Melissa got me up once in the middle of the night to check on me. She was wearing a paint-spattered Buzzcocks T-shirt that said “Orgasm Addict” for pajamas. “Listen,” she said, “when you wake up, I probably won’t be here but Nick will be. I want you to take it slow the next couple of days. Rest. And if anything changes, call me immediately and we’ll get you in for a CT scan.”
I already knew I’d give anything to be her friend. I didn’t go back to sleep right away. I was wondering if Melissa was now my doctor and worried that, since she’d taken care of me, she considered me a patient and not a potential new best mate.
In the morning, there was a cup of tea on the floor near my head. Melissa had left, and Nick was in the front room. She looked like she hadn’t slept. She asked if I wanted to watch a video. I thought if I ran home and took last night’s medication immediately, perhaps I’d get away with having skipped a dose. But I couldn’t make myself leave. We sat on the settee where I’d slept and watched a bootleg video of Nirvana in Tijuana in 1989. Kurt was in torn jeans and flannel shirt and fell frenetically on the floor every chance he got, spinning himself in a circle with his feet galloping like a wild horse. Afterward Nick said she had to go down to the job center to sign on so she’d receive her weekly giro.
“Job center? Giro?” I asked.
“I’m on the dole. Except now they call it ‘job seeker’s allowance.’ I go down to the job center to show I’m actively looking for work, and the government sends me a cheque. If I do find anything, it’s usually temporary or part time. It’s hard to find anything with meaning when you don’t have a career.”
I thought about the Clash song “Career Opportunities” and said, “It’s hard to find anything with meaning under capitalism. Ever think of taking up the bass?”
Nick smiled wanly. “Actually, I played a wee bit of bass when I was sixteen. Doubt I can remember any of it.”
Interesting, I thought, storing that information for later.
Nick noticed me eyeing the blue-and-black badge on the lapel of her leather jacket that read “The Despair Faction,” AFI’s fan club, and said, “I was thinking I should get a lip ring like Davey Havok’s now that my lip’s swelled up anyway.” He was the lead singer.
“Maybe Dr. Jones can do it. That medical degree must be good for something.”
“Oh, come on. I’m the most easily intimidated person in the world, but even I don’t call her that,” Nick teased me.
“Are you sure you feel well enough to go out?”
“I’ve got to face the world sometime.”
I wanted to go with her but felt really ill. When she left, I told myself, now, go. I was weak, and my head rang. But before I left, I looked for paper and a pen to write a thank-you note to Melissa. I didn’t even know what to call her now that she was probably my doctor. Dear Dr. Babe Gorgeous, I thought and laughed. There’s a good start. That would be funny if I were leaving the country tomorrow forever. Dear Dr. Melissa. I can’t call her that. Dear Melissa, I am desperate for your friendship and would do anything to get it. When you go to work in the morning, I’ll be sitting outside your surgery. When you leave to go home, I’ll be sitting in the same spot like a potted plant. I wondered if I’d have to fall on my head again to get her attention. I tried to think of reasons being my friend would be good for her. Dear Melissa, I am of above-average intelligence and have fairly good hygiene. In the end, I scribbled, “Dear Melissa, thank you for everything. You are an extremely kind person.” I left the note in the kitchen with my telephone number. I went home with a heavy heart, thinking I’d never see her again and that all her friendliness had been neutralized by my stupid head injury. I wondered what would happen if I showed up at her surgery and asked her to pierce something.
Melissa rang me that evening to see how I was feeling. I felt queasy and flu-like, but I knew that was the result of not taking my medication properly. She told me if I felt better by the weekend, she’d take me to Camden Lock. My stomach muscles finally took a break from strangling me from inside. While I rested, I listened to Nirvana concerts that included the song “Rape Me.” I played one in particular, from the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, June 18, 1991, because Kurt just screams and screams. It was the first time “Rape Me” was performed live. There’s a lot of emotion in it.
On Saturday, I met Melissa in front of Camden Town station, and she took me to Camden Lock, the street market by the canal, to look for live-music CDs. We walked back to the Camden tube, rode the northern line all the way down to the central line, got off at Notting Hill Gate and followed the crowds to Portobello Road Market, with its brightly painted flats, pubs, and shopfronts. I bought some cheap jumpers and socks, and then we stopped at the Dub Vendor Record Shack on Ladbroke Grove to check out some reggae. It was like Chrissie Hynde had said, reggae had been the soundtrack for punk. “Look at me.” I posed under the Westway. “I am the Clash!” Melissa took a photo of me with her mobile phone.
Later we met Nick at the Iskem for a meal. I felt like a fifteen-year-old boy. Melissa’s beauty was distracting. Sometimes I’d have to ask her to repeat things. I wanted to hold her and stroke her sexy, tousled hair very gently. She made a kind of hush in my heart.
Nick brought her AFI CDs by my bedsit the next day and we listened to those, my best Nirvana bootlegs, and bands I was fond of that were obscure in the States like the Wall, Abrasive Wheels, and the Partisans. Soon we fell into a routine. She came to see me nearly every day. If I was out boxing, she’d sit on the outside steps and wait for me. If I went busking, I left a note on the door telling her where I’d be. Mostly we talked and listened to tunes. Like me, she was mostly involved in the worlds of books and music. She helped me write songs, and was funny and charming, as I played my guitar. I felt she was a rare person. I wondered if I could talk her into looking for a used bass. Every time I’d brought up the idea, she said she’d be too shy to play in front of anyone anyway. She had returned to her own flat, and I offered to visit her in Bethnal Green, but she said she felt claustrophobic there. I guessed that maybe it felt too personal to her, and it was her personal space that had been violated. But she said she didn’t feel like she could keep living at Melissa’s indefinitely, even though Melissa had asked her to stay. She said she was feeling introverted since the attack but was comfortable around me because I’d been there.
Nick liked my stories about getting arrested for civil disobedience when I was an AIDS activist with ACT UP/DC. She gave me a long-sleeved, black-and-white ACT UP Manchester T-shirt, which I prized. “When I was in DC Jail,” I said, “chatting with a woman in her cell, she told me she’d murdered her girlfriend.”
“Whatever did you say?” Nick asked eagerly.
“I said, ‘Oh, so you’re single? Are you dating?’”
Nick started laughing.
“Not really. I didn’t know what to say. Once I went to the United States Botanic Gardens and planted marijuana seeds in with the ferns then dropped dope seeds on the White House lawn through the wrought-iron fence when the guards weren’t looking. It was during that stupid Just Say No to Drugs campaign. Another time, I put pink-and-black ACT UP/DC stickers—‘Until There’s a Cure, There’s ACT UP’—on the soles of my shoes and took the White House tour. I peeled them off and stuck them to the carpet every time I bent over and pretended to tie my shoe. But the funniest thing was after the 1987 March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights. We’d been arrested at the Supreme Court for protesting against the sodomy statutes, and some of us refused to pay our fines. One of the women with me had given the alias Connie Lingus. In a packed courtroom, the judge referred to her as ‘Ms. Lingus’ and everyone started laughing. We were each given a receipt with ‘Three days in DC Jail’ written on it. We were kind of depressed, thinking about peeing in front of an audience in the horrible prison toilet, until we happened to glance at her receipt. In proper last name, first name format, the first line read, ‘Lingus, Connie.’”
Nick took me to see Rabies Babies when they played in Hackney at the Lord Cecil pub. She thought the pink-haired guitarist was cute. And we went to see Intensive Care and Deadline with Melissa. But we liked catching shows by older bands like Stiff Little Fingers best. We usually met up with Melissa once a week, and Nick and I stayed at her flat if it was late. I started carrying at least one extra dose of medication in my pocket just in case. Sometimes Nick and I had a night out at Blush, a nearby lesbian club that had a gaudy pink-and-orange sign out front and did nice veggie meals. But mostly we walked places or stayed inside because we didn’t have any money, even though as the Clash song “Cheapskates” says, “I don’t like to hang about in this lonely room / ’cos London is for going out and trying to hear a tune.”
One night we walked to the video shop and rented a film about football hooliganism. The rest of the night I couldn’t stop singing, “Get yer tits out, get yer tits out, get yer tits out for the lads!” Nick was doubled over laughing. “I can’t help it,” I said. “It’s stuck in my head now.”
“Why don’t you sing it for Melissa?” Nick asked. “I dare you.”
I didn’t get to see Melissa as often as I liked because she had a grown-up job and a busy schedule with her own circle of friends. In other words, she had a life. But Nick and I went busking, and I’ll always remember her in her black jacket, carrying my plastic-wrap-covered amp against her body so it wouldn’t get wet. While I played, she would entreat onlookers for coinage and clap her hands in black fingerless mitts. I had a pair of gray ones and found I could actually play with them on if I was really cold.
When I felt hesitant, I would look over at Nick and she would cock her head at me and grin, rain slanting down her face. Her presence was reassuring, and I tried out new songs that we’d written together like “Rapist Nazi, Fuck Off!” When we made enough money, we ordered pizza from Pizza Hut or Tasti Pizza, which both delivered. Or we rang up Spicy Wok on Seven Sisters Road. It did a lot of different curries like king prawn, vegetable, and mushroom. It wasn’t expensive and had free delivery. The nights were getting colder, and the curries were a treat.
Nick often stayed overnight at mine, and I knew she was afraid of being alone. We slept crammed into my single bed. Lately she seemed agitated and troubled about something she wouldn’t talk about. When Nick didn’t appear for two consecutive afternoons, I was worried. I told myself that just because she and Melissa were my entire London social life, that didn’t mean she didn’t have other mates she’d been neglecting. I tried calling her on the phone but got no reply. I rang Melissa, but she hadn’t heard from Nick either. Four days passed, then a week, and I became genuinely concerned—beyond my usual, oversensitive OCD paranoia that I was unlikable and somehow at fault. It was hard to go busking without her.
On Saturday, Melissa rang to ask if she could come round. When I opened up the door with its panes of stained glass, I was so happy to see her I had to stop myself from jumping all over her like a puppy. I’d just finished showering and I was barefoot, wearing a faded, black-and-yellow 999 tour T-shirt from the late seventies. I’d re-dyed the green portion of my hair because it looked too sallow against the bright pink. My hair was supposed to look like the fluorescent cover of the first Sex Pistols album. My tiny shower didn’t drain well. My feet were green from standing in the run-off water from my hair.
Melissa gave me a quick hug. “How are you? What in God’s name have you done to your feet?” She threw her black denim jacket on my bed and took off her round, blue-tinted sunglasses. When she unzipped her black hooded sweatshirt, I saw a black Angelic Upstarts T-shirt I thought suited her that said “I’m An Upstart.” She didn’t wait for an answer and walked around my room looking at pictures I’d stuck to the walls with Blu-Tack. Kurt Cobain in a London launderette. Kurt lying on his back playing a Univox Hi-Flyer. Kurt in a dress.
Melissa sat on my bed and rifled through my Nirvana bootlegs. I sat next to her. She rubbed the top of my head dry with her hand and ran her fingers through my hair. “Me darlin’, it’s not just your feet.”
I had jumped out of the shower and dressed quickly because, even though it was bright and sunny outside, my room was chilly. When Melissa had knocked on my front window, I’d run to let her in without looking in a mirror. “What is it?” I asked.
“You’ve got a green forehead.”
“I never. Oh, go on.”
“Don’t believe me, mutant.”
I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. “You can barely notice it.” I pulled on a red-and-black plaid shirt, the flannel worn thin, and snapped on a green, leopard-print studded bracelet around my left wrist.
“A green forehead doesn’t have to stand out to be noticeable.” Melissa leaned back, crossing her ankles, her feet encased in black bovver boots. “I’m feeling dead anxious about Nick. I haven’t been able to reach her all week.”
“Me neither. Maybe she’s out with her mates ’cause she’s feeling better.” Hair-dying always makes me feel optimistic.
“It’s not like her not to be around at all. I’ve left messages. I’ve gone to her flat. We used to be really close when Jake was still here. They’re my best mates. The three of us did everything together. Now I don’t know.” Her voice grew quiet. “But it isn’t like her not to give me a bell when I’ve asked her to.”
“Not one single bell?” I played with a ring on her pink-tartan bondage trousers.
Melissa eyed me suspiciously, not sure if I was taking the piss. “Sweetheart, to give us a bell means ringing up on the telephone.”
“I know what it means. The dog and pony.”
“The what?” She rubbed her forehead, gazing at me with eyes the color of the sweet roasted chestnuts I bought in bags from street vendors when I was busking around St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London.
“Cockney rhyming slang. I can’t believe you don’t know it. Dog and pony, telephone me.”
“Dog and bone.” Melissa tried not to laugh. “Dog and bone is the telephone.”
Damn, I thought because I’d been imitating her accent. I really wanted to sound like her. Nick’s Mancunian was also affecting me, and I never quite knew how my vowels were going to come out whenever I opened my mouth.
Melissa had made a list of places she thought Nick might go and asked that we split it in half and look for her.
“Isn’t that a bit extreme?” I said. “Why are you so concerned? She’ll think we’re stalking her. She has a right to privacy.”
“I know. It’s a feeling I have. Like she might be reacting to what happened to her. Like she might do something self-destructive.”
“Does she normally do that?” I asked.
Melissa hesitated. “She’s really depressed about the rape. And she doesn’t always take the best care of herself.”
“Are you thinking of something in particular?”
“Another time she disappeared from my life. Even if we don’t see each other, we usually talk on the phone at least once a week. I went round her flat and found her deathly ill from a really bad flu. She’d had it at least a week and could barely get out of bed to go to the loo. She wasn’t eating or answering the phone. She hadn’t called her clinic. I made her stay with me until she got better.”
“Give me my half of the list,” I said.