So Me

by Graham Norton

  ‘Hang on, just hang on,’ he said.

  Well, I did hang on for what must have been at least a couple of hours until finally it wore me down. A spasm too far and suddenly the battle was over. I sat very still, feeling so much better but horrified by what had just happened. Like a dog sitting by a steaming sin, I looked at Ashley and said simply, ‘I couldn’t hold it.’

  ‘Don’t move and hopefully no one will smell it, and when the bus stops we’ll just get off as quickly as we can.’

  A good plan.

  The bus continued on its merry way with upbeat Turkish music blaring from the radio. Ashley and I were poised like Olympic athletes ready to fly off the starting blocks the minute the doors opened. Finally the bus began to slow down. We clutched our bags. It stopped, the doors opened and we sprang up. As one, the rest of the bus started waving at us to sit down – this was not our stop. It seemed that the non-stop bit wasn’t entirely true. Appalled, we slowly sat back down.

  ‘Shit,’ Ashley said.

  Quite. I looked down at the lino-covered aisle where I had just been standing, and there, like a tiny piece of melted chocolate, was a drop of my poo. As I raised my head, my eyes met those of the man across from me who was also looking up from the floor. He stared at me as if I had just tried to clean his ear with my cock.

  At Effes, the whole bus told us that now was the time to leave and we took them at their word and fled. Under Ashley’s instruction I leant against a wall to hide a rather unattractive dark brown map of South America that had appeared on my trousers. He went to find us somewhere to stay. I hung my head in shame and felt very far from home and holidays both. Some man came up to me and in broken English tried to sell me a day trip to where the Virgin Mary had either been born or died, I can’t remember. The force of my ‘no’ frightened us both.

  Ashley wasn’t just a waiter, he was also a fully trained nurse, and once we got into our hotel room he went into full care mode. He showered me and put me to bed, he washed my clothes, he nursed me. I lay there wondering why, if love was blind, it couldn’t have lost its sense of smell as well.

  The rest of the holiday went by without a hitch. In week two the travelling stopped and we stayed in a small village on the south coast. I had worried that two men travelling together might raise a few Turkish eyebrows, but no one seemed to care or suspect a thing. One night, though, as we ate our dinner, an oiled and groomed moustache appeared above our table. He noticed that we were eating lobster; in fact he seemed fascinated by the idea of us eating it. We tried to chat back and laugh at what he was saying.

  ‘After lobster, later you will have to astable.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Later you will have to musible.’

  ‘No, we don’t understand.’

  ‘Have to marsibo.’

  ‘No.’

  By now he was becoming quite heated and was clearly annoyed by our poor grasp of English.

  ‘Matuba!’ He was getting louder.

  We shook our heads. The other people in the restaurant were begining to look over. It was at this point that he almost exploded with frustration, and as he did a very graphic mime we suddenly heard very clearly ‘Masturbate! Masturbate!’ It turned out he was the local pimp trying to interest us in his ladies after the seafood aphrodisiac effect had kicked in. We giggled nervously as every other customer stared at us and our strange wanking friend. Finally he got the message and sloped off into the night. Of course the irony was that he was quite right – we did nothing but ‘mastuba’ for hours when we got back to the hotel.

  Returning from holiday I took a deep breath and entered the drama school fray once more. This time it was all a bit of an anticlimax. I went to Central, did my speeches and was then asked into George Hall’s office once more.

  ‘I’m very pleased to say that you have a place at Central next year.’

  ‘Oh.’

  After all the trying and dreaming, I had expected this moment to be accompanied by fireworks and an Oscar ceremony intensity, but instead I felt a bit flat. I thanked him and got the tube back to Covent Garden and went to work. I told Ashley, Helen and Mike, and they were so excited they started to tell customers. Even they seemed more pleased than me. I felt like I was listening to my favourite record underwater.

  5

  The Deepest Cut

  THIS WAS MY BEAUTIFUL LIFE. I was going to go to one of the top drama schools in Britain, and I was living with a man I loved. It almost felt uncomfortable. I was so unused to things going my way that I just assumed that this couldn’t last. I was right. Well, as a pessimist once said, ‘a pessimist is never disappointed’.

  Shortly after I got accepted by Central, I was hanging around the Australian dorm we called home, heating up more sausage rolls, when Ashley casually mentioned something about booking his ticket home. Now, I knew that when we had met he was only staying in England temporarily, but I had somehow assumed that meeting me had changed his plans. Home is where the heart is, and surely that was in London with me. For some reason at moments of emotional shock I tend not to cry but instead to get very angry, and this was no exception. I turned into a windmill of tea towels as I stormed around the flat. ‘Do I mean nothing to you? Don’t you think you should have discussed this rather than just present it as a done deal?’ As far as I was concerned, he was a selfish bastard and I was a heaving, bosomed heroine wronged by her man.

  I stomped out of the flat and went to the Oval in South London where I was taking part in some awful fringe play about the Irish in Britain. Ashley couldn’t come because he was on nursing duty through the night for a rich old lady in order to earn some extra money – presumably to help pay for his airfare.

  After the play the cast went across the road to the pub, and I got talking to a very cute man who was a friend of one of the other actors. As closing time approached, one by one everyone started to say their goodnights. Finally there was only me and Cute Guy left. I remember looking around, wondering who he was waiting for, and then the impossible dawned on me – I was the one he was after. This was the biggest sexual compliment I had ever been paid. Thank God I was still in a foul mood with Ashley so that I could somehow morally justify this bit of adultery. ‘Well, if he doesn’t care about me, etc.’

  Cute Guy took me back to his flat. We got into a big wooden bed which for some reason he felt he needed to tell me had belonged to his now dead Granny. As we rolled around I became aware that something very unusual was going on. For I think the only time in my life, my cock seemed to be talking to my heart, and between them they had decided that cheating on Ashley was not the thing to do – I could not get a hard-on. What a great night; what else could go wrong? What indeed . . . After he managed to come, Cute Guy burst into tears because I was the first person he had been with since his boyfriend had left him. I lay there with a limp cock and a stranger sobbing on the pillow next to me and thought about Ashley and the dead Granny who had owned this wooden nest of sadness. Adultery hadn’t been like this on Dallas.

  I went back to Ashley the next day and we discussed the situation. Ashley’s plan to go home would go ahead, but now it was slightly modified. I would follow him during my long summer holiday from drama school, and then Ashley would return to London and we would set up home together properly without the lost tribe of New South Wales sharing with us. Things returned to normal.

  Finally the day dawned when I would start at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Ashley gave me a packed lunch and waved me on my way. After all the anticipation, it was a strangely underwhelming moment when I actually saw the other twenty-five people I was going to spend the next three years with. I’d spent hours wondering who my contemporaries were going to be, and suddenly this was it. I had two shocks. The first was that someone I knew from Cork was in my year, Dan Mullane who I had met through the drama society at university in which I’d dabbled. I thought this was wildly unfair. Central was supposed to be my new beginning where I could reinvent myself. Dan and I looked at e
ach other and I’m sure he felt exactly the same. The other shock was that the vast majority of the boys were straight. Only four of us fitted into the theatrical stereotype.

  We sat in the tiny coffee shop making small talk and looking at hundreds of fading 8 × 10 photographs of ex-students. Although we all pretended to care about the craft of acting, it was obvious that all any of us really wanted was to be famous, so it was slightly worrying that we only recognised about four of the students. The only person who seemed to know all their names was Betty, the tea lady who served behind the counter. It seems deeply ironic that sweet, unassuming Betty is now more famous than most of the school’s past pupils.

  Once I got into the rhythm of going to school every day and working a couple of nights a week at Smiths, I loved it. There is no doubt about it, drama school is the most self-indulgent thing in the world. Each morning I’d wake up and wonder what I would be doing that day and then remember, ‘Oh yes, thinking about myself.’

  Ashley left on a Sunday night. We had a big gathering of our friends at lunchtime and then Ashley and I headed out to Heathrow. Airports are so deceptive. On the surface they are just vast, impersonal concourses full of shiny floors and bland art, but they are in fact enormous emotional hotpots. Everyone who walks into an airport is in some sort of heightened emotional state. The terror of flying, the excitement of a holiday, the sadness of leaving, there seems to be an amnesty for dressing and behaving like the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I don’t think Ashley actually laughed, but he couldn’t disguise how thrilled he was to be going home. I did well in the ‘keeping it together’ department until the very moment when I waved him through the departure gates and turned to leave. I walked through Heathrow bawling like a baby who has just realised that its favourite toy has fallen out of the pram. The tears lasted off and on for most of the tube ride home.

  Of course most people would have dragged themselves to work the next day and stared numbly at a computer screen for eight hours, but I was going to drama school. We were doing a poetry performance showcase that morning, and with my freshly acquired grief I knew I was going to be marvellous. I practically skipped down the road. Sure enough, about three lines into Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’ (long before Simon Callow’s funeral in Four Weddings), I was in tears. Every cloud . . .

  By now I was twenty-four and one of the older people in my year. The other students my age seemed to have spent their whole lives in education, and so I found myself feeling very worldly and, because of my restaurant job, relatively rich. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t happy and that I was living my life in mourning for Ashley, who had morphed in my memory into the first Antipodean saint.

  I was now renting a huge room in a flat in Swiss Cottage with two women who had put up a card on the school noticeboard. It became clear that one of the women, Ann, was very much in charge. She had lived in the flat for years and we all abided by her slightly eccentric rules. She was deeply committed to healthy living and was a strict vegetarian. She religiously used her water filter jug, in fact she used it so much that she had never had a chance to wash it. The grimy, scum-covered plastic jug sat on a shelf, and the other lodger Helen and I would walk past it pulling faces of horror. When my mother came to visit, she took one look at it and summed it up perfectly: ‘A water filter? A fish couldn’t live in that.’ Also Ann had a budgie that lived in the living room. I don’t know what sort of Herculean bird this was, but it seemed to be capable of throwing food and shit nine or ten feet across the room so that the room was less like a lounge and more like an enormous birdcage. It wasn’t ideal. Added to that was Ann’s very long red hair, strands of which turned up all over the flat. It’s hard to describe the full horror of stepping into a bathroom that looks like it was last used by a pony with a hair-loss problem.

  Soon it was time for me to visit Ashley in Australia. Now, I do like Australia. It is a very nice place; however, I don’t think anyone could argue that it is nice enough to warrant the journey. If Australia was where France is I’d go all the time, but it seems perverse to put yourself through airplane hell for days simply to arrive somewhere that is really just America, but with most of the population missing. Most places one visits take on the quality of the centre of the earth simply because you are there. In Australia it is very different. It feels like the edge of the earth, and even Australians who have never lived anywhere else seem to know that they are living very far from the action. Of course none of this mattered to me at the time; I was going to be reunited with the love of my life.

  Ashley had promised that by the time I got there he would have moved out of his parents’ house. When I arrived I found that he had been true to his word. He had moved out of their house – into the garage. Oh, he’d done it up with long drapes of material and nice pieces of furniture that he had been keeping in storage, but no amount of interior design could save me from the embarrassment of having his father walking in on us lying in bed while he looked for a hammer or an elusive drill bit. I wasn’t out to my parents, but Ashley couldn’t have been more out to his. He seemed to think that the only way for his parents to prove that they accepted his life and truly loved him was to have them sitting at the bottom of the bed while we had sex in it.

  Obviously honesty is a good thing in any relationship, but sometimes it strikes me that coming out to your parents can be quite a selfish thing to do. Kids and their sex lives are never going to be welcome topics of conversation for parents. I remember when, a couple of years after my sister was married, she announced that she was pregnant: we were delighted for her, but there was also a feeling of embarrassment lingering in the air because we now knew for sure that she was no longer a virgin. As for my sexuality, I felt that Ashley sobbing in front of my visiting parents as he watched Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and gasping, ‘Her dress . . . her dress is so beautiful,’ was as close to coming out as I wanted to get.

  Ashley’s parents, Mr and Mrs Eccles, were very sweet and couldn’t have made me feel more at home. True, I was on a major charm offensive, and made sure to help with chores, drink ‘stubbies’ with the father and compliment the mother profusely on her signature dish, ‘curried sausage casserole’. By the time I left Mr Eccles was patting me on the back and saying that it was like having another son. You can imagine how annoying Ashley found that.

  Although we had a few arguments (‘The fucking garage!!’) for the most part we lived well in each other’s pockets. His friends liked me and I was surprised by how much I liked them. I will mention Jenny McCarthy, just because I know she will read this and be very upset not to find her name anywhere. Overall I headed back to London believing that I would spend the rest of my life with Ashley. Had there been gay marriage at the time, I would have been popping the vol-au-vents in the oven and arranging bits of old net curtain on my head, as I had in my former life as a toddler transvestite.

  The next few months were spent trying to find a one-bedroom flat for us to share when Ashley got back. Finally I found one a bit further away from Central, over in Queen’s Park. Now I just needed to pay for it. Mike Belben, my catering mentor, had moved to a small restaurant around the corner from Smiths called Melange. It was incredibly busy, and the waiters got to keep their own tips. I said farewell to the ordered calm of Smiths and stepped into the lucrative madness that was Melange. Anyone who ate there would not have forgotten it in a hurry. It was owned by a Dutchman named Freddy who had only ever worked in one other restaurant. He had been fired from that job after one night. This might have given some people an indication that catering was perhaps not the job for them, but Freddy took this initial discouragement as some sort of challenge and opened his own place.

  Melange was unique in so many ways. The interior looked like a designer had lost a bet. Holes that had been knocked in walls during a drink-induced fit of DIY enthusiasm sat gathering dust, islands of mosaics glistened hopefully, bits of scaffolding held up the bar and most of the stairs. An estate agent might hav
e described it as looking distressed. The food was equally eccentric, but for the most part delicious. David Eyre had quit Smiths as well and had discovered somewhere along the way that he was a great chef. The customers piled in and the small band of waiters ran up and down stairs with trays and attitude. Melange became my extended dysfunctional family.

  My life was back on track – Central was going well, I had settled into a group of friends, I was earning more money and I had found my love nest. That was when a letter arrived from Ashley. It lay on the mat in its innocuous airmail envelope. My heart leapt when I saw it and I couldn’t wait until I got to school to read it. I ripped it open as I walked up the hill to Finchley Road. ‘This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write.’ I slowed down. That didn’t sound good. My eyes dashed across the words, desperate not to believe what this letter was, scrabbling to find something positive I could cling to like a drowning man reaching out for a stray plank of wood. ‘I can’t love anyone until I learn to love myself . . . Please try to understand.’ I felt myself slip under the water.

  Because of the time difference I had to wait all day before I could call him. As the day dragged on, my shock and grief turned to anger. The selfish little shit! Fuck the relationship, I had signed a lease on a flat that I couldn’t possible afford all by myself. The phrase ‘learn to love myself’ kept popping back into my head. Well, it’s going to be hard to learn to love someone who behaves like a snake in the ass! That first day I didn’t tell anyone else what had happened because I felt like such an idiot. There I was, all kitted out in my wedding outfit but it turned out it was dress-down Friday.