Read by Gloria Sanders
The main lights go down and the projector whirs into life. “Are you ready?” my partner asks.
“Oh yes,” I grin excitedly and a button clicks on the laptop. Suddenly the white bedsheet that my partner has hung up as an improvised screen is filled with the first slide of a Powerpoint presentation. In big, bold, red letters it reads “St Valentine’s. A Day for Love”
There’s another quiet mouse click and a large question mark suddenly appears at the very end of that sentence. I “ooh” sarcastically as the presentation swiftly moves on to the next slide.
“Little is known about the actual St Valentine.” My sweetheart reads the slide’s text as it appears in bulletpoints in front of me. She’s donned her glasses and is clearly using her office voice. “Indeed, it is thought by some scholars that the person himself is an invention. The most likely candidate for the real life Valentine was a rather unremarkable bishop in the city of Terni in Italy. It seems that the one interesting thing he ever did was to get tortured and martyred by the Roman state. On February the fourteenth.”
“None at this stage”, I smile back – holding up my pen. I feel that this displays the right amount of attentiveness. As if I’m taking notes.
“Right then, I’ll move on,” my love continues, pressing a button on her laptop. A giant image of Lenin fills half the screen, no doubt rousing a gang of angry Slavs.
“Modern day Leninist thinking dismisses romantic love as an instrument of capitalist domination, giving workers hopes and dreams of a fulfilled life within the confines of an exploitative and oppressive regime.”
It would probably be true that most folk who know me would not describe me as the sort of person who would be listening to modern Communist critiques of love on St. Valentine’s Day. The path that got me into this spot started just over three years ago when we had only just started dating. A Valentine’s Day early in a relationship is a hideous minefield, one to be negotiated with diplomacy and care. A balance needs to be struck between two very different romantic messages. On the one hand, you’ll want to make a sweet demonstration that you do kind of like this person a bit. However, you do not want to give any signal that suggests you might be some weird obsessive, whose insides are furiously boiling with a desperate desire for immediate wedlock.
For a fortnight I wrestled with this issue, before finally deciding on a small, but thoughtful gift to give. I planned the relaxed way I would give her the gift. I even wrote a few lines of slightly deprecating comments about it, just in case it was all appearing a bit too serious.
She forgot it even was St. Valentine’s Day.
“Say what now?” she gasped as I surprised her with the gift, her face a perfect mixture of being both mildly shocked and slightly appalled. “Happy Valentine’s Day” I laughed awkwardly, my present still held out towards her.
“Is that still a thing?” she added incredulously, “For smart women like us. Really?”
The third slide was mainly a set of charts and figures, illustrating quite how much money was involved. “It is estimated that the United Kingdom spends nine hundred and seventy six million pounds on Valentine’s gifts, meals, flowers and day trips. To put this into perspective this money could be used to train thirteen thousand nurses or build one point five brand new hospitals. The biggest spenders tend to be young men with existing debt problems”
For our second Valentine’s Day, I opted for sarcasm, and ordered a very large teddy bear with “I WUV YOU” emblazoned on its chest to get delivered to her place of work. She wasn’t amused, especially when her patients kept reminding her how lucky she was to have someone so thoughtful in her life. She stopped off at a petrol station on the way home, and got me a card – which she forgot to write anything in – and some flowers – which I’m allergic to.
“You’re not trying!” I protested.
“I literally do not understand this whole stupid day.” She snapped back.
“What is there to not understand? If you’ve any questions, you can just ask me.” I picked up the teddy bear. “Better than that, you can ask Sir Cuddles, can’t she Sir Cuddles?” I made the teddy bear nod excitedly.
“Just give it a fucking rest” she sighed wearily. I covered Sir Cuddles’ ears.
“On a quiet morning on February the fourteenth, nineteen twenty-nine” slide four began “while good folk were going about their business in the Lincoln Park neighbourhood of Chicago – the peace was rudely disturbed by the violent gun murder of seven members of the North Side gang. Shot under the direct orders of Al Capone.” There then followed a succession of photos from the crime scene, each click of the mouse revealing a grislier image than the one before.
I put my hand up at this point. “Erm… is this strictly relevant?”
“Hold on a second!” she is still clicking her mouse and suddenly there’s an audio recording of a scream, the slide goes red and “The St Valentine’s Day Massacre” bleeds into the middle of the screen.
My beloved looks back at me with a smug grin that seems to say “I think I answered that one, thank you very much.”
Almost exactly a year earlier, my sweetheart flashed me a wide beaming smiling with me as she sipped a cocktail on the balcony of our hotel. “Best idea ever!” she laughed, gazing out at the Sun setting over the Caribbean sea. “Can you imagine how cold it is at home right now?”
“Better than that” I replied, “I can recreate it for you.” I snuck back into our hotel room and came out with a present. It was a small custom-made snow globe containing a small photo. We’d only recently decided to move in together, and doing so during the deepest depths of Christmas chaos had been stressful but brilliant. The photo in the snowglobe showed the two of us, grinning in Santa hats, standing in front of an open door at our beautiful new place. My partner shook the globe and stared at the picture through the fake falling snow. “It’s just… perfect” she whispers, wiping one eye.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, darling.” I laughed, placing my arm around her.
“Oh dear God!” she replied in mock exasperation. Well, not entirely mock. About sixty per cent mock, and at forty per cent genuine exasperation. “Not this. Again.”
“You love it really,” I begin teasing. “And you just admitted to me that the gift’s perfect.”
“The gift is. This holiday is. Why do you have to drag it down with references to some stupid day?”
“It wasn’t so stupid,” I retorted - and I was at forty per cent exasperation at this point now, “when you agreed we should go on this Valentine’s escape.”
“Yes, an escape FROM Valentine’s. That’s what I thought this was. Just us, together. A glorious beach, an enormous double bed and as few reminders of a drab English February as possible.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Right – I’m not going to let it spoil this holiday – but next year. I swear, before the miserable fourteenth comes round again I am going to prove to you that the whole thing is an undeniable fraudulent, expensive waste of time. And you will beg me, yes, beg me to forgive you for all these years of nonsense.”
“Prove it!” I laughed, “How on Earth do you expect to do that?”
“Meet Dan,” my sweetheart continues. She’s clicked through to the next slide and on it is a photo of a smiling young man with glasses on. It’s clearly been taken from a set of stock images, where it’s probably found under some sort of generic title such as ‘hipster librarian’. “Dan is intelligent and independent. He’s a vegetarian, a feminist and hates the Daily Mail. In other words, we like Dan”
I nod vigorously at this. Good old Dan.
“But – oh no – Dan is sad.” There’s another click and the generic photo on the slide is replaced with a new one. It’s the same stock model, but now he’s all miserable. “Why is Dan sad? Well, Dan is single and it’s Valentine’s Day. And due to societal pressures today is the day that Dan feels more alone than ever. Research has shown that more single people under the age of forty call the Samaritans on February the fourteenth than any other day of the year. Single men, in particular, are especially vulnerable to…”
“You win.” I interrupt.
My sweetheart looks up at me from behind her glasses. “Really?” She sounds genuinely surprised.
“Look I know Valentine’s Day is a load of bullshit, and I know it was invented by big, evil corporations and everything like that. I don’t mean to be fucking annoying when I do something about it, it’s just I love you and sometimes I like having an excuse to do something that shows that.”
“Darling,” my partner interjects, “It’s not that. I mean – Really? As in Already?” She looks down at her notes. “I have barely started and have at least sixty-seven more slides to go through before we’re done here. And there’s loads more graphs, and facts, and animation to come. There’s even going to be an interactive quiz with Mr Cuddles.”
“I’ve worked on this for weeks to get this ready for today,” she continues, and I begin to suspect she’s trying to suppress a grin. “I’ve done this all for you. For you, my dearest, on your Valentine’s Day. Your most wretched of miserable Valentine’s Days. So if this day means anything to you, you are going to sit there, watch, make your occasional sarcastic remarks and we’re are going to go through every single one of these slides together before I am possibly going to allow you to come to a final conclusion.”
I tentatively raise my hand. “If this is going to take a while, can I go get Valentine’s cake I made for us to eat while you continue?”
She pauses for a few seconds, “Oh all right then.” She sighs, “Honestly, I fucking spoil you.”
(c) Alan Graham, 2018
Alan Graham studied "Creative Writing" and "Economics" at UEA and is still unsure which discipline relies on make-believe the most. More of his stories can be found at www.alangrahamwords.com
Gloria Sanders’s work includes audio-book narration for the RNIB and collaborations with Cabinets of Curiosity. She has performed her devised one-woman show with Hide and Seek Theatre, The Clock, at the Brighton Fringe, the Pleasance, Islington, and the Artscene Festival in Ghent. She is fluent in Spanish.
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