country 2

It hadn’t been much fun stuck in London without Joel. I don’t think we’d ever been apart for so long. I still saw T., but not as much as before, because of his girlfriend. He was working in a record shop and often I’d pop in and smoke a joint with him. Sometimes we’d take some money out of the till and go off to have a drink, and once or twice I helped out selling records if they were short-staffed. I didn’t have clue what I was doing, but it was quite fun to feel a part of that easy-going, slightly chaotic place.

All sorts of interesting people went there – I could see why T. enjoyed himself so much. I don’t think it mattered too much that the till never balanced at the end of the day when I’d been on it, because it financed T’s daily taxi rides to and from work so it can’t have been anything new to them.

I was at another tutors, supposed to be doing my A levels in a year, but my initial enthusiasm waned when I started going out with Matt who had an endless supply of sulphate, and completely stalled when I got into the habit of living off coffee and chewing gum. I was too cold and too tired to work. Occasionally a thin airmail letter would arrive, and I’d sit there shivering, trying to decipher Joel’s spidery, hopelessly bad attempts at spelling the places he’d been; there were so many of them – New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, California – just about everywhere I’d ever heard of.

Joel hadn’t been sure exactly what the job would entail until he'd got there – it had seemed very vague. It turned out that all he had to do was basically go up to pretty girls and ask them backstage after the gigs. Sometimes they’d be pointed out to him, sometimes he was asked to use his initiative. He was a roaring success; I’d known he would be – persuasion was something he was very good at; no one ever turned Joel down – he was very funny, and if you ever did say no to him, he’d look so pathetic and helpless, you’d soon find yourself saying you’d changed your mind after all.

It wasn’t until the spring that he got home, and then I heard the full story - the bits he hadn’t wanted to put in the letters. It had been lovely to see him again; it hadn’t occurred to me before then how much I relied on him. I’d been so relieved to be back in his room, catching the tshirts that he’d brought back as presents, as he threw them to me one by one, laughing as he told me all about the interesting new drugs he’d tried – Quaaludes, cocaine – and about the funny experiences he’d had with them.

He described the time they’d done a whole load of ludes, which sounded lovely, and then driven as fast as they could back to the hotel before they kicked in, and how the next morning they’d found the drummer asleep in his car in the underground hotel car park, sandwiched between two concrete pillars, the front and back of the car all crumpled in, by his attempts to extricate himself, before giving up and settling down for the night on the back seat. It sounded like a brilliant adventure. I hadn’t been too sure when he’d told me he’d tried heroin – fixing it up – only once or twice, but he’d seemed fine, and I was just so glad to see him again, I didn’t say anything.

I looked sideways at Joel; he was chewing a piece of grass, staring at a pheasant as it picked at the gravel. The tiredness and the sore throat hadn’t started until a month or so after his return, and it had been another month before he’d tested positive for glandular fever and had had to chuck in the job.

It was very hot, there was no breeze at all and I yawned; I was tired too; the night before we’d scared ourselves witless. We’d heard something on the gravel outside and it had been too dark to see what it was. It hadn’t occurred to us to use a torch – we’d just huddled together in bed, half-terrified, half-giggling until it had got light – only then had we realised it must have been some nocturnal creature instead of the bogyman we’d imagined. I shivered at the memory.

It was lovely and peaceful at the cottage, just the two of us. Normally there were crowds of Marnie and David’s friends and we had to sit for hours at the dinner table eating complicated food they’d brought from London, being polite and amusing, and playing endless word games. It was much nicer not being with the adults. I hoped I would never end up like them.

“I really don’t want to get old, you know? I think I might kill myself after twenty one, or my first grey hair or something”

Joel sat up and turned to look at me. He had such an earnest expression on his face;

“You’re fucking mad – I’d never do that;” he swept a hand in the direction of the overgrown garden and the trees beyond, startling the pheasant which flew off noisily. “Look at all this; this is where I want to sit and watch my grandchildren playing in the sunshine. I can’t wait.”

I sat up too, and thought for a minute. It had never occurred to me before that it would be something to look forward to. Then I shook my head, picked up a small piece of gravel and threw it at him, laughing;

“Bollocks. You’re the mad one. Who wants to be old and grey?”