Chapter Nine
London, 1991
Ovarian cancer: one of the most deadly, one of the most invisible. I didn’t see it coming. Not just because there was nothing to see, or because Mum hadn’t wanted me to find out, but because for most of the two years she was having aggressive treatment, I was trawling the lipstick counters and movie foyers of Notting Hill, lost in a haze of bus-stop crushes and top-forty pop hits. I was sixteen. The first few times she went to hospital and my grandmother came to look after me, I thought it was serious, but after Mum had been admitted half a dozen times and was, on each occasion, returned to me in one piece, her absence became routine. I was free to fixate on what all teenage girls fixate on—boys. In my case, I wanted to know why I had grown up to be one of those girls with whom they did not fall wildly in love. Cancer had nothing on that, and try as I might, I cannot go back to redress the oversight.
By that age, I had worked out that my rotten luck with boys had little to do with looks or even personality—plenty of plain, irritating girls in my class were met at the school gates by a different boy each week—and more to do with a hidden magnet you were either born with, or, tragically, born without. If the magnet wasn’t there, you couldn’t get one, or even pretend you had one; you just had to learn to live without it, to watch from the sidelines while girls with magnets made off with all the loot.
That year, Alana and I were hung up on noses. Every single boy we saw in the street, on the bus, in the park had to have his nose rated and classified according to a complicated set of criteria. At the bottom of the sliding scale was the worst kind of nose: large and bumpy and Roman, the sort a French lothario would sport (off the scale altogether was anything potato shaped or bulbous). At the top—the very pinnacle of proboscis perfection—was an RP: a pointed, girlish ski jump of a nose, as sported by the pointed, girlish actor River Phoenix, or “Riv,” as he was to us. To see an RP in the flesh was to fall instantly, swooningly in love, and warranted an immediate four-hour phone call to discuss the details of the nose and its owner. This would be followed by weeks of frustrated stalking in an attempt at further sightings.
On the art department photocopier at school, we made River Phoenix wallpaper and used it to cover the walls of the common room. A competing group tried to do the same with Keanu Reeves, but they got as far as wallpapering the Coke machine before the art department started charging for photocopies and their commitment faltered.
I talked to Mum about boys, but only enough so she thought I was normal, not a lesbo like the PE teachers at school. Any more than that and I risked getting “the lecture,” the one that began with “boys only want one thing.” But as my seventeenth birthday approached, the lecture began to grate in a new way, for it only served to remind me of what I wanted too but wasn’t getting. I’d had enough of talking on the phone about hypothetical movie star boyfriends and their noses; the stuff of my mother’s direst warnings was what I most craved.
For that, I turned to my only other friend, Jo. As eleven-year-olds, we had shared a passionate interest in dressing up as pop stars and had videotaped each other miming with tennis racket guitars to Madonna and A-ha, but Jo had moved on since then. Not only was she on the pill, but her boyfriend Adam practically lived with her in the attic of her parents’ Notting Hill mansion.
It was Jo who introduced me, that summer, to Adam’s best friend, Leon. I had seen him before from a distance, a solid brick wall of a boy, definitely no RP, but my friends thought he was good looking, and their opinions mattered to me as much as my own. One afternoon after school, still in uniform, Jo and I caught the bus to Kensington Park Road, and she let us in through the gate of the communal garden across the road from her house, near where I had once lived. After Dad left, Mum and I had moved to a rented flat in Shepherd’s Bush, a small two-bedroom place with a bathroom but no proper living room, only a carpeted extension of the kitchen (stunning view, also, of a slice of railway and the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout).
Once inside the garden gate, Jo and I made straight for a thicket of mulberry bushes in the center and Jo parted the leaves with both hands. “Have you ever gotten high?” she said, smiling her dreamy smile.
A fleet of nerves spread through me. Keen as I was for experience, I had read that taking drugs even once was enough to set you on the path toward becoming a junkie—one of those walking skeletons I had seen huddled under the Westway as a kid. “Will I be all right for school in the morning?”
“Of course, silly, it’s only hash,” said Jo. “Me and Adam do it all the time, practically every day. You’ll just feel relaxed, that’s all.”