Antonia Quirke - Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

‘How's college?’ my father would ask at Christmas and Easter, then at the Christmas and Easter after that, and I'd think: Don't ask me.

But I couldn't go back. Midway through my first year, Mark's band had got to Number 3 in the charts with a dance hit that went ‘If there ain't no love then there ain't no use’. When they went on Top of the Pops I stood at the back of the studio smiling a false smile with the other girlfriends and watched him on stage working his keyboard as soothingly as if he were peeling an apple, knowing like you know there are dead flies in the cutlery drawer that I was not built to be a popstar's girlfriend, with girlfriendly skills. While I could hardly grasp the idea that something as infinite and boundless as he and I could have an end, I knew that knowing that meant that somewhere it had already ended. Lessons, by definition, are always too late. In the furniture department at Habitat I listened to couples arguing on sofas with their eyes squeezed tightly shut in frustration and watched the streams of students pass the windows, wondering how to enter their lives.

One day I was walking from Maple Street down to Oxford Circus to buy strawberries from the stall that used to trade outside the chapel on Tottenham Court Road when I realised that a man had been following me for the past ten minutes, so I turned on him and demanded an explanation. He had a red flick like Eric Stoltz in Some Kind of Wonderful.

‘How else am I going to meet you if I don't follow you?’ he said.

I simply could not discover the flaw in this logic. I was so completely stumped for an answer that I went home with him to his flat near Russell Square where his flatmate shared his bed as if this were a ménage à presque trois. The thing about being innocent is that you can never be quite sure what constitutes seediness and what doesn't. I thought: Russell Square! This is where Ted Hughes used to live when he was first going out with Sylvia Plath! It seemed to open the city for me, unlock the British Museum, and all the print shops on Coptic Street, and the tall white sycamore-shaded houses of Bloomsbury, and the pale yellow Peabody Trust flats blooming among them, and the little square off High Holborn with its bronze of Gandhi sitting cross-legged; and beyond, all the pubs on Theobalds Road outside which young lawyers in their first suits anxiously smoked, looking pressed for time, and then the Regency terraces of the Gray's Inn Road and the flops of Euston. I had been asked home by somebody and – lo and behold, so to speak – I was home. London. So I kept going home with people. And Mark turned up one day to find he had been deceived. It was the usual sad end to first love. You don't leave them for anyone, you leave them for everyone, and it was as messy as hell. The violence of breaking up was infinitely more surprising and disorientating than losing one's virginity. Mark floored it down the M6 to splinter my door, but somewhere under my own hysterics I was reassured that love was all it was cracked up to be. Telling you this makes me feel old, but it's true.

In my third year an American entered the Man in the Moon in Camden where I worked and told me that he was looking for a place to live. ‘I've run into some trouble back home,’ he said in a Texan accent. He was the first American I had ever met and seemed almost supernaturally exotic. I brought him home in much the way that Elliot brings home ET.

‘Who is he?’ my flatmate Susie said.

‘He's an American!’

‘But who is he ?’

‘He's an American !’

When I got home from the pub, I would get into bed with Wilson and ask about his life in Salado, Texas. His voice was a McConaugheyan velvet coat. He wasn't a man, I now saw. He was just a kid like me. A handsome Texan boy with a twist of a harelip that turned my heart over. In the mornings he would physically open my eyes to wake me. He got a job as a binman and started bringing back gifts for me from work, like out-of-date pancake mix. So I made out-of-date pancakes, and delicious they were too. But I didn't know what to do with the other salvage, like the little wheels off discarded roller-skates: I cleaned and polished them and put them on the mantelpiece as one might arrange an exhibition of totems of a collapsed society. I couldn't understand why he cried so much throughout that autumn until he eventually told me about his trouble back home. He had shot a man dead for two hundred dollars: ‘I didn't think it meant I would never be able to go back,’ he said. It was so dark I couldn't see his face.

‘After I did it, I went up and looked at the body, even though they'd told me not to. He had this small tattoo on his arm. Of a Swiss chalet.’

If it was just acting, it was just acting. And if it were true, then he couldn't be any more unhappy than he already was. The city closed in, black and orange at four o'clock, a world of buses wheezing through puddles, a world covered in leaf mulch or car-shit which seemed as bleary and smeared as if you were seeing it through an uncleanable windscreen, the conditions of life such that you could do nothing but shrivel under them, never quite clean, never quite dry, and all scrawled over with an illegible graffiti of fear, about money, for Wilson, and of guilt about Mark, who had burned everything I had given him in the front garden of my parents' house. Being sacked from both Habitat and the Man in the Moon allowed me to get a job in a travel agency where the more regular hours let me make it home to Wilson before his binman's bedtime. He feared sheep and had to be reassured of their absence from Hampstead Heath.

‘Sheep'll watch ya,’ he said. ‘It'll always watch ya, like it watches everything.’

Bonfire Night shook him something terrible. The smell of the fires in the parks around Muswell Hill, the blackened sparklers on the pavements, the bins full of charred fireworks and ash, the way it seemed to extend for a month of random bangs and shrieks – a season of burning – threw him into prayer. He knelt at the foot of the bed in the posture of the child on the bookmark I had received at my First Holy Communion and gave himself up to a terror of hellfire, craving God's forgiveness. It stunned me. I wanted him to leave, to get away from me, but I knew that I would pay if I asked him to go. I loved him. Yet I had no margin. I envied God the many mansions of His house. It was easy for Him to forgive and accommodate Wilson, yet He never would. At the end of every day, Wilson opened the curtains and looked up at the starless winter sky, and actually – out loud – thanked his lucky stars that he'd found me. I betrayed him then by wishing him away, much worse than I had ever betrayed Mark. I was learning another lesson – that not everybody grew up accustomed to love, and those that hadn't couldn't defend themselves from those that had. But Wilson was a ship going down in a black and cold city, and I wanted only to escape the vortex of his sinking.

By February, he had stopped talking entirely, merely dribbling a yo-yo up and down for hours on end. At the travel agent's I sold round-the-world tickets to students in my year who looked at me like they recognised me but weren't quite sure how. It made me feel like a ghost. By April, Wilson started to talk again and told the Anabaptists in whose basement off the Archway Road we lived that he was a professional gigolo. They wanted us out. Doing my exams was like writing cheques I knew were going to bounce. On a spring day, while I was basing my Chaucer paper around the one couplet I could remember – ‘And as thou art a fightul lord and juge / Ne yeve us neither mercy ne refuge’ – Wilson had a fight with one of the Anabaptists and cleared out for good, leaving his passport behind in the pocket of his one good winter coat.