When we finally spoke I pleaded my case. ‘This isn’t fair. You’ve got to at least do it to my face, give us one more chance.’ He in turn rambled on about some self-help group that he had been going to. Later Ashley sent me a copy of the book that explained the philosophy behind it. I flicked through its crisp pages that were full of platitudes and strange declarations like ‘we don’t choose our parents’. So what? That may or may not be true, but what is also true and far more important is that it doesn’t alter the fact that these two people are your parents and you’d better just deal with it. A long chapter on jealousy could have been edited down by any provincial junior reporter to read: ‘Don’t be.’ Ashley had written on the inside cover ‘I hope this helps you understand’. All it helped me understand was that my lovely, funny, handsome boyfriend had been turned into a howling loon by some group that was claiming to help him.
After a couple of days I managed to tell some friends, and they were as confused as I was, just not as humiliated. It’s one thing if your boyfriend leaves you for someone else, but Ashley was declaring to the world that he would prefer to be with nobody rather than be with me. I kept calling and pleading and even got friends to call. I don’t think I ever admitted it at the time, but I can see now that my aching heart was gradually overshadowed by a real sense of panic about how I was going to pay the Queen’s Park rent. Eventually Ashley agreed he would return and give me one more chance.
When he got back, the first thing he gave me was crabs. It seemed he had been learning to love a few more people than himself. I leafed through his bible but failed to see a chapter entitled ‘Be a big lice-ridden slut’. Ashley was gone; this creature that had returned from Australia was an unbearable, sanctimonious bore. The love nest began to look like a hamster lived in it as piles of tiny pieces of paper started to appear everywhere. These were Ashley’s affirmations. Obviously I read them to see if they said anything about me. Mostly they were things like ‘I deserve to be rich’ or ‘I deserve to live in a flat with a shower’. I longed to tell him what I thought he deserved.
His madness was catching, and I found myself behaving in a really erratic way. He told me he had a date with a man he had met in the shop of the English National Opera. When Ashley wasn’t home by midnight I sat on the floor ringing central London hotels describing him. When that drew no results I started phoning major European Opera Houses trying to find out if anyone who worked there was visiting London. This is why love scares the shit out of me. No matter how many days are spent having picnics and laughing over brandies, this awful day always arrives. Like a dirty ball of farmer’s twine, love tightens its grip around your heart until you end up sobbing on the floor of a tiny flat in North London, hardly able to breathe because your happiness has simply wandered off holding the hand of a stranger.
The couple of months I spent with Ashley at that time were by far the worst of my life. Love had turned into cruel hatred and pettiness. If he said something about the noise of a neighbour mowing a lawn, I would argue that it was a chainsaw cutting wood until one of us had to end up screaming and running out of the flat. I hated him for throwing away our old life, and he hated me because I wouldn’t let him get on with his new one.
Isn’t it surprising that whenever you think things can’t get worse, something comes along to point out the obvious – they can.
I went to a party at Central at the end of the summer term. It was a Friday night and warm. We stood around in the small garden of the school, drinking and shrieking as drama students are prone to do. By the time I left it was late and I was tired. I had just about enough money for a taxi, but I decided that I wanted some Kentucky fried chicken more, and besides, I was in no rush to get home to Ashley fast asleep under his snow-white duvet of spiritual superiority.
I trudged up Finchley Road, got my chicken and chips and munched away as I walked through a deserted Kilburn and on towards Queen’s Park. I was just walking along the north side of the park when I became aware of a boy walking quickly in the shadows on the other side of the road. He overtook me. Then, almost running, he doubled back on himself and headed towards me. This wasn’t good. I turned to flee in the opposite direction, only to bump into another guy who had been walking behind me. I was trapped. Like in a horror film when the inevitable happens, I cried out a thin, ‘No. No, please don’t.’ Then they were hitting me over my head. I heard a strange echoing noise and assumed they were using some sort of plastic pipe. It was only later that I worked out that it was the sound of wood against the bone of my skull. They told me to give them my wallet. I did. They told me to lie on the ground. I did. They emptied my small rucksack. I noticed my chequebook fall to the ground along with the couple of credit cards I had in my wallet. They took only my cash, which was about six pounds fifty. I almost wished I had more to give them, and felt bad that I had thrown away so much on the chicken and chips. Their work seemed to be done. I was told to keep lying there face down for five minutes. I nodded my agreement as vigorously as I could with my head pressed against the ground. I heard their footsteps clattering down the road as they ran off into the night.
Silence. I lay there breathing heavily and thought about Ashley. He was going to be unbearable because I knew he would tell me that on some level I had attracted this attack, that I had wanted it to happen, or needed it, or some such pointless shit. I had been mugged. Couldn’t I just be a victim, please? Then I noticed I had a cut on my wrist. They must have had a knife that I hadn’t seen. Fuck, Ashley would go into full Angel of Mercy mode. This was going to be awful. I felt a slight chill go through me and thought I had better gather my stuff and get home, which was just around the corner. As I got up off the cold pavement I was aware that I was peeling myself off the ground. Odd. I looked down. My chest was covered in blood. My blood. I was bleeding profusely. I pulled back my T-shirt and there, almost in the centre of my chest, was a small, dark, wet hole. I had been stabbed. I started to gather up my books and bag, but I had to lie down. I was suddenly tired, very tired. I lay my head upon the rucksack and breathed in the familiar smells of books and pencils, only now mingled with the warm stickiness of my blood. I knew that all I really wanted to do was lie there, but a tiny glimmer of panic managed to force me into standing up again. I tried to pick my bag up once more, but the books just slipped from my hands. I wasn’t in control. Even my cries for help felt like small wet towels falling out of my mouth.
I managed to drag myself up to a house that had a light in the window and rang the bell. I leant against the door, whimpering. Nothing. With a huge effort I began to stumble down the street shouting ‘Help’ over and over again, because that was what I urgently needed. A door opened and an elderly man stood there staring. I walked down the short path towards him. I lifted my blood soaked top and pointed at the hole and explained helpfully, ‘I’ve been stabbed.’ I was like one of those characters in Shakespeare who declare, ‘I’ve been run through!’ I’d always thought they said it for the audience because there were no bloody special effects in those days, but, no, you say something like that because you are so surprised to find a hole in yourself.
Without waiting to be asked I lay down on his doorstep. He said he’d phone the police. His wife arrived in a bright cloud of dressing gown and stared down at the bloody mess. The bloody mess looked up at her and without thinking asked, ‘Can you hold my hand, please?’ For a moment I thought she hadn’t understood, but then, slightly awkwardly, she reached her cool, calm hand out to me. I held on to her hand like a baby grabs hold of a finger. It was pure instinct – I didn’t want to die alone.
From then on, I started to drift in and out of consciousness. I had always imagined that if I found myself in a situation like this I would ‘fight for my life’, but of course when you are bleeding to death, as I was, your very life force is seeping out of you and it’s very difficult to fight. You’re tired, you want to sleep, you want to let go and drift away. Somewhere there were sirens. A man’s voice floated above me. ‘We better
wait for the ambulance. There’ll be hell to pay if he dies in the back of the van.’ I was a bit light-headed by then and I thought to myself without a care in the world, ‘Oh, this must be quite serious.’ Then I was in an ambulance and a man was saying, ‘All right, son, we’re just going to take your strides off.’ In my cosy fog I can remember translating ‘strides’ into ‘trousers’ and feeling rather clever.
Then a lady was standing at the end of a trolley. We were in a room now. She was holding a thin tube. ‘This is a catheter and I’m just going to insert it into your penis.’ In a slow flash I was seven or eight years old and pouring salad cream on warm boiled beetroot. My Aunt Hannah was explaining a procedure they had performed on my Uncle Cecil in hospital. I remember at the time thinking that whatever it was that having that cured I didn’t care, I’d prefer to die. Now, all these years later, they were about to do it to me and I couldn’t do a thing to stop them. I couldn’t do a thing.
Bright sunlight woke me, streaming in through tall windows the next morning. Fans turned slowly on the ceiling. This might have been the St Charles hospital somewhere in the tropics. I didn’t feel like moving much, but I could see that I was attached to a bag of blood and some other tubes were coming out of my side and of course there was the Uncle Cecil special coming out of my cock. I had to ring Mike to tell him I would probably be late for my shift in Melange that night. Just then a nurse approached and asked me if I wanted to phone anyone. I gave her Mike’s number. She looked at me as if we were talking at cross purposes.
‘Would you like us to call your parents?’ she asked.
I processed this question. If they phoned them they would panic and get on a plane and come to London. What a waste of money if I was going to be all right. I looked up at the nurse and asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable, straightforward question.
‘Am I going to die?’
The nurse did something before she replied that I really don’t think was great in terms of bedside manner. She hesitated, and then almost stumbled over the word ‘No’.
Oh my God, I might die. This is serious; I may not get to Central on Monday to be in our second-year showing of A Winter’s Tale.
Another nurse came up.
‘Someone called Ashley rang,’ she said.
I gave a weak smile. Ashley knew and cared.
‘He said he’ll be in to see you later, he’s busy today,’ she continued.
Of course he was busy. Today was the day of his self-help group seminar. What could be more important than that? Your lover lying with less than half of his blood left inside him in a hospital bed maybe? What blood did remain was boiling.
Mike Belben and my friend Helen from Smiths had started dating, so they turned up together. Rather helpfully, Helen walked in, looked at me and burst into tears. In her defence this turned out to be a fairly common visitor reaction. I obviously didn’t look great.
I slept as people stood around whispering. At six o’clock, handsome Ashley walked in and lit up the room. I hated myself, but I was thrilled to see him. He sat by my bed and, fighting back the tears, explained to me in as much detail as he could what I should have known he would say all along – that this was about him. It was about him collapsing in the hallway when the police came to bring him the news in the middle of the night. It was about him standing up at his fucking self-help conference and telling them all about what had happened and asking them to focus their healing energy on me. I can only imagine the expression on my face, and still he asked me with the wide-eyed glee of the truly deluded, ‘Did you feel anything?’ I had lost half my blood and all of my boyfriend.
I didn’t make it to Melange or Central. I lay in that ward for two and a half weeks as they drained blood off my lungs. Visiting me was pretty much on the timetable of every drama student in my year. Large groups with leggings and scarves gathered by my bed and made a note of how they were feeling at that moment so that they could remember the emotions later when they got a part in Casualty. Other people came too, policemen, ladies with forms explaining how I could get counselling, others with forms explaining how I could get compensation. For the first few days the people I really wanted to visit me were world leaders. As I lay there I felt like I knew the answer to everything – world peace, hunger, history. I was like Solomon with a tube coming out of my cock. Sadly, this feeling faded quite fast and I went back to wondering if we’d get cream or custard with our pudding.
When I finally got out I was back in the flat with Ashley, but not for long. We had given notice, accepting that we and the flat were over. I was moving to Brixton to live in a room in a house, and Ashley was going to Hawaii on borrowed money for a conference on immortality. By now I found it hard to look at him without spitting. Immortality? I wanted to shake him. ‘Save yourself some money, you fuckwit – you are going to die, but hopefully not before you pay the money back to the stupid bitch who lent it to you!’
For some reason Ashley wanted us to remain friends. To stop his mindless rambling, I promised we would be. As he headed off to the airport for Hawaii, he made a great show of hugging me and crying. Dry-eyed I patted his back and thought to myself, ‘You’ll have to live for a fuck of a long time before I’ll ever want to see you again.’ He shut the door and I didn’t see him for fourteen years and when I did it was the sort of meeting you fantasise about having with an ex. I had lost weight and gained money and fame. All the things that normally embarrass or annoy me like fawning waiters or kids banging on the restaurant windows to attract my attention gave me a truly deep satisfaction. I’m not proud of the feeling, but I cannot deny the pleasure it gave me.
6
The Feeble Has Landed
I WASN’T ALLOWED TO WORK, and Central had broken up for the summer break. I wasn’t good at simply hanging around, so I decided to take full advantage of my new single status and post-stabbing skinniness. I booked a flight to Athens and decided I’d head to Mykonos, which was at that time the only gay haven I could think of apart from San Francisco.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t booked my accommodation, nor had I realised it was a state holiday. I ended up having to do the unthinkable: camp. I didn’t have a sleeping bag let alone a tent, but I didn’t have a choice either, and so as the moon shone down and a gritty wind blew across the island, I was to be found lying on a towel, wearing most of the clothes that I had brought with me and a sweater wrapped around my head.
During the day I would leave my bag with my passport and traveller’s cheques sitting in an unlocked zip-up holdall on the campsite. Perhaps it was a sort of post-stabbing fatalistic attitude to life, but remarkably that bag sat there for the next five nights untouched. Sadly, so did I. Bronzed, beautiful gay guys from all over the world roamed the island oblivious to the very needy boy with a fresh scar on his chest. Apart from ordering drinks or meals, I did not speak to one other person for five consecutive days. Looking back this seems extraordinary for me, but I must have been much more emotionally bruised by the mugging and by Ashley’s behaviour than I had realised.
On the last day a Canadian jewellery designer spoke to me on the beach. As he approached me I actually did that thing of looking behind me to see who he was walking towards. Would I like to meet him for a drink later? We chatted a little. He was quite sweet and we talked easily, although I was a bit on the defensive. He walked me back to the entrance to the campsite and asked me if I’d like to have dinner with him. I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘Well, I’ve got to eat.’
He looked a little taken aback. I thought an apology explaining that this was the first time I’d spoken to someone in a week wouldn’t help.
I still don’t know why I didn’t sleep with the jewellery man. I ended up bunking up with him in his hotel in town, we rubbed copious amounts of aftersun on each other, I imagine I even got a hard-on. To the cynical, sex-starved man who is writing this now, it makes no sense, but maybe I didn’t want casual sex, I wanted to fall in love again. If I had known how many years that would ta
ke to happen, I’m sure I would have happily accepted a designer pearl necklace that night.
Back in London with the sort of tan that you usually only see in a sample book at World of Leather, I was starting over again. No Ashley and a new home. I’d moved to Brixton, and the man who owned the house, Henry, was one of the sweetest, gentlest men I’d ever met. The house was one of those classic three-storeyed terraced houses with a small back garden leading out from a tiny lean-to kitchen. Thanks to Henry the whole place had a rural, Bohemian feel full of piano music and bubbling pots of red cabbage.
My final year of drama school was great and mainly consisted of a series of full-scale productions that were open to the public and, far more importantly, agents. This was what the whole process had been about, and tensions ran very high around casting time. People crowded in front of the noticeboard to see who had got which part, and every so often someone would run, shrieking with frustration and disappointment, into the ladies’ loo. A gaggle of actresses who wanted to explain how much they wished they hadn’t got such a big role, and, of course, to check out the quality of the crying, would usually follow. I know that if it hadn’t been for the stabbing I would have got sucked into the whole drama, but somehow my ambition had never reached the same level again. I got a good range of parts and tried to do them as well as I could, no more, no less.
Sadly, this sometimes wasn’t quite good enough. Dame Judi Dench came to the school to direct Macbeth. I have no idea what possessed her to do this, and as she stood in front of the assembled cast, the expression on her face seemed to suggest that she didn’t know either. Dan Mullane, the man I knew from Cork, got the lead and Saskia Wickham got to give her Lady M. I was stood at the notice-board for some time before I found out what my parts were. A lucky public was to enjoy my Donalbain and my Second Murderer. I don’t mean to imply that I wasn’t memorable in these roles, but years later, when I was on the radio show Loose Ends, Ned Sherrin asked Judi, who was a guest, who had played the best Donalbain she had ever seen.
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