Look Back in Hunger Read online

  So I was up and dressed in seconds and ran as fast as I could across the lawn until I got near the house, at which point I dropped to my hands and knees and began to crawl, hugging the wall as if my life depended on it. Something made me look up at the dining-room window and I was greeted with the sight of the entire family standing, arms folded, at the window, gazing down at me as if I was some wounded slug crawling across their line of vision. I stood up and legged it.

  I had kept Dave’s existence a secret from my mum and dad because I knew what they would think. He wasn’t that popular with my friends, I suppose because they could tell he was somewhat unreliable, to put it mildly. As friends always do, they were just looking out for my welfare—they didn’t want me to be pissed about or hurt. And, of course, they were always there to act as a sounding board for endless analyses of:

  1. Why he hasn’t phoned when he said he would.

  2. Whether he’s shown any signs of lacking commitment.

  3. What he said, what you said, what he said, etc., etc. Ad nauseam.

  I didn’t lose any friends because of Dave. They were quite happy to take a back seat and follow the course of the relationship as if it was a comic-strip romance come to life. And, of course, I’m sure they did endless gossiping about it, because that’s what girls do. If a romance is up and running, friends have to be able to accommodate all the ups and downs of it. So one day they will concur with you, as you raise your eyes to the heavens and shout, ‘He’s a bastard, he’s a bastard, I don’t want anything to do with him,’ and then the next day smile indulgently when you inform them it’s all back on track and you’re madly in love again.

  I was in the grip of a grand obsession and had started to work out as many ways as I could to get out of the house and meet up with him. Most nights, I waited until my parents had gone to bed and, because the front door was locked and it was too risky to jangle keys, I went out through the kitchen door and out of the garage window. This was also the way back in. Unfortunately, one night, somewhat pissed, I was climbing back in and fell on the bonnet of my dad’s car. Even though I wasn’t big, it still made a pretty sizeable dent. I held my breath for the next day, but for some reason he didn’t notice it for quite a while and then blamed it on something else.

  Dave and I also spent a night in a so-called ‘posh’ hotel on the seafront. It wasn’t really posh— I would imagine it couldn’t compete with some very downmarket hotels in London—but I thought it was posh because it stood on the seafront, had a sea view and was bloody massive. Added to this, I’d never stayed in a hotel without my parents before. And even then I use the term ‘hotel’ lightly. There would have been a couple of guest-houses on the Isle of Wight and one decent hotel in Jersey. By decent I mean no bed bugs and no prostitutes.

  I was nervous when we checked in, feeling certain that we would be sent packing with the laughter of the reception staff ringing in our ears. But very soon you learn that hotels are not the moral arbiters of society—they are businesses like any other, and if you can afford to pay, they’re happy to take you, whether you have a prison record as long as the pier or dodgy business to conduct.

  We actually did pretend we were married and although we didn’t go down the well-trodden ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ road, we did call ourselves after a colour. I just can’t remember whether it was Green, Brown or Black now. The girl on reception was roughly the same age as we were, and she looked rather envious at the sight of us handholding, scruffy hippies. I left all the arrangements to Dave. That posh, educated voice coming incongruously out of the mouth of a bedraggled ne’er-do-well always commanded a little more attention and respect. The room was secured and we had a lovely night there, sneaking out at about 7.30, hoping desperately we wouldn’t bump into anyone we knew.

  Eventually, I took the risk and told my parents I was seeing someone. Of course they wanted to know everything there was to know about him and so the fearful day came when I brought him back with me after a night out.

  To say it didn’t go well would be to say that the Second World War was a slight scuffle. My parents were waiting up for us and we were late. So when we arrived my dad did his ‘what time do you call this?’ routine. Although it is such a well-worn cliché, delivered by dads to their daughters since time began, it was still terrifying and infantilising, and I had rather hoped that my dad would put on a bit of a show for a visitor to the house, in the way you do when someone you don’t know very well comes round. But there he stood, hands on hips, looking vaguely threatening to say the least.

  I had primed them with a speech about how they probably wouldn’t like him, would be put off by the way he looked, the way he spoke, how he dressed. All this would have been summed up by my dad as him being ‘cocky’. And if there was one type of person my dad really wasn’t keen on, it was a cocky bloke.

  Dave’s manner had always been la-di-dah at best, and his first sentence of apology had the words ‘my dear chap’ tacked on to the end. My dad, a true horny-handed son of the soil, quite reasonably took against being addressed as if he was a serf, and protested in a somewhat threatening manner. Unfortunately, my beau either thought it was a joke or he was too drunk to take it seriously and he used the phrase once more, whereupon my dad promised to hit him if he said it again. I’m sure you can guess the rest. He did say it again.

  Time stood still for what seemed like an age. If I’m honest, I was pissed off with these two stags facing each other off. Why do men have to do this? It seems so tribal, so aggressive, and so utterly pointless. If I could have, I would have banged their heads together. The angry dad and the feckless lover competing in some sort of one-upmanship contest over me. I’ve always been a communicator and a smoother-over of things, I can’t help myself, and the ideal scene which I had had in my head, where they sat down, had a drink together, talked about sport and had a laugh, was beginning to disintegrate before my eyes.

  My dad was never one not to carry through on his promises. I saw a clenched fist come swooping towards Dave’s jaw and he crumpled from the feet upwards, ending up sparko on the floor. All polite bets off, then.

  When he came round a few seconds later, there was much talk from my dad of the ‘never darken my doorstep again’ variety. Dave rose to his feet with as much dignity as someone who’s just been knocked over like a skittle can manage and left. My mum didn’t get involved, but I could feel she was on my side. I felt like I’d been in a short Pinter play. I don’t think we said much. I climbed wearily up to my room. Another jolly day in the Brand household over, and cue yet another enforced curfew for me.

  The next time I spoke to Dave, I apologised over and over. But he was surprisingly chipper about it, and I presume being chinned by someone’s dad is not a bad story to have in your arsenal.

  I continued to fight my corner all the way, in a combination of titanic arguments, much sneaking out of the house, tears and me in my bedroom reading poetry and feeling like a tragic Bronte heroine, dying from love, but not TB. My knowledge of poetry was minimal, so I tended, magpie-like, to hop from school stuff to anthologies that my mum and dad had in the bookcase downstairs. Of course, for a while, the frustrated love ones were the best. A fair bit of Byron: ‘So, We’ll Go No More a Roving’. In my case, literally—roving was over for me for a bit.

  Eventually, I think my parents were just so utterly sick of me refusing to cave in, don a tweedy two-piece and get a job in the library that they gave me an ultimatum: ‘Ditch the loser or move out.’ In some ways, these were the words I had been longing to hear. I still had quite some time left to go at school, but, after much discussion, it was agreed that I would get a job which gave me one day a week free and, weirdly, my school said they would allow me to come back once a week to study for my A-levels.

  I think it must have been a very hard decision for my mum and dad to make, but there was all the background stuff going on with my dad’s depressive illness to which I was not party. In truth, I was absolutely shocked that this was the decision
they had been forced to make, having not realised I had pushed them so far. My discussion with them about it was minimal. They had made up their minds and I could take it or leave it. I think I was just seventeen at the time. I’m not sure why the school agreed to this bizarre arrangement, but my mother, as I have already mentioned, has very impressive powers of persuasion, and I presume she had them wriggling helplessly on the end of a hook before too long.

  A job was procured at the Department of the Environment and there then remained the question of where I would live. Dave found me a bed-sit near the seafront, a crumbling mansion with possibly the most interesting group of people ever to gather in one house.

  Dave knew about the house because he used to live there himself and it was a fluke that a room was free. I think he was quite shocked that he had been responsible for this blowing apart of a family, and it terrified him. He impressed upon me that I wasn’t his responsibility, which I understood, although I didn’t have anyone else to rely on.

  In the basement of this house there was the landlady, a sweet-looking, grey-haired lady who, rumour had it, dealt dope as a sideline. On the next floor was her daughter, a white single mum with a black baby, still frowned upon in Hastings in the seventies. Then there was me. Above me was a Rastafarian who played very loud reggae all day and night and above him, sharing one room, were five Korean cooks who played cards all night.

  So I was all set to push out into the big, scary world when a minor disaster occurred. Dave got a job in west London, one he had applied for and accepted some weeks before I was ejected from the family home. It was a job as a residential social worker in a home for adolescents. It didn’t require any qualifications, which was just as well, because he didn’t really have any. Despite the enormous power of a wealthy family behind him, he had failed to make a mark in the education department. He rather liked working with naughty adolescents, possibly because that’s what he was himself.

  This meant that rather than us living together, he would move, lock, stock and barrel, up to London and return to see me at the weekends. I had mixed feelings about living in the place on my own, but despite the tragedy of the breakdown of my relationship with my parents, I was really looking forward to moving out. I did feel sad, however, even though I needed a break from my mum and dad and they from me. I’m not sure what my brothers felt about it. Bill wasn’t expressing much emotion at the time, although I know he was sad to see me leave Hastings. Also, I had taken most of the flak, and I expect he was worried he and Matt might mop up a bit more of it now I’d gone. Matt was more vocal and, although he didn’t want me to go, he also agreed with the obvious: that we all needed a break.

  So, one Saturday morning, my dad drove me down there, managed to bite his tongue about the suspect smells and grubbiness of the room and, after dropping my meagre belongings off, he bade me goodbye and I was left sitting on the bed, crying, feeling a mixture of fear, regret and excitement. I suspect that although on some level my dad was horrified about releasing me into the community, on another level he was mighty relieved that I would be out of the way. He did not throw open his arms as he bid me goodbye. It was all very self-contained and stiff-upper-lip-y. He preferred it that way. Me too.

  After having been chained up for so long, it was surreal being on my own. Eating what I wanted, drinking what I wanted, smoking what I wanted.

  I set to work to make the room my own and was given permission to paint it. Wanting to make a statement, I chose dark blue for the walls and red paint for the skirting (yes, I was mad). As usual, I didn’t think about what I was doing and bought gloss for the walls. It was only after it didn’t seem to be drying that I realised my mistake and as I didn’t have any more money, I just had to leave it. It looked bloody hideous.

  Despite the fact that I had the option of dissolving into a pissed, work-shy heap of patchouli-smelling, grubby Laura Ashley, I did manage to get myself to work on time and in a reasonable state. My job at the DoE involved paying DoE-employed cleaners and working out holiday benefits and sick pay. Well, I think that’s what it involved; I wasn’t really even sure at the time. It was one big skive. I’d get to work, have a coffee and a fag, do the crossword and cursorily glance at the top sheet of the pile of computer printouts. I love a cryptic crossword. My crossword of choice was the one in the Telegraph because it was the easiest, but I couldn’t stand the paper itself, so I gradually weaned myself off it and tried to do the Guardian crossword, which was more cryptic and required a broader knowledge.

  I remember once taking a call from a sweet woman who had been asked to pay back a million pounds. The poor woman was in a state of near hysteria, declaring there was no way she could afford it and crying snottily down the phone. What had happened was that the computer had generated too many noughts on a statement that had been sent to her about her sick pay, and she was being requested to pay back a million pounds of overpaid sick pay rather than a hundred pounds. When I reassured her that it was OK, that it was our mistake, she was so grateful and relieved that she started crying all over again. What surprised me was that it seemed obvious that a mistake had been made, and I couldn’t believe her touching naiveté.

  After a few months, I had settled into my bed-sit and job pretty well. Everyone at school was so envious of my freedom and there was a constant trickle of friends all attempting to escape their own particular brand of parental conflict at home and admiring the excessively shiny walls with barely disguised contempt.

  Dave had never been the most reliable of partners. He constantly turned up late or got involved in drinking sessions in the pub and arrived home several hours after he said he would. I didn’t mind this too much, though. I never clock-watched and things were going along well. Glorious weekends in bed, drunken parties and hand-holding on the beach … paradise gained.

  One night in the pub, unbeknownst to me, a local, very irritating and silly man slipped some LSD into my drink, a jolly pastime known as ‘spiking’. I didn’t realise this until I was walking along the road at about midnight, on my way home, and I happened to glance into a phone box in which stood a medieval monk swinging a cat backwards and forwards by its tail. It didn’t occur to me that spiking might have occurred and I remember thinking that perhaps I had gone mad. Feeling rather scared, I decided to walk to my brother Bill’s flat and stay there, as I didn’t want to be on my own. At the time, Bill was training to be a quantity surveyor. I didn’t understand what that was for ages (if you really want to know, he works out the amount of materials needed to build a building). He had a small but perfectly adequate flat quite near my parents’ house, although, like the abodes of most boys his age (he was nineteen at the time), it could have done with a bit more TLC cleaningwise.

  As I got over the brow of the hill, about a quarter of a mile from his place, a bright-pink coach, its windows blazing with light, came up the road, mounted the pavement and came straight at me. I dived over a garden wall and found myself sitting in a flower bed facing a pack of huge, slavering wolves, all tied with leashes to a tree and straining to get at me. I picked myself up and ran the rest of the way, screaming and crying. Nobody came out to help.

  My brother had read somewhere that vitamin C is a big help in counteracting the effects of something like LSD, so he poured orange juice down me all night and the effects gradually subsided. It was a terrifying experience and it only confirmed my worst fears about how dangerous acid could be. Perhaps, somewhere in the depths of my mind, some chemical thing had been triggered, and I couldn’t stop myself from losing it and being very, very afraid.

  The following weekend, the bloke who had spiked my drink came knocking at the front door of the house, shouting for Dave. I leaned out of the window and threw a bucket of water over him. Not a particularly effective revenge, but it made me feel better.

  After about five months of my revolutionary new lifestyle, I arranged to meet Dave in a bar in the Old Town on a Friday night. He always got the train back from London and went straight to a pub a
nd I would go down there after I had got home from work and had time to change from Acceptable Drabness into my Teenage Witch About Town look. This consisted of dark clothes— a long skirt and long-sleeved T shirt—messy hair, dark eye make-up and black lipstick, which I cherished, having spent an absolute bloody fortune on it in Biba in Kensington.

  On this particular Friday, I had been allowed off work a bit early and headed down to meet him, thinking that for once I would beat him to the bar. The bar was in a basement and as it was early evening, it was dark and empty apart from one or two shadowy figures. I looked round thinking I must have arrived first. And then I saw Dave in a corner, wrapped round a really pretty girl with red hair, kissing her fiercely. I discovered what the phrase ‘red mist’ meant at that point.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BED-SIT BETRAYAL

  I did not just turn on my heel and walk out, because in the second or so that it took me to register the scene, a list of everything I had lost because of this man-boy flashed through my head. It was short but enormously consequential:

  1. My home.

  2. My relationship with my family.

  3. My security.

  4. My academic future.

  5. My mind.

  Yes, my mind had been slightly disturbed during those few months, and now I had lost it altogether. Had I had a knife to hand, I suspect it would have been difficult not to use it. Thankfully I didn’t, and I scanned the room for a weapon. The nearest thing to hand was a full soda siphon which was standing on the bar screaming to be used. I approached the guilty couple and before they had a chance to move or even react, I squirted them both full in the face with its contents. I have absolutely no idea what the resulting immediate fall-out was from my squirtiness because I exited stage left and made for home as fast as I could. When I got there, I got drunk and sat up all night playing cards with the Korean chefs and crying. They didn’t seem to mind and were quite happy for me to get on with alternately sobbing and putting cards on the table.