Dumped, Actually(59)

Don’t answer that.

The third shed is perfect, though. It’s a bog-standard job, complete with shingle roof and solid-looking pine walls. It should do the trick, no problem. I can pop myself in there and wait it out.

Or at least, I could, if the bloody thing wasn’t locked with a padlock!

Who padlocks a sodding shed in a sodding garden centre?! What possible purpose could it serve? Are they perhaps afraid that someone may try to steal something from the probably empty shed? A cubic metre of pine-smelling air, for instance? Or have they had a lot of desperate men trying to hide from their ex-girlfriends over the course of the last few months, and have decided that enough is enough?

Regardless, that option is not open to me, so off I go into the bloody Wendy house, and the risk of a possible future reputation as a bit of a Rolf Harris.

And it’s just in the nick of time too. If I had dawdled a second longer, I would have been seen by Samantha and JanJane, of that there is no doubt. It’s a miracle I manage to get away with it at all.

I crouch down, hastily squeeze myself through the small front door of the Wendy house, and immediately spin around to look out of one of the tiny windows. I stare up and out of it as the person I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with – and JanJane – go walking past, talking about the shipment of garden gnomes they are expecting in an hour.

My heart pines openly as I look at her in the flesh for the first time in way too long.

Samantha, that is, not JanJane.

I’m sure JanJane is a very nice person, but if I can’t actually remember her name, I’m not really going to be that in awe of her, am I?

Samantha looks beautiful, of course. This was as inevitable as death, taxes and the lies of politicians.

She’s wearing her dark-green Griston’s Garden Centre polo shirt like it’s something from a catwalk, and the way her hair is tied back in a rushed ponytail is a study in effortless style.

This is what my eyes see, anyway. For anyone else on planet earth, she probably looks like an attractive blonde girl in a dowdy work shirt, who would rather be talking about anything other than garden gnomes with her assistant JanJane.

But to me – as I gaze up at her from my crouched hiding place – she looks like a million dollars.

Oh bloody hell, I think I’m about to start crying in a Wendy house. This must be some kind of new personal low for me. It even tops grasping my erect penis in front of a baby deer. If not by much.

As my emotions roil and bubble away inside my chest, I watch Samantha and JanJane come to a halt right in front of my Wendy house, as they are joined by another person – a tall young man wearing a pair of green combat trousers, big black work boots and a Griston’s polo shirt, much like Samantha and JanJane’s.

‘Hi guys!’ he says as he joins them. ‘Sam? Can I speak to you about that problem we were having with the main fish tank? If we don’t get the filtration sorted out soon, we’re going to lose some of the tetras.’

‘Yes, of course, Riley,’ she replies.

‘I’ll go see if I can find out when the delivery’s coming, Samantha,’ JanJane says. ‘See you later.’

‘Thanks,’ Samantha replies, and watches JanJane disappear back where she came from, before turning her attention back to Riley the fish tank man.

‘Is there anything wrong with the fish tank?’ she asks him in an amused voice.

Riley grins and shakes his head. ‘Nah. Course not. I just wanted to get you alone, so I could do this.’

All the universes collapse in on themselves as Riley leans forward and kisses Samantha square on the lips.

‘No,’ I say to myself, in the smallest voice imaginable. It’s probably the same way a tiny shrew would say ‘no’ in the confines of its mammalian brain, as it sees the hawk descending from above.

‘No, no, no,’ I repeat, tears sprouting from my eyes. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no,’ I continue to babble as I watch my beloved swap spit with another man.

Samantha giggles and puts one arm around Riley’s waist. ‘You’ll get us both into trouble, you know,’ she tells him.

Riley looks around. ‘Who with? The place is almost empty! And Jeff is off today, so there’s nobody stopping me.’

Riley kisses Samantha again, this time passionately – and probably with tongues.

No! No! I kiss her with tongues, you bastard! It’s my tongue that should be in her mouth!

‘It should be . . . my tongue. It should be my tongue. It should be my tongue,’ I moan as quietly as I can – obviously now in the midst of a huge emotional breakdown. ‘It should be my tongue. It should be my tongue. It should be my bloody to—’

‘I’m sorry I wiped bogies on you, mister.’

‘Mb.’


Now, then.

If somewhere in this broad and exciting universe of ours (the bits that didn’t collapse when Riley kissed Samantha) there is some race of aliens, far away in the vastness of existence, who have taken it upon themselves to catalogue every single word ever uttered by any sentient creature across the cosmos, then surely they would have catalogued the word ‘mb’ by now.

Quite why they would be constructing such a gigantic tome of knowledge is beyond me. Perhaps in their huge, alien intellect, they have become bored with the trivialities of Euclidean geometry, and the search for a unifying theory for the atomic and subatomic worlds, and have instead turned their attention to writing a really, really bloody good dictionary. The kind that contains every single word ever uttered, including the one I’ve just said – which is ‘mb’.