the cottage

Zach got us the keys to the cottage, It belonged to a friend of his called Jules who lived in a squat near Kings Cross. He knew we wanted to go somewhere to try and write a play, and he just turned up one day with a set of keys. He said he’d come along to settle us in. but he had a gig to play that weekend so then he’d have to be off again.

Jules had no idea Zachy had stolen the keys, and he said we would have to leave the place exactly as we found it or she would go ballistic. He said she was actually quite a violent person, so we promised we’d be very careful. My college friends made him laugh a lot – he had been to our performances, and I think he enjoyed the idea that he could mess Jules around and please me in one fell swoop.

I can’t remember how many of us went in the end. Normally I hate joining things, but a few months before the cottage came up, some of the first years were doing a read through of The Importance of Being Earnest and they were short of a female, so they begged me and eventually I said yes. I had never done drama before and I really liked the rehearsing and the performing. I loved the dressing up too.

It was the year of diamante and hair gel and my hair then was a soft mohican – short back and sides bleached white blonde, then really long on top, hanging down over the shorter parts and streaked orange and blonde. It’s complicated to explain but it worked. Zach said it made me look like an evil baby and I took that as a great compliment.

The two male leads lived in my halls – they were both called Andrew. They had shaved mohicans – one jet black, the other peroxide blonde. Apart from that, they were pretty much identical; low slung studded belts, skinny black jeans, white faces, eyeliner, and many, many earrings. They were also very funny and never stopped giggling.

Another final year student on my corridor, Sabine, and I had rescued them at the beginning of term from the rugby club bigots who lived on ground floor. We had been so angry at what had happened. Poor things; the Andrews, and many others like them, had arrived in London from their small towns hoping, for the first time in their lives, to be able to look and act as they pleased without being beaten up.

Unfortunately there were some other first years – they all seemed to be in the rugby club - who’d brought their narrow-minded prejudices with them. They had been pissing us off since they’d moved in.

Sabine lived in the next corridor to me, and she and I hadn’t minded the first few times when they’d thought it was so thrilling and original to turn on the fire hoses in the middle of the night. Even the fire alarms were acceptable up to a point, although we had grumbled when we’d had to stumble, half-awake, down the stairs and into the car park to be counted.

That was always such a fruitless activity. The official amount of people living in the building was around 100 but there were never less than double that number at night. We always wondered what the point of the counting was, under the circumstances.

We only got really angry when they picked on the Andrews because they were gay. They would gather outside their rooms and bang on the doors shouting obscenities at them, and when they came back drunk from their away games, they would go through the fridge in the kitchen and piss in the Andrews’ milk, laughing loudly.

When we found out, Sabine and I made up a little group of final year students from the top floor. The ringleader, and the most obnoxious of the bigots, was called Tim so we targeted him. At intervals through the evenings, one of us would slip down to the ground floor and push a threatening note under Tim’s bedroom door. They would say things like “Tim. Be afraid”, or “Tim. We will be coming to get you tonight. Make sure you lock your door properly”. We also made collages from things we hoped he would find offensive, and stuck them on his door so he would find them the next morning.

We were quite pleased with the result – we’d never scared anyone before. It only took about a week before he reported us for intimidation. We were all called down to see the manager and Sabine and I were amazed to see Tim really looked frightened. We were more than happy to agree to the manager’s suggested truce, and the Andrews were thrilled with the result, so everyone was happy.

That first play was such fun we did it again - something by Orton, and then we thought it would be even more exciting to try writing ourselves. That was why were all so pleased when Zach turned up with a cottage for us – it was somewhere we could all have a nice long weekend away from London to concentrate properly.

I can’t remember exactly who came now. I know the Andrews were there, and Sabine, and Zach, and an architecture student who’d been Lady Bracknell in drag, and then we took Lizzie along with us to cheer her up. She was in the final year of a European Studies degree and had just had an abortion. We’d supported her through it, each of us thinking how lucky we’d been not to have to make that choice ourselves, and we thought it might take her mind off things.

We didn’t bring much with us. We stopped on the way, at the off-licence, where they sold poppers under the counter. They weren’t illegal as such, but you had to ask for them by name. I’d never tried amyl nitrate before so I was looking forward to that.

We went down by train. The cottage was in Clare – a lovely picture-book village not far from where I live now. We stopped at the Co-op there and bought a couple of boxes of alcohol and some crisps. It was funny walking down the hill with our shopping. No one said anything but we must have looked so out of place.

The cottage was just at the entrance to the grounds of a beautiful ruined priory, tucked away off the main street. It wasn’t a complete ruin – there was electricity and running water and Jules must have been a traveller, because it was furnished with things from all over the world, but apart from that it was pretty basic.

It was early Spring and freezing cold, and the only heating was a big open fireplace. There were logs stacked by the side, but nobody had a clue how to light a fire. I think we tried once or twice but it always either went out, or filled the room with smoke, so in the end we just took all the blankets and wrapped ourselves up in them.

Once we’d had enough to drink we didn’t notice the cold so much. The poppers were fun – they felt like you were going up in plane, only much faster. I can’t remember much about the play but we really enjoyed writing it. It turned into a lewd farce. The plot had something to do with an artefact we found in the cottage – it had fur and feathers and one of the Andrews decided it must be something to do with voodoo.

We each chose another person in the room and wrote a parody of them for their role. I chose Sabine and because she was Swiss-German and slightly bossy, I think I turned her into a leather-clad dominatrix with a big whip. I can’t remember who wrote me, but I became a French au pair who spent almost the whole play lying in a bath, refusing to do any work. I know it was partly set in Ouagadougou because we just loved the name.

We were thrilled with the result and as we travelled home on the train, somehow, Sabine managed to persuade the guard to read it over the loudspeaker system to all the other passengers. Even in a thick Suffolk accent it sounded good. It was such a disappointment when they refused to let us perform it back at college – they said it contravened their obscenity guidelines.