It wasn’t long before our behaviour came to the attention of the authorities. One afternoon, at the back of maths again (I recall probability trees drawn on the whiteboard) we decided to give ourselves DIY tattoos using a compass and a biro (fountain pen would’ve been better but no one had one with ink). I was gonna do Oasis but didn’t go past the ‘O’ before deciding I was satisfied with a circle. V______ did the Nirvana smiley face, two crosses and a wiggly line but we were busted before she could finish. A_____ did KoЯn on her wrist in a font admirably similar to their actual logo. M___ did Metallica, really big, all the way up her forearm. Pretty impressive but even I, in my most crazed, rebellious mindset, had misgivings. (Amusingly, out of all of us M___ was the straightest and least into music, but she must’ve been the most enthusiastic of us when it came to self-harm, because everyone else’s tattoo faded in a matter of weeks while, to the best of my knowledge, hers remains to this day.)
We were expelled one by one.
When my turn came around and I was called in to the headmistress’s office and told to explain myself, I responded to the open-ended question with a question. What aspect of myself was I supposed to be explaining? I didn’t get a response. The headmistress, an enormous woman with a girth to rival a St. Paul’s Cathedral bell, and I sat in silence for several minutes. She broke the silence, asked me if I had anything at all I wanted to say. I told her I didn’t. She told me I was expelled. Her actual words, ‘your career within this establishment has come to an end’. Pompous twat. I got up and walked to the office door in silence, opened it then stopped. Maybe I did have something to say after all.
— Actually, I said, — Yeah. You’re a big fat fucking BITCH!
As soon as the last syllable dropped I was gone, slamming the door behind me. I ran down the teachers’ stairs, legged it along the corridor shaking with adrenaline. I burst into the classroom, where Miss Wilder was still mid-flow, and went to my locker. I opened it and pulled out textbooks and exercise books letting them tumble to the floor. I put my Walkman, my English and History exercise books and a copy of Jude the Obscure into my school bag and left the rest where it lay. I gave Miss Wilder the finger, slung my bag over my shoulder and was gone.
It took me years to discover what I was expelled for. My parents never divulged what the headmistress told them, just kept me grounded until they could find another school to send me to. It was two decades later, when I was 35-years-old, that the subject came up in conversation. My mum told me she’d been informed that I’d brought a replica gun into school and waved it around. News to me! And imagine the position it put me in. Nearly 40 and still needing to rant and rave about the petty injustices of yore! My life = an actual joke.
I told my mother in no uncertain terms, — That did not happen.
Did she believe me? Did she fuck.
Following that pointless conversation I racked my brain for any incident that could even vaguely be interpreted as me bringing a replica gun into school and waving it around. I couldn’t think of anything.
I called V______ , the only member of my old girl gang I was still in touch with, to ask if she could think of anything. At first she was equally stumped and equally offended by the ludicrousness of it all, but then she had a brainwave.
— Maybe it was the water pistols we all had? V______ said.
— What water pistols? I said.
— You remember, V______ said. — From McDonalds.
That was the summer McDonalds was giving away dinosaur-shaped water pistols with Happy Meals. Dinosaur-shaped water pistols that had a surprisingly powerful squirt. We were friends with a guy who worked there (A_____ had kissed him in his previous carnation, which was coming into the school twice a week to change the sanitary bins) and he would sneak us free water pistols without us having to purchase burgers and chips. My favourite was the pterodactyl. Hard blue plastic body with an orange beak. Mystery solved. Kind of. I considered calling my mother to tell her but what would be the point? It was so clearly a set-up and a cack-handed one at that that I decided to let the whole embarrassing incident lie. On their heads be it.
Our tight-knit faction diffused into a looser, more decentralised affiliation. We each ended up at a different London crammer, the only places that would take us if we didn’t want to start the year over. And the thing with London crammers is that they were where ALL the fucks up were sent. Four weirdoes became eight, eight became ten, and in fact eleven, because one of the new people had boyfriend.
From my end there was H______ , a mad alcoholic who would down bottles of Bacardi Breezer during break. She threw up in Geography on my first day, winning my admiration. And P__ , a big, quiet softie who liked his Moschino and went on to take too many psychedelics in Thailand and never be the same again.
From M___’s end there was T__ , an oversized lumbering boy who, when he was first introduced to the group, everyone thought was a woman cos he had long red hair and was fat enough to have tits.
From A_____’s end there was D______ , a crazed Bulgarian skateboarder who dressed half-punk, half-traditional gypsy. Baggy skate pants twinned with embroidered waistcoats and a handkerchief tying back luminous green hair. D______ was going out with B__ , a nondescript west London boy who had taken up skateboarding to impress D______ and turned out to be pretty good at it.
V_______ brought in X_ , a Malaysian lesbian who looked, spoke and dressed like Sonic the Hedgehog. An utterly charming person, who would go on to sort some of us out with our first jobs in a Covent Garden skate shop (not the good one).
Last of all there was S____. No one was sure where S____ came from or at least no one wanted to take responsibility for her because she was horrible. But for some reason, whenever we met up, there she’d be.
With her giant forehead, pointy nose and total absence of chin or cheekbones, S____ might’ve done alright in Tudor times but by 1998 standards she was considered butters. Her natural ugliness was enhanced by a spiteful personality, the dress sense of a psychotic clown (think multi-coloured patchwork pants held up by thick red braces) and a chronic addiction to Super Skunk that left her with permanent red eye but thankfully rendered her speechless a lot of the time. Still, you could see the nasty thoughts she was thinking written all over her ugly face.
S____’s only popularity card was her mother’s absentee parenting. S____’s mother, L_______ , was cuckoo, la-la, totally out to lunch, meaning S____’s flat became the place to go to smoke/drink/screw with zero ʻstressʼ. We would spend days on end at S____’s flat, three or four of us sleeping in S____’s bed, others on the sofa in the front room, hotboxing the kitchen, without ever catching sight of L_______. On the rare occasions where L_______ did surface (her open bedroom door being the warning sign), she appeared to be oblivious to the boys and booze and blazin’. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true… The drugs and the liquor meant nothing to L_______ but she did have a nose for there being a boy in the house. She’d loiter in the dark recess of the corridor in a sheer dressing gown and suspenders, waiting to pounce. It was the only thing that made me feel sorry for S____ because it was awful.
When quizzed about her mother’s paedophilic tendencies, S____ told us L_______ had grown up in Rhodesia where L_______’s mother, sick with malaria, spent the entire time in bed. Her father, bereft by lack of wife, took to dressing L_______ in her mother’s clothes, slathering her in her mother’s make-up and taking her to what S____ said her grandfather called ʻnigger barsʼ, where he would parade his daughter in front of the locals before taking her home to fuck her.
This story is undeniably horrific. Pedophilia, racism, incest, neglect, colonialism. More than enough to forgive L_______ any psychosexual problems she might have. But at the time, with all of us suffering from a terrible case of teenage brain, none of us were able to properly understand it or its implications. We saw L_______ as authority, so the thought of any abuse or humiliation she might have suffered struck us as hilarious. What can I say? Teenage girls are brutal.
S____’s status as Venue Provider might have secured her presence at our pathetic gatherings, but when it came to group politics (of which there were plenty, always stemming from people fancying the same people), S____ was less than an afterthought. Ugly as she was, it looked unlikely S____ would ever get laid, so in the mad scramble to cash in our virginities, no one considered her a threat.
This changed one half-term in suitably melodramatic fashion…
The plan was to meet at Queensway Bowling Alley, I forget the occasion. Being underage, we went there a lot. It was one of the few places that would serve us alcohol without asking for ID.
I arrived and spotted A_____’s blue afro pigtails right away. Hoping she (considerably wealthier and more adult-looking than I) would buy me a drink, I hurried to the bar where she was chatting to a woman who I kinda recognised, brandishing an unlit cigarette. Was she famous?
I kissed A_____ on the cheek then the maybe-famous woman brandishing an unlit cigarette came in for one as well. I hesitated.
— It’s me, she said and smiled revealing pointed incisors, which I recognised right away.
S____.
Gone were the baggy pants and braces. In their place were a black, fitted, knicker-skimming dress, an astonishing pair of red leather fuck-me boots and a yard of thigh. Her normally frizzy, mousy hair was dark with product, ringlets gelled down onto her forehead, Sugababes-style. Her moon-face was thick with foundation, which stopped in a sharp line at her chin (early contouring). Her cheeks were rouged, eyelashes heavy with goopy mascara… It didn’t take me long to deduce that S____ had raided her mother’s make-up cabinet as well as her wardrobe. The overall effect was terrifying. S____ looked more clownish and psychotic than ever, but in one of my first successful deployments of social etiquette, I said, — You look nice, S____.
S____ leaned back on the bar, unlit cigarette dangling between pouted lips. She lifted a leg to rest a high-heeled boot on the barstool, hitching up her skirt to reveal a glimpse of white thong. Yikes!
Her eyes darted from me and A_____ to the door and back again. A smug expression tightened her features. I turned to look at the door to see D______ and B__ , holding hands like always and, like always, dangling skateboards at their sides.
D______ and B__ were the only solid, non-lesbian couple in our group. They’d been going out since they were fourteen and had only recently consummated their affair, incidentally at S____’s. We’d all been in on it and helped with the ‘arrangements’, like the little pervs we were. We’d conferred on what D______’s sacrificial outfit should be, mood-lit the room then sat next door while they did it, tittering and speculating about what positions they were doing. When it was over, we dragged D______ to the bathroom to press her for details. Intense.
The result of this shared rite of passage was that we, as a group, were deeply invested in D______ and B__’s relationship. None of us could imagine a world in which they weren’t together.
Amazingly, D______ recognised S____ straightaway and greeted her with big, effusive Eastern European gesticulations. She plucked at the hemline of S____’s dress, got her to twirl to reveal the full ensemble and aimed compliment after compliment at the hair, the eyeshadow, the boots, all delivered in her sweet, clumsy accent.
B__ hung back from the interaction. He nodded hello to us then dashed into the gents. A_____ and I exchanged a look. Something was up, for sure.
Other people started showing up, each as stunned by S____’s makeover as the next.
V______ was like, —Why d’you do it?
T__ told her she looked like Courtney, which was true.
P__ , who clocked it but was unphased, shrugged.
M___ pretended like it was all good to S____’s face but mouthed, ‘what the fuck?’ in our direction, making little circles around her ear with her index finger insinuating that she thought S____ was insane.
We went to sit in a booth. Booths were preferable to the tables in the middle of the room because they were private and sometimes Security would pop its head round the door and if he couldn’t see us then he couldn’t think to check our IDs.
S____ bought two jugs of frozen margaritas. Unusual as S____ was usually tight. She never bought drinks and frequently demanded ‘tax’ off people for the use of her house, usually two tokes on a spliff every time it was passed. Plus, when she did drink it was always Red Stripe. Every surface of her room was covered in empty tins, which I think she kept just to wind up her mother.
S____ put the jugs on the table but didn’t sit down. She poured herself a tumbler then started parading round the bar area. It was some performance! Going up to blokes sitting at tables and leaning over them to show her (admittedly tiny) cleavage, grabbing a chair and spinning it round then sitting on it the wrong way round, legs apart.
— What the fuck is she doing? someone said.
The rest of us shrugged in bafflement.
S____ continued, doing sexy drinking and sexy walking and sexy leaning over.
— She’s lost the plot, someone said.
The rest of us winced in horror.
— She’s turned into her mother, someone said.
The rest of us nodded in agreement.
B__ , who we’d forgotten about because of S____’s erratic behaviour, returned from the toilets. At the sight of S____ cavorting he went visibly pale.
— Something’s happening, someone said.
Everyone turned to look at B__ , who S____ hadn’t seen yet. He made his way towards us, trying to avoid S____ but when reached where the tables and chairs began, S____ turned and saw him. She made a beeline for him. B__ changed direction in an attempt to avoid her. S____ altered her route, prompting a panicked pantomime where B__ circled round tables clearly trying to get away from S____ and S____ dodged to the left, to the right, trying to second guess him. D______ stood but she was three people deep so couldn't get out of the booth without everyone else moving.
— What is she doing? D______ said. — Let me out!
S____ finally cornered B__ beside a family slurping down Slush Puppies. They looked on in horror (as did we) as S____ looped a leg round B__’s waist, ensnaring him. She grabbed his face with both hands, forcing his mouth into a pout, and shoved her thick, stubby tongue into the hole.
D______ crushed my hand as she scrambled over us to get out.
S____ was still tonguing B__ , slobbering all over him. She took his hand and placed it on her bum.
— Oh god, someone said.
A song came on the jukebox. The Sign by Ace of Base. Tinny beat, wavy audio.
The father of the family decided his kids had seen enough and ushered them out of their seats. He went to the bar to ask for the manager but needn’t have bothered because the barman would’ve noticed in two seconds anyway because D____ started freaking. She wasn’t even saying words, just made strange yelps like she was being strangled.
I, I got a new life, you would hardly recognise me, I’m so glad…
B__ pushed S____ , sending her tumbling to the floor where she landed with legs splayed and where she stayed.
How could a person like me care for you?
D____ ran over and grabbed B__’s arm. We could all see she how hard she was squeezing it.
Why, why do I bother when you’re not the one for me?
— Say it is not! D______ said.
B__’s face was a sight to see. He opened his mouth to speak but no sound came out.
Is enough enough?
S____ began to get up from the floor, her monstrous expression visible even through the make-up. M___ ran over to prevent S____ doing whatever she was about to do.
There was a brief stand off with M___ holding S____, S____ getting off on her bondage, B__ holding D______. S____ went limp. M___ relaxed her grip. S____ slipped free. S____ lunged at B__ , pushing D______ out of his arms and throwing her own arms round him. I watched it all, taking gulps of my frozen margarita as fast I could manage, sure it was only a matter of minutes before we all g
ot kicked out.
— We are in love, S____ spat.
I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes…
B__ visibly shook.
— Well? Tell them, S____ said to B__.
B__ stared at D______.
Life is demanding without understanding….
— We’ve been fucking for months, S____ said. — So your first time wasn’t his. Was it baby? Tell her.
No one’s gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belo-ong…
— Don’t call him fucking baby! D______ said, shoving S____ hard in the chest.
S____ looked triumphant.
— Is it true? Tell me! Is it true?
D______ turned to B__.
B__ shook his head ‘no’, caught sight of S____ in doing so, whereupon the shake became a reluctant nod ‘yes’, then a bow in shame.
But where do you belo-ong?
D______ looked from B__ to S____ to M___ to B__ to S____.
U-under the pale moon…
S____ picked up her drink and took a sexy sip through the straw, finishing it and loudly slurping the ends.
— I’m sorry, B__ said.
For so many years I’ve wondered who you are…
— Oh my god, whispered A_____ , sat beside me.
Security opened the swing doors and assessed the scene. Went over and spoke to B__. — Can I see some ID son?
B__ shrugged, defeated.
— Ok, well, you know I know you lot are underage so let’s make this easy shall we?
How could a person like you bring me joy?
— I don’t love her. I love you, B__ said to D______.
— I can see you’ve got, Security looked at S____ , — a situation here, lad, but best work it out elsewhere. Okay?
Under the pale moon where I see a lot of stars…
Man Hating Psycho Page 8
