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CHAPTER TWO WHISKERS OF IMMORALITY
Pablo’s ears prick irritably as, across the street from my house, a woman screams. It’s not an ugly scream, however, but a scream with laughter oozing out of the cracks. It’s like she senses something, something magnificent and formidable stirring nearby. I drag myself to my feet and limp magnificently to the window, twitching back the curtain like a man twice my age.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and a few minutes to midnight. The Festive Season is almost at an end. Thank God for that.
I’ve never been a fan of the Festive Season. Especially as a child. It started well enough, with the slightly forced excitement of the last school day, but it was all pretty much downhill from there. The Festive Season was like dead air. It was slow, tense time between the predictable uproar of the special days, when the banks were closed and television was relentless. I spent this time in my bedroom, in hiding, or else playing darts at my best friend’s house, and if there was a rumpus of some description at home, I kept out of it as much as I possibly could, blocking out the bickering to the best of my ability, ignoring the tantrums, and suffering whatever contact sports Father was mad enough to insist upon with mute disdain and very occasional outbursts of my own.
The Festive Season was fraught.
Christmas was hateful enough, charged as it was with instinctive, seasonal self-pity, but New Year’s Eve always had something particularly ominous and dreadful about it. Unlike Christmas, New Year’s Eve was neither a time for family, nor for God. Rather, New Year’s Eve was a time for drinking heavily, going berserk and breaking things.
By the age of six or seven, I had already begun to associate the end of the year with scenes of extraordinary domestic ugliness. Many of these scenes came to me in eavesdroppings as I lay plastered to my bedroom floor with my ear cupped to the carpet, or else crouched at the top of the stairs like a cat, coiled and holding my breath. Others I witnessed firsthand as I was summoned to make an appearance and coerced into shaking the nicotined hands of the drove of drunken buffoons whom Father had corralled home from the pub. Inevitably, one or more of these soused strangers would leave a pool of urine on the canvas floor of the toilet, awaiting my bare feet in the early hours of the morning.
From the age of eight or nine, if I was at home, Father made a point of pestering me to join him and his friends in ‘drinking in the New Year’. The first time it happened I knew no better. He called me over and bent down beside me with a beaker of cheap whiskey. I was afraid, but warmed by the gesture. I sipped at the lip of the warm glass slowly, excited and grateful. Then the whiskey hit my tongue and I felt like I’d been poisoned. Worse still, I felt tricked and humiliated. Instinctively, I spat out the poison and fled from the kitchen, coughing and wheezing, pushing through bodies and heading for the stairs, where Mother grabbed hold of my arm and laughed smoke and Bucks Fizz into my burning face. I wriggled free and made a dash for it, slamming my bedroom door behind me. Father was laughing and shouting something up the stairs. I never accepted a drink from him again.
During our last New Year together, Father grabbed me as I was sneaking home from a friend’s house. ‘You come and have a drink!’ he demanded, staggering through the house half full of the usual drunken jumble of strangers. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve, for fuck’s sake.’ He led me to the heart of an inebriated throng, half-filled a plastic cup with neat whiskey and fumbled it into my hands. ‘Drink up,’ he said. ‘Happy New Year!’ He knocked back his whiskey and cheered. A few of the strangers knocked back their drinks too, and a short chain of cheers spread throughout the mob and died. Someone turned the music up. It was ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. The Phil Collins version.
‘Happy New Year,’ I said quietly, raising my glass but not drinking.
Father was silent for a moment. Then he knocked back more whiskey and started shouting over the music. He wanted to know who the hell I thought I was. I didn’t know. He wanted to know why he’d sacrificed the best years of his life putting food on the table for an ungrateful little bastard like me. I didn’t know. He wanted to know if I thought I was better than him. This one I did know.
I thought I was better than him because I didn’t spend my entire life trying to belittle and humiliate the people I was meant to love and nurture.
I didn’t say anything. I tried to walk away, but Father put his hand against my chest and insisted. ‘Do you think you’re better than me?’
I looked into my father’s eyes. They were grey and wet, bulging like infected oysters. I was fifteen years old, full of cider and nihilistic dread. My face was hot, but my eyes were cold, and I assume my father could see something in them that made him slightly afraid. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. I tossed the whiskey in the sink behind him and he let me pass, scowling and grumbling.
Later that night Mother fell on top of the television and cracked a rib.
This kind of nonsense went on all year round, of course, but New Year’s Eve always came with a special tension. All that forced introspection; all that vain expectation; all that shame.
Meanwhile, feeling no shame whatsoever, the woman across the street laughs uncontrollably as her boyfriend holds her against a wall and kisses her roughly. One of his hands disappears inside her skirt, which is, it has to be said, little more than a belt. My right hand caresses my left eyebrow instinctively, and my breath clouds up the window. She must be jolly cold. She pulls away from the man and trots off, dragging him behind. ‘Let’s go!’ she tweets. ‘It’s ten to!’
They disappear into a party to see in the New Year. I hobble back to the settee, pull the duvet over my body and unmute the TV with the remote.
I’m limping not because of nascent arousal, but because I have a severely bruised coccyx from a fall yesterday morning. I was inching down the metal staircase outside my house when I slipped on an icy step and fell like a sack of cement on to the small of my spine. I am still in considerable agony.
Pablo hops into my lap and regards me with a certain disdain.
‘What?’ I ask. ‘What’s your problem?’
He says nothing, just blinks softly as if to say, ‘What kind of loser sits home alone on New Year’s Eve talking to his cat?’
‘Oh, piss off,’ I snap. ‘You’re no better.’
Again, his eyes do the talking. ‘Ah, but cats don’t celebrate the passage of time,’ they say. ‘We have better things to do.’ And, as if to prove his point, Pablo pads three tight circles, then curls up and closes his eyes.
On television, this year’s celebrities are prancing and gurning, all shrill glibness and crass, forced jollity. There is less than a minute to go. Thirty seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight. And so on, till another exhausted year takes off its timeworn hat and with a wildly over-theatrical gesture, replaces it with another, identical hat. Which is not to say that this year will not be different, because this year most certainly will. Recent events have brought change, and the course of True Love is one on which I am suddenly very eager to enrol. I know what must be done, and it shall be done, but not just yet. Tomorrow is another year, but for now I make myself comfortable and listlessly pleasure myself to the familiar grunts and slaps of online pornography.
After which, as I’m removing the sock I have used as a cotton catcher’s mitt, I inadvertently knock Pablo awake with a loose knee. As he eyes me with thinly disguised contempt, I flash back, with shame and confusion furrowing my brow, to my sweaty adolescence, and a sweet little kitten called Mavis.
Mavis was no more than six months old at the time, and one afternoon I was home alone, much as I am now, watching TV in my room and eating toast with Dairylea triangles and too much Marmite. Inadvertently, some of the Marmite found its way on to the back of my hand. Rather than wash it off thoroughly, I merely licked it off lazily with a Marmitey mouth. Then, later that afternoon, still in my room, Mavis began licking the back of my hand with unusual attentiveness. One might even say passion. ‘Hmmm,’ I thought. ‘Interesting.’
A few days later—hours, minutes, whatever—I decided to conduct a little research. I popped down to the kitchen, returning moments later with the lidless Marmite jar. I undressed myself, lay on the bed and smeared a tiny trail of Marmite on—at first—my nipples, which are particularly sensitive, then later, when that proved an enormous success, on the end of my burgeoning boyhood. I’m not proud. But I’m not ashamed.
When I imagine the scene objectively—a teenage boy with a bulbous head lying naked on an unmade bed in a rank and rancid bedroom, the dying summer sun trying and failing to squeeze its fingers through permanently closed curtains—I feel bewildered and amused by what I regard as innocent, albeit slightly bizarre experimentation. Much like the time I pranced in front of the bathroom mirror wearing nothing but my mother’s brassiere and lipstick, or the time I tore my dead uncle’s penis from a photograph and carried it around in my jeans pocket for weeks.
At the time, as I lay on my side, holding myself in my right hand, a tiny black kitten lapping at the tip of my youthful johnson with its tiny, sandpapery tongue, I remember suddenly feeling baffled and incredulous.
As it happens, the experiment didn’t last very long. Not because I discharged myself in poor Mavis’s tiny, startled eyes, but because at some stage—more or less exactly the same time that she began to get a little bitey—I guess I saw what I was doing, objectively, as if watching a documentary about bestial teens, and I felt alarmed, and not a little dismayed. So I stopped. Then I went and washed myself, took Mavis downstairs and gave her some proper food. We said no more about it. Least said, soonest mended.
I remember all this as I pull up my pants, with Pablo curled up close by. I remember it every time I pleasure myself when Pablo’s in the room, and I always feel just a little bit guilty. But not ashamed.
Pablo cocks his head and looks at me now as if he knows all about Mavis. But he doesn’t. I never told him and I never will. This is why he relents at my touch, closing his eyes and purring when I scratch his neck, rather than hissing at me and calling the Cat Protection People. There is, however, a note of distrust in his eyes. As far as he’s concerned, I’m still on probation after the distressing behaviour he witnessed only weeks ago, when I flapped around the dark flat helplessly, shamelessly flailing in the jaws of a giant, inertia-induced doldrum.
After not leaving the house for eight or ten days, maybe more, I’d reached a legendarily low ebb. Pablo had enough food to last him a few more days, but I was completely out. The last thing I wanted to do was leave the house, but I was becoming painfully hungry. My gut was screeching like dolphins. Which is when it happened.
I was feeding Pablo, spooning fish-flavoured meat from a tin to his bowl, when I wondered, ‘How bad would this taste if I heated it up?’
Minutes later, I stood with a single chunk of meat before me on a spoon. It was every bit as succulent, I’m sure, as meat one might find in the guts of a Goblin Meat and Gravy Pudding, for example, but that didn’t stop me retching slightly as I moved it closer to my open mouth.
Pablo was watching me. His head was hovering above his bowl, his eyes focused on mine as if to say, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
I turned away, stuffed the meat into my mouth and gobbled it down. It wasn’t so bad, but still my face was twisted with disgust. Suddenly I saw myself objectively, and I despaired. I felt the kind of despair that only a man spooning cat food into his mouth can truly feel. Thankfully the despair seeped into disgust, and the disgust slapped me hard across the face and prompted action.
I apologised to Pablo and immediately went upstairs to get dressed. Then I left the solitude and hopelessness of the sanctuary of my home, because they were making me unwell, and I forced myself on to the street which marched me swiftly, slightly too swiftly, into bustling Brixton.
Brixton is generally a fairly easy place to feel anonymous, but on that day I was feeling unusually conspicuous. I felt that people were staring, more so than usual. There was disapproval in the air. Condemnation. Despite the cold, which I felt intensely, my skin was clammy with sweat. I was feeling paranoid. Then someone offered to sell me a skunk called Charlie and I freaked out and ran into the Ritzy Cinema, where a young lady with a sleepy face let me hide in the bathroom for ten minutes.
I hadn’t had a panic attack in over ten years. Not like that.
When I got home that afternoon, I sat myself down and gave myself a good, stiff talking-to, if not more of a shouting-at.
My life was a mess. I was spending most of every day smeared across the futon like a rash, like bed-sores, propped up in front of bad TV and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 on unruly piles of pillows and cushions, incapable of finding the impetus to move. The curtains were permanently closed to keep the day at bay, and my waking hours, mostly at night, were filled up with DVDs and packet after packet of Sugar Puffs, Jaffa Cakes and chocolate HobNobs. I rarely left the house. My weight was inching up to the 20-stone mark. My flesh was the colour and consistency of yesterday’s gruel, and although I was pretending to be dead to the fact, I was well aware that I was about to turn thirty. And I had never had a girlfriend. In the conventional sense of the word.
I had even stopped self-pleasuring, which is a very, very bad sign. When you can no longer take even the most fleeting physical pleasure from your own body, and your own brain, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.
I realised that, unless I acted, by the time I was thirty-two I’d be one of those tragic souls who has to have the walls of their house removed so they can be lifted by crane to the nearest hospital for gastric-bypass surgery. Libido would be a thing of the past and I would neither remember nor care. I would survive on a diet of puffed wheat, sugar and cat food. Pablo would long ago have left home.
I had to do something. There had to be change.
And on the night of my thirtieth birthday, there was.
CHAPTER THREE BAG OF ELBOWS
I was afraid. It was a cloudless night, ice hanging in the air. My breath was bright like broken glass and my skin was colder than Christmas. I shivered. The fear I felt had nothing to do with the fact that I was expanding into middle age like a dirty great stain, destined to spend the rest of my life with only my cat for company. No. Rather it concerned the fact that I was trudging towards a pub in Dartford where a gang of my childhood peers was lying in wait, doubtless preparing to relive our schooldays by taunting me with a cruel concoction of harsh words, drawing pins, and spittle, until I’d have no option but to leave the room, walk slowly to the nearest lavatory, lock myself in a cubicle and sob, silently.
But it had to be done. I was in recovery.
All my life I’d been terrified of what people thought of me. I went back to Dartford on the night of my thirtieth birthday because, finally, that had changed; because, finally, I didn’t care any more; and because, finally, I refused to be terrified. Now I was merely afraid, and the verbal slings and arrows which previously I’d allowed to reduce me to a whimpering, bleating, petrified feedbag, would from that point forth bounce off my broad back like ducks off a diving board.
Plus, I’d been invited to a school reunion via Friends Reunited, which I’d joined on a whim a mere matter of months before. It seemed like fate.
Keith, my lifelong friend and schoolmate, had refused to accompany me. We’d been in mostly different classes at school and many of the people I knew, he didn’t. Nor did he particularly want to. The idea of going alone was dreadful to me, but I had to get out of the house or there was a very real danger I was going to lose my mind.
So there I was. Out of the house and consumed with good old healthy fear.
Resisting the ever-present temptation to turn round and go home, I soldiered on, on the path to recovery, all dressed up and taking the bull by the horns.
The last thing I want, incidentally, is to come across as bigoted in any way, or discriminatory, or supercilious—but it’s important that I’m honest about this perhaps slightly controversial fact: people from Dartford are subnormal. If you’ve ever spent any time in Dartford, you will know this to be true. I don’t know what went wrong in the gene pool, but I suspect that, at some stage in Dartford’s history, some malevolent swine shat in it. I swear, the people of Dartford possess less human kindness, less discernment, less decency, and fewer IQ points than the inhabitants of any other inner-city conurbation anywhere else on planet Earth…with the one single exception of Orpington. Maybe. It’s a close-run thing.
I hadn’t been back to Dartford since my mother’s funeral some years previously, and I felt sick, like I was about to jump out of an aeroplane or dive from the top of a giant building in the name of sporting glory.
I caught sight of myself in the window of a stationary car and sighed. Apart from my face, which was an abomination, and my body, which was bursting at the seams, I looked good. Which is to say—with all thanks due to Leonard Cohen—I was dressed well.
While I was studying for ‘A’ levels I would never achieve, mooning after Marie Meeks in her well-filled duffel coat, with her shiny black hair and dazzling mouth, Leonard Cohen came to me with the following words: ‘An ugly man needs good clothes.’ These words struck me in the gut and left a mark that would endure. Until then I’d dressed like a slob, like your average, miserable teenager who gave no thought to matters sartorial. I knew I looked bad as a whole and so assumed—stupidly—that the clothes I wore would make no difference whatsoever. But I trusted Leonard Cohen, and the time and care I began to invest in my attire paid dividends. I felt better about myself and, at least to a certain extent, it showed.
So when I walked into the not especially charming and not especially friendly bar of the Hufflers Arms public house at precisely 8 p.m.—an hour after some of my former classmates had promised to arrive—I may have looked fat and afraid and ugly, I may have been sweating preternaturally, like a pig in a steam room but, at the very least, I was dressed like a prince. And that counted for something.
I made for the bar and ordered myself a pint of Guinness. When it finally arrived, I glugged at it like an overexcited man kissing a beautiful woman for the first time.
The pub was busy. As I sipped at the second half of my drink and glanced around, I recognised no one. I knew that, sooner or later, I’d have to wander through to the other rooms. The thought pained me considerably. Who would be the first person to recognise me, I wondered, and what would they shout out? Which of the hideous, heart-wrenching barbs that passed for nicknames would I first be forced to relive?
‘Stan?’
I turned, and there it was. The smiling face of the first woman to whom I never dared offer my unreciprocable love.
Angela Charlton. Ange.
To my credit, I didn’t stutter. Well, maybe a little. A slight cha-cha-cha on her surname, but nothing to tango to.
When she leaned forward to hug me, something inside me leapt. It was the Christmas-themed sandwich I’d scoffed in Charing Cross station an hour ago. I managed to keep a lid on it as she pecked me on the cheek and cried, ‘Wow!’ Her hand still on my arm, she said, ‘You look good, man. How are you?’
Bless her. Bless you, Angela cha-cha-cha-Charlton, for that small but much appreciated kindness. She was never so kind at school, but I loved her anyway.
I looked at her, felt for a moment that I might be holding back tears, then pulled myself together. ‘I’m fine,’ I told her. ‘I’m OK. You know?’ I added. ‘I’m all right.’
I wanted to say, ‘I survived. I survived the five years of torture that was my comprehensive education.’ But instead I just smiled inanely, suddenly happy to be there.
‘How are you?’ I managed. ‘You look…’ I stopped. How did she look, this woman whose face had filled dozens of socks with my plump, ungainly seed? Actually she looked old and tired and sad. ‘You look fantastic!’ I cried. It was true. She still had an achingly sexy face, with limpid blue eyes, a perky, some might say haughty nose and a lusty, pornographic mouth. Plus she was still stunningly put together, her breathtaking body still lofty, proud and pneumatic. She looked remarkable. I gazed into her eyes and the love I used to feel coursed back through my being.
She rolled her eyes. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I look like my grandmother is how I look. I’m all right though. It’s good to see you.’
‘Can I get you a drink?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Please. That’d be great.’
While I was being served, Angela Charlton’s phone made a noise. She picked it up and put it to her ear. ‘Oh, hi,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I’m here…No, not yet, I just arrived, but you’ll never guess who’s here…No, no, don’t be silly. No…’ Then she said my name. No nicknames. Just my name. Again it was appreciated. ‘Yeah! Yeah, I’m standing right next to him actually…’ I sensed that the person on the other side of the conversation had not been so kind.
Indeed, the person on the other side of the conversation, whoever it was, had shrieked it after the mention of my name.
‘Bag of Elbows?!’
I had a lot of nicknames at school, but ‘Bag of Elbows’—along with its variations—was without doubt the most popular. Variations included ‘Elbows’, ‘Elliot Elbow’ and—sadly only once—‘Edgar Allan Elbow’. Also, when I was fourteen, overnight—thanks to a Sunday-night screening of The Elephant Man on BBC2—I became ‘Merrick’.
The elbow theme kicked off in the first week of secondary school. I was eleven years old, and Gary Butler said to his friend Simon Figgins that I, sitting at an adjacent desk, had ‘a face like a bag of elbows’. Despite the fact that it made my first year absolutely unbearable, I can still see that it was quite a perceptive and well-crafted observation. There’s truth in it. I do have a face like a bag of elbows.
So, naturally, when Gary Butler said those words on that fateful day, they stuck. Bag of Elbows. That’s what I became, and to a certain extent, certainly in the minds of people who know me from school, that’s what I still am. A voluminous bag, fashioned from thick human skin and filled to bursting with the bones of a thousand elbows.
‘You’ll never guess who that was,’ said Ange, sipping at her drink. ‘It was Karen Walsh.’
‘Ah.’ Yes, I remembered Karen Walsh. ‘Oh, joy,’ I said.
Ange laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘everyone’s grown up a bit since school. Even Karen.’
‘Just a bit?’ I tried to affect a sophisticated expression, but I think I may just have managed mean. ‘So you two are still friends then?’
She said yes; they had drifted apart after school, then met at an earlier reunion.
Ange then spent five or ten minutes filling me in on her life since school—the bad exam results and time served at McDonald’s, the subsequent promotions and wasted years; the Pole she loved and lived with, long before Poles were de rigueur; the baby she lost when the Pole got drunk and jealous and punched her in the kidneys; the six-month trip around the world with her younger sister; her new life as a teacher in Hackney, retrained, revitalised and, despite the frustration and laughably long hours, daily rewarded.
‘We should go and find the others,’ she said. My stomach turned. I was enjoying talking to her, listening to her, looking into her eyes and remembering. I really didn’t want to find the others at all. ‘Let me just get another drink,’ she said, knocking back the rest of her rum. ‘Do you want another Guinness?’
‘ELBOWS!!!’
And so it began.
Suddenly a fist of faces reared up at me from the past. There was Neil ‘Bucky’ Buckley, who had a reputation for violence at school he appeared not to have outgrown. He was in tip-top physical condition, with some unpleasant tattoos, including a small blue teardrop high on his left eyelid. When he came towards me laughing, I flinched, but he was friendly. ‘Look at the size of you,’ he laughed, and shook my hand vigorously. He seemed pleased to see me. He asked me what I do now. I told him I write stuff for junk mail. Looking slightly impressed, he said, ‘That figures.’ He said, ‘You was well into all that shit.’ I resisted the urge to correct his grammar.
The best story I heard about Bucky all night was that he might be about to lose his job as a security guard for smoking a joint at work. The detail that made the story golden was that he was filmed smoking the joint on the same security cameras he was being paid to monitor. Bucky had a copy of Nuts in his coat pocket and a rash of tiny white scars on the knuckles of his left hand. He was a travesty and, like me, he was the polar opposite of Deborah Hutton.
Deborah Hutton was almost as unpopular as I was at school, but for entirely different reasons. She managed to irritate almost everybody with whom she came into contact simply by being perfect. Well spoken, beautifully turned out, very bright and sweetly pretty, she always gave the impression that she was in entirely the wrong school. Other girls hated her because they sensed in her a superiority which they suspected was well founded; boys hated her because she wouldn’t let them taste her unnaturally bright lips or put their grubby, nicotine-stained fingers up her skirt. I always liked her myself, but from a distance of light years. We were amusingly dissimilar, and I was very surprised to see her at the Hufflers Arms. She seemed surprised to see herself there. It was her first reunion too, and the only reason she was there at all was because her father was dying and she was desperate to escape the cloying stench of rotting flesh and ylang ylang, even for just a couple of hours.
Age had not withered Deborah Hutton. She was still bright and beautiful and beaming. Also, transformed by impending grief, she was caustic and careless and dangerous. When she smiled at me, I ached. I wished I were eight stone lighter and had Jake Gyllenhaal’s face. Sadly, I do not. Happily, neither does Darren McLaren.
Fifteen years have not been kind to Mac. Indeed, time has transformed a boy with quite a pleasant face and a sprightly form into a man with a pot belly and a comb-over. On the upside, he no longer seems to be under the impression that spitting phlegm at people’s backs is the height of sophisticated repartee. On the downside, nothing seems to have taken the place of this odious habit. Mac is a sophistication vacuum, and a charm void to boot. He’s also a Business Manager at a branch of the NatWest bank in Dartford. Hearing this made me smile. It made me really happy to think that, although I may, in my time, have stooped devilishly low—so low, in fact, that neither stealing and defacing a bible nor ripping the genitalia from a dead man’s memories were beneath me—I have never, never worked in a bank.
If we’d had US-style year-books at our school, Georgina Bentley would have been voted ‘Girl most likely to end up in the sex industry’. Georgina apparently thought nothing of orally pleasuring any boy brave enough to ask her. Such was the reputation she never denied. Now she’s a secretary for an insurance company in Maidstone.
Georgina—George—is a big, bouncy girl with a square face, eyes that are slightly too far apart, and a passion for Arthurian legend. She met her current boyfriend playing World of Warcraft. George isn’t exactly the sharpest chisel in the toolbox, but she is fun and funny and extremely likeable.
Then there was Karen Walsh, sporting a sensible brown bob and a not unpleasant smile on her eager, open face. Walshy was an absolute shit to me at school. Now she’s a social worker in Lewisham. She hadn’t said a lot to me since arriving at the pub, but she definitely seemed to have changed. It was early though. The jury was still out.
The strangest thing was standing there actively harbouring a grudge for at least two of those people. After all these years. As if nothing had changed. As if we were still teenagers.
Things, however, had definitely changed. I’d changed. Apart from ballooning in size, the main difference was that I was no longer crippled by shyness and shame. I used to let the likes of Bucky and Mac make me feel inferior. Now I looked at them and I felt pretty damned good about myself. They both looked so spent, and defeated, and neither of them had anything of any consequence to say. I felt good.
Realising they no longer had the power to make me feel bad, I felt less pressure. I relaxed. And the grudge fell away, like a cloak of dead skin, and a new me emerged, unashamed, unafraid, and confident. Suddenly I was glad to be there. Back where I belonged, among people. However, there was still plenty of time for things to go horribly wrong.
But for now I was mingling magnificently and speaking to everyone. Alfie Mussett had turned up too, as had Liam McDowell and Julie Moore. I caught up with them all, and reminisced like Gulliver, excited and freshly returned from his travels. Sadly, none of us—except Deborah Hutton and Angela Charlton—had done anything particularly exciting with our lives. At least Deb and Ange had each travelled a bit, more than the odd fortnight in a hotel here and there. Bucky, I discovered, had never once set foot outside the UK. And neither did he seem particularly perturbed by this fact.
