That holiday with Penny was the first time I fully apprehended the trouble I was in, and the trouble I would always be in. The villa at the end of the road was owned by people we both knew, a couple who ran their own production company and had, in happier times, offered us both work. We ran into them one night in a local bar, and they pretended they didn’t know us. Later, the woman took Penny aside in the supermarket and explained that they were worried about their teenage daughter, a particularly unprepossessing fourteen-year-old who, to be perfectly frank, is unlikely to lose her virginity for a good many years to come, and certainly not to me. It was all nonsense, of course, and she was no more worried about my proximity to her daughter than she was about my proximity to her purse. It was her way of telling me, as so many others have done since, that I’ve been cast out of the Garden of Islington, doomed to roam the offices of crap cable companies for evermore.
So the dinner that first night in Tenerife just made me gloomy. These weren’t my people. They were just people who would talk to me because I was in their boat, but it was a bad boat to be in—an unseaworthy, shabby little boat, and I could suddenly see that it was going to break up and sink. It was a boat made for pootling around the lake in Regent’s Park, and we were attempting to sail to fucking Tenerife in it. You’d have to be an idiot to think it was going to stay afloat for much longer.
Jess
I don’t think everything the next day was my fault. I take some of the blame, but when things go wrong, you just make them worse if you overreact, don’t you? And I think some people overreacted. Because my dad is New Labour and all that, he’s always going on about tolerance for people of different cultures, and I think what happened was that some people, in other words Martin, were not tolerant of my culture, which is more of a drinking and drug-taking and shagging sort of a culture than his culture. I like to think that I’m respectful of his. I don’t tell him that he should get pissed up and fucked up on drugs and pick up more girls. So he should be more respectful of mine. He wouldn’t tell me to eat pork if I was Jewish, so why should he tell me not to do the other stuff?
There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That’s nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything. Anyway, at the end of their seven years, they’d probably got sick of the sight of each other, and you can see that they wanted different things. John wanted to be in a bag or whatever, and Paul wanted to be on his farm or whatever, and it’s hard to see how you can keep a relationship going when you’re so different, and one of you is in a bag. OK, we hadn’t even been going for seven weeks, but we were different in the first place, whereas John and Paul liked the same music and went to the same schools and so on. We didn’t have any of that to go on. We weren’t all even from the same country. So in a way, it’s no wonder that our seven years got condensed into about three weeks.
What happened was, we had breakfast together, and we agreed that we’d go our separate ways until the evening, when we were all going to meet up in the hotel bar, have a cocktail and find somewhere to eat. And then JJ and I went for a swim in the hotel pool while Maureen sat and watched us, and then I decided to go out on my own.
We were staying on the north of the island, in this place called Puerto de la Cruz, which was OK. When I came before we were in the south, which is really mental, but probably too mental for Maureen, and as it was supposed to be her holiday, I didn’t mind too much. I did want to buy some blow, though, and it was harder to find up here than it would have been down there, and that’s how come I ended up getting myself into the trouble that Martin was in my opinion disrespectful of.
I went into a couple of bars looking for the kinds of people who might sell spliff, and in the second bar I saw a girl who looked exactly like Jen. I’m not exaggerating; when she looked at me and didn’t recognize me, I thought she was messing about, until I noticed that her eyes weren’t quite big enough, and her hair was bleached; Jen would never have bleached her hair, however much she wanted to disguise herself. Anyway, this girl didn’t like me staring at her, so I had to have a few words, and she was English and unfortunately understood those words, so she gave me a mouthful back, and I sort of took it on from there. And after we’d been at it for a while, we were both asked to leave. I’ll be truthful and say that I’d already had a couple of Bacardi Breezers, even though it was still quite early, and I think they made me aggressive, although she didn’t take up my offer of a fight. And then the usual stuff happened: Notjen’s brother, this bar, this guy, money, dope and a couple of Es, wasn’t going to do any of it until later, ended up doing most of it straightaway, some people from a place called Nantwich, this guy, freaked, left to freak on my own. Puke, sleep on the beach, woken up, freaked, driven back to the hotel in a police car. I don’t think I’d ever met anyone from Nantwich before, and this all happened during the day, but other than that it was a pretty typical night out. I told the police that Maureen and Martin were my parents, and Martin wasn’t happy. I don’t think there was any need for him to check out of our hotel, though. It would have all blown over.
I felt terrible the next morning, mostly because I’d gone to bed without anything to eat, although I’m sure the Es and the Breezers and the blow didn’t help. I felt low, too. I had that terrible feeling you get when you realize that you’re stuck with who you are, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I mean, you can make characters up, like I did when I became like a Jane Austeny person on New Year’s Eve, and that gives you some time off. But it’s impossible to keep it going for long, and then you’re back to being sick outside some dodgy club and offering to fight people. My dad wonders why I choose to be like this, but the truth is, you have no choice, and that’s what makes you feel like killing yourself. When I try to think of a life that doesn’t involve being sick outside a dodgy club, I can’t manage it; I picture nothing at all. This is I; this is my voice, this is my body, this is my life. Jess Crichton, this is your life, and here are some people from Nantwich to talk about you.
I once asked Dad what he’d do if he wasn’t working in politics, and he said he’d be working in politics, and what he meant, I think, is that wherever he was in the world, whatever job he was doing, he’d still find a way back, in the way that cats are supposed to be able to find a way back when they move house. He’d be on the local council, or he’d give out pamphlets, or something. Anything that was a part of that world, he’d do. He was a little sad when he said it; he told me it was, in the end, a failure of imagination.
And that’s me: I suffer from a failure of imagination. I could do what I wanted, every day of my life, and what I want to do, apparently, is to get walloped out of my head and pick fights. Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.
JJ
I had a good day, that first day. In the morning I read The Sportswriter by the pool, and that’s one fucking cool book. And then I ordered a sandwich, and then… Well, the truth of the matter is, I thought it was about time to jump-start my libido, which had been on life-support and demonstrating no outward signs of life for like four or five months. You ever read that book some dude wrote with like his eyelid? He had to flicker it every time whoever was helping him got to the right letter of the alphabet. True story. Anyway, my fucking libido couldn’t even have written that book. But sitting by the pool in my shorts, with the sun warming parts of me that had been frozen for a long time, in all the ways there are to be frozen, there were dim but unmistakable signs of life.