What Rhymes with Bastard?

Part One:

1: Me, Jack, and Me and Jack

‘Don’t try and change anyone, Linda. I thought I could change your father. You can’t do it.’

Mum

Before everything turned to shit, Jack was my most successful project ever. He was nineteen when I met him, and as much of a mess as his bedroom. Instead of buying food, he spent his student grant on speed, acid, ecstasy and marijuana, surviving on nibbles ‘borrowed’ from the communal fridge. He always left a regretful note, gracious but with no mention of imminent replacement:

Dear John,

I’m so sorry. I took your cheese.

Jack.

I started to collect them. I noticed he chain-smoked roll-ups, went to bed at nine a. m., and drew self-portraits in charcoal on his bedroom walls, incurring the wrath of the college authorities. A little crowd would gather in his room to witness his battles with the head cleaning lady: Brenda, screeching, hands on hips, Jack with his eyes still shut, making polite sounds from his bed. I found this endearing, but some of his strange practices were definitely negatives:

 A tendency to recite Nietzsche in inappropriate social settings.

 A disinclination to wash.

 Going barefoot (which was OK in itself but incurred ridicule from my friends).

 Walking with a chimpanzee-like stoop.

 Holding his feet at right-angles.

 Getting stoned to slow down and taking speed to speed up again.

 Refusing to exercise or even walk on an incline

I considered this list, then I considered the positives: he was tall, handsome, gentle and sweet, and his ineptitude was charming. I knew a good fixer-upper when I saw one. With the maturity of a twenty-two-year-old I set about the repairs.

Five years later I had a fully functioning boyfriend, ensconced within a highly functional relationship, in which life tasks were assigned according to skill sets. Jack handled the higher issues, deciding which books and films were admirable, who was smart, what was right and – most importantly – what was wrong. I took care of the day-to-day stuff, selecting our clothes, furniture, housing, careers, friends and social activities. Household bills, naturally, were always in my name.

Thus far, my project had failed on only two fronts. The first of these was the inordinate amount of time Jack spent on writing projects. During a week-long holiday in 1998, he whiled away thirty-five documented hours writing a two-page letter to his best friend’s mum. Most of his spare time had been poured into a foot-high stack of works-in-progress. I had, admittedly, made some headway by turning him into a copywriter. Churning out text by the yard had increased his pace, but it was still a source of contention. My other failure was Jack’s smoking. He’d been at it for fifteen years and already had circulation problems – a large varicose vein had appeared in his crotch, coiling across his scrotum and up his cock like a power cable.

Achieving this tightly regulated relationship hadn’t been easy. About three months into our courtship, he went temporarily insane and had to be locked up. It was the Easter holidays, and I was stuck at Mum and Dad’s house, waiting for my new boyfriend to arrive from London. By the time he was eight hours late6, I gave up, dried my tears and went off to visit a friend in Southampton. Mum phoned us later that afternoon.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a call from a girl who said she was ringing from a mental hospital in Woking. She said she was a fellow patient of your friend Jack’s. What should I do?’

The next day, I drove the hundred miles to the hospital, where I found my new boyfriend hopping round a traffic cone. ‘Hi, Bunny!’ Still hopping, he jiggled my shoulders. I asked him what had happened.

‘The pigs got me!’

‘How did they get you, Jack?’

‘Ha ha! They said, “You can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and I said, “The hard way!” So they beat me up, but it took three of them! Look!’ He showed me a nasty crop of bruises.

Later I pieced together the events: after taking the usual cocktail of speed, acid, dope and ecstasy, he had gone to London and begun a mystical quest for his dad, whom he had never met. He decided his philosophy professor was the most likely candidate, and wrote him a series of impassioned letters, hanging some on trees and posting others, which were later returned in a sealed envelope. He walked around naked in High Barnet, reciting from Ecce Homo, which promptly got him arrested and banned from the borough.1 That was where his friend lived, so now he had nowhere to stay. He

decided to build a raft and escape down the Thames, so he dumped his belongings in the tube station and made his way to Camden Lock, where he started throwing planks and branches into the canal, which wasn’t a river but would do at a pinch. He needed to steer his vessel and spotted an ideal-looking mop on top of a narrow-boat. He ran on board to fetch it, but the owner got upset and called the police.

Jack resisted arrest with the mop and was taken to the cells, where the police psychiatrist decided he was mad, and ordered him put away somewhere else. As all the local NHS wards were full, he was sent to a private hospital on the outskirts of Woking – Willowdell Hall – which took a very relaxed stance towards recovery, as the owners got £300 per patient per day from BUPA or the NHS. In return, they hung crap oil paintings on the walls, and made fancy food. (‘Good evening, Mr Stumford, will you have banoffee pie or peach melba tomorrow night?’) This last luxury was a bit of a waste, as most of the patients were anorexic.

On my second visit to Willowdell Hall, I met Jack’s mother. She was surprised by my loyalty – as her son didn’t seem like good boyfriend material, even to her. She told me how she had raised Jack on her own after having been abandoned by a rich American who had got her pregnant. After the drama of the birth, she’d fallen unconscious and then woke up in a hospital in America quite alone. Where was her baby? Dragging her drip behind her, she’d found him spreadeagled beneath a knife, moments away from circumcision. ‘Get your hands off my beautiful boy!’ she’d snarled, and snatched him back, then limped off to bed; next, she’d taken him back to Wales, where they’d lived with her sister’s family while she retrained as a nurse, working nights, studying by day and forswearing sleep and sex. It was there that Jack grew to manhood with his foreskin intact, surrounded by women, hens and puddles. And it was there, as the damp months turned slowly to years, that he grew a pair of size thirteen feet.

Back in Woking, the doctors had no idea when – or even if – he’d recover. I visited him every day, hoping things would get better, but they didn’t. Private clinics don’t accept dangerous patients, so he was the only male resident. A three-strong harem formed round him, solemnly following him through the grounds, giving him shoulder massages. By flirting with one, he provoked me into having sex with him. His bed collapsed. He had to get a new one, and it was obvious why.

Willowdell Hall was not locked, and Jack went missing on a daily basis. He was often found standing on the road out front, directing traffic with volumes of nineteenth-century poetry.

After three weeks of this sort of thing, I had to return to Cambridge to face my final exams – three years of indolence distilled into six weeks of hell. When Jack and I argued on the phone one night, he tried to escape to Cambridge by hitch-hiking up the M1, and was quickly picked up by the police. I decided I needed to visit him again, but the day I arrived, he suffered a bad reaction to his medication, and things got really nasty. He started saying creepy things, and dribbling, and then his face froze, whereupon the nurses dragged him upstairs, pulled down his jeans and gave him a massive injection in the backside. At once he fell asleep, and I went home.

All too soon, my exams began. While I tackled Paper 7: Near-identical Portraits of Fat Old Men in Wigs, 1740–1860, my mum took my boyfriend out for afternoon tea, accidentally driving the wrong way up a motorway slip-road. ‘Christ, Lins, your mum’s insane!’ he yelled, into the phone.

‘Oh, darling,’ reported Mum, gaily, ‘Jack’s a riot! We were in this café run by Christians and he went up to the owner and said, “You know, I don’t believe in God,” and then had this philosophical conversation with him and, of course, the owner couldn’t keep up. Oh, it was marvellous!’ I was glad they were having fun.

While I struggled with Paper 8: Near-identical Classical-style Buildings in Varying States of Disrepair, 1000 bc–the Present, my parents took Jack out to the Woking shopping centre. ‘And, darling – he disappeared! We thought he’d escaped. He was gone for at least half an hour, and we were panicking. We were thinking we’d have to call the police – oh, it was terrible, I had such a fright, because we were legally responsible for him! And then he came out of the gents’, smiling as if nothing had happened.’

‘Mum, I should have warned you – Jack takes for ever in the loo.’2

Things took a turn for the worse. A bed had come up in an NHS place in Cambridge, and he was being transferred. He was happy that he’d be closer to me, and so was I, until I visited him. It was like one of those re-enactments of nineteenth-century Bedlam you see on BBC2, and the place stank of ladies’ pants. Not surprisingly, he got better pretty fast. That summer, his mum got him a job moving furniture, and watched over him while he got his head back in order. Altogether, it had been a humiliating episode. Jack had no more secrets. Those who cared for him had been hurt, and everyone else was laughing. He loved drugs, but it was official: he couldn’t handle them, and it was my responsibility to make sure he never took them again.

These were the inauspicious beginnings of our story. Not the ideal basis for a solid relationship, you might think, but the fact is, I’d never had a boyfriend before. My mother was beginning to despair, so even a boyfriend in a lunatic asylum seemed better than none. I felt the same way.

I was a teenage solipsist

My early childhood was spent almost exclusively with my mum, a devoted and endlessly interested companion. Her friends’ kids were older than I was, and Dad was busy with his crossword, so it was just the two of us. Perhaps as a result of this, I pursued close one-on-one friendships with a single-minded passion from the moment I was pushed into the social whirl of nursery school. When I made a friend, I didn’t want to share her, and I was never the first to let go. I spent most of my childhood lying in bed, reading – a delicious habit that has the preservative effects of heroin but doesn’t build one’s social skills.

Significant Best Friend No. 1 was Melanie. Aged eleven, we dressed up as pigs and became fast friends. We’d go to jumble sales, then totter home in the worst possible outfits, giggling helplessly. As I was copying her, I’d got Mum to buy me a coat just like hers, from C&A, and we used to hold hands within the matching sleeves. But one year later we were marched off to different schools: I was sent to the local comprehensive, five years of breeze-block hell. Melanie started seeing boys and forgot about me. Aged sixteen, I got a job on the till in the Safeway opposite her house and sat on the fire escape, staring at her and her spotty beau as they walked to the bus stop. I went to her birthday party in my brown Safeway uniform, accessorized with tan tights. As I sat in silence, a blond boy approached. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but do you have any friends?’

I worked at Safeway for £1.79 an hour three nights a week. At all other times, I watched TV. On Saturdays, I played the violin in a youth orchestra until one p.m., then went home and went to bed for the rest of the weekend. For recreation, I ate microwaved muffins and jam, and watched TV. Sometimes I just lay there, looking at my bedroom wall, willing time to pass, waiting to become an adult. Nobody intervened: they don’t really fuss about teenagers who do well at school.

I found someone who hated everyone else as much as I did, and we both dressed up as Christmas trees for non-uniform day in June – an anti-fashion protest that aroused great hostility. That was fun, but it was with unmitigated joy that I left the breeze-block gulag behind. Mum bought me a bus pass and I trekked to Winchester for my A levels. I had a bottle of whisky in my bag, and I’d started reading again, but I was still listening to Bartók and acting aloof. One day, a girl at school made a comment about the rain, and I told her I didn’t have a faculty for discussing weather.

Luckily, Significant Best Friend No. 2 saved me from social death. Alice was the world’s cutest Catholic. She had the button nose, the boobs and the confidence to attract a steady line-up of boys. Her friendship helped me eke out a paltry social life, which pleased my mum. While others my age had curfews and the like, she would happily come and pick me up at all hours from a club, a house, a bar or – more likely – the forty-seven bus stop, where Alice and I spent much of our time.

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

He wasn’t much of a talker. One night I gave up hope of conversation and – kind of wishing he’d leave and kind of wishing he wouldn’t – fell into an exasperated, self-conscious sleep while he sat in my chair, quietly reading The English Auden. When I woke up

the next morning, the scene was exactly as I’d left it, except he was three-quarters of the way through the great red tome. A few nights later, he sat in the same chair and began to read Heart of Darkness aloud. I was half bored, half charmed and half asleep to boot. Throughout the night I drifted in and out of consciousness (in retrospect a great way to soak up this delirious tale). Once he’d finished reading, he asked if he could curl up on my bed. I nodded. This went on for several nights, until eventually he plucked up courage to ask to sleep next to me. The weight of his arm round me kept me as wide awake as if it had been a cattle prod. A quiet, trembling joy was bubbling up within me and it was all I could do to keep the lid on. Afterwards when my lumbering suitor was around, I came over all jittery and busied myself with constructing elaborate toasted sandwiches.