You Then, Me Now

by Nick Alexander

  In my final year, though, Gran died, and Mum was surprisingly upset about it. I mean, you could hardly say they were close. Mum had told me very little about her childhood with Granny Eiléan, but what I did know from the few stories she had told me – tales of evenings locked in her room without meals, and beatings and forced confessions of her sins – made my blood curdle.

  All the same, Mum seemed to cry about Gran’s death every time I phoned. A few months later, Right-House laid her off as well, just like that, after fifteen years – the bastards. So my anger shifted to concern, and I started to visit more often.

  On one trip home, I found Prozac in her bathroom. On another, I found an empty blister pack of generic Valium in her bedside cabinet. Mum went quiet for a while as well. I’d catch her staring into the middle distance looking vacant, as if her soul had temporarily left her body. Whatever it was that had previously been broken within her seemed to have shattered, under stress, into a thousand tiny pieces, leaving her unable to even pretend any more that everything was OK.

  So despite the ambiance at Mum’s being pretty miserable, in my more optimistic moments, I started to envisage moving back once my course was over.

  I was missing the sea breeze and the twinkling lights, I suppose. Plus, the town was purportedly going through a bit of a hipster revival. There were clearly worse places to live, I told myself.

  And that’s how I came to find the envelope.

  TWO

  LAURA

  No matter how you look at it, Conor changed my life.

  I met him at a rave party in 1994. That seems such a ridiculous thing to say, especially coming from a sensible soul like myself, but it’s true.

  My mother was a deeply religious Catholic who for some reason seemed determined to inflict upon me the same sadistic upbringing her own parents had inflicted on her. And outside the home, my education had been assured by St Angela’s Ursuline. Suffice to say, I hadn’t had the wildest of childhoods, and I’d taken far longer than most kids to cut free. Mum continued to treat me like a child well beyond adolescence, giving me curfews, kicking off about where I went out and with whom, and it wasn’t really until my mid-twenties that things loosened up a little.

  Because my father, a rarely present merchant seaman, had left us when I was eight (to shack up with a woman he’d met in Denmark – oh, the sin!), I hadn’t felt able to move out, as that would leave my mother entirely on her own. Plus, living in London, I would never have managed to pay the bills single-handed anyway. But when I was about twenty, Mum, who was a nurse, began to alternate between eight- and twelve-hour shifts with occasional sixteen-hour ‘sleep-busters’, as she called them. These sleep-busters, specifically, provided a window of opportunity that had never existed before. So though officially I was always at home tucked up in bed, I increasingly managed to cut loose from her terrifying iron rule.

  Most of my friends came from similar backgrounds to mine, and they had definitely all suffered the same guilt-inducing education at St Angela’s, so none of them were particularly crazy either. With one exception: Abby.

  The first thing Abby ever said to me was, ‘My dad says this is all bollocks.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I whispered. We were in a Bible study class.

  ‘My dad says all this water-into-wine stuff is about as true as Doctor Who,’ she explained confidentially.

  I was ten years old, and coming from where I came from, no one had ever suggested any of this was open to debate, let alone ‘bollocks’.

  ‘Shh,’ I said. ‘That’s blasphemy.’ Blasphemy was severely punished in our house, often with physical violence.

  But I had already decided to make Abby my new best friend.

  By age twenty-five, we were still best friends, and Abby had well and truly broken free.

  She was dating a beautiful black guy called Winston Harper. He looked a bit like Terrence Howard – he had the same beautiful eyes – but he was taller and more muscular.

  Winston’s best friend was a well-known DJ called Carl Fox, and that friendship opened the doors to just about every rave party in Britain. And in the early nineties there were a lot of raves in Britain. Almost every weekend Abby and Winston would head off to some muddy field or another to dance the night away.

  Abby had been trying to convince me to go with them for years, but as I was of a less-than-adventurous nature, and because most of the music Winston favoured sounded like computer beeps, I’d resisted. I was terrified, too, of what my mother would do to me if she found out.

  By 1994, though, it seemed the rave party thing was nearing its end. The newspapers were full of outraged reports about irresponsible youngsters leaving fields littered with beer cans, and the government was legislating to make all the ‘orbital’ parties around the M25 illegal. And I can only admit that this almost universal condemnation started to make them seem quite attractive to me. So finally, that August, I let Abby convince me.

  ‘It’s gonna be one of the biggest parties the country has ever seen,’ she told me one evening. ‘It’s going to be like the Woodstock of dance music or whatever, and one day you’ll have kids and you’ll have to tell them you stayed home and watched it on the bloody news, Laura. Just think of the shame!’

  ‘I can’t, Mum would go crazy . . .’ I said, starting to spout my usual fears. But then I remembered Mum was on a sleep-buster that weekend. ‘Actually, she’s got a double shift on Saturday,’ I said. ‘Would we be home for four a.m.?’

  Abby shot a complex glance at Winston. ‘Oh, of course,’ he said. ‘Absolutely.’

  We travelled to Northampton in a Transit van. I was wedged in the back between boxes of Carl’s records while Abby and Winston travelled up front. I felt sick at first – I couldn’t see out of the windows – but I soon fell asleep, so was fine. When I woke up, we were at a racetrack and thousands of people were already milling around the open, grassy space in the centre.

  We carried all the boxes of records on to the sound stage and I was finally introduced to Carl. He was already quite the star by then but he was very ordinary and friendly towards me. Next we went to a beer tent and drank pints of lager from plastic goblets. Everyone was smoking joints and I remember being shocked by the fact that there were no police to stop them. Both Abby and Winston tried for the umpteenth time to get me to smoke, but I refused. I have never smoked a single cigarette in my life. I have always found the idea utterly repulsive, and that’s always struck me as rather lucky really.

  The music started about nine, and what can I say? I didn’t like it. I did my best to dance by emulating those around me, and just occasionally there would be a snatch of a tune I could latch on to, or a moment in a song when an actual human voice came through. But mostly it still sounded like random computer noise to me. I was always far more Britpop than techno.

  By eleven, my feet were aching and I was feeling well and truly bored. I had lost track of Abby and Winston too, which made me want to cry. But then the music stopped and everyone cheered and there they were again, holding little bottles of water. ‘Carl’s on next,’ Abby told me. ‘You’ll love it. Here.’ She proffered one of the bottles and I frowned.

  ‘Is that water?’ I asked. I suspected she’d used the bottles to smuggle vodka in or something. Water seemed unlikely, to say the least.

  ‘Of course it’s water,’ she laughed. ‘Hydrate, dear. Hydrate!’

  I shrugged, unscrewed the cap, and swigged. It was, to my disappointment, just water. ‘Are we going soon?’ I asked. It was almost midnight, and if we were going to be home by four we’d need, by my reckoning, to get going.

  At that moment, Carl appeared on stage and people started to scream deafeningly. He began flicking through his records, propping specific ones up so they stuck out of the box.

  ‘We’re not going anywhere for hours,’ Abby said. ‘So take a chill pill.’ She held out one hand and opened it, revealing a small yellow pill, printed with a smiley face. ‘Here, take this,’ she said.

 
; ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because then you’ll stop worrying about getting home.’

  ‘And because if you take it you’ll have a really good time,’ Winston added.

  ‘And if you don’t, you’ll just carry on being a bore,’ Abby said. ‘All right?’

  ‘Is it drugs?’ I asked.

  Both Abby and Winston fell about laughing at this.

  ‘But I don’t want to take drugs,’ I said, while trying to imagine what kind of punishment Mum would mete out if I did and she found out. Mum was still perfectly capable of slapping my face or sending me to my room without dinner. She might even phone the police and report me. Even at twenty-five, I still didn’t have the faintest idea how to stand up to her.

  ‘How long have we been friends?’ Abby asked. ‘Forever, yeah?’

  ‘Well, yeah . . .’ I conceded.

  ‘Then trust me. It’s just an E.’

  ‘But I don’t see the point.’

  ‘Well, of course you don’t,’ Abby said. ‘That’s why you need it. Don’t be such a bloody Virgin Valerie.’

  Virgin Valerie had been the most unpleasant, pious member of our class. The comment cut me to the core. I reached out and took the pill between finger and thumb. ‘You’ll look after me if it makes me ill, right?’

  Abby nodded. ‘I’ll look after you. But it won’t. I promise.’

  I moved the pill towards my lips, but then hesitated. ‘And I won’t end up addicted or anything?’

  ‘It’s an E,’ Winston said. ‘It’s not bloody crack cocaine. Jesus!’

  And because I felt like I was being unreasonably prim and proper, and because a few people were laughing at me by now, and because I’d spent half of my short life trying to shake off the various shackles of my upbringing, I took it.

  ‘So, what happens now?’ I asked, once I’d taken another swig of the water.

  ‘Now, we dance!’ Abby said theatrically. Carl had just put his first record on and the crowd had started to scream and throb and bop up and down. The excitement was palpable.

  I forced myself to sway my hips to the music – at least Carl’s stuff had a rhythm I could understand. But I still didn’t like it much, I was desperately craving a bit of Blur or Oasis, and so I soon decided that the drug wasn’t working, and that was fine by me.

  Over the course of the next thirty or forty minutes, though, my fake dancing became more real, and I slowly, almost unnoticeably, ceased feeling bored. Then a further half an hour into Carl’s set, something happened. I honestly couldn’t tell you today if the music suddenly got better or whether the drug took effect, or whether perhaps it was a bit of both, but something amazing happened to me, something I can only describe as ecstatic.

  The crowd had become ever more tightly packed until we were dancing as a sole organism. Your rhythm really had to match that of your immediate neighbours, otherwise you bumped elbows uncomfortably, and so gradually everyone had begun to groove together.

  Carl was doing something clever with his music, too, something I didn’t immediately understand. It seemed to build slowly, become denser, ever more complex, ever more compulsive. And then he would drag all of the bass out of the sound leaving you hungry, thirsty, craving for the rhythm . . . Somehow, almost undetectably, it would start to build again, hinting at something that was coming, at some brighter future just around the corner. And then with a flick of the wrist – from where we were dancing, you could see him do it – he’d whack some lever on his sound deck and the bass would come rushing back in, enveloping you, soaking you, rolling over you like a breaker and when this happened the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up and I’d smile uncontrollably and bounce up and down with the seven thousand people around me. There were so many of us that I swear I could feel the ground beneath us vibrating. If you’ve never danced to that kind of music then I can only really describe the force of that feeling by saying it was the closest thing I’ve ever felt to an orgasm – every part of me was tingling – and it happened over and over again.

  I started to copy the various dances of the people around me. Abby swayed like bamboo in the breeze, looping and rolling her arms over each other while smiling beatifically. I had never seen her look so beautiful. Winston had an entirely different style of dance, barely moving his feet and chopping with his hands as if he were doing slow-motion karate moves. He danced as if he were in a Perspex tube limiting himself to the space within, or perhaps moving as if one of the laser beams that floated above our heads might chop off any limb that extended beyond the space he’d been allocated. At one point he put his arm around my shoulders and shouted, ‘Are you having a good time?’

  ‘I am!’ I shouted back. ‘I never liked this music before! Crazy!’

  ‘It’s the E,’ Winston said. ‘It’s a decoder. It makes no sense otherwise.’

  And then the music reached another one of its climaxes – it felt like each was more powerful than the last – and as it rolled over us all and the crowd went crazy, I pushed Winston laughingly away. I needed my space back so I could swim freely through the warm surge of sound enveloping me.

  It was then that Conor appeared. I had closed my eyes for a moment, the better to concentrate on the overwhelming beauty of all these sound waves, and when I opened them, he was there, grinning at me, and I felt like I was in love with him instantly. I was in love with everyone around me at that precise moment, but because Conor was the closest, I was in love with him the most.

  He was short, stocky, balding, bearded, red-headed, with brown eyes that were so dark, they looked almost black. He was wearing, somewhat incongruously, a shirt and a waistcoat with jeans, and there was something incredibly sexy, incredibly self-confident about him. And he was dancing the most brilliant dance. It was as if his lower half was dancing like Abby, swaying and rolling and grooving – he seemed to have the most amazingly mobile hips. Meanwhile, from the waist up, he was dancing like Winston, chopping and cutting, seemingly forming little boxes with his hands and, from time to time, outrageously spinning on one foot and then landing perfectly facing me all over again, a vast self-satisfied grin on his face.

  I felt more drawn to him than I ever had to anyone in my entire life up until that moment. Which is a lesson for us all, is it not? Never choose a man while under the influence of chemicals that mess with your brain, my friends. Never.

  We danced until three, but then a new DJ came on who favoured a really harsh, angular kind of techno that I was convinced was going to make my ears bleed.

  Conor took my hand. ‘Come,’ he shouted in my ear. ‘This is shite.’

  So I let him lead me through the crowd.

  We crossed to the furthest end of the track where a few hundred people were sitting or lying down. I sat and then rolled onto my back to look at the stars.

  Conor sat beside me and then manoeuvred himself so my head was on his thigh.

  ‘What a great bash!’ he said, stroking my hair in a way that seemed entirely normal, entirely logical. His caresses felt like a thousand tiny electric shocks, which seemed to my addled brain to match the hundreds of stars above us.

  ‘My first,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘My first-ever rave.’

  ‘Really?’ Conor asked.

  I nodded. ‘I’m a good Catholic girl, me.’

  ‘Lucky for me,’ Conor said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I love good Catholic girls. Because I’m a good Catholic boy, myself.’

  ‘You’re Irish,’ I stated. I’d only just noticed his accent.

  ‘Conor O’Leary at your service,’ he said. ‘And other than being the most beautiful girl here, you would be?’

  ‘Laura. Laura Ryan,’ I said. I could feel myself blushing. ‘I’m half Irish too, as it happens. My Mum’s Irish. Dad’s name was Sturgis, but Mum went back to Ryan when he left, so I changed mine too. Mum preferred it that way, so . . . It’s easier to just do what she says most of the time,’ I explained, wonderi
ng why I was blathering in such a way.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Laura Ryan,’ Conor said. And then he moved so his face was hovering just above mine. ‘May I?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes please,’ I replied brazenly.

  When he kissed me, I closed my eyes and all those stars I’d been looking at seemed to explode inside my head. And I remember thinking two thoughts simultaneously. I love you, Conor O’Leary. And, I love this drug.

  I was still incredibly immature back then, and terribly inexperienced with men, too. I had slept with two boys in my entire life, one who, because he wanted to sleep with me, I had assumed was my boyfriend, but he dumped me about thirty seconds after it was over, and another who I suppose one could say I ‘dated’ for a few weeks when I was eighteen. Mum had put an end to that one, and because I was already realising I didn’t much like him, I’d been relatively happy about her intervention. But since I was eighteen, there had been nothing. I had no idea what love actually was, and so chose to assume that this must be what it felt like.

  Though the kiss felt heavenly, any thoughts of sex were a million miles away. Conor’s mouth felt warm and magical, his embrace seemed in some way like home. I felt at one with everyone and everything and, sensing that warmth, that physical closeness, was simply part of the whole experience. It won’t make much sense, but it felt like a God-given right. My right to be happy, perhaps. To feel loved. To be at one with this world; a world as soft and welcoming as marshmallow. Conor was just part of the bigger picture.

  Despite the music, which even at this distance was deafening, we must have fallen asleep, because it was the sun on my face that woke me. Conor was behind, spooning me, his arms enveloping me against the cold. I lifted his heavy, hairy arm away and sat up and yawned. I still felt wonderful and I wondered if this feeling of being submerged by optimism might now be a permanent state. Perhaps a single pill had immunised me against the all-encompassing guilt of my upbringing once and for all. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Or perhaps it wasn’t the pill at all. Maybe it was being in love that had changed everything.