it was about remembering stuff as we felt it then. can anyone tell me honestly is it at all interesting? Or am I just completely up my own arse - would anyone be kind enough to take a look? This is the first time I've tried anything for years and years. Not even sure it's in the right place - apologies if this is only for fiction
it's 1976 and I am walking down the stairs into the canteen at kingsway college. No matter how many times I do it, each time it feels like the first. They're rather grand stairs - you really make an entrance using them. I would much rather sidle in through a door, unnoticed by others, but there's no choice here. The moment you take the first step down you're on display bigtime until you reach the bottom and the relief of finally being able to blend into the crowd. I hate this walk -it's a walk of shame for me. I hate being on display. I feel as if everyone's looking at me - mentally judging my face, my clothes, my expression. my eyes dart around the room below - the tables, lined up either side of a central passageway. I scan them, seeing if my friends are there. I am furiously shy - the shyness from leaving the tiny private girls' tutorial college opposite new scotland yard, plummetting myself into this loud new crowded noisy explosive world of an FE college. I can feel myself blushing - the red heat spreading up my face. I am definitely not in my comfort zone. I don't have one of these at 16.
This is a time just after punk started - and it started here I suppose. The year before, the sex pistols were students here - people say they used to come into college in clothes made from bin bags fastened together. I used to know some of them before now - the year before and the year before that at the Sunday gigs at the roundhouse in Camden. Spikey john became sid vicious. He was older than me by a year or two and he used to look after me in a kind of non judgemental big brother way when I took too many drugs, or when I tried something new - he was my self appointed first trip supervisor. He was kind and gentle then, not the sneery person we all saw on tv that day bill grundy ended his career
Anyway - this is 1976 and everything is here at Kingsway. it's like a melting pot. Hippies with clouds of patchouli around them, those funny boots in rainbow colours that would lace right up to the knee. I cannot remember what they were called but for years I had been desperate for a pair. You could see people morphing from one thing to another. earrings were swapped for safety pins, loons for rips in jeans. I no longer wear my black cloak - god that was so useful for hiding behind. Denim jackets - so many denim jackets. One of my friends already has a hole in his nose from too much cocaine . We are from everywhere - private day schools, boarding schools, state schools. We are on the verge of life - just beginning. We are children playing at being adults - practising. No need to hide the little red schoolbook under the desk like we had at thirteen before I was expelled from my first secondary school. Blushing, giggling, sharing the rudest parts. you could always tell the rudest parts because the little book would fall open at them - like you could see where people had tried to prise the stickers off the pages of Shakespeare where he'd written something we, as young ladies in the making, were not considered old enough to read. At Kingsway, as before at my tutors I don't need to read about things and wonder. I can do them - every single thing. I am determined to try every single thing I can and so long as no-one I personally know has died of it, I carry through this resolve with gusto. My idea of being careful is not injecting. I do this because two years before I hung around with heroin addicts. I know how to do a tourniquet. I know it's dangerous to get an air bubble in the vein. I know you need to pump your hand to find a vein. I can do a mean impression of the heavy eyelids of a smack addict - this is beyond glamorous to me. I can roll a great joint. I was nearly expelled from my tutors two years before when I take some mandrax in and offer it to my friends. They don't throw me out in the end because I manage to convince them they were aspirins, but it was a close thing. Mandrax is lovely. It's nicer than tuinal. I love sulphate as well. Sometimes my jaw aches with chewing gum all night, talking and talking and talking. The first time I did a line of sulphate I feel like I was eight again - that boundless energy, the elation, the excitement! Wonderful feeling ! like superman for a night. It's not good for you though. I see jacko who is much older than me - perhaps even twenty, compared to my fourteen or fifteen. He has an earring, and black hair and a white face and his teeth are bad and he is going grey because he does too much speed. Black bombers! They are the bees knees. Fuck Shakespeare and Thomas hardy. I have no time for these people now. Southern comfort, clumsy casual sex to prop up my non-existent ego. Uppers, downers, playing chicken across the road from Kingsway to the pub. I know that pub better than my classrooms. I know the jukebox intimately. It plays take five and house of the rising sun. I am playing with these things. I am playing with studying art. I like being an art student but I am not really concentrating on that. My tutor leaves me speechless with embarrassment. He is 26 and I have a massive crush on him. He tries to ask me why I don?t come to lessons and what I want him to do is take me in his arms and make me feel safe and loved, but I blush instead and say quietly "I don't know". I have stopped doing acid - ever since I forgot my home phone number one day. This is my idea of damage limitation at 16