I was just going to have a discreet ‘J’ ‘R’ done on my upper arm, but Victor the tattooist wasn’t having any of it.
“Which one is she? ‘J’ or ‘R’?”
“‘J.’”
“And how long have you been seeing this ‘J’ bird, then?”
I was frightened by the aggressive masculinity of the parlor—the other customers (who were all firmly wrestling-team muscular, and seemed inexplicably amused to see me), the nude women on the walls, the lurid examples of services offered, most of which were conveniently located on Victor’s forearms, even Victor’s mildly offensive language.
“Long enough.”
“I’ll fucking be the judge of that, not you.”
This struck me as an odd way to do business, but I decided to save this observation for another time.
“A couple of months.”
“And you’re going to marry her, are you? Or have you knocked her up?”
“No. Neither.”
“So you’re just going out? You’re not stuck with her?”
“Yeah.”
“And how did you meet her?”
“She used to go out with a friend of mine.”
“Did she now. And when did they break up?”
“Saturday.”
“Saturday.” He laughed like a drain. “I don’t want your mum in here moaning at me. Fuck off out of it.”
I fucked off out of it.
Victor was spot on, of course; in fact, I have often been tempted to seek him out when I have been plagued by diseases of the heart. He’d be able to tell me in ten seconds whether someone was worth a tattoo or not. But even after Phil and Jackie were ecstatically and tearfully reunited, things didn’t go back to the way they had been. Some of the girls at her school, and some of the boys at ours, presumed that Jackie had been using me to renegotiate the terms of her relationship with Phil, and the Saturday shopping afternoons were never the same again. And we no longer admired people who had gone out together for a long time; we were sarcastic about them, and they were even sarcastic about themselves. In a few short weeks, mock-marital status had ceased to be something to aspire to, and had become a cause for scorn. At seventeen, we were becoming as embittered and as unromantic as our parents.
See, Laura? You won’t change everything around like Jackie could. It’s happened too many times, to both of us; we’ll just go back to the friends and the pubs and the life we had before, and leave it at that, and nobody will notice the difference, probably.
4. Charlie Nicholson (1977-1979)
I met Charlie at tech: I was doing a media studies course, and she was studying design, and when I first saw her I realized she was the sort of girl I had wanted to meet ever since I’d been old enough to want to meet girls. She was tall, with blond cropped hair (she said she knew some people who were at St. Martin’s with some friends of Johnny Rotten, but I was never introduced to them), and she looked different and dramatic and exotic. Even her name seemed to me dramatic and different and exotic, because up until then I had lived in a world where girls had girls’ names, and not very interesting ones at that. She talked a lot, so that you didn’t have those terrible, strained silences that seemed to characterize most of my sixth-form dates, and when she talked she said remarkably interesting things—about her course, about my course, about music, about films and books and politics.
And she liked me. She liked me. She liked me. She liked me. Or at least, I think she did. I think she did. Etc. I have never been entirely sure what it is women like about me, but I know that ardor helps (even I know how difficult it is to resist someone who finds you irresistible), and I was certainly ardent: I didn’t make a nuisance of myself, not until the end, anyway, and I never outstayed my welcome, not while there was still a welcome to be outstayed; but I was kind and sincere and thoughtful and devoted and I remembered things about her and I told her she was beautiful and bought her little presents that usually referred to a conversation we had had recently. None of this was an effort, of course, and none of it was done with any sense of calculation: I found it easy to remember things about her, because I didn’t think about anything else, and I really did think she was beautiful, and I would not have been able to prevent myself from buying her little presents, and I did not have to feign devotion. There was no effort involved. So when one of Charlie’s friends, a girl called Kate, said wistfully one lunchtime that she wished she could find somebody like me, I was surprised and thrilled. Thrilled because Charlie was listening, and it didn’t do me any harm, but surprised because all I had done was act out of self-interest. And yet this was enough, it seemed, to turn me into someone desirable. Weird.
And, anyway, by moving to London I had made it easier to be liked by girls. At home, most people had known me, or my mum and dad—or had known somebody who knew me, or my mum and dad—when I was little, and consequently I’d always had the uncomfortable feeling that my boyhood was about to be exposed to the world. How could you take a girl out for an underage drink in a pub when you knew you had a scout uniform still hanging in your closet? Why would a girl want to kiss you if she knew (or knew somebody who knew) that just a few years before, you had insisted on sewing souvenir patches from the Norfolk Broads and Exmoor on your anorak? There were pictures all over my parents’ house of me with big ears and disastrous clothes, sitting on tractors, clapping with glee as miniature trains drew into miniature stations; and though later on, distressingly, girlfriends found these pictures cute, it all seemed too close for comfort then. It had only taken me six years to change from a ten-year-old to a sixteen-year-old; surely six years wasn’t long enough for a transformation of that magnitude? When I was sixteen, that anorak with the patches on was just a couple of sizes too small.
Charlie hadn’t known me as a ten-year-old, however, and she didn’t know anybody who knew me, either. She knew me only as a young adult. I was already old enough to vote when I met her; I was old enough to spend the night with her, the whole night, in her hall of residence, and have opinions, and buy her a drink in a pub, secure in the knowledge that my driving license with its scrambled proof of age was in my pocket … and I was old enough to have a history. At home I didn’t have a history, just stuff that everybody already knew, and that, therefore, wasn’t worth repeating.
But I still felt a fraud. I was like all those people who suddenly shaved their heads and said they’d always been punks, they’d been punks before punk was even thought of: I felt as though I was going to be found out at any moment, that somebody was going to burst into the college bar brandishing one of the anorak photos and yelling, “Rob used to be a boy! A little lad!,” and Charlie would see it and pack me in. It never occurred to me that she probably had a whole pile of books about ponies and some ridiculous party dresses hidden away at her parents’ place in St. Albans. As far as I was concerned, she had been born with enormous earrings, drainpipe jeans, and an incredibly sophisticated enthusiasm for the works of some guy who used to splodge orange paint around.
We went out for two years, and for every single minute I felt as though I was standing on a dangerously narrow ledge. I couldn’t ever get comfortable, if you know what I mean; there was no room to stretch out and relax. I was depressed by the lack of flamboyance in my wardrobe. I was fretful about my abilities as a lover. I couldn’t understand what she saw in the orange-paint guy, however many times she explained. I worried that I was never ever going to be able to say anything interesting or amusing to her about anything at all. I was intimidated by the other men in her design course, and became convinced that she was going to go off with one of them. She went off with one of them.