Lila Mackay is Very Misunderstood, page 11
University. God, that’s a scary thought. I thought starting college was scary enough, and in a year’s time, I will have to think about applying to university.
I remember when I was about six or seven, it felt like school would be forever. I would never grow up. Even in first and second year at senior school, the years still felt endless. I thought I would be twelve or thirteen for the rest of my life. And then suddenly, time started to move. I was fourteen, then I was fifteen before I knew it, and now I am sixteen, and the years seem to be flying past at this terrifying speed, and I am getting older and older and I still haven’t done anything with my life. Mary Shelley was seduced and ran off to France with Shelley when she was my age. And I – I have still never been kissed. Not by a tortured poet in a graveyard, nor even by my sister’s dodgy bearded fiancé à la Cassandra Mortmain.
It is not for want of trying. I have given Tom every possible opportunity to kiss me. We see each other almost every weekend, usually at his suggestion. He plans trips to the cinema and ice skating, or just hanging out at someone’s house, and watching films or playing on the Nintendo or Sega.
He usually involves Kate and Weird Nicky in these plans too, though. Tom seems to have formed some bizarre attachment to Nicky, who he still insists on referring to as ‘the Nickster’. I had hoped the novelty of Nicky’s weirdness would have worn off by now, but Tom got quite cross with me when I suggested that we ditched Nicky, telling me that ‘the Nickster’ was a really nice guy and he was surprised at how shallow I was, just because Nicky was ‘a bit different’.
A bit different! I’ll say.
Different though he is, Nicky is not as weird as he used to be. As part of the drive to flesh out those UCAS forms and impress the universities of Great Britain (or even further afield if you are horrid Rachel, who has taken to wittering about Harvard or the Sorbonne, because according to her, ‘Cambridge is letting in all sorts these days’), we’ve all joined the student newspaper.
I was quite excited about this. I had a Vision of myself in a black polo neck, and maybe some sort of sexy glasses (I’d have to buy them off-the-peg in Boots, Mum refused to take me back to the opticians on the grounds I had gone last year and my eyes were fine), and my hair in a severe (in a hot way) bun, investigating … oooh, maybe a story about government corruption? And then one night, Tom and I would be working late on our scoop, and I would take down my hair and remove my glasses and he would gasp at how unexpectedly beautiful I was and then finally he would make his move, and also we would save the world!
This Vision was immediately crushed when we went to the first meeting for anyone interested in getting involved and found Rachel holding forth importantly. She looked disgusted to see Nicky and me, but couldn’t say anything because we were with Kate and Tom, who she is still desperate to suck up to. The Upper Sixth students in charge did not seem to understand there was government corruption to be exposed and the world to save though, and instead were boring on about a story on more vegetarian options in the canteen.
That was not what I had hoped for. I was clutching a proper reporter’s style notebook (as was Rachel) and had been poised to set the world alight with my cutting-edge journalism. In my head, it was only a matter of time before the Telegraph or The Sunday Times called and I was offered a groundbreaking and award-winning column. Or maybe I would become a war reporter, I had seen a film about them, and they mostly seemed to sit in hotel bars wearing combat trousers and drinking whisky and looking terribly intense before having it off with each other. I could do that. Jas had gently suggested that there might be a bit more to it than that, like the wars that would be going on around me. But none of that was going to happen if all the world’s cutting-edge media knew about me was an article complaining that macaroni cheese was a boring option for vegetarians and couldn’t the dinner ladies see fit to spice things up a bit, both literally and metaphorically.
Still, I thought bravely, one had to start somewhere. And maybe Jas was right, and being a war reporter would be quite scary and unpleasant. And I don’t think I would like whisky. So this could be my start of being … a top restaurant critic! I rather liked that idea. I would look mysterious and wear elegant black dresses and perch on bar stools sipping cocktails and live in a high-ceilinged, book-cluttered apartment in London or Paris or New York, where I would write my articles, bashing away rapidly on a vintage typewriter, a glass of whisky at my elbow.
Was whisky really necessary to be a journalist or writer? Or had I just been overly influenced by a photograph I once saw of Ernest Hemingway?
I nobly put my hand up to volunteer for the canteen story, but Rachel intervened, turning to me with her little laugh.
‘Oh, “Lila”,’ she sneered. ‘I don’t think writing anything will be your forte. Your talents are surely more as a backroom girl.’ Making tea, I fear, is what Rachel has in mind for me.
The editor of the paper though, an intense-looking Upper Sixth boy called Ian, who I suspect is rather affecting his John Lennon spectacles to give him an intellectual air (which definitely had not been my plan if I got some glasses from Boots), murmured something placatory about how everyone would get a chance to write something if they wanted to, but was there anyone who wanted to do anything else?
To my astonishment, Nicky put his hand up and muttered he’d quite like to be involved on the photography side. He produced a sheaf of pictures and handed them to Ian, who glanced at them and then said, ‘Wow. Mate, these are really good! Where did you get them developed?’ And he handed them round for everyone to look at.
Nicky said he had developed them himself, his mum had let him make a darkroom in the airing cupboard. An unkind part of me thought that I shouldn’t be surprised that Nicky had found a hobby that legitimised him sitting in a dark cupboard, but then Kate handed me his photos, and they were really good. For a moment, I felt like I was seeing Nicky for the first time, seeing past the weirdness and the party pant-wetting, and the cutting up frogs, which now I thought about it, I might have made up. Tom was right. I was shallow. And looking at Nicky’s photos, I could glimpse what Tom saw in him.
Then I handed the pictures back to Nicky and he dropped them all over the floor and started scrabbling around to try and pick them up and he was just Weird Nicky again.
Maybe if I was less shallow, more like Tom, a nicer person, then Tom would finally make his move? I resolved once again to become a new and better person. Such a good person that surely Tom could not resist me. But no one really falls in love with the VERY good girls, do they? They usually just end up dying of the consumption or nursing their ailing fathers to the end and then living a noble life of impoverished spinsterhood. It is very hard to strike the perfect balance between being good and kind enough to make Tom love me, but also saucy enough for him to not see me as some sort of untouchable Florence Nightingale figure. Boys in general are very difficult to get right. Too slutty and they won’t respect you, too virtuous and they’ll say you’re frigid. You just have to hope you hit the happy medium for whichever boy it is you fancy.
Now we’ve all joined the student newspaper, Tom and me and Kate and Nicky seem to be regarded as a foursome at college. Luke and Andy hang out with us sometimes, as do Jas and Mark, but I’ve never seen so little of Jas in our lives because she is always ‘busy’ with Mark. I’m happy for her, I really am, but part of me is also jealous.
Jas stayed over last night for the first time in ages, and given things with Mark seem to be getting very serious, I gave her the approved Just Seventeen Sex Talk, about not doing anything she didn’t feel ready for, and not being pressured into it by Mark and also precautions.
Jas was unconcerned by my lecture, and said they weren’t even close to that stage, and I was worrying about nothing.
I insisted that you could never be too careful when it came to boys and sex, I had read the problem pages, and then I squeaked in horror as Mum picked that very moment to walk into my bedroom with a pile of clean laundry. How does she do that? She has an uncanny ability to appear every single time we are talking about something like that, or if we’re watching a film and a rudey bit comes on, sure enough Mum will pop her head in to ask if we want a cup of tea. Even when it’s just kissing, it’s still mortifying to have your mother standing there, and if you pause it, it looks even worse, people freeze-framed in all sorts of compromising positions.
Luckily she didn’t appear to have heard what Jas and I were talking about, or she would probably have gone into full GP mode and had a ‘doctorly chat’ with her about it all and put Jas off for life. I could never forgive myself if Mum ruined Jas’s relationship and she was forced to join me in what looks like will be my perpetual spinsterhood. I suppose perhaps if I am destined to spend my life unloved and alone, I could pour all my unrequited passion into a book, like Emily Brontë. But with less of the wretched imagery and my characters would definitely make better decisions than Cathy and Heathcliff. I wonder how Cathy’s life would have turned out if she had been able to consult the Cosmopolitan problem page?
Since Jas seems to have totally nailed the whole ‘how to have a boyfriend’ thing, I asked her for advice on what I should do about Tom. When we’re together, he treats me like more than a friend, he puts his arm around my shoulders, he hugs me, even when we’re out with Nicky and Kate. Or in bigger groups, he’ll make excuses to sit next to me, or to be alone with me. I have read a lot of his poetry now and I have been exceptionally nice about it. He doesn’t seem to be interested in any other girls, Kate is the only girl we really hang out with, and I know there’s nothing but friendship between them. So why doesn’t he take things any further? I confessed that even after Kate’s party, his much-vaunted kiss had been nothing more than a peck on the cheek, and I had perhaps exaggerated the romance of the situation to her just a tiny bit.
Jas was slightly impatient with my pathetic pleas for dating advice, and pointed out that it is 1996, and I could take matters into my own hands. I was not, she reminded me, some damsel in distress, waiting for a dashing knight to come and rescue me, and maybe, she suggested stoutly, Tom was in fact a New Man or a metrosexual and he didn’t want to be a sexist pig or take liberties. Maybe, Jas insisted, he just really respects me.
I still was unconvinced this meant he liked me, as in liked me, but Jas was confident that he wouldn’t always be wanting to hang out with me if that was the case, and he was probably worried about making the first move in case I thought he was just After One Thing, and that it was a Good Sign that Tom had not tried to snog me at the first opportunity and had got to know me first. It meant he was sensitive, Jas declared.
Sensitive. He does write all that poetry, I suppose.
I asked Jas what that said about Mark though, as he had made his feelings clear within a week.
‘Mark’s Mark and Tom is Tom,’ said Jas in a very wise and knowing way, which despite the confidence with which she imparted this wisdom, was not really much help. She was insistent though that clearly I had to make the first move.
‘Me?’ I said in horror. ‘What, you mean, ME kiss HIM? I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Of course you can,’ Jas said firmly. ‘Why should he always have to make the first move? Maybe he’s talking to Mark or Kate right now saying the exact same thing, and wondering why you’ve never taken any of the opportunities he’s given you? After all, who’s the one always asking you to go for walks on your own and trying to get you by yourself? You can do this. Go on. For the sisterhood.’
I am unconvinced by Jas’s insistence I should kiss Tom. Apart from anything else, that is not how I had ever envisioned my first kiss. Somehow I had always imagined it would take place in an orchard, surrounded by apple blossom. He, whoever he was, would gaze into my eyes, with his own gorgeous (sea-green) eyes, and breathlessly compare my flawless skin (look, it’s a PERFECT FANTASY, OK) to the apple blossom, then lean towards me and gently, so very gently, brush my lips with his own, before being overcome with passion and kissing me harder and harder until …
Well, I’d never thought beyond that point, other than he would then declare his love for me and we would go off into the sunset and live happily ever after.
There are no orchards where we live, though. And even if there were, if I want apple blossom, I’ll have to wait till next spring and I’m damned if I’m hanging around for that long, I will basically be a dried-up has-been if I still haven’t kissed anyone by then. If my Perfect Dream Kiss is never going to happen, maybe I should just go for it. Get it over with.
No, not ‘get it over with’. This is my first kiss, it needs to be a moment to be cherished and treasured, not ‘got over with’.
But why shouldn’t I instigate it? We are modern women; I do not need to wander the moors lamenting my lost love and catching fevers. I can go out and get what I want. And what I want is Tom.
I have a week to think about it, because I am staying with Dad for the half-term holiday. My stepmother Anita is away visiting her own mother (and sadly has taken her dogs with her, which is a pity, I like her dogs) so it’s just Dad and me here. An exciting thing has happened though, as Dad has succumbed and got THE INTERNET. So I have had a very good idea about someone else to talk to about what to do about Tom!
I had been a bit disappointed in the Richard III chatroom on the college computers. Apart from TSNO80, there were no other fans of poor old R3, and a lot of the other posters (OK, there were only about a dozen of them, ‘R3’ was unsurprisingly not the hot topic of the day) were very snipey about our attempts to defend him from their accusations of murder, tyranny and even impropriety with his niece Elizabeth of York. After a few days of being shouted down, I saw a message in my inbox from TSNO80, ruefully saying that he didn’t think there was much more point trying to change the other group members’ minds, but we could always talk about R3 here on the private messaging facility, if I wanted, since we both seemed to feel he was rather misunderstood.
So that is what we did. And then our chats drifted away from doomed Plantagenet monarchs on to other things. Like our ambitions, and our hopes for the future. It was strange telling this to someone called TSNO80 so I suggested we call each other something more … friendly, though still being mindful of the college’s instructions not to reveal identifying details.
TSNO80 said I should call him (for he had indeed turned out to be a him) ‘Al’, after his favourite Paul Simon song. I didn’t really know what to make of that. My dad listens to Paul Simon. Was TSNO80 (or ‘Al’) being a fan a sign he was a loser who liked Dad Music, or that he was in fact very sophisticated in his musical tastes?
But what should I say for a name? In a panic, my mind blank, I suggested Elise, which for some reason was the only name that I could think of. Too late I realised that Elise was, in fact, a French version of my own name, Elizabeth, which was probably why it came into my head. Hopefully it would be such a cunning double bluff that Al would be confounded and never realise.
I wondered what his real name was. Perhaps he had also gone for a play on his own name and was in fact called Alan, or Alastair or Alexander or Algernon. Not, I prayed, Algernon. How could you take a boy called Algernon seriously? More to the point, what sort of strange parents would he have to name a child Algernon in this day and age? Even the Victorian parents who had favoured such names could not have much liked their offspring, to saddle them with the hideous name of Algernon.
Algernon or not, I enjoyed ‘chatting’ to Al. He was funny and wry, and he teased me and I teased him back in a way I never felt comfortable doing with Tom. I suppose it was because with Al, I could just be myself. I had nothing to prove and no one to impress. To Al, I was just an anonymous person with a fascination for R3. I didn’t have to be the cool girl or pretend to like strange poetry or music that I didn’t understand.
I feel like I could tell Al anything. I’ve never been able to be so honest or open with anyone, not even Jas. I had even told him about my dream to be a writer, and when I told him about the elaborate scenarios I imagined for my life, such as War Reporter Whisky Drinker or Restaurant Critic Vintage Typewriter, he laughed but in a nice way and didn’t say I was mental or sad or delusional. He told me that it was important to exercise my imagination if I wanted to be a writer. I had never thought about it like that before, when I spent hours daydreaming about the mythical day when I will Grow Up and all my problems will be solved, because like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, I would no longer be boring, ordinary Lila MacKay, but someone else. Someone better. Al makes me feel like all the dreaming isn’t a waste of time, despite what my teachers always say when they catch me gazing out of the window in a reverie yet again. Al makes it seem like a valid thing to be doing.
In turn, Al told me things about himself. His interests and passions. He loves science, and said if my goal was to be a famous writer languishing on the Left Bank in Paris (just languishing in an elegant way on a velvet chaise longue, not in a starving-to-death-in-a-garret sort of way) then his was to win the Nobel Prize. For what, I had asked, and he had replied:
:-D :-D :-D For everything.
Everything?
Why not? OK, not literature. I’ll let you have that one ;-)
Thanks. That’s very kind of you.
