Authors: Graham Norton
I immediately fell in with a clique, Mia, Jerry, Carmel, Karen. We wandered around the campus in a self-consciously Bohemian way, our big charity-shop coats flapping in the wind. We spent hours in the vast basement canteen called the Kampus Kitchen (No! You are kidding, that’s how they spelt it? – how mad!) sitting at the big round tables, burning holes in the styrofoam cups with cigarettes and watching the coffee pour out. We would dissect what everyone was wearing as they came in, and watch the clock. ‘I’ve got a lecture in ten minutes’, ‘I’ve got a lecture in five minutes’, ‘I’m missing a lecture’.
In that first year we had to take four subjects and I chose mine with great care. English because the plan was I would use this degree to pursue my career in journalism, French because I didn’t go through all that stuff in Toulouse for nothing, then it was a toss-up between Geography or History – I went with History because Geography seemed to have a lot of nine o’clock lectures. Finally I took Greek and Roman Civilization because they didn’t fail anyone at first-year exams, hoping that someone might go on to take it as a degree.
When I did go to lectures, which wasn’t often, I quite enjoyed them. The strictest department was French, as they seemed to notice when you weren’t there. The French department was made up of quite starchy ladies, most of whom you suspected had sacrificed their lives for an all-consuming love affair with France in lieu of another human
being. The one exception was Dr Esther Greenwood. In her mid-thirties with very long blonde hair, she had lazy, exotic features, dark, slightly hooded eyes, a delicate nose and the sort of mouth that was designed for eating peaches. She drove a bright blue Citroën van, wore large fedora hats, smoked roll-ups and organised exhibitions of Balinese art. In short she was as pretentious and annoying as I and my little clique were. I adored her.
She had managed to get a book of her short stories published by a small publishing house and she announced one day in the middle of a French class that she would be giving a reading at the local arts centre. Having lived in Britain for many years, I know the phrase ‘Arts Centre’ conjures up something quite municipal, but in Ireland at that time all it meant was a whitewashed basement where you might be able to buy freshly brewed coffee and some woman might know where you could go to get an abortion. Like a little overdressed fly, I was drawn into her creative web. I went to hear her reading. The stories themselves were fairly impenetrable, full of descriptions of leaves hitting windowpanes, but afterwards I bought a copy even though I could ill afford it. I think that’s the way I became friendly with her, and we would chat after lectures.
Everyone was making plans for the long summer holiday and I had decided that I would head off to Paris and get a job; I just needed some money to get there. My friend Jerry was in a similar situation. Now Jerry, although part of the übercool and artistic gang at university, was a proper man. This is really what thrilled me most about being his friend. He would talk about the make-up of a wild flower or a T.S. Eliot poem, but equally he would kick around a ball or fix
a bike. His one blind spot was that he didn’t really seem to notice that I didn’t have a masculine side like him. He came up with a money-making scheme. We would do gardening. As deeply unlikely as this seems, I went along with the plan. A professor he knew from the Old English department wanted a fence put up. Jerry & Graham Landscaping to the rescue.
Of course it was raining. Like some sort of bizarre ballet about trench warfare in the First World War, we slipped and staggered around with wooden poles and rain capes. I mostly remember laughing while Jerry got cross with me. A nervous professor peered from his study window. Finally we finished the job, and we were both enormously satisfied, both with our monumental achievement and with the cash. If you would like to go and see this fence I regret to report it only lasted about three weeks – then the winds came or perhaps a slightly overweight bird landed on it, I don’t know.
We were on a roll and word was out that no job was too small or indeed too simple. Esther asked us if we could help her build a patio at the back of her cottage. Of course we could! We got on our bikes and headed out into the country. I remember that day was so beautiful. This was the way my books and TV shows told me the country was supposed to be, not dreary and bleak, full of mists and yellow school buses. The sun shone as we cycled along the valley of the River Lee. The council hadn’t been to trim the hedges yet and so everywhere we looked was bursting with life and colour. I was young and so happy. I had my friend Jerry with me and we were heading for the inner sanctum of the creative goddess.
Esther’s cottage was one of the most perfectly beautiful
homes I’d ever seen. The sort of cottage door that Jesus might knock at, and then inside there was a series of large white rooms that she had furnished very simply but with the sort of style and flair that never would have made it into the Bungalow Bliss house plans. Her home smelled of fresh bread and well-thumbed books. It seemed idyllic to me. It never crossed my mind that this woman living miles from anyone or anything with her unwanted writing might be anything other than incredibly happy.
Jerry and I started work on the patio one Monday. If the professor’s fence had been our equivalent of Hadrian’s Wall, this was building the pyramids. I let Jerry direct proceedings, but after a while I could tell it wasn’t going well. Esther’s back garden was really a field, and our ineffectual digging was making as much impact as a plastic spoon in a coal mine. I remember that we did work hard, and that Jerry spent a lot of time moaning about what a slave-driver Esther was, and that of course this was somehow my fault. The vegetarian lunch didn’t help matters.
At the end of the day Esther cooked us dinner and we drank wine. It was all so grown-up. We let Esther talk at length about her college days in Brighton and her collection of hats, but most of all she told us about her diaries – her many, many diaries. As I got to know her better it seemed that she really only lived her life so that she would have something to write about in her diaries. It made talking to her all the more interesting, because you thought that what you were saying might be recorded. I’m not sure how we got home that night, but presumably we weaved and wobbled our way back to the city on our bikes.
The next few days went by following a similar pattern,
but on the Friday Esther was going to have a party and we were invited. Jerry had the good sense to be slightly apprehensive, but I was thrilled. I would wear my special green two-tone suit that I had found in some market stall. Somehow it had made its way from a tailor in Hong Kong to Cork. It was too big and smelt of attic, but to me it was sophistication with buttons on. I wore it with a strange silk tie that was covered with what looked like either two melting fried eggs or a couple of vaginas that really needed to see a doctor.
The party was a bit of an anticlimax. The other guests were all thirty- and fortysomethings who were attached to academia or the arts in some way, and they stood around awkwardly with their glasses of wine discussing books they wished they’d written. The highlight was when someone put a Blondie record on. I
loved
Blondie. Off I bopped, but then something happened which I’ve seen at countless parties since (though sadly now I’m on the other side of the divide): I noticed the other guests dancing too, but not out of pleasure, more in an effort to prove the point that they weren’t old, and that they could dance to Blondie even though there were more beats to it than they knew what to do with. I’m the same now at clubs, desperately clinging to a mysterious beat, drowning more than dancing – ‘Taxi for Mr Mutton!’
The party slowly wound down. Jerry and I were going to spend the night in Esther’s loft room so we waited for the others to leave. Eventually it was just the three of us left, Jerry lying on the sofa, Esther and I on the floor in front of the fire. If I were listening to the conversation again now I would probably throw a brick through the window. We discussed words, the ego and I remember a lot of talk about
being self-aware and when it was possible to be lost in the moment. Jerry, and who could blame him, fell asleep. Esther and I talked some more. We danced. She told me she had a crush on the composer Michael Nyman, she told me she had a crush on me, she kissed me, she took me to bed.
The next day was extraordinary. I was full of my secret. This wasn’t a terrible oppressive secret like Jules had been, this was a fantastic, glamorous secret. It wasn’t grubby – it was scandalous and sexy! Esther gave me a lift home to Bandon and even came in and had tea with my parents. Of course they suspected nothing, why would they? Everything felt electric and almost illegal. As far as I was concerned I was back on the heterosexual team. I looked in the mirror and saw a man in love with a woman, when in reality I was a boy in love with the situation.
I had already booked my tickets to Paris for the following week. Esther announced that she would come with me. We could stay with her old friends Alex and Sarah; she had meant to visit them soon anyway. The plan was that we’d spend a couple of weeks together and then I could start my Parisian adventure on my own when she went back to Cork.
She flew off to Paris first and I was to follow a few days later. In the meantime I sat in my parents’ bungalow watching TV, but in my mind I was as decadent as any opium eater. The day of my departure I said goodbye to Mum and Dad, who were both terrified about what might happen to me in the leg-waving, bare-breasted hell that was Paris. I don’t think they would have felt any better if I’d told them I was going to be under adult supervision throughout, and that in fact I’d be sleeping with it.
When I got to Paris, Esther and her friend Alex met me
at arrivals. She took me to one side. The news was not good. Yes, we would be staying with Alex, but Sarah wouldn’t be there. Sarah had died the week before of cancer. Now, there are many ways of responding to a friend who has lost a loved one from cancer: you could give flowers, make a donation to a charity, perhaps cook a meat pie, but I didn’t think a particularly obvious one was showing up with your toy-boy lover. To make matters worse Alex had lost his voice through shock. He rasped hello and led us to the waiting car.
The apartment was no longer a home. Alex was a photographer and had transformed the place into a shrine to his dead wife. The children had been sent to stay with some relatives, so Esther and I slept in the nursery. Perhaps there was another spare room, and Alex was just trying to point something out to Esther.
I can’t say I was very comfortable in my role of toy-boy lover. I sat awkwardly at dinner while friends of Alex whispered and giggled in the sort of French that was way beyond me. I remember once as we walked by Notre Dame cathedral, Esther tried to take my hand. I was appalled. I can only imagine what a grotesque couple we made.
Alex had two lovely friends called Pierre and Christine who photographed food for a living. They worked and lived in an amazing apartment overlooking the Seine – large white rooms that led to more white rooms, all with windows framed by billowing curtains. We visited them one afternoon and chatted while we ate everything they had finished photographing. Somewhere in a conversation that I couldn’t follow they invited Esther and me to spend the weekend with them in the country, presumably to leave Alex alone with his grief. Esther thought it was a good idea, so we accepted.
To this day I don’t know where we went. It took hours to get there and it was either to the north or the south of the Massif Central. The house itself was an old farmhouse that they had started renovating but never finished. Esther and I slept in a room upstairs that could only be accessed by a ladder just outside the front door. The front door led directly into the kitchen and another bedroom led off that. As far as I recall that was all there was to the house. It had a long-drop toilet full of spiders with a rather incongruous pile of back issues of
Vogue
next to it. Still, always quite pleasant to wipe the smile off a model’s face, no matter what the circumstances.
The days were spent sunbathing or helping to weed the big, seemingly empty vegetable patch. It was at night that the place came alive – various friends of Pierre and Christine would show up with copious amounts of wine and some local moonshine. Esther hated these evenings. She didn’t see the simple pleasure in getting drunk, finding everything very funny and then going to bed. These parties were nothing like hers, where the wildest thing was a Blondie record. I would really look forward to these mad nights and would choose to stay up sticking cutlery to walls or trying to lift cars long after she had sniffily said goodnight. The sun was nearly always up when I finally climbed the ladder to my bedroom of bliss. I felt like a teenage Andy Capp returning to a very grumpy Missus.
The sex between us was . . . well, I’m guessing it wasn’t great because on one of these nights in the strange room upstairs she told me that she thought I was gay. Two thoughts: couldn’t you just throw my dinner in the bin like any normal pissed-off girlfriend, and secondly –
of course
I
was gay. At the time I still hadn’t realised this, but it must have been so obvious: how could she ever have thought I was straight? The fact that the rest of the world could tell I was gay didn’t help me, of course. I was furious. How dare she presume to tell me what I was? But at the same time I was sort of delighted that someone was helping me face up to the truth. Back in Paris I began to look at men and wonder if I was attracted to them. It all seemed so seedy – and that was to a boy shagging a woman in her mid-thirties in the flat of her dead friend.
One night after dinner in a restaurant with Alex and more of his friends giggling in French – ‘
II est un pouf!
’ – we got back to the flat and Esther took me to one side. Did I mind if after I went to bed she spent some time talking to Alex, because she felt he wanted to talk about Sarah? Of course I didn’t. I said goodnight and headed off to bed with my diary. As I filled the pages with long descriptions of French trees and reflections on the Seine, I was aware that things in the flat had gone very quiet. The music had stopped. I could just about hear whispering. Then total silence. I lay there listening to the sound of my own breathing. Then some creaking floorboards and the clicking of light switches. A door closed. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening. I’d agreed to Esther giving Alex a shoulder to cry on, not a vagina to stick it in. I felt in my own childish way that she had once again misjudged her response to a friend in mourning. Didn’t she know it was possible to buy special sympathy cards?