The night began when me and my new curly-haired clever friend from my Journalism MA course, Helen, went to our friend Moya’s house for a glass of wine and to talk through our revision for a big exam we had coming up. Helen and I proceeded to drink bottle after bottle of wine in the sun, getting steaming drunk, leaving Moya’s at midnight.
I decided the night wasn’t over and that I wanted a party, so we got on a bus from West Hampstead to Oxford Circus. However, I became suddenly much drunker the minute the bus journey began – which also took an unfeasibly long time due to a road accident – so at some point while in transit I managed to convince myself that we weren’t on a bus to Oxford Circus, but were in fact on a coach to Oxford city centre. Helen, rendered similarly to me, went along with my persuasive theory. Lauren had graduated from Oxford at this point so I didn’t call her; instead, I texted a few of her friends who I had met on my visits there who I knew were in their final year. The messages were barely comprehensible, but they went along the lines of: ‘Me and my friend Helen have accidentally got on a coach to Oxford. We’re nearly there – where is good for a night out and would you like to join us?’
We alighted near the flagship Topshop, which I noted was larger than I had remembered the last time I visited Oxford. We stood outside the shop while I incessantly rang anyone I had ever met from Oxford University – still not taking in that I was in London – but no cigar. Helen and I agreed the night out was a lost cause, but it was too late for me to get the last tube back to my parents’ house in the suburbs. So we got another bus back to the Finsbury Park flat that Helen shared with her boyfriend and she said I could sleep on their sofa.
Refusing to let go of my inebriated hallucination, when stepping into the flat I concluded that we were in Oxford University Halls; that a friend of Helen’s was still a student here, perhaps. Helen went to bed and I scrolled through my phonebook to see if anyone I knew would be up for a party. I rang my friend Will – he was a tall, wild, wiry Canadian with long curly hair and eyes as pale as opals. I had always had a gigantic crush on him.
‘Hello, darling,’ he slurred in his vodka-soaked voice.
‘I want a party,’ I said.
‘Come here then.’
‘Where are you?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t you still at uni in Birmingham?’
‘Warwick. I’m living in Leamington Spa,’ he said. ‘I’ll text you the address.’
I wandered out of Helen’s flat and went looking for a cab firm. After ten minutes of roaming the streets – the alcohol slowly leaving my system as I finally just about grasped I was in London and not Oxford – I found a small, wooden-fronted minicab company. I announced that I wanted a car to take me to Leamington Spa and money was absolutely no object – except it had to be £100 or less as that’s all I had in my account and I was at the limit of my overdraft. One of the three bemused men went behind the glass partition to take a dusty map of England out from his drawer. He unfolded the map and theatrically spread it across two tables pushed together, much to the amusement of his colleagues. They all huddled around it as one planned the journey with dashes marked with a red pen as if he were the captain of a ship plotting an attack on pirates. Even in my drunken state, I thought it to be a touch over the top.
‘£250,’ he finally declared.
‘That’s RIDICULOUS,’ I said with pearl-clutching, middle-class customer-rights outrage; as if he were the one posing the most absurd request out of the two of us.
‘Lady – you wanna go somewhere three counties away at three o’clock in the morning. £250 is a very reasonable price.’
I got him down to £200. Will said he’d pay for the other £100.
I started sobering up on the M1 at around four a.m. (there’s a sentence I hope none of the rest of you ever have to say or write down in all your remaining days). But it was too late to turn back – how I often felt in the middle of these small-hour adventures, convincing myself that this was just getting my money’s worth out of my youth. A Margaret Atwood quote hung over this period of my life like a lampshade from the ceiling.
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
It would pay off in the end, I thought while I stuck my head out of the window on the motorway, the sky turning to dawn. The anecdotal mileage in this will be inexhaustible.
I arrived at half five in the morning. Will greeted me at the door with five twenty-pound notes. I felt triumphant that I’d managed to get there. The journey and the destination were the story; what unfolded was almost irrelevant. We stayed up drinking, talking, and lay in bed half-clothed smoking weed and listening to Smiths albums, stopping only briefly for some half-arsed snogging. We fell asleep at eleven a.m.
I woke up at three p.m. with a terrible headache and a terrible sense that the punchline to the joke wasn’t as funny as I thought it had been the night before. I checked my bank account: zero. I checked my phone: dozens of worried messages from friends. I had forgotten I had sent Farly a photo of me gleefully smiling in the back of the cab at four in the morning while hurtling down the motorway with the message: ‘QUICK TRIP TO THE WEST MIDLANDS!!’
I made a plan. My teenage boyfriend who I had retained a vague friendship with was training to be a doctor at Warwick Uni. I could stay with him for a few days until some overdue money came through from my weekend job as a promo girl and get a train home in time for my Journalism MA exam on Tuesday. But when I texted him, he told me he was away on holiday.
My phone rang – it was Sophie.
‘Is it true you’re in Leamington Spa?’ she asked when I picked up.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I wanted an after-party and my friend Will was having one and he lives in Leamington Spa.’ Will, still half asleep, gave a closed-eye smile and a guilty-as-charged thumbs-up.
‘OK, that doesn’t make any sense,’ she said. ‘How are you going to get home?’
‘I don’t know. I was going to stay with an old boyfriend, but he’s not here and I don’t have any money for the train.’ There was a long pause and I could hear Sophie’s concern for me morph into irritation.
‘Right, well I’ll book you a bus home then,’ she said. ‘Is your phone charged?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll send you the details once it’s done.’
‘Thank you thank you thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay you back.’
Sophie booked me a seat on the longest coach journey she could find – her plan being that I needed some sobering time with just my thoughts so I could contemplate the consequences of my actions. Much to her annoyance, I ended up on a coach with a raucous London-bound hen party. We all did shots of tequila on the journey and they gave me a sombrero to wear. The next day, when I phoned to thank Sophie for saving the day, I asked her if she was annoyed with me.
‘Dolly,’ she said, ‘I’m not annoyed with you, I’m worried about you.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because you were so drunk you thought you were in Oxford city centre when you were outside the Oxford Circus Topshop. Do you know how vulnerable that makes a person? Wandering around London that drunk?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said petulantly. ‘I was just having fun.’
‘How many of our friends need to bankrupt themselves getting taxis across Britain before this madness stops?’
(It would take just one more – Farly, a few months later, from South West London to Exeter. She was in a cab going home from a club when she got a text from a boy she fancied who was still at university and she asked the driver if he could turn around and go, instead, to Devon. To this day, she shrugs off accusations of extravagance and s
ays the entire journey cost ‘£90 and a packet of fags’. The figure has incrementally climbed in value the more we probe her on it.)
But they were all good stories, and that’s what mattered. It was the raison d’être of my early twenties. I was a six-foot human metal detector for fragments of potential anecdotes, crawling along the earth of existence, my nose pressed to the grass in hopes of finding something to dig at.
Another night, with £20 between us, Hicks and I went to a posh London hotel as she had promised that it was a hotbed for ‘bored millionaires with buckets of booze who want the company of fun, young people’. Sure enough, we found two middle-aged men from Dubai who respectively owned a curry house on Edgware Road and one of those English Language ‘universities’ above a mobile phone shop on Tottenham Court Road. Hicks and I did our old routine of flamboyantly telling the well-rehearsed made-up story of how we had met on a cruise. I was singing with the band, her husband had thrown himself overboard and we’d started talking one day when we were both sitting alone on the top deck, smoking and looking out to sea.
They asked if we fancied heading to their friend Rodney’s house, who they assured us was ‘a party boy’ – the universal euphemism for ‘generous with his alcohol and drugs’. We all piled into their car waiting outside and their driver took us to a tower block on Edgware Road, which was far from the Studio 54 promise of excess and glamour we had been sold. Hicks and I held hands as we walked to the entrance, and in the lift I sent Farly a text with the address of where we were in case anything happened to me that night, a rather morbid ritual she had got quite used to.
A Cypriot man in his mid-seventies wearing stripy pyjamas opened the door.
‘My God!’ he shouted as he looked us over. ‘Ees too late!’ He threw his hands in the air in despair. ‘I am too old for thees!’
Our two new friends promised it wouldn’t be too long a party and that we just wanted a few drinks. Rodney graciously invited us in and asked what we wanted to drink. He said cocktails were his speciality, while gesturing at his well-stocked 1970s drinks cabinet. I asked for a dry Martini.
I was quite fascinated by Rodney; particularly by the dozens of framed photographs of grandchildren that were scattered on every available surface. We walked around with our Martinis, him still in his pyjamas, and he gave me the names, ages and character description of all of them. Meanwhile, Hicks was doing what she always did on nights like this – earnestly talking about philosophy with one of the Dubai millionaires, gesticulating dramatically while monologuing about French existentialists, her eyes popping out of her head like forget-me-nots springing from cracks in the pavement.
Rodney and I sat on his sofa and he told me the mythology of his past: the failed business ventures, the bar he owned that was now a Waitrose, the models who broke his heart. He paused from his storytelling at one point, rolling up a five-pound note for the coke he had lined up on his coffee table, and sat back to look at me.
‘You know, ees funny, you remind me so much of a woman I met a few times in the seventies. Long blonde hair; she had eyes just like yours. She was dating a friend of mine for a while.’
‘Oh yeah?’ I asked, sparking up a cigarette. ‘Who was she?’
‘Barby. I think her name was Barby.’ I swallowed, remembering a story my mum once told me of the fun-but-loathsome nickname she was given in her early twenties.
‘Barbara,’ I replied. ‘Barbara Levey.’
‘Yes!’ he yelped. ‘You know this woman?’
‘That’s my mum,’ I replied. I thought of her, in bed in the suburbs, and imagined what she’d make of her daughter getting high with a seventy-five-year-old Cypriot man she’d met in the seventies. I went into the other room, broke up Hicks’s one-woman literary salon with her simultaneously enamoured and indifferent audience and told her we needed to leave immediately. She said there would be a great ‘after-party’ at the curry house one of the men owned on Edgware Road. I told her we were already at the after-party. I wondered if perhaps I had accidentally fallen into the murky hinterland of after the after-party and now I was just stuck there all the time. I wondered if I needed a ladder out.
But I can’t say it was all tragic, because it wasn’t. My friends and I continued to believe what we were doing was a great act of empowerment and emancipation. My mum often told me this was a misguided act of feminism; that emulating the most yobbish behaviour of men was not a mark of equality (‘She was so detrimental to the cause, that Zoë Ball,’ she once commented). But I still think there were moments when those years of partying were a defiant, celebratory, powerful act; a refusal to use my body in a way that was expected of me. A lot of it was just a really good time on our own terms – many of the memories revolve around me and one of the girls leaving a situation we were bored of or didn’t like, just to spend time with each other. I was starving hungry for experience and I satisfied those cravings with like-minded ramblers. And it created a gang mentality that none of us have ever shaken off.
Some of the memories I have are joyful, some of them are sad, and that was the reality. Sometimes I danced with a grin on my face until dawn in a circle of my closest friends, sometimes I fell over on the street running for the night bus in the rain and lay on the wet pavement for far longer than I should have. Sometimes I knocked myself out walking into a lamp post, left with a purple chin for days. But sometimes I woke up in a loving tangle of hung-over girls, filled with nothing but comfort and joy. Occasionally, I now meet people from those slightly hazy years who say they spent an evening with me drinking in the corner of a house party and I’m immediately filled with panic because I can’t remember it. A year or so ago, I shuddered with embarrassment when a black cab driver asked if my name was ‘Donny’ as he was pretty sure he’d picked me up in ‘a right state’ walking down a London street with no shoes on in 2009.
But a lot of it was magnificent, carefree fun. A lot of it was an adventure, through cities, counties, stories and people, with a gang of explorers in neon tights and too much black eyeliner by my side.
And at least, I thought, I had finally proven to everyone that I was a grown-up. At least I could finally be taken seriously.
Recipe: Hangover Mac and Cheese
(serves four)
For the full immersive experience, eat this in your pyjamas in front of Maid in Manhattan or a documentary about a serial killer.
– 350g pasta – macaroni or penne works well
– 35g butter
– 35g plain flour
– 500ml whole milk
– 200g grated Cheddar cheese
– 100g grated Red Leicester cheese
– 100g grated Parmesan cheese
– 1 tbsp English mustard
– Bunch of spring onions, chopped
– Dash of Worcestershire sauce
– 1 small ball of mozzarella cheese, torn into pieces
– Salt and black pepper, to season
– Olive oil, to drizzle
In a large pan of boiling water, cook the pasta for eight minutes, so it is slightly undercooked – it will continue to cook when you bake it. Drain and set aside, stirring olive oil through it so it doesn’t stick together.
In a separate large pan, melt the butter. Mix in the flour and keep cooking for a few minutes, stirring all the time until the mixture forms a roux paste. Whisk in the milk little by little, and cook over a low heat for ten to fifteen minutes. Keep stirring all the time and cook until you have a smooth and glossy sauce that gradually thickens.
Off the heat, add around three-quarters of the Cheddar, Red Leicester and Parmesan into the sauce, along with the mustard, some salt and pepper, the chopped onions and a dash of Worcestershire sauce, and keep stirring until it is all melted.
Preheat the grill as high as it will go. Pour the pasta into the sauce and mix everything together in a baking dish, stir in the mozzarella, then sprinkle over the remaining Cheddar, Red Leicester and Parmesan. Grill (or place into a hot oven at 200°C for fifte
en minutes), until the mixture is golden and bubbling with a crisp top.
The Bad Date Diaries: A Hotel on a Main Road in Ealing
It is my first Christmas back from university and I have a full-time job as a sales girl at L.K. Bennett in Bond Street. Debbie, the glamorous fashion student who always makes the highest commission, paints my lips Vivien Leigh red in the changing room ready for a big date.
The man is called Graysen and I met him at York Uni when visiting a school friend there a month previously. I was waiting at the student union bar to buy two vodka Diet Cokes, when someone grabbed my hand. Graysen – lanky, pale, interesting, Elvis eyes smudged in a cloud of eyeliner – turned my palm over.
‘Three children. You’ll die at ninety.’ He looked at me. ‘You’ve been here before,’ he whispered dramatically.
He is the first person of my age I have ever met who chooses not to be on Facebook. I think he is Sartre.
We meet under a giant Christmas tree and he takes me to a Martini bar because he remembers I said it was my favourite drink (at this point I am still in the ‘training myself to like Martinis’ phase, so worry he’ll see my first-sip wince, but I manage to hold it together). We then move on to the oldest pub in London where I drink strawberry beer. He shows me a set of keys – his boss has given him a hotel room for the night. He never explains why.
Three buses later, in the time it takes for him to explain to me why ‘London has been more of a parent to me than my parents have’, we arrive at a dingy hotel in a converted suburban home on a main road in Ealing.
I don’t want to sleep with him because I want to get to know him better, so we spend all night lying in the bed, staring at the off-white ceiling, and talk about our eighteen years so far. He is the son of a very old, very elegant, very rich man who was ‘the last of the colonizers’ and discovered a rare type of fish on his travels, wrote a book about it and has lived off the money ever since. I am agog with wonder. We fall asleep at five.
Everything I Know About Love Page 4