On the evenings when I didn’t have to work we watched the same films and TV shows, ate the same meals, read the same books one after another, washed and dried at the sink. ‘You and your father,’ my mother said, on one of her final visits before she moved away, ‘are like an old married couple,’ a weird and depressing vision of domestic life that underlined just why she’d left. She didn’t say it warmly. It was a warning.
Though we’d sometimes bump into each other on the streets, I didn’t see much of old friends who’d gone on to college, and all too soon that September came round when they all flew away to Manchester, to Birmingham and Hull and Leicester, to Glasgow and Exeter and Dublin. I’d heard that Fran Fisher was at Oxford (‘at’ not ‘in’), reading (not ‘studying’) English and French, and I thought, well that sounds about right. That makes sense.
Harper, who’d worked steadily when no one was looking, went to study Civil Engineering in Newcastle, where he was rarely seen outside without a traffic cone on his head. Fox, who’d relentlessly jeered anyone caught holding a pen, went off to train as a games teacher and at Christmas they’d meet me in the pub and tell me stories of legendary piss-ups. Soon Harper had a serious girlfriend, a woman of impossible glamour, studying tourism. They were going to go travelling together, perhaps drop in and see Lloyd, who now did something shady in Thailand. ‘Unless he’s in jail,’ said Fox, and we all agreed that a Thai jail was probably an environment where Lloyd could really thrive. We’d all softened a little, in our manner and around our waists, and laughed in a different way. I felt fond of them and we’d even try to revive the old nicknames and scuffles. But if we were a band, then we were past our best, re-formed, a nostalgia act, still playing but a member down and with only the old hits to perform. Harper skipped one Christmas, Fox another, and after that we no longer met up.
In my first summer after school, I’d noticed posters start to appear for Full Fathom Five’s new production. His hair was slicked back and without glasses his eyes seemed puffy and small, but I recognised George as a beetle-ish, hunch-backed King Richard III, in some ways a promotion, in others not. The following summer it was As You Like It, then, because enough time had passed, time for A Midsummer Night’s Dream again. I was no more likely to buy a ticket than I was to gate-crash the school-leavers’ disco, but I still felt a childish resentment that they were carrying on without me. Shakespeare, performing, books, music, poetry, art; the promise had been that these things changed young lives, gave a sense of self-worth, of community, altered the way in which we moved through the world. With missionary zeal, this was what Ivor and Alina had strived for and it had worked. But the process was reversible, and now nostalgia turned to bitterness whenever I recalled that summer. In 2001 it was Macbeth, and this, appropriately, was the production that killed them off. I imagined Ivor and Alina selling off the Transit van, dumping the beanbags and the yoga mats, and felt an unpleasant relief when they didn’t return.
I was in a rut, and knew that it was a rut, and took some pleasure in the shelter it provided. In the war movies and science-fiction films I loved, there was a stock character, the plucky corporal, wounded in the stomach or spine. I’ll only slow you down, he says, go on without me, and surrounded by explosives, and with a grenade clutched to his chest, he sits and waits for the enemy and the most destructive time to pull the pin. I always admired that character, his masochistic nobility. I’m not sure who I thought of as the enemy but I was happy, in my own way, to sit and wait while others made their escape, despite not having slowed them down at all.
Mum and Jonathan moved away to Exeter to be nearer his parents, both finding management jobs. ‘Boutique hotels, God help me,’ said Mum. I missed her, and I think Dad missed her too, but leaving no longer felt like a dereliction of duty, and she’d never really liked our town. Billie excelled in her GCSEs, then her A-levels, and went off to study Chemistry at Aberdeen ‘because it’s so far from Exeter’.
And I did miss Billie. She’d left home at the point where we might have become friends, and I never told her about the worst of times with Dad. In turn, I’m sure she had her own struggles in that stranger’s home, but though she remained my sister, we no longer felt like family. Our paths diverged too soon, and every choice she made took her further away. Perhaps some time in the future those paths will come back together.
I became very good at pool. And darts, and the slot machine. The Angler’s became my local, the staff who once refused to serve me became my friends and I graduated to a regular stool at the end of the bar. I had a few flings with girls I’d met there, consummated in cars or, in celebration of the spring, in the nearby churchyard. A love affair that begins up against a tomb is unlikely to flourish, and soon phone calls went unanswered. Once a drink was emptied over my head, just like in films, and I wondered, my God, is this who you’re becoming – someone who has drinks emptied over their head? What would Fran say?
On Christmas Eve in 2002 I had taken up my spot at the bar, privately resenting the part-timers who packed the pub at this time of year. Like worshippers who turn up once a year at midnight Mass. I wondered, where was their commitment? The woman on my right had wedged her elbows onto the bar and now was slowly pushing them outwards, shouting to the barmaid, ‘Excuse me? Miss?’
A loop of Christmas pop hits was playing loudly but still I recognised her voice and, for reasons that I couldn’t have explained, tilted my face away. A man had joined her now.
‘I need my drink!’
‘Fuck’s sake, just wait a moment, will you?’
‘Do you think I should ask for a vodka martini?’
‘In The Angler’s? Straight glass or tankard?’
If I swivelled to my left I might slide off my stool, take my pint and sit elsewhere …
Too late.
‘Oh. My. God.’
‘Hello, Helen.’
‘Charlie! Charlie Lewis, come here!’
‘Hi Alex!’ I mumbled into his shoulder as they wrenched me from the stool.
We moved to a table. Despite the solemn vows on Brighton beach, we’d drifted apart in their college years. Now they’d both changed just as they were meant to, Helen with a smart military haircut and a small black stud in her nose, Alex looking skinny, poised and quite beautiful, a louche millionaire in a slim black jacket.
‘Thierry Mugler, if you must know.’
‘Second-hand.’
‘Your donkey jacket is second-hand. This is vintage.’
If I’d not known them, I’d have felt intimidated. Knowing them, I felt intimidated, but still cautiously pleased to see them. Predictably, they were both in London now, a Sociology degree for Helen, last year of drama school for Alex, sharing a big house in Brixton with playwrights and artists and musicians, just back for family duties at Christmas (‘Boxing Day, seven a.m., we are out of here’). When it was my turn, I told them about my work, trying to make a dark joke out of it, the comedy sounding a little darker than I’d intended. They laughed but looked concerned. Perhaps I’d had too much to drink. Certainly I’d finished my glass some time before they finished theirs. I escaped to the bar and realised, as I waited, that it was not nostalgia that had brought them here, but irony. The Angler’s was a joke to them and I wondered if I was too, and so I lingered at the bar through ‘Last Christmas’ and ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ and ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’, in no hurry to be served, occasionally glancing over to the table to see their heads close together. I bought myself a beer and a chaser and when I finally got back Alex got up ‘to make a call’, and Helen and I sat in silence.
‘You all right?’ I said.
‘Yeah, just admiring the view.’ She nodded towards the bar and the row of three male backsides, the cleft of the buttocks visible over the backs of their jeans, heads down, no conversation.
‘Don’t wind up like that, will you?’
And now I could say it. ‘Snob!’
‘Hey, I’m not a snob! No one in the world is less of a snob than me—’
‘Because you sound like a snob, Hel.’
‘Coming back here, with your clever college ways—’
‘Yeah, exactly that.’
‘Except I’m not a snob! I don’t give a fuck what you do – live where you want, do what you want. I mean, I get it, it’s your wilderness years and that’s fine.’
‘Helen—’
‘But what’s this?’ She tapped my shot glass.
‘It’s just a chaser.’
‘A chaser?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘You’re too young to have a local. Honestly, Charlie, fuck that. You need to move away, just for a bit. You can come back, but you’ve got to do something else. Try at least. There’s plenty of time to hate your life. Do it when you’re middle-aged, like everyone else.’
‘I don’t “hate my life”.’
‘But you don’t love it, do you?’
‘Why, do you?’
She laughed. ‘Yes! Yes, yes, finally, I fucking do! And you could too, if you weren’t so scared.’
‘I’m not scared.’
‘Well, good. That’s good to hear. Because it brings me to my next point …’
Mariah Carey was singing ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’, and now Alex was back, sitting the other side of me, pinning me in. ‘Have you told him yet?’ he asked.
‘Told me what?’
Helen took a deep breath. ‘We’ve got a spare room.’
‘In the house in Brixton.’
‘It’s a shit-hole really. In the basement; it’s dark and damp.’
‘But it’s free.’
‘Well, shared bills.’
‘But you could get a bar job, or temp or something.’
‘And in September – go back to college.’
‘I’m not going to do that.’
‘No, but you are.’
‘You know you are, so why fight it?’
‘I can’t. Dad—’
‘You said he was better.’
‘He is for now, but—’
‘Well it’s an hour and a half away, Charlie, it’s not New Zealand.’
‘But I can’t just walk away.’
‘You wouldn’t walk. We’d give you a lift.’
‘We’re taking you with us.’
‘On Boxing Day. We’ll wait until seven.’
‘Charlie,’ said Alex, ‘all we want for Christmas, is you.’
In September 2003, at twenty-three years of age, I went back to school. Technically, I was a mature student, though there was very little maturity on display, just a great many false starts, wrong turns, hangovers and missed deadlines. First, I had to fill in the gaps left by my bodged exams, then complete the equivalents of A-levels, then find a university that was open-minded enough to overlook the great blank expanses on my CV, all of this while working weekends and nights in bars and restaurants where the end of the shift marked the beginning of the party. Those years were a kind of second adolescence, the obligation to work hard rubbing up against the desire to do no work whatsoever, and my education began to resemble an immense, unfinished jigsaw that’s been left out on the table for far too long. The temptation to abandon the project and sweep the whole thing back into the box was extremely strong. I would not have got through it at all without Helen and Alex, urging me on, checking the homework, ensuring that I filled in the forms in time, and it occurs to me that the good luck we have in school, in our work, is nothing to the great good luck of friendship.
Two qualifications – Computer Science and Art – provided the shaky foundations for all of this. At a party in August 1997, a stranger had told me that the trick in life was to find the thing you’re good at and go for it, but computers and art were like onions and chocolate; there was no way to combine the two. At university, I learnt that I was not academically bright and never would be. I was not a gifted programmer and had never felt like an artist, but my tutor suggested that I take a course in visual effects and animation, and I learnt how to use software with imposing names like Premiere and Fusion and Nuke. I spent my bartending wages on the most powerful home computer I could afford, and taught myself compositing and rendering, wire-frame modelling and matte painting and while I assembled all these skills, something happened to the culture around me.
The zombies and vampires, spaceships and aliens that I’d loved to draw took over, and those years spent watching movies and playing Doom were revealed to have been part of an unwitting apprenticeship. I already knew how to draw an eyeball dangling from a skull socket and now, with the right software, I knew how to make it glint and sway repulsively, and how to turn a crowd of twenty into two hundred thousand, and how to shave the years off the leading man. And so now that’s what I do: visual effects. Computer Science and Art.
Chasing the work, Alex Asante went to Los Angeles. We still see him all the time but mainly on TV, playing cops or ambitious young lawyers who’ll do anything to win the case, including break the law. He’s quite well known, though never quite as well known as he’d like to be.
No longer students, we moved out of the student house. I met Niamh, exchanged restaurant work for full-time post-production and then, not so long ago, set up a company with colleagues. Occasionally, we’d be invited to the premieres of films that I worked on, finding our seats at the very rear of the auditorium, and peering down at the actors, distant and alien, taking their bows.
Helen met Freya, fell in love and moved to Brighton ‘like a complete stereotype’. Walking on the beach there, she told me they were getting married and asked me to be her best man.
‘Okay. Do I have to?’
‘Of course you do! It’s a great honour, you homophobic bastard. Also, Alex is filming, so—’
‘Fine, but do I have to make a speech?’
‘Uh, yes.’
‘And does it have to be funny?’
‘Of course it has to be fucking funny, it’s the best man’s speech.’
‘It’s a lot of stress. I’m not a natural performer.’
‘Oh, I know that.’
‘I can’t be funny.’
‘You can be funny, you just have to do it out loud. The main thing is to be heartfelt. Tell everyone I swear too much and you cherish our friendship. There you go – I’ve written it. Now you have to say yes.’
And so I was Helen’s best man, and when the time came, I asked her to be mine.
And then a month before the wedding, an email arrived, a screen grab of a Facebook page announcing a London reunion for the Full Fathom Five Theatre Co-operative, 1996–2001.
Got to be done, don’t you think? See you there.
Digging Down
I pulled on the jacket, while Niamh watched from the doorway.
‘That’s not your wedding suit, is it?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t realise it was that kind of party.’
‘Got to make an effort …’
‘Of course. She’ll be expecting it.’
‘They’ll be expecting it, all of the people there.’
Was my behaviour so unusual? It’s true that I’d always resisted the tug of nostalgia. I skipped school reunions, rarely went home, had few photographs, did not chase down old girlfriends online. Life was a series of befores and afters, the dividing line shifting every seven years or so: before and after meeting Fran, before and after moving away, before and after Niamh, the divide between each era as distinct and precise as the stratification in geological layers of rock. As long as the ‘after’ was better, why dwell on ‘before’?
Marriage would mark the next great divide, and yet here I was, three weeks before the ceremony, digging down through one, two, three layers. It was uncharacteristic and Niamh saw this too, and the light-heartedness she’d put on when I’d first explained the expedition had faded as the date drew near.
‘I’ve told you, you’re very welcome to come.’
‘Someone else’s am-dram reunion? That’s desperate. No thanks, I’m not deranged.’
&
nbsp; ‘Helen’ll be there.’
‘I can see Helen any time. You’ll both be wanting to talk to all your old friends anyway. Doing your vocal warm-ups, tossing your beanbags, playing your trust exercises …’
I laughed. ‘If it’s like that, I’m not staying either. I probably won’t even know anyone.’
‘Oh, I think you’ll know someone.’
I sighed and slumped onto the bed. ‘I don’t have to go, if you don’t want me—’
‘Oh, no, don’t pin it on me. You’re a grown-up, you can do what you want. Do you want to go?’
‘Well, yes, I kind of do.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Nostalgia.’
‘Curiosity?’
‘Bit of that.’
‘So go. I’ll have a nice night in by myself. Google old boyfriends. Photoshop my face into their wedding photos.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Don’t get any lipstick on your collar.’
‘Like in the song.’
‘What song?’ she said.
‘That’s where it comes from. Lipstick on your collar/Told a tale on you. You know that song.’
‘No, because I’m not one of the Andrews Sisters. I wasn’t born between the wars.’
‘Who gets lipstick on their collar anyway? How would it get there?’
‘Lipstick on your dick, more like. That’s what I’ll be looking out for.’
‘You’re filthy.’
‘I am. So hurry home.’
Now that we’d laughed, I felt able to leave, but on the bus I found myself unaccountably nervous. I’d once seen a documentary about locusts or cicadas that hide as dormant adolescents in the sun-baked soil of Arizona, or Mexico, or the Sahara, then, after precisely seventeen years, rise up simultaneously in a great, destructive swarm. What if first love was like this? Dormant but gathering its strength, then laying waste to everything stable and good? These things happened.
It seemed unlikely. I loved Niamh like mad and besides, Fran and I were entirely different people then, bizarre sixteen-year-old aliens, and first love wasn’t real love anyway, just a fraught and feverish, juvenile imitation of it. These things don’t happen if you don’t want them to, and if I summoned up the thought of Frances Fisher, I felt a kind of fond embarrassment. Something else too, harder to name and hardly the stuff of great destructive passion, but still enough to make me change my clothes and brush my teeth and leave the house on a damp Sunday in November.
Sweet Sorrow Page 35