A blushing policeman bearing the past

SECOND THOUGHTS

On Monday morning, having persuaded ourselves that a book fair in Bloomsbury is infinitely more attractive than work, my partner and I find ourselves on the leafy pavements of Russell Square.

Suddenly, the policeman we've just passed turns and shouts back at us: "Hey! Hey there!"

We swing round sharply. "Who? Me?" Jonathan mouths politely. Since when do policemen have powers to arrest the self-employed for skiving? But this PC's jogging urgently towards us - young, shortish, plumpish, a little pink.

He points a finger at me. "I know you, don't I?"

"Do you?" Panicking, I try to think of what I might have done.

"Derby Road," he offers, then, enigmatically, screwing up his eyes:

"Derby Road?"

"We were neighbours. Wittyfoot."

Jonathan and I snigger helplessly. It's that name - the surname of my first boyfriend - now a joke between us. Jonathan can't believe such a name exists.

"I'm Ed's brother," the PC explains earnestly. And at once the uniform, tall hat and fizzing radio dissolve and he's a blurry teenaged face in a house bulging with boys microwaving their jeans, driving their mother insane, eating takeaways or lying flat on the ground dismantling their bikes. This blushing policeman is Nigel Wittyfoot, younger brother of my very first boyfriend, Ed Wittyfoot.

"You won't believe it!" my sister whooped the day we moved into No 862 Derby Road. "There are five boys living next door! Five!"

My 18th birthday party was imminent. We invited all five of them. What else could we do?

I danced all night with Ed, love at first sight. "He's so gorgeous," I wrote in my diary. "The most fantastic smile, big dimples, blonde hair, he looks about 19 though he's actually 22. ... We talked in the kitchen till 4am, then he slipped back through the hedge. ... God, everything's perfect now."

"Been down here seven and a half years," Nigel divulges, fingering his chin strap.

"How is everyone?" I can't even remember what all the other Wittyfeet were called.

"Fine. Ed's in Cambridge, John in Dubai, Pete and Dave still back home in Nottingham."

"And your Mum and Dad? Still there?" The Wittyfoots had a room covered in tartan wallpaper where their Auntie Jean used to push back the furniture and perform a sword dance.

"They're fine."

We stand there a moment longer, with nothing else to say. I've never known this plump, gruff-voiced young man - not then, not now. I doubt we've ever exchanged more words than this. I was too full of myself to notice him then; no way would I have recognised him now.

Jonathan gives me a look. "Nice to see you," I say.

"You too."

"Well, take care."

We collapse giggling into the Russell Hotel. "Wittyfoot! I've actually met one! I heard him say it. Wittyfoot!"

"The trouble is," I remark as we trail around the stands, which smell of ancient paper and cat's piss, "it feels so unsatisfactory. You feel you ought to say or do something, but what? You can't say, `Bye - forever this time. We'll never see each other again!' "

Jonathan cackles.

"I mean ..." I struggle to explain the bleakness of it, "...we'll both die and never see each other again and we wouldn't want to, either, so why stop in the first place?"

Jonathan's found the first edition of Rabbit Redux he's been looking for.

"What makes a person stop another person, purely because they recognise them? Isn't it completely pointless? OK, so our pasts collided briefly at one particular point on Derby Road - so what? And yet it's somehow nice that he stopped me. Why?"

Jonathan looks up from Updike. "Well, think: why did you contact Simon?"

Recently, I wrote to an(other) old boyfriend - the serious, three-year one - at his mum's address, asking her to forward it. I'd been thinking of him and wondering whether, as grown-ups with families of our own, we could now be friends. Life is short. To be blunt, I could not bear the thought of never seeing him again.

His mother wrote a warm letter back and said she'd pass mine on. When no reply came, I wrote to her again, asking for his address.

"You didn't!" a friend exclaimed when I told him this tale. "Julie, how uncool can you get?"

I blushed like a policeman. "Why is it uncool?" I demanded. "I just wanted to know where he was. I liked him."

But the letter his mother sent back was carefully worded; "I hope you will understand," she said, "that Simon is very happily married (underlined) with two children and if he has decided not to renew the friendship then you should perhaps respect that decision."

Thanks a lot. I felt put in my place, sullied, trampish. "I only wanted to ask him to tea!" I protested to Jonathan, who confirmed that I had indeed been staggeringly uncool.

Well, I'm not like Nigel. I wouldn't shout out in the street at any random piece of my past just because it floated by. But I can't see what is wrong with trying to contact someone who has meant something in the past.

"It's not the contacting," Jonathan insists, "it's the trying a second time when he didn't respond the first time."

"But ..."

"No buts."

OK, it's true, I'll never be cool. I'm all forward gears and no reverse. You see, I'm sure Simon never even got the letter. Things get lost in the post all the time, don't they? Or then again, how do we even know his mum passed it on?

I mean, who wouldn't want to be in contact with me?