‘Oh, anyone can sing.’
I laughed genuinely at that because Billy had no idea quite how wrong he was.
Looking back, I’m a bit embarrassed at how superficial I sounded, but it wasn’t superficiality, honest it wasn’t. It was fragility, really, that was driving me.
Despite the sexually liberated side of me, which, admittedly, was well developed for a seventeen-year-old, I was desperate, achingly desperate to be loved, to be appreciated – to be respected as different and individual and above all cool. I wanted tonotbe like my schoolfriends, who for the most part were what, round our way, we called bus stop girls — those youngsters you see hanging around the bus stops of small towns, smoking, drinking lager and swearing. But inexorably, that’s exactly what I knew I was becoming.
My problem was that my ideas about who Ididn’twant to be were far clearer than my thoughts about who Idid. I’d prepared for adult life by ruling out all the obvious Margate clichés: chav, fashionista, skinhead... I’d determined that I’d never be right-wing or racist or boring or conventional, because these were the things I hated most. But these self-imposed limits had only served to create an emptiness – a sort of void that left me feeling self-conscious and scared in almost all situations. The only side of me I felt confident about was the fact that I was sexually attractive. Boys liked me, I knew that much. They liked my blond hair and my long legs; they liked my precocious boobs. And I knew how to flirt, that’s for sure. I’d mastered that one by watching Mum. But otherwise, the truth of the matter was that I hadn’t the faintest idea who I was.
Billy seemed to have self-assurance and personality to spare, and, if I could just get into his inner circle, I hoped I’d soak up some of that cool myself.
So when, flicking his cigarette into the darkness, he said, ‘Time I got back for the second half. Will you still be around when we finish?’ the only possible answer was ‘yes’.
Billy’s parents had a huge red brick house overlooking Dane Park, but Billy lived in the garage. It had been converted into a sort of studio flat, with a shower cubicle in one corner, and fluffy insulation that peeped out from the tops of plasterboard walls. But you could tell that that’s what it had been: a garage.
He had a messed-up sofa-bed in one corner that I never once saw folded away, and a drum kit and a keyboard at the back. He had three guitars hung on the walls, a hi-fi, racks of records and fridge-sized speakers. I thought it was the coolest pad I’d ever seen.
We lounged on his bed, drinking rosé from a box, until I found the courage to ask him if he was wearing anything beneath that jumpsuit. This led directly to the big reveal: he wasn’t. And I mean, not even underpants.
After sex – which was OK if not exceptional – I felt miserable. I’d decided halfway through that Billy was out of my league and that if I wanted to hang out with him and the rest of the band, I should have played hard to get rather than serving myself up on a platter.
But then Billy, still naked on the bed, picked up a guitar and started strumming, and instead I decided I was in love.
As he played, he asked me about myself, so I told him about growing up on the Millmead estate, and about my mum, and her boyfriends, and about Wayne.
Billy said he thought that was all ‘really cool’, which was a bit of a shock. He said the working classes ‘knew where it was at’ while people like his parents had their ‘heads so far up their own arses they could barely tell night from day’. But his approval gave me the courage to refuse a third cigarette. I didn’t, I finally admitted, smoke.
‘So why d’you take ’em before?’ he asked, still strumming, still smoking.
‘Dunno.’ I shrugged. ‘Peer pressure, maybe? I think I wanted you to like me.’
‘Because how could I ever like a non-smoker?’ Billy laughed.
‘Sorry.’
‘Oh, don’t apologise,’ he said, then, more seriously. ‘And don’teverdo that.’ He gave me a sad shake of the head, then dropped his gaze to a new chord sequence he was trying to master.
‘Don’t do what?’ I asked.
‘Don’t say yes to things you don’t really want,’ he said. ‘Saying “no” is as important as saying “yes”. More important, maybe. What you say “no” to defines who you are.’ He stopped playing momentarily then, and reached to a shelf behind him for a notebook and a Biro. Once he’d jotted something down and returned the book to the shelf, he looked up at me and smiled.
‘Just notes,’ he said. ‘Ideas for songs. You see? You’ve inspired me already.’
My relationship with Billy lasted just one summer – the summer of 1990. But my God, what a summer that was!
Maybe there are just moments in a life that are special – moments when you’re changing from one thing to another, the way caterpillars change to butterflies – moments when you’re open and ready to become someone new. So perhaps it was just luck that Billy happened to be there at the right time for me. But it’s always felt like more than that somehow. It’s always felt like he wasmeantto be there right then, like he was the one person on the planet I needed to meet.
Billy taught me everything, really, and by the time the summer was over I’d filled that gaping void of mine, and built a whole new personality.
He introduced me to his parents, that was the first thing. They were these incredibly calm, cultured dope smokers and were unlike any parents I’d ever met.
His dad was a schoolteacher, and his mother a freelance copy-editor – intellectuals, I suppose you’d call them. They listened to classical music and read books and drank too much wine, letting Billy do pretty much whatever he wanted. His mum actually gave me a copy ofThe Life and Loves of a She-Devilto read, and it was the first novel I ever read out of choice rather than because it was on the school syllabus.
Of course, if you’re a literary snob kind of person, then you might turn your nose up atThe Life and Loves of a She-Devil; you might not consider it to be ‘proper literature’. I’ve met plenty of people who seem to think anything that’s been adapted for TV is automatically rubbish. But to me, Fay Weldon was a revelation. Her books were funny, sassy, opinionated and tragic all rolled into one, and I realised for the first time how reading let me peep into other lives, lives I’d never see otherwise. I was hooked, and by the end of the summer, I’d readPuffballandPraxisas well.
Billy introduced me to new music, too. My friends rarely ventured beyond Radio One, a burst of Madonna or, at a stretch, just maybe an album by Sinead O’Connor. But Billy listened to Pink Floyd and Siouxsie and the Banshees. He made me listen to David Bowie, the Stone Roses and Prince.
I remember one night in particular. Billy had stolen some weed from his dad’s stash in the sideboard and convinced me to take a hit from his bong. Predictably, I’d coughed my guts up, but afterwards I did feel super-mellow.
