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Even the first time round with Paula I hadn’t been certain, not really. I knew I loved her, but I also knew I was nineteen and didn’t have a clue what life had in mind for me, or what
love
was, for that matter. Back then, I had been blasé and naïve enough to think that, hard as it was, finishing with Paula wasn’t the end of the world; that it must have been for the best and I was special enough (hah) to be confident that no matter how good it had been with Paula, it could only have ended because something even better was round the corner.

Unfortunately that corner soon turned into a roundabout.

For the first few years, I’d put my mind’s insistence on comparing every girl I met to Paula as simply the normal ‘first love is the sweetest’ sentiment they used to sing about in the fifties, and dismissed it. By my mid-twenties, though, I was starting to acknowledge it might be more than that.

I tried very hard to be in love with other girls. I didn’t
want
to have a Paula Fraser shaped albatross causing me spinal injuries as it perched on my shoulders; it could be a real passion-killer at times. And so, with every new relationship, I’d start out with such hope that this would be the one to cure my affliction. We’d be happy for six months, a year, two years. But, eventually, you-know-who would bludgeon her way back into my head, and that would be it. It was
pish
, to be honest.

Paula coming back was the chance I probably didn’t deserve to make it right, to be with the one woman on Earth I actually, truly, genuinely loved. I could not mess this up, and the hard work would start any minute, when Paula walked through the door of Kelly’s. Thank God she was pissed.

‘Are you not supposed to get better looking when I’m
steamin
’?’

Paula had inherited her father’s ability to appear out of nowhere and scare the shite out of a person. I jumped at the sound of her voice.

‘Hey, you found the place then,’ I said.

‘Are you
jokin
’? Andrea bought me my first slippery-nipple in here when I was sixteen; I used to love this place. Buy us a wine, handsome.’

‘So, I
am
still good looking?’

‘Never said you weren’t, just that you’re not
better
looking.’

‘Sorry.’ She was certainly drunk, that was obvious in the way she was teetering slowly towards and then away from me, but her hair wasn’t
too
windswept and her eyeliner hadn’t run
that
much. ‘You look great.’

‘I doubt that very much, but ta for saying so.’

I paid for the wine and we found some wall-space in the corner of the pub. ‘Is Terry away then?’ Paula asked.

‘I wasn’t with Terry; I was with your dad.’

Her face froze. ‘He’s not still here is he?’

‘No, I managed to persuade him
you
were Terry and needed to see me in private, but it was close.’

‘
Jaysus
.’ Paula was suddenly sober(
er
). ‘He didn’t suspect anything?’

‘No.’ Of that I was absolutely uncertain, but I didn’t see any point in worrying her.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because he was standing right next to me listening to every word I said. I thought you were going to go home, but when you decided to come here I had to come up with something to get rid of him. I think I did pretty well, under the circumstances.’

Paula looked horrified. ‘Christ, we need to be more careful.’

I wasn’t so sure the ‘we’ was wholly accurate, but chose not to point this out. ‘It’s okay, we’re fine.’

‘This time, maybe.’ She sounded extremely sober now.

 
Time for a change of subject.

‘By the way, it turns out Terry isn’t gay after all.’

This seemed to get her mind off our close call. ‘Really? How do you know?’

‘Because he spent last night in the arms of a woman, a very energetic woman, by the sounds of things. Turns out he only stopped chatting girls up because he thinks he’s too fat to get anywhere with them.’

‘Aw, that’s a shame. Sammy was looking forward to taking him under his wing. He’ll be disappointed.’

The fact that she had clearly spoken to Sammy and Andrea about Terry made me wonder what else they’d discussed. ‘How did you end up talking about Terry?’

‘I don’t know, Sammy was going on about you working in the pub again and I mentioned what you’d said about Terry.’

‘So they know we’ve met up, then?’

‘Yeah, of course.’

‘And do they know anything about …
us
?’

‘No, I
told
you, Jim, we can’t tell anyone yet.’ She paused. ‘You didn’t tell Terry, did you?’

‘What? No, absolutely not.
Pfff
.’ Simon was right, I
was
a rubbish liar and I hoped Paula was inebriated enough not to notice.

‘Oh for feck’s sake, you told him, didn’t you?’

Guess not.

‘Okay, I did, sorry. But this is a very big deal for me, Paula, I had to tell someone. You don’t need to worry about him saying anything; he knows how to keep his mouth shut when it matters.’

Paula looked like she was about to explode for a second, and then she laughed.

‘We are a pair of eejits, aren’t we? First you blab to Terry then I phone you when you’re having a pint with my bloody daddy.’

‘We’re not the best,’ I said.

‘Well done for not wheeling out the puppy-dog look there, by the way.’

‘Thanks for noticing.’

‘You’re welcome.’ Paula had a furtive look around then reached for my hand. ‘So, what does Terry think?’

‘That we’re both mental and it’ll never work in a million years.’

‘Yeah, that’s what Andrea and Sammy said, too.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s a natural … wait a minute, you told them?’

She lowered her head and looked up at me with an embarrassed smile. So
that’s
what the puppy-dog looked like from the other side. It was cute, on her at least.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t help it,’ she said.

‘We both managed to keep it a secret for less than two days, that’s impressively poor.’ We both laughed. ‘So they think we’re kidding ourselves too, then?’

‘Well, Sammy’s all for it. He met Ingo the last time we were over and they didn’t exactly hit it off.’

‘How come?’

Paula sighed. ‘Ingo isn’t as
liberally-minded
as he could be about certain things. That was a red-rag to Sammy and he turned up the camp factor to eleven. After that Ingo was terrified of him, so Sammy thinks he’s a wimp.’

‘You married a homophobe?’

‘No, he’s just had a sheltered upbringing. I’m working on him, he’ll get there.’ Pause. ‘I mean, I
was
working on him and he
would
have got there. Sorry.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ I tried not to let the stab in the heart show. ‘What about Andrea?’

‘She
does
think we’re kidding ourselves. She likes Ingo, but she understands I’ve not been happy. She just doesn’t believe I’m going to stay here for long, with or without him.’

‘Or me?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ Paula said. ‘She thinks you’re a conveniently familiar rebound.’

That
I could just about understand, but that wasn’t what was worrying me. ‘Why doesn’t she think you’ll stay here?’

‘She remembers how much I wanted to go to Germany, even before I met Ingo.’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘God, of course, you don’t know any of this, sorry. When I moved to
London
I ended up working with this lovely old lady,
Corinna
, in the German Languages department at the Uni. She used to tell me all these stories about the village she grew up in, and I got hooked.’

‘Was she a Nazi?’

‘No, she was Jewish
actually
. She had to be smuggled to
England
when she was a teenager, didn’t go back till she was thirty. But she loved her country so much, even after losing most of her family during the war; it was infectious. She invited me back with her for the summer eight years ago and it blew me away. It’s so beautiful, Jim, especially out in the countryside.’

‘Cool,’ I said, not knowing what else was appropriate.

‘After that summer I decided I wanted to move there, and then I met Ingo and it all kind of fell into place. The school was his idea but it seemed so perfect. I already loved the language and now I loved the place too, combining both was so obvious.’

 
‘And Andrea thinks you’ll go back?’

‘Yeah, she does,’ Paula said, with what I felt was unnecessary wistfulness.

‘But you don’t?’

‘No, Jim, I don’t. I love the place, but I need to be here with my family now. I’ve done my time there.’

‘With your family, right.’

‘And
you
,
ya
feckin’ idiot.’

‘Sorry.’ I relaxed as I saw the warmth in Paula’s smile. ‘Wee touch of the paranoia there, for a minute.’

‘No, it’s my fault. I won’t pretend I didn’t love
Germany
; still do. That doesn’t mean I’m going to change my mind about anything. I love you, Jim; I wouldn’t ever lie about that. Andrea knows me well, but maybe not as well as she thinks.’ Paula reached over and held my hand again. ‘I don’t do rebounds, or at least if I do I don’t tell them I love them. Promise.’

‘I believe you.’ And I did.

We gazed at each other in silence for a couple of seconds before Paula spoke again. ‘This is the point where normal people would have a wee snog, isn’t it?’

‘Yes it is,’ I agreed. ‘And Jesus, do I wish we were normal.’

Paula had clearly decided to appropriate the puppy-dog look now I was finished with it, and it sneaked onto her face again.

‘Maybe we could pretend we are, just for tonight.’ She held my eyes even harder than she held my hand. My legs went all funny.

‘I … can’t,’ I said, for no fucking reason I could fathom at all. ‘I want to, I
really
want to, believe me. But I can’t until you’re single. It wouldn’t be … real enough.’ These words definitely came out of my mouth, I heard them, but their existence mystified the hell out of me.

Paula looked briefly disappointed (a bit more briefly than my ego would have preferred). ‘Am I detecting signs you may actually have matured in your old age, Jim Cooper?’

‘Possibly, but don’t tell Terry, he’s already worried about me.’

Paula leaned forward and kissed the tip of my nose lightly. ‘Is that allowed?’

I nodded. ‘This is going to be hard, isn’t it?’

‘Looks that way,’ Paula agreed.

‘Why the fuck did you have to go and get married?’

‘Because you were a feckin’ wanker twelve years ago.’

‘Ah, okay. So this is all
my
fault, then?’