Sixteen, Sixty-One

by Sixteen, Sixty-One- A Memoir (epub)

  ‘Oh God, was that it?’ I asked, half relieved that it wasn’t something I’d done, half pissed that I’d been made to sweat for someone else’s mistake.

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, totally my fault.’

  The actor wasn’t so forgiving. He glared at me as I tried to say sorry for the lights at the end.

  ‘Just get it right tomorrow,’ he boomed and turned away.

  Becky shoved a glass of champagne into my hand and, after we’d cleared the house, we descended to the bar. I introduced Becky to my family and, offering me more champagne, they all told me to forget about the tech and enjoy my birthday. Hungry, I asked at the bar if they had a food menu but all they could offer was a bag of crisps.

  After an hour or so, my family said they had to drive back and bought me another drink as a final congratulation before heading off. Becky sat with me and asked if I was all right. Still a little upset but thoroughly inebriated, I said I was fine and continued chatting to the bar owner and theatre manager. They left me to buy more drinks and, sat on my own, I finally started to feel queasy. Closing my eyes, I realised I was going to be sick. I lunged towards the unisex bathrooms, colliding with Raoul on my way to the porcelain bowl. Becky followed me in and held my hair back as I hurled into the toilet, muttering apologies.

  It was a while before we emerged and, upon everyone clapping at my re-entrance into the bar, I dashed for the sink and threw up again. Becky said she’d take me home. She pleaded with a bored-looking bus driver to let me on and I sat at the front with her shirt held tightly to my mouth.

  I don’t remember much else, but was informed the next day that Becky and her boyfriend had had to carry me up the stairs to her flat. I woke in my clothes and walked towards the bathroom holding my head. On the way I passed Becky’s bedroom; the door was ajar and I glimpsed the naked back of Becky’s boyfriend protruding from the covers, with her just visible beyond him. The sight upset me and, with my hangover pounding in my ears, I ran a shower and sat for a long time trying to erase the image of Becky in the arms of a guy.

  Said guy later made me brunch and I thanked him profusely for looking after me the previous night, before returning to Kew to prepare for the evening’s performance. It was a week before the bar staff let me forget that night, but Becky was sympathetic, only teasing me now and again.

  She and I continued to have our post-show ‘FUCK’ and our conversations began to take a more intimate turn. Becky was by far the least bashful and, night after night, she made me hiccup with laughter as she related the gory details of her busy sex-life. While she was currently living with the Irish boyfriend I’d met, she had always had trouble with monogamy and seemed to constantly find herself in compromising situations with professors, strangers in bars, workmates and, currently, Raoul.

  ‘I just need it, you know?’

  In return, I told Becky modified versions of my own relationship history, painting Nadiyya as the tragically doomed love of my life and referring only vaguely to Matthew.

  Becky’s reckless love-life became a bit of a joke and, by the closing night of the show, two days before her twenty-first birthday, I was thoroughly entertained by my friend’s disastrous relations with men. That night, a girl Matthew had been encouraging me to chat to on Gaydar had unexpectedly turned up at the play and asked for me after the show.

  A little annoyed, I went down to talk to her. She bought me a drink and I nodded as she told me about her interests in theatre, but I kept glancing at the other end of the bar, where Becky and Raoul were doing shots and falling into each other’s laps. With the bar staff giving me occasional funny looks, I grew more and more embarrassed by the sordid situation. At the first opportune moment, I excused myself and sent Becky a text from the bathroom saying: ‘HELP ME!’

  Five minutes later, Becky rushed up from the other end of the bar exclaiming, ‘Nat, Nat, Raoul has just told me we need to start the get out tonight. It can’t wait until the morning, we have to do it now!’ Turning to the girl, she added, ‘I’m sorry, another team’s meant to do it tomorrow but something’s gone wrong, it’s going to take at least a couple of hours!’ Before I could even shoot the girl an apologetic look, Becky clutched my wrist and dragged me out of the bar and up the stairs to the theatre, where we both collapsed in giggles.

  ‘You’re my hero,’ I panted.

  Three hours later, the bartenders had fed Becky multiple doubles, Raoul had tried to kiss her and I’d missed the last train back to Kew. Sat in a circle, the whole crew and various friends of Becky’s swayed to the pop-music on the radio and hooted at only half-funny jokes. I perched on the arm of Raoul’s chair and we both watched a boy of around nineteen try to chat Becky up.

  ‘Shall I put him off?’ Raoul asked.

  ‘How?’ I slurred.

  ‘I’ll kiss him,’ he replied.

  ‘You wouldn’t!’

  With that, he walked up to the boy and said, ‘I’ve been looking at you all night and I just had to do this.’ He took the boy’s face in his hands and aimed his puckered lips at his mouth. The kid shrieked and ran back to the bar. Simultaneously, I grabbed Becky from her seat and took her to a different table.

  Almost falling off the stool I’d planted her on, Becky looked at me and said, ‘Everyone here knows I like you. Why haven’t you kissed me?’

  Digesting her spidery lashes, I swallowed.

  After a long silence, I murmured, ‘I should go. My last bus is in ten minutes.’

  ‘Stay with me,’ Becky purred.

  I thought of Matthew waiting for me in Kew. Becky followed me outside, but I could say nothing except ‘Sorry.’ She shrugged and allowed me to walk away, shouting after me: ‘Why don’t you come to Philly for New Year’s Eve?’

  I looked over my shoulder and smiled, ‘Okay.’

  I missed the last bus, got stuck in Putney for an hour and fought with Matthew when I finally made it home, but Becky sent me an email saying she’d been serious, I should visit during my winter break.

  With the play finished and my flight only a week away, I began to feel guilty about not seeing my family. Matthew and I decided to leave Kew at the end of the week. We would have to clean the flat ready for the new tenants, tidy baby oil, handcuffs and vibrators from the bookshelf next to the bed, and pack away the cards and Scrabble set permanently littering the fold-out dining table in the absence of a TV. My clothes would have to cease hanging beside his in the wardrobe, and our toothbrushes would need to be parted and returned to larger, cleaner, more luxurious bathrooms. Matthew would drive us both as far as Tunbridge Wells, where I would lug my suitcase onto a train and call my mum to pick me up from Battle an hour or so after Matthew pulled his Saab up to his house.

  But before any of that could happen, I was to meet Nadiyya as she stumbled from the District Line.

  ‘Baby!’ She kissed me on the mouth and wrapped her arms on top of mine. ‘Where is Albert?’

  ‘He’s at the flat.’ I tried to smile away my nerves.

  ‘I’ve missed you soooooo much.’ She kissed me again as we walked. ‘Hugh sends his love.’

  ‘Oh, cool.’

  ‘So, are you excited about tonight?’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ I swallowed. ‘We thought we’d get Chinese. Is that okay with you?’

  We walked through lanes, past the tiny cemetery and up to the grand, converted building that had begun to seem like home.

  ‘Hello?’ I whispered into the gloom as I let us in. The curtains were drawn, which was not unusual for us during the day, but now struck me as shamefully seedy.

  ‘Well, hello.’ Matthew emerged from the one room, smiling and holding out his hand to Nadiyya. He was wearing his favourite dusty pink shirt and a pair of pale trousers. I saw his silver hair and the lines creasing his face, his yellowing teeth and his sagging earlobes. I noticed his old-man shoes and smelled his too-powerful Jovan Musk. I didn’t dare look at Nadiyya, but wondered in horror what she was making of this bizarre situation. I felt a sick churnin
g in my stomach, realising what a mistake it was to mix my worlds. Nadiyya, though a girl and part of something beautiful and unattainable I’d dreamt of in the sixth form, belonged to my student reality; she knew the nineteen-year-old, nightclubbing, beer-drinking Nat, not the ageless romantic Uncle who could sit with a sixty-three-year-old and cry passionate tears about his inevitable death. This is a crazy mistake, I thought.

  But Nadiyya swallowed her surprise if she had any and launched into her characteristic ‘baby’s and ‘darling’s, telling Matthew she’d heard ‘sooooo’ much about him and touching both our arms as she spoke.

  Our nerves quietened as we opened a bottle of wine and played some Aimee Mann. We sat around the table eating chow mein and kung pao with forks. Nadiyya asked excitedly about Rosella and quizzed Matthew on how he would cope with my absence. By the time we led and followed each other up the three stairs to the bed, Matthew and I were feeling sentimental and panicked. One of us set up a video camera on the bookshelf while the other two began kissing. I’d read that, in the majority of threesomes, the man gets left out, but as I thought more about leaving for America, I ached to be closer to Matthew.

  The next morning Nadiyya gushed that she’d had a good time, but once alone Matthew and I giggled that she hadn’t really got a look in. It had been a success I suppose: Matthew and I were closer than ever and I was sure we would make the long-distance thing work.

  While Matthew finished vacuuming the flat and packing up the car, I walked Nadiyya to the station and lingered for a final stroll around Kew. My head full of love and Uncles, I dawdled through the streets, filling my stomach with bittersweet notions about the months to come. Passing an empty-looking tattoo parlour, an impulse rose through me like a fever.

  Half an hour later, I skipped back up the hill with a small black ankh inked to my hip. Wriggling in the passenger’s seat of Matthew’s car, I grinned and peeled away the cling-film dressing to show my lover what I’d done.

  ‘Wow,’ he released the hand-brake and turned to the road with a smile. ‘You really are mine.’

  PART TWO

  15

  In a small office on the lower floor of the ugliest building on what I’d already come to believe must be one of the most beautiful campuses in America, Gregory Russell looked up at me from a desk of scribbled notes and hard-backed books ranging from Art History to analyses of the Russian Revolution. He had almost white hair and leathery tanned skin, but a clearly muscular body beneath his tatty T-shirt and jeans.

  I stood nervously in his doorway.

  ‘Hi,’ I offered tentatively. After a pause, I continued in an apologetic rush, ‘Um, sorry to disturb you. I wanted to talk to you about your directing class.’

  There was blank silence that reminded me of the void of panic that catches your breath when a computer crashes in the middle of an essay you haven’t yet saved. I waited for him to respond, but he merely nodded, studying me curiously. I had my hair pulled back into a low ponytail and suddenly felt conscious that my nails were bitten.

  ‘I’m an exchange student,’ I spoke to fill the silence. ‘So, I don’t have the credits to take the 200-level class, but they said at orientation to talk to the professor because I’m really interested in directing.’

  ‘Are you?’ He raised a messy eyebrow and stared at me some more. Ignoring my request, he said, ‘Well, why don’t you assistant direct my play this term? What’s your name?’

  I looked at him in surprise. With the offer hanging in the stuffy air, I felt that familiar pang of fear. As I had for most of my first week in America, I felt out of my depth: a child playing at an adult’s game, convinced it would only be a matter of time before someone noticed that my masterpiece was simply a crayon drawing, worthy of no more than a place on the fridge.

  I swallowed back my fear and told him my name. I vaguely tried to talk him out of his offer, admitting I didn’t really have any experience, but he’d made up his mind and seemed quite pleased with his decision, no matter what I said. He told me it would mean a lot of watching him and taking notes, but some people would pay just to be able to observe a good director at work. Humbled and excited, I nodded. I was to go away and read the script and, if I liked it, come to the theatre at seven tomorrow for auditions.

  I wandered slowly back to my dorm, thinking while I passed under the shadows of the impressive buildings and towering oaks of the ancient women’s college that Professor Russell was the only person I’d met so far that hadn’t immediately commented on my accent. He hadn’t even blinked when I opened my mouth and had skipped any of the ‘Where are you from? Oh, is that near London?’ banter I’d grown accustomed to over the six days since my arrival in the US.

  When I reached my dorm, I decided I couldn’t face my empty room in the eaves and instead opted to sit in one of the wooden porch chairs. I took out the photocopied script Professor Russell had given me and curled up to read Mac Wellman’s ’Twas the Night Before … in the late summer sun.

  As I imagine it happening, at the very same moment, Jessica Hunt climbed out of her father’s car and slammed the door shut with more force than was necessary. Her mom gave her an angry look and Jess suppressed the desire to roll her eyes. Her feelings about being back at Rosella for the beginning of senior year were, at best, mixed.

  Today was her birthday and she’d just spent twenty hours in a car with both her parents. All summer, her brother and she had been planning a road trip as her transport back to school. They were going to chill out to some old-school nineties classics and stop at midnight diners and Taco Bells along the way. This way, the trip from Dallas to Delaware County would not be spent next to a crying child on a plane and, best of all, she would have her car for senior year. But the plan had died a solemn death when, on the way home from her sister’s baby shower, Jess had rolled her vehicle off the road and into a ditch. Luckily unhurt, she’d clambered out of the dented mess and promptly burst into tears.

  Now, heaving her suitcases out of the trunk as her father held the door open because of his back, she tried to muster some excitement. This was to be her last year of school: who knew where she would go after that and how amazing it would be to get away from this oestrogen-charged bubble?

  It wasn’t working. The last time she’d been on this campus was over a year ago and not an especially happy memory. Her senior year stretched before her more as a necessary sentence than an opportunity to sentimentally savour the ‘final’ everything and the power of being the oldest.

  As a Sophomore, Jess had chosen to major in Theatre Arts and minor in German. Hoping to study abroad, she’d overloaded her Fall semester with language courses and impressed her professors with her extra-curricular reading. It was in ‘From Hitler to Hesse’ that she shone as the star student and secured her nomination for Student of the Year. Of course, it helped that the tutor – a PhD student from the neighbouring co-ed – was rated a ten out of ten for looks on the Daily Jolt website and had gaggles of first-years whispering about his chiselled jaw and toned body every time he walked past.

  Unlike most of the giggling teenagers, Jess had spent quite some time talking to Mr Atlas and knew details such as where he’d spent his childhood skiing in the Alps to obtain such a physique and how he found it hard to understand why everyone walked around campus in their pyjamas. Jess was always the last to leave after class, not because she was deliberately dawdling – this happened in every class – but because she had an extraordinary ability to spread herself out. Even after the shortest of classes, she would have three notebooks and six pens, numerous scattered pieces of paper and various doodles, her phone, her glasses case, a couple of hair-ties, some Burt’s Bees and possibly eye-shadow dribbled around her. In these minutes after the classroom had emptied, Jess would ask Mr Atlas seemingly random questions about language that she’d been mulling since their last session and grill him for information on regional variations in dialect. At first, her piercing curiosity had unnerved him. He had never taught a student who devou
red syllabus and non-syllabus with the exact same attention. Jess seemed unaware of the fact she’d have to write a research paper and sit a midterm; she’d turn up five minutes late or early with the appearance of someone who’d been walking along the hall when it’d suddenly occurred to her to learn some German. She wanted to know everything she could and approached the language like a mathematical problem – ‘If this rule works here, then what if I want to say this? And how does it change if this happens?’ – coming up with the most bizarre of hypothetical situations in order to cover all possible circumstances.

  In time, Atlas – as Jess soon began referring to him – began to look forward to these post-lesson chats, partly because they challenged his own knowledge and partly because of Jess herself. He became almost fascinated by her variations. His class was at 9.45am and, while with the other students he could predict which ones would stumble in bleary-eyed, which would be in full make-up and which would have the exhausted air of those who woke at 4.30 to get to crew practice, with Jess, every day was a surprise. On the days when she wore enormous green hoodies and clashing baggy pants, he’d assume she didn’t care about her appearance and sometimes wonder if she fitted the women’s college stereotype and preferred girls. At other times, though, she’d strut into the room with her hair intricately knotted, her face made-up with blue eye-shadow and scarlet lips and three-inch heels transforming her slumped posture into elegant grace. On these days, he guiltily caught himself wondering if the effort was for his benefit.

  It was because he knew he shouldn’t be thinking this that he asked her one day if she would mind not applying her make-up actually in class as it gave the impression she wasn’t listening. He hadn’t meant this to sound as stern as it came out and immediately regretted it. Taken aback, she apologised and explained she’d always fiddled and doodled and it helped her concentrate, that she had never not listened in a single class and that his was her favourite subject this semester. He felt guilty and tried to make up for it. They were discussing the subjunctive as he locked the classroom door and, not wanting to end the conversation, she asked if he was free for a coffee. He didn’t have another class until the afternoon and, though part of him thought it was a bad idea, he knew students and professors were often friends and seen having perfectly innocent coffees in the library café. He said yes. Over this hour-long latte, their conversation leapt from Texas to the Rhine, Oasis to Bon Jovi, dorm life to living alone in a foreign country. When it was finally time for them both to get back to their days, Jess, never having seen the point of subtlety, said she’d had fun and would like to hang out with him sometime. He ignored the alarm bells sounding in the distance and said he’d like that too. They arranged to meet in Albany at the weekend and said goodbye, each walking away smiling.