All Growed Up

by Tony Macaulay

  ‘You’ve no idea!’ Lesley shrieked. We drove another mile or two down the road and stopped in a car park near Banbridge, a town with a proper nightclub called The Coach. We got out at the side of the road and used tissue paper and Lesley’s make-up remover to wipe the brown stains off my George Michael and her Gloria Vanderbilt. A British Army landrover sped past, splashing water from a puddle all over my good jeans and I was sure I heard someone with an English accent shout, ‘Shat yourself, mate?’

  ‘Brits!’ I thought. Marty Mullen would have been proud of me.

  I continued to use my second-hand bike from Smithfield market as my main mode of transport in the final weeks of my second year. When the sun came out and the exams began I studied hard to keep up my 2:1, which was like a B at A level. I cycled to and from the university for all of my exams, rhythmically reciting facts about the history of mass communication with every push of the pedals. The summer holidays were on the way and I was enjoying living by the seaside and beside Morelli’s. On sunny days the students flocked to the beach. My fellow virgins had a Christian barbecue with hamburgers and sausages and sang ‘Majesty’ on one sand dune, while my fellow Shakespearean actors opted for marijuana, Morrissey and nookie on a neighbouring sand dune. I had managed to make my student grant last until the end of term and I was looking forward to signing on the dole with everyone else in Snugville Street and having some money for my summer holidays. I was also looking forward to volunteering for a charitable summer scheme on the Antrim Road led by Rev. Patrick Traynor, a ginger minister who had radical views on the church helping poor people in the inner city. But on the day of my Feminism exam, all of my positive end-of-term feelings were shattered. I had just left The Diamond where I had written several excellent essays about the media being unfair to women, blaming the BBC and Margaret Thatcher. I was looking forward to a pleasant cycle back to Portstewart in the sunshine and I was planning to meet Lesley, some Heathers and a few other friends for an end-of-term poke on the prom. My bicycle was locked safely in the bicycle shed underneath the Central Building and once I hopped on my saddle I would be heading for the seaside within minutes. I was not prepared for the crime scene that awaited me in the bike shed. I couldn’t believe my eyes – my rickety bicycle was still locked securely to a pole, but the wheels were gone! The saddle was gone! The light was gone! Even the wee basket I used for carrying my books was gone! It had all been stolen by some wee tea leaf from Coleraine. All that remained was the frame, the pedals and the oily chain that fell off every two miles. My shock turned to anger, and I kicked the wall of the bike shed so hard that I stubbed my toe and had to limp to the bus stop to try to hitch a lift. It wasn’t fair. This bike had been my most expensive possession in the whole world, apart from my collection of ABBA albums. What use would anyone have for a saddle and a couple of wheels from a second-hand bike from Smithfield market? I had been as much a victim of spite as of theft, I decided. When I arrived in Portstewart Lesley was most understanding, and she gave me hug and bought me a knickerbocker glory in Morelli’s.

  ‘Hey, boy, what’s the craic, hey?’ asked Billy Barton.

  I ignored Billy’s question as this was a situation devoid of craic.

  ‘I locked my bike in the bike shed and some hallions stole the wheels off it,’ I fumed.

  Tara Grace offered to pray that the thieves would repent and return my wheels under the conviction of the Holy Spirit and Clive Ross explained that this was God’s way of teaching me to be less dependent on material goods and more dependent on the Lord.

  ‘It was desperate, so it was,’ I lamented. ‘It was just sittin’ there with no wheels nor nathin’. It was just a shell … like one of them there DeLoreans in the closed-down factory in Belfast.’

  Aaron Ward was somewhat less sympathetic and burst into laughter at this description of my forlorn, wheel-less bicycle.

  ‘Oh, aye, but if it was your middle-class car that got nicked you’d be laughin’ on the other side of your face, wouldn’t ye?’ I barked.

  This just made him laugh more. Lesley said that Aaron and I argued like an old married couple even though we had only lived together for two years now.

  The trauma of losing my bicycle triggered an impulse that I had kept under control for several years. As a teenager I had developed a habit of purchasing pets that inevitably lived very short lives. As a result, there was a substantial pet cemetery in our back garden beside the greenhouse where my father grew tomatoes and killed greenfly. Up until this point I had resisted the urge to buy any of the helpless creatures in the Coleraine pet shop, even though I was a regular visitor and often tempted, but the distress of losing my bike had driven me over the edge. I should have known better. After all, I was nearly twenty years old and not a gormless teenager anymore. I had lost so many previous pets to premature death, I sometimes imagined that when I walked into the pet shop the parrots would squawk in a Scottish accent like yer man in Dad’s Army on BBC1, ‘We’re all doomed, Captain Mainwaring! We’re all doomed!’

  So the next day I went into Coleraine and bought a hamster and a cage with a squeaky wheel and a wee bottle for him to drink from. I named my new pet Buffy, and everyone said he was dead cute even though he bit a Heather from Portadown on the finger. I used the remainder of my student grant to stock up on straw and sunflower seeds to feed him and a huge plastic bag of sawdust to line the bottom of his cage. Deep down I knew all of this was a mistake and certain to end in tragedy. Previous experience suggested that the poor wee crater was condemned. We lived together happily for the last few weeks of term, our relationship blighted only by the incessant squeaking of his exercise wheel during the night, which continued even after I applied Flora margarine to the mechanics of the wheel. However, history was determined to repeat itself like an election in Northern Ireland. Poor Buffy developed a sore ear and began to fall over as he tried to run around his cage. At first it seemed that he had merely developed a mild case of hamster vertigo, possibly caused by the over-enthusiastic use of his wheel through the wee small hours of every single night. But when I noticed that his condition had deteriorated to the extent that he could no longer stand up, I ran to the telephone box to call Lesley. She responded immediately, turning the Renault 5 into an animal ambulance and transporting me and my patient to the vet in Coleraine.

  ‘Don’t worry, Tony,’ Lesley said reassuringly. ‘Sure you’ve been lookin’ after the wee crater really well. He’ll be all right, so he will.’

  Lesley loved animals and talked about her ponies and dogs and wee banties – which I thought meant ‘birds’ – with great affection, so I knew she would be horrified to learn that nearly every pet I had ever owned had come to a premature end. If she found out I was an animal assassin she would chuck me for sure, so I had no choice but to keep this dark secret to myself.

  Lesley held my hand in the waiting room and joined Buffy and me in the consultation cubicle as if she was one of the family. The vet looked most concerned over his half-rimmed glasses. I had the urge to ask him the question Captain James T. Kirk always asked Doctor McCoy in such dire circumstances, ‘What are his chances, Bones?’ but I didn’t need to. The vet shook his head and explained that Buffy had a terminal tick. As Lesley gripped my hand the vet gave the devastating verdict that it would be kinder to put Buffy to sleep. I was shocked, not so much that yet another one of my pets lacked longevity, but that for the first time I had to decide to end the animal’s life. At least all the others had simply died of natural causes or unfortunate accidents – apart from the gerbil and the snake who had died together in a fight to the death. This was euthanasia! We had discussed this moral dilemma in tutorials, but this was real. As a pacifist I could not possibly countenance the termination of a life.

  Lesley could tell that I was struggling with the ethics of this dilemma. ‘It would be cruel to keep the wee crater alive,’ she said gently.

  I nodded and the vet took this as assent. Buffy was gassed and I was upset and I vowed never to buy a
nother pet for as long as I lived.

  As I considered the prospect of moving into my third and final year at university I was amazed that time had passed so quickly. The university bosses had decided to change the name from ‘The New University of Ulster’ to simply ‘The University of Ulster’. Just like my student career, the university officially wasn’t going to be new anymore. It seemed like only yesterday when I had gone to my first lecture, played my first game of Frogger and watched my first film noir. For my final year, I had agreed to move into a new house in Millbank Avenue with Aaron and two new friends – Peter from Holywood who liked U2 and prayer, and Colm from Scotland who liked Robbie Burns and rugby. Our new accommodation was the same rent but about one degree warmer than the fridge I had shivered in for the past year, and it had an open fire like my granny’s which you could light with newspaper, sticks and wet coal. Once the summer was over we would be moving into our new digs. I would be studying for finals and starting to look for a job and thinking about life after university. I was going to be a proper mature student, so I was.

  15

  SPIELBERG BEWARE

  I was a final year student, so I was. I could hardly believe it. I was twenty-one years old and finally shaving daily. Somehow, in the midst of all the intellectual, romantic and spiritual excitement of the past two years I had failed to notice when exactly I finally began to need a daily scrape of the razor. Ironically, now that it was an essential part of my morning ablutions, I no longer had the desire to shave every day. After many years of longing for any sign of facial hair, now that I had them I simply took my bristles for granted. I rebelliously went several days without shaving, as having masculine designer stubble like George Michael had become very fashionable. I resisted the urge to grow a full beard, however, as this was considered very old-fashioned, and I certainly did not want to look like Grizzly or Gerry Adams. Clive Ross grew a full beard to make him look more like Jesus.

  As I moved into my final year of Media Studies, I realised that I needed to start preparing for my future career. The only proper paid employment I had secured to date had been as a paperboy and a breadboy, and although I had acquired exceptional customer service skills this was not enough to sustain my career now that I was an adult. I still dreamed of becoming a great investigative journalist in the tradition of Woodward and Bernstein, although now I was also open to the idea of becoming a consumer champion, like Esther Rantzen with the teeth who exposed corrupt companies and penis-shaped vegetables on That’s Life. I still harboured a desire to be the next Terry Wogan, using my Northern Irish charm to dazzle live television audiences with witty repartee and persuading famous actresess like Shirley MacLaine from Terms of Endearment to tell me secrets they had never revealed to any interviewer before. The technical term for this was ‘a scoop’, like when that journalist found out that Cecil Parkinson had a mistress and a love child and he was forced to resign from Mrs Thatcher’s government. The journalist who discovered The Hitler Diaries in East Germany had the greatest scoop of all time, until another journalist came up with the scoop that the diaries were a forgery.

  However, as my degree also included practical modules on photography, radio, television and film production, I realised that I could also pursue a career in Hollywood in the USA, which was very different from Holywood in County Down. I could be a great director, following in the footsteps of Michael Winner and Stephen Spielberg. All I needed was a wee bit of practice. Stephen Spielberg was a genius, which made it okay for him to have a proper beard. My two-day stubble indicated that my filmmaking genius was still in its early stages. Stephen Spielberg had directed all the best movies I had ever seen – apart from the Star Wars movies and Doctor Who and the Daleks with Peter Cushing – and he was widely regarded as science fiction royalty. He directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the aliens were intelligent life forms that could play a great wee tune on a synthesizer like Depeche Mode. Spielberg also directed E.T., about an alien who flew a bike across the moon and phoned home and made me cry even though I was far too old and cool to be weeping at a movie. Spielberg’s movies were so brilliant that millions of people went to see them over and over again and they earned so many millions of dollars that the first movie was always followed up with a sequel. But cinema had been in decline for a long time, even outside Belfast where the cinemas weren’t being burned down. This was because video had taken over. Video hadn’t just killed the radio star – it had stopped people going to the movies as well, because now we could watch everything on video in our own homes. My Uncle Freddie got videos of the Rocky movies before the films even came out! Some of my media studies books said cinema was finished, but I thought that Spielberg might just save it. I was looking forward to the sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark with Indiana Jones, though I wasn’t sure how the first film could possibly be bettered, and I couldn’t wait for E.T. 2.

  In my final year of university I had to create another video of my own to show off all the film production skills I had acquired over the past three years. I had learned a great deal about genre and screenplay, plot and narrative, I had studied everything from Citizen Kane to Dial M for Murder, and I knew how to create a really, really dark and brooding screenplay using ambivalent imagery and angular camera perspectives. This was my last chance to showcase my talents for the whole world to see, so I decided to put all of this learning into practice in one final, artistically complex and sophisticated production. I decided to make a pop video of an ABBA song. However, as ABBA had more or less split up and were no longer considered cool (Byron Drake argued they had never been cool to begin with) I cleverly found a cover version of one of their best songs by a genuinely hip New Romantic band called Blancmange. This band had achieved a huge hit with ‘Living on the Ceiling’ and everyone thought they were a serious and credible part of the New Romantic movement with their synthesizers and space age clothes and implausibly large shoulder pads. The lead singer’s hair was as big as his collars were small. So it came as a great surprise to many of their fans when Blancmange recorded a cover version of ‘The Day Before You Came’. This was one of the Super Swedes’ final hits before Benny and Björn started writing songs about chess and Agnetha and Frida released solo albums which I alone purchased. ‘The Day Before You Came’ was a melancholy song about how life for Agnetha was routine and boring and very sad right up until the day before she met me. Although this song had been one of ABBA’s least-greatest hits it was a groundbreaking composition. In fact, it was the only love song I knew which referred to the gritty, everyday reality of having your dinner and watching TV – ‘I’m sure I had my dinner watching something on TV / There’s not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn’t see.’

  I knew it wouldn’t be easy to create a video worthy of the lyrics of this classic song that was good enough to be shown on MTV, but I was up for the challenge. After all, I had managed to simulate Armageddon on the beach and cemetery in Portstewart for my Cliff Richard video.

  ABBA’s original video for ‘The Day Before You Came’ wasn’t one of their best ones. It featured Agnetha in a raincoat with good shoulder pads, waiting at a train station in Stockholm and looking very sad because it was ‘the day before I came’. She was oozing Scandinavian beauty and melancholy, but it was still just a video on a train. The official Blancmange video didn’t do the song justice either because there were far too many scenes on a more dirty-looking train in London. Blancmange even had the audacity to use parts of the original video to suggest that Agnetha was flirting with the lead singer (as if he had a chance with his bad teeth). So it was my responsibility to create a new music video worthy of the song, as a tribute to the genius of Benny and Björn and the beauty of Agnetha (Frida just sang a few ‘oohs’ with a new spiky hairdo in the background as she was busy moving onto serious rock with Phil Collins). I persuaded a few of my fellow students to play the lead romantic parts. My housemate Colm agreed to be the leading man, going through the motions of life without love on a dull and
ordinary day. I persuaded a Heather with long hair to be the girl who hadn’t come yet (Byron Drake laughed and said there were many girls like this in the Christian Union). Colm looked good on camera because he was dark and handsome, like me, and my chosen Heather looked amazing when she shook her big hair like a member of Bananarama and I transformed her into sexy slow motion. I considered setting the video in California or Barcelona but my budget wouldn’t stretch that far. In fact, as I hadn’t enough money to buy train tickets to transport my principle actors to Belfast I made the artistically innovative decision to set the video in a university in Coleraine. My premise was that it was the day before the girl got transferred into an easier course at Coleraine after failing her first year of Law at Queen’s University in Belfast. As nearly every video production in the Media Studies department contained at least one scene set on the beach in Portstewart I decided to shatter convention and film my video entirely in the stark urban landscape that was the university campus. I wanted it to be really, really dark and really, really deep. Behind the superficial narrative of a love story brooded the suggestion of socialist revolution with a hint of impending apocalyptic disaster. When I explained to the professor that I wanted to create a Mad Max tone blended with New Romantic sensibilities and a hint of Swedish kitsch, he said he was relieved that I wasn’t going to do anything too pretentious.

  ‘I must have gone to lunch at half past twelve or so, the usual place, the usual bunch,’ sang Blancmange.

  I persuaded all my friends to meet up with Colm and me in the university canteen so that I could film them having sausages and chips with baked beans. I gathered all of the necessary equipment, including a microphone with a very professional-looking feather duster on the end, and as I walked across the longest bus shelter in the world I could tell from the admiring glances I received that my fellow students were impressed to see a film crew on campus. When I arrived in the canteen and explained my vision for the piece, everyone was surprised that on this occasion there was no religious or socialist message. I explained that sometimes it was important to create art for art’s sake and simply to tell a story that people might relate to and enjoy. It was also important that no one called you a wanker at the end of term screening.