Authors: Graham Norton
I totally embraced the idea of being in a couple, and friends were put on a back burner while I got busy spending lots of ‘we’ time. I would have been quite happy for us just to sit around playing with each other’s hair, but Ashley was determined to see a bit of Europe, so a holiday plan was hatched. We would go to Turkey.
We flew into Turkey’s third largest city, Izmir, thus carefully avoiding Istanbul, the only place I had ever heard of or had any desire to see. Never mind. The first night we headed out for a meal and then back to the hotel where after sex we fell into separate single beds and I slept right through the night. In the morning Ashley didn’t look great. It turned out he had spent most of the night on the toilet with an upset stomach. We wondered what might have caused it because we had eaten exactly the same thing. I tried to make the right cooing noises, but really I just felt very smug.
Ashley got us into some sort of shared taxi thing and we
headed off to the bus station to catch a ride to Effes to see its famous Roman ruins. Whatever. As the taxi rolled and shuddered around dusty corners I became aware of a slight rumble in my stomach. Oh-oh. By the time we got to the bus station, the Vesuvius of my ass was in danger of turning the inside of the taxi into a poo Pompeii. I ran from the car and found the public toilet. Although I couldn’t read the Turkish signs it wasn’t that hard to find, since my nose knew what it was looking for and a helpful swarm of flies were flapping their shit-covered wings and buzzing encouragement about the place. I didn’t care. I squatted over the hole in the ground and my insides promptly fell out.
I stumbled from the scene of the grime and found Ashley. By this time he was fully recovered and hurrying me to get on the bus for Effes. We were the only tourists on it, and since we were the only English speakers I’m not sure how we knew this, but the route was non-stop and took about three hours. I put on my Walkman and Ashley got out a book. The engine started and the doors closed with a hissing noise. Literally the moment the bus started to move and there was no escape my ass went into spasms. It seemed my insides had not all been left behind – there was lots still in there and it wanted out. I clutched the seat in front and broke into a cold sweat. I battled each new wave of spasms like some woman not wanting to give birth to her sticky brown baby. I kept saying to Ashley, ‘I’m in bits, I’m in bits.’
‘Hang on, just hang on,’ he said.
Well, I did hang on for what must have been at least a couple of hours until finally it wore me down. A spasm too far and suddenly the battle was over. I sat very still, feeling so much better but horrified by what had just happened.
Like a dog sitting by a steaming sin, I looked at Ashley and said simply, ‘I couldn’t hold it.’
‘Don’t move and hopefully no one will smell it, and when the bus stops we’ll just get off as quickly as we can.’
A good plan.
The bus continued on its merry way with upbeat Turkish music blaring from the radio. Ashley and I were poised like Olympic athletes ready to fly off the starting blocks the minute the doors opened. Finally the bus began to slow down. We clutched our bags. It stopped, the doors opened and we sprang up. As one, the rest of the bus started waving at us to sit down – this was not our stop. It seemed that the non-stop bit wasn’t entirely true. Appalled, we slowly sat back down.
‘Shit,’ Ashley said.
Quite. I looked down at the lino-covered aisle where I had just been standing, and there, like a tiny piece of melted chocolate, was a drop of my poo. As I raised my head, my eyes met those of the man across from me who was also looking up from the floor. He stared at me as if I had just tried to clean his ear with my cock.
At Effes, the whole bus told us that now was the time to leave and we took them at their word and fled. Under Ashley’s instruction I leant against a wall to hide a rather unattractive dark brown map of South America that had appeared on my trousers. He went to find us somewhere to stay. I hung my head in shame and felt very far from home and holidays both. Some man came up to me and in broken English tried to sell me a day trip to where the Virgin Mary had either been born or died, I can’t remember. The force of my ‘no’ frightened us both.
Ashley wasn’t just a waiter, he was also a fully trained nurse, and once we got into our hotel room he went into full care mode. He showered me and put me to bed, he washed my clothes, he nursed me. I lay there wondering why, if love was blind, it couldn’t have lost its sense of smell as well.
The rest of the holiday went by without a hitch. In week two the travelling stopped and we stayed in a small village on the south coast. I had worried that two men travelling together might raise a few Turkish eyebrows, but no one seemed to care or suspect a thing. One night, though, as we ate our dinner, an oiled and groomed moustache appeared above our table. He noticed that we were eating lobster; in fact he seemed fascinated by the idea of us eating it. We tried to chat back and laugh at what he was saying.
‘After lobster, later you will have to astable.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Later you will have to musible.’
‘No, we don’t understand.’
‘Have to marsibo.’
‘No.’
By now he was becoming quite heated and was clearly annoyed by our poor grasp of English.
‘Matuba!’ He was getting louder.
We shook our heads. The other people in the restaurant were begining to look over. It was at this point that he almost exploded with frustration, and as he did a very graphic mime we suddenly heard very clearly ‘Masturbate! Masturbate!’ It turned out he was the local pimp trying to interest us in his ladies after the seafood aphrodisiac effect had kicked in. We giggled nervously as every other customer stared at us and
our strange wanking friend. Finally he got the message and sloped off into the night. Of course the irony was that he was quite right – we did nothing but ‘mastuba’ for hours when we got back to the hotel.
Returning from holiday I took a deep breath and entered the drama school fray once more. This time it was all a bit of an anticlimax. I went to Central, did my speeches and was then asked into George Hall’s office once more.
‘I’m very pleased to say that you have a place at Central next year.’
‘Oh.’
After all the trying and dreaming, I had expected this moment to be accompanied by fireworks and an Oscar ceremony intensity, but instead I felt a bit flat. I thanked him and got the tube back to Covent Garden and went to work. I told Ashley, Helen and Mike, and they were so excited they started to tell customers. Even they seemed more pleased than me. I felt like I was listening to my favourite record underwater.
5
The Deepest Cut
T
HIS WAS MY BEAUTIFUL LIFE
. I was going to go to one of the top drama schools in Britain, and I was living with a man I loved. It almost felt uncomfortable. I was so unused to things going my way that I just assumed that this couldn’t last. I was right. Well, as a pessimist once said, ‘a pessimist is never disappointed’.
Shortly after I got accepted by Central, I was hanging around the Australian dorm we called home, heating up more sausage rolls, when Ashley casually mentioned something about booking his ticket home. Now, I knew that when we had met he was only staying in England temporarily, but I had somehow assumed that meeting me had changed his plans. Home is where the heart is, and surely that was in London with me. For some reason at moments of emotional shock I tend not to cry but instead to get very angry, and this was no exception. I turned into a windmill of tea towels as I stormed around the flat. ‘Do I mean nothing to you? Don’t you think you should have discussed this rather than just present it as a done deal?’ As far as I was concerned, he was a selfish bastard and I was a heaving, bosomed heroine wronged by her man.
I stomped out of the flat and went to the Oval in South London where I was taking part in some awful fringe play
about the Irish in Britain. Ashley couldn’t come because he was on nursing duty through the night for a rich old lady in order to earn some extra money – presumably to help pay for his airfare.
After the play the cast went across the road to the pub, and I got talking to a very cute man who was a friend of one of the other actors. As closing time approached, one by one everyone started to say their goodnights. Finally there was only me and Cute Guy left. I remember looking around, wondering who he was waiting for, and then the impossible dawned on me – I was the one he was after. This was the biggest sexual compliment I had ever been paid. Thank God I was still in a foul mood with Ashley so that I could somehow morally justify this bit of adultery. ‘Well, if he doesn’t care about me, etc.’
Cute Guy took me back to his flat. We got into a big wooden bed which for some reason he felt he needed to tell me had belonged to his now dead Granny. As we rolled around I became aware that something very unusual was going on. For I think the only time in my life, my cock seemed to be talking to my heart, and between them they had decided that cheating on Ashley was not the thing to do – I could not get a hard-on. What a great night; what else could go wrong? What indeed . . . After he managed to come, Cute Guy burst into tears because I was the first person he had been with since his boyfriend had left him. I lay there with a limp cock and a stranger sobbing on the pillow next to me and thought about Ashley and the dead Granny who had owned this wooden nest of sadness. Adultery hadn’t been like this on
Dallas
.
I went back to Ashley the next day and we discussed the situation. Ashley’s plan to go home would go ahead, but now
it was slightly modified. I would follow him during my long summer holiday from drama school, and then Ashley would return to London and we would set up home together properly without the lost tribe of New South Wales sharing with us. Things returned to normal.
Finally the day dawned when I would start at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Ashley gave me a packed lunch and waved me on my way. After all the anticipation, it was a strangely underwhelming moment when I actually saw the other twenty-five people I was going to spend the next three years with. I’d spent hours wondering who my contemporaries were going to be, and suddenly this was it. I had two shocks. The first was that someone I knew from Cork was in my year, Dan Mullane who I had met through the drama society at university in which I’d dabbled. I thought this was wildly unfair. Central was supposed to be my new beginning where I could reinvent myself. Dan and I looked at each other and I’m sure he felt exactly the same. The other shock was that the vast majority of the boys were straight. Only four of us fitted into the theatrical stereotype.
We sat in the tiny coffee shop making small talk and looking at hundreds of fading 8 × 10 photographs of ex-students. Although we all pretended to care about the craft of acting, it was obvious that all any of us really wanted was to be famous, so it was slightly worrying that we only recognised about four of the students. The only person who seemed to know all their names was Betty, the tea lady who served behind the counter. It seems deeply ironic that sweet, unassuming Betty is now more famous than most of the school’s past pupils.
Once I got into the rhythm of going to school every day
and working a couple of nights a week at Smiths, I loved it. There is no doubt about it, drama school is the most self-indulgent thing in the world. Each morning I’d wake up and wonder what I would be doing that day and then remember, ‘Oh yes, thinking about myself.’
Ashley left on a Sunday night. We had a big gathering of our friends at lunchtime and then Ashley and I headed out to Heathrow. Airports are so deceptive. On the surface they are just vast, impersonal concourses full of shiny floors and bland art, but they are in fact enormous emotional hotpots. Everyone who walks into an airport is in some sort of heightened emotional state. The terror of flying, the excitement of a holiday, the sadness of leaving, there seems to be an amnesty for dressing and behaving like the cast of
One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. I don’t think Ashley actually laughed, but he couldn’t disguise how thrilled he was to be going home. I did well in the ‘keeping it together’ department until the very moment when I waved him through the departure gates and turned to leave. I walked through Heathrow bawling like a baby who has just realised that its favourite toy has fallen out of the pram. The tears lasted off and on for most of the tube ride home.
Of course most people would have dragged themselves to work the next day and stared numbly at a computer screen for eight hours, but I was going to drama school. We were doing a poetry performance showcase that morning, and with my freshly acquired grief I knew I was going to be marvellous. I practically skipped down the road. Sure enough, about three lines into Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’ (long before Simon Callow’s funeral in
Four Weddings)
, I was in tears. Every cloud . . .
By now I was twenty-four and one of the older people in my year. The other students my age seemed to have spent their whole lives in education, and so I found myself feeling very worldly and, because of my restaurant job, relatively rich. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t happy and that I was living my life in mourning for Ashley, who had morphed in my memory into the first Antipodean saint.
I was now renting a huge room in a flat in Swiss Cottage with two women who had put up a card on the school noticeboard. It became clear that one of the women, Ann, was very much in charge. She had lived in the flat for years and we all abided by her slightly eccentric rules. She was deeply committed to healthy living and was a strict vegetarian. She religiously used her water filter jug, in fact she used it so much that she had never had a chance to wash it. The grimy, scum-covered plastic jug sat on a shelf, and the other lodger Helen and I would walk past it pulling faces of horror. When my mother came to visit, she took one look at it and summed it up perfectly: ‘A water filter? A fish couldn’t live in that.’ Also Ann had a budgie that lived in the living room. I don’t know what sort of Herculean bird this was, but it seemed to be capable of throwing food and shit nine or ten feet across the room so that the room was less like a lounge and more like an enormous birdcage. It wasn’t ideal. Added to that was Ann’s very long red hair, strands of which turned up all over the flat. It’s hard to describe the full horror of stepping into a bathroom that looks like it was last used by a pony with a hair-loss problem.