I went to the cinema in France where they watched films entirely in French without any subtitles. I saw an award winning film called La Balance that everyone said was hard hitting and gritty and très bien. The movie was all about racketeers and police informers and gang leaders and murder – it was just like Belfast in French.
By the end of term, our production of Hamlet was judged a masterpiece of theatre and a Europe-wide success. It was decided that the drama society would build on this success with The Comedy of Errors, a Shakespearean comedy full of farce, slapstick and mistaken identity. I knew that I had paid my dues as a sentry in Hamlet. Now the director would give me my big break as he had promised, and I could finally have a wee go at method acting. All those hours of standing in my wellies with pike in hand, emoting at Hamlet’s every word and tolerating smug sarcastic asides had surely earned me a leading part in this next production. But when the time for casting arrived, to my great disappointment I was cast once again as an officer. It was deeply ironic that the only teenage pacifist in West Belfast should be repeatedly cast as a soldier in arms, or at least in wellington boots. This time when I searched through the text I discovered that I had even fewer lines than Marcellus. Once again, all of the clever English students had got all the good parts, and the director had failed to recognise the bright light of talent shining before him. Either that or I was just a wick actor. I concluded that something was rotten in the state of the drama society. I retained my dignity and declined the part. The director told several of the principals that he was disappointed that Tom had given up.
In spite of all my efforts, my acting career had come to an end. I abandoned my ambitions to be the next Roger Moore and gave up my hope of becoming a great method actor like Jack Nicholson. Of course, I was aware that I could have a successful future after acting, like Ronald Reagan did in America, but I knew then that I would never replace Peter Davidson as The Doctor. I had once again tried my very best, and once again it simply wasn’t good enough. It was not to be, so it wasn’t.
14
NEW ROMANTIC
I was a New Romantic, so I was. When I first started out at university I was only pretending. Simon Le Bon would have laughed at my feeble efforts. Now that I was more than half-way through my second year, though, I was completely mature and free to buy and wear whatever clothes I wanted without my mother’s approval. I was no longer dependent on the limited availability of pilot jumpsuits or East German army jackets paid over 20 weeks from the Great Universal Club Book. It was the 1980s and my tablecloth scarf, combat trousers, suede ankle boots and legwarmers were the height of cool. Of course, I didn’t go to the extremes of frilly shirts, eyeliner and lipstick, as this was too expensive to achieve on a student grant and too androgynous to avoid the risk of getting your head kicked in. I had plenty of hair, though, and I decided to make the most of it with the assistance of many tubes of hair gel from Boot’s Chemist. After many hours of practice in front of the mirror I managed to construct a hairstyle of Duran Duran proportions. I didn’t care for the sort of floppy fringe sported by Byron Drake, even though it made him look like the lead singer in the Human League, so I concentrated on height and volume on the top of my head and length at the back. To achieve this I limited my visits to His and Hers hairdressers on the Shankill road so my locks would grow long and thick enough to support a hairdo worthy of an appearance on Top of the Pops. Some days my hair was as impressive as one of the ‘wild boys’ in the Duran Duran video where Simon Le Bon was strapped to a spinning windmill and his head got dunked beneath the water with each revolution. This was a brilliant video with fire and trampolines and dancing and monsters. I wished I had the resources to make a video like this on my course, even if it had to be set on a beach. When I raved about this post-apocalyptic mini movie to my big brother, he made it clear that he did not approve of my newfound New Romanticism.
‘Pity they didn’t stop turnin’ the windmill when that big fruit’s head was under the water,’ he remarked.
When I boasted to Billy Barton that my hair looked as trendy as one of the ‘wild boys’ from the Duran Duran video he was not impressed, either.
‘Sure that’s nothin’,’ he said. ‘There’s been a quare lot of wile boys runnin’ round Bushmills for years!’
Of course, New Romanticism wasn’t just about clothes and hair – it was also a brilliant new form of pop music. I bought cassettes by great new bands such as the Thompson Twins, who had three members – one black, one female and one ginger – none of whom were actually related. I bought a cassette by Tears for Fears who sang a really, really dark and really, really deep song about living in a very, very ‘Mad World’. Tears for Fears were so cool and big haired that I tried very hard to appreciate the album tracks that I didn’t really like. I had come to realise that an intellectual has to make an effort to appreciate art that most people don’t instantly enjoy, like Bob Dylan songs and modern art paintings that were almost Nietzschean.
Never before in the history of pop music had there been so many bands using synthesizers and electric drums. It used to be just Kraftwerk and Gary Numan and Jean Michel Jarre, but now everybody was playing electro-pop. I sometimes played along on my stylophone until the batteries went dead. My father had once again kept up to date with the latest technology by purchasing a shiny new, portable radio-and-cassette stereo with speakers built into the front and extra buttons to turn up the bass. Apparently the nickname for this new type of stereo player was a ‘ghetto-blaster’, but to me this sounded more like the name for a petrol bomb (in America they called it a ‘boom box’, but that still sounded much too explosive to me). This latest technological innovation was suitably silver and space age and looked just like the one yer woman used when she couldn’t stop dancing in Flashdance. I borrowed the ghettoblaster one Sunday night and after that it remained with me in Coleraine. I bought the new Howard Jones cassette with my student grant and played ‘What is Love?’ with the volume turned up full in an attempt to lessen the pain of having to do the dishes in our student flat every two months. I played my Howard Jones cassette so many times that it got stuck when I tried to rewind it, and I had to take it out of the ghettoblaster and rewind it with a pencil. As the 1980s gathered pace, the make-up and the clothes became more and more outrageous, just like the shoulder pads and plotlines in Dynasty and Dallas. It was definitely the era of the shoulder pad soap opera. Margaret Thatcher and Nancy Reagan even had a friendly shoulder pad competition when Maggie visited Ronald Reagan in America to build their ‘special relationship’ and give the Soviets a hard time. Conor O’Neill said that New Romanticism was a ‘disgusting display of excess and indulgence typical of Thatcher’s Britain’ and naturally blamed it all on ‘that wummin!’
Of course, now that I had a real live girlfriend I had to learn to be a true romantic as well as a New Romantic. I discovered that girls loved to receive nice, romantic presents from their boyfriends rather than anything too utilitarian such as oven gloves or a duster. Of course, as a feminist I would never have insulted Lesley with such stereotypically gendered gifts, so I bought her a pink cuddly dog for Valentine’s Day which she loved and put on top of the wardrobe in her bedroom. For Christmas I gave her the gift of a Panda rug from the British Home Stores, although for some reason this present elicited less enthusiasm. When I decided to buy Lesley jewellery for the first time, I saved money by skimping on beans on toast for weeks. A gift of jewellery was an indication of true love, so it was very important to get it right. I secretly researched what type of jewellery Lesley liked the most by asking a Heather or two about her preference of precious metals. They told me that she preferred three colour gold, which was the latest big thing, and I decided to buy Lesley an expensive three colour gold locket in the shape of a heart. The locket opened so you could put a photograph of yourself inside for your girlfriend to gaze upon at any time, day or night. This exclusive gift would have to be sourced in one of the finest jewellers in Belfast, so one weekend I travelled home,
made my way into Belfast city centre and, after a full-body search at the security gates, proceeded to Argos. I had to queue for ages, but when I eventually got to the front of the line I was able to look up the jewellery section in the catalogue and fill in an order form with the wee biro on a chain, like my big brother when he put a bet on in the bookies. Then I made my way to the cash desk.
‘Where’s your wee slip, love?’ enquired the purveyor of fine jewellery at the cash register. She pressed some buttons on an amazing new kind of computer that instantly checked if the product was available. Argos was like an instant Great Universal Club Book!
‘You’re in luck, love. It’s in stock,’ she announced.
I wrote my biggest cheque since paying the deposit on my student flat and handed it over.
‘You can collect it over there in a wee minute, son,’ the cashier advised, pointing to a long counter lined with cardboard boxes. I waited as a small man collected a new strimmer to tidy up his lawn, a fat woman picked up her Jane Fonda’s Workout video, and a mother with two noisy children waited impatiently for a My Little Pony doll with a unicorn horn. After everyone else’s boxes had been delivered from the warehouse upstairs, I stood alone and began to fret that the necklace had been out of stock after all.
‘Are you gettin’?’ enquired the lady at the collection desk.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Where’s your wee slip, love?’
I presented her with the copy of my order and she disappeared into the warehouse, returning with a small plastic bag containing the exquisite locket, and a stainless steel toilet brush for the customer behind me.
‘The bog brush and the wee necklace,’ she announced.
I rushed forward to claim the precious gift.
‘You’re dead lucky, wee fella,’ she explained. ‘They’re goin’ that cheap this is the last one, so it is.’
The Coleraine Palladium became a regular romantic rendezvous for me and Lesley. I held her hands to keep them warm when the Superser at the front of the cinema flickered and ran out of gas before the interval and the staff had to change the gas tank as well as the film reel. My gold-adorned lover and I cuddled through the most romantic classics of the year, such as Psycho II (which was really, really dark), Jaws 3D (which was really, really deep) and Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo (which was really, really crap). We were as happy as Charles and Diana on tour in Australia, except I had no money and Lesley’s dresses were from Anderson & McAuley’s in Royal Avenue rather than Harvey Nicholls in Kensington.
However the colossal class divide between me and Lesley was never far from my mind. Our backgrounds were so different. When I had been delivering newspapers for Oul Mac up the Shankill, Lesley had been riding ponies for a stud farm in Kildare. Only a few years ago while I was working as a breadboy on the Ormo Mini Shop on the peace line in Belfast, Lesley had been preparing triangular cheese and tomato sandwiches for supper at the Presbyterian Women’s Flower Festival in Bellaghy. These social and cultural differences threatened to come between us on more than one occasion. When Lesley arrived at university one Sunday night driving a new, blue Renault 5, which she named ‘Rocky’ after Sylvester Stallone, I was shocked at the extent of her wealth and resources. All I had was a rickety bike with a broken radio. Even my father’s green Simca looked pathetic compared to Lesley’s Renault 5. It was like comparing Gary Ewing’s house in Knot’s Landing to Southfork Ranch where JR lived in Dallas.
‘Well, whad’ya think of my new car? Isn’t it gooorgeous?’ she asked with the proudest of Bellaghy whoops.
I paused, swallowed, and put on what Lesley called my ‘self-righteous bake’.
‘Have you ever thought about how many starving children you could feed for the cost of that car?’ I replied sullenly.
‘Och, stop you bein’ jealous, wee fella, and c’mon with me and we’ll give it a good hoke down the Agherton Road. You’ve no idea!’ she continued, completely unassailed by my socialist critique.
Clive Ross made it clear that he too disapproved of Lesley’s worldly materialism, although his reproach was less direct and came in the form of a prayer at the Bible study meeting in his freezing flat.
‘Dear Lord, we humbly beseech you to challenge us to give up our material possessions for the sake of others and for the sake of the Gospel,’ he prayed.
‘Yes, Lord!’ Tara Grace agreed, raising both hands heavenward with pure serenity.
I gave Lesley a dig in the arm.
‘Forgive us for putting money and clothes and new cars before you, Lord,’ he prayed.
‘Yes, Lord!’ repeated Tara, on the brink of breaking into tongues.
There was only one person in the room with a new car. I gave Lesley another dig in the arm. We both opened our eyes before the ‘Amen’s and shared a wee wink.
My first trip in the new Renault 5 was across the border to Dublin for a student leadership training conference. It was a long drive – down the M1 past the Maze (which was Protestant for Long Kesh) where the IRA escaped; through the army checkpoint at the border where you worried you might get blown up; across the border into bandit country where you worried you might get shot by a sniper; on into Dundalk and across the River Boyne where King Billy won; down through all the wee towns with colourful shops in the main streets; through Drogheda with the bridge and the big chapels, until finally we reached the traffic jams in Dublin. It was a long journey, so we stopped in one of the wee towns to change our pounds into punts to buy petrol and Love Hearts and a bag of Chocolate Éclair sweeties and several packets of Tayto crisps. We both agreed that Tayto in the south never tasted as nice as in the north, despite the fact that the bags looked almost the same.
Every time we passed a field of animals Lesley whooped. ‘Och, look at the lovely wee lambsies! … Oh, look, I bet you that wee donkey’s a character! … Oh. My. Nerves – that stallion is gorgeous!’
‘Why, thank you,’ I replied.
The whole way down to Dublin we played cassettes, or listened to the radio, turning up the volume for all the best songs. Going down the Dublin Road wasn’t half as bad as Ian Paisley always made it out to be! I wound down the car window and sang along to Wham!’s ‘Bad Boys’ as we sped through the hills of Newry. When we crossed the border I switched to RTÉ Radio 2 which was a sort of Catholic BBC Radio 1. Larry Gogan played ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ by U2 and we sang along even though we were Protestants, because I had heard Bono was a proper pacifist like me. I played drums on the dashboard to ‘The Eye of the Tiger’ the whole way down O’Connell Street, past a real McDonald’s that wasn’t allowed up north and the old Post Office with all the bullet holes. Lesley put on her James Taylor’s Greatest Hits and held my hand during ‘You Got a Friend’ like a true New Romantic. Of course, Lesley did most of the driving because she said I didn’t know what to do with a car. I agreed that she should drive as a feminist statement because it was normally the man who was supposed to drive the woman and I wanted to challenge gender stereotypes and I didn’t want to crash her new car. My limited driving skills were often a point of discussion among my fellow students who all agreed that I was probably safer on my bike. On the way home from the Fair City I fell asleep. I dreamt that I was Michael Knight driving a brand new Knightrider, an artificially intelligent computerised car that spoke to me in an American accent, and Lesley was Dr Bonnie Barstow with the dark hair and lovely eyes. However, just as I was about to stop an evil Russian from setting off an atomic bomb in California, I was woken by the sound of Lesley speaking.
‘Do you wanna stop for a wee see?’ she said seductively.
I required no further encouragement. Within minutes Lesley had pulled into a layby for changing your flat tyres and we were locked in a passionate embrace, our bodies separated only by the gear stick and the handbrake. But just as we were really getting into it, Lesley backed away from me suddenly.
‘Oh. My. Nerves!’ she shrieked.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘You’ve ruined my
good Gloria Vanderbilt!’
‘Wha?’
‘What are you like, wee boy?’
‘Wha?’
‘We’re friggin’ plastered!’
I looked down to discover that I’d been lying on the bag of Chocolate Éclair sweeties as I slept and they had melted all over my brand new white T-shirt. There were unpleasant-looking brown stains across where it said ‘Choose Life’ on the front (the same as George Michael’s in Wham!). I had opted for a T-shirt with a nice, clean message this time instead of ‘Frankie Says Relax’. Radio 1 had banned Frankie Goes to Hollywood because apparently ‘Relax’ was about sex or being gay or something. A George Michael T-shirt seemed much more sensible and heterosexual to me. But now my trendy T-shirt was minging! At some stage mid-snog the melted chocolate on my T-shirt had transferred onto Lesley’s good white Princess Diana blouse from Anderson & McAuley’s, and now she too was covered in unsightly brown stains. Her blouse had a designer label in the shape of swan, which now looked as if it was pooping inappropriately.
All Growed Up Page 16