Get Into The Light: Chapter One

We needed sleep, a plate of healthy food and a good, well thought through discussion. We needed to think about things properly - logically. We needed to weigh up the options and not get carried away. But right now, right in this moment, all I wanted to do was grab Carl, mash my face into his chest, give myself a nosebleed, anything, just so I didn’t have to stay on the tram destined for the depot. The next bus for London left in under an hour. I wouldn’t be getting on it. And in the end it was easier than I thought. Carl wouldn’t stand in my way.

Carl was the kind of man who spoke to birds - actually put on a high voice and bent down to their level, studied their feathery faces and beady eyes - gave them names. This was one of the many things we shared - like laughing at National Lampoon films, melting a slice of cheese on a fried egg, making up new lyrics to songs and giving birds names. We had so much in common. Why was he insisting I leave Amsterdam? Carl stared ahead as if things were going to unfold just as he’d planned, as if he couldn’t sense the nest of sparrows frantically screeching in my chest - like it would all be fine as long as we didn’t make eye contact. He was too tired to see what was happening right now. I stood up, pressed the button and picked up my bag. The tram stopped and I jumped. Life thrown upside down in one moment.

And in the end, you could think about things, ruminate for hours on whether it was right, draw columns of pros and cons, ask friends and family what they’d do in your place, read books like, ‘Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway’ or you could jump from the tram and start walking in the opposite direction. And I didn’t even bother to check if Carl was following. With each step I spoke out loud - I’m not leaving, I’m not leaving, I’m not leaving, but no one noticed because it was early and besides, foreigners gibbering to themselves were a regular sight. Amsterdam hadn’t been swept clean and new yet and was still a repository for the haunted souls of English and Italian space cake eaters. But I wasn’t one of them, not yet anyway. I knew what I was doing. There were no chemicals in my brain that shouldn’t have been there. I started the adventure sober. I started it off with energy and verve.

‘You can’t expect me to support you Lola, I’m hardly able to get by myself at the moment.’
‘What about the studio? They pay you don’t they?’
‘Not enough for two people. How are we going to eat?’
We didn’t eat much anyway. You didn’t need food when you were in love. And yet I could see that food wasn’t what Carl was worried about. Yes Carl loved conversing with birds. But he was also pragmatic. Didn’t I want to return home and finish my exams? They were only three months away. Was I really going to throw all that hard work away? And what about my parents? They’d be worried sick. They were bound to think Carl had abducted me or put me on the game. And Carl’s voice grew louder as he paced up and down the tiny flat, flapping his arms like he was about to take off and I wasn’t really listening because I had the unique ability of anyone in their late teens to simply turn my ears off when adults were talking. Instead I’d retreated inside and my brain was focused on a blank, white, space - a mental state that it takes some Yogi’s years to achieve – and this was easy because I’d made the decision now and apart from throwing me onto the street (something Carl would never do), there was nothing that could be done. The relentless grey of the city, the loneliness of my parents house, the disconnect from all my friends, that was all in the past.

It was a happy/sad kind of crying that followed because whilst I wanted to be with Carl forever, I wasn’t a WITCH, didn’t have fingernails filled with bats entrails - I loved my parents and Carl was right - they’d be worried - in fact Amsterdam was the worst possible place as far as Mum was concerned –a cesspit of prostitutes and marijuana. I cried because I was the type of person who could do this to their Mum and then I cried because Mum had made me into this type of person. And all the time Carl flapped his arms up and down like a bird trying to excavate an interloper from the nest. And when I went into the freezing, cold bathroom I saw a half shadow of my reflection and Nancy Spungen staring back. Some people become more attractive when they cry. Then there’s people who’s noses double in width and get red and angry like they’ve been stung by a bumble bee.

‘Why don’t you take it easy for a bit?’ Carl said when I emerged, wiping the tears away with a piece of loo paper.
He sounded patient but also annoyed. It was a tone that I would grow more familiar with.
‘You don’t want me.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense.’
‘You don’t love me anymore.’
‘If I didn’t love you then I would have called your parents already.’
‘Maybe you have.’
‘Why don’t I make some tea? Isn’t that what you English people do when there’s a crisis?’
As he reached up to get two mugs from the cupboard, the bottoms of his trousers rose up exposing two delicate ankles. The ankles of a lady - not stumps like mine. And his trousers were always too short. Before Carl, I’d never met a man who wore trousers that finished an inch above his shoes.

In my mid- teen years, there’d always been a particular type. These boys were lumpy, broad shouldered; they had big, fleshy lips and towered over me with long, floppy hair that hung over one eye and I wasn’t a complete slag but there were enough to see a pattern emerging and one thing for sure, they were never small, delicate-ankle, bird lovers. They wore ripped Levi’s and T-shirts. Didn’t talk. You knew they liked you when they stuck their tongues down your throat and pinched your nipples. One of them had even tried to get his penis in through the fabric of my 70 denier, black tights. Despite their generally rash approach, their silence created a rich tapestry of possibilities. They became the subject of endless debate in my teenage diaries. But Carl was different. You could tell just by looking at him that he was listening. And he looked nothing like these primitive, butcher boys. His hair never flopped in his eyes because it had the consistency of tawny-brown, candyfloss. And he dressed himself in old clothes - paisley cravats, pleated harem trousers and dusty, long coats from charity shops. Like he was wearing the clothes he’d be buried in. His eyes drawn on with a fine lick of green eyeliner.

And another thing that set Carl apart was the fact that he was a genuine, bona fide MUSICIAN - the keyboard player in a world famous, New Wave band called ‘The Secret Scribe’. I didn’t like to think of myself as a groupie but there was something undeniably attractive about someone worshipped for their creativity. Carl had bags of fan mail that proved how deeply he was worshipped (including an envelope of pubic hair that a female fan had sent him). He’d toured the US and South America and played the more niche, Goth festivals in Germany. Unfortunately I’d met Carl when his career was on a downward trajectory. The relationships in the band had soured - the lead singer, Robert, had lost his mind, investing so much money in hair extensions that he could no longer think properly and refused to give the other band members any credit - wanted to dominate all the interviews and photo shoots. He was convinced that they needed a darker, edgier, industrial sound - the sound of millions of hairpieces being bolted into the skulls of screaming, terrified teenagers up and down the land. He believed the parts were truly bigger than the sum. Carl was miserable- this was when I met him in a nightclub just off Hanover Square (they were recording what was to be their final album together). I remember dancing, trying desperately not to sweat too much despite the fact I was dressed in an enormous puffa jacket ( I was into hip hop at the time) and this strange, bird - man with candy floss hair just flew right down from the night sky and landed at my feet.

And I’m sure there are some people who may think it was wrong for an seventeen year old to get involved with a man already in his late twenties. But he was more gentlemanly than any man I’d met so far. He didn’t think grinding his teeth up against your neck was erotic. And when he returned to Amsterdam because the band had now broken up, all of the things that had been pleasing like drinking Thunderbird, vomiting on night buses, fighting off penises in the park, well none of these things were pleasing anymore. My friends and family didn’t understand why I was drawing green eyes on my face. And so it was inevitable that a long Easter weekend would turn into something more permanent.

Eventually Carl stopped flapping his arms, rolled a cigarette and put Cocteau Twins, on the CD player. We ate a sandwich. Watched re-runs of A-Team. An hour of CNN news. It grew dark. We went to bed early. The next morning I woke up and tried not to think about the scene unfolding. Mum driving to Victoria station. Watching all the red-eyed youths spilling out onto the pavement, waiting for twenty minutes and then asking the driver whether he’d seen me, then onto the information desk to check the arrival time of the next bus. Finally locating a call box and phoning Dad- What should I do? Has she called? Where is she? - Then collapsing onto the same bench and waiting some more. She wouldn’t have noticed the birds congregating around her feet, feasting on the scraps of fried chicken and crumbs. The birds called Whistler,
Grey-tail and Stan. She wouldn’t have talked to them. Wouldn’t have thought about names. But that wasn’t the reason I left. That would have been a stupid reason.

Then after another hour had passed, once the birds had flown up into the rafters, the pigeons fidgeting till they found a comfortable place to rest, by then she’d have waited three hours and realised I wasn’t coming back.