My first proper experience with alcohol was when I was fifteen. On the last day of school in May, before we went on a ‘study leave’ to get in the zone for our GCSE’s, we all went a bit mad. As you’re meant to on your last day. Everyone gathered in the park before school, all signing each other’s shirts, girls put on excessive make up and gave each other and the boys big red lipstick kiss marks. I sprayed my hair green; something a couple of annoying, weedy little kids would then tell me would get me sent home. It didn’t. Then, about 15 minutes before registration would start, we marched on Cheam High, singing songs, mostly just shouting, crowding the suburban roads and enjoying the angry horns of pissed off drivers, honking back with our aerosol horns.
The day continued with a similar amount of discord. We went to classes, but we barely did a thing in any of them. We had an end of year assembly, but nobody really paid attention. The entire day was lived in the breaks between lessons, signing books, signing shirts, basically writing on whatever we damn liked. By the afternoon, my green hair dye had made it round the social circle, and I ended up, like everyone else, with a head of half green, half red, with black and white spots and the odd purple stripe. We were all loud, obnoxious caricatures for a day. Eventually this started to grate and people started to get irritating. And the only thing that makes irritating people more irritating is an irritant. Drink.
After school, everyone marched back off to the park and a group of us sat by the shut down cafe that was next to the playground. Once we were done with hanging around there, we migrated through the wood and to the green behind the park manor. Passing around was a bottle of coke to which rum was added. Once this had run out, and by the time we were done with the little amount of beer that each of us had managed to steal from our parents, it was time to get more drink. I went with a couple of friends in an older brother’s car who bought us WKD and Fosters. We arrived back at the green behind the trees and manor and were ambushed by thirsty teenagers. It was like wearing a coat of rotting fish on a light swim in “Shake Bait Cove”.
Somehow – I still have no idea how – none of us were caught or sent away by park marshals. We saw their range rover cruise around but we simply moved to avoid being found out. In lower years we had heard tales of how the leaving students went and got absolutely shitfaced in the woods, so you’d think the school would have picked up on this was going on and notified the police, but there you go. It’s also a surprise that no one was murdered or lightly stabbed. A couple years later, my friend and I were chased by three figures all in black in the same park.
By about 5pm, most people were comfortably drunk. By 6 – slightly more. At half six me and a friend went to the nearest supermarket and tried to by bread to calm the stomach of a few others. Instead, we thought it was a great idea to buy iced lemon buns. They actually seemed to aggravate the sickness, and a couple people threw up quit a bit. We were then removed from future food gathering duties. At 8, everyone was pissed.
Being a naughty and delusional boy, assuming that I was just having fun and that this was what fun felt like, I went out the three or four following nights and got similarly drunk, and so the entire week is a bit of a haze. (Of course, almost immediately after I realised that wasn’t fun at all and fun actually consists of being boring with tea and biscuits and not caring.)
There was a lot of drama that night; I managed to annoy several friends by howling that I hated them when they told me I should go home as I was too drunk. Then, when they took me home, I went back out to the park. Not smart. Other drama included the wry and hysteric girl who wouldn’t be returning to school for sixth form the next year, like a couple of other people, but was extra crazy since no one was paying attention to her sadness. Another girl got her boobs out. Just, out. Other relationships fell apart, new ones sparked, all in this clumsy mess as about fifty kids congregated in this littered pit in the middle of the woods. Some were breaking glow sticks and flicking the inside liquid across the trees and floor. The drama, the offsetting colours, and the general noise (a sort of hum of conversation and argument that was unaccompanied by any music) created a swirly hole in centre back of my brain when the memory should be.
After a few days of being stupid and drunk, I had my first GCSE exam. I think it was half way through the two hour torture of silence and sitting still that still felt like a crowded and busy thump, as I was trying to remember the German for ‘Railway station’ (Bahnhof), I said to myself, for the first time, “I am never going to drink again.” And I didn’t … no, ha, I did, I did.
I got a C in German. Which I was pretty happy with, to be honest.
PnL.x
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