Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

  When I get home that night, after the longest day’s work of my life, I log on to Facebook to survey the photographic damage from the night before. There, at the top of my homepage, is a close-up photo of Lauren’s enormous knickers loaded by Hayley into an album called ‘Lost Property’. Everyone from the party is tagged. The caption reads only: ‘WHOSE PANTS ARE THESE?’

  A Hellraiser Heads to Leamington Spa

  The first time I got drunk, I was ten. I was a guest at Natasha Bratt’s bat mitzvah along with four other lucky chosen girls from our year. In the sun-flooded marquee in their Mill Hill back garden, the wine was flowing and the smoked salmon was circling; the women’s hair was blow-dried into aggressively undulating trajectories, their lips a uniform frosted beige. And for reasons I will never understand, all of us girls – clearly prepubescent in our Tammy Girl strapless dresses and butterfly clips in our hair – were given glass after glass of champagne by the catering staff.

  At first, it just felt like a wave of warmth flushing through my body, my blood sprinting, my epidermis humming. Then like all the screws in all my joints had been loosened, leaving me as springy and light as just-proved dough. And then came the chatting – the funny stories, the dramatic impressions of teachers and parents, the rude jokes, the best swear words. (To this day, this three-step progression is still how I experience initial drunkenness.)

  The father–daughter dance to Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ was brought to an abrupt and premature finish when one of the girls, slightly further along than the rest of us, threw herself belly-first on to the dance floor and wiggled manically underneath the legs of both parties, like a flapping fish out of water. I quickly followed suit before we were both removed and told off by an aggrieved uncle. But the night had only just begun.

  Flooded with newfound confidence, I decided it was time for my first kiss, followed by my second (his best friend), followed by my third (the first’s brother). Everyone got stuck in, swapping and trying out kissing partners as if they were shared puddings at a table. Eventually, this suburban child orgy was broken up and we were all taken to the front room and given black coffee; the door was locked and our parents were called to come pick us up. So unprecedented was the bad behaviour, we were reprimanded a second time by our headmistress on Monday and scolded for ‘representing the school in a bad light’ (this was often an accusation thrown at me during my scholastic years and it always struck me as a slightly weak takedown, particularly when I had never chosen to represent the school; rather my parents had chosen the school to represent me).

  I was never the same after that night, the contents of which provided enough material to fill the pages of my diaries well into my teens. I had, at far too young an age, got the taste for alcohol. I begged for small, diluted glasses of wine at any family event. I’d slurp the sweet, throat-catching syrup from the bellies of liqueur chocolates at Christmas in the hope of a hit. At fourteen, I finally found out where my mum and dad hid the key to their drinks cabinet, and would knock back capfuls of cheap French brandy when they were out of the house, enjoying the warm, woozy haze it pulled over the task of homework. Sometimes I’d rope Farly into my furtive, suburban binging – we’d swig at their Beefeater gin and refill it with water, then sit cross-legged on the plush carpet and watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, drunkenly fighting over the correct answer.

  I have never hated anything as much as I hated being a teenager. I could not have been more ill-suited to the state of adolescence. I was desperate to be an adult; desperate to be taken seriously. I hated relying on anyone for anything. I’d have sooner cleaned floors than be given pocket money or walked three miles in the rain at night than be given a lift home by a parent. I was looking up the price of one-bedroom flats in Camden when I was fifteen, so I could get a head start on saving up with my babysitting money. I was using my mum’s recipes and dining table to host ‘dinner parties’ at the same age, forcing my friends round for rosemary roast chicken tagliatelle and raspberry pavlovas with a Frank Sinatra soundtrack, when all they wanted to do was eat burgers and go bowling. I wanted my own friends, my own schedule, my own home, my own money and my own life. I found being a teenager one big, frustrating, mortifying, exposing, co-dependent embarrassment that couldn’t end fast enough.

  Alcohol, I think, was my small act of independence. It was the one way I could feel like an adult. All the by-products of drinking that my friends were hooked on – the snogging, the squealing, the secret-swapping, smoking and dancing – were fun, but it was the pertinent adultness of alcohol that I loved the most. I would live out make-believe vignettes of mundane adult life. I would confidently wander into local off-licences and browse the backs of bottles while having pretend conversations into my Nokia 3310 about ‘a casual drinks party this Saturday’ or ‘a nightmare day in the office’ or ‘where I left the car’. While holding my dog-eared copy of The Female Eunuch (ironically, mainly decorative), I would place myself in the middle of the corridor within earshot of teachers in the four o’clock rush out of school on a Friday and shout, ‘WE’RE STILL ON FOR DINNER, YEAH?’ at Farly, ‘I FANCY A FULL-BODIED BOTTLE OF RED!’ and enjoy the slightly quizzical look on their faces as they passed me. Well, screw you, I would think. I’m doing something you do too. I’m drinking. I’m an adult. Take me fucking seriously.

  It was only when I went to boarding school at sixteen that I really cultivated a habit for hard drinking. My co-ed school was the last of the English boarding schools to have a bar on-campus for sixth formers. On Thursdays and Saturdays, through a token system, hundreds of sixteen to eighteen-year-olds descended on a small basement, claimed their two cans of beer and rubbed up against each other on a dark, sweaty dance floor to the sound of ‘Beenie Man and Other Dance Hall Legends’. My boarding house was, luckily, right opposite the bar, which allowed a swift stumble home come eleven o’clock, where our matron would lay out boxes of pizza for us to drunkenly gobble together. It also meant that our house garden was used as a hedonistic, after-hours playground, and half an hour after curfew, my housemistress would strap a pit helmet to her head and go out into the bushes foraging for semi-clothed, fumbling pupils. After sending any girl found in the garden up to bed with no pizza and sending the boy back to his house, there was always a wonderful moment when we’d overhear her calling the boy’s housemaster from her study.

  ‘I found your James behind my rhododendron bush with my Emily with his trousers down,’ she’d say in her broad Yorkshire accent. ‘I’ve sent him on his way, he should be with you in ten minutes.’

  All the teachers knew we drank before we got to the bar. We’d smuggle bottles of vodka in our suitcases hidden in empty, washed-out shampoo bottles; we had a never-ending supply of Marlboro Lights under our mattresses. We covered the scent of our tracks with cheap perfume and menthol gum; when I smoked a spliff and had bloodshot eyes, I’d wet my hair as if I’d just got out of the shower and blame it on the shampoo. The general unspoken rule was: we’re trusting you to know your limits, so don’t be a dick about it. Drink and smoke, but don’t behave badly and don’t make it obvious. On the whole, the system worked. There was always the odd kid who took it too far and smashed a chair or tried to hump a young maths teacher on duty, but the rest of us managed to hold it together. The teachers were, on the whole, very respectful of the pupils; they treated us like young adults rather than children. The only years of my adolescence that I enjoyed were the last two spent at boarding school.

  University is never going to be an ideal place for someone with an unhealthy relationship with booze, but my God I chose the worst one imaginable the day I submitted a UCAS application to Exeter. Nestled in the green, rolling hills of Devon, Exeter has long been known as a university for half-soaked, semi-literate Hooray Henrys. If you ever meet a middle-aged man who still plays lacrosse, knows every rule to every drinking game and sings better Latin than English when he’s drunk, the chances are he went to Exeter University – or ‘The Green Welly Uni’ as it
was known in the 1980s. I only applied because Farly applied. Farly only applied because it was good for Classics and she liked the seaside. I only went because I didn’t get on to the one course I really wanted at Bristol, and my parents told me I had to go to university.

  To this day, I am convinced that the three years I spent at Exeter left me more stupid than when I arrived. I did little to no work; I went from being a voracious bookworm to not reading a single page of a book that wasn’t a set text (and I don’t think I even finished one of those). From September 2006 to July 2009, all I did was drink and shag. All anyone did was drink and shag, pausing only briefly to eat a kebab, watch an episode of Eggheads or shop for a fancy-dress outfit for a ‘Lashed of the Summer Wine’ themed pub crawl. Far from being the hub of radical thinking and passionate activism I had hoped for, it was the most politically apathetic place I had ever been. During my entire time there, there were only two protests I was aware of: the first, a student-body stand against the removal of curly fries from the Student Union Pub’s menu; the second, one young woman’s petition to have a bridleway built on campus so she could travel to and from her lectures on a pony.

  I would deeply resent the years of my life wasted at Exeter were it not for the one thing that made the whole sorry experience worthwhile: the women I met. Within the first week, Farly and I found a gang of girls who would become our closest friends. There was Lacey, a gobby and gorgeous golden-haired drama student; AJ, a luminous brunette from a strict all-girls school who sang hymns when she got drunk; Sabrina, the charming blonde, full of life and wide-eyed enthusiasm. There was South London girl Sophie, red-headed, funny and boyish, always coming round to fix things in our flats. And then there was Hicks.

  Hicks was our ringleader – a Suffolk-born Stig of the Dump with a bleach-blonde bob, wild eyes in a cape of shimmery turquoise shadow, long, coltish, teenage legs and tits I could identity in a line-up, because she had them out so much. I had never met anyone like her; she was bold and dangerous, quick-witted and daring. Nothing seemed to ever have a consequence when you were with Hicks. It was as if she operated as an empress in her own kingdom with its own rules where the night finished at one p.m. and the next night began the following afternoon, where an old man you met in a pub would end up as a temporary lodger in your house. She was entirely, wholly, completely present; impossibly glamorous and enviably rock ’n’ roll. Her reckless, limitless appetite for a good time set the tone for the following three years.

  The atmosphere at Exeter was so aggressively laddish and male, I often wonder if it is an explanation for why we behaved the way we did when we were students; whether my all-female group of friends was trying to match that energy with our behaviour. It was a perpetuation of American frat-boy culture from the films we had grown up watching, intersecting with the boorish hierarchical system of public school. We enjoyed group-crouching urination behind skips (Farly and I were once caught out and reprimanded for doing this on the outskirts of a graveyard, bare bottoms on show for passing traffic – unfortunately one of them happened to be a police car). We stole traffic cones which piled up in our living room. We picked each other up and threw each other around on club dance floors. We talked about sex like it was a team sport. We were puffed up on bravado and rodomontade; and we operated with ruthless honesty and zero competition with each other, often boring each other’s prospective conquests senseless with long, drunk lectures about how amazing our friend was.

  In the ramshackle house with the red door in which I lived with AJ, Farly and Lacey, we had a ‘visitors’ book’ for ‘overnight guests’ to sign on their way out the next morning. There was a defunct 1980s television in the back garden that sat there, come rain or shine. Slugs that covered our hallway, that I’d save one by one after a night out by taking them outside and putting them in a special corner of grass (Lacey later admitted they put pellets down for them but never told me). It was a time of heightened, eccentric debauchery. A world where two of my friends stayed up all night dancing before heading to Exeter cathedral for a Sunday service and warbling hymns while wearing gold Lycra; a world where Farly once got up for a nine a.m. lecture to find me and Hicks still downstairs drinking Baileys with a middle-aged cab driver we’d invited in the night before. We were the worst type of students imaginable. We were reckless and self-absorbed and childish and violently carefree. We were Broken Britain – in fact, we used to shout it as we walked to pubs. Now, I cross roads and get off tubes a stop early to avoid being in the direct vicinity of the exact type of noisy, silly, self-satisfied exhibitionists that we were.

  If I ever wanted to gauge the extent of the binge-drinking culture in my group of friends at my university, I only had to see it in the eyes of the people who visited. My little brother, Ben, came to stay for a couple of days when he was seventeen and was ‘appalled’ at the half-clothed, barely conscious apparitions he met in the clubs I took him to, taking particular umbrage at an area of one bar nicknamed ‘Legend’s Corner’ because only members of the rugby team were allowed to sit there. He later told my parents that his three-day visit to Exeter was one of the main reasons he refused to apply to university and chose to go to drama school instead.

  Lauren went to read English at Oxford and a few times we did a sort of university exchange programme. She’d get the Megabus down to Exeter and knock some brain cells out of her head for a few days with me; I’d return to Oxford with her and wander round the Magdalen deer park, imagining an alternate life where I read books and wrote bi-weekly essays and lived in a spire-topped house with no television(s).

  On Lauren’s first ever visit, it was as if I was teaching her how to be a student. On a night out, I ordered a bottle of five-quid rosé from the bar.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Is that just for the two of us?’

  ‘No, that’s just for me,’ I replied as Lauren looked round at my various friends all carrying separate bottles of wine and one plastic glass from the bar. ‘We get one each.’ The following day, lying around on the sofa eating overpriced, sweet, doughy pizza, she watched her first episode of America’s Next Top Model. That afternoon she met the lacrosse player on campus who famously began writing his Human Geography dissertation in the pub at two p.m. on the day it was due in. Lauren said she always went back to Oxford feeling relaxed and refreshed after a much-needed break from her exhausting university experience of intellectual peacocking. After a few days in Oxford, I always returned to Exeter feeling a bit low and ready to leave.

  When illustrating the bubble of unanswered bad behaviour with no punishment that was my university experience, I often return to a particular anecdote involving Sophie – now a successful and respected journalist covering crucial LGBTQ and women’s issues – to remember how far we’ve come. One night, having left a Thai full moon party at a quayside club – dressed as a Thai fisherman – she lay by the water next to a pissing male friend, thinking she was about to vomit on account of the eight-shot bucket of Vodka Shark she had just purchased and consumed. To her side was a half-comatose friend of a friend who was lying on her back like a starfish. Sophie spotted an opportunity both to take a young woman back to safety and to potentially get lucky. But once she got to the girl’s halls of residence, it was clear this wasn’t on the cards, so she got another cab back to the club where she ordered another bucket of Vodka Shark. She then met a boy who said he was heading to a local late-hours curry house for a takeaway. Sophie went with him, chanting ‘PASANDA, PASANDA’ while banging on the shop counter. They ordered their food, went to his house and ate a mountain of curry. Sophie was sick into a perspex bowl in the boy’s bedroom and left it on the side. She passed out in his bed, woke up the next morning in her fisherman’s costume, glanced at the vomit bowl but did nothing about it and then took the boy’s micro scooter and gleefully scooted all the way home.

  ‘We were just trying to collect stories for each other,’ she tells me now, whenever I question how we could all have had such an infantile appetite for recklessness and s
uch little self-awareness. ‘That’s what we traded in. It wasn’t to show off to anyone else but each other.’

  It was obvious that while everyone loved drinking, I really loved drinking. I’d down booze at breakneck speed. A lot of it was simply that I loved the taste and sensation of booze, but I also drank as a student for the same reason I drank on my own at fourteen: pouring alcohol into my brain was like pouring water into squash. Everything diluted and mellowed. The girl who was sober was riddled with anxieties, convinced everyone she loved was going to die, fretting about what everyone thought of her. The girl who was drunk smoked a cigarette with her toes ‘for a laugh’ and cartwheeled on dance floors.

  I graduated from Exeter a month before my twenty-first birthday and come September I was a student in London, studying for a Masters in Journalism. This was, believe it or not, the year in which my partying peaked; I had been unceremoniously and brutally dumped and I threw myself into weight loss to sidetrack myself from heartbreak, and I drank and smoked for the distraction.

  I still hadn’t lost the taste for it. It was just as exciting at twenty-one as it had been at Natasha Bratt’s bat mitzvah eleven years earlier. I remember sitting on the tube on one of many Saturday nights that year, looking out on the glittering city as I journeyed from the suburbs to central London on the Metropolitan line that rode like a cantering horse on the tracks. All of London is mine, I thought. Anything is possible.

  My hedonism this year came to a head in a particularly un-rock ’n’ roll way: a long journey in a minicab. In my defence, Hicks started it. In our third year of university, she became a household name amongst the student body of Exeter when she left a night out at a bar on the High Street, got into a taxi and asked the driver to take her to Brighton. She spent every penny she had getting there and stayed on the floor of a hotel suite with her married friends who were there on a romantic getaway. She returned to Exeter the following week to tell the tale.