Look who it is! (10 page)

At the time my A-levels dragged, but in retrospect they seem to have gone in the blink of an eye. But in that blink a lot of things had changed. I had made progress and smoothed out a lot of my creases. I was starting to fit into my skin more; the sight and sound of me on film wasn’t making me feel so nauseous and, once the hormones that had hijacked my body at adolescence had calmed down, I actually started to like myself.

Choosing a university wasn’t the hardship I thought it would be. I had had so many rejections, there wasn’t an actual choice as such. I was stuck in a ‘like it or lump it’ situation. The only university to offer me a place was Middlesex. It wasn’t ideal, to be honest. I was a bit pissed off that Oxford and Cambridge hadn’t come knocking. In my head I had pictured myself riding a pushbike side-saddle across the cobbles, debating with my fellow students or punting on the river with people called Jemima and Crispin. Alas, I accepted Middlesex University’s offer mainly because of its geography – the campus was based in North London. At last this was my escape. I would see life there, I could feel part of something, and at least it wasn’t Northampton.

As with everyone else, there were still things that needed work: my sexuality still hung around my neck like an albatross; in fact, it was not only hanging there, it had started to smell. Frustratingly, the longer it hung there, the more it dawned on me that perhaps it wasn’t a phase that I would simply grow out of. I also noticed that some of the boys in their transition to men were becoming quite handsome. Whether it was more definition in their cheekbones or that few inches taller, it was like I’d had a bottle of wine – people seemed to be getting better looking. I hoped one day that my cheekbones would emerge triumphant from my puppy fat.

I’m still waiting.

A
t last it was time to go to London. When I turned up in the city I was 18 and desperate for adventure. So I was a bit disappointed to stay in halls of residence for the first year. Naively, I wanted a house in Camden near the market or High Street Kensington with trendy, bohemian London types, not to stay in a brick purpose-built block of flats on the Cricklewood border. Although a disappointment at first I’m so glad I did end up in halls because that was where I met some of my best and closest friends. Mum was in tears at the gate as we arrived at the halls that Sunday. I had a duvet under my arm and a potted plant ready for my new room. We’d gone to ‘Food Giant’ across the road and stocked up on soups, ready meals, basically anything with ‘just add boiling water’ on the front.

Once I’d popped my aspidistra on the windowsill and had a sip of my Oxtail Cup-a-Soup, it finally sank in. Wow! I was living alone in London. I couldn’t believe it. This was living. My life had just begun. OK, it was Cricklewood. OK, I was doing a course that was taking me in a totally different direction to where I wanted to go. OK, so I couldn’t afford to leave Cricklewood to enjoy this amazing London life, but it was life.

But anyway, I left my new room to meet my fellow thesps. The bloke opposite was called Michael Chicken (that was his real name). A lovely but strange man, he would often eat cat biscuits and had a sign saying ‘Astoroth’ on his door. I think it was something to do with Dungeons and Dragons. He showed me a photo of when he’d scrawled ‘Revenge’ in his arm, but he had carved ‘Revenje’. Later that year he gave me the shock of my life. I was awoken from a power nap by Michael standing over me, dressed as the ‘Crow’ and saying Mum was on the phone downstairs. (Now I know how Minstral felt with the pig costume.) He was a sweet guy, but altogether a bit strange. Usually if your surname is Chicken, you like to keep a low profile, but not Michael, oh no.

The next person I met on my course was a big girl called Helen. She was nice enough but we never really gelled as mates. The last time I saw her, she was trying to remove a one-pence piece lodged in her face that someone had thrown at her during the Middlesex University slave auction. Ironically, it was a penny more than anyone had bid for her.

As you can imagine, seeing these two hardly filled me with joy. I rechecked my university prospectus to see if it in fact read ‘Circus Studies’, but no it definitely had ‘Theatre Studies’ emblazoned on the front. The prospect of spending three years with them seemed quite daunting. After I’d unpacked, we met some other first years. In a desperate attempt to bond and make the best of a bad situation, we went to a local pub. After being asked in the first pub to donate to the IRA, we decided to move on to the next one where Vicki, a bookish girl who lived downstairs, told us that this was the pub where gay
psychopath serial killer Dennis Nilsen picked up his first victim. The omens for this course weren’t looking good at all.

My saving grace came the next day when the girl next door knocked to introduce herself. It was Catherine. We had a bit of small talk, mainly about the strange man called Chicken sitting in our kitchen in an off-white muscle top eating cat biscuits. I asked her where she came from, and she replied, ‘Kettering.’ That probably means nothing to you, but it’s a town just ten miles from my house in Northampton, and it was music to my ears. Well, we instantly bonded, united by our contempt for life growing up in the Rose of the Shires. As it turned out, we had gone to the same nightclubs. We both dubbed Reflections ‘Rejections’ – see, I was witty even back then. As it happened, we also had a smattering of mutual friends. It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship that is still going today.

Catherine wasn’t doing Drama or Theatre Studies; she was doing French International Business, and it must have been frustrating for her living among these Drama students. She would often spend hours slumped over a hulking great French business dictionary trying to find the right words, doing yet another essay till the early hours of the morning, and we’d come in ‘exhausted’ after doing two hours of breathing exercises and movement. I don’t think she realised how tiring it is being a tree.

The Drama and Theatre Studies course was based at this rather run-down mansion at the top of Golders Green Hill. It had been Anna Pavlova’s old house. Her dying wish was that her house should be used by the council as a centre for
creativity and arts. Looking back at some of the shit we came out with, I’m sure she’s pirouetting in her grave. But the house was very conducive to being a centre of creativity. It had wonderful grounds, a lake and two performance spaces – I won’t say theatres, because that will build your hopes up. You could imagine how beautiful the house must have been in its prime – the tall ceilings, the staircases, the air of quiet contemplation in the large study, adorned with oil paintings and murals before a load of excitable Drama students burst through the doors. What a fall from grace. Even the large mirror in the rehearsal room that Anna Pavlova would practise in front of had a massive crack through it by the time we’d finished there. A fat girl had fallen against it in a dance class. The final insult.

I was still envious of the Acting course over at Trent Park. We were hearing stories that they were doing all these dynamic, challenging dramas, and were working nine to five every day. That was exactly the thing I secretly wanted to do, but sadly I wasn’t talented enough for it. I kidded myself that I enjoyed making things out of papier mâché and wire-wooling the gussets of leotards. Although the course wasn’t to my satisfaction, I threw myself into London life. Ivy House’s location was a wonderful spot, right at the top of Golders Green Park. It was the perfect antidote to the grey of Northampton’s industrial estates. There was the park on your doorstep. A short walk up the hill, you had the pub Jack Straw’s Castle, and then the magical Heath spread out before you. Hamp-stead Heath’s reputation has been sullied a bit of late. When you mention the wonderful walks and impressive scenery,
people look at you suspiciously; but there is something mystical about that heath, especially at one o’ clock in the morning when you’re looking for your bearded collie in the undergrowth.

It does sound poncey, but after doing two hours of stretching and vocal warming, meandering across the Heath with a copy of Ibsen (unopened) under your arm, you couldn’t help feeling like an artiste, even if you didn’t have the range to back it up.

As it turned out, the two hours of breathing exercises on the Monday and the two hours of designing theatre sets on the Thursday were the entire course for the first few months. A few students left, stating that it wasn’t intense enough, but I loved it. After the intensity of A-levels and the weariness of life in Northampton, I felt reborn. We lived like tourists. We had an amazing amount of free time to see the sights, and we visited all the museums, shopped at Camden Market, pottered around Portobello Road, and went to all the cool clubs, after a few hiccups in the first week. We naively believed the hype about these neon super-clubs in Leicester Square like Equinox and the Hippodrome. But we took one look at the Japanese tourists doing the conga to Ace of Base and turned on our heels. We were young and in London – we only did the really cool clubs. We only went in the week, mind, when it was a pound a drink. We never even ventured there at the weekends, when the drinks could cost as much as
£
3.00.
£
3.00
!!
Oh, the outrage.

At the weekend we went over to Food Giant and bought this lovely champagne with a plastic cork, Château Belnor,
for 98p. It was always welcome at Cricklewood Halls. The Drama students would crank up the stereo and dance the night away, while the Business students complained about the noise and asked us to turn it down as they couldn’t concentrate on their French dictionaries. I don’t know what was in Château Belnor, but it would bring out the worst in us. I don’t know if it was the bubbles or the slight whiff of poppers that emanated from the cork-hole. I remember Matt, who was always so sensitive and gentle, banging violently on Thannos’s door and threatening to deck him when Greece gave us ‘nul points’ in the Eurovision Song Contest.

I remember thinking what a loser everyone else was, and that I was so lucky to be a creative type and not one of those boring Business students who don’t know how to have a good time. Of course, all those Business students had the last laugh when the Theatre students graduated. We’d all be waiting for the Pertemps minibus to pick us up in a layby to take us to some godforsaken industrial estate, while they’d be driving past in their sports cars making deals and having power lunches. Obviously, they’d be on Brut and Laurent Perrier at these power lunches, and I’d have a Château Belnor poking out of my Tupperware box. But that was the future. That was a whole three years away; c’mon, let your hair down!

In a way, I was helping to seal my own fate. I was getting incredibly lazy. I didn’t go to London’s Glittering West End at all to watch the hot new plays by the hottest new playwrights. That would mean giving up a night of drinking. I didn’t even put on plays in my spare time to get myself an Equity card. I was blasé about life in London, and anyway, I wanted to be at
the front of the stage, not behind it, which is shameful. Even though we only worked a four-hour week, to our shame we never read the plays we were supposed to. We’d turn up oblivious to who was in it, what happened and why. Instead, we would sit down with a packet of Hob Nobs and watch daytime telly. Besides, when we weren’t focusing on stage sets, sound and directing, the acting modules of the course (which were minimal at best) would concentrate on such styles as Kabuki theatre or August Boal’s Invisible Theatre. I just wanted to be in Hollyoaks.

* * *

Not surprisingly, as I was such a social butterfly, my social outgoings were becoming enormous, and my evening journeys to Food Giant for Château Belnor were becoming more and more frequent. The guilt of doing absolutely nothing in term-time began to jar with my conscience. Mum would ring up asking what I’d been up to, and I didn’t have a clue. I’d start making things up just to throw her off the scent, but you could tell in her voice she wasn’t falling for it. I couldn’t act to my own mother let alone an audience of theatregoers, but she was right to be cynical: I wasn’t doing anything. After a while, doing nothing became exhausting, and I thought that it would be best if I got a job. At least then I’d have some money. My flatmate Karen was working part-time at Tesco Brent Cross and said that there were jobs going – would I be interested? At
£
4.80 an hour the money was good, plus it was double time on a Sunday. I was very tempted to say the least.

I went to see the store manager, Carol, a woman with dyed red hair and a pinched expression. The photo of her, near the store entrance, welcoming the customers in to ‘her store’, was sadly, like the food in the discount aisle, past its use-by date. It had been airbrushed within an inch of her life. It was Dorian Gray in reverse. She took me behind the scenes of the shop floor and quizzed me.

‘What attracts you to working at Tesco Brent Cross?’ she asked with a straight face.

‘Er, I love pushing trolleys around a car park in tight grey poly-cotton trousers?’

I got the job. Result! And with a ‘10% off’ loyalty card, I felt like the King of Brent Cross.

The money came in very handy, and I quite liked sitting there gossiping with the customers, scanning their shopping and learning all the different food codes – 7710 for bananas, 10 for a clove of garlic and 3245 for Braeburns. It was fun – well, for about ten minutes it was fun, then it really began to drag. That was before Tesco turned into the monster that we all know today. I’m sure it was a monster back then, but its fangs weren’t quite as sharp and its grip over the high street wasn’t quite so tight.

Tesco was intent on pushing the ideal of ‘customer service’, the belief that the customer is always right, even if said customer is mentally ill. I used to dread Tuesdays, because that would be the day Stan would come to shop. Stan, for some reason, had taken a shine to me, not in a fruity gay sense, but in an OAP/youngster-type capacity. The problem was that he only had one arm, and every time he wanted something off
the shelf he would have to put the basket down, take the product off the shelf, pop it in the basket and then pick up his basket and carry on. As you can imagine, this got very tedious for him, but we couldn’t allow a one-armed pensioner to push a trolley unaided around a superstore.