Jane Green: Bookends

© 2000

I would like to thank the following people for their support, kindness and help: Dr Patrick French at the Mortimer Market Centre; Adam Wilkinson at Body Positive; Marek, Jessica and all at the Primrose Hill Bookshop; James Phillips and Andrew Benbow at Books Etc. in Whiteleys; Laurent Burel; Yasmin Rahaman; Tricia Anker.

My ‘inner circle’: Annie, Giselle, Caroline and Julian, and finally David, for everything.

The first time I met Josh, I thought he was a nice guy but a transient friend. The first time I met Si I fell hopelessly in love and prayed I’d somehow be able to convert him.

But the first time I met Portia I thought I’d found my soulmate.

She was the sister I’d always longed for, the best friend I’d always wished I had, and I truly and honestly thought that, no matter what happened with our lives, we would stay friends for ever.

For ever feels a long time when you’re eighteen. When you’re away from home for the first time in your life, when you forge instant friendships that are so strong they are destined, surely, to be with you until the bitter end.

I met Josh right at the beginning, just a few weeks after the Freshers’ Ball. I’d seen him in the Students’ Union, propping up the bar after a rugby game, looking for all the world like the archetypal upper-class rugger bugger twit, away from home with too much money and too much arrogance.

He – naturally – started chatting up Portia, alcohol giving him a confidence he lacked when sober (although I didn’t know that at the time), and despite the rebuffs he kept going until his friends dragged him away to find easier prey.

I’m sure we would all have left it at that, but I bumped into him the next day, in the library, and he recognized me instantly and apologized for embarrassing us; and gradually we started to see him more and more, until he’d firmly established himself as one of the gang.

I’d already met Si by then, had already fallen in love with his cheeky smile and extravagant gestures. I was helping out one of the girls on my course who was auditioning for a production of Cabaret . It was my job to collect names and send them into the rehearsal hall for the audition.

Si was the only person who turned up in full costume. As Sally Bowles. In fishnet stockings, bowler hat and full make-up, he didn’t bat an eyelid as the others slouched down in their hard, wooden chairs, staring, jealous as hell of his initiative. And his legs.

He went in, bold as brass, and proceeded to give the worst possible rendition of Cabaret that I’ve ever heard, but with such brazen confidence you could almost forgive him for being entirely tone-deaf.

Everybody went crazy when he’d finished. They went crazy because he so obviously loved, loved , being centre stage. None of us had ever seen such enthusiasm, but even though Si knew every song, word for word, he had to be content with camping it up as the narrator, as Helen, the director, said she never wanted to hear him sing again.

Eddie was a friend of Josh. A sweet gentle boy from Leeds who should probably have been overwhelmed by our combined personalities, but somehow wasn’t. He was easy company, and always willing to do anything for anybody he cared about, which was mostly us, at the time.

And then of course there was Portia. So close that our names became intertwined: Catherine and Portia. Two for the price of one.

I met Portia on my very first day at university. We were sitting in the halls of residence common room, waiting for a talk to begin, all sizing each other up, all wondering whom to befriend, who seemed like our type , when this stunningly elegant girl strode in on long, long, legs, crunching an apple and looking like she didn’t have a care in the world.

Portia, with her mane of dark auburn hair that reached down between her shoulderblades. Portia, with her cool green eyes and dirty laugh. Portia, who looked like she should have been a class-A bitch, but was, then, the greatest friend I’d ever had.

Her confidence took my breath away, and, when she flung her bag down on the floor and sank into the empty chair next to mine, I prayed she’d be my friend. She stretched out, showing off buttersoft suede thigh-high boots, exactly the boots I’d dreamt of wearing if I ever got thin enough, and, taking a last bite of the apple, tossed it with an expert flick of the wrist into the dustbin on the other side of the room.

‘Yesss!’ she hissed triumphantly, her cut-glass accent slicing through the room. ‘I knew all those years as goal shooter would pay off sometime,’ and then she turned to me. ‘I’m Portia. When does this bloody thing start?’

Portia had more than enough confidence for both of us. We found, within minutes, that despite our different backgrounds we had the same vicious sense of humour, the same slightly ironic take on life, although it took a few years for the cynicism to set in.

We made each other laugh from the outset, and there never seemed to be a shortage of conversation with Portia. She had a prime room – one of the most coveted in the building. A large bay window overlooked the main residential street, and Portia repositioned the armchairs so that they were in the bay, draping them with jewel-coloured crushed velvet throws. She sat there for hours at a time, watching people go by.

Most of the time I’d be there too. The net curtains would be rolled around the string of elastic from which they hung, and in summer the window would be open and we’d sit drinking bottles of Beck’s, Marlboro Lights dripping coolly from our fingers, waiting for the men of our dreams to walk past and fall head over heels in love with us.

They frequently did. With Portia, at any rate.

Even then she had more style than anyone I’d ever met. She would go to the hippy shops in town and pick up brightly coloured beaded dresses for a fiver, tiny mirrors sprinkled all over them, and the next day I’d find her finishing off two stunning new cushions, the mirrors glinting with ethnic charm.

She did have money, that much was obvious, but there was never anything snobbish or snooty about Portia. She’d been brought up in the country, in Gloucestershire, in a Jacobean manor house that could probably have provided accommodation for most of our campus.

Her mother was terribly beautiful, she said, and an alcoholic, but, Portia sighed, who could blame her when her father was sleeping with half of London. They had a pied-à-terre in Belgravia, to which Portia eventually decamped when she refused to go back to boarding school, opting to do her A-levels in a trendy tutorial college in London instead.

It was a world away from my own background. I was intimidated, impressed, and in awe of her life, her lifestyle. My life had started in deepest, darkest suburbia, in an ordinary pre-war semi on a main road in North London. My father, unlike Portia’s landowning, gambling, semi-aristocratic parents, is an accountant in a local firm. My mother is a housewife who works occasionally as a dinner lady in the local primary school.

As far back as I can remember I would escape from my humdrum world by burying myself in books – the one true love of my life when growing up.

I love Mum and Dad. Of course. They are my parents. But the day I went to university I realized that they had nothing to do with me any more, nothing to do with my life, with who I wanted to be, and never was I more aware of cutting the umbilical cord than when I met Portia.