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with the appetite-suppressant effect of a broken heart, I’d lost some weight. I was looking healthier and more attractive. Every wish had come true except the one that mattered.

The ‘six months or so’ came and went. I’d occasionally see her at panel show recordings. If there was a Peep Show screening party, I’d invite her. She’d come and we’d chat and it would be lovely but I was never left in any doubt about her status: she had a boyfriend. That was that.

I waited for three years. Isn’t that weird? Aren’t I odd? I can’t explain it other than to say that I couldn’t do anything else. She’s not only too wonderful, she’s too right for me. Any sane straight man would find her attractive but she’s funny, bright, sexy, nervous and confident in ways that could have been meant for me. I suppose that’s why I waited. I couldn’t shake the cheesy thought that it was ‘meant to be’.

Three years after we met at that party (met for the second time I bloody-mindedly can’t not say) she became single again. And we went on some dates again. It was different this time. We started gradually – secretly really. But each week, we spent more time together than the last.

I switched over from feeling cursed, as if the world had been constructed to spite me, to feeling so much luckier than I believed I could ever deserve. If only I’d known I just had to wait three years, I kept thinking. That was nothing – I would have gladly suffered ten times as much, as long as I’d known it would work out and we’d have our chance. We.

It’s so much easier to talk about what makes you unhappy than what makes you happy, I’m now discovering. And I am happy now, I can’t deny it. And I am happy because of Victoria. All my priorities are different now, and better.

In March I asked her to marry me and she said yes. In fact, to my unsurpassable delight, she said ‘Of course.’ Of course we’re getting married. It’s obvious. Perhaps I should have asked her at that party.

There’s a down side to all this – and I don’t mean not being able to drink beer in the bath or scratch my balls during dinner, because she insists on both. Neither do I mean the fact that we won’t be living in Kilburn, although I’ll miss it. But Harlesden it has to be – she insists.

The down side is the fear. The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean. I hope you do, for your sake.

It’s a worry I’ll have to learn to live with because I’m definitely out of wishes. And whatever happens from now on, I want to concentrate on being grateful. I thought I was too old to change – someone once told me that anything you haven’t done by the age of 28, you’ll probably never do. And by my mid-thirties I’d never formed a long-term relationship, never moved in with anyone, hardly ever got off with the same woman twice. Now I’ve met someone who I can’t live without – and I don’t have to.

So I’m inexpressibly grateful, to her and to fate, for this change, this miracle. It would have been an incomplete life, one not properly lived, if I’d never fully loved or had the amazing feeling of it being reciprocated.

- 35 -

Centred

I cross Uxbridge Road opposite the Defectors Weld pub. Now there’s a name! No apostrophe so we can’t be sure that the weld – the joining of two metal parts together – belongs to the defector or defectors. But, as apostrophes are often omitted in names of businesses (Waterstones, where you may well have bought this book, have dispensed with theirs) we can’t be sure that it doesn’t either. Maybe it’s a statement: that’s what defectors do – perhaps metaphorically. Is it a refutation of the argument that suggests defectors, those who desert or leave a country, company, cause or civilisation, are divisive figures? On the contrary, the pub is saying, defectors weld: they join together nations and ideas, their very act of treachery a sign that people are not so different. Somehow. Or is it just a reference to a Soviet émigré’s bodged bit of metalwork?

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