he left Simon hugging the downstairs toilet and drove me home apologising profusely for Simon's behaviour and blaming the rugby club.

"I don't know Christina, that bloody game, it'll ruin him."

His parents sent a huge bunch of flowers to my house the next morning with a card and fifty pounds for a new dress. I rang his Mum to thank her, and she said how good I was for Simon and perhaps between us we could wean him off of his 'beautiful game'.

And that was it of course - rugby. He trained for rugby, talked about rugby, watched rugby on TV, ate, drank and slept rugby and was going to be a professional player.

He played for the school, then the village club, the local pub, the Young Farmers Institute and waited to be called up for the county side and any number of professional clubs he'd invited to watch him play and discover him and his natural greatness.

He never was and they never did, and he took it personally. It was everyone else's fault of course."

I sipped some more Coke, indicating to the barman I'd like two more.

"The county selectors only went for public school boys he insisted even though Tom Callaghan, Dave Naismith and Colin Jardene from the year above us and Pete Roberts and Josh Kelly from the year below were in the county junior first fifteen; then it was because his father had refused to sponsor the club, all that kind of shit. Truth to tell he was a reasonable and very keen player just not an exceptional one.

It all ended in the Rugby Club bar on the Friday three nights later and he still hadn't apologised or mentioned my birthday.

I'd bought him a really nice watch for his seventeenth, one he'd been going on about for months, and I cooked him dinner which we ate in the summer house with candles..." I looked at Christian, that had once been OUR hangout - he just smiled, "My Mum spent a fortune on really nice food for that dinner and he yummed it all up, he even got to take home the cake that I baked him - he didn't bother to say thank you, not even to my Mum.

Yet his 'something nice' for me was tell me to meet him at the freezing recreation ground after his training session so we could sit on a broken plastic bench like a couple of ASBO kids with some random booze he pinched from his parent's drinks cabinet. I was just sat there looking at him waiting for an explanation.

He mumbled how sorry he was and stared at the floor for a moment, then admitted that he was short of money and swore he would get me something 'later' - not confirming when that was likely to be. I pointed out that he was on ten times my salary but I'd still managed."

"His parents were loaded!" Christian threw in. His Dad was a property developer and both refurbished old houses and built new ones, and owned properties all over the place and Simon regularly reminded people of it.

"Yeah, but once he started working for his Dad he was always going on about how little he earned, tonnes better than me. I got paid £29 a week for working a Saturday, more in the holidays, while he was on £300 a week labouring, £350 if he worked a Saturday. It wasn't about the money honestly, it was about his total lack of consideration, like I always had to be there for him but he didn't need to reciprocate.

I knew he was saving up for a car but then he admitted that more important than the car even was the Rugby Club trip to France that summer and while he'd paid the coach and hotels, he'd need quite a lot of beer money for the trip and for the Fridays and Saturdays in between, and he said that obviously that was really important.

I said that him getting pissed with his mates was obviously the most important thing of course which he thought was funny but stopped laughing when he saw my face.

I think I knew as much as I'd tried, that was always going to be the case. And I was fed up with fucking rugby!" I said loudly, almost to the entire restaurant! Christian smiled at me again and nodded encouragement, "watching him play the same people in different teams on the same three pitches; training on Tuesday nights then again on Friday, then in the bar afterwards. Then I had to join him on Saturday night where his getting completely shitfaced, singing stupid songs while stripping naked with a load of men in their thirties, forties and fifties was only funny the first few times.

I tried one more time and asked if we could go to the cinema the next evening for my birthday, the last Harry Potter was on, then perhaps a meal afterwards. He grimaced and picked up his wallet from the table held it upside down and shook it. I tapped his watch that I'd spent two and a half weeks wages on. He pointed to the bar and around us, shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth to explain how it was out of his hands seeing as Saturdays were sacrosanct, so I folded my arms and stood up staring down at him.

He was in a corner and knew it; he blustered with his words for a few moments then did his usual thing which was to turn it around and make it about me, questioning MY commitment to our relationship, grumbling how all of his mates had been 'doing their women' for months yet we still hadn't, and he wasn't going to put up with that for too much longer. The dickhead," I hissed.

Chris narrowed his eyes,

"Meaning?"

"I never stopped to ask," I said, "I took my bag and said I was going to the bathroom. I was saved from further discussion and arguments by two of his teammates starting to sing 'the Zulu Warrior' as I came out of the ladies and I climbed into a taxi with a couple of other WAG's who realised that was the time to leave as well - it was a Friday I suppose," I took a sip of Coke, "he rang me at one in the morning asking where I was, I told him that I'd left with two other ladies a bit before ten and I was surprised and a bit disappointed that he'd only just noticed."

"Iss always 'bout what you want 'Stina innit," he slurred, "always about YOU! Fuck my career, fuck my dreams..."

That really pissed me off, it was ALWAYS his career and his dreams. If I ever talked about my course and joining the police, he'd grumble that it was never going to happen, I should carry on working at Boots and accept it or shut up moaning. Then it was all big fake yawns and blah-blah hand movements when I disagreed with him, while him learning about the building trade as pointless because him leading out England at Twickenham and winning the World Cup, the Triple Crown, the Grand Slam and the Calcutta Cup was just a few years away."

"I never saw him on the TV, but then I have been out of the country quite regularly over the years," said Christian with a grin.

I rolled my eyes and pursed my lips like my Mum always used to, which became a smile.

"I'm sure we'd have heard Christian!" I leaned back again, "so after his little outburst I switched off my phone and barred his number. He emailed me on Wednesday saying he'd missed me on Tuesday after training and unless I answered his phone calls it was OVER. I emailed him back and said, 'Bye then'. He moved on to another girl... oh..." I tapped the table as I tried to remember her name, "Fiona... FIONA BENNET!"

"Oh yeah!" said Chris, "lived in Cavendish Grove, big hair, went to the same college as me - didn't she train to become a vet?"

"The very same, she has the small animal practice at the big pet store in town, looks after Mum's cat. Well she'd fancied him from school it seemed and put out straight away according to the local whispers."

"And Simon would have told everyone he'd lost his cherry after all wouldn't he."

"Surprised it never made the papers," I said, "his Mum was fuming - my Mum did her hair of course and she told her all about 'Fiona' - she asked him what he thought he was doing chucking over me for 'that other girl' - she was fuming because he took Fiona out on their second date on his previously sacrosanct Saturday - but I understand she slept with him on the Thursday before. She dumped him pretty soon afterwards mind you, apparently because people at her college, your college in fact, knew she'd had sex with Simon. Rachel told me it was all around the refectory the next Monday. That's one of the reasons I never slept with him, I knew he'd have to tell the world that he was no longer a virgin."

"Don't tell me, was it in the rugby club stand?"

"I don't know!" I said with a chuckle and narrowed eyes, "with Simon it would have to have been let's face it, bet the twat would have taken a lap of honour afterwards. Urrgh!" I shuddered, "best of luck to Fiona for laying on the floor in THERE!"

I laughed and hoped I didn't sound catty. Christian just smiled at me, again!

"Fiona dumped a few weeks later, and his Mum said she KNEW that would happen and how he should have tried harder with me. He lost his rag about that, slagged me off and argued with his Mum and got nasty with her.

Then his Dad got involved and they all fell out big time, probably because he was actually making him work for a living rather than swanning around in posh clothes pretending he was. His older brother David had done his Dad's ad-hoc apprenticeship and after a couple of years was driving around in a posh car, managing jobs, pricing repairs and dealing with architects and builders. His older sister was 'front of house' and having studied Marketing at University was the sales manager and the 'face of the company'.

Simon, in the way of Simon of course, said it wasn't fair and he could do all that rubbish just as well. His Dad disagreed. Simon had a tantrum, and said he had two choices.

He started to miss work, particularly on Wednesday and Saturday mornings for the obvious reasons then it was his other favourite, turning up at Enterprise Court in smart clothes when he should have been in jeans and rigger boots digging footings, ditches and mixing concrete; he pushed his luck and on his third warning his Dad told him that was it, he was sacked and could go on the dole for all he cared.

He was installing double glazing with his big sister's husband last time I saw him, doing the house three doors down from Mum's - must be three or four years back now."

Christian looked me up and down,

"And did he see you?"

"Yeah," I grinned, "Mum made sure of that. It was a Friday afternoon and I was with half a dozen girls from my flight heading out on a hen weekend in Bournemouth for our flight sergeant. I said to Mum that I was coming south and would pop in and see her and she offered afternoon tea to the whole gang AND to do our make-up and hair before we hit the town."

"And I bet the whole gang just loved her!"

"Of course," I said, "this my Mum we're talking about, you should have seen what she laid on - my Flight Sergeant Emma asked if she would adopt her."

"And your Mum hugged her and said yes."

"She hasn't changed - I think she had more fun than we did! On her second round of the cocktails she said 'I nearly forgot Baby - that AWFUL boy you used to go out with is working at Derek and Heather's place'.