WHEN I MET HER, Beatrix Cecilia Montague was somewhere between seventy-five and eighty-five years old. She was born in colonial India and attended a posh girls’ finishing school in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Her hobbies included bridge, golf, and tennis—her mother was the all-India women’s tennis champion. She made sure she never missed an episode of EastEnders, Neighbours, or Coronation Street, owned a beige fifteen-year-old Ford Fiesta and a cockatoo named Dippy. She smoked a pack and a half of Lambert and Butler cigarettes per day, washed and reused the half dozen pieces of cling wrap she owned, and seldom arose before eleven. She delivered a right-wing newsletter throughout the neighborhood regardless of inclement weather. Her hair was salt white and pepper gray save for a pompadour, stained the color of egg yolk from cigarette smoke. Her entire wardrobe was polyester and sported all sorts of unclassifiable stains. On any given day she could smell of faintly spicy sweat, pet stores, or musty cupboards. She didn’t flinch when using racist, empirical terms like “golliwog” and “pickaninny.” Beatrix Cecilia Montague was my college roommate.
Mrs. Montague—I never once addressed her as anything else in three years of living with her, so I won’t here either—was above all else a woman of principle. She wasn’t in the business of taking advantage of anybody and was vigilant in ensuring that she wasn’t being taken advantage of herself. This is what I knew about Mrs. Montague prior to meeting her: in her inconveniently located ground-floor flat in leafy Hanwell, W7, she had a spare room that she rented to students for twenty-five pounds per week. She had one pet, a cockatoo, she was a smoker, and she would not be providing meals.
“Twenty-five quid?” said Sandra, my mum’s best and brassiest friend, when I told her about my bargain over a meal from Mandarin Court, an establishment known locally as “the chinky.” “Blimey, that’s cheap, innit? A cockatoo? Are you sure it doesn’t say she’s looking for a cock or two?”
Getting a cheap place with no lease was of the utmost importance to me. Here’s why: I was not exactly college material. A precocious five-year-old, I had peaked early intellectually. Since then I’d become bone idle and had developed a socially debilitating love of heavy metal and had a D+ average. Undeterred, my dad threatened severe economic sanctions unless I at least tried to get into a school.
In the United Kingdom, where until recently education was entirely paid for by the taxpayer, all university places are provisional until the publication of A-level results in the second week of August. A-levels are the equivalent of SATs. Let’s suppose your first choice of school was Oxford but you didn’t get the grades required there. You would have to opt for another one of the schools you were provisionally accepted to who would admit you based on your A-level results. Schools are required to keep these provisional places open until the results are published. This means that after publication a lot of university places suddenly become available and there is a mad scramble to fill them. (On the day the results are published, broadsheet newspapers include supplements made up purely of ads from different schools to entice those still without a place to secure one over the phone!) Places at better schools are snapped up instantly by the most qualified, but the trickle-down effect means that a lot of the shittier universities are practically dragging people in off the street regardless of their academic aptitude. That’s how I got in.
Upon getting a place at Thames Valley University my plan was to leave Thames Valley University. I felt by the age of eighteen there was barely any room left in my brain to learn any new stuff—even “Media Studies”—but I also knew that my attending university, even for a semester, would make my father a happy man. Nobody in our family had gone to college and it was my father’s ambition that I should be the first to go, in spite of me expressing absolutely no interest in furthering my education or even having the grades to get into anything but the most piss-poor of institutions. In our town, going to university was far from expected from a child, and I felt it unfair that I was being randomly singled out to attend. In my graduating class, I would say less than one in twenty kids went on to university, or “uni,” as it’s known.
All I really wanted to do was play in what I now realize was a dreadful rock band. My plan was a tightrope act: I had to teach my parents a lesson about not overestimating their children, but I knew that if I made that lesson an expensive one, I’d never be able to forget it. That’s why when I saw Mrs. Montague’s ad in TVU’s Accommodations Office, I knew I had found the perfect housemate. TVU had no student housing but instead provided listings of whole houses to rent with other students or rooms to rent within a family home or private residence. In either situation, it was unheard of to pay less than fifty quid a week.
Before my mother and I took a train to London to meet her and see the available bargain room, I hoped that Mrs. Montague was a sexy divorcée, or better yet, an independently wealthy widow in her early forties, yearning for the company of an eager house boy as per the ad’s insinuation. The way I saw it, what a sultry Mrs. Montague could teach me in the bedroom would ultimately have a more practical application than anything I’d glean from a patchily attended semester of Media Studies classes at Britain’s worst university. The school’s only real claim to fame is that it used to be Ealing College of Art and was attended by rock heroes like Queen’s Freddie Mercury, The Who’s Pete Townsend, and Ron Wood from the Rolling Stones. With such a rock-and-roll precedent, I idly hoped that, if nothing else, a bit of uni might bolster my chances of rock stardom.
After a week spent convincing myself that I’d be spending the autumn at the mercy of a nymphomaniacal Anne Bancroft type, my mother and I pulled up to Golden Court, the grand name given to what looked like a run-down assisted living home. Mrs. Montague opened the door to her dusty little flat. To my utter horror she had about forty years on the Mrs. Robinson character from my sordid imagination.
She ran a wrinkly hand through her thick wild hair and peered at us both from behind her bifocals.
“Hello, you must be Grant,” she said with a dark brown voice and a throat that begged in vain to be cleared. “And you must be Grant’s mother. Won’t you both come in?”
She turned on her heel and we followed her down a narrow hallway. My mother was trying hard not to make eye contact with me. She was finding a lot of amusement in the thought of me shacking up with the old buzzard and was very close to succumbing to a fit of the giggles.
Mrs. Montague showed us in to one of her two living rooms and introduced us to Dippy, who was emitting cranium-splitting squawks at the rate of about two per second. The late-afternoon sun picked up the thick dust that filled the room and gave everything a tangerine aura.
“The bird came from my grandchildren. A gift if you please. Heaven knows what they were thinking.”
She turned on her heel to fetch tea and biscuits, both allowing my mother to expel some of the laughter that was threatening to shake her apart and treating us to another rear view of her trademark quick march. I’d never seen a senior citizen walk with so much haste and conviction. Long, quick strides, each foot planted down as if stomping an injured field mouse out of its misery.
“Ain’t she posh?” said my mum, and she struggled to regain her composure.
In fact Mrs. Montague was just about the poshest person I had ever met, and in the truest and most literal sense of the word. (Posh is an acronym for Portside Out, Starboard Home, the preferred cabin allocation for the upper classes as they traveled by boat to the far reaches of the British Empire, so as not to subject their faces to any more sunshine than absolutely necessary.) The various knickknacks from Africa and India around the room suggested a colonial past, the dust and tatty furniture suggested a chaotic one. She hurriedly returned with some tea in chipped pastel-colored mugs and an assortment of biscuits arranged on a glass plate.
“Well, you must tell me about your journey.”
When you are raised in the borough of Thurrock in Essex, London is often referred to as “town,” and a visit to the capital might be signified by saying that you are simply going “up the road.” The insinuation of geographical proximity to the nation’s mighty capital is of course borne out of the indignity of residing in one of the UK’s cultural blind spots. Conversely, to Londoners, Essex is a far distant and unfortunate place. The way Mrs. Montague oohed and aahed through my mother’s recounting of the ninety-minute trip, you’d think we’d trekked in from the Congo.
Growing up, I felt incredibly intimidated by and ill at ease in London. All of my family had lived there at one time or another but had all moved east long ago. As a child I would accompany my mother on day trips to Covent Garden, Kensington High Street, and Knightsbridge. I vividly remember the filth, the overtly sexual atmosphere, the punks, seeing the black, the brown, and the Irish for the first time and being frightened and confused by the maelstrom of stimuli. I felt an immense relief when it was time to get back on the train and go home.
As a teen, I’d only go to London to see my favorite bands play, a bittersweet experience. Skid Row at London Docklands Arena, Def Leppard at Earls Court. Heavy metal fans were a rare and unpopular breed of teenager in our town. I had an overwhelming feeling of fraternity as my long-haired and much put upon chums and I drew closer to the venue, the number of virginal, acne-ridden, problem-haired, studded-leather-jacket-wearing brethren growing thicker and more vociferous on the streets. In the leafy commuter villages of semirural England we metal heads scuttled around in the shadows, trying to avoid the thorough beatings our getups so clearly invited. Here in London, far out of arm’s reach and earshot of the incensed local “trendies,” we strode triumphantly, singing “Youth Gone Wild” at the top of our lungs. In reality, the youth, as wild as we were, had to get back to Fenchurch Street station by 10:56, when the last train to Essex carried us home, drunk, deafened, and temporarily vindicated. The race back home often meant that we had to leave a show halfway through the encore, the strains of our favorite band’s greatest hit singles still playing as we made a desperate drunken dash for the tube.
I saw London, and by association any big city, as a big, pulsing, offensively cool, sexual, scary hassle that served only to highlight my virginity, provinciality, and lack of savvy. As I sat there with Mrs. Montague and my mother, I sort of couldn’t believe that I would be actually living in the belly of the beast. But Hanwell, in reality, was far from the belly of the beast. Sure it had a metropolitan postal code and was crisscrossed by red double-deckers, but it was too far west to have any urban cred whatsoever.
MRS. MONTAGUE had an abnormally jowly and wrinkly face; in the telling daylight it appeared positively scrotal. I could only count four tombstone teeth on the top of her mouth. A rare wide smile exposed two large gaps on either side of them. She was taller and thinner than most old ladies, although she was always bent at the hip, ensuring her precise height remained shrouded in mystery. Mrs. Montague gave us a quick tour of what would be my room, as well as the kitchen and bathroom we would share. My room was pokey, eight feet by six and a half, only room for a narrow little bed and quite dim, the ground being level with the windowsill. The bathroom contained a tub but no shower. I also couldn’t help noticing a threadbare toothbrush whose handle was in the shape of a naked man with an erect penis. The kitchen was painted a weak yellow and boasted thick, dusty cobwebs wherever possible.
The whole afternoon was just a formality; I knew that Mrs. Montague’s pad would be perfect for my plan to waste precisely the right amount of my parents’ time and money.
The following week, as my parents drove off home after delivering me and my personal effects to Golden Court, I started to wonder why they didn’t once ask me if I was sure that I’d be okay living with some wild-eyed old bat. They thought either that living with a relic would be somehow character-building, were agreeable with her bargain asking price, or had gotten wind of my ill-fated plan and were fixing on teaching me a lesson of my own.
My going to college garnered me only pity from my school chums, who couldn’t fathom why I had agreed, albeit under duress, to go. They wanted fast cars, sharp clothes, booze-fueled vacations in warm climates, and, a couple of years down the road, enough for a down payment on a house in or around Corringham. Uni would just be putting that all off for another three or four years, slowing down the fags and booze-fueled march to a plot in a local cemetery.
My farewell drinks do at the White Lion Pub was more like a wake.
“Well, looking on the bright side,” said John, who, despite being two years younger than me, was already pulling down a good salary at the Bank of England, “you might actually get your balls wet, for once.”
My friends were always riding me about my status as a sexual nonstarter. Every Friday night a group of four or five of us would drive to some obnoxious super-club to “pull birds.” John, Martin, John, Matt, and the other John would invariably snog a handful of birds and probably get their hands in their knickers on the dance floor, a maneuver we called feeding the pony a sugarlump. I, on the other hand, ended up as the designated eunuch. I would have loved and appreciated an anonymous tug-job in the parking lot of the Pizzazz! nightclub. It seemed that normal sexual experiences like that were being doled out willy-nilly to my crew, while the only visceral pleasure I could count on was rounding out the night with a gyro from Memet’s Abra-kebabra.
If any of us could have benefited from three years of undergraduate bacchanalia, it was probably me.
I’LL BE ASKING you to make yourself scarce every second Wednesday,” said Mrs. Montague with what I was beginning to realize was a permanent phlegmy rattle.
She watched me stack cans of baked beans and pasta onto my end table, windowsill, and under my bed.
I was told that all of the real estate in the refrigerator was accounted for and that I should also stick to “nonperishables” that I could store in my room.
“You can stay in your room on these occasions if you’ve nowhere to go but you may not use the bathroom, as movement can be distracting.”
She went into the other room to watch the omnibus Sunday screening of EastEnders but carried on talking to me in her haughty, horsey tone. “On those occasions, you ought not to drink a lot of fluids. Bridge tournaments, don’t you know. Distractions. We have our home games here. We play Putney next week. Putney! They are awfully good but oftentimes late.”
And then, with a drag on her cigarette and a heavy sigh, she added, “To the victors go the spoils, I suppose.”
She stopped for a long, loud slurp of tea. When it came to imbibing hot fluids, she had this interesting habit of giving her month a running start, beginning a powerful inhalation before she had even lifted her cup from the coffee table.
“I saw your banjo.”
She was referring to my Fender Stratocaster.
“I trust that you won’t be playing it while I’m about. I can hear everything. I’m like a hawk.”
The theme tune to the UK’s most watched nightly soap opera began, and even from the next room I could feel that Mrs. Montague had been placated.
“I say,” she shouted from the living room in a softer, sadder tone, “would you care to watch EastEnders with me?”
And so began a ritual. Mrs. Montague would knock on my door with exactly enough time for the kettle to boil, the tea to steep, before the opening credits finished.
I always found it interesting how my haughty housemate took such an acute interest in a gritty soap opera about the cockney underclass. I’m sure she saw it as a sociological documentary.
“Would you credit it?” she cried after an unexpected turn of events, her arms gesticulating wildly. “The gall of the man! I don’t like him at all, Grant. No, not one bit.”
Most nights, Mrs. Montague ate her supper on her lap whilst watching EastEnders with me. When I went to the kitchen to make the preshow tea, there was often a singular potato, a diminutive piece of fish, and a solitary sprig of broccoli all cooked to death in single-serving-size cookware. Prior to her tucking in, I routinely caught her eyeing me up in my peripheral vision. Content that I was engrossed in what was on TV, she pulled a Pepto Bismol–colored plate from her mouth that harbored two of her four top teeth, and placed it on the telephone table that sat between our two threadbare chairs. It was at this time that the loud rotary-dial phone would typically ring.
“God’s teeth! Who is calling me at this time?” she screamed.
This often sent great globs of semi-masticated food flying in my general direction.
“Four-oh-eight-nine?” she’d answer brusquely, her excellent diction compromised by her temporarily toothless mouth.
Mrs. Montague was evidently still living in a world where phone numbers were made up of only four digits; 4089 became a sort of code word for my friends from home to allude to my supposed intergenerational-sex-for-affordable-lodgings trade.
In the rare event that it was somebody worth interrupting her TV program for, she’d noisily rattle and click her plate back into place. If it was what she termed a “nonemergency” call she gummily suggested that they call back after “my EastEnders.” If it was for me she’d hand the phone to me and angrily jab her index finger at the screen. If I hadn’t gotten rid of them within the time it took for a slurp of tea, she raised the TV volume until the sound distorted, sending poor Dippy into a feathery squawking panic.
Over the din she’d yell, “Why on earth they have to call at this time, Dippy, I’ll just never comprehend.”
At some point within the first few months of my strange new life in west London, I must have decided that I was in no rush to leave Mrs. Montague’s flat or Thames Valley University. The nine hours of classes I was expected to attend per week meant that I enjoyed an amount of leisure time I could have only dreamed of before attending college. The classes I took were fairly eclectic, mainly due to the fact that I selected them purely based on the time they took place. My aim was to try to shoehorn everything into one bumper Wednesday. The rest of the week was spent lying in bed and puttering about the flat with my ancient housemate.
I grew to like and admire Mrs. Montague immensely and few were the times that I rued missing the opportunity to shack up with three or four snot-nosed northerners in a damp basement flat closer to campus for three times the price. How I got to TVU and how I lived once I arrived made me feel that I was separate from almost everyone else I met there. I felt like I’d fallen asleep and woken up in somebody else’s life, and quite inexplicably I had just gotten on with it. It was the first time in my life that I’d really taken a step out of my comfort zone as well as breaking formation with my own peer group, and I began to find the feeling of being somewhere or doing something I wasn’t destined to do somewhat exhilarating. At university, I felt that I infiltrated a whole strange genus of human beings who wanted to learn, grow, aspire to lead interesting, satisfying lives, go on cycling vacations through the south of France, eat salad with every meal out of little wooden bowls, watch less television, read more books, read the Guardian, expose themselves to interesting cinema, stage an intervention when they saw a parent smacking his or her child on the street. I would return back to Essex to see the boys at the weekend and noticed myself cringing as everyone else happily watched someone be kicked and punched motionless in a nightclub car park.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but through osmosis I must have started to adopt a new mind-set.
At university, there was certainly no one from my part of the world to relate to. In fact, Scousers, Geordies, Mancs, Toffs, Taffs, Brummies, and Slones all found common ground in swapping tired Essex jokes in my presence, asking me what the correct rhyming slang for this or that was, making fun of the way that I spoke! Up until I left for college I was told on an almost daily basis how “properly” I spoke.
“What time are you off to college in the morning?” said Mrs. Montague whenever I retired to my bedroom after an evening’s television feast or political debate.
If I told her that I had a class that started before noon she would dramatically place both hands on her head and exclaim, “By Christ, that’s the middle of the night! Leave quietly or on your own head be it.”
In the colder months she’d request that if I was going to be out early would I mind scraping the ice from the windscreen of her crapped-out Ford Fiesta. Given the pittance that she was charging me in rent, I could hardly say no. To be honest, I rather liked doing things like that for her. On the few occasions I did catch her up before noon she cut a striking figure with her red silk kimono and wild unbrushed hair. For the first ninety minutes of consciousness, the skin of her face seemed to lack any elasticity whatsoever and her features just tended to dangle, swaying to and fro in the morning sunlight. After a few cups of tea she could make enough basic sounds to let me know what on earth she was doing up before the crack of noon.
“I’m having a man in,” she’d whisper, defeated, pointing to yet another appliance that she’d completely reduced to a pile of screws and transistors. On an almost weekly basis, Mrs. Montague would become convinced that some other household item was “on the blink” and ruthlessly take it to bits.
With a screwdriver and fifteen minutes of spare time, the woman was a menace.
Every once in a while she’d inform me that she was “having a soak” and that I should “attend to any urgent business sooner rather than later.”
I soon noticed that, at bath times, my roommate was walking into the bathroom with a bundle of clothes. It seemed that Mrs. Montague would bathe and wash her clothes in one fell swoop, her loud splish-splashing in the tub a bid to re-create the motions of a washing machine. The only question that remained was whether she was washing her clothes in bath oils or was bathing in detergent. I tended to suspect the latter as her skin did appear considerably tauter after she emerged, though neither she nor her polyester garments seemed any cleaner after an hour-long bath. With no dryer, she hung the clothes over three taught lengths of thin white rope above the tub. Bathing meant worrying about gravity getting the better of Mrs. Montague’s dripping drawstring bloomers and then depositing them on my face should I dare to close my eyes for the briefest of moments.
MRS. MONTAGUE was a personification of the demise of the British Empire. Born just after its zenith, she enjoyed a privileged childhood spent in India, then dubbed the “Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire.” In Hanwell, W7, she lived a mile away from Southall, the highest concentration of Indians in the world outside of New Delhi. But it was the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis living in the neighborhood that proved more irksome for her. Around one particular religious holiday in which fireworks were let off, she would gaze mournfully out the window, shaking her head as rockets lit up the sky.
“I wish those ruddy wogs would shut up, don’t you, Grant?” she said as a Roman candle exploded in great blooms of magenta.
I hated it when she asked me a question like that in regards to ethnic minorities, but just didn’t have the chutzpah to tell her that she was a crotchety old racist. I often met her halfway.
“I suppose they are being a bit noisy. Getting their revenge for Guy Fawkes Night, I expect.”
“Wogs,” she said gently under her breath.
I began to think that the old woman I lived with had lost her marbles, but it became increasingly clear that Mrs. Montague simply didn’t give a shit anymore. The senior ladies I’d ever met had been cheery, house proud, clean, early to bed and early to rise, tolerant and sweet to a fault. These suburban old dears that I’d grown up knowing seemed lobotomized compared to Mrs. Montague, who was becoming noticeably more militant by the day.
A few days after commencing classes I returned home to the flat to see Mrs. Montague surrounded by the innards of yet another electrical appliance that she’d decided to vivisect in order to find the omnipresent “blasted squeaking noise” that could usually be attributed to Dippy.
“I shall have to have a man look at this,” she said. She put the screwdriver down and picked a cigarette up. I knew that she didn’t mean me.
“What’s that? One of your textbooks?” she said and nodded to the thick hardback I had tucked under my arm.
In retrospect the correct answer would have been a simple yes.
“No, a Hare Krishna man made me buy it for ten pounds,” I said.
“Pardon me?” she screamed with so much gusto that poor Dippy flew into a feathery conniption.
“I mean, he didn’t forcibly make me buy it, but he said I really should read it.”
My first few months at university were extremely lonely, mostly because I’d chosen to live with a geriatric, almost three miles away from campus, which precluded me from what little university life was on offer at TVU, and I spent my long weekends back in Essex. I was feeling a bit depressed for the first time. The shaven-headed gentleman in the orange robes on Ealing Broadway was very friendly seeming when he jumped into my path and started firing off questions, quickly convincing me that he was interested in the answers I had to offer. He was both a figurative and literal splash of color in a time period that was awfully gray seeming. Pretty soon he’d swung the conversation around to the huge box of books he had nearby, but he didn’t do it in a way that seemed at all mercenary. The book, he promised me, was full of answers to finding happiness and enlightenment that were possibly less chafing than my own methods. At that moment it seemed to be just what I needed. Before you could say country cousin, I had made my purchase, finding that suddenly my grinning friend was immediately less interested in continuing our chat.
“Where are my keys?” said Mrs. Montague. “This is a bloody liberty, you’ve come up from the country and you are being ripped off. This is something I shan’t stand for, by Gum.”
She shucked herself into her decades-old Marks & Spencer Windbreaker and continued the hunt for the keys.
“Where are you going?” I said. I was worried by her furrowed brow and the ferocity with which she sucked on her cigarette.
“We’re going to get your ten bloody pounds back. We’re going to teach him a lesson! Shame on him for taking your father’s money. You’ve just come up from the country.”
I felt grateful that my elderly landlady had my father’s finances at heart, annoyed that she had outed me as a bumpkin, and fearful for whatever she was about to inflict on the unwitting Hare Krishna.
“Please, no!” I cried, doing everything to demonstrate my horror at her guerrilla methods besides physically restraining her as more feathers spewed from poor Dippy’s cage.
Nothing’s quite as emasculating as having an old lady you hardly know defending your honor on the leafy thoroughfares of Ealing.
“Bloody golliwogs, I’ve a good mind to call the authorities. Get out of the way!”
“No, he was white!” I said, which immediately seemed to take some of the wind out of her sails. “And I did know what I was doing.”
“Well, now,” she said, slowly unzipping her jacket and pointing a bony finger into my chest. “You really ought to be a lot more careful.”
After a cursory leaf through its nonsensical pages, I left the Krishna book on Mrs. Montague’s nightstand as a kind of thank-you for looking out for me. It stayed collecting the flat’s ample dust for three long years.
Far from the lovefest I’d sort of hoped it to be, university had proved to be a continuation of my invisibility to the opposite sex. That theme had begun so long ago that I wondered if I’d ever successfully shrug it off. I logged countless hours at the student union bar, but in spite or perhaps because of my wounded, lovelorn glares, there was never the slightest danger of a snog.
Being a city school with its students spread all over London, there was no palpable school spirit at TVU. And certainly no pride, given that in my third year a BBC documentary on what a ridiculous institution TVU was had been televised, as well as numerous tabloid articles about the school offering degrees in making curry. In addition there was a self-perpetuated segregation between the mature students and the teens, the southern Asians and the whites, the Sikhs and the Muslims, the Greeks and the Turks, the Americans and the English, which would in some cases escalate to verbal abuse and physical violence. Still, TVU would often take pains to kid its students that the school was as much a university as the red-brick institutions across the land, and an increasingly apathetic student body was coerced into taking part in what was known on bulletin boards as “TVU Life.”
To that end, a few times a year the student union bar (called the Dog’s Bollocks) would throw jolly traffic light parties. Attendees would be asked to wear green if they were “totally up for it,” yellow if they would “consider a shag,” and red if they were unavailable or not interested. I took this to be a dress code that everyone would adhere to in the spirit of being young, crazy, and financially subsidized by the government.
It had taken forever to find a pair of forest green pants, but this being my first traffic light party I didn’t want to give off any mixed messages. I wore a pastel mint button-down shirt and olive tie and began the three-mile walk to campus.
I saw one of the other new “freshers,” who was disconcertingly dressed in normal clothes, standing outside.
“Well, you certainly look the part,” he said with a chuckle.
I walked into the Dog’s, which was only half full. I ordered a Dog’s Bollocks Brew, which only cost a pound a pint, and surveyed the field of battle. It appeared that everyone else had deliberately not worn the slightest hint of green or yellow or red in their outfits.
“Look, it’s the jolly green not-so-giant!” said one portly northern girl to her group of field hockey friends, who all had a hearty laugh at my expense.
“Do you think he’s trying to tell us something?” she continued.
As innocuously as possible, I took off my tie and fed it into my pocket, but I still looked like a Jehovah’s Witness who’d been dunked in chlorophyll.
“You been having a dry spell, mate?” said the hateful ringleader to my face.
“Um…I thought this was the traffic light party tonight,” I said, hoping for a respite in her brutality.
“Yeah, but no one actually dresses up. That’s just fucking”—she looked me up and down—“really sad.”
She looked over my shoulder.
“Wait, tell a lie,” said the girl. “There’s a girl in yellow over there. You should go and have a word.”
I saw the girl in the corner. Aside from her pin-straight, slightly lank-looking hair, she was not terribly unattractive. But I decided to hedge my bets and wait for some other people who weren’t “too cool” to literally wear their hearts on their sleeves. I ordered the undergrad cocktail de choix, a snakebite and black: half a pint of lager, half a pint of cider, with a splash of concentrated black currant juice and a shot of Pernod for good measure. The mix is so potent that it was recently banned in a lot of pubs in Essex, where it is known as a catalyst for violence. There it’s called Diesel or a row in a glass.
I needed to be drunk enough to be numbed to the smirks and stares being cast at me from every direction, yet lucid enough to be charming and funny with any other earnest soul clad in yellow or, preferably, green.
After a half hour I noticed that no one else was adhering to the dress code aside from the Sissy Spacek look-alike sitting on her own in the corner. The girl noticed that I had been leering at her for the past five minutes and seemed to be looking back, playing with her hair, which I’d heard was a good sign. Everyone else in the bar seemed to be aware of the two of us sizing each other up on either side of the room and surveyed the scene with their heads on swivels, as if they were in the first row at Center Court at Wimbledon.
“Go on then,” said the zaftig hockey lezzer, punching me hard in the shoulder.
I was probably imagining it but I swear I heard the volume of the music—“Roll with It” by Oasis—dip considerably.
I put my glass down and started taking confident strides toward her; the throng of undergrads began to part like the Red Sea before me. I was at college, miles from home. A brand-new start.
“No one knew me here,” I repeated to myself as a mantra.
No one knew, for example, about the brown stain that was found on my towel in the showers after gym. (As I said at the time, it was the remnants of a melted Kit Kat in my gym bag.) No one knew about when I offered the high school good-time girl a fiver to snog me out of desperation. (She laughed and told everyone. Her hook-nosed cousin said she’d do it for fifteen, but I didn’t have the money.) No one here knew that I was sometimes called “the Jew” because I was one of three kids in my grade who was circumcised, and out of the three of us the only one with foreign lineage and, relative to the other fair-skinned, peg-toothed, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, stubby-nosed pupils, had a vaguely international look about me.
Anyway, she, the girl in yellow, didn’t know any of these things.
She seemed to quiver with fear as I walked closer to her, the crowd following my progress with their eyes.
“Do it! Do it! Do it!” the hockey girls began chanting as I drew ever closer.
“Do it! Do it! Do it!” The chant caught on and grew louder.
The girl looked at me coming closer, shook her head, and mouthed “Fuck off” at me. Without breaking pace, I hooked a sharp right turn and scurried out the double doors and out of the student union building.
She seemed to have known all about the kind of hapless eunuch I was just from my getup. I ran out into the rain and across St. Mary’s Road to the kebab shop. The night was a bust. I ordered a doner with salad and chili sauce and a can of Lilt, a fluorescent green tropical fruit soda that tastes disgusting and is wildly popular in the UK.
I began walking back to Mrs. Montague’s, when a group of sixteen-year-old girls detected my frailty, which I was learning must be completely apparent to all.
“Oi, mate!” one of them yelled out to me. I ignored her and picked up the pace.
“Oi, mate! I is fucking talkin’ to you, innit?”
I turned around.
“What?”
“I’m not being funny, yeah, but does you know that you look like a massive, wet bogie?”
I turned around and resumed walking.
“Oi! I’m fucking talking to you!”
Ridiculed by my peers, humiliated by the girl in yellow, and now victimized by a group of urchins. Only two weeks into further education and I was at a breaking point.
“Fuck off, slag!” I shouted once I was twenty yards ahead.
“You what? Does you know who my bruvvah is, you little cunt?”
The language! I couldn’t believe it. Reminded me of home.
“Come back ’ere and say you is sorry,” she shouted. “I’ll ’ave ’im cut you!”
There’s only so much humiliation I could take in one evening. It was time to stand up for myself for once.
“Bollocks!” I screamed and began defiantly sprinting away up St. Mary’s Road, leaving steaming slithers of reconstituted lamb in my wake.
I thought I’d left the girl and her posse behind until I heard the swoosh swoosh sound of her arms pumping against the sides of her puffy jacket. She was just a few steps behind. I may have shrieked at this point but I often like to think that I didn’t.
The possibility of being kicked to death by a gang of teenage girls for no more a crime than expressing my loneliness in hues of green gave me an added burst of speed that allowed me to break away from her as we headed toward Ealing Broadway, which at nine forty-five was still thick with people.
I dropped the kebab completely in the vain hope that my tormentor would skid to her death on it. I could hear a sudden quick burst of footsteps, which I correctly guessed was the girl stopping herself dead in her tracks.
Victory, I thought as I made for the bright lights.
Victory was tainted by the sharp yet thudding blow I received to my neck two seconds after. The little cow had thrown a full can of Cherry Coke at me. A few inches higher and I would have been knocked out cold.
“Aaaarrrggghh!” I screamed, turning heads all around.
“You better fucking watch yourself from now on,” she screamed.
Still in a sprint, I turned my head to see her looking at me. Disoriented from the blow, my foot came off the curb and I twisted my ankle.
“Fuck!” I screamed.
“I’ll be looking for you!” she shouted out.
Humiliated, emasculated, injured, and missing a doner kebab, what else could I have to pay for? I limped a few hundred yards down the road until the pain in my foot grew too great and I jumped on an atypically convenient double-decker bus.
I arrived at the flat to see a number of people leave. It was ten fifteen. It was bridge night.
I walked into the flat, which was rank with cigarette smoke, old ladies’ perfume, and sweat. There was evidence of some truly manic game play—be-doilyed plates full of cookie crumbs, stained coffee cups, emptied bottles of sherry, and an emotionally spent Mrs. Montague sucking hard on a postmatch luxury-length cigarette, shaking her head and lamenting the terrible hand with which she and her partner, Mrs. Boothroyd, had once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
“Maddening, Grant.” She sighed, her eyes still fixed upon an arbitrary patch of her ratty Persian rug. “Years to learn and a lifetime to master. This game is designed to send one completely around the bend.”
Bridge, I learned, was not so much a game as a calling.
“And what on earth has happened to you?” she asked.
My wet hair was plastered to my head, my tie hung out of my pocket, and a massive chili stain stretched the width of my chest.
“You look like a sort of weed.”
Too emotionally beaten down to explain, I simply smiled.
“What would you say to a nice cup of tea?” she said, making for the kitchen. “I taped EastEnders from earlier on.”
“That would be lovely,” I said.
I meant it. Mrs. Montague was old and I was an old soul on the run from the brutality of the modern world, the indignity of love, and the arrested social development of my hometown. Mrs. Montague was my new best friend, gently easing me into a world I hadn’t conceived of living in just a few weeks before.