by Jamie Jones
Once we’d sunk the first couple of pints, my inhibitions were just about loose enough for me to tell him about that morning’s drama with Amy and Matt, much to his amusement. In a cloud of laughing, drinking and indie tunes on the jukebox, the afternoon morphed into the evening without us even realising. We watched new students come into this tiny bar, take one look at the ropey décor and us, before walking out again. We knew then we weren’t going to be the bright new things of the 1995 Cardiff University intake.
At some point in the evening, Louise and Amy came into the bar and, seeing no better alternatives, decided to sit with us. My heart leapt when I saw Amy, which is never a good sign when a girl has just slept with one of your flatmates.
As the night descended into a blur of Southern Comfort, peanuts and storytelling, I discovered that Amy was apparently “very shy”, could quite obviously handle her drink, liked the trip-hop scene that was achingly fashionable, that the only indie band that she liked was Suede and that she was from Cambridge. With her home city being only 40 miles from mine, she at least had heard of Peterborough. I even laughed along, whilst biting my tongue, as she told Louise (who had now instructed us to call her Lou) and Neil that it was a ‘shithole’. I explained that due to the footballing rivalry between our two cities, I had a natural hatred of anyone from there. In a fit of giggles she, quite rightly, pointed out that ‘Nobody cares about Cambridge United in Cambridge’. As she sat there laughing at me, not with me, whilst pushing her hair behind her left ear, I could feel myself falling for her.
She, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to ask me “What do you know about Matt?” before proceeding to stamp on my feelings by telling me how amazing she thought he was. I should really have walked away at that point, wished her all the best with him and remembered that I had a girlfriend back home, or gone and thrown myself into the grinding mass of teenage sexual tension in our SU nightclub. Instead, I went to the bar and ordered another round of drinks.
The More You Sleep With Him, The Closer I Get
FOR the next couple of weeks, Amy, Lou, Neil and I would spend most evenings together in our Halls bar or The Tavern. Amy was undertaking an Archaeology degree course, which meant it was easy to come up with a nickname for her, and from then on I would regularly call her ‘Indiana’. Oddly, she had wanted to take a couple of sociology modules so we found ourselves sat next to each other in plenty of lectures in that first term. Often we would leave the lecture and go and sit in The Tavern, gently wasting the afternoon away and talking about family, friends, music and the future.
One night I went (on my own) to a riotous Black Grape gig at the SU, complete with an off his tits Shaun Ryder falling off the stage. I arrived back in the Taylbont bar at just after 10.30pm and my gang all seemed pleased to see me, with Amy shuffling along in her seat to make a space. She asked about the gig and kindly wiped the sweat from my forehead that had gathered during my speed walk back to her. Just as I thought that we were getting close and her laughter meant that I should try and kiss her, Matt turned up. It was as if he had radar. As soon as last orders were called, Matt would miraculously turn up, out of nowhere, like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn. I would be stood at the bar getting the drinks in and would hear Amy shout over in her clipped Cambridge accent, “Jay, can you get Matt a pint of lager as well please?” I would slump at the bar, knowing that another night that had so much potential was about to be ruined.
I’m not sure if she realised that, as the days rolled past and we spent all this time together, I was falling in love with her. Matt certainly hadn’t realised. He was just interested in his bike and getting Amy back to his room. In fact, in the year that I lived with him, I don’t think I saw Matt show anything vaguely resembling an emotion. He wasn’t the type. The only time I saw Matt express any feelings was during our second year in Cardiff, when we were part of the same football team that played a game against the university’s Hellenic Society. It was a cup semi-final and a terribly violent game, with some of the worst tackling I had ever seen. After an hour of the game, the Hellenic centre forward didn’t much like a sliding tackle I had made on him, got up from the puddle he had landed in, ran over and spat straight in my face. I wasnt a violent man and he was at least a foot taller than me but I lost the plot in that split second and spread his nose wide across his face with my forehead. Fair play to Matt, as the ref waved his red card in my direction and the baying hordes of Greeks bearing fists attempted to take my head off, he piled into the scrum and managed to keep me from certain death. When we eventually reached the relative safety of our dressing room, he told tell me that incident was his favourite moment of his time at university.
Back at the bar, Amy and Matt drank their last pint of the night, which I had paid for, then roared off back to our flat on his motorbike, leaving us mere mortals to trudge home in the rain. I went back to my room and again tried to block out the noise of her in his room by playing Pulp so loud through my headphones that my ears began to bleed.
Despite a new Morrissey album, ‘Southpaw Grammar’, having been released the month before I went to Cardiff, it was “Viva Hate” that became the album that I turned to during this very odd period of my life. It’s not that I didn’t like “Southpaw Grammar’, but that was an album for jumping around the room to. “Viva Hate” was an album to sit in the park to listen to and mope. Sleep was tough to come by knowing that the girl I had fallen in love with was in a room 10 yards away with another man. I sought solace with Morrissey in the form of “Everyday is Like Sunday” and the 7 minutes of sadness and humour that was “Late Night, Maudlin Street”. I was confused, lonely and 200 miles away from everything I knew and loved other than this girl that had crash-landed into my life without her even seeming to notice. I clung to Morrissey like a life raft, desperately trying to find even more meaning in the words that he sang. He meant more to me in those first weeks in Cardiff than he’d ever done before. He kept me from running back home and giving up on Amy. I found a twisted sense of hope in songs like ‘Alsatian Cousin’ and knew that I had to hold on, tie my feelings up in a plastic bag and wait to see how this particular drama was going to play out. I was sure it wasn’t going to work out in my favour and knew that Moz wasn’t trying to signpost a potential victory, just that the song needed to play until its final note.
My inner Morrissey was telling me that I needed to put all of my emotional energy into this increasingly one sided romance with Amy. This in turn meant that I had to finally do the decent thing and split up with Jess.
I hadn’t written to or telephoned Jess every day as I’d promised I would when I left dear old Peterborough in September. I had taken the cowards way out and hoped that in the 3 weeks I had been away from home she had got bored and decided that she didn’t want a long distance relationship after all.
In mid October, I went home for Doody’s 21st birthday and arranged to meet Jess on the afternoon of the party. It probably wasn’t the greatest of ideas to agree to meet on “our bench” in “our park”, as it maybe didn’t give her a sense of what was about to come springing out of my mouth. She bounded into the park with a huge smile on her face and gave me an equally huge hug. I wasn’t looking forward to what I was about to do. Startled by her affection filled welcome, I lost my nerve and bluntly blurted out: “I’m really sorry Jess but this long distance relationship isn’t working. We need to split up now before either of us get hurt. It’s not you, it’s me…..”
As the news hit her right between the eyes she started to cry. In that moment, I realised what an awful tosspot I had been to her and searched desperately for something to say that would stop her being so upset. As always, I reached inside my head for the file marked “Emergency Morrissey lyrics”, and quoted some lines from The Smiths “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish….”
Mozzers wise words stopped Jess’s tears as she went from crying to furious in the blink of an eye. She stood up from the bench, as did I, and she pushed me with both hands full in the chest. A
s I fell to the ground she stood over me and growled:
‘You total and utter wanker, when are you ever going to grow up, Jay? You think quoting bloody Morrissey lyrics is ever going to help any situation? Ever? I really hope I never see you again.’
Still laid flat on the grass, I watched her walk away and thought that I’d deserved the push, the rant and if she had smacked me right between the eyes, I couldn’t have complained.
That night I went to Doody’s party at the local community centre, got drunk and talked rubbish with my oldest friends in the world. I was where I belonged, talking and joking with people that I loved. I decided that, despite Moz urging me to stay until the end of the song, I was going to quit university and move home. I would have my mates, some money (assuming I could get my old job back) and get to watch Posh every weekend. As long as I could afford a few CD’s and go to a couple of gigs a month, what more did I need in the world? I went to bed happy in the absolute knowledge that I would never live anywhere other than Peterborough again. I had been away, tried it, hated it and so now was the time to head home and never leave. I wrote down my plan on the back of a McEwan’s Export beer mat and stuffed it into my pocket for safe keeping.
When I woke the next morning though, she was back. With my mates at the party, I’d pushed all thoughts of Amy out of my mind, but in the cold light of morning, my infatuation was urging me to get dressed and run back to her. I laid back in my childhood bed and decided that now I was single, I would go back to Cardiff and tell Amy exactly how I felt, or, at the very least, make a drunken, piss-poor attempt at telling her. It would be my last stand, the epic squalling finale to the song. I had nothing to lose.
I got the painfully slow train back to Cardiff on the Sunday afternoon and spent the evening preparing myself for my big chat with Amy the next day. On the Monday after my 3pm lecture on Beveridge and the setting up of the welfare state, I felt a new found freedom and positivity. If this mesmerising vision of beauty didn’t want to get with a young, newly single lad who had a head full of inspirational social policy and Morrissey lyrics, then more fool her.
I went to the bar at the now traditional time of 7pm. When Neil hadn’t turned up by ten past, I went and threw pebbles at his bedroom window. He staggered to the window with what looked like a George Best sized hangover then, with a weary shake of the head, he redrew the curtains. I got back to the bar just in time to walk head first into Amy who was approaching from around the corner, causing my glasses to fly off and go skidding along the path. As she rubbed her head and swore under her breath, I scrambled to get my specs back onto my face.
Amy – ‘Shit that hurts … I was just running to meet you, I wondered if you would give up as nobody was here.’
Me – ‘Running to meet me, that’s a good start to the night. Usually you’re running to meet Matt.’
As I silently scalded myself for saying such a stupid thing, I looked at the ‘I’m hurt and offended’ look that was spreading across her face and knew that I needed a plan, and quick. As per my training, under Doody’s tutelage, I knew I had only option;
Me – ‘Ignore me, I’m a twat. Let’s get drunk, first round of Aftershocks are on me.’
Her mouth broke into the smile that had caused me to think I was having a heart attack when we first met and, within 5 minutes, the alcohol was easing the pain caused by our bumped heads and my irrational tongue syndrome. We talked, drank and giggled our way through the evening, just the two of us. I knew that Matt would arrive on the bell of last orders but I was determined to only worry about that when it happened. It was one of those nights where I was so totally engrossed in our conversation that I didn’t notice that the rest of the bar had slowly filled with people. The kind of night where, in Hollywood rom-coms, we would be in sharp focus while the world flew around us in a blur. As the double Southern Comfort and lemonades eased my naturally occurring Englishness, I told her that I had split up with Jess.
Upon hearing this news, something odd happened with her eye, not so much a glint or a sparkle, more of a tic. She whispered an “Ok” whilst taking a hefty swig of her drink.
My brain had lost the radio signal to my heart with her simple, non-committal response. I had no idea what the right thing to say was, so wisely bit into my tongue until the pain caused it to spasm and didn’t say anything audible.
After a minute or two of crippling silence, she pushed her fringe to one side and opened her eyes just enough for me to see a trace of a tear building before asking “I suspect I know the answer but why did you finish with her?”
I resisted the temptation to bring some humour to an ever darkening situation by saying ‘Blimey you rate yourself, don’t you?’ Instead I let the alcohol, which was by now straining at its leash, take over my speech;
‘Because of how I feel about you.’
She went deathly silent, looked into my raw, drunken eyes, leant over and kissed me full on the lips. As we locked in for the 2nd circling of tongues, somewhere deep down inside me, a feeling emerged that I hadn’t experienced before. I knew then without a shadow of a doubt that I loved her.
We spent another couple of hours alternating between drinking and kissing before the dreaded bell for last orders rang and my focus switched to the bar doors, through which I was fully expecting Matt to walk any second. When he didn’t come crashing in, I took it as a sign that it was now or never so turned to Amy and said; ‘Do you fancy coming back to mine to listen to some music?’ As we both burst out laughing and she chuckled, ‘Sure, if that’s all you want to do’, I downed my drink and sprang to my feet, eager to get back to my room, to lock the door and keep the outside world outside.
It was only as we stumbled out of the bar arm in arm that it occurred to me that Matt might be in the flat when we got back there. When I opened the front door, I was relieved to see no sign of the motorbike warrior. I probably should have been more concerned when I noticed Amy sneaking a longing look at Matt’s closed bedroom door. As it was, I just wanted to get us both into the safety of my room as quickly as possible. I relaxed as I locked the door behind me, lit some tea lights, put Portishead’s debut album on the stereo before, in a twisted mass of band t-shirts, we tumbled onto the bed and spent the rest of the night wrapped up in each other.
I drifted off to sleep having taken dozens of mental photos of this beautiful girl who was already fast asleep across my chest. I needed to record our first time so I could recall the date in years to come, when we had friends over for dinner and they asked; ‘So, when did you and Amy get together?’
I woke with a head full of cotton wool thanks to the Southern Comfort but with a smile on my face, only to find Amy frantically trying to find her socks in the dark;
Me – ‘Are you ok?’
Amy – ‘Shit, sorry I didn’t mean to wake you.’
Totally misjudging the mood, I came up with a suggestion.
Me ‘It’s freezing, why don’t you come back to bed and we can warm each other up?’
Amy: ‘I’ve got a lot to do today, so I thought I’d make an early start.’
I steal a glance at my Indiana Jones alarm clock
Me: ‘Errr, you do realise it’s 5.30am?’
Amy: ‘Yeah, but I don’t want anyone to see me leaving….’
My heart sinks as I realise what she means. As she pulls on her Gazelles, still with a faint blood stain on the right one, she sits back on the bed, switches on the bedside Star Wars lamp and turns to me, her eyes set to full Bambi cuteness.
Amy: ‘Jay, we’re close right? I can trust you, yeah? Can you promise me one thing?
I know what she is going to make me promise and I also know that I am powerless to say anything other than;
Me: ‘Yeah, sure.’
Amy: ‘Promise me you won’t tell Matt about last night, will you? It was lovely and all that but it was just a bit of fun, a drunken night. Just a student thing. You know how much I like Matt and I really want to see if we can get together properly. You under
stand, right? We’re good, yeah? All sorted, yeah? You’re such a good friend.’
With that she bent down, kissed my head and walked out of the room, having first opened the door slightly to make sure the coast was clear.
I lay there with my Peterborough United emblazoned duvet pulled up tightly over my face, hopes shattered, in sheets that smelt of her, trying not to cry. I had, I thought perfectly reasonably, been convinced that our kissing and her coming to my room was the start of something special. She had seen it as something quite different and was now desperate for Evel fuckin’ Knievel not to find out. It was just a bit of fun for her, a quick exchange of bodily fluids between friends, no big deal.
The concept of casual sex hadn’t really come into my life before, and certainly not with someone that I already felt so much for. Wasn’t casual sex meant to be fun rather than invoking a feeling of gut shredding grief? In the same way that some people would reach for the bottle to ease the pain, I reached for the stereo. I knew that within my CD rack, I had the best medicine known to mankind. The sound of The Smiths filled my headphones. I played “Strangeways….” over and over again as the morning peaked its nosey beak through the thin curtains. I daydreamed about spending the short time I had left in Wales just listening to “I Won’t Share You” on repeat.
Driven by hangover hunger, I eventually staggered out to the kitchen, only to encounter Matt, who was beaming like an idiot:
Matt: ‘Blimey mate, sounded like a lively old night in your room. Anyone we know?’
A half second pause when I was tempted to tell him the truth before mumbling; ‘No, just a girl from my course.’