Oh my God! They Kilkenny!! (3)

So I was quite chuffed with that. In fact, dead chuffed. Really, a highlight of the year. All that knuckle-cracking and double-jointed gymnastics finally paid off. But seriously, it meant a lot to me. Maybe it’s a power thing or a self-confidence thing. Yeah, I think it’s a self-confidence thing. That I did that. And I know I did because she actually yelped in a very uncharacteristic fashion. Ok, gonna stop writing about this now because it’s getting silly. I just wanted to write it down somewhere. It’s like passing my driving test all over again!

So after that, we went into the others (stop sniggering) and had a few more drinks. I think then I feel asleep again and next thing I know I’m in Lindsay’s bed. I really didn’t want to be there, mainly because it’s her bed and I didn’t want to kick her out. But obviously in my tiredness she had coaxed me into it. She wasn’t there though, and before I had a chance to consider this, she was there. And the same happened again, although it’s only her that’s telling me this. Imagine if I was a girl telling you all this. How I had drunken, half-unconscious sexual relations and barely remember it now. You’d all call me a slut. Although you all think that anyway so…

I still do this childish thing of clinging on to any “lovin” I get til it rots away. I did it with Deb (did I ever tell the story here of that crash-and-burn exercise?) and I’ve done it for years. I’m a mess, honestly I am. I just want to hold someone for a few hours.

But not her. Lindsay and me are so different in so many many ways. We sat in her front room the next day for hours. We kissed a bit, but apart from that we had very little to talk about. She’s so unbelievably quiet and painfully shy at times, which makes me look like this loudmouth idiot. Well, more than usual. It’s more on a microscopic level, like we’d almost match except when, like what happened later on that day, when I see fifteen huge flags representing each member of the EU in a park I’m fascinated. She sees them and says “ok then”. She says that a lot to me, and it hurts a lot. That guy Dave from Cork, I got on very well with him. He says he wants to get into politics. We got talking about politics. We have very similar views. What does Lindsay do? Calls him a nerd. So I asked her does that make me a nerd to? Because I’m just as interested. No, Joe’s not a nerd, she says. Why? “Because…look, you just aren’t, ok? Trust me.”

We got talking a little more as they time came for me to catch my train. By the time I had to go, we were on better terms. I walked down to the taxi rank and realised she wanted to come too. I laughed, thought it was like that Friends episode where Chandler says he’s going to Yemen and Janice insists on following him right to the plane, meaning he has to actually fly to Yemen. Lindsay was going to make sure I went to Dublin. I laughed. I never knew what a terrible decision she had just made.

What a tiny detail it would have been. That little bit in the whole Kilkenny adventure where I’d wait for the train back. Sitting on the platform waiting for the train, maybe reading a magazine. I’d bought Newsweek especially to read on the platform. I’d wait maybe twenty minutes, the train would come and I’d get on, falling asleep all the way home.