Scratby Orgasm
Andrew Sudell Davis
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Andrew Sudell Davis
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Scratby
As love-hate relationships go, it wasn’t too bad.
I wobbled between liking and loathing the place, and Scratby gave me, well, if not unconditional love, then a sort of unconditional acceptance in return. If Scratby was your friend, it wouldn’t be your actual best friend, the sort that you would share all your secrets and experiences with. It would more be like the sort of friend who is always there when you need them. Not the one you go to parties or on holiday with, not the sort of friend that you’d get drunk on cheap red wine with when you’ve split up with your boyfriend, but the friend you go to see on a wet boring Tuesday evening cos there’s nothing on the telly and you don’t fancy going out to the pub on your own.
That was Scratby to me – solid, dull, reliable, and always there when I needed it. It drove me to whatever the next category down from ‘rages of tears’ is when I was younger, but now I had a sort of quiet understanding of the place. A bit like the grudging respect and admiration you might get between two completely-different-but-similar characters in a crap American comedy thriller.
Scratby – my kind of town.
Thursday Evening
'What's this, Mum?'
A familiar mix of curiosity and dread, expressed through the spoken word. Even before the question I'd inadvertently blurted out lay fresh on the dining room table, I knew what it was. This long weekend was going to be longer than I'd already feared. It really was.
Greek salad – or to be more politically correct, vegan Greek salad.
In nearly three years at university, the diverse horrors of student self-catering were still being given a run for their money by my nearest and dearest. Undergraduate meal-making – weighed down by inexperience and poverty, driven by cheap booze and youthful enthusiasm – was easily surpassed my mother's years of experience and lack of remorse in the race for the food recycling bin. She was a pro, and there was no denying it. Her culinary atrocities were given further impetus by the fact that she and Dad had – inexplicably, in my eyes – decided to go vegan not long after I went up to Sheffield.
For reasons that remain shrouded in mystery – vaguely to do with saving the planet, vaguely to do with eating more healthily, vaguely to do with a two-headed mid-life crisis – they started living off lentils and rice not long after I left. Pretty rich given that they a) still drove a 2.5 litre motorhome (a 1999 Autotrail Cheyenne) round to Sainsburys every week, and b) they both still bloody smoked. Also, I couldn't help thinking it was something to do with me; a control thing. Though what exactly, as I said, I hadn't a clue.
So here I was – 22 years old, their only daughter, indeed their only child – and spending Easter with my parents. Just the three of us. So it goes...
When they first mooted the idea of buying a place by the sea, I was thrilled. I really was. Having spent all my 15 years in boring Bexley (an area of South East London, located on the banks of the River Cray, according to Wikipedia), a bijou pied-à-terre, in somewhere funky like Brighton, sounded just the thing. I foresaw exciting Friday nights clubbing till dawn with all my friends, then crashing back at the parents’ empty flat in the middle of town – suddenly the most popular girl in class. Or day-long Christmas shopping trips with my best mates, hanging out in cool cafes and boutiques, followed by a Thai, wine and a DVD at my place.
Such adolescent fantasies were quickly dashed by the parents, who said that they were looking to buy in somewhere more peaceful and family-orientated than London-on-Sea. The finance for this new venture into second-home buying came unexpectedly, when Mum’s great aunt Dot died and left her sheltered retirement flat to us. It sold easily, and for the first time in their lives my parents were left with the quandary of what to do with excess cash. Working in social services – Mum is a unit manager and Dad a peripatetic whatnot in child welfare – they never had a lot of money, bringing me up in our modest-but-comfortable terrace in the glamour-free hinterland of the A2.
And now they spent months agonising over what to do with the dosh.
At the time, interest rates were low and dropping lower and house prices were rocketing. What would have normally seemed like sensible behaviour – such as paying off most of your mortgage, or sticking the money in a long-term high-interest account – suddenly looked like reckless folly of the highest order. Overnight, not investing every single spare penny in a second home was viewed with the degree of scorn usually reserved for degenerative alcoholism or serial child abuse. My innately cautious parents were in a state of ongoing low-level panic, paralysed by the twin social and economic fears of getting their fingers burnt by horribly over-priced property or letting the opportunity of a lifetime – literally – slip between their anxious liberal fingers.
But I didn’t care – I was still thrilled. I really was. Although Brighton would have been my number one choice, the idea of a town that was ‘more peaceful and family-orientated’ happily got the thumbs-up from me. I had in mind somewhere determinedly relaxed and sloppy, like Southwold – lazy fish and chips after a chilled day on the beach, pastel artisan’s cottages festooned with ironic seaside tat. Or perhaps a place in our old stamping-ground of north Kent, such as Whitstable? Bistros and delis jostling side-by-side with art galleries and bric-a-brac shops; pubs with groovy music every night. That would have suited me.
So I was slightly surprised when they made the choice they did.
I mean, like who has ever even heard of Scratby? For starters, it sounds like a notifiable disease. Just down the road from mange. And secondly it’s north of Great Yarmouth and east of Norwich – somewhere deep in Norfolk’s answer to the Bermuda triangle – where the highlight of the social calendar is watching your neighbours bungalow slide inexorably over a cliff into the sea. Twenty miles east of boredom.
But Scratby it was, and this was where I ended up spending my last Easter as a student. Instead of putting everything they’d got into the holiday house, they took the radical decision of buying a motorhome as well. My pleas for them to at least take a look at a VW Beetle, or perhaps a Mini Cooper convertible fell on deaf ears. My 17th birthday was not a million miles away, and I had hoped to be borrowing Mum and Dad’s car at weekends for trips with my friends, as some kind of compensation for their not going with the Brighton option, but they were having none of it. To make matters worse they even sold the little red Micra they had driven for years, now making every trip out with them an occasion for mild social humiliation.
Other people’s parents came and picked them up from the cinema in Volvos or Range Rovers – not exactly cool in any way, but at least neutral in the street-credibility stakes. We would come spilling out of the film, the smell of popcorn and stale coffee still fresh in our nostrils, only to be confronted by the sight of my father sat there in his white and beige behemoth, reading the Guardian and smoking a roll-up out of the window (as if that made any difference). And to add automotive insult to social injury, any attempts on my behalf to ignore his presence until my friends had left were met with loud hooting and manic arm-waving, as if some demented spaniel had been left to die in a hot car. So it goes.
It wasn’t good. Needless to say, I never bothered to learn to drive.
As well as being deeply unpleasant to look at, the motorhome was also ridiculously expensive. It really was. They could have bought a Beetle and a Mini for what they paid for it. This was part of the reason why their search for a second home ended up buried in the sand at Scratby – it was the logical conclusion to the bizarre and inexplicable financial journey they made with great aunt Dot’s money.
Other weird parental decisions – such as going vegetarian (the start of the slippery slope to veganism), Dad getting his large, rubbery ear pierced and Mum getting a middle-aged woman’s tattoo – all came at around the same time. I was losing sight of who my parents really were. By the time I went to uni, they were different people to the parents I’d had as a child. Mum was nearly 40 and Dad was halfway to 50, and they had suddenly started acting in immature and unpredictable ways.
And so here I was – 22 years old, spending Easter with my parents, trying to stare down a vegan Greek salad and wondering what to do about my lacklustre boyfriend of nearly two years.
A Greek salad should be a wonderful thing, both hearty and light, alive with the contrasting tastes, colours and textures of tomatoes, olives, baby spinach and onions. A herby dressing of zesty lemon, robust garlic and slippery olive oil, set off by strong, soft, crumbly, creamy, salty, tangy feta cheese. Matched with hot, doughy pitta bread and cheap red wine, it’s the ideal meal for a warm April day like today. The sun’s shining, the seagulls are calling and all should be well with the world.
And that was the problem, in an organic nutshell. Mum got all the ingredients right with one glaring exception; you cannot replace feta cheese with chunks of raw tofu and not expect anyone to notice. With all the good will in the world, off-white cubes of tasteless, slightly-slimy rubber are no match for the robust, earthy joy of that most distinctive sheep’s cheese. Dad did well, bravely going on about how you wouldn’t know it wasn’t ‘the real thing’. I tried to enjoy it, but it was a lost cause from the outset. Mum ate the stuff as if she actually was enjoying it. I wondered, had they really lost sight of what real food was like as they’d spent so long living off of tofu, soya milk, beans and dairy-free spread? Were they beginning to believe their own hype?
I washed mine down with a couple of large glasses of red wine. Vegan wine, Mum informed me. I presumed all wine was vegan. Amazing how labels can shift products to people like my Mum and Dad. Stick ‘vegan’ on it and they’ll buy it. They’re probably smoking vegan tobacco too (no, don’t write to me, I’m sure it exists too).
The Thursday before Easter and I had just spent the evening with my Mum and Dad, eating their horrible vegan food and drinking their (actually quite drinkable) vegan wine. The little house they’d bought in Scratby hadn’t gotten any better over the years. They called it a house, but it was actually more of a bungalow, except that it had one small bedroom wedged into the roof space. The other was downstairs, between the toilet and the garage. It had the look and feel of a bungalow – all nasty square windows and convoluted hallways, a vaguely damp bathroom next to the front door and a large featureless garden out the back. A few dismal white plastic chairs and a table on the concrete patio outside the kitchen door added a final note of poignancy.
The patio and its furniture had a hint of green about them, and not in a good way.
Inside, it was a marginally more jolly story. My father had watched a BBC4 programme about the Mexican Mural Renaissance a few years ago, and had since set out to become the East Anglia’s very own Diego Rivera. Undeterred by such bourgeois concepts such as ‘interior design’, ‘1950s suburban bungalow’ or ‘bleak North Sea coastline’, he strode manfully to decorate the interior of the house in a series of somewhat striking, lurid Marxist-style paintings. Instead of depicting the workers’ fight for universal rights, though, Dad went for an idiosyncratic medley of scenes from English history (Elizabeth I at Tilbury), his own personal history (The Clash at Victoria Park) and local sights (Horsey Windpump – Google it). But space was running out on the interior walls (there was only the spare bedroom to go) and he had his eye on the front of the house.
What Dad lacked in technical skill, he made up for in brio and hard work. He had always said that he wanted to go to art college like Mum had, but somehow he’d drifted into social services and – over 20 years later – was still there. Unlike Mum, who had actually spent four years at art college (Wimbledon – 1 year foundation, 3 years BA in illustration), and had trained to a pretty high standard as an illustrator, before drifting into a career with social services.
Mum’s impact on the house was seen more by way of the furniture and other artefacts she had left behind her. An ardent fan of car boots and charity shops, and a keen student of the Blue Peter school of product refurbishment, the front room stood in silent testament to my mother’s tireless pursuit of novelty and curiosity, and her gleeful disdain for fashionable trends, colour coordination and formal convention. It was like sitting in the corner of an Oxfam warehouse, except that no one had got round to sorting all the stuff.
Another development I noticed when I first got there that weekend, was a large bucket full of shells sitting by the toilet. I wasn’t sure whose they were, or what they were planning to do with them. But there were some sketchy scallop shapes drawn on the back of the door, plus a large tub of PVA glue sitting in the corner, so it didn’t look good. I resolved not to say anything about the shells – or the terrible fishy smell that got stronger day-by-day. No one mentioned them for the whole time I was there.
A few more glasses of wine, and I went to bed early. I could hear the parents in the living room, watching Newsnight, and I was taken back six years again; trying to get to sleep in our new, unfamiliar holiday house. I never really felt comfortable or happy in Scratby – it was always their place rather than ours. In between motorhome holidays to Scotland and France, they often went up on their own. I was off on holidays on my own too by then, so the whole Norfolk thing just kind of passed me by. When I was on my gap year, then off to Sheffield, I would sometimes meet up with them here, but there was little to see and even less to do.
But they were my parents, and despite all the weirdness with the vegan food and the murals, I now went there on regular pilgrimages when I could.
Exhausted by the uncertainties of travel by public transport, I now could not sleep. It took nearly six hours to get there from Sheffield, via Doncaster, Peterborough and Norwich. In a dystopic tour of the worst parts of the East Midlands, I had to endure an endless succession of boring industrial landscapes and the flattest, grimmest agricultural land this country can boast. The whole journey had nothing to offer; it was just dull, dull, dull. And it was a journey I’d done often enough before – nothing new to interest me at all. I attempted to read a stupid book, listened to my mp3, tried to sleep, stuffed my face with pastries at Peterborough, even took a look at my molecular biology notes. The trains were noisy and crowded – I was just grateful that I’d booked my ticket, otherwise I’d have been standing most of the way. Fields, factories, canals, fields, car parks, fields, factories, fields, motorway, fields, fields and more fields swept past in a blur.
Dad was waiting in the behemoth with a fag and the paper by the time the train crawled into Great Yarmouth. I was pleased to see him.
I hadn’t left the house in Sheffield in the best of moods, having had another spiteful little spat with Henry, and now I was doomed to go over and over those last few stupid words as I lay in the dark. I knew Henry was not really happy about my going away on my own that Easter, but I just needed time and space on my own. A real cliché I know, but it was true. It really was.
Two good reasons, too:
a) I had to concentrate on my dissertation, and that was not going to happen with Henry buzzing around.
b) I was becoming increasingly irritated by his presence, full stop.
Not good news. Not the end of the world necessarily, but I just couldn’t think objectively about him and me when we were living in the same room. I just didn’t have time to think things through. Obviously, he sensed my coolness, and his immediate panic reaction was to make things as difficult and unpleasant as possible for me to go away for a few days. Which – of course – made me all the more determined to do so; men can be so stupid.
Now listen. I first met Henry in my first year at Sheffield. I was 20 and he was 18, as he’d come straight up from school. I thought he was older, as he was quite a big, confident sort of person. Very much a product of the public school he’d been to (Kings College, Wimbledon); his parents got their money’s worth. Henry’s life was very different to mine – private education, big wealthy family, lots of rowing and rugby – whole life mapped out in advance, I felt. He was determined to get university out of the way as quickly as possible – he was reading English so he could join his father and brothers in the City. University, to him, meant three years of down time until the real work began. A chance to play rugger and drink a lot.
Which was sort of interesting and different to my dull little world, but at the same time – and in many ways – quite repulsive. He said he loved me, but I often felt that he just needed a girlfriend – any girlfriend – to fit in with his social norms. Someone for regular sex, to take to posh parties and to sit patiently on the beach at Rock, with a book, while he was doing windsurfing or sand-yachting with his braying chums. When I thought about that side of our relationship, it made my heart sink.
But the parents liked him, although they viewed him as a bit of a curiosity, as if he had just stepped out of Brideshead Revisited and was a case study about the British class system, waiting to be inspected and reviewed. I could tell they were slightly impressed by his gung-ho attitude, even though they often affected to sneer politely at him (when he wasn’t there) and more pointedly, at his parents. The fact that his parents had electronic gates at their house down in Sussex was a particular bête noire for my mother. Even though she had never even seen the bloody gates, they seemed to pop up regularly in conversation, as if they were always there in her mind, eating away at her.
Mum imagined them as big, grand security gates – all wrought iron and CCTV cameras, more akin to Kensington Palace than rural Sussex – but the reality was a low, wooden, five-bar gate, that swung open ponderously when you drove up to it. Here was more to do with laziness and convenience than with paranoia and braggadocio. But she could never see it that way, and any attempts on my behalf to describe or defend them just made me sound like a silly little girl who was easily impressed by the tasteless gadgets of anyone with a bit of money. So I kept my mouth shut and left her to be tormented by her own fantasies.
I think I loved Henry, but I don’t know that I was in love with him. Another cliché but true. We had good times – he was always full of energy and enthusiasm, up for anything. We once drove to Scotland after a party, for no reason other than because we could. Us and a group of friends piled into two cars and set off up the A1. We got there at dawn, and had breakfast on the beach at North Berwick. He raided the shops as soon as they opened, and we had croissants, Danish pastries and Bucks Fizz to keep our spirits up. Then we fell asleep in the warm early-morning sunshine. Stayed till noon, then drove back again. It was fun and silly and the sort of thing that Henry delighted in. I loved it – I dozed in the back of the car and felt safe, warm and happy. But at the same time, those jollies could easily become a chore, a drag, and a stupid excuse for not getting on with real life. So it goes.
* * *
Good Friday Lunchtime
‘Scratby Orgasm?’ I squeaked. He was having a laugh, but I was colluding. I really was.
‘Yeah – schnapps, vodka, orange, cranberry and lemon – just the sort of thing a sophisticated young lady like you would drink.’ Jack-the-lad was behind the bar of the most depressing pub this side of Nottingham, making up stupid local names for stupid local cocktails in a heavy-handed attempt at flirtation.
‘Hemsby Screw – vodka, cointreau, pineapple, Ribena...’
‘Ribena?’ We were reaching heights of sophistication I’d never known before.
‘Yeah – all served up in a half pint glass, with a fucking umbrella stuffed in it!’ I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. He was a gormless arse, but a funny one too. I eschewed the joys of a Caister Shag for a pint of cider (Westons Organic 6.5% ABV) and took my drink outside. Sitting in the watery Easter sunshine, I grinned at his Scratby Orgasm – two words that should never really come within a hundred yards of each other.
Winter had not been kind to the east coast. What was old now looked even older, and last summer’s bright colours had already faded. The funfair had been revealed for the first time since September, and it hadn’t kept well. The dirty streets of Hemsby remained unswept and the only new and fresh thing within eyesight was the dog shit on the side of the pavement. Wary parents steered unwary toddles around it with skill and patience, as they made their way back to the holiday park.
There was also day-old guano on the table, I noticed. And the ash tray was overflowing. I moved to another bench, but it wasn’t much better – this time splattered with tomato sauce. A dirty napkin blew around my ankles. If Tom Cruise in there spent a bit less time on thinking up moronic cocktails and a bit more on clearing the tables, I muttered to myself, it would make my day a little more pleasant. I was beginning to think like my mother, I thought.
Henry had spent the day bombarding me with texts. He was at home and bored, frightened and angry. His parents were in America, so he didn’t go back to Sussex and now had run out of things to do. I’d suggested revision, but that didn’t go down too well. There’s only so much Kurt Vonnegut you can take, he replied – half-joking but half-irritated that I had even mentioned it.
Henry’s reaction to any emotional crisis was always to go into texting overdrive. I think he thought it was a way of staying in touch without getting too close. His way of continuing an argument without the inconvenience of having to respond immediately. A way of staying in control. To my mind it was a cop out, an avoidance technique. I imagined him down the student union bar with Jason and Terry, having a good time and fitting in a quick text to me when he had a spare minute.
This morning, his texts were coming thicker and faster than usual – a sure sign that he was lacking in company and wanting to keep in touch with me. Feeling a bit anxious perhaps? At first I responded immediately, but then my replies became less and less frequent. Today, I was staying in control. And besides, if anything was that important or that urgent – why didn’t he just phone me? Actually, why didn’t he just phone me anyway, if he really had something to say?
I made a point of leaving my phone in my bag, so I would not necessarily hear it when it went off.
As a result I was responding to him at a ratio of about one to three – which I knew would piss him off, but I didn’t care. He sent me a curious mixture of the apologetic, the accusatory and the mundane throughout the course of the morning. Something along the lines of ‘really, really sorry bout last night, hate it when we argue, didnt mean 2 shout xxx’, then ‘if u hadnt been in such a hurry 2 go 2 norfolk we wouldn’t have argue in 1st place why do u always start argument and leave’ and ‘going 2 tesco 4 milk have run out wont b long’.
I really couldn’t be bothered – I had more important things to do. I really did.
The parents took themselves off to Norwich for the day in the behemoth, so I was trapped in Scratby and environs. No serious public transport came near the place. The first time I was up here I naively wandered along to the nearest bus stop on the main road, and waited for a bus to go into Great Yarmouth. After 45 minutes and nothing in sight, I resorted to plan B and actually read the timetable attached to the shelter. It appeared that I had missed the morning bus, and that the afternoon bus was not due for another five hours. So not exactly the 269 to Bromley (every ten minutes). But you get used to it, and resign yourself to the fact that it’s a lift with the parents or nothing.
I chose nothing.
The parents were going to the University of East Anglia Gallery to see an exhibition of prehistoric Albanian figurines – not my thing really – followed by dinner at some dubious vegan restaurant and then out to the cinema to see ‘whatever was on’. They always optimistically trekked to the cinema without first checking out what delights actually awaited them – and then often came back faintly narked by the lack of choice, having sat through another Batman film when what they really wanted was Jean de Florette. They’re funny like that – very picky about films, but too lazy to find out what’s on.
So I felt I was better off staying at home, with my molecular biology dissertation notes and a packet of Hobnobs. And a constantly buzzing mobile.
The morning passed by quickly enough. I got through over five sections of scrawled text, three cups of organic green tea (not my first choice) and the entire packet of biscuits. Vegan, apparently. By noon I felt knackered from trying to convince myself that anything I read was being retained, and by trying to ignore Henry’s ongoing texts. I was doing neither very well, so I had a shower.
Standing under the running water, I had time to reflect on the events of the last week. It wasn’t good and I didn’t think either of us came out of it very well. I blamed Henry, but then I suppose it was my fault for going along with it in the first place. Maybe he was testing me, and maybe I should have said no, but he seemed so keen and I didn’t want to disappoint him or the others. It just got out of hand, and what was supposed to be a bit of fun turned into a nightmare of recrimination and tears.
Now listen. It all started innocently enough, us going back to his friend Jason’s place for drinks after a night out. We’d been to see a band and the atmosphere at the place, a small bar in the middle of town, was friendly and relaxed. Which is enough to count as a good night out in the middle of Sheffield. We picked up chips on the way home and greedily stuffed our faces as we swaggered down the street. Jason’s new girlfriend, Sam, seemed nice. I noticed Jason couldn’t keep his hands off her; he appeared to be in sexual overdrive.
When we got back to Jason’s he produced a random selection of drinks, including nearly-full bottles of rum and vodka – and we all proceeded to get drunk all over again. Henry put on music, lit some candles turned the lights down. Jason got out a small bag of grass, and we smoked that. And that was when the atmosphere changed. Jason was always a little bit leery with me – especially after a few drinks – but I didn’t mind because I quite fancied him too, and it’s nice to be lusted after by someone you like the look of, even if it is never actually going to come to anything. But today he was being particularly forward and in my space. He asked me to dance – dance?! – and Henry encouraged me, in a slurred and rather weird, letchy sort of way.
So there was me and Jason, slow dancing to some nondescript music, his hands all over me, while Henry was busy chatting up Sam. Chatting up Sam? Oh right, I could see where this was going – though why Jason would want to share his pretty new girlfriend with Henry was beyond me. Jason was kissing me now and I was way too pissed to care what Henry or Sam thought. I’d always fancied Jason and was – to be honest – a little bored with Henry, so I didn’t really care. We were dancing and snogging and I could feel his hands sliding round the top of my jeans, trying for a way in. I closed my eyes and went with the flow...
When I opened my eyes and looked up I caught a knowing look pass between the two boys – this wasn’t some spontaneous act of drunken passion, this was a premeditated operation. The glance that Henry gave us was a strange mixture of approval and excitement, as if he was more interested in us than in Sam. But then I saw that Sam was lying face down on the bean bag, and that Henry’s hands were all over her back and worse.
I felt an instant sting of irritation. Despite the fact that I’d had my tongue halfway down Jason’s throat and was enjoying him pressing himself against me, I still felt betrayed, stabbed in the back, used and let down. I couldn’t help myself – it just happened. For a second I made eye-contact with Sam as she turned round to look at me and Jason. I looked at Henry, his hand greedily feeling her, and he looked at me – pleadingly, I thought. He nodded his head at us, as a sign that he wanted us to get on with it, then went back to kissing and groping his way round Sam’s irritatingly curvy and petite body, without a second glance.
Before I had a chance to collect my thoughts, Jason was on me again, sliding my jeans down and pushing against me harder still. We had half an hour of semi-enjoyable, over-enthusiastic drunken fucking in Jason's bedroom, and I presumed Henry and Sam were doing the same on the sofa or something. I didn't really think about it. I really didn't.
Later, when I came out to get a drink, I saw Henry sitting on the sofa, dressed, large tumbler of rum in hand, looking none too happy. Sam was nowhere to be seen. I don't know what happened, but it didn't look great.
He stared at me and said 'come on we're going'. I limply protested – I was knackered and thirsty – but he threw my jacket at me angrily, and said again 'we're going'. Sam and Jason suddenly appeared in the kitchen and were busying themselves with fixing a drink, avoiding eye-contact with me and Henry. I pulled my jacket on and we left. We walked home in silence. I was sore and cold and tired, and the last thing I needed was a fight on a chilly street in the middle of Sheffield. I wanted a drink, to lie down and be warm, to be cuddled – but there was little chance of that. So it goes.
We got back home and Henry went straight to bed. He didn't say a word. I tried to talk to him but didn't really know what to say. I wasn't sure what I – in his eyes – had done wrong. I thought he wanted this. I did it for you, Henry. Well, sort of.
And now I was stuck out on the east coast with my parents – supposedly revising and feeling like shit about everything. Henry did a very good job at apportioning blame, and I was feeling guilty but unjustly accused. I imagined that Henry would stop texting and go down the bar eventually. That's the sort of simple mind he's got. Once one problem gets resolved – or not resolved – he moves on to something else better, more entertaining, more enjoyable. He isn't one to dwell on problems and arguments. Which is fine, but it does mean that you have to get your argument done with him at the time, when it happens, cos he will act like there's nothing wrong the next morning. It's like you've missed your window of opprobrium, your landing slot to get stuff sorted. And usually I give in and just go with it, rather than me be the one who's looking for a fight. Only this time I didn't let it go – I was so pissed off by him treating me like I had done something wrong that I pursued the point and extended the quarrel beyond its natural life.
So for once I stood up for myself and now I was paying the price for saying what I felt, for not letting him walk all over me – which was the natural rhythm that we had managed to fall into. Fuck, I hated him sometimes.
Of course, the parents were blissfully unaware of all this – they were just pleased that I had come to spend Easter with them. They vaguely enquired where Henry was, but were used to him not turning up for things. If I'd said he was wind-surfing in Paraguay, they'd have believed me. They really would.
I turned off the shower and went and got dressed. I was bored bored bored with my dissertation and life and everything, and it was a nice day (it was not raining), so I decided to take a walk up the coast to Hemsby. I say up the coast, it was only a mile or so, like it wasn't that I was doing some sort of route march. A short, sandy wander up to the next collection of bungalows and static caravans. The sun was warm-ish, some seagulls made it feel a bit like the English seaside, and I thought – I thought – I saw a seal in the water. It may have been a bit of driftwood, but I clung to the possibility of it being a seal, if only to make a dull day more interesting. My parents often regaled me with stories of seals swimming up to them on the coastline, like it was a common occurrence – like seeing a fox in the suburbs of Kent – but I had never truly seen one. And, to be honest, I'd spent long enough standing on sandy clifftops, looking hopefully out to sea. If there was any justice in the world, my life would have been full of seals. But no, seagulls were the only positive UK wildlife sighting. It was probably driftwood.
And so to Hemsby. Not my favourite place in the world, as you have probably realised, but it was Las Vegas to Scratby's Des Moines – or some such similar North American analogy. Let's just say it was Hoxton to Scratby's Bexley. Or Kensington to Scratby's Norbiton, or something like that.
It was marginally more interesting than Scratby, either way. But then dermatitis is marginally more interesting that Scratby, in my opinion. I felt it even more so this weekend.
I gathered sand in my flip flops as I made my way into town. You could hear the panicky sounds of early-season holidaymakers trying hard to enjoy themselves even before you could smell the wretched stench of the cheap burgers and pop-corn that lingered year round. As I got nearer the centre of 'town', the incidence of baseball caps, middle-aged men in vests and pitbull terriers increased steeply. I was entering familiar yet still (after all these years) alien territory. One word from my pretty little university-educated mouth would betray me a class traitor, as a tourist in other peoples’ misery, not as a born and bred, dyed in the wool, regular. I was among these people, but not of them.
Strangely, my parents always managed to fit in here, even though I felt so awkward. Maybe it was their age. Maybe it was my Dad's penchant for all things Primark. Maybe it was their smoking – lighting up a fag is always a great cross-class ice-breaker. The martyrish bond felt by smokers, in their increasingly reviled and regulated habit, makes for much stronger common turf than any such frivolities as education, financial status or accent. The siege mentality they share is something so powerful and universal, that I envy them with their Marlboro Lights, I really do. What else can you do that so instantly endears you to bunch of complete strangers than share a crafty ciggie in the cold bleak huddle of a smoking shelter? It's like instant best-mates.
By the time I got to Hemsby my feet felt dirty and made a mockery of having had a shower. The filthy sand had done its worst, I felt stupidly hot and sweaty – the sun was really only warm-ish, like I said – and needed a drink. Now then, Hemsby offers a range of fine watering holes – I was spoilt for choice. The last time I was here, there was only one pub open, and that boasted a stripper and a skinny Alsatian chained to a gate. It's that kinda town. Today I was lucky; the other pub was open.
Oh, the other pub. Brilliant.
The sky was a kind of dirty blue, streaks of vapour trail from two USAF jets (probably McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagles) giving it more depth and interest than usual. The sun twinkled at me like a long-lost friend. I felt like it could almost be summer. Almost be summer, if only. Of course my idea of summer was a dream, a mirage, an imaginary world where England was warm and dry and sunny. I knew the true reality of summer was hot cloudy, windy mornings, followed by torrential afternoon rain and humid-yet-strangely-chilly evenings, when earlier-planned barbecues never quite lived up to their hype. By the time you got the thing hot enough to actually cook something on, the sun had gone down and everybody was feeling decidedly parky. Your friends and family would politely stand around in their fleeces and their hoodies, earnestly trying to pretend that they weren't really cold at all, despite the ongoing background percussion of chattering teeth and shivering bodies.
Nothing like being cold and hungry and waiting for a badly-cooked beefburger – or tofu-burger – in the suburban garden of somebody you don't know that well anyway.
Sorry, am I being cynical about the great British summer? It just comes with age and experience. It really does. Forgive me.
And it was in the other pub that I found Adam, with his impromptu novelty cocktails and weak attempts at flirtatious banter. He was – I dunno – about my age, but had that grit and dirt about him of someone who had spent their brief adulthood working. He was a doer, rather than a thinker. And what little thinking he did do was at the basic end of the scale. I could see right through him, and wasn't very impressed by his repartee – except I was. Well not by the actual words that were coming out of his mouth – I could have written something more witty and perceptive when I was eleven – but I was impressed by the fact that he actually could be bothered to try. Even though it was clear to me that I was – as my mother would have said – way out of his league. I had grown used to, and got tired of, Henry and his friends and their casual presumption that I and any of the other girls were just there waiting for them. For that lot the focus was always on them, what they were doing and what they were saying. There was hardly any more room in their lives for anyone else (like me, for example). Whereas Adam – I saw immediately – was on to me like a dog with a bone. Unfortunate analogy, but you know what I mean.
Stale beer, day-old fried food, fags (despite the smoking ban) and dust. Oh, and something sickly-sweet but unidentifiable (though poss to do with the loos). The Tanners Arms had a unique aroma to it. It was dingy, suffering from the sort of light that pours in through dirty, half-washed windows that you get in daggie pubs the length and breadth of Britain. Almost anti-light. The kind of light that sucks the colour out of the immediate environment. The vampire bat of dynamic photon sources. The dark, evil flip-side of brilliant sunshine. An evil curse.
I walked across the sticky carpet to the empty bar. Actually going there at all was my first mistake, but the kind of mistake that I feel happens too often to me. I was still mulling over Henry and (more specifically) my feelings towards him. If I had been someone else, sitting in the pub watching what was going on, I would have noticed that Adam had clocked me and was staring at me all the way up to him, but I really didn't notice. Too preoccupied. Tied up in my own thoughts. I really didn't. But if I had seen it, I may have thought that Adam was doing this deliberately, as some kind of non-verbal interrogation, looking to see if I'd respond, how I'd respond. That’s the sort of thing you get from some cocky, arrogant blokes. A sort of inverted insult. If I didn't know Adam, that's what I'd have thought. But by the end of this long and interesting weekend, I realised that it wasn't like that at all. He was just staring. Not innocently, mind you, but just staring mindlessly either way. Staring from the groin probably covers it. He couldn't help it. It's not that he was innocent or anything, but just that he was too thick to do anything else. Well, other than shit, drink and sleep.
I hate it when I explain someone's behaviour and people then somehow blame me for the explanation. Do you know what I mean? A long time before Henry, I briefly knew this very sweet but very possessive boy from Dartford – Dan – who would blame me for the way other people behaved towards me. He made my life hell for about three weeks. We were both only about fourteen, and he acted like he owned me. Right from the start. I should have seen the warning signs – it wasn't the sort of behaviour I would put up with now, but I was young and – well, not innocent exactly, but naïve and forgiving.
And I should have realised that Adam was cut from the same cloth, cut from the same cheap Primark man-made fabric.
Dan started off friendly and open enough. We met at a friend's house, under the usual circumstances – stolen cigs and bottles of cider, music on too loud – and kind of hit it off straight away. He was very keen on me right from the start, and although I wasn't immediately impressed by him, over the course of the next couple of hours I was won over by his sheer enthusiasm and persistence. And he was funny – he made me laugh. Well at first he did make me laugh – actually make me – when I didn't instantly react to his feeble humour. He'd crack a joke and then act all hurt and offended if I didn't get it straight away. He did this as a joke in itself, which in fact was funnier than the original joke in the first place. But at the same time, the joke had an edge to it, and he was insistent that I publicly demonstrated my appreciation of his comedic talents.
It's funny how behaviour that now, over five years later, I would perceive as mildly paranoid and very controlling, appeared to me then to be perfectly acceptable and normal then. By the end of the evening I was running to get him more cider and getting him lights for his fags – even though I wasn't smoking – while he sat there, telling me stupid grandiose Dartford-based stories and crappy jokes, and I was loving it. I couldn't say that I didn't know any better, but I kind of fell under his spell, whatever sort of weasel magic that was, even though he was a weedy and unattractive specimen by most people's standards. What drew me to Dan – other than the fact that I had no one else at the time and I'd polished off the best part of three litres of White Lightning – was that he focussed in on me, to the exclusion of all else. I felt that he wanted me, and to be wanted felt to me at the time like the best thing in the world.
If – back then when I was an unworldly schoolgirl – I was asked to list the top five things I wanted in the world, it might have been something like:
1 - Be famous (I hadn't got around to thinking about what for, it was enough just to 'be famous'. If there had been a supplementary question such as 'what for' I'd have probably responded with something equally vacuous and immature as 'for being on television')
2 - Lose weight (no, of course I wasn't over-weight in the slightest, but I felt it)
3 - Own a horse (I know...)
4 - Learn to fly (slightly different for a fourteen year old girl, but something I always said I wanted to do – almost out of habit by the time I was that age, though)
5 - Be wanted
Of course I didn't mean 'be wanted' like I meant 'be famous'. This was a deeper, darker, more personal need. Why it existed in me, I don't know. My parents lavished me with attention, it wasn't as if I had no emotional resonance in my young and uneventful life. I was wanted, I was loved, I was needed. But I just wanted to be wanted, to be needed, to be loved by somebody – anybody – who wasn't obliged to feel that way about me. In my eyes, your parents and family, and to some extent even teachers and even friends, were somehow contracted to like you and love you. In my cosy, suburban, family life, it hadn't occurred to me that my mother and father might not love me, might not even like me, might even actively despise or even hate me. That just didn't figure as a possibility in my life. As far as I was concerned, these people were there to feel well-disposed towards me, and were going to feel like that no matter what. And so, in my own little, stupid world, in my sad little adolescent way, their approval blah-di-blah was worth nothing, because it was (I had assumed – and as far as the broader world was concerned – I assumed wrongly) my inalienable right to expect and receive it.
No, I wanted to be wanted by somebody who had no previous knowledge of me, by a stranger. I wanted somebody who was so impressed and overwhelmed by me that they wouldn't take their eyes or their hands off of me. And that's what I got – so I thought – with Dan.
After a long night's hard snogging, I met Dan the next day and we went out for a walk. Even then, I now remember, he was acting in that strange and possessive way that you could either take as a sign of undying love, or you could equally take as a sign of deep mistrust, unjustified suspicion and ultimately cold-eyed contempt. We passed a group of boys I vaguely knew, and one of them nodded at me and muttered hello. I smiled and said hi in return, and Dan was on to me like the Stasi.
'Who was that, why did he say hello? What's his name, how do you know him? Did you go out with him, have you snogged him, have you fucked him? Do you fancy him, does he fancy you, how do I know you don't fancy him?'
Under a barrage of virulent and ceaseless questioning I was forced to deny things that were untrue as if they were true, and was forced to over-compensate for my previous baseless crimes by saying things that were laughably meaningless and grossly exaggerated just to calm Dan's stupid bruised schoolboy ego. I ended up saying something like 'of course I don't fancy him, why would I even think about fancying him, when I've got you and you are all I want or need'. Over and over and over again until he said he believed me.
All this within twenty four hours of having set eyes on him for the very first time. I so much wanted to be wanted and he was fulfilling that need in spades. Needless to say, after three weeks of that level of intensity, I was feeling so stifled that I didn't know what to think or believe. Every day brought some sort of new challenge or new threat to our nascent relationship.
Dan would ring me – weirdly – on our home land-line phone, rather than ringing my mobile. As my parents had never really got used to using their mobiles – like they'd use them if they were out somewhere and they absolutely, really had to, and then only in short, brief blasts, as if the battery and their credit were precious resources that had to be conserved – it meant that they were often on the home phone. Well, my Mum anyway – I don't think my Dad would ring anyone, given half the chance. So it would sometimes be engaged when he rang. But instead of ringing my mobile like any normal human being, he'd sit there and stew about why it was engaged, then act as if it was me who was on the phone – not my Mum – and that, of course, I was spending hours, chatting away to some faceless boy from Sidcup or somewhere equally exotic.
And the upshot of all this pointless ruminating and speculation was that in the end it would be me apologising for my Mum being on the phone when he'd called. I would be me saying sorry, trying to smooth things over, feeling guilty for something I hadn't done. Again and again.
It just got silly. We’d go out somewhere with his friends, and Dan would get all stressy and surly if I spoke to them, even if it was them that spoke to me first. My job was to be by his side, young, sexy and pretty, but also silent, respectful and dumb. Likewise, if we went out anywhere, he’d order and pay for the stuff – a milkshake or chips or whatever. Which sounds great, but he’d do it without even consulting me, as if I had no mind of my own and he knew best what I wanted. And the stupid thing was, I went along with it. I actually enjoyed it. It made me feel special, wanted, desired, worth fighting for.
At least that’s what I felt at first. Remember, I’m talking about three weeks max here, so it was all pretty quick, high octane stuff. We reached a stupid crescendo one day at Bluewater, where I looking for a birthday card and present for my Mum. Dan was tagging along grumpily, acting like he had a hundred and one more important things to do than hang around a shopping centre, but he didn’t want to leave me to go on my own (‘Why do you want to go on your own? You meeting someone or something?’).
Really, he didn’t want me to go at all. It was half-term, his mum was at work and his sister had gone to Thorpe Park with her friends, and he had the house to himself. What he really wanted to do was spend the day in bed with me, not trawl the mall in search of glittery greetings cards and over-priced choccies and things. Likewise, I didn’t really want him to come with me – I had had three weeks of full-on Dan style possessiveness, and I could do with a break. Also, I liked the excuse to browse around the shops, on a mission to get my Mum something that I knew she’d really like. She was difficult to buy for – nothing too modern or too flashy, nothing too tasteless or too tasteful – but I did know the sort of thing that she liked, and it was always good to feel that after a long search I’d found her something that I knew she would really, really want. And I could have done without my miserable and unenthusiastic sidekick for the day. Each time I stopped to look at something I could see the wince of boredom and irritation sweep across his face, but he did his best to keep the visual manifestation of his emotions firmly under control.
We’d had an argument the night before, when he tried to persuade me that this wasn’t the day for going shopping for Mum’s birthday present, but I resisted this time, lost my temper with him and had threatened him that if that was the way he wanted to be, I’d go without him. When he said he’d come I said I didn’t want him to, and we argued and argued and in the end we ended up with my saying I’d allow him to come only if he didn’t moan and complain. And I said that if he did I’d just run off, there and then, and wouldn’t be coming back. Which I think was a bit of a shock for him – I think I caught him by surprise, cos although he acted like I was always looking elsewhere and was about to go off on my own, I don’t think he thought that it would really happen. He thought he was invincible, which was why he acted like a prat half the time.