You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (25 page)

Inspired by the Eildon surrounds we would strip off and roll around in the mud, feral with drink. I formed an army with Derek and Larkis and we stood for hours in the shallows, naked skin burning, jabbing oversized sticks at anybody who dared attempt to pass. Somebody took a photograph of us from behind, standing there, backsides grazing the water. Dirty Derek ultimately turned it into a painting. You can see it now, hanging over a bar in High Street. At the time, we wanted to document everything. Art shows and videos and paintings and Polaroids. Perhaps even then we knew it wouldn't last forever.

It was on one of those Eildon trips that we saw a light plane dip across the lake. Afterwards, everybody swore they caught the moment it clipped the power lines and fell, but mostly we remembered when all the emergency services vehicles started circling the water. Four people were missing. We watched from the shore as a helicopter buzzed overhead in vain hope of finding life.

‘Fuck,' somebody said.

We did not want this reminder of our mortality.You could sense the pull of pain and real life.

Jarrod opened another beer and we turned our backs to the water.

‘How did we not die?' I said to Blair, years later. ‘All that riding around in the speedboat . . . everybody was so fucked up.'

‘I don't know. We just didn't.'

‘Yes, but
how
?'

After the crash I started leaving parties early, tasting the hangover even before I'd taken my first drink. That front-row ticket to death had shaken me. I became famous for my sneak-away act, perfecting the art of being mid-conversation with somebody and then disappearing as they turned to refill their drink. ‘The Hardy Slip-Off ', the Bubble would call it, annoyed by my cunning. I hated goodbyes at parties, hated once I'd decided to leave being strongarmed into staying for one more drink, one more pill, one more investment in tomorrow's hangover. If I was caught picking up my bag and sliding out the front door I would lie and say I was just going to the 7-Eleven to buy a mixer, or Pringles. If the person who caught me called my bluff I would be inevitably dragged back into somebody's bedroom or other, where the rest of the party all lay in a big messy pile, and find myself talking about Alex Chilton records until morning.

One time it was Gabi who caught me. She had stepped off the living-room dancefloor for a rare moment and was getting a glass of water. I froze, guiltily, one arm in my dufflecoat.

‘You're not
going
.'

‘It's five-thirty in the morning!'

Gabi came close. Pointed to the living room. I could hear the delighted rodeo of fun, of a room crammed full of everybody we knew and loved at that moment. Nobody was missing. Everybody was in. All hands on deck.

‘All this,' she said solemnly. ‘It's not going to last forever.'

‘Please don't try and guilt trip me.'

‘It
won't
.'

She was right. This permutation of people, the comradely ‘all in' mentality, couldn't last. It would break and scatter, little pieces of glass. Somebody would decline a party invitation due to a work function and then someone else would get pregnant and the Bubble would pop. It was bound to happen eventually. At the time, though, it felt endless.

Gabi likes to remind me of this story.

‘You took your coat off and ran on to the dancefloor,' she smiles. ‘For once you came back. I bet you're glad you did now.'

The Bubble parties grew more debauched, the need to behave in a fashion more brutal and urgent. We would wake up, not remembering coming home, not recalling who we'd been with or what we'd done with them.

Over afternoon drinks recently I was told about a girl who went through a terrifying stage of getting blind drunk and going home with strange men and shitting somewhere mysterious in their houses.

‘She'd wake up knowing something terrible had happened,' my friend said solemnly, ‘but not know where she'd done it.'

‘What sort of places did she shit?'

‘Oh, everywhere. Behind the couch or the curtains, mostly. Once she did it on a pile of unwashed dishes in the sink. Then she went to see a psychologist who told her it was a direct result of father issues.'

I found this intensely funny and strange and frightening. And then remembered that one day, in the thick of Bubbledom after a long bender, when Gabi appeared in the doorway of my bedroom.

‘You have to see this,' she said with a shocked expression, beckoning me into the bathroom.

Someone had shat in a drawer.

‘Did you do this?' I asked her.

She looked horrified.

‘No! Of course not. I mean . . .' she paused. We looked into the drawer again. ‘I was pretty out of it when I came home. But I think I'd remember . . .
this
.'

We agreed that yes, one would probably recall doing something as significant as rising from bed in the middle of the night and going to the toilet in a drawer full of makeup and hairpieces, which thankfully ruled us both out. We further agreed that it was probably Matty, who was still at this moment passed out in my bedroom and seemed overall capable of such an act. But the fact remained that for a moment we had doubted ourselves. Our brains were so fried with drink and night there was a chance that in the brume of sleep we had stooped that low. Did I really do that?

‘And on top of your favourite
scarf
,' I wailed to Gabi sympathetically, conveniently ignoring the fact that a soiled neckerchief was probably the least of our problems given that we were now getting so fucked up somebody in our house was shitting on furniture.

The unfairness and acceptance of adulthood and responsibility kept creeping upon us, piece by piece. Shannon and his girlfriend Jonesy broke up, then Sime and I did. Gabi and her feller danced a few torturous rounds before she left him for the American guitarist who would become the father of her child. Our Scottish friend Danny, who had led the immigration department on a merry chase for years, was eventually tapped on the shoulder and sternly asked to leave the country. We trooped out to the airport as one to say goodbye, dressed in idiotic costumes, chanting, making a racket. Someone was passing a hipflask full of whisky. Danny kept his split-melon grin for most of the day before it fell apart, in a big mess of wet washing, right at the departure gates. As he waved goodbye, the fare-thee-well smiles faded from our faces too, and the gravity of our loss began to sink in.

He didn't come back for four years.

Eventually everybody started throwing the word ‘depression' about like ‘drug comedown' or ‘period pain'. It was used as an excuse for cheating, for the most part. One untidy night in the toilets at the Tote, when revealed in a blister of finger pointing and recrimination, was credited entirely to depression.

‘I'm so sorry I had sex with that bartender in an alley off Little Lonsdale Street,' we pleaded through sobs and curled up, agonised fingers. ‘I think . . . I think I have
depression
.'

Depression was the reason we had such long and torturous affairs, sneaking guiltily off to the beige surrounds of the City Crown Hotel while unassuming partners toured the country. Depression was the reason we ingested chemicals and chased tail at music festivals. Depression was the reason I had another three-way which ended in a huge fight complete with hair-pulling and the spat-out, accusing question
why don't you two just stay here and fuck each other then
?

I asked my father about my Great Aunty Mary, who shot herself in the head when I was eight years old. I remember walking to the milk bar with my friend Amanda and seeing the story spread-eagled across the front page of the
Sun
. MARY HARDY SUICIDE.

‘Your Aunt Mary . . . she was very moody. She drank heavily,' he began. ‘She was always surrounded by people, but she was very lonely.'

It was easier to sidestep the potential diagnosis and carry on self-medicating with hard liquor. Who knew if it really was a chemical imbalance, or simply the bleating mantra of a mid-twenties hedonist with no excuses remaining up their sleeve? Nobody had the inclination to see psychologists or GPs back then; we just bandied about the ‘D' word as a lazy fallback. Some of us were probably horribly and clinically depressed. Others were just sad the party looked as though it were coming to a close.

As time passed there was a profane amount of crossfading behind closed doors, sad remnants of each relationship seeping into another. A comforting ear would turn into a comforting bed and before too long most of us would turn up at a party and realise we'd slept with almost everybody in the room. Ex-lovers were growing rightly bitter. Cruelty was never intended, but inevitably people were hurt. I would try to turn away from the angry eyes of an increasing number of ex-partners to seek comfort in the Bubble, but the Bubble wasn't always there. We were beginning to drift apart.

Dallas Crane played their last show. I didn't go. Neither did Gabi.

‘They'll play again,' we told ourselves.

They did, only once, when the man they named their band after was struck down with terminal cancer. The gig was a fundraiser to cover medical costs. It seemed a stark and sobering fact: Dallas Crane was dying. Those of us who went stood up the back of the Tote, listening to songs we used to regard as anthems. We looked old and felt foolish. After the show the band barely spoke to each other. Pat and Shannon hung out in the front bar. Dave and Pete locked themselves in the band room.

The Bubble started meeting in reduced numbers, in factions, and the conversation became, over time, less about what we were going to do than what we had once done. We revelled in past glories, in that slice of time when we had been perfect and loved and unencumbered by responsibility. And yet with this acceptance of life outside, we were conceding what we had never done before: that we were just like everybody else. We would have babies and get fat and quit drinking and not spend every waking moment together. We would turn up to events for which we had accepted invitations without texting absurd excuses. We had grown up.

It was an essential part of letting go, deciding which ribbons of the past we wanted to tie around our fingers and which were best left on the maypole.

I could weep for the unfairness of it all now. For the necessity in closing the door on the travelling salesman of youth. I could weep with such fondness for us all.

Born this way

For a few not unlively moments in a Kew hospital in 1976 my father believed I had been born with a penis. Wait, there's more. Not only did he believe I'd been born with a penis, he also believed said penis was so gargantuan it was capable of wrapping itself around my tiny, newborn throat and cutting off my air supply. Which it seemed to be, astoundingly, in the process of doing at that exact second.

‘It's a boy!' he exclaimed with a mixture of pride and alarm. ‘And
what
a boy!'

I don't know exactly how it all played out after that, which member of the medical team was the first to gently tap him on the arm and explain in hushed tones that the long pink thing turning my face blue was not in fact my genitalia but my umbilical cord and that if he didn't mind quieting down as they attempted to save the life of his newborn daughter it would be most appreciated, but he got the idea eventually and backed into a corner, chastened.

My mother likes to bring this story up at least once a year. ‘Remember the time your father thought you were born with an enormous penis?' she says fondly, while my dad makes a lot of noise about how overblown the whole incident was and anybody might have made the same mistake and isn't it just a blessing she was a healthy baby and so forth.

They were very into ‘hands on' parenting, channelling all their energy and enthusiasm for performance into raising their child. As out-of-work actors they rarely had anything better to do with their time than indulge my elaborately imaginative play scenarios. A request for a game of hospitals would involve not only a white coat and stethoscope costume, but a variety of role changes, from consumptive patients (‘I think . . . it's fatal,' my mother would gasp, collapsing onto the floor of my bedroom with seemingly uncontrollable tremors) to pacing, concerned GPs. To my father's eternal credit he continued to play these games with me even when I turned into a sniggering, helpless eight year old and named all the patients juvenile things like ‘Mrs Cock' or ‘The Boobie Twins'.

‘Mrs Boobie? I'm afraid it's bad news,' he would announce, stroking his beard, and as the mother of these unfortunate twins I would duly enter a state of deep shock, all the while trying to contain myself at the abject hilarity of my brilliant surname.

My mother loved me with a searing devotion and was always available for my clinging, emotionally overwrought needs, but insists that after I was born she was more determined than ever to be known as something other than ‘just a mother'.

‘You gave me,' she says, not unkindly, ‘a reason to get out of the house and do something else with my life.'

She tap-danced when she was heavily pregnant, an activity she often rudely and publicly states ‘explains a great deal', and raised me with a sense of independence and a propensity for cussing at passing drivers and running away from home. From my mother I have learned how to listen to others, how to organise my life with an unnerving rigidity, and to
always
say please and thank you in mixed company lest she somehow appear in the background with a looming glare and vague promise of violence.

We marched into that predictable two-person war, of course, when I became an adolescent and overnight she turned into Hitler. There were four dreadful years when my beleaguered father was forced to creep between the bedrooms of the two women in his family, imploring one to please apologise, and then sheepishly telling the other that he's not exactly sure where her daughter got to but the flyscreen on her window seemed to have been slashed open and her bed not slept in and did she think it was perhaps time to call the police yet or should they give it a few more hours.