Nerd Do Well (26 page)

Word had spread that Ann was taking custody of a genuine French girl, so myself and Nick May, who lived conveniently close to Ann, wandered up to the top field to see if we could catch a glimpse of her Gallic mysteriousness. We were in luck, and she was everything we had hoped for: tanned, chic, fragrant, exotic and unspeakably beautiful, with a pidgin English and hypnotic accent that immediately elevated her to the status of Most Amazing Girl I Had Ever Met, more amazing even than the blonde Finnish girl who had visited a year before and spoken frankly about masturbation. Murielle was smart and funny, with a touching note of affection in her laugh that filled me with a curious warmth.

I would ride up and down past Ann’s house on my red Raleigh Grifter, hoping that the pair would emerge and see me cycling past, as though by sheer coincidence. If they didn’t appear, I would knock and casually ask if they wanted to come out and loiter in the warm evening air, since I just so happened to be passing. Murielle became my obsession that summer; she made my entire being ache with longing. I hadn’t felt anything like it before, not with Laura or Libby, my sixth-form crushes, nor with Ann or her best friend Allison who followed, not even Meredith Catsanus. This felt more like Princess Leia, bottomless and painful in the most exquisite way.

On one particularly balmy, magical evening, a party was being held in a barn on the other side of the village for purposes I have now forgotten, possibly a rich kid’s birthday. The event was fully catered and featured a sound system and disco lights and promised to be a lot of fun. King of the swingers, Darius Pocha, who for some reason had not been around that summer (maybe encephalitis), was joining us at the party and I was excited for him to meet Murielle. I had taken great pleasure in telling him about her, making sure I said her name in a Charles Aznavour voice,
Murielle.

The night was electric and I relished the chance to hang out with her for a few hours in an environment more conducive to socialising. Fences and fields are fine but nothing beats a paper cup full of warm Coke laced with cider. She seemed to get on well with Darius, which pleased me immensely, although a couple of times I noticed her making faces behind his back. At the end of the night, tired and psychosomatically tipsy, we clambered into Ann’s mother’s car and headed back to our part of the village. Huddled in the back seat, Murielle shifted her weight and put her arm around my shoulder, her hand drooping down over my chest. Her head nodded forward as exhaustion overwhelmed her and she slept next to me.

I became more awake than I had ever been in my thirteen years. My heart rate doubled and my breath became shallow and shaky. I slowly closed my fingers around hers and shifted my weight to make her more comfortable. She didn’t wake or protest, so I held my position as though balancing a priceless vase on the tip of my nose. Her head lolled on to my shoulder, and in a moment of semi-consciousness, she felt my hand clasped around hers and snuggled into me, purring slightly as she drifted back off to sleep.

I didn’t want the journey to come to an end. I wanted Mrs Tickner to just drive round until dawn, so that I could prolong this moment of closeness to the object of my affections. Eventually we reached our destination and Murielle stretched and yawned out of the embrace, giving me a tired smile, within which I desperately searched for some meaning. Were we going to kiss? Was it possible in front of Ann and her mother? Would I be able to stay upright if we did? Her lips were a perpetual pout of softness and I had imagined many times the feeling of actually kissing them. Was this it? She kissed me on both cheeks, as was customary in her part of the world, and it was enough for me. I can still feel the sting of her cool saliva on my face and the smell of her spiky eighties hair as it brushed passed my ear. I walked home in a daze of intoxication, my clothes infused with the smell of her. This was it, I was in love.

The next day I discovered her and Darius in an amorous embrace outside Ann’s house and my world exploded. I could barely contain my shock as I saw them sat snuggled together, planting tiny kisses on each other’s lips. With sudden clarity, it dawned on me that the faces she had been making behind Darius’s back had been expressions of attraction and approval, and her affection towards me in the car had been nothing more than friendly – we had, after all, become close over the summer and her actions denoted nothing more than her sense of ease and comfort in my presence. Somewhere inside me, something lurched and snapped and I stumbled towards my Raleigh Grifter, making the hasty excuse that I suddenly had to be elsewhere, the first time that entire summer I had wanted to be somewhere other than near her.

As I rode away, my eyes clouded with tears and I released a torrent of anguish that forced me to pull over and give in to its weight. I sat against a blackberry bush and wept openly, tears mixing with the grime and sweat on my face as I tried to make sense of the situation. He had known her for one day, one single day. I had been her friend for weeks, I knew her better, liked her more, how dare he appear out of nowhere and destroy everything. The truth pricked at my despair, threatening to deepen it further. Darius was very cool in an androgynous, slightly self-conscious way. He was tall and beautiful, a perfect mix of his pretty English mother and smart, exotic Indian dad. His fashion sense was avant-garde, which definitely appealed to Murielle’s European sensibility over my own jeans and T-shirt simplicity. He was novel and fresh, a newcomer to our little summer clique. Just like she had appeared as a breath of French air to invigorate our familiar surroundings, Darius had made a timely entrance into the ranks of pasty English boys that had turned out to get a look at this exotic beauty, and without even meaning to, he had swept her off her feet. After a while I realised I was going to have to go back. As painful as it was to see them together, the idea of not seeing her at all was far worse.

I rounded the corner on the faithful metal steed I had owned since I was eight, simply raising the saddle and handlebars every time I noticed I had outgrown it. Darius and Murielle sat together on the grass verge outside Ann’s house, arms draped over each other; Ann sat slightly apart from them, no doubt almost as pissed off as I was. Not because she was jealous, but because she had found herself custodian of the summer’s main attraction and as such became the conduit to Murielle, rather than a person in her own right. I climbed off my bike, flipped it upside down and threw it into a hedge, overwhelmed by a fit of impotent demonstrative emotion.

‘Are you hungry?’ Murielle enquired, chewing her words for clarity.

‘What?’ I said, betraying my disgust at her betrayal. She made a face and continued.

‘Why are you hungry, Simon?’

It took me a few seconds to realise that what she was actually asking me was if I was ‘angry’. She seemed genuinely oblivious that her actions may have upset me, which frustrated me even more, as it meant the unspoken sexual tension which I assumed existed between us was a myth of my own construction. We were just friends, that’s how she saw me. Not as a potential boyfriend or an object of desire, just a friend whom she nevertheless cared for very much.

She seemed perplexed and upset by my reaction, which left me with little recourse but to take it out on him. Even that was hard. I loved Darius, he was one of my best friends and someone with whom I felt an enormous affinity. He was aware that I had feelings for Murielle but he had no idea how deeply they ran because he hadn’t really been around that summer. I did not extract myself from our social summer huddle but instead became the wounded martyr, wearing my pain on my sleeve. I noticed a bloody purple splash across the back of my T-shirt later that day, where I had leaned against the blackberry bush, and made some vague comment about it being evidence of Darius stabbing me in the back. Melodramatic, yes, but I was thirteen and in love with a French girl.

When the time came to say goodbye to Murielle, I had just about got used to the idea of her and Darius and managed to get a little angst-ridden mileage out of being the spurned lover. Murielle realised that I had feelings for her and seemed apologetic and genuinely concerned about my moods, often pleading with me not to be ‘hungry’. The night she left, Nick, Darius and I gathered on the lane leading up to Boots’s field and lined up to give her our goodbyes. The tears spilled down her cheeks and I remember being pleased that she was hurting, not in a sadistic way but because it was some indication at least that she was going to miss me. I didn’t cry, perhaps buoyed by the validation of her tears; I smiled and said I would see her again next year. As we walked away, my mind raced with the implications of the goodbye and I realised that I could not possibly end things there, I could not permit that to be the last moment we shared. I ran back over the brow of the hill, calling her back, sprinting towards her, full of something I couldn’t contain. She opened her arms as her face once again crumpled into an expression of sadness and I wrapped myself into her embrace.

‘Kiss me,’ she said through her tears.

‘A proper one?’ I heard myself say dumbly.

She nodded and I leaned in without a second’s pause. It was a long, slow, passionate kiss, which required both of us to breathe heavily through our noses, squeezing our eyes shut as we pressed our mouths together. I could taste her tears as they gathered at the sides of my mouth and felt something strange in the very pit of my stomach which I assumed was love but now know was simply profound infatuation. I became aware of an echoing rhythmic slap some way off and realised it was Darius walking back over the crest of the hill slowly clapping his hands. He wasn’t angry, or being sarcastic, in fact he seemed oddly happy.

We walked back down the hill together with our arms clasped round each other’s shoulders, our friendship tightened by his graciousness. There was no regret, no feeling of betrayal. We came to the silent understanding that, in the end, Murielle had liked us both and was sad to be saying goodbye, and this simple truth suited Darius and me just fine, since neither felt undermined. We were oddly grown-up about it really, which was surprising given our age.

I corresponded with her regularly over the next year and looked forward to her letters, which always smelled faintly of her floral scent. She returned to the UK the following summer but it wasn’t quite the same. She and Darius weren’t speaking after their relationship faltered in the face of the distance between them. I asked her out while waiting for Ann to buy perfume in Boots the chemist but she insisted she wanted us to be just good friends. Whether this was because she had already lost one British friend in Darius or because I was wearing a cagoule tucked into a pair of pinstriped jeans, I will never know, but truth be told I wasn’t terribly heartbroken. She was still as beautiful and exotic as ever. Something, however, was definitely missing. The summer of ’84 wasn’t as hot and seemed somehow less magical, and perhaps we both subconsciously knew it would be pointless to try and top the previous year. We resolved to be friends and enjoyed another few weeks hanging out, although sitting in fields and on fences had somewhat lost its appeal in the intervening year, a fact we accepted without nostalgia. We were, after all, growing up.

To this day, whenever I smell horses, I am taken back to the summer of 1983; not that Murielle smelled in any way horselike, it simply evokes the atmosphere of the time we spent in frequent proximity to the pungent beasts. Murielle smelled of sweet flowers and dizzy promise, and whenever I find myself on a farm or near a stable, I can locate the phantom of her aroma amid the acrid pong, even though it isn’t there, such is the indelibility of her presence in my memory.

You might wonder why I bothered to include this story. It has no real bearing on my professional life. I didn’t eventually find myself acting alongside Murielle in
L’odeur d’un Cheval
, an Anglo-French production from Studio Canal about a cross-Channel love affair set in the Cotswolds. Tenuously, I might suggest that I tend to relish the drama of heightened emotion and have channelled it into my writing. I definitely enjoyed contributing to the romantic interplay between Tim and Daisy in
Spaced
, appreciating through experience how compelling the will they/won’t they relationship can be. Playing the victim of unrequited love certainly formed an important part of my early persona as a stand-up comic, but that was born out of desire for someone other than Murielle Burdot. Truth is, it’s a story I have always had a hankering to write down, recalling the heady emotions as keenly as I do, and there’s always room for a little nostalgia. You don’t need an
ESTB
for that.

Basket Case
,
Lemon Popsicle
,
Inseminoid
,
King Frat
,
Screwballs
,
Porkies
and
Class of Nuke ’Em High
– every one of them an enticing proposition of illicit thrills and mild titillation. The auditorium for the viewing of such school-holiday delights was usually the front room of a friend whose parents worked during the day and couldn’t afford childcare. Their absence meant the top-loading video player was open to anything the boys at Astrovision permitted us to rent, which was usually anything.

Not every classic horror film suffered alienation at the prim whim of Mary Whitehouse and her brigade of knee-jerk crusaders. The numerous pre-Blockbuster video rental shops that appeared in the mid-eighties were a veritable treasure trove of fascinating titles, yet to be eclipsed by a continual wave of new releases. These cinematic emporia were more akin to vintage bookshops in their appeal and were a ready source of cultish and low-budget entertainment. For a single English pound, one could spend an entire day with Chuck Norris or a bunch of horny, Popsicle-sucking Israeli teens, pausing the action to study a particularly grisly act of violence or flicker of nudity.

Maybe there was a small amount of validity in the moral panic that ensued after the arrival of
VHS
. I certainly wouldn’t want my teenage child watching a film that made violence titillating, promoted misogyny or featured truly disturbing imagery. It’s just a shame these self-appointed guardians of decency lacked the guile and intelligence to distinguish between smart, cinematic genre pieces and witless exploitation. We were permitted access to films we would not have stood a chance of seeing theatrically, due to our being under age. This was most likely due to video shops being run by nerdy guys who relished introducing youngsters to a variety of mondo video rarities for vicarious thrills.