by Jamie Jones
Me: ‘Ok, sure, definitely, yeah.’
I quickly ordered her drink and went to find Doody and Jacko to give them their half full bottles. When I came back, having given my mates only a minimal explanation of where I was going, Jess was sat in a booth on her own.
I’d quickly worked out that she had changed a lot in the last 3 years and was now a confident, pretty young woman who was happy to laugh at her ex-boyfriend when he made a prat of himself in a club.
As I went to sit down, she moved in her seat and I flinched, expecting a slap at the very least, which again made her chuckle. We spent the rest of the night discussing how crap the club was, why we were both single and what music we were into. Basically anything and everything other than talk about us splitting up 3 and half years previously. She wanted to know if I was “still obsessed with Morrissey” and feigned shock that I was still wearing my jeans with turn-ups and hadn’t shaved off my sideburns. We moved onto her laughing and telling me about our hatred of shit nightclubs and the drunken fumbles that she had experienced in that very booth. I had to say something though; I couldn’t just ignore the ‘You Broke My Heart’ neon sign that in, my inebriated state, appeared to be sitting on top of her head. I blurted out:
‘Sorry… You know, about before. I…well… well I don’t know what to say really, just sorry.’
Jess: ‘It’s a bit late, but thanks. Look, let’s just leave it in the past shall we?’
As the club lights went up at 2am, we were still sat talking and laughing. As we wandered off to find our own friends for the journey home, we reached a vague agreement to, ‘see you back here next week.’
I still went to sleep that night, after treating myself to a 10” Cheese & Tomato thin crust from Perfect Pizza, thinking of Amy. I couldn’t deny how good it had felt to talk to a woman who had made me smile, seemed to enjoy my company and wanted to see me again. I was also quite glad to have finally been able to clear the air with her and emerge without a black eye.
The following Saturday night we wandered into 5th Avenue at pub closing time and after a quick drink, I told Doody and Jacko that I was going to the upper level of the club to see Jess. They both rolled their eyes and started singing in unison, the Embrace song “Come Back To What You Know”. With their “good luck” and “be careful” ringing in my ears I walked up the stairs, hoping that Jess would be there. I strolled confidently to the bar, caught sight of her talking to her mates and my heart fluttered. I hadn’t been expecting that, but it was a welcome return of some kind of urge towards the opposite sex. I was trying to process that feeling revival as she bounded over and gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
With a beaming grin and holding my hand she opened the chat with: ‘I’ve got a spare top in my bag, just in case you pour a drink all over my tits again.’
Without thinking, the fluttering kicked in again and my gaze must have inadvertently darted towards her chest.
‘Ha ha, this week you’re checking out my cleavage even before you’ve thrown a drink at it.’
I went bright red with sexual charge and embarrassment but her laughter had broken the last thin layer of ice between us and we wandered off to a booth. We sat, talked, laughed and drank the night away in much the same way as we had done the previous week. I was so out of practice when it came to flirting that I wasn’t sure whether that was what she was doing when she kept flicking her hair around or if she had developed a nervous tic. I resorted to my schoolboy style of flirting and poked fun at her at every opportunity in the hope that it would make her laugh. I complimented her on the fact that, due to the blistering heat in the club, her eye make up looked similar to Robert Smith of The Cure. Not a line that is generally a winner but she giggled, smacked me playfully on the arm and moved ever closer to me on the seat.
By 1am, she was virtually sat on my lap but still we just kept talking. Even as the DJ announced the dreaded “Erection Section” to end the night, we didn’t move. By 1.30am, we weren’t talking anymore, we were looking around, catching a glimpse of the other then looking away. I now wasn’t sure if we were both too drunk to take this any further or too shy. It became excruciating in the end, as we slowly turned and twisted our necks, like two juvenile giraffe’s, waiting for the other one to take the final step and lean in for the kiss. To anyone watching we must have looked like a pair of inebriated fools having a late night staring competition. Eventually, with the music about to end for the night, our neck muscles finally gave up and, as our faces clunked together, we kissed. Within seconds of this breakthrough the lights in the club went up and the flock were shepherded out by the bouncers, signalling the end of another Saturday night out.
As we strolled down the stairs and out into the surprisingly parky autumnal air, we arranged to meet the following Monday night. We then both quickly located our mates and crossed the warzone that was the square at the front of the club. Every week, at this time the young male gladiators attempted to rip each other’s shirts off, to show how masculine they were to their drunken, heckling girlfriends who were busy holding their jackets. Some nights, the ladies couldn’t resist getting involved and, in a blur of hair and cries of “Get off him, he’s my MAN…”, all hell would break lose. This was a dangerous place to hang about and we never did, always choosing to gather our clan together and head off to the local kebab shop Turkish Delight to escape the mayhem. Even ensconced in “Turkish” you could never consider yourself safe from the drunken Neanderthals that stalked the city centre after nightclub chucking out time. Fortunately, we always got on well with the gents that worked at Turkish and they were never afraid to lock the doors of the shop to keep out the goons.
We all made it home safely that night and, 48 hours later, I found myself back at 5th Avenue. Monday in Peterborough was a pretty popular night out thanks to 5th running an 80’s night called “The Margaret Thatcher Experience” which was run by the effervescent local DJ, Paul Stainton. The basic premise was a night of 80’s music, 80p entrance fee and lots of drinks at 80p each. Essentially it was an excuse to get drunk on a Monday night and only spend £10, including your late night takeaway. I got there bright and early to get a couple of drinks down my neck before Jess turned up. This was different to our being in the same club and chatting and drinking as we had done for the last couple of weeks. No matter which way you dressed it up, this was a date. I’d even bought a new maroon Fred Perry polo shirt for the occasion. Once Jess had wandered in and plonked herself down on the sofa next to me, I went to the bar. At those prices, even I recognised that it was a good idea to buy the drinks. We sat and talked, as we had done on our last couple of meetings about life, loves and ambitions. The difference this time was, that for at least part of the evening, the music was pretty good. Monday nights were the only time that I would dance in a nightclub and, thanks to the cheap booze Jess and I were enthusiastically consuming to quell our nerves, we spent all of the indie section of the night on the dancefloor. As we swayed along to “This Charming Man”, I realised that I was actually enjoying myself with a woman other than Amy. I had been convinced that this wouldn’t happen again but here I was dancing, singing and kissing, though not all at once.
I had no idea where this thing between us was going and blotted out any such thoughts as best I could. I knew that I was on a night out with a woman that I fancied, wasn’t that enough? Judging by the number of times she had leant in to kiss me and grabbed the back of my hair (a little too tightly for my liking if I’m honest) she was feeling the same. Other people my age lived for the moment, so why not me for a change? Everyone from my mates to my mum had been telling me for years that “you think too much about things” so, here I was not thinking, living on the edge, well, closer to the edge at least.
With both of us living with our parents, any move towards doing what most 22 and 19 year olds think they are best at was going to be problematic. As our petting moved towards what they prescribed against on swimming pool signs, we agreed that we needed to leave the clu
b and find somewhere private.
Even though my family were away on holiday in North Wales, I didn’t contemplate us going back to our house. My mum had forensic skills that would make a CSI team blush at their incompetence and I really didn’t need another lecture.
Instead, after a quick confirmation that we were both having the same carnal thoughts, we jumped in a taxi and went to the local budget hotel, Formule One. A hotel that charged just £19.99 for the night and, if you arrived after 7pm, you had to put your credit card into the machine fixed to the main entrance door, which then unlocked and gave you the number of your room and a code to get in. The Ritz it wasn’t. Neither of us had ever been to such an establishment before but, on that particular night, filled with alcohol and lust fuelled bravery, it seemed like the best idea in the world. We were both young, free and single, what harm could it do?
The magical front door of the hotel responded to my Barclaycard and let us into this den of iniquity. As we wandered along the corridor, our faces illuminated by the harsh glow of strip lighting, all the bravado that we’d shown in the taxi quickly fell away.
As we took refuge in our desolate hotel room, Jess sat on the bed, while I pulled out the only chair in the room and sat at the desk that I’m sure nobody staying there had ever used. I cracked open the 2 cans of emergency lager that we had smuggled in. I could feel the alcohol following our confidence by flowing out of our bodies. We needed this can to help set the scene and reinvigorate our libidos.
Ten minutes later, after I had made a quick trip to the machine in reception that prevented two potentially becoming three, we were laid on the bed. This sweaty embrace suddenly didn’t seem like the inspired idea it had when we got into the taxi. The beautiful, confident young woman and the cocky man in his 20’s now resembled a Chuckle Brothers tribute act, as we went ‘to me, to you’ with hands that now appeared to lack opposable thumbs and brains that were refusing to even find first gear. With the Krypton Factoresque task completed, vaguely successfully, we laid back in an awkward tangle of limbs with only the animal sounds from the other rooms breaking the silence. The alcohol now long gone, the sober reality of what we had just done started to hit home. I should have made a joke, broken the tension, made it seem like it really was the “bit of fun” that we had discussed prior to entering this godforsaken place. I could feel Jess restlessly drifting to sleep and laid still, not wanting to wake her, wondering if it would make me even more of a scumbag if I just got up and left? I needed to get home. I felt guilty about sleeping with someone other than Amy. With a hangover, in that Soviet style hotel room, that was all that was going through my head. I needed to get out, to get home, to seek solace in Morrissey’s words.
When Jess woke at 7am, we dressed without saying a word, her in the bathroom, me in the bedroom, desperate to hide every square inch of the naked flesh that we had shared a couple of hours previously. We stood, waiting for the other to say something. After a full two minutes of painful silence, I blurted out, ‘Let’s just go shall we? I’ll pay for you to get a cab home.’ As we left the hotel and almost sprinted the 100 yards to the safety of the taxi rank, my sense of guilt and shitness was already kicking in. As a parting gesture, we shared the kind of kiss where our lips resembled two magnets, an invisible force holding them apart, before she got into a waiting taxi. I passed a crumpled fiver through the window to pay the fare, and ran. I didn’t look back to see if the cab had moved off, I just ran. I didn’t stop until I had covered the 2 miles back to our house. I phoned work and explained that I wouldn’t be in due to a 24 hour bug. With the house all to myself, I put “Vauxhall & I” on the stereo and collapsed onto my bed in a puddle of self-loathing.
After 5 hours of sleep I felt a lot better about the world. Why was I feeling guilty about sleeping with someone else? Amy and I had been split up for a couple of months and she had moved onto a new man. I had to get on with my life as well. I was just about to ring Jess to apologise for my running away and to see if she fancied meeting up for a drink that evening, when the phone rang:
I was halfway through “Hello…”, when the primeval growl on the other end of the line took over the conversation.
‘I know where you fucking live, you smart twat. I’ll come ‘round in a bit and smash your skull in, you smart-arsed university prick.’
By ‘smart twat’, I had recognised the voice as Jess’s Dad. After he slammed the phone down, I stood shaking, petrified that this giant of a man was going to come round and kick my head in.
I quickly surveyed my options, which boiled down to either ringing the police or ringing Jacko. I didn’t fancy explaining the whole scenario to the police so opted for Jacko, who I knew was skiving off work as well. He answered the phone on the 3rd ring and I explained the fraught situation:
‘You need to get round to mine now, I slept with Jess and now her dad has just rang to say he is going to kick my head in and is coming round now and he is massive, so you have to come here and help me fight him off. HURRY UP.’
Like any good mate would, Jacko ambled round on his bike about an hour later, moaning that he was missing Home & Away, not caring that I could have been slaughtered in the time between our phone call and his arrival.
I had already taken precautions and reached into my dads golf bag and handed him a 2 iron, whilst I kept a firm grip on the 3 wood. We sat on our front porch for hours, with Jacko sniggering about me being an idiot and us both jumping up in fear if a car came around the corner and into the cul-de-sac where we lived. By early evening we decided that he probably wasn’t coming after all. Jacko wanted to get home for the teatime edition of Home and Away so we packed away the golf clubs and I went back into the house.
As night descended, I decided to utilise Mum and Dad’s bed as a king-sized comfort blanket. I jumped out of my skin when the phone rang at 11pm. With a sense of foreboding, I slowly picked up the receiver and whispered ‘Hello…..’ For a couple of seconds, all I could hear was heavy breathing which I realised was my own and then, from the other end of the line, came:
‘If I EVER hear of you so much as talking to my daughter again, you are a dead man. Dead. Goodbye.’
As the phone went dead, I felt a mixture of fear, relief that my ordeal appeared to be over and a strange desire to chuckle at the fact that he had been civilised enough to end with a goodbye.
I had been an arsehole to Jess, not once but twice. With that thought rattling round my head, I reacted the only way I knew how. I went back to listening to indie tunes whilst sitting under my desk. This may have been vaguely endearing when I was 13, now that I was 22 it just looked a bit sad. I would go to work, come home, put on “Meat is Murder” or “Your Arsenal”, and feel sorry for myself. Why did all of my relationships end in such a mess? I even began to wonder if I wasn’t totally blameless.
I still went out with Doody and Jacko on weekends. It wasn’t a conscious decision or even a choice, it was just what we did. We were single lads in our early 20’s living a couple of miles from the city centre. What else were we going to do? I always went out with the intention of not ending up in a crappy club but inevitability that’s where I would find myself every Friday and Saturday night. It had now become traditional for me to enter such places with Doody and Jacko, have a couple of drinks then leave on my own after a couple of hours. I would occasionally leave even earlier than that, usually when I spotted Jess on the dancefloor. I didn’t want to embarrass her or cause a scene. I also didn’t want her dad to kick my head in.
It was in a taxi home, on a stormy November night, that I decided that I had better get off my arse and find a proper job. Pearl had been a useful temp job over the years but it was time for me to start thinking about the future, grow up, get a career and be a man. That was a depressing cab journey.
My first permanent job duly arrived later that month when I was the successful applicant for the vacant “Collections Officer” post at our local building society. My job was to telephone people who had fallen into arr
ears with their mortgage repayments and attempt to persuade them to pay up. In truth, my heart wasn’t in the job and I wasn’t very good at it. I would listen to what I considered to be genuine tales of woe and misfortune from our borrowers and mark on their file that they should be given another month to get themselves together. It was a difficult subject to talk to people about and anyone that burst into tears instantly got my sympathy and a promise of “we will do whatever we can to help”. I was pretty sure this wasn’t the approach my bosses wanted me to take. I thought that by making lots of calls and occasionally persuading some wealthy type who had genuinely forgotten to pay their mortgage to deposit cash into our account would mean that the bosses would leave me alone. Instead, I got a shock one day when our big departmental boss called me in to his office. He was a bear of a man with a temper to match. As he slid onto his high leather swivel chair and looked down at me in my plastic seat, which looked like it had been stolen from a local primary school, it was obvious I had done something wrong:
Him: ‘Mr Jones, you have been with us now for a few weeks is that correct?’
Me: The obvious answer was, ‘You know full well it’s bloody correct’, but what came out of my mouth was a meek; ‘Yes that’s right, sir.’
Him: ‘Did you know we produce a report which shows me how much money you have collected each week from chasing debtors?’
Me: Nervous chuckle – ‘No, I didn’t know that.’
Him: ‘Did you also know, and I’m sure you were told in your induction to the office, that we record all calls that you make.
Me: Mildly terrified chuckle – ‘No, I didn’t know that either.’