The Theory

It's her suicide; I can't stop thinking about it.
My mind appears to have latched onto it, locked tight.
I wonder how it must have felt for her, those last few hours, minutes¦ and then the last few days, of course, perhaps even months, years: was it a spur of the moment kind of thing? Or had events in her life been leading up to that moment for a long time? I wonder how her life must have been. I wonder what thoughts were going through her head when¦
It was an overdose, I think. She died on Christmas Eve, three days ago. And of course the first question that it raises in my mind is what she took: paracetemol, perhaps? That's not a nice way to go. A few years ago I wouldn't have believed just how nasty a death it would be. I believed in the romantic idea of taking the pills, maybe washing them down with alcohol, then just falling into a luxurious sleep and never waking up again. But no, that's not how it is at all. People wake up in hospital after taking a paracetemol overdose feeling fine, perhaps not even remembering that they've taken the pills at all, only to be told by the doctor that there's nothing they can do about it; the damage to their liver is irreparable; they've got two or three days left at the most, and it won't be at all luxurious.
The organs in your body close down one by one. Your skin turns yellow, as do the whites of your eyes. And then you're in agony, racked by crippling stomach pains, and by then there's no going back. The organs in your body shut down one at a time until there's only your heart left beating, and then¦
I met her once, years ago. Her dad was a friend of my dad; we went to their house a few times. I must have only been eight or nine at the time, but I remember her. I remember seeing her in her judo costume. I remember how much older than me she was, and how beautiful she looked. Now I try to imagine how she looked when they found her¦ and please don't judge me too harshly for being vaguely aroused by the thought.
It gives me a giddy feeling thinking about it.
Anyway, there hasn't been anything in the papers about it yet. I've been scouring the local paper and Teletext every day¦ several times a day. I want to know more, that's all. I want to know what she took. I want to know what took her. I want to know her story¦
I want to be with her.
If I'd known that she was going to commit suicide on Christmas Eve, I'd have gone round to her house¦
¦And said what, exactly?
"Hello, Andrea. I'm Will. You might remember me¦ we met when we were younger. My dad was a friend of your dad's...
Then Andrea says: "Okay. What do you want?
And¦
And nothing, alright. I wouldn't have been able to come up with anything. I've always been terrible when it comes to talking to women.
One woman in particular¦

The Love Interest in this particular story, ladies and gentlemen: my Childhood Sweetheart, otherwise known as Jessica McKellar. She was in my year at secondary school, but I didn't really meet her until 5th Form, when¦
When I was skiving Theatre Studies, alright? You can hardly blame me for that: I mean, Theatre Studies? Come on! What the fuck is that all about? Besides, it wasn't your average skive. I wasn't your average skiver. There was always a deep-rooted intelligence in all that I did, something so incredibly profound in my rebellion that it flew right over all my teachers' heads. I was skiving on the stage, for one thing. Skiving my Theatre Studies lesson on the stage: how about that? How ingenious is that? Doesn't it just make you want to go into a quiet room and think for a while?
Anyways, the stage at that moment in time was filled with scenery and props for a play that was being put on by the Amateur Dramatics Society. I can't remember the name of it, only that us stage-crew members had a lot of fun pissing-around with all their equipment (we found a half-bottle of whisky in one of the costume pockets once, and shared it).
The stage was empty; the scene was set.
I can't remember what I was doing.
And then the Princess entered¦
I met my Juliet.

I want to apologise here and now for the poor quality of this script. It was written in something of a hurry, as I'm sure you'll come to appreciate. The chances are enormous that you won't actually be reading it now at all¦ and at this moment in time, I don't think that'd be too bad a thing.

Anyway, onwards¦
Forever onwards.

I can't remember what we talked about, that afternoon.
She was a girl, so I suppose that I talked about utter shite. It was even worse, I think: I think that I told her I was gay.
A wise move on my part, I'm sure you'll agree.
A real fucking ice-breaker.
Jessica McKellar was something of a star in our year, one of those fortunate (questionably fortunate, I guess) girls whose chest developed much earlier than the rest. Yeah, her cleavage was pretty damn impressive. She wore a top on Non-Uniform Day that pressed those babies real close together, so tight that you couldn't even fit a pencil between them ' but you'd have sold your soul just to be given the opportunity to try.
And maybe I couldn't help but stare at them, that day. I can't remember. Maybe I was good, and just looked at her face. Maybe I looked her straight in the eye, and she made a personal note-to-self that I was different from other guys because of it. Or maybe she just didn't catch me looking¦ or maybe she actually liked me looking. Who knows? I guess that we'll only ever know our own perception of such events. We might try to look at it from the other person's point of view, but there'll always be that distance¦ that insurmountable distance between ourselves and everybody else.
All I know is that I didn't make a complete hash of our first encounter, because she stuck around for a long time after that. Maybe because I told her I was gay. Who knows?

The world was in a deep-freeze this morning. The ground looked batter-fried, bone dry: it crunched and cracked beneath my feet as I made my way up to the station. Pitch-black too, but my eyes soon adjusted to it. No cars on the streets. The streets were mine and mine alone; I owned the whole damn town, the whole fucking world. Everybody else tucked-up nice and warm in their beds, no idea what was happening, what was ending. I had Joy Division on my CD player; smoked a cigarette on my way up. Past all the houses, the shops¦ all the places that had been there since my childhood, though of course most of them have changed their names since then, changed hands. Change, I suppose: everything changes, right? Except me. You. We stay the same while everything around us changes, evolves, turns into something that we don't even recognise¦ until we feel like strangers in our own damn town, and we realise that we're getting old, saying the exact same things that our fuddy-duddy grandparents always used to bore us with.
I got to the station with twenty minutes to spare. I didn't leave a note, so when my mother gets up at 5.30am (the same time she gets up every morning, regardless of whether she has anything to get up for) she'll hopefully assume that I'm in bed, still. I planned all of this meticulously; I can't imagine anything going wrong. By the time that my absence is noticed¦

I don't know what went wrong with me, to be perfectly honest.
I mean, my primary school teachers adored me. I wrote stories; I was great at that. I won a poetry competition when I was ten, held by the local paper. Got my picture taken, all that. But I always felt like a phoney, somehow: a fake, even at being me. When I look back, I can identify a few warning signs, indications that all was not well:
Starting a book entitled "101 Ways to Commit Suicide when I was seven. (I could only think of four, by the way).
Taking twenty batteries to school one day, wiring them all together in the hope that they would explode. (It didn't work, but I got absolutely bollocked for it.)
Following Alan Bowe to the woods, that day¦
Being "the wife, as he put it.

The platform isn't empty, like I imagined it to be. Commuters, I suppose¦ just people going about their everyday lives, travelling to work to earn money for their wife-beating husbands, happy-slapping kids; maybe to fuel their heroin addictions, or put food on their tables. Who knows? Most of life goes on behind closed doors. Sometimes you read about it in the papers; other times, well, maybe it just goes on and on.
Like the girl. The Unfortunate Woman.
Taking those pills on Christmas Eve while most folk were wrapping presents, drinking sherry, kids grilling their parents for information regarding whether Santa Claus truly was coming¦ she was taking those pills, focused 100% on self-immolation, whilst the rest of the world¦ went about doing what the Rest of the World always does, I suppose. And what did she matter, in the scheme of things? Destined to be just another statistic, another example of The Winter Blues¦
I was wrecked. I stumbled to Midnight Mass at the local Roman Catholic Church; sang the carols with real gusto, then staggered out before they started all that Mass shit. I was looking for something; I didn't know what. Redemption, perhaps. Think I was expecting God to make a public appearance for once, tell me that everything was going to be alright.
Funny how that word gets into your head. That single word. Funny how it worms its way into your mind and stays there: sticks fast. A door that, once opened, can never be closed. A question that, once posed, cannot be ignored. The cadence of it! Such beautiful sibilance, the way it rolls off your tongue like a dream¦
So I was probably passing-out at the same time that she was checking-out. Did she find what she was looking for? And what happened to the presents that she never got around to opening? I wonder if she'd have changed her mind if she'd known that she was going to get a DVD player or the CD that she'd been asking for or maybe even an engagement ring from her boyfriend¦ would it have changed anything?
I could ask myself the same question, I suppose:
If I knew that tomorrow would be better, that everything was going to change¦
Would I be here, right now?
Would I change my mind?

Jessica and I, we started to hold hands.
It wasn't a sexual thing, mind, in light of the fact that I had officially declared myself to be gay. No, it was purely platonic. I used to sit back-stage with her for hours, just playing with her hands while everybody else went about their business. I did this thing, you might have heard of it: telling the person to close their eyes, then running your finger along their wrist, up their forearm, telling them to say "There when they feel your finger get to their elbow. If you do it right, the person always gets it wrong ' they always say "There when your finger is a few inches away, for some reason. Anyway, I was in heaven doing that. I could have quite happily done it all day, everyday, for the rest of my life.
She had such beautiful, smooth skin.
Damn it, she was just a Goddess¦ simple as that.
Her eyes¦
They haunt me to this day, and right now I wish that I could close them somehow. Close the whole damn thing.
Look away.

The air was see-your-breath chilly, every exhalation an Indian smoke-signal to the dark. I didn't sit down, all the benches were made of metal and I didn't want to freeze my arse off, so I just stood and smoked and looked at all the people, obviously searching for an attractive girl to look at. But there wasn't one. I guess that attractive girls don't get up at that time in the morning, or they have better things to do than wait for a train at 6:56am.
I have a thermos flask filled with Southern Comfort. I took swigs of it while I was waiting, and it had the desirable effect: it warmed my nerves, every blood vessel in my body; made me feel like I was curled-up on a rug in front of a fire. I took care to drink it in moderation, mind. I can't afford to get arseholed, not now. There's a hell of a lot left to be written and done.
The train came rolling in, bang on time. Predictably, there were no passengers getting off. I took the furthest carriage, hoping against hope that the ticket-collector might not find me there. He did, of course. Bastard.

But I was prepared, of course. I had purchased my ticket a week earlier, over the internet. Got a good deal, not that money is really an issue anymore. Financial security is hardly something that I strive for, these days. It's all or nothing, now: last-gasp stuff.

A fortnight ago I was on the internet, just browsing, mind¦ not for pornography, mind¦ When Jessica just popped into my head, I remembered everything, and I typed her name into one of those people-finder sites¦ not holding up much hope, mind. Just curious, I suppose¦ having lost all hope in the future, I was delving into the past for my single good memory, hoping that it might somehow still be there, preserved, exactly how I left it, waiting for me the same way that I waited for God on Christmas Eve.
And it was. Her name came up. The search-engine wielded her name, and of course my first instinct was that it was false: just some other Jessica McKellar, perhaps some obese fifty-six year old with athlete's foot¦ but no, of course I couldn't just dismiss it like that. I thought about it for a while: McKellar is hardly a usual surname, is it? And hell, it was worth a go¦
What with there being nothing left to lose, and all that.
It gave me her address. Her telephone number.
Three days ago, Thursday night, I paced around the living room in my house for about three hours before finally deciding to pick up the phone and give her a call.
It would probably turn out to be nothing, I thought, but it was worth a try. Say if she answered, I told her who I was and she said something like "Oh Will, thank God! I've been waiting for you to call for the last six years! I love you¦ I always did, I always will ' or something to that effect. And then I'd go down to meet her, and her face would erupt into a grin of joy just as soon as she saw me and she'd run¦ hug me so hard I nearly fell over¦ and then what? I dunno: maybe we'd run through fields of corn together, that kind of thing. Have kids. Settle down. A happy ending.
She picked up on the twelfth ring. I could lie and say that I was about to hang up, but nah: I was pretty-fucking-desperate. If she hadn't answered on the twelfth, I'd probably still be waiting for her to pick up now.
"Hello? ' a female voice, instantly recognisable as hers ' as if the phone had somehow, by the wonders of modern technology, transported me back to 1999, and I was talking to her again she same way that I talked to her that night, that night when we talked until 3am and she was whispering, she told me that she was hiding under her bed covers because she didn't want her parents to know that she was still up¦
That was probably the last time we talked on the phone.
I was silent for too long. "Hello? she repeated - sounded irritable this time. I had to hurry up.
"Hi¦ er¦ is that¦ erm¦ Jessica McKellar?
(I must warn you right now that, although it's already blatantly obvious that I'm a poor writer, it's in my dialogue that my ineptitude really comes into its own.)
"Yeah.
"Oh¦ hello¦ I just had to go for it, grasp the nettle. Nothing to lose, everything to gain. "This is¦

I gave up on overdoses a while ago. Anything you can buy in a chemist is no damn good, even the over-the-counter stuff.
I tried Nytol, once. Took a whole packet. I woke up the next day feeling like shit, went back to bed and slept for the rest of the day ' but that was it. It certainly didn't do me any good, but it certainly didn't kill me either.
Next I tried paracetemol. Woke up in hospital the next day with a drip in my arm, again feeling like shit. It wasn't worth it. The nurses treated me like dirt; I'm sure they punched their needles into me with a little more force than was absolutely necessary. And then the doctor gave me a speech about how nasty a drug paracetemol is, how if it doesn't kill you then you can end up on dialysis for the rest of your life ' etc, etc. They aren't too bright, are they? I mean, don't they understand that, when people take overdoses, they're not really that concerned about the consequences? But of course they have to give you that speech; they have to ensure that they make you feel even worse than you already do. Anyway, I was on the drip for a day; a psychiatrist came to see me (in their own fucking time, as per usual), asked the same old questions¦ and that was it. I went home the next day, bought a litre of vodka and started thinking about the next time.
I wonder what Andrea took.
Whatever it was, it must have been good.
Rumour has it that she was a druggy, so maybe it was heroin, something like that. One of the better ways to go, I've heard. I mean, have you seen Trainspotting? Renton looked pretty fucking happy to me, "A Perfect Day and all that. If only I'd thought about it a year ago, maybe I'd be dead now¦ and I wouldn't be on my way down to Eastbourne to meet the love of my life now, would I? I guess it's true: everything really does happen for a reason. Like what happened to me in March this year¦

It's a long story.
The train has only just stopped at Preston, so I figure that I've got plenty of time to tell it.
If my damn writers' lump stops hassling me, that is.
Yeah, so it was a few weeks after the paracetemol overdose. God bless the NHS, so bloody disorganised that there was never actually any follow-up from my hospital admission. I don't know, it felt like they were daring me to do something more serious. But by then, I had no real interest in getting peoples' attention. I just wanted to die; I didn't want to wake up in a hospital bed again, some other "I'm God, actually doctor giving me yet another speech about how suicide is bad for my health.
There could be no mistakes this time, and after weeks of deliberation, I finally drew-up a fool-proof, 100%-guaranteed plan.
I'm not going to wax lyrical about this. I'm just going to give you the breakdown:

¢ Buy rope (at least 10ft long), plus a litre of vodka and a bottle of Pulmo Bailly cough medicine (for the codeine in it)
¢ Wait until everyone has gone to bed, then take equipment (plus torch, CD Player (Joy Division, of course)) to St Catherine's Wood
¢ Find a suitable tree (must have a strong branch at least 20ft of ground for me to sit on and tie rope to)
¢ Tie rope SECURELY around branch and around my neck, then:
¢ Drink vodka, cough medicine, until I pass out and slip off branch¦ even if the fall isn't sufficient to break my neck, I'll hopefully be too out of it to feel any pain.

There. Brilliant, isn't it? Utterly perfect, right? Nothing could go wrong¦
Except that I didn't tie the rope to the branch tightly enough, did I?
Fucking retard.
Yeah, the rest of it went smoothly; it ran like a fucking dream. I necked the vodka, the cough-syrup. Even had time to write a note in the interim, plus sing "Show me the way to go home about a dozen times¦ and yeah, I did pass-out like I expected and yeah, I did slip off the branch¦
And guess what happened next?
Why, I woke up in a bloody hospital bed, of course.
Feeling like shit, of course.
Only that time there was a Psychiatric Nurse by my bed, watching me 24:7 to make sure I didn't try again.

Incidentally, my other plan was to check into a Bed and Breakfast somewhere miles away under a false name, then slit my wrists in the bath.
I bet that I'd have picked the only Bed and Breakfast in the country that didn't have a fucking bathtub.

I'm in a "Silent Coach, apparently.
Lots of expensive-looking business-men with expensive-looking laptops, and I bet that most of them are playing Solitaire.
There's a couple sitting a little down the aisle from me. They've got a kid, she looks three or four years old¦ she's blatantly on some kind of sugar rush, nigh-on climbing up the walls, and her parents don't look particularly happy together. I'll give you an example, just a sound bite:
Man says: "Looks like this is gonna be a fun trip, huh?
Woman says: "It's your fucking fault, giving her all those Jelly Babies.
Man says: "Well maybe if you hadn't let her sleep so late¦
Woman snaps: "Don't even get me started, Gary! Tell you what, let's put you in charge of getting her to sleep, okay? You can get up at half-fucking-six with her every day, see if you can do any better?
Etc, etc.
Hearing them squabble is painful for me, a bit too close to home.
I've been there, ladies and gentlemen.
I've had that conversation before.
A little further down the aisle from them, a very attractive woman whom I keep trying to make eye-contact with¦ she got on at Preston, and just as soon as I saw her waiting on the platform I silently wished that she would get in the same carriage as me. And she did! Not only that, but she sat pretty close to me as well. She had the whole carriage to choose from, but she chose to sit¦ well, relatively close¦ and I'm ecstatic about that. She's even reciprocated my eye-contact, once or twice, but the jury is still out as to whether or not she means it.
Think my CD player has got enough battery left to last me the whole journey, but I've got some spares if it doesn't. Got plenty of pens, as well. I like gel pens the most, ones with rubber-grips. No good with pens that smudge, seeing as though I'm left-handed. My mother is left-handed; so was my elder brother, and my sister as well. We're all blue-eyed, our family. People always tell me that I've got beautiful eyes and beautiful handwriting. I've got my dad's "Irish Eyes, apparently. I guess that I should be grateful¦ except that neither my Irish eyes nor my beautiful handwriting have ever gotten me anywhere.
A girl in secondary school once told me that I was "cute, but that's it.
Not counting the girl that I nearly married, of course.
The mother of my child.
The pretty lady, she got off at the last stop by the way. I know, I know: it's a crying shame. Who knows, she might have been my soul-mate, something like that. If only I'd said hello, she'd gotten to know me¦ who knows? She might have fallen in love with me within twenty-six seconds. She didn't even look at me when she walked past. If she was playing hard to get, then, well that's just fucking stupid. Anyway, what was I going to do? Go up to her? Ha! Or maybe she'd have come up to me¦ asked me out¦ and I'd have most probably screamed; the universe would have imploded; I'd have blinked and found myself locked in a rubber-cell with a straight-jacket on, which is probably where I really belong right now.
She's gone, anyway, so there's no point in thinking about it.
Life, eh? Just when you think that it can't hurt you anymore, that it's about as bad as it can get, it pulls out yet another instrument of torture¦
Shit, I need to concentrate. I need to focus on the task in hand. I'm going down to meet a girl that I haven't seen in six or seven years. She could be married. She could have kids. What would I do then, eh? Go back home? What if she doesn't fall in love with me as soon as she meets me? What if she is nothing like the person that I remember her to be? I'm putting an awful lot of eggs in a very small basket here, folks¦ I really am taking a flying leap, here, and I don't think that there is a safety-net beneath.
Not like when we were kids, and nothing we did actually mattered¦ we could get hurt, sure ' graze a knee or cut a lip every now and then ' but nothing truly bad could ever happen to us¦
Anyway, I'm wasting time.
I haven't even told you about my theory yet, have I?

My theory¦
Imagine that this was a suicide note, right?
Imagine if I was travelling down to Eastbourne not to meet my childhood sweetheart, but to throw myself off Beachy Head?
And imagine, then, if someone found this note.
Imagine if they were a publisher, say, or just someone who liked it so much that they sent it to one.
My theory is that it would get published, and that the fact that the author had committed suicide would ensure it a small amount of cult success¦ in fact, I think that it would become renowned as a classic ' purely because it was written by someone quite clearly on the edge, on the verge of ending their life.
Shit like that sells, doesn't it.
Take Kurt Cobain, Richey Edwards, Ian Curtis, Sylvia Plath, all the rest¦
The amount of people that got into their work purely because of the artists' premature demise, though of course they'd all try to deny it.
If this was a suicide note, I think that it would be massive.
It'd be like the biggest piece of graffiti ever written!
In death I would be famous, up there with all the rest¦

I was in hospital for eleven weeks.
It was pretty unremarkable, really. All you need to know is that after eleven weeks I was cured, 100% better; they sent me out as a new man, completely transformed.
I can honestly say that I am never going to go back there again.

I wonder what she looks like now. It's only been six, seven years, so she can't be that different, but who knows? Maybe she got fat, or alopecia, or had a sex-change or something. I know that I haven't changed. I see the same old mess in the mirror now that I've always seen¦ hell, I still get that same damn cold-sore in the same damn place every winter, and I still have the same speech impediment that I've always had: that feeling of drowning in my own words, choking on them, not being able to get anything out right¦
Maybe she's exactly how I remember her. Yeah, and when I meet her she'll run up to me and grab me and smile into my eyes and ask me what took so long? And I'll tell her that it doesn't matter, all that matters is that I'm here now, and that I always will be¦

Wow¦ time has really flown. I knew that I wouldn't have much¦ I figured that I would only get chance to write on the train between Oxenholme and London Euston, just over three hours; it's the tube after that, and then one-and-a-half hours on a train that most probably will not have a table. So yeah, I knew it was going to be tight, but¦ damn, there was so much that I wanted to tell you about! But I guess that it'll just have to wait. Approaching London Euston, now, and then it's on the tube to London Victoria, then onwards to Eastbourne¦
Jess and I arranged to meet in the Beachy Head pub, would you believe?
Approaching the station now, and I'm starting to get butterflies.

Ah, well I got to the pub earlier than I thought I would, so I have a little time to end this.
It feels strange being here, knowing that the number-one suicide-spot in the country is just over the road. And looking around the bar, I can't help but wonder how many people came for a drink in here before going out and jumping off the edge¦ wonder what their stories were, the thoughts rushing through their heads as they took the last few gulps of beer before stepping out into the cold, crossing the road¦
That girl again. The one I can't stop thinking about. Her last few minutes¦
What went wrong between Jess and I?
It was going so well for a while, us holding hands and 'smooching', I guess you'd call it ' if it wasn't for the fact that we weren't going out and that I was officially gay, that is. Anyway, it was wonderful. I walked to school every day feeling excited, butterflies in my stomach, just at the thought of seeing her again.
One day I kissed her on the forehead and told her that I loved her, and she said it back.
Looked into my eyes and said it right back.
But we were just kids, right? We had no idea what it meant. Or maybe it was only then, as teenagers, that we could ever truly know what it meant to be in love, and as adults we would forget the notion entirely: 'love' would become just a word on greetings cards, some pointless appendage on the end of every text message, slip from being an abstract noun to a concrete one¦ our teenage love an idyll, the first high that we would forever chase but never find. Or maybe it was all just bollocks¦
What went wrong? It's all my fault, I guess. That old cliché about not knowing what you have until it's gone, y'know? I watched it all fall apart, and I did nothing.
I fell in love with suicide; that's what happened.
My other childhood sweetheart.
Started cutting my arms, starving myself, writing suicide notes as though they were shopping lists, and pretty soon a door slammed down between Jess and I¦ a seed of distance planted that just grew and grew¦ until the day came when I could see it in her eyes that she had given up on me. I didn't notice any of this at the time, mind: I was completely oblivious. The only pain that I felt was that which I inflicted upon myself, and the only words of support that I craved were those of the weighing scales¦ everything else was just this blur of activity around me, people with angry voices ruining everything by saying that they cared about me. And then one day it stopped, everything slowed down again, and I looked around and saw that pretty much everything that I had cared about was gone. Jess included. The last time I saw her was at Kendal College, in the cafeteria. It was I that had persuaded her to go to that college; I'd told her that it would be great, that we'd eat at MacDonald's every day and have fun together¦ maybe fall in love for real, who knows? But that day in the cafeteria, after everything that had happened, she just walked right past me, no recognition at all. Nothing.
But, well, maybe I can make it up to her now.
I've been given a second chance, right? Finding her on the internet¦ her answering the phone, agreeing to meet up with me here, in this pub¦ who knows? It could be the start of something. A new beginning for me, y'know? A chance to put right what once went so hideously wrong. Maybe she'll walk through the door in a few minutes, scan the room before spotting me, then her face will erupt into a smile and she'll come practically bounding across the room, I'll be about to tell her "Sorry. Sorry for how I treated you back then, but she'll put her finger to my lips before I have chance to say it, she'll say "Shh! It doesn't matter now. All that matters is that we are here, now, and everything is going to be alright, and within an instant, the dead-weight of the last few years will simply fall away, evaporate in the heat of her mega-watt smile¦ and yeah, maybe everything will be alright.
Except that she isn't coming, of course.
Ha!
I never even arranged to meet her, did I.
As soon as she picked up the phone, I hung up.
I mean come on, what was I thinking?
Anyway, it's nearly closing-time now: time for me to bring this to an end.
It wasn't a complete lie, by the way:
I am here to meet a childhood sweetheart of mine.

And on the back:

I guess that my theory was correct.