To this day, I have never, ever been able to get over the fact I don’t need to drink gin from shampoo bottles any more; that there is no lights-out; that I can stay up watching films or writing until four a.m. on a weeknight if I want to. I am relieved, energized, invigorated that I can eat breakfast foods for dinner, play records really loud and have a cigarette out of my window. I still can’t quite believe my luck. My entire life as a young twenty-something adult was lived like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York when he finds himself booked in at The Plaza and orders mountains and mountains of ice cream from room service and watches gangster movies. I blame this entirely on a strict upbringing. Nearly every adult I’ve met who went to boarding school cannot believe they now live a life where they can go to a Kentish Town old man’s pub on a Tuesday night and not be given a detention or a suspension or a rustication, whatever that means. If university had been a playground in which to live out my adult fantasies, my own house and salary in London was a veritable nirvana.
We searched for three months before we found our first adult London home. Our budget was small and flats with three double bedrooms were hard to find. There was the house in Finsbury Park that cunningly photographed like a Notting Hill mews house and, on arrival, we realized was more like a wing of Pentonville Prison (‘All we’d do here is stay in watching The X Factor while eating Sainbury’s Basics penne,’ AJ commented). There was the disastrous viewing of the flat on the estate in Brixton that Farly and AJ attended alongside a large group of millennial hopefuls all queuing up outside like it was Madame Tussauds. The estate agent forgot to bring the keys, so kept everyone waiting for half an hour, then after they’d finally done a three-minute tour of the dump and left, they all had to get down to the ground as there was a gunman on the loose being chased by police outside the property. Finally, just as we were about to lose hope, Farly found a three-bed within our budget through a private landlord on Gumtree.
It was just off a notoriously dodgy crescent that joined the Chalk Farm end of Camden Town with the Kentish Town end. It had a proper old-fashioned market twice a week that sold pairs of five-pound slippers and cartoon bed sheets; it had a daily fruit and veg stall and a cash-only independent supermarket that sold weed from under the sandwich counter. It was graceless and garish and gorgeous.
The house was a beautiful mess. One in a row of 1970s ex-council maisonettes made of Lego-yellow bricks and bizarre placement and proportions of windows and doors that made it look like it was built in a rush by a teenager playing a game of The Sims. The front garden had two overgrown bushes that meant, in the summer, you couldn’t make your way through the rotting wooden front gate without vigorous arm-swiping. The tiles in the kitchen had English countryside scenes painted on them. The back garden was a forest of weeds. There were these odd liquid streak stains down the hallway wall which, after much examination, we could only assume to be piss. Everything smelt quite damp. The flat above us was occupied by squatters.
The landlord, Gordon, was a good-looking man in his forties with a boxy midlife-crisis leather jacket and suspiciously dark, floppy hair. He was also a BBC news presenter and liked everyone to know about it: his voice was loud and posh, his manner bizarrely brusque and informal.
‘So, this is the hallway,’ Gordon bellowed. ‘As you can see, lots of storage space.’ We opened one of the large dusty white doors. A black box lay in the middle of the empty shelves with ‘RAT ATTACK!’ emblazoned on it in a bold yellow font. ‘Oh, ignore that,’ he said, scooping it up in his hand. ‘All sorted now.’ There was a brief exchange of glances between us. ‘Do you know what?’ he said, crinkling his nose slightly. ‘I think the best thing is – I’m just going to get out of your way and let you have a look around the place yourselves. Tell me when you’ve seen everything.’
It was wonky and wobbly and eccentric, but we knew it was the perfect first home not only for us but for our extended family of friends who we planned to have round every weekend. We went back downstairs to tell Gordon we wanted it – he was in the middle of a call.
‘Ya … ya … well. That’s the worst-case scenario,’ he said, flapping his hand at us dismissively. ‘Ya. Well, for the moment let’s just try and keep it out of court. Don’t want to be back there AGAIN.’ He looked at us and rolled his eyes. ‘Great, well I’ll be round tomorrow at ten to see this roof. OK. Yap. OK. Yes, yes. OK. Bye.’ He put his phone in his jeans back pocket. ‘Bloody tenants,’ he said. ‘So do you want it or not?’
We scrimped and saved to cover our deposits so the first month was spent living in exciting, frantic, frenetic frugality. We had barely anything for the house so Farly bought a pack of Post-its to stick on various surfaces and state things like: ‘TV WILL BE HERE’ or ‘TOASTER WILL BE HERE’. We ate Marmite and cucumber sandwiches every night for dinner. On the second night in our new home, I returned to find both the girls running around the living room in their wellies as they’d spotted the first mouse and didn’t want it to run over their bare feet as they tried to catch it. Farly bought a block of Pilgrims Choice Cheddar from the Nisa Local, put it in her emptied vanity case and waggled it along the carpet, trying to entice the mouse to a safe rescue.
We also quickly made acquaintances with the manager of the local corner shop, a middle-aged bloke called Ivan who was built like a marine. On our first visit, he ominously told us that if we ‘fell into any trouble with any gangs’ to come to him immediately as it would be ‘dealt with’. Farly was wearing a string of pearls at the time. But I felt strangely safer knowing Ivan was always ten seconds’ walk from our front door and when the mouse thing became a recurring problem, he always came to the rescue. I would often run straight out of the house barefoot in pyjamas and into the shop shouting ‘IT’S BACK, IVAN! IT’S BACK!’ with a sort of Blanche DuBois hysteria.
‘All right, dahlin’, all right,’ he would say. ‘I’ll come now. Do you want me to bring my gun?’ I’d decline, ask him to bring his torch instead, and he’d crouch under every bed, fridge and sofa to try and find it.
(Eventually, Gordon organized for an exterminator to come in. An East End geezer with, ironically, the surname ‘Mouser’. When he laid down some traps, I asked him if there was a more humane way of dealing with the problem.
‘No,’ he said, his arms folded in dismay.
‘OK,’ I replied. ‘It’s just that I’m vegetarian.’
‘Well you don’t have to eat it,’ he replied.)
Camden felt like the right place for us to be: it was central, it was near all the nicest parks and, best of all, it was perilously, hopelessly uncool. None of our friends lived there; in fact no one our age lived there. When we went out on Camden High Street, we were confronted with swarms of Spanish teenagers on a school trip or forty-something men with Paul Weller haircuts and winkle-picker shoes who were still waiting for Camden’s glory years of Britpop to return. ‘Goon Watch’, AJ used to call it. We’d walk down the High Street on a Saturday night and she’d slur ‘Goon, goon, goon’ in my ear, pointing at passers-by. For the first few months I lived there I had a glamorous but ultimately ruinously self-obsessed musician boyfriend who lived in East London and refused to ever come visit me, because it was ‘too 2007’ to go to Camden.
Occasionally, during the years we were there, we’d go for a party or a night out in East London and be surrounded by young, cool, gorgeous people and we’d wonder if this was really where we were supposed to be at our age. But, as we left, we would always feel rather exhausted by the experience and grateful that we lived somewhere where we never had to pretend we were cooler than we were; which was not very at all. We could go to the shops in our leggings and hoodies and no bra and not bump into anyone we knew. We could take over a dance floor doing a drunken, comic cancan in a line and comfortably still be the coolest people in the entire bar. We could go out and spend the whole evening absorbed in each other, not trying to impress anyone. There was simply no one left in Camden to impress.
One of the firs
t things I bought for the house was an industrial-sized cooking pot fit for a soup kitchen. Our friends had always been great eaters and I was thrilled to have a stove and a kitchen table to call my own. In those first years living together, we had people round for dinner three times a week. I worked out the cheaper things to make – pot after pot of dhal, tray after tray of Parmigiana. We’d have candlelit dinners in our hideously overgrown garden in the summer; at one point so overgrown that a tree caught fire in a strangely biblical way and we all drunkenly threw saucepans of water and glasses of Ivan’s dodgy five-pound Sauvignon Blanc over it.
There was a freedom in the feeling that our house was fundamentally too broken to fix. Gordon was relaxed about it too – he let us paint all the walls bright colours and never commented when the paint just stopped with a wobbly line on the staircase wall where we had got to the bottom of the Dulux tin. It meant it was a house we could really live in; a house we weren’t precious about. We could trash it on a Saturday night and all it would take was a ten-minute tidy the next morning to make it look passable again. We could have our record player on its loudest volume and stay up until six a.m. without the neighbours complaining – I swear those 1970s houses were built to be disco-proof, because in the years we lived there we never received one noise complaint. In fact, the neighbour told me she’d never heard us. And for this reason, our house was also the place where everyone could come to get high.
I got the majority of drug experimentation completely out of my system in my first couple of years living in London. First, I created a familial rapport with a friendly drug dealer called Fergus. Fergus wasn’t a sit-in-the-car-moodily-and-pass-you-a-baggie-under-the-dashboard dealer, but rather would join me late on a Friday night when I had friends round for dinner, rolling spliffs at the table and telling long-winded jokes while digging into the leftovers, before I’d finally send him packing with a Tupperware box of spaghetti carbonara. Farly, who had always been much more sensible than me and was always in bed by midnight when we had people round for dinner, never had the pleasure of meeting Fergus, but was always baffled by the way that I spoke about him as if he were ‘a cousin or a family friend’. One night, she was woken up at four a.m. by the sound of me giving Fergus an estate agent’s walking tour of the house as he advised me on the feng shui of each room. The next day, she came into my room to find me huffing and puffing while moving my bed to the opposite wall.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘I’m moving my bed. Fergus says it’s not in a good position at the moment.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the headboard is too close to the radiator. He says it’s not good for your head to be near heat – especially for your sinuses.’
‘Yeah, the man sells you Class A drugs, Dolly,’ Farly said. ‘He’s in no position to be handing out health advice.’
Fergus dropped out of contact rather suddenly, as I was told they often do, so I was then pointed in the direction of CJ – who was a steadfast disaster. CJ was known to be the worst drug dealer in London. His timekeeping was appalling, he would regularly give the ‘wrong order’ to the ‘wrong customer’ and turn up at your doorstep half an hour later asking for the ‘product’ back. His phone was never charged. His satnav was always conking out. It got to a point where he’d kept me waiting for an hour and a half and I found myself telling him on the phone that he was ‘his own worst enemy’, like a frustrated teacher. The last straw came on the Thursday before I left London to go to a festival and I rang him to ask if he could sell me some MDMA.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘MDMA,’ I replied. ‘Mandy.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘Ecstasy. Come on. MDMA.’
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ he said.
No matter how I got them or who I got them from, it was the acquisition of drugs that was nearly always more exciting than the drug itself. Talking about whether to get any, calling the number, getting the cash out; someone waiting in the flat while someone else went to go find the car, coming back with a tiny plastic pocket of herbs or powder; the promise of what was to come – that was the bit that got my heart beating fastest. Farly once witnessed the effort that it took to buy, divide up and take cocaine and she couldn’t quite believe how tediously time-consuming it was; ‘Like making a shepherd’s pie,’ she observed. But the time-consuming faff of lining up powder and rolling up spliffs is the very joy of it for someone who never wants a night to end – it’s a distraction, a guaranteed night extension. It’s the muting of your rational mind that says Go to bed at eleven, we’ve talked about everything we could possibly want to talk about now and in its place brings an artificial desire for the party to continue endlessly. For me, cocaine was only ever a vehicle to carry on drinking and staying awake long after I was tired; I was never that wild about any sensation it offered.
I thought that, to be a writer, I had to be a collector of experiences. And I thought every experience worth having, every person worth meeting, only existed after dark. I always remembered something Hicks told me as we lay in bed under the fairy lights of her student room twinkling around her window.
‘One day we will sit in a nursing home, Dolly, bored out of our minds and staring at the quilt on our laps,’ she said. ‘And all we will have to make us smile are these memories.’
But the increasing regularity of these nights meant I felt myself being defined by these stories, rather than a specialist collector of them. Staying out until dawn stopped being a one-off; instead I began equating any evening out with a hedonistic all-nighter. And, worst of all, everyone else expected it of me too. A night with me meant a night that ruined you for the next day and friends awaited that constant level of debauchery from me, even when we’d meet up for a quick pad thai on a Thursday evening. My energy, bank balance and mental state couldn’t keep up with it. And I didn’t want to self-mythologize and inflate myself into this sort of tragic Village Drunk figure that everyone would dread planning a coffee with, knowing that it would probably end the following morning in some all-night casino in Leicester Square.
‘I do love those stories,’ Helen once said the morning after we’d been at a party and I had gathered a group of people to bore them with my best folkloric tales of nights out. ‘But there are quite a lot of them, Doll.’
Another thing that no one tells you about drinking as you get older is that it isn’t the hangovers that become crippling, but rather the acute paranoia and dread in the sober hours of the following day that became a common feature of my mid-twenties. The gap between who you were on a Saturday night, commandeering an entire pub garden by shouting obnoxiously about how you’ve always felt you had at least three prime-time sitcom scripts in you, and who you are on a Sunday afternoon, thinking about death and worrying if the postman likes you or not, becomes too capacious. Growing up engenders self-awareness. And self-awareness kills a self-titled party girl stone-cold dead.
I also ended up having two entirely separate jobs, working in TV and being a freelance writer. They demanded more and more of my time and focus, and regular blackout boozing and hangovers were not conducive to productivity and creativity. ‘You’re trying to lead two lives,’ a friend once said to me when I was on the brink of exhaustion. ‘You have to choose which you’d rather be: the woman who parties harder than anyone else or the woman who works harder than anyone else.’
I decided to strive for the latter. Life grew fuller in the daylight hours and there was less need to escape at night. But it would still take me some time to realize that the route to adventure doesn’t just involve late nights and hot bars and cold wine and strangers’ flats and parked cars with lights on and little bags of powder. I always saw alcohol as the transportation to experience, but as I went through my twenties I understood it had the same power to stunt experience as it did to exacerbate it. Sure, there were the juicy confessionals you’d get out of people with dilated pupils in a loo cubicle; the old men with good stories who y
ou’d otherwise never meet; the places you’d go; the people you’d kiss. But there was also all the work that wouldn’t get done when you were hung-over. All the bad impressions you would make to potential friends because you were so drunk you could barely speak. All those lost conversations, in which someone tells you something really, really important, which are rendered meaningless because neither of you can remember it the next morning. All those hours spent lying in sweat and panic in your bed at five a.m., your heart beating as you stare at the ceiling, desperately willing yourself to sleep. All the hours lost in the cul-de-sac of your head torturing yourself with all the stupid things you said and did, hating yourself for the following few days.
Years later, I would discover that constantly behaving in a way that makes you feel shameful means you simply will not be able to take yourself seriously and your self-esteem will plummet lower and lower. Ironically, my teenage one-woman mission to be a grown-up through excessive drinking left me feeling more like a child than any other of my actions in my life. For years of my twenties, I wandered around feeling like I was about to be accused of something terrible, like someone could very easily march up to me and say, ‘YOU’RE the dick who drank Jo Malone Pear and Freesia bath oil in a pint glass at my house party for a dare – you owe me £42!’; or ‘OI! TOSS POT! I still can’t believe you got off with my boyfriend outside the Mornington Crescent Sainbury’s!’ – and I would have to nod reverently and say, ‘Yes, I can’t recall that specifically, but I shall take your word for it and I’m sorry.’ Imagine walking around in a world where you think someone is ALWAYS about to tell you you’re an arsehole, and you’re ready to agree with them whole-heartedly. What sort of fun is that?
Wherever I am on a Tuesday night, from now until the day I die, you can be sure that I would prefer to be in a grim pub in Camden drinking beer while talking to a stranger. But I eventually grew out of those clockwork-regular blackout benders that wiped out the next day like a tsunami, just like I eventually grew out of the yellow-bricked maisonette that was crumbling down. For a short while, though, sitting in my overgrown garden of Eden, drinking sour Sauvignon with the women I loved, the record player turned up loud and the empty plates piled high by the sink, I thought I lived in the best house in the world. I still think I did.
Everything I Know About Love Page 9