When Reagan was elected president, Annie and I walked to the university mental health center so I could ask for political asylum. I heard the women in my head telling me, “Stay in England. Stay in England.” We were informed that Great Britain did not have a policy of extending political asylum to Americans. Of course Maggie Thatcher was just as bad, but I tried to argue that she wasn’t as personally humiliating. Then I asked for citizenship based on being a member of a former colony, but that didn’t work either.
We went to an “end-of-the-world” party in town given by a friend of a friend of Annie’s. Music blared, and the house was crammed with people dancing. Annie and I fought our way to a bit of space in a corner, trying not to knock into anyone’s cigarette ash or beer. “You wanna drink?” Annie shouted over “Ant Music” by Adam and the Ants. We were smashed up against a keg of Scrumpy. She handed me a plastic cup of the alcoholic cider and said, “Watch that. It goes down easy, but it’s a killer.”
We couldn’t move, so I kept refilling my cup. The cider was sweet like apple juice. I was sweltering inside my red leather jacket. The first two things I’d bought upon arriving in Exeter were a pair of black Doc Marten boots and a jacket with zippers across the sleeves like the one Chrissie Hynde wears on the cover of the first Pretenders record. Those were my two essentials. Of course I didn’t realize then that hers was probably not actually leather but made out of some cruelty-free substitute. The collar of my Day-Glo pink-and-black striped shirt stuck to my neck.
“You know, I don’t really like most Yanks.” Annie rolled a cigarette as I filled my cup again. “But you’re not a real one, are ya?” She pulled a stray leaf of tobacco off her tongue. “You’ve got to stop sounding like them. We have to work on your accent and vocabulary. First off, the British ‘R.’ Not arr,” Annie said, exaggerating the contortion of her jaw to sound American. “Say aah. Weekend not weekend. And for fuck’s sake, stop saying garage. It’s gair-edge.” But of course since Annie’s accent was Mancunian, she didn’t pronounce the “A”s the way they did in London and the south. “I want to smoke.” Annie gestured at me to go outside for some fresh air. She threaded through the crowd, but when I tried to follow her, the room pulsated and my legs felt too weary to walk. Annie said later she’d got all the way outside before realizing I wasn’t behind her. She had to fight her way back to the corner where I was still leaning against the wall.
“Oh, crap. What did I tell you about Scrumpy?” Annie put her arm around my waist and dragged me. I remember being poured into someone’s car. The next thing I knew, I was lying on Annie’s bed and she was handing me a mug of coffee.
I drank the coffee, and Annie put the kettle on to boil again. She had run out to get Cornish pasties and chips while I was passed out. Now she handed me the food and told me to eat something.
My red leather jacket hung on a chair, and I noticed a small tear at the elbow. “What happened?” I asked.
Annie said, “I dropped you,” and we both started laughing.
By the spring, the tear had swelled and I finally got round to having my jacket repaired. The man with the leather stall in Exeter market noticed the badges pinned all over it: “Don’t Do It, Di!,” “Lesbians Unite,” “Women United in Armed Snuggle.” Because when I returned to pick it up, he offered me a hundred pounds to go to bed with him. He fingered the purple “Punk Dyke” button on my lapel. “I’ve been thinking about you since last Saturday,” he said. “Are you really like that?”
“Of course,” I said. “You don’t think I dress in meaningless slogans, do you?”
He began to ask those exasperatingly stupid questions unenlightened straight men ask about how two women could possibly have sex “all alone.”
“For Chrissake, read a book,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’m going to take you out, buy you a meal, and then I’m going to go to bed with you. And I won’t use my fingers. I’m going to change your life. I’ll give you a hundred pounds. If I can’t bring you to climax, you keep the money. Well?”
I stared at him, trying to work out how his enormous ego could fit inside a normal-sized head. I put on my jacket and pointed to a yellow-and-black badge that said “Piss Off.” “Do you know what that means?”
“Yeah.”
“Then do it.”
When I got back to Jessie Montgomery House, I immediately rang up Annie. She and Neil drove directly to my residence hall. Neil had a garment bag full of clothes. “This tie will look smashing.” He held up a green tie to the gray “Eve Was Gay” sweatshirt I was wearing. I’d had it made when we were in Cornwall. Neil had snapped a photograph of me pointing to the bright-red, blasphemous letters with an entire Salvation Army band marching behind me, staring. I put on Neil’s baggy white shirt over a black thermal-underwear top. I put on his suit, and Annie rolled up the trouser legs. Neil knotted the tie around my collar, and Annie tucked my hair into a trilby hat. “You’re Jeremy Lesbian,” Neil pronounced.
As we left the car park in town, Annie took out the eyebrow pencil she sometimes used to underline her dark eyes and drew a mustache under my nose. Neil stepped back and eyed me critically. “As a gay man, I will say that I could be very attracted to Jeremy Lesbian.”
Laughing, we walked down the High Street, holding our scarves over our faces against the strong wind. We were nervous and ducked into a wine bar for a quick half-pint to fortify ourselves. Neil drank tonic water. He was worried that the man at the leather stall would take a swing at me when I made a pass at him, and he wanted to be alert enough to pull me out of the way.
At the indoor market, Neil had a look at our target and said, “Christ, he’s bigger than the lot of us. If he hits her, he’ll knock her bloody head off.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Annie said.
While they argued, I said, “I’m going to catch myself a real man.”
“Sorry?” Neil acted like he was offended, running his hand through his hair.
Annie said, “A real man, missus,” and put her hands on her hips. “Not some bloody poof.”
I walked up to the leather-stall guy. “Listen,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to take you out, buy you a meal, go to bed with you and change your life. I’ll give you a hundred quid to have sex with me. You need a real man.”
His face went completely red. Neil and Annie jumped out from behind a fruit and vegetable stall. Then he recognized who I was and calmed down. “Okay, I get your point.” He held out his hand, and I shook it.
We ran out of the market feeling liberated. We believed that every little victory counted. I took off my hat before it was whipped away by the wind. Pink and white blossoms from the cherry and almond trees swirled around us like confetti. I felt like I was inside one of those plastic globes you shake to make it snow. I had one of Exeter Cathedral, and when I shook it, snowflakes fell around the plastic steeples.
Neil started the car, and Annie wiped the eyebrow pencil off my face with spit and a Kleenex. I looked out the windscreen at the big drops of rain that plopped down, mashing blossoms into pink-and-white mud on the pavement as people trod on them. It was getting dark, and the yellow streetlights came on. Neil drove through the familiar roundabout to his flat.
Neil lived on Monk’s Road in a sea of terraced houses with brightly painted woodwork and drainpipes. His flat was red brick with white brick around the bulging, ground-floor bay window. We walked toward the orange “The Canton Fish Bar” sign for some takeaway, then strolled back along the blue, black, yellow, and green-painted terraces, eating hot, mushy chips out of paper bags.
Neil’s room was in front on the ground floor. We dried our scarves and gloves on the radiator. I unwrapped the newspaper from around my piece of fried battered fish, and Annie pulled back the white, lacy curtains, letting in the light from the street.
I woke up the next morning to a cup of tea being set on the floor near my head. “Mornin’ sunshine,” Annie said. “Sleep well?” It was Sunday. We drank our tea and went to a nearby café for a proper English breakfast—a “fry-up,” as Annie called it. I had a plate of fried eggs, chips, beans, sausage, tomato, mushrooms, and fried bread. Afterward Annie and I walked leisurely back to the university. A gray cobblestone lane led through blackberry vines, daffodils, and purple crocuses and alongside an overgrown hedgerow. I decided that the real Garden of Eden must be full of daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, primroses, bluebells, white snowdrops, ornamental garlic, and cowslips.
That evening at Jessie Montgomery, it was regular Sunday tea—roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I worked on a long-overdue E. M. Forster essay and had a hot bath. In my little room in Exeter, I felt insulated and safe. I had almost forgotten what it was like to have OCD-induced insomnia. I’d fall asleep listening to the rain beat against the window, surrounded by green hills that were so bright I almost thought I imagined them, tucked in among the glistening hedgerows.