17

You had two choices for getting to Kingsway College from Kings Cross station. Either way it wasn’t very nice. You could cross over and take the shortcut through the council estate, risking being spat on by someone from the balconies, or you could walk along the Gray’s Inn Road – a noisy, dirty, smelly walk. Endless rundown shops, none of which looked interesting enough to go in. Mostly they seemed to be grubby cafes and amusement arcades that stayed open all night catering to the awayday girls who came down from the North on cheap tickets to make some money before going back home again. I am guessing they bought their smack there too, but I didn’t know until a few years later that Kings Cross was smack central - I only did pills and speed at the time. When I was a little older, Zachary took me around the back of the station where there were surprisingly pleasant houses – Georgian I think; some derelict, some in the process of being gentrified with skips outside. There was a barrister who lived in one of these who also sold heroin. Maybe that’s where the girls went.

I can remember choosing Kingsway after having a conversation with Matt, who was there the year before me. He said you didn’t actually need to go to classes – they were really laid back about it – and even when he did go he said it was only a few days a week. For a while I had thought about boarding school, like some of my friends were doing, but I think my parents had just about given up on me by then and they said they weren’t going to throw anymore money at my education. It was fair enough – I had totally buggered up the exams I’d taken in the summer. I had done no revision for my history – I’d never revised before and always got by so it hadn’t occurred to me to read notes or anything, and I’d left my art A level early because I was going to see the Rolling Stones at Earls Court that night and I’d wanted to get changed before. So I opted for Kingsway. They did a pre-foundation course, where you mixed art with a few other A levels.

I quite enjoyed the art there – we did interesting things, like life drawing and screen printing. The photography classes were the best though. They were held in an annexe close by, called the Hugh Myddleton building. It looked like a typical Victorian school from the outside. You could still see the two entrance doors – one with “girls” and the other with “boys” written across the top. We also did English here, in one of the conventional classrooms on the ground floor. I hated English. The only nice part was the walk over with Zach where we’d discuss how best to poison the teacher. She read us endless poems by Sylvia Plath, standing on a table for some reason, waving her floaty black sleeves as she droned on and on and on – and when she had finished with Plath she turned to Hemmingway and Thomas Hardy. I think I stopped doing English before anything else.

I still strolled over with Zach for photography though – I wouldn’t have given that up for anything. The school had been built on top of the Fleet Debtors Prison, and the basement had remained untouched since those days, except for the odd lick of paint and so on. The cells made perfect darkrooms, and workrooms. They were all jolly with fluorescent figures painted on the walls, and the acoustics were wonderful. In my memory, Thin Lizzy played on a constant loop, at top volume, while the lovely tutor – a man called Dennis who was tall and gangly and looked like Peter Cook with a straggly beard, - shuffled around, smiling at us vaguely while we experimented with the enlargers and chatted with each other. He even let us smoke, although I don’t really think we were meant to with all those chemicals and no windows. He was great.

When we were in the main building, we spent most of our time in the canteen – there was a particular table we all sat at – it was a third of the way down, on the left, as you entered from the stairs. I am trying to remember if any of the boys I knew there didn’t wear denim jackets, jeans , and an earring – and no-one springs to mind.

You could pick out Adam because he was the one with the hole in the side of his nose from too much cocaine. It was healed up now, but you see where it had been. He was Matt’s little brother. Matt had left Kingsway and was working as a reporter now. He had a fast motorbike, a cool leather jacket , and he used to race the planes as he drove to work near the airport. He was 18 and sarcastic about everything and he made me laugh a lot – I idolized him from a distance. Adam was the same age as me – he was funny too but also a little lost looking. The Stannard brothers kept open house and we often went over there.

Their dad had been the editor of a national newspaper. He’d divorced their mother and then had a stroke which left him in hospital until he had died a few years before. The money had dried up and they’d had to move from their large house in Highgate to a tall thin one in Archway, just near Suicide Bridge. Adam showed me photos of them as children, all dressed in little pale coloured coats with peter-pan collars and button up shoes, posing in their father’s big office. Their mother was a journalist too. She’d written a book about bringing up children as a working mother but it hadn’t sold very well, and the boys had made a whole armchair of the remaindered copies . She had a new boyfriend now and she’d been offered work for a year on an island in the Caribbean so she had filled a freezer with food and left the boys in Archway.

We had such fun there while she was gone. The freezer stayed full - they lived only on peanut butter sandwiches and alcohol the whole year. The boys lived at the top of the house and we often stayed over, smoking dope, doing speed and listening to music, laughing and joking. I met other people from their old school – a progressive one in Hampstead – that was where Adam had got the hole. He was my boyfriend for a while so I spent more and more time there. Sex wasn’t as important then as it had been before. I was enjoying the company of friends more.

We used to go drinking in Hampstead. The Hollybush was our favourite pub. It got so crowded, people would spill out onto the little courtyard. When the pubs closed we would gatecrash parties, or wander up to the Heath. Once we lit a small fire, but there had been so little rain that year, it grew bigger and bigger and began to spread alarmingly fast. Soon we could hear sirens in the distance and we saw torches coming nearer. We were all so wrecked – we’d been smoking dope around the fire, but we leapt up to escape whoever was coming to get us, half giggling, half terrified. It was like a nightmare – each time we ran in one direction we would see another big torch at the end of the path. I have never run so fast in my life. Eventually we managed to get off the Heath, and we collapsed in a heap, laughing, until we’d got our breath back.

Even though Adam was only sixteen and couldn’t really drive, we often took his mother’s car out for joyrides. We went really fast and I loved it when the tyres squealed like on Starsky and Hutch. Once though, Adam took a bend too fast – it was on a road that edged Hampstead Heath and there was a big bang as one of the tyres exploded. He lost control of the car and we careered towards the drop into the Heath. I was terrified. I thought we were going to die, but eventually we managed to stop and when we got out it was clear the car was totally ruined. We somehow managed to get it home, bits of metal scraping loudly along the ground the whole way, and he showed Matt while we sat drinking brandy. Matt decided the only thing to do was to get it stolen and dumped somewhere so that their mother would be able to claim on the insurance. That night, some other friends took it away and left it somewhere while we called the police to report it stolen. I said I was okay to go home, but as I changed at Kings Cross, on the escalator, my legs suddenly felt like jelly and crumpled beneath me. I’d never heard of shock before.

Unfortunately the police never did find the car that time. It had to be restolen and redumped in ever more obvious places before they finally saw it – it took about four tries and Matt and Adam were beginning to worry. We all joked about how stupid the police were but underneath all the bluster it was clear to see that they would have done anything not to hurt their mother. They really loved her and they knew she didn’t have much money.