We eventually became friendly in our second term, on account of his failure to pass his first set of exams. When the results were posted in our first week back, I looked down the list and expected his name to be picked out in gold leaf. Maybe the examiners would have augmented the initial T into an illuminated depiction of the Ascension into Heaven. In fact, he fucked them up with a vengeance. A straight fail. Oh yes! During term two his social and sexual bonanza abated considerably and he was around the corridor a lot more. He started knocking on my door in the afternoons and coming in for a chat and a biscuit (McVitie’s, not masturbatory), to take a break from revision. This ritual was entirely at his instigation, but I came to long for it to come round. New friendships have the effect upon me that new love affairs have on others. I would quite happily have spent whole days talking with him. Rather like Henry does now, he would come and sit on my bed and make me tea, and retrieve my fags from the far side of the room and fix me a bowl of Shreddies. He made out, rather unconvincingly, that he had always been as in awe of me as I had been of him. He also had a tendency to understate how privileged he was. But that was OK, because I would do the same thing, talking up the generic Northern accent, talking down the fee-paying education and the ‘ontreprenerr’ dad.
For the first time in my life, I even started to develop a crush on another man. As he worked his latest contestant through some rococo moves on the other side of the wall, my eavesdropping self-abuse began to be charged with ambivalence. Whose rapturing face and body was in my mind’s eye more? This was a powerful new feeling, and disturbed me greatly. I was from the North, for goodness’ sake. The phase took a long time to pass fully, even as long as two years, perhaps. I later decided that it was merely symptomatic of a delayed adolescence. Most boys go through a homosexual period at some time, normally when they’re about thirteen. Like many things in my life, mine came later and lasted longer. I still believe now that I’m a late developer. I don’t know what gives me that idea.
I became fiercely protective of Tom when my lager and triv mates cast him as just another yah-yah bubblehead. I liked to think that they were only so savage because they were jealous, because they wanted what he had too. Now I realise that this wasn’t the case at all. Not everyone is as seduced by Tom’s kind of glamour as me (but many more than admit it). In fact, I never did really become part of his social circle, and certainly never got near to entering into his culture. Even when we moved into a house share together in the second year, and I had more direct exposure to his social MO, I was tentative. Take the parties. I just couldn’t do his sort of party. My sort of party had grave gender imbalances and not enough booze and tended to sift down to four pasty lads arguing bitterly about D.H. Lawrence. His were straightforward sensual bacchanals where everybody took a little toot, smoked a little draw and had a great time. When they were at our house I would spend the next morning tidying up, wondering why I was the only person who hadn’t enjoyed myself. I put it down to the fact that I was a drinker rather than a drugger, and a prole not a party member. My version of a great time was measured by how closely it resembled senility: memory loss, gibbering and impotence. Here were people who liked to laugh and dance around and have sex with one another. What did they know?
Of course, this was just before the great late-eighties drug liberalisation. In the suburbs of Northern towns in the mid-eighties, there was a defence mechanism employed, born of fear of change, that drugs were like tears: strictly for Southern nonces. It was, of course, narcotic Luddism, and the world was moving on regardless. Nowadays, none of the young folk, North or South, drink much any more; they do E and go out and have a lot of straight-up-and-down fatuous fun. An entire generation who no longer associate a good time with vomiting, collapsing and blacking out. Poor lost souls.
My friendship with Tom stayed weekday and one-on-one, but it was none the weaker for that. All my friendships have been based on idolisation, and with Tom this was compounded by my faint, remaining desire to give him one. However, I didn’t just adore him because of his confidence, looks and charm. A more crucial element in it was his family. Firstly he had siblings: two rangy blonde sisters. To an only child like me, they inevitably seemed to be great things to have. The real source of my admiration, however, was his relationship with his mother and father. He described to me one January when we arrived back at college what Christmas morning in the Mannion household was like. The children would assemble on his parents’ huge bed and the family would spend the morning exchanging gifts and talking. Now, to you this may seem commonplace. If so, then I apologise for being banal. But for years whenever I wanted to fuel a really good dark mood, I would permit myself to recreate a picture of the Mannions on Christmas Day.
The biggest favour I ever did him was to bring him together with Lucy. She was my study partner on a Seventeenth Century European History option in my second year, and would come to our house before tutorials to pick me up. When I first met her I thought she was a real dim bulb. She had this twee way of talking that to me seemed affected. Did anyone ever say ‘fab!’ and ‘lush!’ without irony? In tutorial she turned out to be extremely clever. It was the kind of intelligence that I could never have; common-sensical and measured, rather than flashy and over-heated like my own. I also didn’t realise for some time that she was probably beautiful, in a womanly, unattainable way, but even then I had no real desire for her. Maybe pit ponies only really fancy other pit ponies. Tom was on to it like a shot. Around the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia he was ardently negotiating terms on dinner dates. By the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession he was garrisoned in her undergarments on a permanent basis.
One freezing, foggy February morning, trudging to another tutorial I remember breaking a silence by asking Lucy a facetious question, about the character of Mazarin or what Wallenstein did of a weekend or something. She stopped on the pavement and looked at me as if I’d been talking Old Norse.
‘Hm? Oh yes.’ Very impatient, very far away.
And we continued in silence. I speculated that maybe I was seeing love at close quarters for the first time, and felt all of a sudden bewildered and out of my depth, and truly, horribly envious.
Tom even managed to stay faithful. In his position, this was an heroic feat. He had a kind of perfect magnetism for women; they wanted to fuck him, mother him and be his best friend all at the same time. I mean, even I wanted to do him, for Christ’s sake, imagine how just-turned-on-to-sex nineteen-year-old women felt. I hung around on the edge of the penalty area, hoping to pick up some of the stray crosses he’d manfully headed out, but didn’t even get in a strike on goal. Whilst he spent the better part of two terms lounging in his bower with Lucy, I regressed to my real best mates, Stella, Marje and Triv.
At this point, I moved into my Early-Period Marie O’Sullivan affair. She was in the year below me and had not yet realised that there were better places to start the Big University Relationship than the college bar on a Thursday night. But much more of Marie later. She merits several digressions all of her own.
Tom and I have weathered all the trials of the best-friend relationship. Lucy even underwent a ‘Have I ever told you, Frank, that I really want to sleep with you’ aberration just after we left university. I believe this is a common occurrence, but it seemed special to me. I remember all the strange and disorienting details. Firstly spending an evening in a dark Tandoori in Shepherd’s Bush with her stockinged foot pressed against my groin. While Tom was grinding on at noisome length about pupil masters, tenancy and cheeky-chappy Cockney clerks to my then girlfriend (post-Early-Period, pre-Middle-Period Marie), his fiancee was agitating my balls with her big toe and eyeing me disgracefully. My groin had acquired the