More Than Just Coincidence. Julie Wassmer

Now we all waited with bated breath to see if the experience would be repeated. We were disappointed.

      Martin lived about a half a mile away from Lefevre Road. His parents were divorced and his Irish mother, Bridie, worked night shifts as a hospital receptionist. His flat was larger than ours so once she had left for the evening we had the space—and the freedom—to do things I couldn’t do at home, but it was all relatively innocent. Martin’s room was something to behold. The walls were lined with posters of Jimi Hendrix, T-Rex and Led Zeppelin, all bathed in the glow of a red light bulb. A stolen British Rail safety lamp sat in pride of place in a corner and on the ceiling were cutting-edge polystyrene tiles. We spent a long time looking up at them, smoking either designer cigarettes like Sobranie or Du Maurier or very weak joints that quite possibly contained henna rather than cannabis. We wouldn’t have known the difference.

      With his lean build and delicate features, Martin was in every way the antithesis of my father. He wore his curly hair like Bob Dylan’s on the cover of the Blonde on Blonde album, and was generous with his meagre wages as an apprentice with the Gas Board, buying me jewellery and bottles of Aqua Manda perfume which made me smell like an orange. He had left school after taking his O-Levels and found gas-fitting incredibly boring. His parents’ divorce was hard for him to accept and when we visited his father one afternoon, I could tell, just by the way Martin looked at him, how much he missed having his dad in his life.

      I began to see Martin most evenings and in time his flat came to feel more like home than mine. My parents didn’t approve of me going out so often, especially when I began staying out increasingly late. They wanted me to concentrate on my schoolwork. To my dad, education was everything. ‘You could work in a bank!’ he said enthusiastically, in an effort to inspire me. It was his idea of a respectable, steady job with prospects and a good pension but exactly how he envisaged it bringing fulfilment to him or to me I can’t imagine. His expectations of me were fierce but unfocused. My parents simply wanted a better life for me than the one they had, but while I was struggling to discover what I wanted for myself I felt constantly under pressure.

      I never actually told them where I was going or who I was seeing but, not surprisingly, they guessed there was a boy involved. When a neighbour told my mother she had seen a handsome young man walking me home one night, she didn’t sit me down to discuss sex or contraception. Instead she simply insisted point-blank that the relationship should end. To me this seemed unreasonable, so I ignored her edict, but from then on when I went to Martin’s I pretended to be visiting June.

      My best friend now seemed to come and go as she pleased with little parental supervision. She and her father had reached an accommodation: they just avoided each other. June appeared to be reacting to her mother’s absence by developing an eating disorder. Looking back, she displayed all the symptoms of anorexia, though at the time it wasn’t a word we’d ever heard.

      After six months, my mother backed off. Perhaps she was in denial about my relationship with Martin; perhaps she had decided to trust me to be sensible. My father, however, remained outraged about the late nights I kept.

      One evening when I was round at Martin’s there was a knock on the front door. Bridie was in, too, as it was her night off, and she opened it to find my mother on her doorstep, upset and pleading for me to come home. It transpired that she had argued with my father, who was blaming her for having no ‘proper control’. Bridie calmed her down, reassuring her that there was no cause for concern. She convinced my mother there was nothing to fear from her son. Martin was a good boy, she said. He and I were dating, it was all perfectly normal at our age and he would always walk me back to our flat.