Edinburgh 1994

Episode Three

Flash forward to the autumn after Edinburgh, after everything’s finished, and it’s one afternoon in October, or November, and Matt Ball has arrived at my house. We haven’t seen each other for ages, so we decide to go out to the Griffin for a drink, and to catch up on what’s been happening in our respective lives. We drink ourselves a few pints and I tell Matt what it’s like living in my one room flat on Burton Street, where I’m living with Steve, and Liz, and Karl, and, Valerie, and "Mad" Tony. I tell him about being on the dole, I tell him about how Keir and I are still writing songs, and I tell him that I’m going out with Madeleine again.

Matt tells me that he’s going out with Lindsay Ross. I don’t tell him that, in fact, I already know.

The signs were there in Edinburgh, but for a long time it was difficult to recognise them for what they were. I know for a fact that my relationship with Matt was different in Edinburgh to how it had been throughout the summer, and that the change occurred almost from the moment we arrived there.

Ever since Byact’s first visit to the Fringe Festival a year earlier, Matt had taken theatre a great deal more seriously than he ever had before. Whereas previously he had enjoyed it, maybe even loved it, for what it was – the adrenalin rush of performance, the grand old cliché of the crowd, the lights, the greasepaint, or something like that; the fun – throughout the last year of school, his love of it had become something else. He’d seen the possibility and the potential of theatre as a legitimate, serious art form – a medium to express himself, his feelings, his desires, his inner soul written large onstage. Theatre studies lessons, and their inevitable overspill into sessions after hours, were enjoyed and worked hard at by the whole group, but Matt took it to a different level. However, unlike, say, Jim Keane, whom, if hearsay is to be believed, also had a watershed moment involving Lindsay Ross and became pompous, strait-laced, and incredibly dull in his obsession with theatre, dressing like Lindsay, speaking like Lindsay, and trying his very best in some way to be Lindsay, even when we were away from the drama studio, Matt was always the same old Matt when we sneaked out during free periods for a fag, or when we went out to the pub or Echo’s on a Friday night. His deep passion for the theatre didn’t interfere with dancing, drinking, partying, and trying to pull girls.

However, in Edinburgh, it was different. Whereas for me, the trip was very much an extension of a summer in which I’d done all four of those things, for Matt, the trip was almost an extension of a theatre studies lesson – it was serious. And when it became quickly evident that I was showing little or no interest in the multitude of theatrical, comedic, and musical performances that are on offer during the Fringe Festival, all things that for him were as important as being in "Blood Wedding", he distanced him somewhat from me, and for the majority of the week, we barely spoke. In the mornings, as I lay in bed sleeping off the previous evening’s intake of booze, he would go off into town exploring the arts. In the evenings, after the performance, as I went to the Fringe Club to take in another evening’s worth of cheap booze, Matt was again off in town, exploring the arts. I was sanguine about this state of affairs, partly because I was so colossally arrogant in those days and was more interested in myself than anybody else, but also because I appreciated Matt’s love for the theatre, even if I couldn’t quite understand it. We’d talked about it at length one night a couple of months earlier, in my kitchen back at home after we’d been out, and he was incredibly passionate about it. I wrote in my diary thus:

"Matt knows he’s at possibly the biggest crossroads of his life; the leap between the security of family and school, and the rest of his life. He’s worried he’ll end up like Marie* - talented but living in a poxy flat with a dead end job. It’s bizarre hearing Matt talk so personally as he did because he only does it rarely, showing the depth of his feelings on this matter.

I know he’s got the talent, both musically, literally, and theatrically to make himself immensely famous, and also for him to be able to satisfy himself. And yet, it could all go wrong, which would be a tragedy. I’ve only known Matt for less than two years, and there’s still a million things that I don’t know, yet we’ve shared so much that I feel I know him better than so many people. He deserves to be somebody, because he already is somebody; somebody very special."

*A member of the 1993 Bract group, who because she couldn’t get the time off from work, had been unable to accompany us this time around. Almost inevitably, for a while during the time she was in the group, I had a crush on her.

So while I stayed in bed until the afternoon, then ate toast with Pete Newton in a television lounge we’d discovered somewhere deep in the bowels of our digs, watching "Neighbours" and "Home and Away", Matt was out with Lindsay Ross, and her stooge Daron, getting seriously theatrical.

After what happened between Madeleine and I, and Lindsay’s reaction to it, my estimation of my former drama teacher and one time close confidante, had sunk to an all-time low. My feelings for Daron had always been in a state of flux between tolerance and dislike throughout the entire time I’d known him, but by the end of rehearsals I’d had enough of him and after the meeting with him and Lindsay the morning I got home after being with Madeleine, he was public enemy number two. A couple of days later, he rose to the top of my shit-list – he was in my room with Matt, possibly in the morning or maybe late at night, thinking I was unconscious after a combination of alcohol and amyl nitrate. I can’t remember if he called me a twat, or a cunt, but it was one of the two and his voice positively dripped with contempt when he said it. Under my duvet, I was wide awake, and furious. I offered some kind of silent prayer to whoever may have been out in the ether that Matt wouldn’t agree, or say something even worse. Thankfully, he didn’t, and they left the room. What with one thing and another, seeing Matt spending his time with these two affected me more than I could admit at the time. My arrogance and self-obsession had half-convinced me that Lindsay and Daron were deliberately trying to "steal" my friend away, corrupting his mind and changing his opinion of me in some bizarre parable of the battle for Darth Vader’s soul in Star Wars. Whether that was true or not, I’ve never been sure of to this day. If they were, they did eventually win and he did go over to what I saw as the Dark Side of the Force. But that was still to come. At this point, he was still my friend, even if other people were of the opinion that I was a twat. Or a cunt.

On the surface, things were okay. I still saw him during the performances, obviously, and afterwards at the Blue Moon café and from time to time, the Fringe Club. But I didn’t realise that something else, besides a pursuit of the artistic, was going on with Matt and Lindsay, until something happened later in the week. It was the evening before A Level results day, and a few of us were in Tilusha and Sheila’s room, with the intention of smoking some dope. However, an essential item of smoking paraphernalia was missing – whether it was skins, or a lighter, or some tobacco, I can’t recall – and we knew that Matt would be able to help us out. We also knew that he was in Lindsay and Daron’s room, so I volunteered to go and ask him for it.

The scene that greeted me there wasn’t what you might have expected, from where this story has been leading. There was no interrupted clinch, no discovery of both of them, or even all three of them if you include Daron, romping under the sheets like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t look in, and rush out, screaming that my friend Anakin Skywalker had fallen to the Dark Side, to continue the earlier metaphor, and was shagging the Emperor to boot. None of these things happened. In fact, it’s difficult to recall exactly what was so disturbing about what I saw. What happened was that Lindsay and Daron were lying on one of the beds, and Matt was sat on the floor, leaning against the side of the bed. All three of them were mid-conversation, laughing and smoking. Everyone was fully-clothed, and nothing of a sexual nature was going on whatsoever. Yet there was something so strangely intimate, and exclusive, about the three of them being there in such close proximity, that I knew there and then that if something hadn’t happened between Matt and Lindsay that transcended mere friendship, then it was only a matter of time before it did. I took my leave, with whatever I had come for, and returned to the others. I’d like to think I got stoned, and forgot what I saw, but the image was still strongly imprinted on my brain. It still is.

The next day, we got our A Level results. Obviously, as we were in Edinburgh and several hundred miles away from Burleigh, where all our one time schoolmates would be opening their results, myself, Matt, Ian, Kate, Tilusha, and Jim would be getting ours in a slightly different manner. It had already been arranged that Lindsay Ross would call Burleigh in the morning, and get our results. She would then write them down on bits of paper, and bring them to our rooms.

I wasn’t particularly bothered about my results. I had no University place awaiting me pending the attainment of certain grades, and had paid little attention beyond the bare minimum during the exams, so when Lindsay knocked on the door of our room that morning, I was more concerned with going back to sleep than actually seeing what I’d got. When she came in, she handed Matt and me a piece of folded paper each, and left without speaking to either of us. I unfolded the bit of paper, and saw

Theatre Studies – C, English Literature – C, Sociology – N, General Studies – D

I asked Matt what he had got. I knew that he didn’t have a University place riding on his grades either, but as we shared English classes as well as theatre studies, I was curious. I think, if I recall correctly, he showed me rather than told me, because I have no memory of his voice saying that he had got an ‘A’ in theatre studies, which is indeed what he had got. It didn’t strike me at the time as anything other than well-deserved, because as has been mentioned elsewhere, he had got so heavily into theatre during the last twelve months that anything less than a top grade would have been scant reward for his dedication and hard work. I congratulated him and went back to sleep.

Later in the day, we all compared results and results stories. Ian and Kate had the grades they required to get their University places. Tilusha and Jim didn’t even want to know theirs, the former refusing to look at her slip of paper for several hours, the latter throwing it in the bin without as much as a glance at its contents. That evening, after the performance, I called Beth, to find out how she and others had got on, and I also spoke to my parents, to break the news to them that my results were resolutely unspectacular. My mum tried not to let the disappointment show in her voice, and failed. Although I didn’t care about my grades, I know they did, and I felt, not for the first time, like a bit of a schmuck.

The irony of Matt’s grade, and a comment he had made many months earlier, still failed to strike me.

4.

The next day was our final performance of "Blood Wedding". In the Blue Moon afterwards, Lindsay Ross hailed the performance as the best the group had achieved during the entire run of the play, and managed to mix congratulations with contempt by telling me, "welcome to the performance", as if to say I’d been good that day and not on any other. I didn’t care. I’d won a small victory in the large battle, because I was sat with Matt and we had our arms around each other. I don’t remember whether there’d been a declaration of armistice between us, but it’s unlikely as nothing had been said, bad or good, and although silence speaks volumes at times, it only takes a word to break it. Who spoke the word is lost to history, but I think if either of us did, it was Matt, simply because he was a better person than me. Suffice to say, whatever was happening between him and Lindsay, and whether he was a mate of the odious Daron or not, he was still my friend, and the words of the earlier-quoted diary entry remained true. We went out, me, Matt, and everyone, and we drank, and danced, and partied, as we’d done so many times that summer, and with the hours ticking away on our youth, I had never felt so young.

The next day I woke up, and found this.

It was a nice thought, a sweet thought. This was our last day in Edinburgh, and with no performance in the evening, we were free to do as we wanted. What I did was go to one of the other halls of residence at Moray House with Ian, to sing a few songs, including our own "Our Lost Youth", and finally wrote in my diary, for the first time during our sojourn in Scotland, and lamented the fact that I hadn’t documented anything that had happened in the previous week and a bit. Kate and Ian also wrote messages for me in my diary, but more of that in just a little while. In the evening, it was back to the Fringe Club one last time, where I did indeed see Matt, and everyone else, and then… then it was over. Then it was time to come home.

The following day, we packed the set off to the airport, and sat down on the grass outside our digs with our bags of dirty washing, and our tapes, and our Edinburgh memorabilia, and waited for the minibus to return, to pick us up, and carry us home.

A few hours cramped on the minibus later, and we were back at home in Loughborough, back once more at Burleigh College. Edinburgh, and Moray House, and the Rifle Lodge, and the Blue Moon, and the Fringe Club, and toast in TV rooms, and burnt hands and kisses and small beds at Madeleine’s digs, and "Blood Wedding", and everything else that I’ve written about here and all the things I haven’t mentioned, were already turning into nostalgia, changing from experiences to memories, and comfortably re-writing themselves in all of our minds. The mood was almost sombre, but not quite. As opposed to the grey day that we had set out on, the Sunday evening that we returned home on was a beautiful, warm, golden evening, the sky deep August red, the streets quiet, and perhaps the mood amongst us was a mirror of the palpable sense of serenity in the air. The realisation that this chapter of our lives was nearly over, that we were all going to be different people in too short a period of time, that we may not know each other for much longer, crept over us like the first breath of Autumn, and there was that feeling again, the feeling I had felt at the beginning of the summer and on occasions throughout it, that feeling of endings, of things lost never to regain, of time inexorably slipping away.

Ian’s mum arrived in her car, and she drove me, Kate, and Ian, home. We said our goodbyes, and that was pretty much it. There was one more party, and a few hundred loose ends to be tied up before we finally bade farewell to that summer, and maybe one day I’ll write about them. But all stories must end, even if they’re not a hundred percent done, and this is as good a place as any to leave this tale, on a beautiful August evening in a different time, in almost a different world to the one I know now. The car pulls away from outside my house, and I turn and walk up the drive. This isn’t the end, not really, but it’ll do. It’s enough that everyone is home, safe and sound, with the past secure and the future still left unsullied. The summer, the great and almost endless tequila summer of 1994, is over.

At some point, either on the journey home, or as we stood around outside the college gates for the last time, or maybe even in bed that night, back at home once again, the irony of Matt’s grade in theatre studies finally struck me. During a lesson in said subject at an unspecified point in our last year of school, we had been talking about how to get the best possible marks in the written examinations, and what you needed to get certain grades, and so forth. In response to a witty comment by someone else on how to attain the highest possible grade, Matt said, "the only way to get an ‘A’ is to shag the teacher". Well, he did. And he did. But before there is the suggestion of any wrongdoings, I remind you that, if you pardon the expression, by the time he did shag her, she wasn’t the teacher anymore.

What Ian and Kate wrote in my diary in Edinburgh wasn’t supposed to be read by me until the last day of the year – they specifically wrote them at the end of the diary for this purpose. However, like a kid who digs around in his parents’ wardrobes looking for birthday presents a month before the actual day, I couldn’t resist sneaking a peak almost as soon as I was alone with the book. When I read them, I wished I hadn’t, and was paradoxically glad I had – again, just like the kid and the birthday presents, that joyous moment of surprise upon opening up something new was gone and could never be got back. Unlike this fictional kid, who would eventually get bored with his birthday presents, I’ll never get tired of reading what Ian and Kate, my two dear friends, wrote back in the dim and distant past. And I’d like you to read it too.