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Chapter one was actually titled:If You Love Footie You’re Going To Hate Hearing This.And then it just plunged right in, completely unapologetically with:Right, so if you’re reading this thinking oh, this is gonna be a grand little trip down footballing memory lane, let me just stop you right there, mate. Because the first thing you should know about me is: I actually fucking hate football. And grand little trips. And, to be honest, memory lane. So what this here memoir is about to be I do not know. But I do know that’s it not going to be close to whatever you might be thinking. So let’s just all strap in and hope for the best.
And it did not get less wild from there.
In fact, it got significantly more wild.
In about ten thousand different ways.
Chapter two was all about his childhood. But it wasn’t her sanitized notes turned into something sort of accurate. Or even some of the mechanical-sounding passages she’d crafted to fit the brief. It was the kind of thing she would have written if she’d been let loose. If she’d been free to write as herself, with love for him.
Onlyhewas the who had done it.
He described the childhood he’d actually told her about. That he’d sometimes even written about, before telling her it couldn’t be included. Peeling the backs off cardboard coastersin pubs, so he could write little stories on them with the stubby pencils usually used to note down darts scores. Or hiding behind the sofa with a pack of Post-its, so nobody would catch him filling them with thousands of words.
And then just as she was feeling knocked for six by this, she flipped forward. Far beyond anything she’d ever even taken notes on, far past whatever she might have said.
And got to the chapter on how much he fucking loved rom-coms.
My favorites were the ones with Sandra Bullock in them, he’d written.But really, any would do. I wanted what they promised: soft-focus lives lived in enormous houses while wearing massive jumpers and having big feelings. Because it seemed almost constantly like my own feelings were meant to be small, compressed, like a lump of coal that someone was trying to turn into a diamond.
Only the diamond never emerged.
It was just hard, dusty rock all the way down.
And I hated that about myself as much as everybody else seemed to like it.
In fact, that’s the real reason I actually stopped going on shit likeA Question of Sport.It wasn’t that I had a fistfight with David Weathers—although I did because frankly, he’s a complete doorknob who can’t keep his hands to himself—or that I didn’t like how they did my hair, even though they fucking did do it wrong every time no matter how much I fucking told them the side part goes on the right. No, fuck no, that wasn’t it. It’s because I would see myself on whatever and find that man so far from the one I wanted to be that it would make me physically ill.
So now you’re thinking, fuck’s sake, this is depressing, isn’t it? Is this all just going to be a dark descent into one man’s disgust with himself and his inability to ever change? Well, it’s gonna be a bit of that, I’m not going to lie. But if you bear with me a minute, it’ll pay off, I swear. Because we’re only a chapter or two of self-loathing away from meeting the woman I’m talking about in that title you were absolutely baffled by when you clocked this book on the shelf.
At which point she almost put the thing down.
It felt like she had to, because her hands were sweating so much.
Somehow, she was shivering and yet boiling hot at the same time.
Which was probably just a natural consequence of being the most foolish, blinkered, oblivious person in the world.You should have known, her brain was telling her, over and over.You should have guessed all this, you should have guessed he would do it himself and that he would do it honestly and rightly and it would be about you. And it was true, she knew it was true, she knew she should have.
But she also understood why she hadn’t.
It was because things never turned out all right where she was from.
Instead, your dad pissed away the money you were saving up for the Scholastic Book Fair. Kids made fun of you because you bought your clothes from Oxfam. Boys you liked thought you were strange, then later men you’d learned not to like too much thought the same. And if they called the next day?
It was only to say they’d never liked you anyway.
So you put your dreams aside and learned to live small.
To not write what you wanted, or be openhearted with friends.
Or believe that someone lovely might love you, against all the odds.
Even if they loved you so much they put it down in their books.
Because there it was, on page ninety-nine:
Now here’s the thing: I can’t tell you anything specific about the person. You’re not getting her name, so you can just put that from your minds right the fuck now. All you really need to be aware of is that she is, indisputably, the love of my life.
I know. Spoiler alert.
