I suppose most peoples lives extend when they leave school - pub, jobs, adventure - but mine somehow shrunk. I lost contact straight away with a lot of people I had known from school (the days before the internet and mobile phone) and my social life wasn't actually bursting with life anyway.
I was left with a handful friends, each of us misfits in our own way. We were a fractious group of people who met up only rarely as a group (usually on a Saturday). Most of the time when I met up with them it was with only one or two other people. We were all keen to move on with our lives - and some of us did, -though I wouldn't for another three years.
We weren't much into going to the pub. If we were then I imagine that the tensions of being lost and 18 might have dissipated somewhat. I don't know why we weren't that much into drinking as a group. I would have a beer or two every now and again, but it never appealed that much to me. I also had a morbid fear of vomiting (emetophobia), and after one apocalyptic hangover that year I was not keen to get drunk again.
E. was the friend I saw the most that summer. We had been at school together, and he had no idea over what he wanted to do either. We would meet up from Monday to Thursday at a halfway point between where we lived (the public library in Hillingdon - a few miles from where we lived) at 10:30am. We wouldn't do much, wonder about the shops, watch Neighbours and Home and Away, play on the swings in the RAF owned playground up the road from me that I had always called The Twilight Zone. E's Dad would pick him up at 5:30pm every night and take him over to his girlfriend's house on the edge of Hayes where he also lived.
On Thursday's E. and myself would go to London, where we would haunt the second hand record shops, looking for anything 'cult' - a word we used to describe anything that was cool and / or nostalgic.
After an adolescence full of noisy thrash metal, things were branching out slowly - I was discovering the horror-punk delights of American band The Misfits. E. had decided that Toyah was a cult artist, and he would buy her albums second hand in the bargain bins at Notting Hill Gate. Over that summer I remember buying albums from bands such as Danzig, Darkness, Cryptic Slaughter, Realm, Sodom, English Dogs, Warfare...
On Saturdays, the 'Saturday gang' would sometimes meet - and sometimes not. Sometimes I would meet up with Julian, and we would have a jam session in our garage (he was always a far better guitarist than me). None of us knew what we wanted to do really - a couple of our friends were at university - another friend ended up being a priest - but he had moved on with his life by this time.
Something dark crept into that summer when I was 18. Isolation (those endless roads of suburban Ickenham) and heat, and that feeling of being totally lost combined into something else. Under those circumstances, imagination turns feral, and my imagination has always had a tendency to be somewhat overactive anyway. Edward and myself became obsessed with the idea of the apocalypse - and would talk ourselves into believing that armageddon had begun, We dragged in the Bible, Nostradamus, a poster that had been thrust into my hands in Uxbridge town centre a few months before, and bits of all those books on the occult and paranormal in my room. When Iraq invaded Kuwait that summer, we took this as another terrifying sign that some new world war (probably nuclear) was about to begin. If conscription was introduced, we reasoned that the best thing we could do was 'head for the Welsh hills' where we would, somehow, live wild.
In the April of that year, we had all had a terrifying night in the house where I lived in Ickenham. My parents had gone away for the week, and I had had various friends stay over. One night, there had been four of us staying and we had convinced ourselves that the place was haunted. Lights kept flickering on and off, I started shivering uncontrollably, and all of us were overcome with an awful feeling of malevolent evil. It was like we had all shared in some insanity - hypnotised ourself with some odd edge-of-adulthood hysteria,
E's personality had changed since then. When 1990 had begun he was a happy-go-lucky character - a bit socially strange at times, but he had a sometimes-confidence that both mystified and made me jealous. He was now riven with uncertainty and superstition, and refused to watch any horror films, or indeed, anything he regarded as even vaguely 'scary' - this included Kate Bush videos which he found demonic and mad em turn off one night when we were watching them.
My personality had darkened since that night too - a predilection for melancholy and anxiety was turning into something darker. I say 'darker' but when I think back to the endless heat of that summer, I think of that darkness as being brighter - a scary, all consuming thing that threatened to blow everything up like that armageddon that haunted those months. When Edward and myself weren't discussing armageddon - when I was left alone in that house - I would start to convince myself that the house was (again) under attack by unseen, malevolent forces. I would scour everyday for omens and coincidence - prophecies and signs - and my mind would duly supply various interpretations to the most mundane of events in a way that was rarely comforting or benign.
E. had changed in other ways too. He had shown no aptitude for study while we were at school (none us did really), but now we had left he began reading Homer's The Odyssey and writing his own stories. His writing was wildly individualistic -not particularly good as such, but they were undeniably like nothing else I've read since. He began talking about wanting to be a writer. I was jealous of both his new reading habits and his prolific writing output. I tried writing myself that summer. The only one I remember writing was something called Flipside of the Coin where someone in a totalitarian future, leading a drugged-up totally controlled existence, preferred living like that to the uncertain freedom a band of rebel fighter offered him.
Over August I went for an interview for a job at a hospital - working in the stock room, or cleaning medical equipment (I can't really remember now). I had decided by this point (thanks to talking to Julian) to take my art A-level in one year at nearby Uxbridge College. They offered me the job at the hospital and I didn't take it, and got a part time job working at WHSmiths in Uxbridge instead, The day before I started there, I think it was the first week in September, I had gone to London with E. I remember buying Kate Bush's The Hounds of Love, and that album marked the end of that summer somehow. On the way back from Ickenham tube station we walked through Swakeleys Park. I remember sitting on one of the rotting wooden benches near the tennis courts. The late afternoon sky was grey and cloudy. There was something cooler in the air.
I was eager for the autumn to begin.
