The first problem was the fifty-yard distance between us. I would see her and smile and she would see me and smile. So far, so good. Then I had to walk to her with her staring at me. I knew how to walk, I had been walking for about ten years at that point and had been practising walking throughout my day at school. But I felt so self-conscious under her gaze that my walking skills abandoned me. My normal straightforward walking style was temporarily replaced by a swagger that even Liam Gallagher would have laughed at. I also struggled with direction, often colliding with other people, painfully smacking my hand against a lamp post or brushing along the hedge that ran from the school gate to the wall she was perched upon.
By the time I reached her (covered in leaves and with a sore hand), my mouth would be so dry from nerves that occasionally no words came out at all, just a sound similar to the one a dog makes when you accidentally step on its foot.
We would have an awkward conversation while she would flick her hair from one side to the other. This hair flicking was really quite something. She had fair hair in a bob and would move all of it to one side of her face and then a few moments later flick it back to the other side. I don’t know if this was a habit or if she couldn’t decide which side looked better; all I know is that it made me look like a tennis spectator, regularly shifting my head to the left and right to follow it. It only added to the hypnotic effect she was having on me.
Between her bobbing hair, she was beautiful. I was fresh-faced, narrow-eyed and chubby. I may not have looked like Matt Goss from Bros but I was determined to maximize whatever attributes I did have. My best feature was, and is, my perfect teeth. The problem is that I don’t know if teeth are that high up the list of what girls find attractive. But it’s all I had, so I felt I needed to show them off. I would thrust them out of my mouth, like a Bee Gee at the dentist. So I basically looked like a Chinese Bee Gee watching the tennis dressed as a ladybird wearing Kylie Minogue’s hot pants. I hoped she fancied me.
She didn’t.
We had one ‘date’. I flew her to Paris on a private jet and we watched the show at the Moulin Rouge and spent the night at the Ritz. Not quite. We went to the Odeon cinema in Swiss Cottage. Our romance was as successful as the film we saw, Slipstream starring Mark Hamill. Exactly. She said there wasn’t the right chemistry between us. I was devastated, heartbroken, and blamed my chemistry teacher.
Lucy was just the first in a long list of infatuations with girls that never came to fruition. In fact until I met my wife, Kitty, when I was twenty-two years old, my love life may have been the least successful in history. Teenage girls simply weren’t interested in me. Nowadays, I have plenty of teenage girls screaming my name at my gigs, waiting outside and trembling when they meet me. Where were they when I needed them? If only I had released my first DVD when I was thirteen.
When Lucy rejected me, I was heartbroken. ‘There’re plenty more fish in the sea’ tends to be the consoling wisdom of your friends. But it was useless.
‘I don’t want a fish,’ I would squeal with my head in my hands.
‘It’s just an analogy,’ my friends would explain.
‘Well, it’s a shit analogy, fish stocks in Britain have reduced by 10 per cent due to overfishing, the EU have tried to step in and introduce quotas, but it’s no use, I’ll never meet another girl.’
That summer I went to Corfu with my best friend Sam, who had forgiven me for beating him in the boxing (it wasn’t just a beating, it was a devastating display of my superiority). Sam is properly posh, he’s the real deal. He has lords and ladies on one side of the family and royalty on the other. He’s in line to the throne, although it would have to involve a lot of unforeseen deaths or a bomb at a Royal wedding he was running late for. I spoke just as ‘proper’ as him. As you know, my dad was Canadian and my mum from Hungarian stock. I don’t have Sam’s pedigree, but in his presence I too sounded like an aristocrat.
I’ve always picked up other people’s accents very easily. The problem is that rather than use them as an impression I tended to keep them. Without a doubt I get this from my mum, who embarrassingly takes the accent of whoever she is talking to and starts speaking like that herself. This led to countless cringeworthy scenarios during my youth. If she was in an Italian restaurant and the waiter said, ‘Whatta can I getta you?’ she would reply, ‘I woulda like a Spaghetty Bolognesey anda Garlico Breado, thank you, yes, please.’ What made it worse was that she wasn’t that good at accents and would sound more like Manuel from Fawlty Towers. (I’d like to add that Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel, is a very fine actor, and I’d like to wish him and his family well.)
The worst was when she addressed Pila. Pila was a very sweet little Filipino lady who cleaned our big Hampstead house during the few months we were rich. Pila could barely speak English, so in return, my mum would barely speak English back to her. ‘Mis … Kati … would … like … me … do … now?’ Pila would hesitantly enquire.
‘Pi … la,’ my mum would respond equally slowly, ‘must … you … now … very please … do … How do you say? … Ironing?’
The habit nearly became dangerous in a newsagent when my mum was buying some magazines from a six-foot dreadlocked West Indian man. ‘Whatsup, Blood,’ rapped my mother, ‘I is lookin’ to buy dis here readin’ material, Jah Rastafari.’ Luckily Steve and the newsagent were old friends from Brixton, and he managed to diffuse the situation.
So Sam and I went to Corfu sounding like Princes William and Harry. We went with his parents, Hugh and Harriet, his brother Luke and his friend from Eton (wait for it …) Quentin Farquar. Hugh always wore corduroy trousers that were one size too small for him, even on the beach. Harriet was lovely jubbly, Luke was like Sam, but older, and Quentin was a perfectly named posh wanker.
I’ll never forget Quentin turning to me on the flight and embarrassing me. ‘You’re quite plebby, aren’t you?’ he mocked. ‘I bet you say things like settee rather than sofa, and serviette rather than napkin, and toilet rather than loo.’
I didn’t really know what he was on about. His class teasing made me afraid to speak for the remainder of the flight for fear of saying the wrong thing. In hindsight what I should have said was ‘Hey, stupid name snob, what does that say?’ and pointed at the ‘Toilets’ sign on the plane. ‘It doesn’t say “loos”, does it? Have you got on the wrong flight? This is Pleb Airways, mate. You’re fucking with the wrong fake posh boy. Why don’t you ask Sam what happened in the boxing tournament?’
When in Corfu, Sam and I were on the hunt for girls or, as Quentin called them, ‘top totty’ (I think Quentin is probably still a virgin). We both had suntans and Ray-Bans and were feeling confident. Sam’s dad rented us a couple of Vespas, and we hit the local town. It was actually more of a historic village. But we weren’t perturbed. We had until nine o’clock, our Corfu curfew, and were determined to make the most of it. We scoured the streets. If we had been ‘on the pull’ for elderly Greek men playing cards, we would have been in luck, but other than them the streets were deserted.
Finally we spotted two similarly aged young girls and devised a carefully thought-out plan of seduction. ‘Let’s follow them,’ Sam suggested. And follow them we did, for about twenty minutes, round and round the village. When they stopped, we stopped. When they continued to walk, so did we. We wanted to be cads but were acting more like private investigators. The problem was that we didn’t really have a plan beyond ‘Let’s follow them.’ The two girls then turned and started walking towards us. It seemed like the ‘Let’s follow them’ strategy had worked after all. Sam and I frantically styled our hair as the girls approached. They were surprisingly attractive.
‘Bingo,’ I whispered to Sam.
The girls halted in front of us and with thick Liverpudlian accents screeched the unforgettable, ‘Why the fuck do you think you’re following us, you little turds?’
Sam and I had no answer and apologized. ‘We’re awfully sorry,’ we muttered and went home. That was as close as we
came to pulling.
Within months, however, I was to experience my first kiss. Doesn’t that sound romantic? ‘My first kiss.’ Well, it wasn’t. Sam invited me to a Summer Ball frequented by upper-class-toff teens. It was held at the Hammersmith Palais in London. If you’ve ever flicked through the pages of Tatler magazine and seen the party photos towards the back, you’ll know the sort of people who were there. ‘Horsey’ doesn’t come close to describing them. Something happens to your mouth when you speak too posh; it becomes slightly misshapen as if in a constant state of preparation to say something along the lines of, ‘Er hillar, jolly good.’
All the Hooray-Henry boys were dressed in black tie, probably in suits passed down through generations of gentry. All the girls were in figure-hugging little black dresses and had names like Arabella shortened to ‘Bells’ or Pippa shortened to ‘Pips’. The object of the ball was to use your odd-shaped posh mouth to ‘snog’ as many other odd-shaped posh mouths as you could. My mum hired me a suit from Moss Bros and a clip-on bow tie, and I went with Sam and four other cologned young men.
We were dropped off by our parents. ‘Have a good time. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ they hollered, as we disappeared inside clutching our phenomenally expensive tickets. I was nervous and self-conscious. Was tonight the night I would meet the girl of my dreams?
I will never forget the sight that met me when I adjusted my eyes to the Hammersmith Palais lighting. Literally hundreds of underage upper-class kids with their faces stuck together, ‘getting off’ with each other. Wow. Maybe it had something to do with them rebelling against their suppressed stiff-upper-lipped lifestyle. Maybe they were just making the most of it until they were carted back to their single-sexed boarding schools. Whatever the explanation my immediate thought was, ‘Surely I’m going to pull tonight.’
I turned to express my optimism to Sam only to find him with his tongue already down someone’s throat. My other friends also ploughed straight in, mouths open and latching on to whoever was nearest. There are very few things in life as embarrassing as standing next to a kissing couple, so I wandered on to the dance floor and danced, for some time, on my own. Just as I was mid-twist to Chubby Checker’s ‘The Twist’, I saw Sam and another friend, Alex. ‘Hey,’ I shouted over the music, ‘how’s it going?’
‘Forty-six,’ said Alex.
‘Fifty-two,’ said Sam.
‘What? What are you talking about? Fifty-two what?’ I genuinely enquired.
‘Girls!’ they said in unison, now both twisting too.
‘You’ve snogged forty-six and fifty-two girls tonight?’ I asked, amazed.
‘Yeah,’ said Sam.
‘Forty-seven!’ said Alex coming up for air from his latest conquest on the dance floor.
‘How many have you snogged, Michael?’ asked Sam.
‘None,’ I admitted. ‘How do you do it? What do you say? Do you say anything? Shall I just start licking someone’s face? Help me.’
Sam explained that all he was doing was approaching girls and asking whether they wanted to go and sit down. This was code for ‘snog’. They would then take a seat together and he would rack up another digit on his tally.
‘Go for it, Michael. Find a pretty girl and ask her if she wants to sit down with you on one of the sofas,’ Sam encouraged.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘That’s all, just ask if she wants to sit with me on one of the settees?’
‘Sofas!’ Sam corrected. ‘You’re such a pleb.’ And with that, he disappeared.
I now felt I had more purpose. I saw a space open up on one of the sofas and scanned the dance floor. And there she was, without a doubt the best-looking girl at the ball. ‘That’s her,’ I thought. ‘I’d rather kiss her than a hundred of the others.’ I twisted over to where she was dancing as Chubby Checker continued to sing. ‘How long is this song?’ I thought. ‘It must be the long version.’ She had dark hair and beautiful green eyes and fitted perfectly into her obligatory little black dress. It was as if she was the only girl on the dance floor, the only girl in the world. My heart was pounding. I moved in closer, a bit too close. I moved back a bit. I caught her eye.
‘I would like to go and sit down.’ I fluffed my line. Rather than ask her to sit down, I had simply informed her of my own movements. She looked at me, puzzled. I quickly tried again: ‘Would you like to come and sit down on the sof-tee with me?’
This was better. At least it was a proposition of some kind. However, I had forgotten whether sofa or settee was the correct thing to say and ended up creating my own chair, the sof-tee. I corrected myself again: ‘The sofa. Would you like to sit down with me on the sofa?’
There it was, the big question. It was out there. I’m not exaggerating when I say it took her some time to come up with an answer. She literally mulled it over, looking me up and down as I continued twisting to a record I was now convinced was stuck.
‘All right, then,’ she finally said.
I’d pulled!
Just.
Together we found a vacant slot between two other sets of snoggers. She was gorgeous, smelled wonderful and her perfect lips were attached to a perfect mouth, not like the back pages of Tatler at all. We sat down, she took out her chewing gum and within moments we were kissing. In the middle of the Hammersmith Palais surrounded by girls of loose morals, I had finally found one loose enough to kiss me. The sensation of kissing for the first time was extraordinary. Our tongues met with all the passion of a Magimix. Hers was swirling round and round, so mine did the same, chasing it. There was so much swirling that we started to froth a bit and my saliva was in danger of becoming stiff peaks. Then it was over. I thanked her, way too much; she returned the chewing gum to her mouth and stood up to leave.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked, worried I would lose her for ever.
‘Izzy,’ she said.
‘Easy?’ I questioned. Just my luck, the only girl I can pull is actually called ‘Easy’.
‘No,’ she said, ‘Izzy, short for Elizabeth.’
And then she was gone.
Sam’s final total was ninety-one and Alex’s eighty-seven. Mine was one. But I didn’t care, because I was convinced she was ‘the one’. I was in love with her. I told my four friends that I had kissed the most beautiful girl at the ball. They seemed happy for me. ‘Her name was Izzy,’ I told them through my perma-grin.
It transpired that they all knew Izzy. They’d all snogged her that night. I was just a number on her tally. It was also the common consensus that she wasn’t a very good kisser. ‘Kissed like a blender,’ somebody said. I had to agree. I was deflated, but not for long. I was off the mark. Surely things could only get better now. I had a newfound confidence. I had blender-kissed some chick called Izzy, and now I was a player. I had experience.
The next time I saw Lucy Protheroe sitting on the wall outside my school, I played it super-cool. No problems walking the fifty yards now.
‘Hi, Michael, how have you been?’ she asked, between hair flicks.
‘Good,’ I said. As if I couldn’t care less.
‘Are you going to the disco?’ she asked.
The major event on the school calendar was the Arnold House Disco. All the local girls’ schools were invited, and the gymnasium was transformed into a discothèque. I’d been dreaming about this night for ages. But I played it cool.
‘Maybe,’ I said with more nonchalance than I knew I was capable of.
She seemed intrigued by my cocky persona.
‘What have you been up to?’ she asked.
‘Snogging,’ I coolly announced.
‘What? In school?’ she probed.
‘No, me and my friends went to a ball the other night, and let’s just say … I got a little bit of action,’ I said, trying to make her jealous.
‘Oh, the one at the Hammersmith Palais. I can’t believe you went to that. That’s for like, the poshest people on earth. Apparently everyone snogs everyone, it’s gross. I know a girl called Izzy went a
nd snogged, like, every boy there. But I’m glad you met someone, what’s her name? Where does she go to school?’
My face went bright red as I looked for an excuse to leave. A National Express coach drove past us.
‘I’d better go, that’s my bus,’ and I ran after the coach.
‘Where are you going, Michael? … That’s a coach … to Birmingham …’ she cried as I sprinted after it.
All week the school was buzzing at the prospect of this year’s school disco. I was thirteen years old and in my last year at Arnold House. I went shopping with my mum for my outfit and ended up opting for a fluorescent red shirt. I can’t remember where we bought it; all I remember is that it glowed in the dark, and I truly believed that my increased visibility would give me the edge over my male rivals. One of my mother’s friend’s daughters, Jessica Taylor, was also going, so my mother organized her to be my ‘date’. Before you get excited and think I may have ‘pulled’ before I even got to the disco, let me just explain that Jessica was 6 foot 3 inches and had a thick moustache.
Steve had a new ‘company car’ that David Rosenberg had given him to replace the written-off BMW 6-Series. It was a black Ford Orion 1.6i with ‘new car’ smell. It was a balmy summer’s night, a perfect opportunity to use the sunroof which came as standard. Steve and I picked up my ‘date’, Jessica, and he chauffeured us to the disco. I sat in the back with my red shirt glowing, and Jessica sat in the front with her head sticking out of the sunroof, her moustache blowing in the warm wind.
It was so weird arriving at school at night. I looked at Lucy’s empty wall in the crepuscular (surely the most impressive word I’ve used so far. It basically means dim) light. I was so over her. As soon as I shake off Jessica, I’ll have the pick of all the girls in the Borough of Camden. Jessica and I put our coats away and nervously walked into my school gymnasium, the sound of Wham!’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ getting louder with every step. The gym was unrecognizable; there was a glitter ball, flashing coloured lights, and smoke pumped out of a smoke machine. Nobody was dancing. All the boys were camped out in one corner and all the girls in the opposite corner. I looked up to Jessica’s face; the lights were reflecting off my fluorescent shirt making her moustache look like it was on fire. Almost in unison we said we wanted to find our friends. So we each took our places on our respective sides of the gym.
Life and Laughing: My Story Page 10
