Nothing much happened over the summer when I was 20. It just didn’t seem to have much an identity, a bit bland, not too bad, not too good, just a bit… nothing.
The previous autumn I had begun an art and design foundation course at Harrow college. I had enjoyed the first term, and had got along with my course mates. After Christmas when we had to specialise (I chose fine art) I hadn't fared so well. Very few people I had been with over the previous term chose to do fine art (most doing graphic design), and I suddenly found myself in a very large class full of strangers. A social anxiety began to grip me, and I was unable to connect with many (any really) people in my class. I had a disastrous meeting with my tutors, and after Easter I decided to leave college. It was about a month before the course was due to finish, but I was convinced that I wasn’t going to pass. I didn't tell anyone - not even the tutors - I was leaving, and one day just never went back.
I had lost contact with Geoffrey and Colin over the past year too. I’m not sure what had happened to Colin. Since leaving school he had worked in a bookshop in town – Had he got a new job? Moved away? I am uncertain now. I would run into him a couple of times in the future, but it wasn’t until the era of Facebook that we renewed contact.
As for Geoffrey, he was eager to distance himself from us – to such an extent that David and myself – in a remarkable display of maturity – began to refer to him as the ‘traitor-general’. I think we ran into him once over the next year or so, a vaguely uncomfortable meeting.
I still continued working Saturdays at W.H.Smiths and occasionally worked extra shifts there too. As spring crept into summer (and that summer there was nothing to mark its beginnings) I spent my days just hanging out with David. There was a certain place we liked to go, an overgrown patch of countryside that lay on the other side of Ickenham golf course. Here there were man-made lakes (some used for fishing, some for boating), some kind of industrial quarry, farmland, and stretches of thickly clustered woodland. On the other side of this – or really, running through this, was the Grand Union Canal which led eventually to Uxbridge town centre. No-one really came to this hidden patch of countryside.
That summer all centred around the Holiday to Tunisia. This had been planned (and paid for by parents) over the last year. David, his girlfriend Mary, John and myself were going to spend two weeks in a 4* hotel on the coast. We were going to go mid-July – and those weeks leading up to it required a great deal of preparation. I remember we all had to get shots at the doctors before we went – I remember nearly feinting when I had mine (always been a bit squeamish).
I spent the early part of that summer trying to get into death metal. I had never really got the hang of death metal – which had surprised me, given my teenage love for fast, heavy thrash metal. Death metal was faster and nastier, and thrash had lost its way since the beginning of the decade. Too many bands, emboldened by the success of Metallica and Anthrax, had started to slow down, record ballads, and adopt a more commercial sound in the pursuit of record sales. Thrash metal's venture into realms of commercial acceptability was a total creative failure. Death metal had more in common with the thrash metal I had loved over my teenage years – the lyrics, the imagery, the speed… but something was missing. There seemed to be a lack of adrenalin bursting intensity, some vital x-factor I couldn’t quite connect with.
I made it my mission to ‘get into’ death metal. All this was sparked off by a cheap compilation I had bought at Our Price one Saturday lunchtime. I found that there was some songs I actually enjoyed – from bands like Vader, Unleashed and Immolation. London trips provided further records – Convulse, Sentenced, Deceased – and I was able to pick up the occasional one (Therion's second album) from Our Price. I would listen to these records deep into the night whilst playing the computer game ‘Elite’ on my Amstrad CPC 464.. Long hours were spent hunched over the grey keyboard, trying desperately to increase my rating from ‘competent’ to ‘dangerous’, trying even more desperately to convince myself that death metal was the way forward. At some point David and myself went to see Guns’n’Roses at Wembley Arena. I was annoyed that my death metal listening was interrupted by this gig. Guns’n’Roses weren’t very good. The highlight was a cover version of the Misfits’ ‘Attitude’. We left before the concert finished.
A few weeks before we were due to go on holiday to Tunisia, David and myself had gone on a trip to some local woods – a little bit further than we would normally travel to. In the days and weeks following David complained that the walk had left him ‘knackered’ and was unable to come out. I remember this state of affairs lasted until Tunisia.
It was obvious looking back at it from a distance of over 20 years that he was trying to avoid me, trying to put some distance between us. Though he had no job, he had a girlfriend, and wanted to spend more time working on his writing. He had got a number of rejections for his short stories, some of which were quite promising and encouraged him to send the stories elsewhere and to try again. I was probably quite annoying company; insecure and irritating in equal measures. After the previous summer I was terrified of being isolated in the house I lived in – a place I began to associate with depression and a certain kind of desolate, haunted despair.
And what was Tunisia like? I’ve not really thought about that two week holiday for a long time now. It was hot, and the sky had that constant dreamlike haze about it. I shared a room with John, and Mary and David shared a room. The beach was busy with people trying to sell us things. We went down the Marina and bought drink (glass bottles of coke) from there, and a bad leather hat from the hotel shop, not to mention a cassette tape of Tunisian folk music I never listened to after that summer (perhaps not surprisingly). We went for a weekend trip into the Sahara desert, where I didn’t go for a camel ride (only John did - I stayed in the coach with David and Mary).
Us being us, we didn’t drink much, we didn’t stay up late, or spend our days sunbathing on the beach. We spent a lot of time in our hotel rooms watching pornographic Italian game shows and trying to work out what was happening on the news. I was greatly worried over images of Saddam Hussain giving some kind of speech. It didn’t take much for my apocalyptic fears to make their way to the surface. Was there to be a new Gulf War? Had Saddam Hussain got some kind of super weapon he was aiming at the West? In-between these apocalyptic concerns we watched MTV; Ministry and Fields of the Nephilim. Home seemed a long time away.
Part of the problem with the holiday was that I had somewhat more than platonic feelings for Mary. I always had done, right from the time I had first met her – in the first year of my A-levels, way back in the autumn of 1988. I had thought for a time that she might feel the same, but it transpired that she had feelings for David. They had been together since the Christmas of that year, a not inconsiderable time for any relationship, let alone one started when he had been 16 and she had been 17.
I suppose, looking back on it, that my less than platonic feelings had been picked up on – certainly by David (Back in the 6th form he had confided to a friend that we ‘clashed over Mary’). I'm sure that Mary had suspected too. Over the holiday – in such close quarters with each other, there was a certain level of tension that spilled over in any number of ways. At one point during one hot African afternoon John had fallen asleep on his bed and had had a dream that he had died. He had said that in the dream he could see his coffin being loaded onto the plane, then his funeral, the mourners at the funeral. This terrified David and myself, seeing this as a premonition not only of John’s death, but ours too. John had had a dream a few months before the holiday where he had been in a dark room and had been confronted with four coffins, each bearing all our names. David started crying while we tried to comfort him. I remember him holding Mary’s hand and wailing ‘you don’t believe, you can’t understand, you don’t believe’… Away from the more rational John and Mary, David and myself discussed the possibility of returning to England early.
In the event we stayed, and on the last day of the holiday, we had somehow managed to find our way to the roof of the hotel. I remember peering through the vast stone letters that adorned the roof of the hotel, spelling out its name ‘Marharba Hotel’. We had finally begun to relax, and Edward even commented how typical it was that we ‘had begun to enjoy ourselves on the last day’.
We arrived back in the early hours of August the 2nd. I remember getting home in the early hours (I don’t remember how though, whether one of our parents picked us up, or if it was by taxi) and Mum commented on my lack of a tan. I thought strangely guiltily of all those hours in our hotel room away from the sun… only we could go away on holiday to the Sahara and not get a suntan.
England seemed incredibly autumnal after the hyper-summer air of Tunisia, shadowy and cooled – though this was only in contrast to North Africa and the Sahara. It was one of those endlessly hot summers that seemed to come every year in the early nineties. Of those first few weeks back I remember very little. I remember watching a Sapphire and Steel story (Assignment 3) with Simon that I had just bought. The story was long, stretching over three hours. Time travellers from the future were studying the present in an invisible penthouse on top of a block of modern day flats. The sentient piece of meat, bred in future world laboratories, that they had used to travel in time had begun to experiment on the travellers, and to threaten the earth itself. Sapphire and Steel were called to sort the problem out. I found watching this story quite disturbing – I’m not sure why – I’m not even sure if it was connected to what was happening on the screen, but a sense of sick foreboding crept over me. Even if I watch Assignment 3 now, I can feel that same dark-adrenalin rush in my stomach, a nauseous mixture of nerves and dread.
Another image I remember is of having been to Harrow-on-the-Hill – possibly with David – and getting off the bus down Clifton Gardens, where my old school, Abbotsfield Comprehensive was located. I had bought the All About Eve album ‘Touched by the Hand of Jesus’ and maybe the first self-titled Bathory album. Sweat-shadowy air, an autumnal-August, summers-end coming closer. Why had I got off the bus there? Why had I even caught the bus? Had Edward caught the bus with me up to a certain point and then got off, returned to his girlfriend’s house that was near there and I had walked the 40 minute walk home alone? I’m not sure why this image seems somehow to sum up that August between the end of that unremarkable summer and the holiday in Tunisia… but it seems resonant with, well, something. The mysteries of why I was there, or how I got there are forever lost to the summer of 1992.
Toward the end of that summer, my sister had a friend, Karen stay over. They were both waiting for their A-level results which were due out the next day. I had always liked – fancied – Karen, even though she was two years younger than me. I didn’t see her that often, but we got on well when we did. I remember my parents being away, and my sister, myself and Karen spent our time in the living room watching Red Dwarf videos. I remember at one point looking at Karen, and with her blonde, almost white hair, she suddenly looked like an old, old woman, and I thought, with sudden clarity, that there was something of tragedy about her, or something of tragedy about her in the far, far future. The hallucination – or shift in perception- only lasted for a few seconds, and felt like some warning or premonition.
At some point my sister left the room , leaving Karen and myself alone. We lay next to each other on cushions on the floor, and at one point I looked at her, and she looked back at me and held that gaze. That moment of certainty. That charged air. We might have kissed then, but I bottled it. A sudden terror came over me. I needed to be out of there. It was enough that I knew that she was attracted to me. It wasn’t of course. It wasn’t enough. When I lay in my bed that night, washes of regret came over me. I regretted that moment of fear for years afterwards. Funny, until writing this, I’ve not thought about that non-moment for years.
My sister passed her A-levels and left to study nursing in Bristol. I sent a story off to Interzone, about a piece of alien technology creating monsters in the desert.
Summer ended at some point. Autumn began. I don't really remember. I had no job, no plans, not even any ideas.
My life would be very different at the end of next summer.
(All names, needless to say, have been changed)
(All names, needless to say, have been changed)
