Love Story

“You drive me round the bend, Thomas” she would say, her voice dripping with distain. “You never do anything for yourself.”

She was wrong of course, but I never argued back. I never once raised my voice to drown out hers. I just let her speak. It didn’t matter to me that she was chastising me like a mother scolds her child. Just to hear her was to know that she was there, that I was with her, that she was mine.

“I’m having a breakdown, Thomas” she would say, her voice quivering like a car running over a cattle grid. But I knew she was being melodramatic. She was an actress after all. An attention seeker. I would listen to her, and obey her in silence.

She had a pointed, slender beauty. Perfect for the stage and screen. The directors loved her poise, her calm. But I loved her voice, the way her lips formed her vowels. No trace of an accent. No hint about where she had come from. She was always ‘here’.

She was my must-have accessory. After a show, she would be on my arm, and I would open the car door for her. Just sitting on the leather seats turned her on, and she would whisper in my ear all the way home.

“I have a new job, Thomas,” she said one evening. It was voice-over work, she said. She would be recording her voice for other men. “We have gone as far as we can go,” she said calmly, and stepped out at the traffic lights.

I feel as if I have been driving ever since. The flat no longer felt like home without her voice wafting through the rooms, without her constant nagging and ordering and complaining about where I had gone wrong. I never spend time there now. Instead I sleep in my car, and take long journeys through the busiest cities and to the farthest beaches. So long as I keep driving, and I keep my sat-nav switched on, she will always be there, telling me where to go.

4 Replies to “Love Story”

  1. A collegue at work (who’s a bit more IT savvy than me) has programmed his to do the directions in various “comedy” voices – scouse scally, welsh sheep farmer etc. It’s mildly amusing for the first 10 minutes……………
    Seriously, get rid of it – getting lost occasionally is part of life’s rich tapestry. There’s nothing like happening across a remote country pub, having a drink in it and then never being able to find it again.

  2. “There’s nothing like happening across a remote country pub, having a drink in it and then never being able to find it again.”
    That’s funny, my TomTom does just that! I find sat nav systems are good at taking users across fairly obscure minor roads – good fun.
    Some years back I lived in London and found that the best way to get from A to B (and often the most interesting way) was to use a compass. I’d end up going down lots of interesting streets and inevitably missed lots of the traffic – sat nav kind of does the same sort of thing.
    No, no, no, keep your sat nav, continue your love affair – we are, of course, both a multicultural and multitechnological society after all 😉

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