I finished my Laura Sadler portrait which you can find here.
So, following on from yesterday, I am now revisiting the summer of 1998. If you've read my private entries from last week you'll already know what happened that summer. The anniversary will be on wednesday this week. I still don't know how I'll feel when it arrives but I do know I'll be writing about it properly for the first time instead of trying to distance myself from it. I finally did that with what happened the week before it and that helped, so perhaps that will too.
But for the purpose of this entry, I am trying not to dwell on those parts. Next week will be the time for that. Tonight.... tonight, I'm just trying to prove to myself that there were other parts that I should be remembering instead.
In contrast to the previous summer, I'd just had a fantastic year at college. I'd loved every minute of it. The tutors were fantastic and so were the projects. The one thing which wasn't so good was the fact that we had to prepare for the diploma show in the final weeks and the work of the many fell to the few. Most people slacked off and felt as though they were already on summer holidays while the remaining few goody-two-shoes of us actually wanted to get a good pass and had to complete the show ourselves. For the last few weeks I did far more work than was fair and when I started the summer holidays I made myself a promise I lived to regret - that I'd accept any invoitation that came my way and make the most of every day.
Unfortunately, the very next day was the family party. The day after that, I was shopping with L. I really wanted to talk to her about what had happened but she was never the kind of friend you could talk to in that way. great for a laugh, not so good with the heavy stuff. In the end, I didn't say anything.
Just before the end of term, I'd discovered the joys of the Internet at college and couldn't bear the thought of a summer without it, so I started booking up half hourly sessions at the local library. My first was at that very weekend. Into the next week and everything seemed bright. Bugs was about to come back on TV (despite the threat of the Houghton :/) and I was going to London at the end of the week with my parents. I'd managed to get several more trips in to hunt for Bugs locations since my first trip to Canary Wharf the summer before and I had two major items on my hit list: The Circle and The Hive.
There was a small crisis when a couple of days before we were due to go I started bleeding and spent the day and night in sheer agony, but I was absolutely determined to get there. It was a bit like a pilgramage to me, finding these locations. I'd withstand two elephants tapdancing on my head if it meant I'd get there. And so the day before, the thursday, I rested up to make sure I'd be up to it and I watched and rewatched clips of tapes to make sure I was going to the right places. I had maps, camera films, tube maps, route plans.... oh yeah, I can be organised when it comes to Bugs :)
At just after eight that night, the doorbell rang. The ringing of that doorbell led onto nothing in my life ever being the same again. Yes, it was him. Yes, what happened over the next few hours has haunted me ever since. The whole person I was changed with the ringing of the doorbell. I lost huge fucking parts of me. I'm only just begining to realise how angry I am with him for stripping me of who I was.
That night, just before we went down to the pub for that awful night of horror, Bugs came on UK gold. It was The Revenge Effect, the very same that I had chosen my pseudonym from. I told myself that night that I would become Miranda. Miranda was tough. Miranda wasn't the person who was almost raped that night. Miranda wouldn't hide herself from the world. It took me five fucking years to let that be true, but that night was the night I took Miranda as my real name. Miranda wasn't the name he whispered with horrid glee. Miranda wasn't the girl he stole a part of. Miranda was just the girl who spent five years trying to recover it.
That night I slept like fire. Awful temperatures, burning me, nightmares, wanting to scream, feeling like I wanted nothing more but to die. The next day I had to use my Miranda mask for the first time, to get through the day pretending everything was alright.
It was a great day, admittedly. Standing in the places that they had stood.... that she had stood... It was a bit like a religious experience in a way, I suppose. I took so many photos. I even bluffed my way into one of the buildings with the old art-student excuse :) And then when lunchtime came disaster struck. We chose by far the wrong place to eat. It was a snooty sandwich bar. My mum asked for a chicken sandwich.
"We don't DO chicken!" the man serving said in disgust, "We only do TURKEY!"
My dad was also repremanded for asking for a 'meat' sandwich instead of specifying 'Italian Meats' and I got in trouble for asking for a crispy bacon sandwich instead of saying it was a baguette! As for my mum's coffee.... It was a classic. She asked for an espresso coffee and she was given a tiny.... four inch high cup..... It cost her �1.80. When she opened it, the coffee only came up half way and was stone cold and black! We roared with laughter! Well.... she didn't....
When we came home and put the tennis on, however, my mood went straight back down. Tim Henman was playing Pete Sampras. And Sampras looked exactly like that fucking bastard who'd tried to rape me the night before. Now you can understand where my hate for that player comes from. I remember sitting and watching it, picking a scab on a flea bite that had gone dodgy, just to try to take away the pain. It didn't work.
I spent the whole summer wearing my mask. I didn't show to anyone how I felt. It was only Bugs and the internet which stopped me from becoming a recluse that year. It was hell leaving the house as a group of builders had been creating flats near the town and they had to bloody comment every time I walked by. It terrified me. I just wanted to cover up every inch of flesh. i wanted to hide my face. I wanted to not go out at all. But I had to.
I had to on that next day in fact. A saturday. A library internet booking. I found the recently opened official Bugs website for the first time and had a ball on that, then raced home and wrote my book all day, waiting for a Bugs trailor to come on the way it had the year before. And it did. Those same feelings rocketted in me as the year before. Bugs was coming back! I always remember Beckett yelling in the trailer, "Show me a body, Jan!".... and I always wanted to add to it, "....Not your body, Jan!"
The week went by and my previous year's trick of buying all the magazines and newspapers was put into practice again. But when the actual day came, I was disappointed. I'm not sure which of these following two reasons is true now: Whether it was simply because the episodes were not so good, or whether it's because I had already started to link him to it. He also wrecked my writing for me. I carried on writing for two, maybe three weeks, before it got too hard to conitinue. because I had written so intensely on the friday night and saturday after it happened I found that writing was tainted by the memory of it now. I forced myself to write out of duty, not out of passion, for another year after that and I shouldn't have done that.
It was around the same time that I made the decision to come out to my best friend. It was a terrifying step. And when I got up the courage to do it, she didn't believe me. She thought I was joking and said, "Yeah, yeah, what is it really?" I spent hours persuading her and when she finally believed me I felt awfully uncomfortable about it for a long time.
At this time, my local radio station started doing a show on saturday night's called Saturday Nights At The 80s, playing all my favourite 80s songs. One night, Live to Tell by Madonna came on. The lyrics struck a chord with me. They expressed exactly how I had felt after he did what he did to me. It was the first time since it happened that I actually cried. When the song finished, the mask went back on.
Another song that kept being played that summer was Sweetest Smile, by Black. Those lyrics seemed fitting, too.
# I think my heart must be made of clay
Cause everyone said it would be broken some day
And now I've come to that fateful day
So I sit on the floor with my head in my hands
And don't tell me how to make it pay
I write a new song every day
I just wish I was made of wood
I might not feel pain, even if I should
even if I should, if I should....#
One tuesday when I went to get the TV magazines the two blokes in the newsagent started giving me a hard time, seeing me go in twice a week and buy out half their stock they were curious.
"So go on then," one of them said, "what programme do you keep buying all these things for then?"
"Guess," I said, very maturely :)
"How can we guess?"
"I'll give you a clue - it's on on saturday nights!"
The younger one beamed.
"I bet it's the X Files!" he said.
"Erm, no," I said, thinking 'a few years late!'
"Ha ha!" the older one heckled him, "Bet it's the X Files indeed!"
I got into a routine that summer: Go down to the library for my internet slot first thing in the morning, come home, talk to my mum, have lunch, go upstairs with a spanish lager, write some book and pluck the hairs on my leg. The leg plucking thing.... I don't know where that came from. I was that desperate to try to get it out my head that I'd do anything to take my mind off it. I grew to like thursday nights because Babes In The Wood was on. I have lied to people for years, saying I only watched it because of Denise Van Outen and Samantha Janus. Truth it, I liked it. I found it funny. Not just once or twice, but religiously. Hale and Pace followed this up each week, with the 'Black pepper?' sketch that I have to imitate whenever Y and I get offered black pepper in our favourite Italian restaurant!
I remembered finding a Bugs message board some time a couple of months earlier and tracked it down again to see if it was livlier now there were episodes on. And boy, was it! I grew addicted. Hopelessly, unashamedly addicted. Sitting in that corner of the library, I truly was Miranda. No one else knew any different. I could escape the memory of his attack for half an hour every day. As you know, however, it was during this time I made a friendship I really wish I hadn't. But I have spoken of that before and I won't do that again here.
I did make other friends as well though, most of which I lost contact with over time and a few of which disliked my coming out and disowned me a couple of years ago, but yeah, there were a couple of very good, long term friendships that came from that :)
DESPITE being accused of loving The Houghton via text! Ahem! Oh, revenge will be mine! :)
The message board was great. We exchanged fan fiction, we formed a little support group for each other at the stress of Beckett and Ros splitting up and we had fun things like Jesse rotas and such. I just loved the whole thing. Escaping into the computer kept me sane.
A sad event happened in the middle of the summer. My cat died. It had been on the cards for a long time but the death of a pet is always extremely sad. I was too frightened to cry because if I sttarted crying over her then I might have started crying over other things, too. A song by Roxy Music called Oh Yeah (On The Radio) came on the radio that night. Every time I've heard it since, I've thought of my cat. I like having a reminder like that :)
# and so it came to be our song
and so on through all summer long day
and night drifting into love
driving you home from a movie show
so in tune to the sounds in my car
there's a band playing on the radio
with a rhythm of rhyming guitars
they're playing *oh yeah* on the radio....#
The next day, I received a tape of Between The Lines. I'd had it on order from WH Smith for MONTHS but... I don't have much luck with tapes, do I? They said my tape had gone astray. So I tracked one down at a BBC shop and it was sent to me the very next day. I waited until evening to watch it. I can't even describe how I felt. I have very sweet dreams of Jaye that night, I can tell you ;)
Saturday 1st August may have been the best day of the summer. Jaye was on CBBC that morning, looking gorgeous and putting up with the likes of Kirsten O Brien and Otis the Aardvark for several hours. I sat about 2 cm away from the TV screen watching her, my heart just pounding. I'm sorry but there is no crush, before or since, that's done half as much to me as Jaye has. Not the heart-thumping and the practical dribbling and the happy sighs and the high feeling inside. The day just got better from there. newspapers, Bugs on the telly, and then me standing at the window with a huge sketchpad leaning against it drawing a picture of Ros looking gorgeous and Beckett in a bow tie, while the air blew through the window and 80s songs blared out on the radio. Sweetest Smile, On The Radio, Hold Me Now, The Riddle, Going Down To Liverpool.
Later that week went to London with L. We went to see the Channel 4 building (which had been used in Bugs) accidentally saw the Cartlon TV building and so we decided to make it a complete set and went to see the BBC Television centre on a whim! The tube train was almost empty on the way there. We saw a strange stage being set up in a park, spent ages doing impressions of South Park Characters, imagining worst-case scenarious of Kirsten, Otis and Carpet Monster (from The Big Breakfast) having a threesome and trying to make each other confess love for horrible people. We also went under the Grenwich Foot Tunnel.
I would like to take this opportunity to make a public information announcement. Going under the Grenwich Foot Tunnel was the most boring, pointless thing I have ever done! We'd thought it was going to be AMUSING! Only go under the foot tunnel if you actually want to get to the other side! Do not do it for fun!
That is all.
We were also amused when the tube train stopped and we could see the top of an advert outside the window - just the head of a beer! We decided to make up a supid tune:
# Gary and Tony were here,
They came to put up a beer.
Gary and Tony came back
They put up a beer in their slacks! #
Yes, it's crap and horrible! But it made us laugh at the time :)
later that summer, we had ANOTHER trip to London. This time, I had a secret mission in mind. I was desperate to find the building used as the Bureau in Bugs and I had a feeling it may have been in Uxbridge. So I pretended that I just 'thought Uxbridge sounded good' and dragged L all the way there. A man tried to chat us up on the train and I completely freaked out. I just shook. I couldn't handle it. I was terrified. I'd never been so relieved as I was when he got off the train.
When we got to Uxbridge a large, glass building loomed into view.
"That looks like the Bureau...." I said, "....It IS the Bureau!"
I almost fainted. I took a whole camera film of pictures there, including me standing on the steps, 'conquering' the Bureau. I just felt unbelievably happy. I'd never known elation like it.
At the start of September, L and I went to Brighton for the day. I felt really sad along the way and I couldn't work out why - then I realised: I was picking up Back-to-School vibes off the kids! I still had another 3 weeks before I went back but their vibes were rubbing off on me! The day was fantastic though. I remember getting the top of my ear pierced, to be like Denise Van Outen (yes, it may be sad but it's true) and having to listen to the damn Dolphin Darby next to me as I queued! I felt free there, but when I came home I felt scared and horrid again.
The BBC held back the last 3 episodes of Bugs. They didn't care about the poor, angry Bugs fans. And the local radio station stopped playing 80s music on saturday nights and favoured 70s music instead. By the end of the summer, when I went back to college, I thought my mask was solid. I thought I was stronger. I was only kidding myself, of course, but it took me another yea to work that out.
Which is where I will be tomorrow. Goodnight, everyone xx
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