All Growed Up Read online

  ‘Tony’s all right, but half an hour’s usually long enough,’ I overheard Lesley from up the country tell a Heather from Portadown.

  When the sun began to set and there was insufficient light to film any further scenes of death, destruction and resurrection, I announced ‘It’s a wrap!’ with all the conviction of Alfred Hitchcock and treated my cast to 99s in Morelli’s.

  The next stage of the production process was to edit the action in time with the music. I spent many hours in front of a huge editing machine, working late into the night to make sure the action in the film matched the beat of the music and the message of the song. I edited the scenes on the beach with so many quick cuts in succession it looked like it really was the end of the world, and eventually my work of video art was complete. My message to my fellow students, announcing my faith and the second coming of Jesus, was ready to be premiered.

  On the day of the screening, everyone gathered in Lecture Room 1 to see our finished productions premiered on the big screen. We applauded a Chris Rea music video set on a beach; a really, really dark horror movie set on a beach; and a really, really deep murder mystery set on a beach. There was a documentary about legalising marijuana with interviews on the beach and a documentary about the beach. At last, it was my turn. I was nervous, knowing that from now on I would be known as a wee good livin’ media studies student. I prayed that I wouldn’t be thrown off the course or stoned to death and that at least a few of the viewers would experience a religious conversion. After several other music videos featuring a beach, it was finally my turn. The lights dimmed and the audience waited with bated breath, apart from Marty Mullen who went outside for smoke. My video began quietly at first and slowly grew into a crescendo of religious rock, the music blasting all of Cliff’s conviction over the speakers. The audience watched my visual masterpiece in silence. When Cliff had sung his final word and my concluding image froze on the screen there was a long silence. Perhaps people were praying? Finally, Marina with the Daisy Duke shorts broke the silence by whispering a solitary, incredulous, ‘Fuck!’

  I had come out, so I had.

  10

  COURTING IN COLERAINE

  At first me and the Belle of Bellaghy were just friends, so we were. But providence put us in the same Bible study group, and this provided an opportunity for romance. In addition to the main weekly meeting in LT17, the more zealous members of the Christian Union met every Tuesday evening in someone’s flat for Bible study. This was an opportunity to study God’s Word and pray and get to know the girls in a more intimate environment.

  ‘Dear Lord, we are thankful that we do not live in a country behind the Iron Curtain, Lord, where our persecuted brothers and sisters, Lord, fear a knock on the door …’ prayed a Heather from Portadown earnestly.

  At that very moment there was a knock on the door! I could not contain my laughter, and this drew disapproving looks from Clive Ross, the holiest student in the university, and Tara Grace, an English charismatic with a nice bum and the gift of tongues. The lovely Lesley from up the country had arrived late with a Tupperware box of her mother’s scones, left over from the Festival of Flowers organised by Bellaghy Presbyterian Women’s Association. It was Lesley’s knock on the door that we had momentarily mistaken for a visit from the KGB. Barbara Brown, a Ballymena Baptist and very good kisser (according to Aaron Ward, the spoofer) was leading the Bible study, and although her eyes twinkled a little at the incident, it was only me, Billy Barton from Bushmills and Lesley herself who found the coincidence truly amusing rather than sacrilegious. Barbara had a good sense of humour when it came to clean jokes like my hilarious ‘Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Doctor. Doctor Who?’ joke, but this particular ‘Knock Knock’ joke seemed to be a step too far.

  We were studying a passage from the Book of Malachi at the end of the Old Testament. It was generally accepted that it was much more intellectual to study an obscure passage from the Old Testament than anything from the New Testament because no one could understand it, except for Clive Ross who bought a big Bible commentary from the Faith Mission bookshop to explain it all to us at length and in great detail. The Old Testament was sometimes really, really dark and always really, really deep. It was almost Nietzschean. Clive brought his Bible commentary to these meetings along with a hugely conspicuous King James Bible. I preferred to arrive with a pocket-sized Good News Bible tucked away in my back pocket to avoid being persecuted or laughed at by fellow intellectuals in the street. The Good News Bible was regarded as slightly suspect by some of the more conservative members of the CU because it was written in everyday language that anyone could understand. Boyd Harrison often argued that the King James Bible was the only true and authorized version of the Bible and all the new-fangled, modern versions would put us on a slippery slope and make us backsliders. I wanted to tell him to catch himself on, but I didn’t want to start an argument that might sully the fellowship of the Bible study. Sometimes Boyd reminded me of Mrs Piper in our street in Belfast, who regularly said ‘If the King James Bible was good enough for the disciples, it’s good enough for me!’

  Once we had regained our composure after the knocking incident and consumed every last crumb of the leftover scones, the deep spiritual discussion of the Book of Malachi continued.

  ‘When I read this passage I feel really just kinda encouraged,’ gushed Tara with a charismatic smile. She went on to tell us how God had told her to walk down the longest bus shelter in the world between the main university buildings so she could bump into a non-Christian girl on her course and tell her about God at just the right moment, because the girl was very down in the dumps with her third in Social Psychology. God never spoke directly to me like this, and so I felt spiritually inferior to Tara. God told Tara when to get the bus and who to speak to and who needed healed. The nearest I had to a direct line to the Creator was when I sensed very strongly that he disapproved of my daydreams about Bo Derek in the sand dunes.

  As the discussion continued, we moved on to a debate about whether it was possible to live for a whole day without sinning. I declined to participate because I had already sinned with Bo Derek in the sand dunes at least twice that day. However, Clive Ross was adamant that it was entirely possible to be a perfect Christian, implying that he was a good, living example. I wasn’t so sure that he was as perfect as he obviously believed he was. The more he went on about being perfect the more I wanted to give him a good slap, and I was supposed to be a pacifist, so how could Clive have been perfect when he was tempting me to sin? Morality was complicated.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Lesley. ‘Sure even the Pope sins sometimes and he’s the most famous Christian in the whole world.’

  Silence.

  It was as if someone had let off a particularly stinky fart but no one in the room dared mention it.

  ‘You’ve no idea!’ she added, inexplicably.

  Lesley clearly had no idea that most people in the Bible study group had been taught in their church that the Pope was the Antichrist, rather than the best Christian in the world; and in the unlikely event that there was an actual Catholic quietly present, Lesley’s view was not in tune with the doctrine of infallibility either. Byron Drake often pointed out to me that there were hardly any Catholics in the Christian Union.

  ‘All the Catholics are in the GAA Club having a bit of your utterly hilarious Irish craic and all you Protestants are in a holy huddle in the CU. Even when you go to university you stick to your own sides,’ he would say, offering his unsolicited observations on the divisions in Northern Irish society. I wanted to argue against Byron and accuse him of always taking sides with the Catholics even though some of the members of the GAA Club hated him for being an evil Brit, but I knew his analysis was basically correct.

  I smiled at Lesley until Barbara Brown skillfully broke the uncomfortable silence by moving us onto the cutting-edge issue of whether we should be premillennialists or postmillennialists. No one openly disagreed with Lesley, but it was obvious
that she had said the wrong thing. As the tiresome debate continued I had to control the urge to slam Clive Ross’s Bible commentary closed on his perfect fingers. I was certain the lovely Lesley would laugh at my irreverence. I liked this girl. Sometimes when I missed the last bus from the university to Portstewart I would call over to the Halls of Residence and tell Lesley that I didn’t want to impose, but could she give me a lift home? She was always smiling and animated, always accommodating and always offered me a lift home, even though she said I was just using her. Lesley got annoyed when I said that I was sorry for asking but I wasn’t middle class like some people and I didn’t have a daddy who could afford to buy me a pony or second-hand Ford Escort estate with headrests for my birthday. She told me to wise up and stop being so jealous, and turned up ‘My Song’ on her Elton John’s Greatest Hits cassette to drown out my socialist arguments.

  On these short trips in the car it seemed Lesley could not pass a field of animals without commenting on how much she loved them.

  ‘Och, look at the lovely wee lambsies,’ she whooped at the slightest glimpse of a sheep.

  Her excitement was uncontainable when she spotted a horse in any field.

  ‘Och, look at the gorgeous wee palamino!’ she shrieked as we drove along the road from Coleraine to Portstewart. I was confused, thinking she had just spotted a new Fiat.

  I soon discovered that Lesley enjoyed science fiction, which was very unusual for a girl, and like me she generally disliked sport, which was very unusual for a boy. We were becoming good friends, just like Mork and Mindy, though I only greeted her with ‘Nanu, nanu’ occasionally.

  But at the beginning of our second year at university, something happened which would change everything. Every year before the first week of term, the Christian Union met up for a weekend in a bed and breakfast in Portrush to pray and plan for the year ahead, and to meet the new first year girls. While we were rehearsing a drama which would remind the freshers about the importance of justice for poor people in the Third World, one of the Heathers from Portadown burst into the room.

  ‘Lesley’s in hospital!’ she cried.

  ‘Is it her appendix, hey?’ asked Billy Barton, who had just arrived on his motorbike from Bushmills where they made whiskey for my granny.

  ‘No, she’s had an asthma attack and she’s on oxygen,’ explained Heather. I had never seen this Heather get so upset about anything. She was even more upset than the time the bulb in the overhead projector exploded while she was leading a chorus of ‘Majesty’ at the CU Praise Night.

  ‘Hey, tell Lesley I was askin’ her what’s the craic, hey?’ Billy requested.

  Tara Grace offered to organise a special prayer meeting and said she would go to the hospital and lay hands on Lesley to heal her, but only if Lesley had enough faith and no hidden sins.

  I was upset. I was so upset that when the meeting began I couldn’t concentrate on the Bible teaching from the Second Book of Chronicles even though it was really, really deep. But why did I feel upset? Lesley and I were good friends, of course, but this felt different. I always thought Lesley was attractive even though she was a big stout girl from up the country. She always made me smile when she shouted at me in her lilting country accent. I called this her ‘Bellaghy Whoop’. I had no idea where Bellaghy was – I was vaguely aware that it was somewhere north of Glengormley – and I had never heard anyone else speak in such a unique accent. I was amazed when I discovered that the word ‘floor’ had four syllables in Bellaghy. I noticed this the day I spilled a cup of coffee in the Students’ Union.

  ‘Look at the mess you’ve made on the fa-loo-wer-ra!’ Lesley had whooped.

  Lesley had lovely big eyes that widened with every emotion and she expressed a wider range of emotions than any girl I had have ever met. Yes, she talked an awful lot, and some of it was nonsense about clothes and shopping, but as time went on I began to notice that when Lesley actually stopped talking she had the sort of mouth you really just wanted to kiss. After a while, and most inappropriately in the middle of a meeting as we were singing ‘Bind Us Together, Lord’, I realised that this was what people in America called ‘having feelings’ for someone. To my surprise, I was having feelings for the lovely Lesley from up the country.

  Once I heard the patient was feeling a wee bit better, I decided to go and visit her in hospital. Coleraine Hospital was so small and old fashioned that I thought that Florence Nightingale might still have been the matron and would appear any moment with her lamp. When I found Lesley’s ward, I waited until all her family visitors with tidy hair and nice clothes had departed and went in with a bottle of Lucozade and a book about faith healing from Tara. I had never seen Lesley in a nightie before. When she saw me, she pulled the bedclothes up to her chin and touched her oxygen mask demurely.

  ‘You’ve … no idea,’ she said weakly, removing the mask.

  She was wheezing like Oul Mac the day he had tried to give up cigarettes. I had a sudden urge to rip off the mask and give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  ‘Tara Grace wants to lay hands on your chest to heal you, but I thought I would offer first, so I did,’ I said.

  Lesley almost relapsed with laughter. Her wheezing laugh reminded me of Dick Dastardly’s dog, Muttley, but Lesley was starting to look more like Penelope Pitstop to me.

  In the weeks that followed, when I wasn’t studying the impact of Marxism on Coronation Street or arguing with Byron Drake about the existence of God, I wrestled with the dilemma of how and when I could ask the lovely Lesley to be my girlfriend. If she said no it could mean the end of a beautiful friendship, just like the couples in ABBA. Lesley would be Agnetha, but with short, dark, curly hair and a Bellaghy accent, and I would be Björn, except with a chin. After much thought, prayer and a good few walks the length of the Strand beach in Portstewart, I came to the conclusion that is was worth taking the risk. Lesley was so good-natured it was possible that she would still want to be my friend even after I embarrassed her with an attempted snog. One weekend when I was visiting my granny in Belfast, she made the customary enquiry about my love life.

  ‘Any sign of a nice wee girl for you son, now you’re all growed up and all?’ asked Big Isobel as I removed the ashes from her fireplace with the previous night’s Belfast Telegraph.

  I obviously hesitated long enough to indicate the possibility of romance.

  ‘Oh, as sure as you’re livin’, I think our Tony’s got himself a girl!’

  I hit a beamer and spilled ash on my Wranglers. ‘How do you know that, Granny?’ I asked.

  ‘Have a titter of wit, son, your oul granny’s no dozer, so she’s not,’ she replied.

  Back at the university I had a confidential chat with one of the Heathers from Portadown behind the reference books for nurses in the library. We agreed that the perfect venue for me to ask Lesley out was the Strand Hotel disco in Portstewart. This was the apex of the triangle of romance on the north coast of Northern Ireland. The Strand Disco was nothing like the Westy Disco; it had a bar with proper alcohol rather than vodka and Coke smuggled inside in a C&C lemonade bottle, and a proper dance floor with no discernible splodges of chewing gum. There was a proper DJ wearing a Miami Vice shirt who spoke in an American accent with only a hint of a Coleraine twang. I had noticed that people from Coleraine said ‘man’ at the end of every sentence just like the grooviest people in America. In America they said, ‘Hey, man. What’s happenin’?’ In Coleraine they said, ‘What’s the craic, mawn?’ The disco in the basement of the old hotel was so plush, with padded seats around the dance floors and toilet seats in the Gents, it made the Westy Disco look wick. There were more brightly-coloured flashing lights in the Strand Hotel Disco than at the scene of a bombscare in the Europa Hotel.

  So I hatched a plan with a Heather from Portadown. We had to keep it a secret from Lesley in case she worked out what was going on, and it also had to be hidden from the holier members of the Christian Union who disapproved of dancing because it was like sex w
ith clothes on. Heather would arrange for me and her and Lesley and Aaron to go to the Strand Disco, ‘just to see what it was like’. Then at the appropriate moment, in between Spandau Ballet and a Duran Duran twelve-inch, Heather and Aaron would disappear to the toilet and I would pop the question to Lesley. I fretted about how I should ask her. In Belfast we usually said, ‘Will you see me, wee girl?’ but this seemed too unsophisticated for the lovely Lesley from up the country. I didn’t want to be too formal, either, as it wasn’t exactly a marriage proposal. So I decided I would try a much cleverer and subtler approach. When we arrived at the disco it was completely empty. Lesley’s perfect teeth gleamed white in the ultraviolet light and she was wearing big, shiny red earrings like the girls in Human League. Her makeup was perfect as usual, and her red lipstick was as glossy as her cropped black hair. It was no wonder I had taken a shine to this girl. She was dressed from head to toe in a new denim outfit with shoulder pads and a frilly neck, which I assumed had until recently adorned a mannequin in the window of Anderson & McAuley’s in Royal Avenue.