Dialogue: Cruel jolts from an overlooked passion

By JOE BENNETT

It's all so unfair. Of course no one ever said it was supposed to be fair, any of it, but somewhere in the back of the skull most of us harbour a half-baked notion that cosmic justice of a sort rules in a rough way.

Well, it doesn't. I'll show you.

I've just received an e-mail from a woman overseas. Seventeen years ago, I taught her English or French or I don't know what when she was in her last year of school.

But that was a long time ago and in a foreign country and I'd forgotten her. But she hasn't forgotten me. Oh no, sir. And now, out of what is aptly called the blue, she gets in touch and tells me that all those years ago she had an all-consuming crush on me.

Back then I never noticed a thing. Nothing unusual in all that, of course. Schoolgirls are given to crushes on their teachers, and I doubt if I have been the only young man in history so solipsistic as to be blind, deaf and numb to the feelings of anyone around him.

But there's more.

A year after she left school, we met once again at a party and she danced with me. She writes that I danced well. I do not dance well. I dance like a corpse or I dance like a threshing machine, in direct proportion to the booze on board and with no intervening stages.

Her deluded memory of my dancing only confirms the intensity of the crush. But after we had danced she drove me to near where I lived and we sat in a parking lot in a scene that sounds badly Beach Boys or even Beverly Hills and, lord love me, we kissed in the car, chastely, she says.

And then, apparently, but all too believably, I said something insensitive which she quotes but I won't and then we parted.

I remember none of this. So far so dire. But there is still more. A few days later I was packing to leave that country forever and ever amen and she came round to visit. How I could have been blind to her persistence I can't tell you, but clearly I was.

She tells me she brought with her a bottle of wine and we shared it as I packed my suitcase with essential stuff and threw other stuff away.

And I gave her a heavily annotated copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. She still has it, 17 years later. Oh dear.

Oh dear for several reasons, the oh-deariest of which is that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Crappiness is a dreadful book. I do not know who annotated the copy I gave her but it certainly wasn't me. I never got past chapter one.

I gave it to her, I'm sure, simply because I wanted to be rid of it and I have a superstitious fear of throwing any book away, however much I might hate it.

And now, a married and much-travelled woman, she tracks me down and tells me this. It's all so unfair.

Of course I don't mean unfair in that we didn't go to bed. That's about the only fair bit in the story. No, I mean unfair in the way that the dice of emotion are so often so cruelly loaded.

What was intense and probably painful for her was neutral and forgettable to me. The events that for her were so fraught with significance, for me were just dust in the wind.

The feelings that kept her awake at night were invisible to me. The book that she has kept, to me was trash. The thoughtless words I tossed at her, she thought about.

And yet, of course, I have many times been on the other side of this ledger. There are times in my past so poignant that I will not write of them, so tender still that to touch them even today is to wince a little, mainly at my own remembered crassness.

Times of affection unreturned and even unnoticed, from which came memories and mementoes, tokens of intense feeling, some of them stolen, that I will keep till I die.

They mean nothing to anyone but me. They're trash. To the object of my desires they meant nothing at the time. While I rolled and pitched on the high seas of feeling, the other sailed oblivious through calm, dispassionate waters.

Though we shared a time and place we lived in different universes. Those times have influenced much that has followed.

I have e-mailed the woman back. I have said that I am sorry, sorry for all of it, sorry for insensitivity, sorry for universal unfairness.

But sorry's a fat lot of use.