Sixteen, Sixty-One
Page 1
NATALIE LUCAS
Sixteen, Sixty-One
A memoir
authonomy
by HarperCollinsPublishers
For Trish, who saved my life
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Two
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Three
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Thanking
About Authonomy
Footnotes
Letter 1 transcript
Letter 2 transcript
Letter 3 transcript
About the Book
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
14th May 2007
Dear Matthew
Dear Mr Wright
Dear Albert Sumac
Dear Bastard
Dear Ghost,
My therapist keeps asking what I’d say to you if I had the chance. I wonder this myself: what will I say if we bump into each other when I return home this summer? I see your grey eyes coolly inspecting my appearance, noticing I’ve put on weight and look plainer with my hair this length. I imagine you composing an email after the event, though you no longer have my address, so perhaps it’ll be a letter. It will tell me I’ve turned into my mother or that I was cruel to return or that you’re shocked by how evil I’ve become. The worst thing you could write would be that you’re proud of me.
None of this will have been provoked. I see myself still moving on the same strip of pavement, heading for a collision, and I see the moment of horrified surprise that will wash your tanned face of its careful persona, a flash of reality, followed by your collecting yourself, straightening your spine and telling me how nice it is to see me, how was studying abroad?
But I cannot see my own face in this. I cannot form a response, hysterical or otherwise. All I can picture are fantasies of keying your car and smearing pig’s blood on your door, of scratching the letters P-A-E-D-O on your bonnet and hurling bricks through your French windows. Sometimes I scare myself thinking I actually would post a petrol bomb through your letterbox if I could be sure Annabelle was out. And if I wasn’t a wimpy English Literature student with no idea how to make a petrol bomb.
I imagine you now, reading this and laughing. This means you’ve won, doesn’t it? You are still inside me. At sixteen, you filled me with love and that was bad, but now you fill me with hate and this is worse. I hate that you have this power still. Are you flattered? Maybe this is better for you: most people can be loved, there is nothing extraordinary in that. Even the plebs you scorn have their Valentine’s cards and wedding bands. But how many people are utterly despised? How many people are in someone else’s thoughts every day and in their nightmares every night? You should be proud: you’ve achieved some kind of immortality, even if you haven’t written that book you said you would, filmed your screenplay, or established your name.
I hate you by any name.
Sincerely,
Nat
Harriet
Lilith
Natalie
PART ONE
1
I was fifteen when my second life began.
It was the summer of 2000. Other things that happened that summer included Julie Fellows allowing Tom Pepper to touch her nipples for the first time, Sam Roberts claiming to have gone all the way with Rose Taylor and her denying it, Wayne Price getting permanently excluded for selling his crushed-up medication on the playground, Mrs Forman resigning her post as head of English amid rumours of an affair with the new science teacher, Pete Sampras winning his thirteenth Grand Slam title at Wimbledon, the leaders of North and South Korea meeting for the first time and the News of the World campaigning for new legislation giving parents the right to know whether a convicted paedophile lived in their area.
Sheltered from such dramas, my first life had been pretty regular. I grew up in a small town in the countryside. I had a mother, a father and a brother. My parents separated when I was eleven, but my mum, my brother and I only moved across town, a few streets away. After we moved, I fell out with my dad for a few years. He began dating twenty-three-year-olds, going to raves and acting like a teenager. I began revising for my SATs, reading books and swapping notes with boys in class. I had my first kiss when I was eleven – with Harry Heeley on the bus back from swimming practice while Kayla Weatherford timed us with her digital watch and Danny King looked out for Mrs Rice walking up the aisle. Shortly after that I started secondary school, where I held hands with Ben Legg, Robbie Burton, Chris Price, Michael Peterson, Stephen Hunt, Simon Shaw, Steven Critchley, David Robson, Gavin Gregs, Reece Cook and a guy at youth club known as Spike.
My favourite item of clothing was a floor-length denim skirt I could hardly walk in. My dark blonde hair reached my shoulder blades in a thick tangle, curtaining my face when I wanted to hide from the world. I’d recently purchased my first pair of tweezers and a box of Jolen personal bleach but had yet to use either, thus noticeable hairs shadowed both my upper lip and between my brows. I was short, not even five foot one – a situation I had tried to rectify a month ago by convincing my dad to spend £16 on five-inch silver platform sandals. I’d worn them with denim pedal-pushers to go shopping and would never again remove the Bowie-esque disasters from beneath my bed.
I considered a day a good one if I managed to avoid embarrassing myself during the seven excruciating hours spent at my mediocre school in the next town. They were few. Most recently, the blonde, bronzed netball captain had seemed to befriend me in order to confirm rumours that I had a crush on Stuart Oxford and, moments after I confided in her, summoned him to tell me – over the sniggers of all around – that he had a girlfriend (a hockey-playing, make-up wearing, French-kissing, Winona Ryder-look-alike girlfriend), but if she and all the other girls in this and every other school coincidentally fell in a vat of beauty-destroying acid, perhaps he’d take me to the cinema. Later that week, I’d also managed to alienate Rachael, the one friend I still had, while we secretly watched her sister’s Sex and the City videos by claiming with confidence that spooning was a kinky form of anal sex and I thought it disgusting. She’d asked her sister to clarify and told me at school the next day that I was full of shit and would probably die a virgin.
While on the topic, though I’d had a few boyfriends and even touched Peter Booth’s thing after we’d been ‘going out’ for six months (but only for a second before feeling utterly repulsed, darting out of the tent to find another cherry-flavoured Hooch and telling him I didn’t want to be his girlfriend any more), I had never handled a condom, still believed you could get pregnant from oral sex and had a poster of Dean Cain dressed as Superman on my wardrobe door that I’d torn out of Shout magazine at the age of twelve.
However, for all my naiveties, I was worldly-wise enough to realise owning up to them was out of the question. I may have known nothing about boys or sex that I hadn’t r
ead in the Barbara Taylor Bradford novels my mum left in the loo, but I had never received less than an A*. I studied long words in the dictionary with the same voracity others my age collected Pokemon cards, I watched the news rather than cartoons and I made it a point to have every adult who met me comment, at least to themselves, ‘She’s so mature for her age.’
Why was I mature? One therapy analysis would conclude it had something to do with being a product of a broken home, my parents splitting up the same year I transferred from primary to secondary school and my devastated mother telling me every nasty thing she could think about my father as we packed our family lives into boxes and moved out of the thirteen-room Georgian detached house that had been a home for the first eleven years of my life. Another would suggest it was down to the amount I read and my stubborn insistence on skipping straight from The Famous Five to Anita Shreve, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker and Paul Auster, bypassing entirely those Goosebumps and Point Horror years that might shape an average teenager’s development. And another theory entirely would say that, as of yet, I wasn’t any more mature for my age than every other teenager who wants to be grown: that it was what came next that thrust me into an adult world with a child’s mind.
My second life began one Saturday in March when I begrudgingly followed my mum to a tea party at a neighbour’s house. We lived on a row of skinny Edwardian semis on the edge of town, the gardens backing on to a small wood beyond which acres of farmland stretched towards the horizon. The party was at the end of the street. Even my brother James decided this outing required sufficiently little effort to warrant attending, so the three of us plodded the few dozen steps along the pavement to be ushered through to the open-plan kitchen of number twenty-seven.
Once inside, the host Annabelle handed us mugs of tea and directed us through clumps of people to help ourselves from the buffet table. I loaded a plate with sausage rolls and fairy cakes and scuttled to a chair in the corner. When I’d swallowed my first mouthful and was reaching for my sugary tea, a voice spoke from my left.
‘I hate these things.’
I looked over and saw the mildly familiar face of Annabelle’s husband.
‘Isn’t this your party?’ I placed another sausage roll on my tongue and, noting the glass of wine in his hand, wondered if he was drunk.
‘Oh yeah, of course you have to put on a show, keep them all happy.’
‘What d’you mean?’ I asked, only half interested.
‘See over there?’ He pointed. ‘My in-laws. She chairs the WI and he sets the church quiz every Tuesday. If I didn’t throw a party, especially for a “big” birthday like this, I’d be hung, drawn and quartered by the gossipy blue-rinse brigade. Barbara’d come knocking on our door asking Annabelle what’s wrong, was I ill? Were we having marital problems? Annabelle would try to shut her mother up and Barb’d shriek, “What will everyone say?” and we’d end up having a party just to calm her down anyway. Much easier this way.’
I tried to stifle a giggle and almost choked on a large flake of pastry as he put on an old woman’s voice and flailed his arms in prim horror.
‘I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that. How old are you anyway?’
‘How old do you think I am?’ He looked at me with a smile.
‘Oh no, now you’ll get offended.’
‘I promise I won’t.’
‘Hmm, okay. Well, you said it’s a big one, and I’m pretty sure you’re older than my parents, so I guess it must be fifty.’
‘HA!’ His face cracked into a grin and he spilt a little wine on his beige trousers as he chuckled to himself.
‘What?’
‘I think you’re my new best friend.’
‘What, are you older? Fifty-five?’
‘Nope.’ He grinned.
‘Well you can’t be sixty, I don’t believe you’re sixty.’ Sixty was the age of grandparents, that pensionable age where spines curved and walking sticks were suddenly required. The man before me was a little wrinkled and his hair was silver, but his skin was brown, his eyes sparkled and his limbs moved with muscular ease. He certainly betrayed no signs of qualifying for free prescriptions on the NHS. I liked him; he was funny; he couldn’t be sixty.
But he was nodding.
‘Wow.’
‘Yep, I was born in the first half of the last century. It scares me because I don’t feel that old, but I can remember the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.’
I was silent.
‘You don’t even know when that was, do you? Oh dear. 1953. I was eleven. But that’s enough of old-fuddy-duddy talk anyway; let’s speak of youthful things. What rubbish are they teaching you at school these days?’
‘I’m revising for my GCSEs,’ I replied importantly, dismissing his implication that my studies were anything but monumental. ‘And next week I have to pick what subjects to do for A-Level. It’s pretty stressful.’
‘What are you going to take?’
‘Well, at the moment, I think it’ll be Maths, Further Maths, Business and Geography, but I’m not sure.’
He recoiled. ‘Yikes, what would you want to do those for?’
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘Nothing, they’re just all so dull.’ He faked a long, loud yawn. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’
‘An actuary … or maybe a lawyer.’
‘Oh dear. Child, you’re going to have a boring life. Have you met the people who go into those professions? They have no gnosis, no emotions, no pulse. They’re just money-grubbing machines.’
‘That’s not true,’ I replied defensively, though I’d no idea what ‘gnosis’ meant. ‘Some of the work’s really interesting. And I like numbers.’
‘But what about the poetry? The passion?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t you do English and Art? Aren’t there any subjects that make you feel excited, spark your creativity?’
‘Well, sure. I love English and I gave up Art in Year 9 but I still like sketching and things. They’re not exactly practical career options, though.’
‘Says who?’
‘Um, my mum, my teachers, the careers adviser.’
‘What do they know? They’re stuck in unfulfilling jobs that sap all creativity. What would the world be like if every artist since Shakespeare had followed the advice of their careers advisers and become lawyers instead?’
I was silent.
‘What they don’t want to tell you is that none of it’s real. Earning money and following the system isn’t real living, it’s just what you have to do in order to find the space to live. The whole thing is an elaborate unreality designed to make us conform. Have you read Nineteen Eighty-Four?’
I shook my head.
‘What about Hermann Hesse?’
‘No.’
‘I tell you what, you say you like English, how about I lend you some books? You can take them away and when you’re done, come and have a pot of tea with me and we’ll talk about this actuary business.’
I took away Steppenwolf and The Outsider that day. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Mrs Dalloway, The Age of Innocence, Brighton Rock, The Plague, The Bell Jar, The Pupil and Sophie’s World followed.
Each time I returned a book, Matthew would carry it down the stairs and place it delicately on the farmhouse table while he boiled the kettle. After nestling the cosy on the pot, he’d offer me a chair and, sitting opposite me, begin: ‘So, what did it make you think?’
‘I don’t know.’ I was shy at first; worried my thoughts wouldn’t be deep enough, worried I would have missed the point of the prose, that I wasn’t reading as I was meant to, that he might think me stupid.
‘Come on, there’s no right or wrong answer. I just want to know how the book affected you.’
Gradually, I allowed myself to answer.
‘It made me wonder why people have to conform.’ (Camus)
‘It made me think one single day can offer more beauty and pain than a whole life
time.’ (Woolf)
‘It made me question whether a society can condition you to accept anything and, if so, whether there’s any such thing as right or wrong.’ (Huxley)
‘It made me think philosophy is like maths: just logic applied to the world. So, if you think hard enough, there must be an answer, but that religion seems to get in the way.’ (Gaarder)
‘It made me think I should dislike the character, but I didn’t.’ (Hesse)
‘It made me wish I’d been born in that time.’ (Sartre)
And, of course, like every girl my age: ‘It reminded me of me.’ (Plath)
‘Excellent.’ Matthew smiled. ‘Existentialism asks all those questions and comes to the conclusion that the only thing that’s for certain is that we exist; we are here. Nothing else is real. All this crap society puts into our heads: money, work, school, cars, class, status, children, wives – everything we’re supposed to care about – it’s completely unreal. True reality is what’s in our minds. And when you accept that, you realise that conforming to society’s rules just makes you a sheep. You might as well die now. Only a few people have the courage to truly accept this and those are the few that stick their heads above the manhole-cover, who make art and seek out love. I call them Uncles. They’re usually persecuted for it, but at least they’re living.’
‘Why “Uncles”?’ I asked.
He frowned as if I’d missed the point, but shrugged and replied, ‘Because parents are too close, they fuck you up, so it’s down to Uncles, relatives with a little distance, to guide you through life. When I was slightly older than you I found a mentor, I called him Uncle. It was a sign of respect back then, but now I know it means more.’
I considered his words after I left. I watched my mum cooking dinner and wondered if she had ever stuck her head above the manhole-cover. I observed James playing on the PlayStation and decided he hadn’t yet realised the world was unreal. Visiting my dad at the weekend, I looked at him tinkering in the shed and thought perhaps he’d never read Camus.
I sat on my bed and looked out the window.
That is unreal, I thought. Only I am real.