AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And possibly yelling at him, just a little bit.
“Alfie, what in the flipping flip is this?” she went with. But even then he didn’t seem like a man who’d just told someone he loved them via his own memoir. And certainly not like one who’d said it in that absolutely overwhelming way.
He just seemed mystified.
“Think you’ll find that’s my memoir,” he said.
Then he pointed. Like she wasn’t quite clear on that part.
Even though she absolutely bloody well was.
“Yeah, I grasped that part.”
“Then what are you struggling with?”
“You can’t be seriously asking me that. Mate, this is supposed to be a boiled-down bunch of ghostwritten nothingness. To be about that time you had a dull footballing conversation with Terry Venables, written in a boring version of my writing. Or somebody else’s writing. And instead, it’s this. It’s you. It’s exactly how you feel, laid down perfectly on paper.”
She flicked through the pages in front of him, occasionally pausing at ones she’d turned down the corners on. You know,to really give him the strongest examples of his many, many attempts at turning her heart inside out. Though she could see he still wasn’t getting it.
And in ways she knew were not going to make any sense at all.
He was going to be absolutely weird about this, quite obviously.
Then sure enough:
“Yeah, but in my defense I didn’t think you’d mind me not going with the dull conversations in the boring version of your writing. I mean you kept telling me it wasn’t what you really wanted to do. And that I should just do it myself. So I did, without really thinking you’d feel like I erased your hard work,” he said.
As ifthatwas what she was talking about.
As if that fuckingmattered.
And was not something so irrelevant she almost couldn’t speak for a second.
Every word she wanted to say just tried to get out all at once, and created some kind of logjam. And when she finally managed, it wasn’t with anything that got the point across. It was just outrage.
“For goodness’ sake, Alfie, I’m not talking about my hard work.”
“So what are you talking about, then?”
“Me being bloomingstaggered.”
He at least had the decency to nod for that.
And agree with her in words, too. “Yeah, to be fair, you do look it.”
“Well, can you blame me? I mean honestly, why are you looking at me likeI’mbeing the weird one here? You’re the one who named your hecking memoir after me.”
“I never did. I kept your name fully out of it.”
“Yeah, butI’m the girl in assembly, Alfie. I’m the bloodygirl.”
“Well, of course you are. It’s just you and me that know that,though,” he said. And then he laughed. He laughed, like she was being absurd. Or the only points of contention here were minor quibbles about whether or not he’d written down the wordsMabelandWillicker. When of course they were not.
How could he not know they were not?
“Which is the only thing that matters. It’s all I’m talking about here. I don’t give a good gosh that people know it’s me, you weirdo. I give a good gosh that I mean so bloody much to you that you did this absolutely wild thing. That you remembered this one little conversation we had, and that it affected you so strongly you gave it the most importance in a book about yourlife,” she tried to explain.
And by that point she was really going for it, too.
