Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [59]
So, there I was, juggling homework, three jobs and half a dozen hobbies, and I was flying. I was going great guns. I bought myself a brand new Claude Butler racing bike for £500 and took part in the London to Brighton race. I was healthy, I was wholesome, I was happy. Everything was rosy. Granny and Grandpa must have been so grateful that I wasn’t displaying any of the tendencies that their daughter had shown. And then I came off the rails.
It all seemed to happen at once. Boys, alcohol, cigarettes – they all came a-calling and I gave each my fullest attention.
Boys came first and, initially at least, nothing much changed. My first boyfriend worked at Robert Dyas with me. He was eighteen years old and another bike fan, so we used to cycle everywhere, especially at weekends, when we both went out with the Brighton Cycling Group for thirty-mile rides. I loved the whole routine of packing sandwiches and a bottle of Coke into my panniers and setting off with a bunch of other healthy people.
We went out for quite a while and eventually nature took its course. Because I had told Robert Dyas I was sixteen, that’s naturally how old my boyfriend thought I was. He would have been horrified to learn he’d slept with a fourteen-year-old – just as my father had a decade and a half earlier. In my case, however, I was already on the Pill, having been prescribed it to combat awful period pains.
It was another boy who set me on the path to alcohol. A really great friend of mine when I was young was a chap called Peter – one of my playmates from the woods. We were inseparable as mates for years and his parents were convinced we’d end up married. That never happened, but we did a lot of things together – including getting drunk for the first time.
Other kids had started talking about drinking and somehow we’d got hold of a bottle of vodka. Units and percentages meant nothing to us, so we just sat on a wall near his house and swigged it like it was Tizer.
I remember swinging my feet and trying to concentrate on them. The next thing I knew, I’d fallen off the wall and landed in someone’s garden. In a rose bush. Thanks to the vodka, I didn’t feel a thing, but to this day I still have a thorn embedded in my back.
When the bottle was empty we decided to go back to Peter’s house. En route was a greengrocer’s and, sitting out the front, pride of the display, were lovely-looking gala melons.
‘I’d love one of those,’ I said.
‘Me too.’
So Peter grabbed this melon and off we fled. We thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world, but honestly, what a pair of chumps! Peter’s house was only a hundred yards away and the greengrocer had known him all his life. There was no way we weren’t going to get caught.
Convinced we’d outwitted the greengrocer, we ran into the house and tiptoed up the stairs so as not to attract any adult attention. But obviously we were both wrecked, so it must have sounded like a herd of elephants passing through. Giggling elephants at that.
The hilarity continued. Peter’s room had a basin in it, which was just as well because shortly after I sat down to eat the melon – like an apple, skin and everything – I threw up. We both stared at the melony mess in the sink and Peter declared, ‘Coffee! We need coffee.’
So back downstairs we crept, but there was his mum cooking dinner. I hid in the doorway while he tried to have a sensible conversation, waiting for the kettle to boil. In the end, he panicked and filled the cups with lukewarm water.
After that, I would go to the woods with my friends and drink there. Whereas a few years earlier we’d been