Hello everyone, this is Mindreader, I know what you are thinking (after all thats what I do), “Billygean hasn’t posted for a while, what on earth could be wrong?”
Well, she is confined to bed, with suspected Glandula fever, and is just too tired to maintain her writing position for long enough.
She will resume posting when the crazy dreams have stopped.
Wishing you an early Happy New Year.
MR
I walk into old boss’s office, who discovered my blog once I’d left work.
“Hi,” I squeak, and do a little jump because it’s been ages. Madfather is with me and he shakes Old Boss’s hand.
“Where is R?” I say.
“She’s upstairs,” Old Boss says, reaching for the phone. “I’ll tell her it’s a new client for her and she’ll be straight down.”
R walks through the door a moment later.
“Aaah,” she says. “You!”
“Oh,” she says, turning to my dad. “You must be MadFather.”
I raise my eyebrows at the nickname. “You don’t -”
“Everyday,” she says. “I’m utterly addicted. How was Paris?”
—————————————————————-
“Billygean,” a voice says behind me. “We know so much about you.”
“Do I know you?” I say, clutching my wine. Stranger is wearing a Santa’s outfit and fishnet tights.
“No,” Stranger says. “But I know all about your English degree and your lawyer stuff and your new boyfriend. Is MindReader here?”
I smile at the nickname that has taken off so. “Yes, he’s in the living room,” I say.
“Are you over your flu?” he says. “Your doctor’s very mean.”
I am, I admit, completely weirded out by a stranger knowing about my entire life.
“Do you have a blog?” I say, deflecting the conversation before we get around to tampons.
“Yes, I’ll comment on yours and you’ll see the URL,” he says. “Anyway good blog.”
“Thanks,” I say, baffled.
“And by the way this is the first ‘I read your blog’ conversation I have ever had!” he says.
I wish I could say the same.
“Here it is,” MindReader says as we cross from the Jardin de Tuileries to the Louvre.
“Oh,” I say, taken aback.
“Modern, isn’t it?” He says as we admire the glass pyramid.
“But… where -”
“That’s not the museum,” MindReader says, well, mindreading.
“Oh! I did wonder where the pictures would go.”
“Oh my God,” I say in Angelina’s (recommended by my blog readers). “My hair looks orange in this mirror!”
“It’s not,” MindReader says.
“Is it her colour?” I say, pointing out a beautifully posh blonde girl.
“Er, no,” MindReader says nervously.
“How about her?” This time, a redhead.
“No.”
“Her?” a mid-brunette, kind of stripy.
“Yes?” MindReader says. He pulls on the sides of his own beautiful blond hair. “It’s like Russian roulette this is.”
“Are you scared of me?” I say.
“Totally.”
“Your turn,” MindReader says, holding me to my promise of speaking French.
“Bonsoir,” I say to the hotel lobby man. “Demain, je suis departer a six ans.”
“Oui,” he says slowly, his French moustache twitching.
“Check – out – now?” MindReader says, a lilt in his English words that is apparently supposed to make French people understand.
“D’accord,” he says.
After paying we headed out into the freezing night, past the sleazy sex shops and brothels. Yes, this is what happens when Billygean books the hotel.
“MindReader,” I say after a moment. “Did I say six heures or six ans?”
“Now I think about it,” he says. “I think you said ans!”
“Oh my God. I just told the man we are checking out in six years tomorrow!”
“Tomorrow est l’anniversaire of our checking out,” MindReader says, that loud laugh escaping.
“Ha! We are leaving in six years, how do we check out, we must know?”
I am unsure how we faced him when we got back.
“You know quite a lot about my history,” MindReader says as we stroll through Montmartre, steely under the stars.
“Not that much,” I say. “I hate to think of you with someone else.”
“Oh it’s very different though,” he says, a gloved hand waving.
“How?”
“It’s simple: I didn’t love her like I love you.”
And suddenly everything is right.
It is midnight and MindReader is asleep next to me. A terminal insomniac, I have been playing Scrabulous whilst he sleeps.
He rolls over, a puff of warm air across my legs. “Alright?” he says, a sleepy smile.
“Bored,” I say. “Can I look at your photos?” I’m not sure where the impulse comes from. From having spent the day with his family, observing the 25 year history of MindReader that I feel I know little about, perhaps.
“Sure,” he says, asleep already.
He appears near waterfalls whose locations I don’t know, thigh deep in snow, in remote cottages in Skye, Prague, Macedonia, Belgrade, with people who I have never met. In one photo he is slimmer, less stubble, holding a blue fishing net. I wonder where, with who.
I cannot resist the holiday folder. It is some peverse voyeurism. I know they went to Devon, Rhodes, together. I open it, my teeth clenched in anticipation.
For she is, of course, a big deal. They were together for five years, with cats. and it ended amicably. He is vague on the reasons.
She is, to my dismay, beautiful, and in the way that means something. But of course, I think darkly, looking MindReader’s rather beautiful body next to mine. She stands classically, upright, her hair often in a low bun.
She is, to my relief, not like me. She is ginger, bigger boobs, thankfully a bigger bum too. She is photogenic. She has a tattoo. Smooth hair though, and I wonder briefly what MindReader makes of my woolly hair. Bright blue eyes, like his, and freckles everywhere, like him.
They went everywhere, it would appear, drinking and laughing together. Like we do, I suppose.
I roll onto my back, my curiosity satisfied. A new wave of emotion rises; is it something you accept, that you won’t ever know everything about someone, where they’ve been and who with? Or you do try to compartmentalise their life into neat little boxes you understand?
I push their life away from my mind and spoon the sleeping MindReader. And then I do the only thing I know how to do: write.
I adore this photo.
Taken on a lad’s weekend in Nottingham, as MindReader texts me, a tell-tale smile across his features.
I logged onto MindReader’s blog late last night. It was a sort of pining; the long distance stretching out sometimes during the evenings.
This is what I found. It feels good to finally post the missing link – more legitimate, somehow.*
* I must point out his name is not Ian. It would appear he has more than one internet pseudonym. MindReader is obviously the best one. He even gets people calling him it at parties.
*Breathes*
Well that was all very traumatic. Apparently my ftp password became corrupt! Who knows what it was doing – probably insider trading again.
The past two weeks have been quite difficult. I got flu, which in hindsight I don’t think I’ve ever had before. I was incapacitated, and every time I got slightly better I spent the day coughing over the Companies Act which set me back another week. I eventually made it into college for a mock interviewing exam.
The real exam is tomorrow and whilst I’m still not right I am certainly functioning.
I have no done any Christmas shopping. I have however watched approximately 75 hours of A Place In The Sun when ill. Priorities.
MindReader and I are off to Paris a week on Wednesday. MindReader is difficult for me to write about. There is a certainty about him that I feel; a kind of gut feeling that I can’t quite write. Suffice to say he’ll be around for a while.
I think that’s everything! It’s nice to be back.
“I saw that Friends episode the other day where Monica tells Chandler her friend from work is the funniest person she’s ever met,” I say to MindReader.
“Oh right?”
“Would that bother you?”
“Why?” he says, a smile appearing.
“Because. That’s your thing! Being funny.”
“And handsome,” he says.
“Yes.”
“No I don’t think it would bother me.”
————————————–
“Oh here’s David’s speech,” MadFather says, waving a DVD in my face over dinner.
“Who’s David?” MindReader says.
“My cousin. It’s his best man speech.”
“Born comedian,” MadFather says.
“Mmm,” I say. “He is literally the fun-”
MindReader’s blond eyebrows hit the top of his forehead before I can finish my sentence.
