Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  I should have been pretty pleased with myself as the new term unfolded. Outwardly mobile, financially independent, socially established. Rob and I had gelled into some kind of double act, with he the raconteur (‘Come on, Rob, tell that story about your Dad again!’, ‘I’m not a juke box!’), and I the louche, moody, scruff-bag diarist. We had been to see The Smiths at Brixton Academy and afterwards pushed our way out of the steaming, cardiganned throng into the tense, urban night and hopped nonchalantly on the back of a 45 bus which took us all the way to Battersea, feeling like real Londoners. He and I began a course of weekend jaunts in Shake, picking a direction and just driving, connecting up the capital’s labyrinthine streets, from West Hampstead to East Ham, making the city ours. Rob shot a surreal, self-congratulatory cine film of me standing in the street and chucking my London A-Z over a fence: not needed on voyage of discovery.

  I should have been on top of the world. But I wasn’t. That’s not the student way – you live a heavily subsidised life within institutions designed to shield you from the harsher realities of the working world and your parents give you food and postage stamps even though you no longer live with them, and yet your response to all this good fortune is to place the back of a hand to your lavender-scented brow and wail, ‘Woe is me! I have an essay on the role of women in advertising to write by May! I found an Elastoplast in a cheese roll at the canteen! And I had to call the AA out under their excellent Home Start scheme this morning to charge my battery! Why me?’

  Of course, all this self-pity would have evaporated if I’d had a girlfriend.

  In truth, the girlfriend-shaped hole in my life was the source of all my angst, the void into which all corresponding joy was violently sucked. I lived in what was tantamount to a hotel, whose young female guests outnumbered the males by a ratio of 3:1 and yet I couldn’t get a single girl – or indeed an unsingle one – to sleep with me. Unless you’ve been a 19-year-old boy during a drought you won’t understand the ache, the longing, the self-flagellation. And so much awful poetry to write. My chances of affronting or riling a girl sufficient for her to go to the trouble of making and leaving me a voodoo doll were as good as nil. Sandy didn’t even know where I lived.

  In late February, desperate, I devised an ingenious form of martyrdom. Having collected my new sheets and pillowcases as per usual from the laundry room on a Tuesday morning, I took the bold step of not putting them on my bed. I would leave my bed melodramatically unmade. That would show them! If no one will lie in it with me, I declared, what’s the point of making it?

  That night I slept on top of the bare mattress with just the brown bedcover over me, the fresh sheets folded in a pile on the floor. It was chilly and itchy and stupid. For my penance the gods of Ralph West sent me a girl.

  Catherine is, frankly, astride me. I can’t believe my good fortune. Bloody hell, the jumper’s coming off. This certainly makes up for news in the NME today that the Cocteau Twins have cancelled their GLC benefit gig.

  Catherine is from the middle of nowhere in Scotland – a Ralph West resident and painter. Her father is a sculptor. You might have heard of him; I haven’t, but then I’ve only heard of two sculptors. Three if you count Rodin but I don’t even know his first name and it’s hard to focus on such matters when a girl is taking her jumper off in your room. Catherine has finely sculpted features; unlike many female art students who disguise their shape under shapeless clothes for fear of objectifying their own gender and thus undermining their artistic integrity, she favours long skirts and tight black jumpers that hug her windswept Scottish curves. She has long, straight, mousey hair, a ruddy, make-up-free complexion, and often goes barefoot at breakfast which is a turn-on in itself. On top of all this, she is the only girl I’ve met since becoming a student who seems happy to sit on top of me in my room.

  I’m already calling her my Highland Fling.

  It’s Auguste. Auguste Rodin.

  Catherine slept in her own bed that night and who can blame her – mine didn’t have any sheets on it. She was also concerned what her 6th floor neighbour Debbie might think if there was no answer when she knocked on her door at breakfast. Catherine was no dirty stop-out and in the halls of residence reputations must be preserved. Still, we certainly connected that evening, and although the relationship – if we may call it that and I think in the circumstances we must – lasted just eight days from introduction to termination, nobody got hurt. What I mean is, I didn’t get hurt.

  The social calendar dictated our premature coming-out at a Chelsea-organised party. Catherine and I sat together at a rotten nightclub called the Embassy in Piccadilly less than 24 hours after jumper removal. We canoodled together on the night bus and repaired this time to her room to spice things up a little, although I recall it being slightly less romantic due to all the lights being on. I was already beginning to get that nagging, tied-down feeling in my bones. It was Thursday.

  By their very nature, first-year halls romances play out in time-lapse, like a badly-written Mills and Boon novel flicked through in the shop. Unlike training-bra relationships forged at school – in other words at Mum and Dad’s pleasure – these couplings are no longer restricted by access or privacy or a lift home. Military planning is no longer required in order to facilitate a hand up a skirt. No thought need be spared for how you’ll get home after your bit of slap and tickle. You are home. Even if she kicks you out at two in the morning during a cold snap, you can creep back to your room in your socks. Which is why the spring term transforms Ralph West Halls from an Inner London Education Authority hostel into a South London pastiche of the Playboy Mansion. Not because all 19-20-year-olds are insatiable, amoral sex maniacs – although many of us are – but because at our time of life it seems ungrateful to do otherwise. Whizzing hormones and biologically programmed opportunism clearly play their part in this circus, but it’s more than just sexual gratification. I am away from home for the first time, displaced from familial love, and clearly a part of me was trying to fill that void – clean sheets, hot food and emptied bins do not replace family life, they merely parody it. But was I really looking for love that term or simply reassurance that I could mean something to another?… and another and another.

  By Friday, Catherine and I were having awkward conversations about ‘obligation’ and ‘doing exactly what we want’. Such conversations were a poor advert for talking, so we decided to shut up and roll around a bit instead. For the final time. On Saturday I tipsily declared my love to a St Martins girl with a bob called Jo at an ad hoc 3rd floor lift-lobby party, thus drawing a line under the Highland Fling.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Catherine, as I sprawled on the carpet with a bottle of Cinzano gazing rheumily into Jo’s saucer eyes. Catherine returned barefoot to the 6th floor to announce tearfully to Debbie that I was just like all the others. Which I was. And so was she. And so was Jo.

  Even though nothing happened between me and Jo, I felt guilty the next day and spent much of the afternoon making Catherine a torn-paper collage of a map of Scotland because I knew she missed the Highlands. More to the point, Jo already had a London boyfriend. (And a mini-fridge in her room, which put my car into the shade.) I tiptoed up to the 6th floor and blu-tacked my peace offering to Catherine’s door. Would it heal the wound? It would have to pretty quickly, as I was starting to have impure thoughts about Lara.

  I can with confidence rule Lara out of the voodoo doll investigation. Principally because she doesn’t live in halls, nor would she have the imagination to perpetrate such a hex. Or the skill to make a doll. A supremely ungifted Sunday painter on one of my courses, she has a flat of her own in Pimlico, just behind the Tate Gallery, which is handy for an art student you must admit. When I say flat, it’s actually an apartment; an apartment in a block where guests are buzzed in by a doorman who then phones upstairs. She effectively has a receptionist. Inside, it’s like a photograph in an interiors magazine: new wooden furniture, scatter cushions, a green oven.

  I
effectively wasted three whole weeks of my life on Lara – weeks in which I could have been wooing girls much closer to home (in terms of proximity and class). But it took me that long to work out that she was so far out of my league she may as well have been royalty. Lara is quite the poshest girl I have ever met. She actually says ‘Yah’ instead of ‘Yes’ – just like Princess Di – and wears pearls and stripy shirts with upturned collars under navy round-neck jumpers. And flat shoes. Rob calls her a Sloaney and writes her off as the type who treats art college as finishing school – slumming it with the students for three years. Having moved among the privileged at Cranbrook – and picked up the finer points of their accent – Rob’s a lot wiser on these delicate matters than me. I just thought she liked wearing her collar up.

  Learning curve.

  It was an infatuation heightened by the challenge, and with everything in your life in flux, anything seemed possible. I ladled lots of attention on Lara at college. Observing that she smoked Rothmans International, I bought her a packet of 20 from the newsagent as a token of my affection. Never having been a smoker, I was anything but conversant with the coded nature of cigarette brands, but these Rothmans came in a fancy blue box with gold trim and a royal crest, and inside the fags were divided into two compartments of ten, which was very cool. Were they the cigarette of the aristocracy or was Lara slumming it? I waited until she was down to her last Rothman and presented them to her and she called me ‘sweet’ and somehow held back from kissing me patronisingly on the head. It was all the encouragement I needed. I gave her a lift back to her flat one lunchtime to pick up some keys and she uttered these words:

  ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  I started to wonder what shape she was under those unflattering jumpers. Lara invited me round for what she calls supper, which turned out not to be a sandwich and a hot drink before bed but a kind of late dinner. Not expecting a full meal, I ate my normal dinner at halls before driving over the river to Pimlico. This actually turned out for the best as she served up pasta with hardly any sauce on it, just oil really, as if it was half-finished. I wish I could tell you that supper turned to wine and dimmed lights and the removal of that jumper, but we were not alone. Lara had also invited our friend Jane Chipchase from college, who comes from Basingstoke and is as unused to all this finery as I am.

  We chatted about the course and the tutors and briefs and crits and then Lara’s flatmate turned up. She was called Mouse and that was a bit weird. She looked identical to Lara and I noticed that they both have these red cheeks and when Lara said, ‘I really do,’ it sounded to me like she said, ‘I rarely do’, which means the opposite and that’s confusing. Then she put on a Eurythmics tape and the scales fell from my eyes.

  Looking back on it, I don’t know what came over me. It was clear from the photographs of Lara riding her horse that she’d no sooner go out with me than the doorman. I invited her to a halls party and she never turned up. The Eurythmics!

  Filled with gloom, I was forced to invite a catatonic, big-haired shop-assistant ex-girlfriend called Geeena (her spelling) up from Northampton to stay the weekend. She hardly said a word between being picked up from Victoria Coach Station on Saturday and being deposited back at Victoria Coach Station on Sunday. Of course I felt dirty and opportunistic, but at least she doesn’t have a horse or a receptionist or a flatmate named after an animal, and, to quote my new Killing Joke 12-inch, ‘the act is done.’

  Next suspect: Teri from Portsmouth. Fashion student. Black clothes, staggeringly long auburn hair, small breasts and a long-term boyfriend back home, though she didn’t regard this as a barrier to halls romance, so neither did I.

  ‘Can I take my clothes off?’

  Now there’s a question.

  Rob’s gone back to Kent for the weekend, so I feel duty bound to get off with someone new and unexpected, just to piss him off and live up to what is now his snake-like caricature of me, but no girl has ever asked me if she can take her clothes off before.

  It seems so stupid to have to say yes.

  ‘Umm, yes.’

  I met Teri through Catherine, which is awkward. Catherine and I went for a drink in the Prince Albert last night and she brought along three of her friends from halls: Vicky, Tracey and Teri. I’d seen all three of them around socially – by which I mean in the dinner queue, the laundry queue and the phone queue, but never actually met them. I liked Teri immediately. I think I liked the fact that she had this boyfriend at home in Portsmouth. The boyfriend acted as a kind of insurance. He meant that Teri and I could dally without difficult questions arising. It’s clear to me now that it wasn’t love I was after, but a largely self-gratifying, method-acting version thereof. Perfect for the unreal pantomime of our student world. Because grown-up sexual intimacy was involved, albeit still achieved in teenage haste, the stakes were higher, the potential for hurt and heartbreak increased. But it was still a game.

  After last orders, the five of us retired to Teri’s room on the first floor, which, all draped in black fabric and netting, was more like a Gothic tomb. Where had this girl been all my life? And that’s when we decided to be students and stay up all night. If there had been a telephone box, we’d have all tried to squeeze into it.

  The others dropped out one by one, first Tracey, then Vicky, then – after a determined effort to stay the course and stop me sleeping with her friend – Catherine. It was with a heavy heart and sore eyelids that she threw in the towel at 4am, knowing that she was unable to avert the inevitable. Teri and I had certainly worked hard to find ourselves alone, and the gently probing conversation that followed was interrupted by purposeful bursts of getting up and walking around in order to stay awake. We eventually dozed off at 5.30am – she on the bed, me on the mat – which is the precise time when all students who try and stay up all night doze off.

  I tiptoed out of her room at eight and went straight to breakfast, feeling understandably delicate. I sat with Stephen, but decided against telling him where I’d spent most of the night, even though I hadn’t laid a finger on Teri. Catherine shot me dark, disapproving looks across the fish fingers, having made her assumptions and cast me as the villain, like it was any fucking business of hers. I’d made her a collage of Scotland – what more did she want?

  While Teri sensibly slept, undisturbed, for the rest of Saturday, I gathered up all the strength in my spare tank and honoured a commitment I’d made to Stephen for our Rob-free weekend: to go clothes shopping. This meant getting dressed up in secondhand suits we can afford, and trotting off down the King’s Road and South Molton Street to look at first hand ones we can’t. Stephen’s constant refrain while perusing the racks: ‘Fuckin’ lovely, that!’

  It was probably the lack of sleep, but I kept thinking that perhaps last night had never happened and in fact I’d never been to Teri’s tomb and drunk bad wine and instant coffee until 5.30am. Everyday sounds like ringing tills and pelican crossings seemed unnaturally amplified and I thought I could hear my own blood being pumped around my head. At one stage I felt like I might pass out in the oppressive, stuffy heat of a boutique which only seemed to be selling three different jumpers, two pairs of shoes and a range of military cap badges. Thankfully, I kept it together. Wouldn’t want to embarrass Stephen in his imagined natural habitat. We bought a crêpe from the crêpe stall on the way home and saw Tom Selleck filming a London-based episode of Magnum P.I. on Albert Bridge. This lifted my spirits and I’ve been awake ever since.

  And now Teri’s in my room and she’s asking me a question and I’m saying yes and she’s doing what she just asked me if she could do. I think I’m in love, but I don’t know what sort of collage of Portsmouth I can do at the other end.

  Teri and I were not built to last. Because of the boyfriend, we never really went public. She would leave me notes in empty Silk Cut packets outside my door. Sometime she just left empty Silk Cut packets, meaning she’d dropped by when I was out. Sometimes she left a packet when I was clearly in
, which was a little more spooky. I got off on the intrigue though, and loved the fact that she wore men’s pyjamas. Then one time when I ventured down to her room after lights out, heard a low, male voice behind her locked door and made a swift exit up the fire escape. The boyfriend had dropped in unannounced. My enthusiasm for the relationship waned after that. He was fine as a concept but not as a physical threat.

  One evening, with nothing better to do, I watched Falling In Love, that night’s rented video in the hall coffee bar and, in characteristic style, I found portent and omen in what was really just a boring film about Molly and Frank, two middle-class suburbanites having an affair after a chance meeting.

  ‘I’m very married,’ says Meryl Streep, before embarking on the fling.

  ‘I am too,’ replies Robert De Niro.

  When all was said and done, Teri was very married and I was playing with fire. The Silk Cut packets soon packed up and I was free to fall in love again.

  Her name says it all: Dawn. It’s late May. The weather has turned prematurely hot and the roof of Ralph West is the place to be. Dawn has broken, like the first dawn, flooding light and magic across my grey, post-Portsmouth existence. She is a dishevelled and buxom illustrator from Central School of Art and Design, larger than life and twice as colourful, with her Medusa-like orange hair and the messiest, paintiest room in halls. It’s like a work in progress: wherever you stand or sit or recline, there’s a tube of paint or a bottle of ink or a felt tip pen within easy reach – in case inspiration strikes. Paint without a top, ink without a lid, pens without caps. Dawn gives the impression of being dizzy, although it might be an act; her outfits look as if she coordinates them using a lottery system and she ties up random fistfuls of her voluminous Kia-Ora hair depending on the day. I find her fascinating, although I think what clinched it was the spooky black-and-white childhood photograph she has on her pinboard. In it, aged about five, she is being hugged by a man in a horribly realistic polar bear suit. It’s winter, there’s snow on the ground, other people are skating on a frozen pond, while Dawn beams winningly for the camera – despite the fact that she is being attacked by a bear. I fell in love with the girl in this picture. Though in real life she dwarfs me, I want to protect her from the polar bear.