In 2008, I got on a train at Paddington that changed my life for ever, but not in the way I anticipated. It wasn’t at all like Before Sunrise or Some Like It Hot or Murder on the Orient Express. I didn’t fall in love or do a raunchy, boozy performance of ‘Runnin’ Wild’ on the ukulele or get entangled in a murder mystery; instead I began a chain of events that would unfurl slowly over the next five years until finally the story was so frustratingly far away, I couldn’t touch it, let alone undo what I had begun. The story of the train journey that changed my life, actually, hardly involves me at all.
It was the coldest winter that I could remember (probably due to my fondness at the time for the form-fitting bodycon dress) and while I was on the last Sunday-night train from London back to Exeter University, it started to snow. The train broke down just outside Bristol and while other passengers moaned and sighed and stomped about in frustration, I couldn’t have found the whole thing more romantic. I bought a bottle of cheap red wine from the First Great Western buffet carriage and returned to my seat to stare out into the inky, silent countryside being neatly frosted with thick snow like icing on a Christmas cake.
On the seat across from me, there was a boy about my age with the prettiest face I had ever seen. He had been trying to catch my gaze while I had been staring out of the window, dreaming of a man on this broken-down train trying to catch my gaze. Finally he caught my eye, introduced himself as Hector and asked if he could join me for a drink.
He had the sort of peculiar, unshakeable confidence that had so obviously been cultivated at a public school. It’s a confidence that comes from being handed an ancient blazer of identity aged thirteen – a set of house colours, a crass nickname and a motto that can be recalled in song even after five pints. It’s the brash confidence that comes from being in a debating society aged thirteen, then ultimately elbows its way to the top of government; the type that makes you believe it has a right to be here and things to say. Fortunately, Hector could offset such arrogance because he had the features of a cherub: sparkly blue eyes with irises like cornflowers and an upturned nose like a boy in a 1950s soap advert. He had the curly, floppy hair of a young Hugh Grant along with the rich, plummy, playful voice. We talked for two hours as the train sat still, laughing and drinking and eating the mince pies my mum had packed me off with.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: if only this encounter could have been more twee. Well, that went through my nineteen-year-old brain too. So, inspired by the many romcoms shown on terrestrial television on a Sunday night, I decided it would be a serendipitous act if we didn’t swap numbers and hoped to be reunited again by chance. And off he went, into the cold night at Bristol station, leaving me with enough material to write about on my rambling, anonymous ‘single girl’s adventures’ blog for at least three entries.
Two years later to the month, a few months after Harry and I had broken up, I was standing at the bar in a pub on Portobello Road when he walked in. Even with just two years of aging, his cherubic face had become ironic and sexy when paired with a grown-up suit and coat and a slightly less floppy haircut.
‘Of all the pubs in all the world,’ he said as he approached me and kissed me on both cheeks. As history dictated, we passed the night drinking cheap red wine while the snow fell heavily outside and, come last orders, we were trapped again. The snow was too heavy for me to get a bus home and I was too drunk to muster the energy to play hard to get. Unable to tackle the snow in a wobbly, cheap pair of heels, he flung me over his shoulder like a Persian rug and we went back to his flat.
Come four a.m., we were still awake, lying naked on his floor, chain-smoking American Spirits and flicking ash into a cup balanced on my stomach. He took my eyeliner out from my handbag and wrote a line from a Ted Hughes poem on his wall (‘Her eyes wanted nothing to get away / Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows’). The words hung, slurred and smeared in kohl, next to numerous charcoal drawings of a naked woman. (‘I did them. They’re my ex,’ he boasted, as I lay naked as his current project, staring up at his wall of artefacts of shags gone by. ‘Sweet girl, shame she was married.’) Next to his bed there was a black leather address book with three words embossed in gold on the front: BLONDES, BRUNETTES, REDHEADS. You had to hand it to him – he may have been a shagger, but he was certainly an imaginative shagger.
Hector was waggish, impish, boyish, caddish, rakish, roguish; all the ishes you would use to describe a man in a Noel Coward play. I had never met anyone like him before. Everything about him was antiquated: his family had titles, he wore a floor-length wolf fur coat from Russia that belonged to his grandfather and his shirts had labels in them from boarding school. Everything in his room was overused or borrowed. Even his career was borrowed; his boss was the ex-toy-boy lover of his ex-socialite mother, who had given this disastrous graduate a job in the City out of adoration for her. I used to leave Hector in the morning and wonder what on earth he would do at work in between flouncing around in my underwear which he put on under his (unpressed) trousers and sending dirty emails to me all day from his work account.
Our relationship was entirely nocturnal because he was entirely nocturnal, like a mythical beast of the night, like the wandering wolf that was skinned for his coat. We went out and got drunk in dark bars, we had dates that began at midnight. I once actually turned up at his house naked under a trench coat. I was twenty-one and living out a Jackie Collins novel, starring opposite an overgrown, randy Just William.
He never met my friends and I never met his – which suited us just fine. I didn’t even know he had housemates until I drunkenly stumbled into the kitchen one morning at six a.m., entirely naked, to be confronted by a man called Scott. I slammed open the door and switched on the light to find him sitting in his suit, eating cereal and reading the paper before work. Hector thought it was funny – more than funny, he found the idea of his housemate seeing me full-frontal naked hot. We had our first row.
A few days later, I was making scrambled eggs in his kitchen when Scott reappeared in his dressing gown. He smiled at me apologetically.
‘Hello,’ he said with an awkward wave.
‘Hello,’ I replied. ‘I’m so, so sorry about the other morning. Hector told me no one was in. I was so angry with him.’
‘It’s fine. Honestly, it’s fine.’
‘It’s not fine, it’s awful, I’m so sorry,’ I babbled. ‘The last thing you want to see before work.’
‘It was … er … a nice surprise,’ he said. I offered him some eggs and toast as an olive branch.
We sat and made polite conversation that eased us on to the subject of dating. Was he seeing anyone? No. Did I have any nice single friends he could date? Yes, I had the perfect girl. My best friend, Farly.
‘But she definitely isn’t looking for a relationship at the moment, she’s happy being single, so it would be more of a casual thing,’ I warned.
‘That sounds perfect.’
‘Great! I’ll give you her number. It’s the least I can do,’ I said. I tapped her number into his phone. Why not? He seemed like a nice guy – attractive, courteous. She probably fancied a fling. I mentioned it to her in passing and thought nothing of it again.
I think it’s important that I pause here to do a bit of explaining, so you are aware of why I single-white-female my way through the rest of this story.
My friendship with Farly was not instantaneous – she spent her first year at school tightly bound to a group of Power Princesses. They were a brand of North London suburban girl who ruled school. They had blonde highlights, Tiffany jewellery and anecdotes from Brady, a social and sports club in Edgware for Jewish teenagers; the Chinawhite of the suburbs. I, on the other hand, wore a lot of black at the weekends and spent time at school devising plays in the drama department, trying to depict the trauma of a plane crash using only a wooden block. But we were put in the same classes for French and maths and we soon discovered we had a shared sense of humour and a passion for The Sound o
f Music and watermelon lip balms.
Our out-of-hours friendship started tentatively, after a few months of sitting next to each other in lessons. I invited her round to my house first and my mum made roast chicken. My dad did that thing he does with all my friends when he holds on to one fact about them in a panic to find a common language and brings it up in every other sentence. With Farly this is anything pertaining to Jews or Judaism, which he has continued to do for around ten years, saying things like ‘Have you seen Sir Alan Sugar has had to downsize Amstrad? Great shame’ or ‘I saw an advert recently for reduced flights to Tel Aviv. Must be lovely, hot weather there at the moment.’ But after a slow start, we were inseparable. We spent every moment we could together at school and when we got home we wolfed down our dinners then called each other to go through any other business we forgot to cover at our various meetings throughout the day. So ingrained was this ritual that even now I can recall Farly’s mum’s landline number between the years of 2000–2006 quicker than I can remember my credit card PIN.
I hated school and was often getting into trouble. Aged twelve, after a suspension, bust-up with my deputy head and a detention, I returned to lessons for geography with a teacher who particularly disliked me. We were asked to get out our exercise books, which I had forgotten to bring, as I did with everything when I was a kid. I was a disaster. Every year at the Christmas party a bin bag was awarded as ‘The Dolly Alderton Prize for Disorganization’. The chosen pupil had to go round the school and pick up all her belongings she’d left lying around. I hated it.
‘Where is your exercise book?’ the teacher asked, peering down at my desk, her sour breath curdled with Nescafé and cigarettes.
‘I forgot it,’ I muttered.
‘Oh, there’s a surprise,’ she said, raising her voice to the volume of a public announcement and pacing around the classroom. ‘She forgot it. Has there been a day in your life when you haven’t forgotten something? It’s a book, one book, it’s not difficult.’ She slammed her board rubber down on her desk.
My face reddened and I felt the rising nausea of holding hot tears at the back of my throat. Farly squeezed my hand underneath the table twice, fast and hard. I knew what it meant. A universal, silent Morse code for I’m here, I love you. At that moment I realized that everything had changed: we had transitioned. We had chosen each other. We were family.
Farly and I had always been each other’s plus ones for every day of each other’s lives. We were each other’s sidekicks at every family dinner, every holiday, every party. We have never properly rowed unless steaming drunk on a night out. We have never lied to each other. In over fifteen years, I have never gone more than a few hours without thinking about her. I only make sense with her there to act as my foil and vice versa. Without the love of Farly, I am just a heap of frayed and half-finished thoughts; of blood and muscle and skin and bone and unachievable dreams and a stack of shit teenage poetry under my bed. My mess only takes a proper shape with that familiar and favourite piece of my life standing next to me.
We know the names of all our grandparents and our childhood toys and we know the exact words that, when put in a certain order, will make each other laugh or cry or shout. There isn’t a pebble on the beach of my history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too. She is, in short, my best friend.
Valentine’s Day, 2010. That’s the day Scott and Farly chose to have their first date. I mean – who does that? I don’t even know why they bothered with a date, I was under the impression that the drink was just a formality; what they were really doing was meeting up for a one-night stand.
‘I know it sounds weird,’ she explained. ‘But we’ve been texting back and forth for a bit and it’s the only day we can both do.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I don’t know. He’s going to pick me up from work and he’s said there’s a nice place in Notting Hill for dinner.’
‘DINNER?’ I bellowed. ‘Why are you going out for bloody DINNER? I thought this was just going to be a shag?’
‘Well, I can’t just go round to his house, Doll, I have to at least talk to him first.’
‘Yeah but why dinner, it’s not like we’re … forty. What a waste of money. Also, why Valentine’s Day?’
‘I’ve told you, otherwise we’d have to wait for ages, we’re both very busy.’
‘ “We’re both very busy,” ’ I mimicked. ‘You’re acting like you’re married.’
‘Oh, shut up.’
‘Don’t you think it’s going to be weird when he – a man you’ve NEVER met – meets you at work then takes you to have DINNER on VALENTINE’S DAY around LOADS OF COUPLES? Don’t you think it’s going to distort your judgement of whether you actually like him or not?’
‘No. It’s going to be very casual.’
The dinner went well. The dinner wasn’t very casual at all. Scott picked Farly up from Harrods where she was working on a jewellery counter, in the rain (in the rain – Christ, talk about gilding the lily); they got in a cab to Notting Hill, went to the restaurant and had the best date of Farly’s life. I knew it was the best date of Farly’s life because she didn’t do her usual thing of wittering on and on about how it was the best date of her life. When I asked her about Scott, she was coy. Measured. She even sounded a bit like an adult.
It was the infuriating adultness of Farly and Scott’s courtship that made me realize what a joke my relationship with Hector had become. The ‘ishes’ of Hector went off like milk – selfish, oafish, nightmarish. He was too disastrous and the shtick wasn’t fun any more; I didn’t want to drink a bottle of white wine for breakfast or hit him round the head with a loafer in a play fight or pretend to be a naughty pixie as a part of his whimsical, overcomplicated narrative in his sexual fantasies. Twice in the space of a week he got drunk, passed out and locked me out of his house in the rain for the best part of a night. The enviable head-boy confidence came with something else – the need for a matron. And that was not the job for me.
‘Please, Dolly,’ Farly begged on a Friday night out. ‘Please just see him for one more night, please.’
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I don’t fancy him any more.’
‘Oh, but me and Scott aren’t at a point where I can just go round to his flat, I’ll look like a stalker.’
‘It’s never bothered you before.’ (Farly once gave a man £20 for phone credit and made him promise he would text her – he never did.)
‘Yes but I want to be normal with him,’ she said earnestly. ‘I am being normal with him, it’s really nice. Please text Hector. We can go round together, it won’t be awkward.’ I thought about it. ‘Come on, I’ve done this for you.’
Damn her to hell, she had.
I texted Hector and said I was bringing Farly. We got on a night bus to Notting Hill.
Predictably, after the four of us had a drink together in their living room, Hector wanging on about the history of nipple clamps in his annoying, drunk Nigel Havers voice while Farly did her best hair-twirling and shy smiling at Scott, the pair of them went off. Hector led me up to his bedroom because he wanted to ‘show me something’. He was being uncharacteristically affectionate and needy, the way men like him are when they sense you’ve grown distant (I hadn’t answered his pornographic limerick emails in over two weeks). I sat on his bed and drank warm white wine straight from the bottle.
‘What is it?’ I asked flatly. He picked up a guitar. Oh no. Not this – anything but this. The bedroom I had spent months dreaming of, wishing I were in, had quickly become a cave of my own personal nightmares. I suddenly saw the bohemian mess for what it was: dirty socks all over the floor, a faint smell of mould and must like an old cricket pavilion on a wet day, a duvet with holes burned from comatose chain-smoking. The beautiful charcoals of naked women had morphed into ugly, knowing gargoyles staring down at me. We had to go through this, now you do too, they hissed.
‘There’sho
mething I want you to hear,’ he slurred and struck two violent chords, in between an attempt at tuning his guitar.
‘Oh God – no, it’s fine, you don’t have to.’
‘Dolly Alderton,’ he announced, as if he were at an open-mic night. ‘I am vey shmitten. I wrote thishong for you.’ He started playing the pattern of three chords he had already played me over and over again before.
‘I saw her on a train,’ he sang in an Americana croak. ‘Life would never be the same. After the first night we –’
‘Hector,’ I said sullenly as I felt the wine hit me with full force. ‘I think we should stop seeing each other.’
I left with Farly early the next morning and that was it; I never saw him again. I was assured by Farly and Scott that I really did break his heart and apparently the Mulberry Bayswater handbag of an overnight guest didn’t appear on the kitchen table for at least three weeks after that night.
(Footnote: Hector is now a very successful entrepreneur and married to a Hollywood actress. I found out through an article in the Mail Online while sitting in my pyjamas eating a whole chocolate yule log to myself: go figure.)
Things I Am Scared Of
– Dying
– People I love dying
– People I hate dying so I feel guilty about all the times I said bad things about them
– Drunk men on the street telling me I’m tall
– Drunk men on the street telling me I’m fat
– Drunk men on the street telling me I’m sexy
– Drunk men on the street telling me I’m ugly
– Drunk men on the street telling me to cheer up
– Drunk men on the street telling me they want to shag me
Everything I Know About Love Page 7