Title: Boy Meets Girl

Author: Linda Burgess

In: Sport 13 Spring 1994

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 1994

Part of: Sport

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Sport 13 Spring 1994

Boy Meets Next Girl and First Girl Meets Next Boy

page 37

Boy Meets Next Girl and First Girl Meets Next Boy

He meets Mary at the university and she will do it, and he can buy protection from the chemist because no one there knows him, as long as he waits long enough to ask the chemist himself; you could never ask for such terrible things from the young girl so often behind the counter. And because they do it quite often and go to the pictures together and sometimes to parties and he’s finished his BSc they get married. It’s probably her that suggests it but it sounds a good idea to him. So they get married and go home and he gets a job teaching science at his old high school and she gets a job in the chemist because she’s a trained pharmacist. Often she’s the only one in the shop—no wonder there’s a rash of unexpected pregnancies that summer.

What about Megan then? She’s done well for herself has Megan, gone for a holiday to America just the year before and there she has met an exotic foreigner, from Syria he is and he says he will kill anyone who looks at her. She is so flattered she marries him, no one has ever loved her so violently. But she has stayed friends with David’s mother and writes to her every Christmas and also when there’s another dark and ruddy beauty of a baby born. And when David’s mother gets each letter a tear is shed every time for there are now two What ifs for her to fret about. For Mary is a pale English girl and she cannot warm to her. If it’s raining it’s always raining and if it’s hot she can hardly breathe. And when the one child is finally born it’s a pale little english thing like its mother and it cries a lot and fretfully pulls at the woollen jumpers that David’s mother has spent hours knitting. It’s because she is allergic to wool, says Mary, then dresses her in nylon that she’s bought from Mothercare. Nylon! thinks David’s mother as she knits another woollen jumper and puts it in the post to Megan for her latest baby. Oh Megan, Megan, lost in America, come back home over the sea, to me.

And time passes.