Encounter with the Ex

A few days ago, while I was on the train reading the Times online on my IPad and laughing at Caitlin Moran's latest outspoken rudeness on the subject of, I think it was, combing your pubic hair, a man got on at the station with a woman and two boys. I gave them a passing glance before returning to my personal chortles, and then I stopped chortling and gave them a much closer look. Especially the man. He looked very familiar, and after a few moments I recognised him. This man was an ex boyfriend. He was someone I had gone out with very briefly in my teens, in a relationship that ended, humiliatingly, when he sent his bezzie mate to come and break it off because he obviously didn't have the front to do it himself. I have friends who have their own hard-to-believe stories of being dumped - by text message, with the words "because you're just too fat", or by some other ignominious route, but I have to say that sending a mate to tell your girlfriend you don't want to see them any more, probably hits the jackpot, or at least it's a contender. On reflection, and I have to say this didn't strike me at the time, but it began to cross my mind as I stared, with increasing ill will, at this man sitting opposite me, it probably says as much that is awful about his mate as it does about him. If ever one of my girlfriends asked me to go and meet up with their partner instead of them and do the honours I feel fairly confidently sure I would refuse and would probably follow it up with a lecture about doing your own dirty work. Be that as it may, here is what happened. I was due to meet this guy, who I'd been seeing for a few months, at a station, from where we were going to go to dinner. His mate turned up. I went to dinner with him. He broke the news. We'd got through the starter by the time he'd plucked up the courage. I lost my appetite. He left. I went home and cried on my Mum's shoulder. By the weekend I was over it, though I had learned more than a few lessons from the experience, and among other consequences, I dropped contact with his friend as well as with him. So you can imagine the slight shock of finding myself opposite him. Well, he didn't appear particularly discomfited so obviously he hadn't recognised me. The woman he was with was obviously his partner and the two boys looked hilariously like a mixture of both of them. So, the idea of raising the past and demanding an apology bordered far too much on a cack-handed episode of daytime drama, say, EastEnders, and I'm too much of a Britisher and it would take a lot, even from me, to go down that route. But I did indulge myself in fantasising about it. In my fantasy it went something like this. He recognises me. He says, hi, it's Melinda isn't it? How are you doing? He says this, you understand, because he is a shameless bastard who has not repented for his sins. I tell him I am an extremely important person with an extremely important job. He tells me I seem a bit hostile. I take several deep breaths and then I say something like this. That would be because, I say, I have a mental list of the top 5 Blokes I would Go To Great Lengths Never To Meet Again If I Could Help It, and you are on it. And you might think it's not that big an insult because maybe the other 4 are also blokes who treated me badly in a relationship. But you would be wrong. In assessing who to put on this list I don't just include ex boyfriends. I don't just include everyone I know well, or everyone I've ever met. My assessment includes the hairy bloke in a white van who yelled obscene innuendo as I cycled down the street. It includes the bloke I saw chuck rubbish out of his car window and drive off. It includes the grumpy station guard who wouldn't tell an elderly woman when the next train was due. It even includes the courier who put a "Nobody at Home" card through my door and made me trek to the post office to pick up my package, because he couldn't be arsed to ring the bell. In short my assessment is drawn from millions and millions of people. And your stinking cowardice STILL sounds out sufficiently strongly to put you in the top five. And then I get up and leave the carriage, to the applause of other passengers and the embarrassed chagrin of the ex, who meets his wife's accusing eyes and has no words.  I don't say any of this. I don't get off the train, because it's not my stop and would be really inconvenient for my commute if I did. But I think it, in technicolour and minute detail. And boy, it feels good.