The first time I met Neil Perry was when he accosted me in a corridor in 1993. He was looking for someone to interview for the university’s student radio station, and because someone had let him down at the last minute, he was desperate. ‘Do you know anything about road movies?’ he pleaded as I passed him on my way to a semiotics seminar. The panicked look on his face made me feel sorry for him – plus I didn’t really want to go to the semiotics seminar – so I pretended I was an expert, which is when he first told me that he wanted to kiss me.
I accompanied him to a deserted classroom where he pointed a microphone at me and I told him everything I could about Thelma & Louise. He laughed in all the right places and he was overjoyed that he wouldn’t need to edit my interview that much. I don’t know why this made me feel special but it did. I was getting up to leave when he began bumping his gums about something else, but I wasn’t listening to what he was saying. I was much more struck by the tone of his voice, the way he laughed, and the passion he had for whatever it was he was banging on about; knowing Neil it was probably something pretentious. I tried to locate his accent. He didn’t seem to have an accent. That made him even more interesting.
We got to know each other better over the next few weeks, mainly because we were both heavy smokers. Whenever we stepped out of the edit suites on the first floor of the media department for a cigarette, we seemed to bump into each other. I was finishing my final-year video project, while Neil, who had just been offered the position as a part-time lecturer in video production, was training himself to use the equipment in the room next door. He was very nervous about his new job; understandable really, because he didn’t know what he was doing. One day he couldn’t get his equipment to work and I had to tell him it was because he’d removed the tab from the VHS tape, which meant he couldn’t record over it any more. Seriously, who offered this numpty a job?
We were puffing away one day when Neil proudly told me that he was a ‘new man’. That’s OK, I thought, I was starting a new life and a new man was just what I was looking for. He was a little younger than me, and a bit of a flirt, but we really hit it off, which is surprising because we had practically nothing in common. I told him that I wanted to make furniture for a living. He told me that he was the only boy at his school who studied Home Economics because the tools in the woodwork block intimidated him. I liked football and tennis; Neil liked to read and talk. I was good with my hands; Neil was good with his head. I was divorced; Neil swore to me that he would never get married. But we made each other laugh and we both knew how to use an edit suite. Well, I did.
He didn’t even back off when I told him that I had a four-year-old daughter. I was one of the 1 per cent of single parents studying at a university, and Neil seemed genuinely interested in some of the challenges this posed – he could be a bit patronising with it but he meant well. Most people clammed up or didn’t know what to say.
When he told me that his name was actually Neil Perryman, I just laughed. He explained to me that his ex-girlfriend had been a radical feminist and it had been her idea to ditch the patriarchal part of his surname. He also told me that he was a feminist sympathiser; I thought this meant that he felt sorry for feminists. But on the plus side, if a girl could convince him to change his surname, then asking him to leave the toilet seat down shouldn’t be a problem.
The thing is, right, Neil was different from every man I’d met up to then. Most of the men in my life had been, let’s say, butcher than Neil, and that includes my gay brother, Gary. Neil was very earnest when it came to discussing gender politics, which he did a lot, but his heart seemed to be in the right place. Having said that, his hair was a mess. He had a tuft of fuzz poking out of his forehead that was one of the stupidest things I’d ever seen. He looked like a cross between a sex pest and a unicorn. I’d trained to be a professional hairdresser, so every time I spoke to him I wanted to rush at him with a pair of scissors. When I pressed him about it, he told me that he’d woken one day with some chewing gum stuck to his head. But rather than wash it out like any sane, rational, normal person, Neil had cut it out with a razor blade. Every time the hair grew back, he had to hack at it again, but sometimes he’d forget, and when he did forget I couldn’t look at him without staring at the ridiculous thing sprouting from the top of his head. It was especially noticeable when Neil tied his hair back in a ponytail – it was like he had one ponytail at the back and a second, rival one at the front. I know it sounds silly but I wanted to fix it for him.
That Easter, we went to Whitby together. I was one of a number of students on a university field trip while Neil was there to look after us. This was ridiculous because Neil could barely look after himself. We had supposedly come to the seaside resort to visit some of the locations that featured in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which we were studying in one of our classes, but everybody knew that these trips were just an excuse for a very competitive pool tournament in a pub on the quayside. Neil didn’t have a partner for the pool tournament, so I teamed up with him before he could find one. Sadly, he couldn’t play pool to save his life, but thanks to my misspent youth we still got to the final. I did everything I could to keep Neil away from the table as much as possible, but when it came to the deciding game it was his turn to pot the black. He was snookered behind the opponent’s yellow and he had given up the shot as a lost cause before he’d finished chalking his cue. I told him not to be so hasty as I pointed to the cushion at the far end of the table, which set him up for a spectacular trick shot. Not only did Neil hit the black ball, he potted it. Neil has subsequently told me that this was when he fell in love with me; I don’t blame him, that shot was sweet. Or maybe it was when I told him I’d been a contestant on Bullseye? I’ve asked him about it for this chapter and he says he can’t remember the precise moment because he was so drunk – but he does recall that we accidentally left two of his students behind in Whitby at the end of the night.
So, a raving feminist who looked like Jesus, who couldn’t hold his drink, who was hopeless at pool, and who couldn’t count people back onto a bus. Yes, Neil was quite a catch. Even so, I still invited him back to my home in Hartlepool for a meal. I probably would have done it sooner but my parents had been living with me while they rented out their house to some lodgers. But this was the day they were finally moving out, and because my parents were also looking after Nicol that night, we would have the place to ourselves. I definitely wasn’t going to introduce Neil to my family until I was sure about him. You know what they say. The gentle, funny, unicorn ones are always the worst.