So Me (5 page)

My mind was racing. Lying in a bunk bed surrounded by pictures of Babar the elephant and a dead woman, I considered my options. My thoughts froze when it came to what
I should do, but the one thing I was certain of was that I didn’t want to be here in the morning. No croissant could be buttery enough to tempt me to that particular breakfast
àtrois
. So that was a sort of decision – I would leave. As quietly as I could I packed my things back into my summer-of-adventure backpack. Then I turned my thoughts to the note I was going to leave for Esther.

The fact that I made a duplicate copy of the note for my diary says quite a bit about my excruciatingly self-absorbed state of mind at the time. The note itself tells you everything you need to know about my relationship with Esther: a little bit of sexual frisson topped by catering portions of pretentious wordy nonsense. When I rooted it out and read it again after all these years for this book, I was appalled. My hand is itching to give myself the most enormous slap. I really hope I wasn’t the person who wrote this note and that it was written by the version of me that went out with Esther. I’m probably wrong – I’m sure friends would say that I not only was but still am the kind of person who wrote this:

Dear Esther
,

My leaving like this may seem a bit childish and hypocritical but let me explain . . . Actually I can’t so let me say that all of this has been marvellous! Back to Paris, the twist in the plot, my cinematic departure, long may such silliness continue!

I’ll write to you again but then I say that to everyone but I think to you I will. My leaving like this is quite unusual for me. I’ve wanted to do something a bit peppy like this for ages and never bothered. What a
time to choose to start! What a way to start my French adventure! This should be a long epistle clarifying everything but you know me (better than myself, you know me) and how I couldn’t clarify a steamed up window. I think I’ve said all I can. I don’t know if the affair is on or off. I think I’ll just put it on hold for a few months. When I ring again I think I’d prefer to get an engaged tone rather than ‘number disconnected
’.

From the boy you were/are/will be fond of – Thanks for everything
,

Graham (who lives as far away from Poland as Passion is from Graham)

Nothing to add or subtract, though I could easily divide or multiply
.

Graham
.

Writing this letter out for the third time in my life I can sort of forgive myself a little. I was only nineteen, and it was three in the morning.

But where could I leave it to be sure Esther and Alex would find it? Only one place sprang to mind – the toilet bowl. I genuinely didn’t think they would read any extra subliminal message into the location. Sweet boy. It really was just the one place where I was certain they would find it. I shut the door and headed off into the silent wet streets of Paris.

If this were a film, this is the point when I would get myself into all sorts of adventures with drug dealers and prostitutes, perhaps hook up with a travelling circus, but all I really remember was doing a lot of walking. I found a youth hostel and left my bag there. While having imaginary angry conversations in my head with Esther, I tramped the streets wondering what I should do. Obviously I needed a job. I wandered into shop after shop and wandered out again, unable to pluck up the courage to ask for one. I walked past the Pompidou and it struck me that I could busk. Odd, when I think back, that I never thought further as to what sort of busking I would do. I bought a long bolt of some material, and that was about as far as that plan got.

One evening around dusk a couple of days later, I was walking along the banks of the Seine when I suddenly looked up. There, high on a balcony over the far bank, were Esther, Alex, Pierre and Christine having a drink. I couldn’t make out their faces clearly but I liked to imagine that they were having a good old laugh at my expense. The music swells, the camera pulls out to show Graham as a tiny dot in the vast teeming city of Paris. Cut to:

A bus heading from Paris to London. A friend called Julie from university was spending the summer there and I’d worked out that whatever chance I’d have of getting a
job, it would be marginally higher in a country where I could speak the language.

I’ve now lived in London for nearly twenty years. It is still my number one favourite city in the world, so I’m slightly surprised at how disappointed I was by it that first time. After the scale and grandeur of Paris, there was something very domestic about London. All the legendary landmarks, Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, they were all so . . . well, so small. Dublin had places that looked this good.

I tracked down my friend. She was living in a squat in West Norwood. If you haven’t been to West Norwood, and I can think of no good reason why you would have been, it is one of those seemingly endless bits of south London with semi-detached houses and rows of shops like Radio Rentals and Clintons cards, and if you’re really lucky a Greggs pie shop. It was exactly the same in 1982.

It turned out that the first thing Julie and her new English boyfriend Harry had done was discover that instead of getting a job, you could go on the dole – free money! This country left France in the dust. I immediately signed up for some. Sadly, somewhere along the line I must have told the wrong lie or, perhaps, cardinal sin, the truth, because I never got any dole money. Part of me felt like giving up and just heading back to Ireland, but because I was so sure that money would be shoved into my hands, I had spent all that was left of my summer savings, so I was, in effect, trapped in London. I would have to get a job.

This was at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland and there had just been bombs in London, so it really was not a great time to be Irish and looking for work. Place after
place turned me down. I don’t know what possessed me, but I finally went into a restaurant called Rockwell’s American Diner on the piazza in Covent Garden and announced in a strange accent that I was Canadian and my name was David Villapando. It worked, I got a job. I would start the next night. I never thought I would actually look forward to wearing a stripy apron and a paper hat.

The name was not pure invention. David Villapando was the name of one of the pen pals I had in school. While all the Malaysians and Germans had fallen by the wayside, I did still correspond with David. He lived in Whittier, California and, surprise, surprise, was struggling with his sexuality. What complicated matters slightly when I showed up at the restaurant for work was that nearly everybody who worked there seemed to be from Canada. Where was I from? Where did I go to school? Did I know Cindy Bloggynuts? This was going to be slightly harder than I’d thought. Being a consummate liar, I used the age-old technique of distracting people from one lie by admitting to another. I confessed I wasn’t Canadian. I was in fact from Whittier, California but had to lie because I didn’t have a work permit. My secret was safe with them, they assured me.

For the next six weeks I had the time of my life. With money in my pocket and an extended Canadian family, I went out drinking and clubbing every night. I bought bright orange clothes and had my hair cut in a ‘Salon’. Truly this was my beautiful life. Sadly it was someone else’s. I was going to have to go back to Ireland to start my second year.

On my last night in the restaurant I was put on washing-up duty. I couldn’t have been more upset – washing-up was boring and you couldn’t chat to anyone. My glorious summer
and career shouldn’t be ending like this. So it didn’t. I didn’t do any washing-up. I simply hid the dirty dishes and pots and pans all over the restaurant. Even as I did it I felt guilty for the poor sods who would come in the next day and find an old lasagne tray in the laundry basket, but this was my special night.

When I got back to Cork, it really was a case of ‘How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’ I was miserable. What had seemed glamorous, exciting and fun to me in the first year just a few months earlier was now, in comparison with my summer, dull and wretched.

The months dragged by and I did nothing to help myself. I moved into a rancid bedsit that was in the attic of what was essentially a derelict building in the centre of Cork. People would break in to have sex in the hall out of the rain. Once I came home to find a rat lying dead on the stairs about halfway up to my flat. If it had been on the ground floor it wouldn’t have upset me so much but its early grave proved that rats were capable of climbing stairs. It was just a matter of time before I would wake up staring into the tiny beady eyes of one of its fitter relatives.

It was also in this flat where I started finding hundreds of flies – big heavy winter flies that seemed punch-drunk. I killed them systematically and then – and this is the slightly weird part – kept them in a small styrofoam tray on top of one of my stereo speakers . . . and I would count them every day. I can’t remember the death toll, but it was well into triple figures by December. This was also the time in my life that I decided mirrors were bad. I didn’t have one in the flat. If I needed to shave I used the reflective surface of the kettle.

I positively pursued loneliness. I stopped phoning people and practically dropped out of university. It’s hard to describe my state of mind, but I remember being shocked and saddened when I had a small party in my flat and nobody came. A normal reaction, you might think, except that I hadn’t actually invited anybody.

The moment when even I fully realised something was wrong came in a very unexpected place. I was struggling with my French. I had just scraped through into the honours programme in the first-year exams and it was now February and it looked like I was going to fail in spectacular fashion. One of the French professors called me to her office after a lecture one day. Madame Lafarge was a classic French academic, with a serious bob and large glasses that took up most of her pale face. When I went in she had one of my essays in front of her. Unless a red pen had exploded while she had been reading it, I was guessing I hadn’t done very well. She started to go through the mistakes. I was listening to her drone on, watching her thin lips and wondering if she ever wore lipstick, when I got an odd feeling. I was going to cry. I was going to cry now, this very instant. I made to leave, to mutter something about feeling
malade
, but it was too late. I burst into tears. I never knew what that phrase meant until that moment. I was like a salty water balloon that had hit the ground from a great height. Bawling uncontrollably I sat back down.

Madame Lafarge looked suitably appalled and tried to reassure me that there weren’t as many mistakes as it seemed and that they weren’t very serious. I told her the one thing of which I was certain: ‘It’s not the essay.’ I repeated this again and again through huge gasping sobs. Madame opened
her handbag to find a tissue. She pulled out a large pile of paper napkins that even in my state of distress I recognised as ones she had stolen from the staff canteen. After I had rendered all those to a grief-filled pulp, she finally gave up the gold: a foil-wrapped moist towelette from Aer Lingus that looked like she had been hoarding it since 1965.

I finally managed to stop crying and I started to leave, thanking Madame Lafarge for her kindness. There was awkwardness in the air, the sort of tension you get between strangers who’ve had sex. I wondered if she knew about Esther.

I walked back towards the fly-filled hovel. Of course it was raining. Every hundred yards or so I would start to cry again. Off and on this torrent of tears continued for days. Perhaps if I behaved like this now it might be described as a minor breakdown or a bout of depression. Maybe I would seek professional help and take a pill or two to get over it, but at the time all I knew was that my life couldn’t continue like this, and it was up to me to change it.

3

Hippy Replacement

E
VERY SUMMER IRISH STUDENTS WERE
given the opportunity to apply for J1 visas issued by the American government. This meant we were allowed to travel to the States with a temporary work permit. I applied, got it and then told my parents about my plan to go to America for the summer. Obviously they had received a highly edited version of my trip to Paris, but as far as they were concerned I had proved I was responsible. I could go to America, and they even lent me the money for my ticket. On top of that I had another two hundred pounds which, we budgeted with supreme optimism, would last me for at least four weeks while I looked for work. I know this was a long time ago, but even if it had been pre-Revolution America I doubt if that would have been enough.

My plan was that I would go with the other J1 students to New York and then I would travel by bus to California to see the man who had given me my happy alter ego, David Villapando. In the year of misery after Paris and London, David had taken on a strange importance in my life. When I couldn’t talk to anyone because ‘they wouldn’t understand’, for some reason I felt free to pen page after page of rambling soul-searching to David. In fairness I think he was pretty miserable and confused himself, and he used me in the
same way. The plan to meet was hatched and, although unspoken, I think we both sort of thought we would fall in love and that would solve all our problems in one fell swoop.

My parents drove me to Dublin airport and waved me and all the other Irish students off as if we were a pack of Paddington Bears. We flew in a jumbo jet! Our excitement knew no bounds, but wait, yes it did – we had landed again in Shannon. We had been in the air for about half an hour when we were brought down to earth due to technical difficulties. The hours dragged by and the ground crew kept giving the passengers tokens to use at the buffet. Of course, this being Ireland all the tokens went straight behind the bar. When we finally took off I have never seen a drunker group of people sitting in rows. The air hostess abandoned her safety demonstration, presumably because she felt, quite rightly, that if anything happened to this plane these sodden idiots were all doomed.