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