In early 2004 I tried my hand at writing a blog (it was the next big thing) and this was one of the first pieces I wrote for it… coincidentally several of the people mentioned here are the people I based the characters in The Elephant Rock on…
Back in the haze of my school ‘daze’…
I used to hang out with a group of people, mostly fellow school inmates, assorted older/younger siblings, or friends from the neighbourhood. We used to spend our evenings and weekends hanging around the park drinking, having parties when our parents where away, nearly always getting wasted on cheap booze and other substances (if you know what I mean).
Over the years the group spread and grew until anywhere we went was a party, just by the shear number of people that we could collect together in one place!
It seemed like it would go on forever, but as was inevitable, there came a time where our school life ended and everyone went their separate ways, to college or jobs, or in my case moving to a new town with my parents for a year whilst doing some more ‘A’ levels then going to university.
At least that’s what I always thought had happened…
As it’s approaching my 30 birthday this year, I starting thinking up wild notions of getting everyone together for a big party, I’d get all my friends from Brighton, some old uni mates, and of course everyone I used to hang around with in the ‘Halcyon’ days.
Now I suppose I should fill you in on some details. Moving to a new town and going to ‘tertiary’ college with a whole bunch of new people, I had to basically get myself a completely new set of friends. As it happens these are also, with the except of a few, the friends I still have to this day. I keep in touch with a couple of people from university, but i didn’t really have a desire to keep in touch with most of them, and I moved straight back down south the moment I’d finished. In fact i hammered though my course work and left a week early, that should give you an indication of how much I didn’t want to be there (it is indeed grim up north!)
Ok back to the story. Out of the blue a few weeks ago I bump into two of my old school mates whilst in Jessops. We exchanged phone numbers and a week later I meet them in the pub for a few drinks. Except it’s wasn’t just them, it was about a third of the old gang! It turns out that most of them are still living in the area and still see half a dozen of the others, having kept in touch with them throughout the university years.
Three of the guys, Glen, Peter and Chris had a party on Saturday night and invited me along. So myself and Christian, my best mate for 11 years and one of those friends I met during my tertiary year, drove into Lewes, visit his parents where we will be staying the night, and head down to the party…
After a small warm up period and a bit of trepidation on my part we arrive at the party and spot absolutely no-one who I know, just a bunch of people who quite clearly know each other. But as consummate professional party goers (we been to/hosted a few in our time) we slip into a corner and look like we’ve always be there.
Slowly people start arriving, as we make so serious headway through the bag of booze we have with us. Each time someone I know comes over I introduce them to Christian and explain the nature of our previous relationships through quickly recanted tales of old, and of course how I know him.
One of these people is a guy called David, who I strongly believed I wouldn’t ever actually see again. The last I’d heard of David he’d gone to ground in the west country, was living off the land, had a kid and started to grow his own cannabis and opium. I think you can see why I thought that was him gone. Now David was one of my oldest mates, we where pretty tight, lived within 5 minutes of each other and spent most of the time hanging out together. So seeing my best mate until the age of 18 having a conversation with my best mate from the age of 18 onwards was spinning me out quite a bit, of course that may have been the quantity of alcohol I’d consumed. Let along the fact that until about two weeks ago I thought I’d never see David again!
However the strangest thing was yet to come… David tells me that an old acquaintance of ours, Peter, is going to be turning up soon, with his new fiancé, but he says it with a wry grin on his face so I ask why he’s grinning.
“Don’t you remember how you guys used to not get on in the slightest?”
“erm… well I have this vague recollection of us always being at each others throats, but nothing specific.”
“Ok well I think the only way to describe your relationship is as ’mortal enemies’”
Peter takes this moment as his cue to enter the party, Dave sniggers under his breath and Christian gives me the “is that him” look. Now Peter is actually taller than me and I’m 6’ 4”, so it wasn’t exactly hard to hide from each other. Clearly deciding to get it over with as soon as possible he strides over to me and offers his hand.
“Alright Mr Keller, how are you doing? David told me you’d be here.”
And so the merry play of forced pleasantries begins. He asks me what I’m doing, and I explain about work and introduce Christian with the whole business partner thing. He introduces his fiancé and quickly hides her away behind him. All the time, each of us are looking around for an ‘out’. Peter spots one in the form of Glen and quickly exits the conversation.
The strangest thing is I still can’t remember any specific reasons why I don’t get on with the guy, but I find myself seething with rage for no reason. Now I’m not an angry person, far from it in fact, I am one of the most tolerant people on the planet, but every time I look at him It’s like a red haze across my vision. I decide to ask the expert, so I turn to Dave and ask him for specifics reason why I should hate Peter, cause I quite clearly do!
“Well he fucking hates you mate…”
“Yeah but why?”
“Well he tried to set fire to you for starters! And he kicked you in the nuts”
“OK now that rings a bell…”
Suddenly a flash of recollection springs to mind and I see Peter and I having a fight, right outside his house on a steep grassy bank, I punched him in the nose and almost broke it and he landed me one in the nuts. In an instant I’d managed to dispel a myth about me having not had a fight since the age of 11 that I had always maintained. Thinking about it now, in fact it wasn’t the first time we’d clashed. I believe it was probably the last however, we tended to just avoid each other completely after that.
After what seemed like an eon of avoiding each other, but was in reality about 2 hours, Peter and his fiancé decide they’ve had enough of the party and leave, much to my relief.
And so to the point of this somewhat rambling tale. After the party had run it’s course, we’d drunk all our, and indeed everyone else’s booze, and most people had either crashed or gone home, Christian and I decide to leave and stagger drunkenly up the hill to wake his mum up and spend another hour or so in drunken conversation. As we walk the well trodden path home, Christian turns to me and says:
“You know, you didn’t need to tell me what you where to most of those people where, back there”
“What do you mean?” I replied.
“I could tell just by the way you acted around each other, I could see who were your closest friends, who you just used to hang around with, quite obviously who you didn’t get along with. I noticed quite a few of the girls you used to know that were there still fancy you!”
“Really… that’s pretty mad, especially the girls, I could see what you mean there”
“Yeah, it’s kind of like pattern recognition. The way you act with certain types people is universal. I could tell Dave used to be your best mate, because you act in a certain way when your around him. I recognise it cause it’s the same we you act around me.”
He’s got a point there.
