Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke

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       6

      After my A levels I got a job selling insurance at Scottish Amicable in Manchester where every day I was convulsed by psychosomatic illness. But the job was useful because it enabled me to pay for all the drugs which my boyfriend and his friends liked to take.

      ‘What are you talking about? What are you on?’ my mother asked one day across the kitchen table.

      ‘Ecstasy!’ I beamed, happy to inform.

      It was 1989 in Manchester and, had I but known it, my boyfriend was very cool. I had seduced him by the length of my jumper. I hadn't seen my own hands in eighteen months. He was a musician called Mark who looked a bit like Peter Firth in Letter to Brezhnev, I thought, and I adored him. I loved him. There was nothing else. But when he suggested that we should go to bed together, I was baffled. It was as if he had suggested that we move to South America, or that we weren't English at all, but French. Or aliens. A bizarre and totally irrelevant suggestion. Sex was abstract and ever present but it never actually happened. Like maths. I was horrified by the voice-over on Betty Blue which insisted that the principals had been ‘screwing for a week’.

      ‘Screwing for a week! Screwing! Screwing? Screwing! Skerreww-ing! For a week?. Can you imagine?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Mark.

      I would roll around the floor of the Hacienda in a three-hundred-person embrace while Mark talked record deals with an old man who used to hang around called Tony Wilson. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Shaun. You too, Manni,’ I would say at five o'clock in the morning out of my tree on ecstasy and speed before removing Mark's hand from my thigh. Just what kind of girl did he think I was? What was he on?

      Eventually, I acceded to Mark's request. ‘Tonight, on the 12th December 1989, I, Antonia Quirke, became a woman,’ I thought tremulously to myself. Or had I? A couple of days later I thought: ‘Tonight, on the 14th December 1989, I, Antonia Quirke, almost certainly became a woman.’ The day after that I thought: ‘Bloody hell. Bloody hell!’ and proudly munched my way through half a packet of Anadin. I was immensely lucky to have Mark as my first boyfriend. My first love. He had great talent as a musician and the dedication to back it up. He was as sincere and grave as any prince in an Oscar Wilde fairy story and bought me a ring whose inscription, love you baby blue, obliquely thanked Beatrice Dalle for her help in binding us together. In his blue and serious gaze I was wide open. I was invisible, I had no secrets to conceal. That's young love. Not because it's the first time but simply because you are young, before Life thins into that pointed little thing, A Life. Before time turns your life into a one-woman show.

      On the strength of my convalescence-assisted A levels, I got a place at UCL to read English, which gave Scottish Amicable the excuse to sack me they had long been looking for. As I descended in the lift from the fourteenth floor for the last time, the nausea and palsy which had gripped me for a year unclenched themselves floor by floor until I arrived at reception and walked out into Piccadilly a new person. The only truly strange thing that has ever happened to me. It was like I'd been sacked into reality. Everything around me suddenly came into its full life. The traffic sounded out, the shadows of sandstone buildings on dusty concrete became delicately blue, sunlit Georgian granite sprang into heat, the Pennines showed up, windy and bright and in focus thirty miles away, and I felt for the first time, in the nicest way, like I was on my own. I have never felt more well than I did at that moment. In this lofty mood I was reluctant to take money off my parents for university and told them that I had won a ‘special grant’ to cover my costs in London, which I hadn't. I wanted to do it on my own, like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. The afternoon I arrived I managed to get a job at Habitat on Tottenham Court Road for six days a week, and at a pub in the evenings, leaving me absolutely no time for lectures or tutorials, but I reckoned I could work around this if I chose only those courses where you don't have to do any thinking (like Phonetics) and stole all the books I needed from the Waterstone's on Gower Street.

      ‘How's college?’ my father would ask at Christmas and Easter, then at the Christmas and Easter after that, and I'd think: Don't ask me.

      But I couldn't go back. Midway through my first year, Mark's band had got to Number 3 in the charts with a dance hit that went ‘If there ain't no love then there ain't no use’. When they went on Top of the Pops I stood at the back of the studio smiling a false smile with the other girlfriends and watched him on stage working his keyboard as soothingly as if he were peeling an apple, knowing like you know there are dead flies in the cutlery drawer that I was not built to be a popstar's girlfriend, with girlfriendly skills. While I could hardly grasp the idea that something as infinite and boundless as he and I could have an end, I knew that knowing that meant that somewhere it had already ended. Lessons, by definition, are always too late. In the furniture department at Habitat I listened to couples arguing on sofas with their eyes squeezed tightly shut in frustration and watched the streams of students pass the windows, wondering how to enter their lives.

      One day I was walking from Maple Street down to Oxford Circus to buy strawberries from the stall that used to trade outside the chapel on Tottenham Court Road when I realised that a man had been following me for the past ten minutes, so I turned on him and demanded an explanation. He had a red flick like Eric Stoltz in Some Kind of Wonderful.

      ‘How else am I going to meet you if I don't follow you?’ he said.

      I simply could not discover the flaw in this logic. I was so completely stumped for an answer that I went home with him to his flat near Russell Square where his flatmate shared his bed as if this were a ménage à presque trois. The thing about being innocent is that you can never be quite sure what constitutes seediness and what doesn't. I thought: Russell Square! This is where Ted Hughes used to live when he was first going out with Sylvia Plath! It seemed to open the city for me, unlock the British Museum, and all the print СКАЧАТЬ