With the disappointing lack of Ronsellier based accommodation listed in the Fitchester Echo over the next 3 consecutive weeks, I had no choice but to look further afield before a homeless crisis set in. I was forced to accept living back out towards Peer Road and I settled for a room in a house in Henry Place. It hadn't got the grandness that much of Sacville had but it did offer the general civil aspects of the area and it certainly wasn't Rodden.
The day I moved in, I opened the door to find a completely tattooed and heavily pierced housemate, with bright orange dreads, in the hallway. With a thick northern accent and a rollie stuck to his lip, he introduced himself as Gary and asked if I needed a hand with my stuff. I took him up on his offer and as we lumbered everything up into my new bedroom, he happily chatted about why he was in Fitchester and why he hated it. I liked him instantly. He was a city boy from Sheffield, trying to cope with the culture shock of provincial Fitchester. "M'am thinks that being around cultured Southerners will be good for me...fuk that...I'm not a bad lad and I ain't changing nothing for no one!" he explained, as he sat comfortably on my bed making another rollie. He continued. "How's about I make us a nice cup of cha and then leaves ya to sort out that pile of shite?" as he nodded at the heap of my belongings. That was exactly what he did and by the end of my first day at Henry Place I had discovered that Gary was as straightforward as that. He did what he said, and he said what he did.
Later, when my other new housemate came home, he knocked on my bedroom door and politely said that he hoped that he wasn't disturbing me, but thought that he would introduce himself, and just wanted to see that I had everything I needed. Chris was tall and gangly with curly hair, round glasses and a cheeky smile. His thick accent instantly gave away his Devonshire roots. The three of us sat around the table in the dining area of the open plan sitting / dining room and chatted. I was delighted with my choice of accommodation and felt miles away from the cold and characterless Donald Drive.
A sudden announcement that it was likely that the shoe shop would be closing down in the near future caused me to address my life. Perhaps it was living with Chris and Gary, who were both students who knew where their lives were going to take them, that made me decide that I should go back to study. I enrolled at FitchTech to do a part-time, year's course of 2 'A' Levels, working at the shoe shop when I didn't have lessons.
With three students in the house, it was remarkably quiet. Gary popped back to Sheffield whenever his finances allowed and when they didn't, he spent a lot of time getting stoned and listening to music in his room. He was always cheerful even when he was complaining about being stuck in Fitchester. His mother called the house fairly regularly. I assumed that it was to check that he hadn't jacked everything in and done a runner from Fitchester. Her opening line was always 'Alright luv. Our kid there?'. He also had quite a lot of phone contact with his twin brother, with whom he clearly had a loving and yet volatile relationship. Shouts of '...for Christ's sake, our Bill, for Christ's sake!' were common and often followed by the sound of the handset being slammed down in exasperation.
Chris was in his final year of his photography course and usually got home late, ate and spent the rest of the evening in his room playing REM whilst working on some college project or another. I had morning lessons followed by work at the shop and then home to study. Philip, my dear old friend who had helped me move from Peer Road in his Land Rover returned to Fitchester. The proximity of his mother's house to Henry Place meant that I started to see a lot of him. Despite the length of our friendship, and his normally overconfident manner, Philip had a very annoying way of phrasing his self-initiated invitations to come over. He always called with the line, 'If I bring a bottle, can I come over?'. Despite constantly reprimanding him and asking him to at least change the focus of his question he somehow couldn't help himself. My response became, 'Of course you're welcome to come over. It would be lovely to see you! I have a bottle open but if you want to bring one, that would be great!' As one of my A level subjects was British Government and Politics, I had convinced myself that to discuss the state of the country over a couple of bottles of wine with Philip was as effective as textbook learning. When my bottle was empty, and we were getting close to the bottom of the one he had brought we would go to the pub around the corner for more supplies. Normally by that time, the subject of politics had long slipped off the conversation agenda. We never actually made it into the Pub's bar because just inside the front door there was an off-licence alternative. Over a stable door, up until the last client in the bar was ready to leave, you could get a bottle of Pinot Noir for two quid. Philip and I became regular take away clients and over the stable door we would get welcoming nods and smiles from the old regulars drinking on the other side in the bar.
I had only attended a couple of weeks of my economic lessons, which were first thing in the morning, before the lecturer noticed that I had a tendency to nod off and was only awoken when my head flopped forward. Having pulled me aside and mentioned it, he compassionately understood that it was a result of working and cramming two 'A' Levels into a year. The delightful result was that I was assigned the seat next to the door and an explanation was given to the class that I had prior permission to go out, get a coffee and come back. Unfortunately, he went on to say, 'She is a motivated student who is determined to educate herself. She works to pay for her studies. She hasn't yet handed in an assignment late. She is an example to all of the rest of you slackers who have already wasted two years and are now here to do your retakes! An absolute example, you should take a leaf out of her book!'
During one of the academic holidays I was in the pub with Emma and some of her old friends from St Matilda's College for Girls who were back in Fitchester. As the discussion turned to the pressure of not allowing the workload to get in the way of socialising, I confessed that I didn't know how they all coped at degree level as I couldn't even stay awake through a couple of hours of economics at 'A' Level, without having to pop out for caffeine hits. One of the girl's face froze into a fixed grin as she asked if I was studying at FitchTech. When I confirmed, she screamed in inebriated excitement, 'I don't bloody believe it! It's you! It's got to be! The model student! My arse! Complete piss artist, more like! Look at you now...you're hanging! Ever since my father got a letter from LSE saying that if I didn't get my act together, I would be thrown out, he has been going on and on about, this model student of his. Mimicking her father, she recounted the 'never misses a class... assignments always on time... works to pay for her education and is so exhausted she can't stay awake in class. I assumed that it was some geeky swot not you!' With my cover blown I defensively pointed out, 'I do always go to class, no matter how hungover and I hand in what he sets. He asked what else I did, and I told him that I was also studying Politics and I work. It's not my fault that he drew a conclusion from that!'
She bought a round to toast parental naivety and I bought the next in the hope of silencing her and so that she wouldn't shatter her father's allusion of me. When classes started again, I casually mentioned to my economics teacher that a friend of a friend had the same surname as him and after a short conversation on the subject he confirmed with delighted surprise that I did indeed know his daughter. I closed the topic, reassured that she had said nothing, and that my fake façade as the model student was still intact.
Chris was set a college assignment that caused him to ask me for a favour. It was one that caused me to roar with laughter at the very idea. He wanted me to model for him. Only after he had plied me with copious glasses of wine, did I even give him the chance to explain what the assignment was. Reassured that I would need to be fully clothed and that the quality of the model was not important, I felt obliged to at least be helpfully receptive to the idea. Reading the spec to me, still left me with no idea of what he was expected to achieve. In Layman's terms he explained that basically, in black and white, he wanted to combine a female subject with her reflection and her shadow. The aim was to capture all three but to completely deflect attention from the obvious and redirect all the attention into the shadow and the reflection. As I had seen hundreds of Chris's photos since I had been living at Henry Place, I was confident that he would successfully achieve his aim and as such was convinced that I would be artistically represented as an unidentifiable blur. On that basis, and with a few ground rules put down, I agreed to be the female subject. In accordance with my stipulations, and the necessary light, we got to work on a bright day when Gary was out.
My modelling career lasted for about an hour and, as I stood like a piece of wood and died of self-consciousness, I knew that I would never put myself through a similar experience again. Unfortunately for me, the results came back to haunt me. Chris hadn't quite understood the reason why I had wanted Gary to be out when he took the photos. The bottom line was that I didn't want Gary, or anyone else for that matter, to know that I had agreed to model. Several days later I walked into the house and to my horror, I found Gary and six of his mates admiring the photos that Chris was framing on the dining room table. Everyone was artistically talking 'shadows and reflections' but as I stared at the images, all I could see was an ugly bird who was indisputably me.
As it happened, Chris was awarded the highest merit possible for the assignment and as a thank you present to me, he framed a second copy of the photos. Although I still saw nothing but my ugliness, I was suddenly very happy with the present. Mother's birthday was looming and in my brokeness I was already worrying about what to get for her. It was a perfect present for a proud Ma. Like any good masterpiece, I wrapped it in brown paper and string. On the outside I wrote my mother's encouraging catch phrase of 'Every mother's goose is a swan.' The accompanying birthday card contained strict instructions that the photos were never to be hung or shown to anyone other than my father or brother. The P.S. was that I would really rather that no one, other than her, ever saw them. The fact that I confessed that it was actually a second-hand present didn't deflect from her pleasure. 'They're fabulous! I completely appreciate the artistic aspect, but I do have to force myself to look beyond the shadows and the reflections to see you!' was her analysis.
As a result of my frustration that Sally was still with 'him' and that lovely Philip was still single, I decided to attempt to match-make the two of them over supper at Henry Place. My role as cupid was as unsuccessful as my imaginative spag-bol but the good company and lots of wine made it a good evening all the same. Some days later I had a call from Sally. She was calling from Heathrow having decided to do a daylight flit and run off to Morocco with 'him'. There wasn't much I could say. It was certainly a bit late to try and talk her out of it, so I went into practical mode. My pearls of my wisdom included that she should keep enough money aside for a flight home and that to remember she could always get hold of me via my parents if she needed anything. I managed a quick 'stay in touch and do take care' before she said, 'There go the pips...I'll write...' and the phone went dead. It rang again about five minutes later and when I answered it, I got, 'Call yourself a friend? You should've stopped her! She's gone off with 'him' and none of us will probably ever see her again...If you had spoken to her you could have prevented all of this! Imagine how her father and I feel...This is all your fault!'
In light of the understandable upset state that her mother was in, it seemed useless to confess that I was as surprised and upset by the situation as she was. Calmly, I explained that there was nothing I could have done and that whilst I was not hanging up on her, I didn't think there was any point in continuing this conversation. With the handset carefully replaced, I tearfully smoked a cigarette and tried to convince myself that despite everything, there was actually a chance that we could all have been wrong about him and that 'he' did actually love Sally.
The shoe shop's imminent closure and my 'A'results looming meant that another era was coming to an end. I handed in mynotice at Henry Place and waited, in anticipation, to see where I would finishup. Although it was well past the time to move on from Fitchestershire, I knewthat when it came down to it, I would