I started to talk less at school. I stopped putting my hand up to answer questions. If no one heard my Englishness, I thought, then maybe they’d un-see my difference. During the days, I kept myself to myself and trudged long corridors with lever-arch files clasped to my chest, hunched inwards. I sat at the back of the classroom, defacing my books with Tipp-Ex, fighting my natural inclination to work hard because I knew now this marked me out as weird. I started cheating in tests, sneaking in scraps of paper with the answers on them and propping them up inside my pencil case. I did the bare minimum.
It was a big school and during the days, I was able to lose myself quite effectively amid the blue-and-grey-uniformed mass. At nights in the shared dormitories of the girls’ boarding house, I took down the posters I’d Blu Tacked of fluffy seals (too babyish) and striking Calvin Klein adverts (if they had a woman in them, I was called ‘gay’ by the other girls) and replaced them with black-and-white male Levi’s models and pop stars. At weekends, I wasn’t allowed to leave until Saturday morning, when I got the coach back home. The journey took ninety minutes. When my mother picked me up from the stop, my shoulders would drop with relief that I could be myself again.
But I only had one night of grace, because we were required to be back early on Sunday evening for a chapel service. My mother would give me dinner, making my favourite things, and I’d have a lump in my throat as I ate and I would try not to cry. I dreaded returning to school and my way of coping was to seek comfort in the rare pockets of the familiar. I brought food from home. I read books, and cherished the ability to lose myself in a different world. When I cried, I did so in private, behind a locked lavatory door. And as time went on, I did make a couple of friends who were, like me, social outcasts.
My grades spiralled downwards. I failed exams, once getting 47 per cent in a Chemistry exam – a shame so acute it haunts me still, three decades later. I developed two distinct personalities: a home self and a school self, and I went to great pains to ensure that the two never coincided. I never invited anyone back to mine at the weekends. I didn’t tell my parents a lot of what was going on because I wasn’t sure I fully had a grip on it myself. I just knew I was unhappy.
It was to set in motion a coping mechanism that would last into my adult life, and cause me a great deal of heartache. It was an internal dislocation, which meant I could distance myself from the pain of my sadness and put it to one side, like a washed-up dish left to dry in its own time, while I continued to exist and function seemingly effectively. But the detachment from my own hurt meant I gradually lost touch with what I was actually feeling, which meant that this became difficult to express. I, who had so many words, could not find the right ones when it came to myself. At the same time, I was desperate to please others in the hope that, by doing so, I would finally be granted the secret access code to belonging. So I shaded my character according to the company I found myself in. I would pretend to like pop stars and clothes and television programmes I didn’t much care for, all the while clinging on to my English accent like a life raft that could still carry my disparate selves back to the actual me. I felt fury and guilt at what I conceived of as deception, and I turned these emotions inward and worried, all the time, about the myriad things I was doing wrong.
Eventually it got to the stage where I point-blank refused to go back to school. My mother pleaded with me to finish the term, but I couldn’t. I had reached the point where I had no emotional energy left, and in the end my parents agreed to take me out halfway through my third year. During the time that followed, I got a scholarship to a boarding school in England where no one thought my accent was exceptional. That September, I went back into the year I was meant to be in. The school was single-sex rather than co-ed, which I found less intimidating.
I had also learned some valuable lessons about how to be popular from my earlier experiences. I knew to stand back a bit and take stock. To be cautious about revealing myself too quickly for who I really was. I needed to suss out the other girls first and assess the group dynamic before making my move.
So it was that, aged thirteen, I approached my first day as a new girl with Machiavellian intent. My strategy was simple: I would identify the most popular girl in my year and I would befriend her. I would observe the way she dressed and spoke and what she did with her hair. Then I would copy it. This I did. It worked like a dream.
It was, in some respects, relatively straightforward and a matter of acquiring and doing the right sort of things. I bought River Island black hipster trousers. I said I fancied Robbie Williams from Take That. I drank Cinzano straight from the bottle on a park bench because you had to get drunk to be cool. I had a boyfriend in my final year and went to the Algarve with a group of friends to celebrate the end of our A levels. It was the first time I’d ever stayed up to watch the sun rise. On the surface, at least, I appeared to belong. I was one of the cool ones.
After my earlier failures, I was indubitably better at playing the game. I got good grades and made real friends. The teachers liked me. Still, I didn’t much like school. I always felt resentful that I wasn’t in control of my own life. I wanted, more than anything, to be an adult and in charge of my own existence. I was impatient to get on with things, to have a job, to live in my own flat and pay my own rent. In fact, I couldn’t wait to leave.
I had a growth spurt at the age of fourteen and people frequently told me I seemed older than I was. It caused some confusion when I visited my sister at university. When we went out for a black-tie dinner with some of her male postgraduate friends, I was keenly aware that I didn’t want to embarrass her. I wore a black dress, with white buttons all the way down the front (River Island again. I really did love that shop). Halfway through the Chinese meal, I was told that one of the men had taken a shine to me. He tried to strike up conversation across the table. I politely asked what degree he was taking and after a few moments of chit-chat he said:
‘So what are you up to at the moment?’
‘I’m in the first year of studying for my GCSEs,’ I replied.
His lower lip trembled as if he’d been punched. No more conversation was forthcoming.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that, one way or the other, I never entirely fitted in. I was immature in some ways (horrifyingly unworldly) and overly mature in others (I asked for a three-quarter-length camel coat for my eighteenth birthday). Adults assumed I was capable because, by now, I was tall and good at exams and well behaved in class, but really I was just trying to work things out and I still barely knew myself. I always felt something of an outsider – in Ireland because I spoke like a foreigner; in England because I hadn’t grown up there.
But this social failure at school had some positive by-products. At an early age, it made me into an observer of human behaviour. I started to listen more than I talked. It’s a skill that has been incredibly useful as a writer. And because I wasn’t born cool but had to learn how to fake it, I like to think I have a degree of empathy for others who have never felt they belonged. When it came to writing my fourth novel, The Party, I mined my own experiences of being a scholarship kid on their first day in an unfamiliar environment for my protagonist, Martin Gilmour.
I have often been asked at literary festivals how I imagined myself into the character of a misfit teenage boy and the truth is, I based it on what I felt at the time. The emotions were so vivid to me that I can feel them still. (Although it’s worth pointing out here that Martin is a borderline sociopath who inveigles his way into his best friend’s life with disastrous consequences. That’s where any similarity between him and me ends.)
It’s interesting how many of the successful people I’ve interviewed, both for the podcast and as a journalist, have felt a similar sense of alienation at school. I’ve found that a surprising number of performers – specifically comedians – had parents in the military and therefore moved around a lot as children. They got used to adapting to new environments and often the easiest way to make friends