One person is one thing, but several people are quite another. If the evening involved more than the two of us, I’d spend it on a knife edge, striving so hard to impress people that I’d forget to be nice. To be honest, it never occurred to me to be nice in the first place. I’d never liked groups of people. In junior school I’d giggle away in lessons, then squirm with anxiety as break-time approached. I’d march up and down the playground on my own, practising my whistling. In secondary school, I clung to the periphery of groups, and when it got too much, headed for the library cupboard or the toilet.
I was usually second to last to be picked for teams, one up from the fat kid, and always found myself at the end of the row. I would clam up, then hate myself for it. Not that anyone would have noticed: they were all too busy worrying about themselves. That’s the trouble with solipsism – you think you’re the only one.
By the time I could finally drink and drive legally, I sensed Life just beyond my grasp. I was certain it would begin for real once I got to university. I’d find a little gang of people who were just like me. (Of course, had I actually met anybody just like me, I wouldn’t have liked them.) I couldn’t wait, so I didn’t, despite the social pressure to take a year off and ‘see the world’. I had other reasons to avoid the world, too, and as this stay-at-home stance helped shape my future, I’ll explain a few.
1 I couldn’t imagine enjoying myself, no matter where I went.
2 Financing the expedition would have necessitated six to nine months’ hard labour behind a till or a bar, earning £2 an hour. I could have done it with student loans, but in a household where only the house was bought on credit, such lavish expenditure was unthinkable, and under Mum’s eagle-eyed surveillance, I couldn’t pretend I’d gone to the Isle of Wight instead of Cameroon.
3 I had no one to go with, as Alice was in Poland, and travelling alone is only fun if you like talking to and/or sleeping with strangers. I envisaged myself alone in Thailand, relaxing with date-rape drugs and falling off elephants, fending off Brazilian street kids, swimming in corpse-laden Indian rivers, staggering forlornly up the Himalayas, contracting malaria, playing host to tropical parasites, or (more likely) watching French TV alone as an au-pair.
In October 1991, I arrived at university in a delightful floral dress. No one was impressed.
‘Why do you dress like that?’ said one.
‘Hmm,’ said another.
‘You like to be noticed, don’t you?’
Look closely at our freshers’ photo, and you’ll see tears in my eyes.
On the first night of term, there was a power-cut, and I retreated to my room. I was alone in the dark with a daddy-long-legs. I tracked my new friend as he buzzed across the ceiling in the yellow glow from my bike light, casting a gigantic, sinister shadow. Across the gardens, a crowd in the college bar enjoyed the thrill of the black-out. I fell asleep to the muffled sound of squeals and laughter.
I’d arrived at college unkissed, as insecure as I was arrogant. Hard to approach, and less than beautiful, I continued not to be kissed. The longer this went on, the harder it got to kiss me. When a bitchy boy told me I was predatory, I stopped wearing dresses and switched to pyjama trousers with baggy sweaters. I longed for a lover to halt the vicious cycle. Had I known that one day he’d just walk into my room, I could have saved myself a lot of hassle. While other girls seemed to get drunk, then wake up with a new boyfriend, nothing happened to me, no matter what I did.
I unwittingly got myself cast as a dominatrix in a play about masturbation: nothing (although, years later, the director sent me love packages, one of which contained a photo of my corseted self wielding a whip). I joined Footlights and played the part of a tree: nothing. I sent a red paper heart to a Catholic rugby player, who liked guilty one-night stands with short, busty girls: nothing. I told A to tell B that I liked B without realizing that A was in love with B: nothing. I spent the night in London with a curly-haired idiot film-maker, who got me into his bed, asked how many men I’d ‘had’, then leaped to the far side of the bed when I told him. I went on a blind date with Ali G.
Of course, Ali G didn’t exist back in 1992, so I was actually out on the town with plain old Sacha Baron Cohen, a second-year history student, currently playing the lead in Fiddler on the Roof at the Amateur Dramatics Club. Hundreds of us were out on random dates that night, as part of a fund-raiser, but Sacha had got to choose his date because his friend was organizing the whole thing. He claimed I’d written the funniest application form, but I suspect he’d been swayed by my self-description as ‘blonde, busty and six feet tall’. He did seem a bit disappointed.
‘You’re not blonde.’
‘No.’
He was confident, charismatic, funny, and corrected my English very nicely. He was also, not surprisingly, incredibly popular. We stood outside the local kebab shop in a sea of his friends, and from time to time, he’d put his arm round me and say, ‘This is my blind date!’ A little cheer would go up, after which I’d return to my chip butty. Still, I must have done something right, because I got to hang out with him and his friends a few more times. I adored Sacha, and Sacha’s friend adored me. The friend was sporty and a bit bland, with the same private-school glow of confidence. Aside from the full-length Barbour coat, he was perfectly acceptable – a nice posh football-player. We went to a party together where I drank red wine, which made me want to throw up. ‘There’s a spare room at my place,’ said the friend, ‘and I live just round the corner.’ In fact, he lived about a mile away, and the spare room, I realized gradually, was his bedroom. Even though I kept saying, ‘I want to puke,’ he started dancing with me, then lay on the bed with me and kissed me. Or tried to. I broke away from his embrace, and eventually he fell asleep. At dawn, I sneaked away.
Looking back, it strikes me that he would have been a good one to start with, but I had aspirations beyond sportswear – a cricket jumper here, a baseball cap there – and was looking for an artist or a philosopher. Or maybe a piano-player.
By the end of my first year, I was the only virgin left, outside the computer science department. EVERYONE else had done it, at least once. Everyone. My last romantic relationship had been in 1979, with an eight-year-old boy who lived next door to my nan.
Given the intensity of my same-sex friendships, my mum would occasionally make enquiries about lesbian activities: ‘But what do they do, Linda? Do they use a carrot?’
To help me cope, I told myself that I could never have a boyfriend because there was something wrong with me, and that was absolutely fine because if I didn’t find one by the time I was twenty-five I would kill myself, and then I couldn’t be alone for ever, just three more years, max.
October 1994. I was about to start my final year at university and I was still a goddamned virgin. Sighing, I booked myself into a house full of strangers because there was a gigantic room available, and, as it turned out, four of them were cute: four under one roof! There was the tall guy with the stoop – I liked him because he’d been to art college and didn’t wear shoes, and all my friends thought he was a ridiculous, pretentious twat. Then there was the really good-looking tall one with the bowl cut, and the massive tall one with the Yorkshire accent, and the sweet scientist in the room opposite. I couldn’t cope with all the pressure so I hid in my room and took to peeing in a cup.
Jack – the tall one with the stoop – was intrigued by my air of mystery. One day, he took a phone message for me and then a rare proactive step: he crossed my threshold. I was thrilled – he was in my room! I put the kettle on to boil, and so began his primitive courtship ritual:
1 coming down the stairs and entering my room;
2 sitting in a chair reading a book;
3 not leaving unless explicitly told to.3