Chapter 19
Then
My college doesn’t feel like school. We do things like lie down, whilst a teacher plays political speeches at us which are meant to get us fired up but we’re all too self-absorbed so just lie there, thinking about our own problems. We study Chekhov. Stanislavski. We turn Dr Seuss books into protest theatre. We bark cliché messages about anti-drugs. Anti-racism. Anti-bullying. Anti-sexism. Anti-homophobia. Anti-war. We stare at ourselves in the mirror to Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ and the aim is to cry. We make movement pieces. We are trees. We are ghosts. We have no tongues. We are mothers. We are cows. We then have to become a city, without talking, to twist and turn like the river, improvise. ‘Trust,’ whispers the teacher as my hands link with a girl called Dominique – perfect eyeliner and an oversized washed-out tracksuit, which she somehow manages to make look like fashion – to mime a bridge.
‘What the fuck?’ I ventriloquist-whisper and this makes us both crack up.
Our school says: you get out what you put in. So we put in everything. Very quickly I realize I don’t to be an actor but I do feel like I’ve met my kind, people who want to make stuff happen. Like Dominique. She’s made her own coat; it’s long and black with colourful felt shapes. It’s incredible – just like her. Here, there aren’t gangs and crews and groups; everybody meshes. Everybody can just be themselves. I am able to express myself outside of my notebook, in my clothes and body. I wear more bright colours, I accept my raggle-taggle look and scruffy hair. I am lifted, lighter, happier. A few months in, I find the confidence to share some of my poems with Dom.
‘You should write us a play, Ella!’ she encourages, wrapping her braids into a bun.
Really?’ I ask.
‘A hundred per cent!’
I shrug. ‘OK, why not?’
Here, without even trying, I start to think – no, believe – that I am actually alright at writing, which I never did at the girls’ school with its academic grades and unobtainable targets.
‘I’m writing a play!’ I rush in from school, slamming around my house. I need a notebook, a pen, a beret.
Violet rolls her eyes.
‘If you must know’ – she didn’t ask – ‘it’s called Bad Wolf and it’s a modern adaptation and feminist examination of—’
‘Little Red Riding Hood?’
‘Yes.’ How did she know?
‘Kind of obvious.’
‘Rude. ANYWAY. It’s from the POV of Little Red’s gran – her lived experience of home intrusion as a senior female and how there aren’t enough parts for women in theatre. Except it’s set in Croydon and Little Red Riding Hood wears a red Nike hoody and gold hoop earrings and speaks in verse and we’re going to perform it in the car park and school are going to let us use real cigarettes as props if we promise not to light them.’
Violet gags.
I squint at her, unsure how to take her feedback.
The rehearsals are full on. I still try to hang out with my old friends but I’m writing or sitting in on rehearsals or going to new house parties with my new friends. I find myself cancelling on Aoife, The Twins. Missing Bianca’s calls. Not replying to Ronke’s texts. I tell myself that long friendships are like stews that get better, over time – left undisturbed, flavour deepening and concentrating days after. I can no longer justify sitting on a common freezing my arse off whilst a spliff I don’t even smoke is passed in front of my face. I see Lowe’s name slip to the back of my recents, until the restricted memory on my phone is at full capacity. I delete around him, not having the heart to lose his messages.
It’s Shreya’s birthday at the Rainforest Café, a dusty central London tourist attraction in a windowless basement that’s made to look like a rainforest and has a thunderstorm every half an hour. It’s quite exhilarating when the robotic rubber gorilla beats his faux-fur chest, or the clunking trunk of the mechanic elephant sucks up stagnant water, its screw-loose eye wobbling around its skull. Shreya has been given her parents’ chequebook to buy us all lunch and Coca-Colas. Bianca rebelliously orders a beer and Shreya holds up the menu and reminds, ‘Coca-Colas.’
Bianca mumbles, ‘Aren’t we a bit old for the Rainforest Café?’
Aoife snorts into the garlic tear ’n’ share bread.
‘Sorry, Ella,’ Bianca says, like there’s no possible way she can go on with Shreya’s birthday lunch unless she addresses the actual elephant in the room, ‘have you changed your perfume?’
‘Yeah’ – I try to own it – ‘it’s DKNY Women.’ I sniff my wrist. ‘Justin Timberlake isn’t the only cool one these days.’ But that goes down like a shit baguette.
‘We haven’t seen you for ages.’ Bianca pokes, ‘Do you not love us any more?’
‘Seriously? I am just at one of those schools where you get out what you put in and I want to do well.’
‘We all want to do well!’ Aoife bites into her cob salad.
‘That’s good to want to do well.’ Ronks picks at her noodles.
A Twin asks, ‘So will we see you in a production or anything soon?’
I just want this conversation to be over. The thought of The Twins dressed up in their silver spangly Oscar dresses, clutching opera binoculars, expecting West End ice-cream tubs, only to see me shouting about in a Sarah Kane play is too much.
‘I’ve actually got a show soon.’ After Violet’s reaction, I can’t bring myself to pitch Bad Wolf out loud.
‘Yay!’ a Twin claps.
Not Yay. I don’t want to invite them; they won’t get it (or the many layers). But I’ll feel bad if I don’t.
‘I’ll send you the details.’
The other Twin – the more outspoken of the two – let’s call her Twin 1 – asks, ‘And have you spoken to Lowe recently … ?’ His name spikes me right though the chest. Just because she’s going out with Sam now – as in Sam’s house, where I first met Lowe – she thinks she’s superior.
I haven’t spoken to Lowe in a while; I’ve been so whipped up with college. We still keep our friendship cooking but things are … scratchy. We are less like a stew but a risotto that needs a sturdy hand and constant feeding of stock in the form of love and attention. We are no longer silky smooth and unctuous. We are starting to catch to the bottom of the pan. To stick. To get stodgy. And it wouldn’t be long before we’d burn.
I say, ‘No, not as much as before. It’s not that I don’t want to see him, but you know what it’s like: he’s at some music college now, which is in the total opposite direction. Don’t you have to get like a tram there or something?’
‘Hmmm,’ Twin 2 adds like she knows otherwise. She’s going out with Nas; they’re double-dating friends like their life is a constant game of squash. ‘Still, you should probably just call him.’
‘What is this?’ I feel myself sharpening.
‘You don’t have to get so defensive, Ella; it wasn’t an attack. I just know he’d appreciate to hear from you, that’s all,’ Twin 1 says.
‘OK. Thanks.’ I sip my watered-down Coke. This is blatantly Pepsi. ‘Why, did he say something?’
‘Well … ’ Twin 2 checks with Twin 1 if it’s OK to speak and says, ‘We bumped into him on the common and he said you hadn’t really spoken to him since you started this new college.’
‘He hasn’t spoken to me either!’ I snap back, shooting the messenger dead.
‘He said he thought you might be too busy, that’s all,’ Twin 1 says.
‘So now I’m the one that’s too busy to see him? That’s hilarious.’ I’m thinking back to all the times he’s been off on his BMX and never called.
‘To be fair, you are quite busy,’ Bianca adds, letting her fork clang on her plate. Oh here we go …
‘I’ve written this production – the ONE I am going to invite you all to, obviously.’ I am flustered. ‘I’m rehearsing, reading—’
‘—hanging out with Dominique … ’ Aoife mimics my tone, letting her glasses slide down her nose like a challenging librarian – how did she get so cocky? I know Dom annoys them with her creativity and love for life. The others go quiet.
‘Aoife? What the hell?’ I laugh but not because it’s funny. ‘We go to the same college. What do you want, me to have no friends?’
Ronks sticks up for me again. ‘It’s good to meet new people.’ Thanks, Ronks. ‘You’re blossoming, Ella, and it’s glorious to see. Lowe will have to just suck it up.’ But then she adds, ‘You’ve always been too available for that guy anyway.’
‘What does that mean?’ I ask, my voice rising. ‘Ronke?’
Shreya looks about for a waiter, desperate to flag down her own surprise birthday cake (that we were meant to bring out) to slice through the tension.
‘It’s like you’re saying I’m some desperate people pleaser,’ I add.
‘No, we’re saying you’ve changed.’ Shreya drops the mic. ‘There. Said it. You’re different.’
The whole table is silent. Ouch. Changed is the worst. Changed means Judas.
‘Grown.’ Ronke finds a kinder word.
Bianca hides her face in the dessert menu; Aoife wipes a tear from behind her glasses. I’ve betrayed my friends by enjoying college. I’m having an affair on my whole entire past.
‘This isn’t even about Lowe, is it? It’s about all of you.’
‘God, I wish we’d never said anything now.’ Twin 1 folds her arms.
‘Me. The. Fuck. Too.’
Thunder and lightning strikes our table, the restaurant is thrown into darkness and drama, caught in an invisible rainstorm; a soundscape of hooting chimps, roaring lions and screeching birds; the gorilla beats his chest. A startled baby cries in a highchair on the table next to us.
‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!’ sing the waiters, winding through the tables with a cake on fire that, for some reason, Shreya’s pretending she’s never seen before, even though she ferried the bloody thing, along with the seventeen candles, in a fuck-off Tupperware, on the 159 bus.
And we’re all looking very separate. The spaces between our chairs, huge.
That evening – as an olive branch – I reluctantly send a text inviting my friends to our show next week. They all RSVP yes.
I can’t invite Lowe though. I’m not ready to share my new life with him. Or maybe share him with my new life. Why is that? Is it that I’m embarrassed of trying? I don’t want him to see that I’ve been having a go of living outside of him.
Knowing my friends are coming to the play has instantly snuffed out my creative flair. I worry about how certain lines will land and begin to panic-edit the play at the last minute. Then I fret I’ve cheated myself by compromising my vision from fear of what others will think.
Cut to:
Aoife, Bianca, Ronks, Shreya, The Twins and their boyfriends, Mum, Adam, Dad, Violet and Sonny, all there to support me at 4.25 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, shivering in the school car park to see the production of:
BAD WOLF
By Ella Cole
And no one can hear a single line as the wind drags my precious words off into the distance. The forecast said ‘sunny spells’ – what the hell spell do you call this? I wince and cringe during the entire production. Begging for it to be over. Wishing that I, too, could get eaten by the bad wolf. At the climactic ending, I’m sure I hear Aoife snort with laughter but when I look around, she is nodding at the scene, feigning pensive and it’s way better acting than ANY of these amateurs on stage.
At the end of the terrible production, one by one I hear the critics:
‘Well, that was interesting,’ says Violet.
‘Entertaining,’ says Dad.
‘Very avant-garde,’ says Stepdad Adam.
‘What does avant-garde mean?’ I ask.
‘It means weird as fuck,’ says Mum. ‘Are you coming in the car home?’
I see Dom and the others in their outlandish outfits, walking in the direction of the pub where the bar staff turn a blind eye at our lack of IDs, half-waiting for me to join them. Then there’s Aoife, Bianca, The Twins, Shrey and Ronks, standing around, talking about hot chocolates and jacket potatoes at the café near Bianca’s. Even though I’m meant to be celebrating with the cast, I can’t not go with my old friends; it would be unforgivable. Besides, in my eyes, there isn’t a great deal to celebrate.
‘I’ll get the train with this lot,’ I say to Mum. I see Dom and her wonderful long black coat with the colourful felt shapes turning away in disappointment, linking arms with the New Friends from college. To them, performing anything, good or bad, is what they love: playing, creating, experimenting. It’s the process; what other people think is irrelevant and so, yes, there is much to celebrate – our wonderful weirdness, the refusal to cringe at our freedom of expression regardless of critique.
My Old Friends wrap their arms around me like they won the friendship battle, like they always knew they would.
‘Now tell me please,’ Bianca says, ‘what the FUCK was that play about?’
And we all laugh.
As we are heading out of the school gates, this guy (from my class but we’ve not spoken yet; he’s quiet – his name, maybe, Nile?) in a denim jacket who has the most charismatic face in the entire world, a big hooked nose and massive brown eyes, with the greatest Madonna gap in-between his teeth, walks past and without stopping says, ‘Great play.’
I flush rose with embarrassment as our eyes hug and say, ‘Thanks,’ but he’s already gone.
PING!
‘Who was that fitty?’ Aoife whispers in my ear.
‘Some guy from school,’ I say, a smile creeping across my face.
That weekend Dominique and I go to a wild house party with the New Friends. I’m wearing a pink spaghetti-strap dress covered in palm trees that Dom has convinced me I look ‘astounding’ in. A guy is going around cracking imaginary eggs on knee caps and letting the invisible ‘yolk’ trickle down because apparently it’s like an orgasm. If that’s true, I really don’t get the hype over orgasms. We play a game called ‘Nervous’, where you have to let someone run their hands up your leg and see how high the person can climb your thighs until you shout ‘NERVOUS!’ There’s a hot tub and the whole party clamber in with their clothes on, share bottles of sour alcohol and play spin the bottle – a real game of spin the bottle where everyone actually plays. I’m standing on the sidelines because I don’t want to catch crabs.
He’s in the garden, holding a bottle of cider. Nile. He looks like he’s walked out of the Seventies.
I point him out to Dom. ‘That’s the guy who said he liked our play.’
‘In that old brown suit?’ she asks.
I nod, yeah.
He turns to face me, under the garden lights, and smiles. We stare at each other from either side of the bubbling tub, the bottle swinging back and forth in our direction, as kids from our year group kiss.
He appears beside me with a ‘Hey.’ He congratulates me on the play, for, and I quote, having the bollocks to throw shit around. I try not to take the word shit personally, even though the damage is already done.
‘Oh, you’ve got an accent?’ Like clotted cream and rolling hills.
‘It comes out more when I’ve had a drink.’ He laughs. ‘I’m from Devon.’
He then tells me he is absolutely head over heels in love with London and I laugh. ‘I’m not joking,’ he says. ‘I just cannot get over this place. The history, the clothes, the libraries, the literature, the shops. Do you have any idea how lucky you are to have grown up here? You have all this stuff on your doorstep! You can just walk to a gig! The theatre! And the food, my God. I don’t sleep cos I’m so excited by it.’ He laughs. ‘I miss the sea though.’ His face is calming. Like the sea. He says he’s not been to Camden. Ever.
‘What?’ ‘I say. ‘You’re going to die.’
The next day, Nile and I meet up at the station to go to Camden. He’s wearing a Smiths t-shirt and a smile – toothpaste fresh. On the Tube, I wonder if people think he’s my boyfriend. I take the lead like a tour guide. We stroll the markets: the overpriced band t-shirts, the latex platform boots, tattoo and piercing shops and sticks of incense, the troughs of luminous orange sweet and sour chicken. We sit by the canal, the sun breaking through the clouds, and eat pulled noodles. It’s nice; it feels good. Simple. And easy.
Scarily, I find myself wanting to call Nile ‘Lowe’. I’ve never called anyone else ‘Lowe’ before. The rare name, to me, holds such weight. Nile must be pressing on that familiar affectionate pad in my brain – I can’t help but think of Lowe; what he’s doing today, who he’s with. How much it would break my heart to see him sitting by some sunny canal with a girl who isn’t me. But I have to move on with my life. I’m almost seventeen now, so this time with Nile, I’m trying my very hardest not to friend-zone myself.
Pretty soon we’re glued to one another. Some lunches, we skip the canteen and go to the deli. Nile speaks Italian to the staff because his mum is Italian and they can’t believe it and feel sorry for him that he’s studying so far from home – as if home is in actual Italy. ‘You’ll starve!’ they say and gift him sheets of fatty ham, thin as glass, in waxed paper and posh plump olives with the pips still in, which Nile can expertly spit out from the corner of his mouth without having to nibble the flesh like a mini apple like I do. Once, for no reason at all, they give Nile a whole panettone that comes in a massive, decorated box with a ribbon, a box so flamboyant you’d expect to find Marie Antoinette’s shoes inside. He quite sexily rips massive hunks off the sweet bread throughout the day, offering me handfuls.
Nile is the best actor in our year group. He’s shy in real life and yet, on stage, he evolves into this charismatic, flamboyant wild angry man who is good at playing gangsters; shouting and pulling at his hair and punching his chest like the gorilla in the Rainforest Café, letting himself spit when he talks on stage, spritzing through the spotlights and we sigh in awe, like, now THAT’S what I call acting! Once he lets himself get slapped during a performance and the whole theatre gasps – even the orchestra stop playing their strings for a second – and real tears bulge in his eyes and in the eyes of the actor who slapped him (who never meant to hit him that hard), and Nile’s left with a red diamond of a hand mark on his cheek. Everyone is starstruck.
It is all very fit.
Nile is the teacher’s new prodigy.
He is also my new crush.