Bed is sticky and crummy. It’s shared with a banana, a quarter-eaten Panini, the latest Ilya & Emilia record and my laptop and wire, snaking under-and-over a pink duvet. I am wearing a green striped T-shirt with a black drip on the front, which is actually from painting the events board at work with blackboard paint but has the effect of making me feel like I’ve been dribbling. BBC news is on telly – a feature on how complicated it is to use fire extinguishers – and a gale is whipping the morning up outside.
I shouldn’t really be awake and will have to sleep some more before work at 5pm. I got in at around 4am – it’s now two tiny minutes to eight – because we stayed up drinking and smoking, and most importantly, talking, after hours. We reminisced about being up talking another night, when Roz was recovering from her small operation, but more than that, we talked about love and possession – photographs on lovers’ walls and noticing the cupid-bow lips of pretty customers; what it is to be a girl; how blistered we are, if at all, because of booze. Roz spoke of being with a lover and not drinking, but allowing yourself to be intoxicated by the person. The way her voice rises and falls like reggae is so hypnotic and beguiling, and you wonder – why haven’t I lain around with my boy, asking him question after question before peeling off a layer of clothes? And of course, I have, but never to Roz’s narrative voice, which makes you feel like you’re part of a beautiful, grainy indie film – the kind Chloe Sevigny would be in.
The Panini is no longer in the bed, but in my belly, and I didn’t mind eating it because when I weighed myself the scales said I was lighter than yesterday.
I’m playing a gig in London tomorrow. I can never guess how a gig will go. It will be good to be in London though. When I was fifteen and my mum was doing an MA in Silversmithing in London, we spent a lot of time surveying the shows at the Art colleges and rummaging through clothes in street markets and cheap outlets that sold crop tops advertising: 90% Angel. This teenager had bleached her hair with Sun-In, wore wrap-around skirts, tight tops, denim jackets and white platform trainers. In the previous year her cheeks had shrunk away and her figure had conformed to the lithe girl-next-door prototype she’d miss in adulthood.
It was a hot summer; the roasting dirt gave the shopping streets a baked-potato aroma. This was a term of looking: the Parisian-style women in black sunglasses; the older kids in tie-dye with tattoos that told stories, lovelorn scars and bracelets from festival companions; the men in crisp suits and pink shirts; the punks; the prostitutes; the druggies.
But, walking around the degree shows at the Art colleges – that was where I really felt excited. Cow gum, acrylics, linseed oil, spray paint, ink, developing fluid, heat-treated plastic and canvas – breathing, quivering, resonating with future promise.
I thought I’d live above a Chinese takeaway and that the windows in my flat-share would be single-glazed, the ashtrays would be heavy green glass, the plates would be made by Ittalla and the fabrics – curtains, bedspreads, tablecloth – would be covered in the cut-out patterns of Matisse.
This all seemed a certainty.
