17

Time passed. I enjoyed Kingsway, but it was so easy not to go to classes and my attendance record got worse and worse. There was a pub across the road, which soon overtook the canteen as the place to be. We’d spend hours there in the smoky semi-darkness, drinking southern comfort, listening to the jukebox, playing darts. At afternoon closing time, with drunken bravado, we’d play chicken with the traffic, darting across to the other side of the road in small groups. You weren’t cool if you didn’t join in. Some of the boys had a competition to see how many motorbikes they could steal in one day. It was quite impressive how many they managed to find – they did a parade of glory down Sidmouth Street, and we stood and watched admiringly.

We occupied the college one night. I have no idea why, but it was fun. We broke into the administrative offices and took it in turns to swivel round in the principal’s big executive chair, using the telephones to call random numbers in foreign countries. T and Zach joined a band and a huge crowd of us went along to watch them play Dingwalls. Zach was so shy he had his back to the audience the whole time. Joel and I clapped until our hands were sore – we were so impressed.

I split up with Adam. T started going out with someone else from his old school. It didn’t really seem to affect how often we saw either of them though – we moved in a crowd, apart from weekends, which Joel, T and I still spent mostly together. I don’t remember T’s girlfriend being there much that year. I don’t think she liked me. I had no idea why.

Joel and I went to Paris together. We were supposed to stay a month I think – to improve our French and visit all the great museums and galleries. I don’t know why T didn’t come, but he gave us his grandparents’ address and told us to be sure to look them up – he would let them know and they’d be thrilled to welcome us into their home.

It was the first time we’d been abroad without supervision of any kind. Joel didn’t speak a word of French and what little I had then, I was much too self-conscious to use. We were deeply excited leaving Victoria Station on the boat train. We felt as if it was the start of a huge adventure. We weren’t at all scared arriving at the Gare du Nord – I remember all the smells and sounds that met us – the unintelligibly rapid French, the fresh coffee, the clinking of the little glasses of eau de vie, the srange aroma of blond tobacco. We hadn’t made any plans about where to stay – we just wandered around that evening, looking at various rooms. Eventually we chose one that was crammed full with mahogany furniture – great big wardrobes and two huge beds with elaborately carved headboards, and long bolsters instead of pillows
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We couldn’t resist the novelty of the bars being open all day long – we drank Pernod, enjoying the little ceremony of pouring water from the pretty jug into the glass and watching the drink go cloudy. It was foul tasting but we felt so grown up drinking it we carried on until eventually it wasn’t so bad. It was the same with cigarettes - We smoked Gauloises and Boyards and persevered even though they made the backs of our throats feel like sandpaper. They looked so cool.

There are only two places I remember visiting apart from bars, one was the Galleries Lafayette, where we bought exquisite little masks on sticks, made from feathers and sequins, to take home as presents, and the other was T’s grandparents’ flat. It took us ages to find so we were later than we had meant to be. It never occurred to us to phone them first. We rang and rang the bell and eventually someone opened a window several floors up. She didn’t look very welcoming. We tried to explain – we shouted up: “nous sommes des amis de Thierry”. She shouted back something long and complicated in very rapid French. We tried again – maybe she just hadn’t heard us properly. Then she went away and a man took her place. “Thierry not here. Go away” he said, and he waved his hand, shooing us off and shut the window firmly. We couldn’t understand what had gone awry. We rang the bell again – hoping to try to explain – they’d obviously got the wrong end of the stick, but no one answered and eventually we left, puzzled and slightly hurt.

The money only lasted a week – it disappeared astonishingly quickly. When we got home we found out that T had forgotten to tell his grandparents we were coming, and he’d been in deep shit at home when they’d phoned late one night to ask his parents why they were being harassed by two drunks who’d refused to leave. We were so embarrassed.

I did a gig – not a proper one like T and Zachy – it was more of an accident. I had a friend called Maria – she was tall and blonde and she lived in a council estate just off Camden High Street. Her family was like no other I’d ever met before. They were Irish and so kind and welcoming – they didn’t seem to mind what time of day you called round. Maria’s dad was lovely. He had this obsession with The Wizard of Oz. There were no videos then, but he had tapes of the soundtrack and he would play them over and over, leaning back in his armchair, eyes half closed, with a rapturous smile on his face. He knew every bit of the dialogue by heart – he never missed a cue.

Maria and I used to sing together a lot, and one day her parents said they’d arranged for us to be in this concert at London University – it was an Anglo -Arab cultural evening and I think we were supposed to be the light interlude between more serious things. We were terrified, and rehearsed until our voices were hoarse. No-one told us there would be a thousand people in the audience – the curtain just opened and there they were - a great sea of faces stretching away. I was shaking with nerves and so sure I would open my mouth and nothing would come out, but we got through it ok.

Afterwards, in the dressing room, they gave us our payment, a bottle of whiskey – and we drank it there and then – me, Maria, and her little brother who’d played guitar for us, dancing round the room, so buzzed from all the applause – it was the best feeling in the world. We’d kept it a secret from everyone – we hadn’t wanted our friends to come and we died of embarrassment when someone at college mentioned they’d actually gone, and how they’d enjoyed our performance.

Towards summer, it was fairly obvious I wasn’t going to stay on at Kingsway. My tutor gently suggested I might like to find something else to do. I had no idea what. He made me an appointment at the careers office in the college the next day and I remember going in that morning still smarting from the huge row at home the night before, my father being especially angry and scornful. We both had very bad tempers and I avoided him whenever I could. It wasn’t hard – he was a foreign correspondent at the BBC and often abroad for long periods of time.

I still had no clue what I was going to say when I got there, and then suddenly I had a brilliant idea – I could really, really piss my father off and do something interesting. By the time I was sitting opposite the employment advisor I had my answer off pat; “I think I’d like to be a journalist”, I said.