Deepest Cut
T HIS WAS MY BEAUTIFUL LIFE . I was going to go to one of the top drama schools in Britain, and I was living with a man I loved. It almost felt uncomfortable. I was so unused to things going my way that I just assumed that this couldn’t last. I was right. Well, as a pessimist once said, ‘a pessimist is never disappointed’.
Shortly after I got accepted by Central, I was hanging around the Australian dorm we called home, heating up more sausage rolls, when Ashley casually mentioned something about booking his ticket home. Now, I knew that when we had met he was only staying in England temporarily, but I had somehow assumed that meeting me had changed his plans. Home is where the heart is, and surely that was in London with me. For some reason at moments of emotional shock I tend not to cry but instead to get very angry, and this was no exception. I turned into a windmill of tea towels as I stormed around the flat. ‘Do I mean nothing to you? Don’t you think you should have discussed this rather than just present it as a done deal?’ As far as I was concerned, he was a selfish bastard and I was a heaving, bosomed heroine wronged by her man.
I stomped out of the flat and went to the Oval in South London where I was taking part in some awful fringe playabout the Irish in Britain. Ashley couldn’t come because he was on nursing duty through the night for a rich old lady in order to earn some extra money – presumably to help pay for his airfare.
After the play the cast went across the road to the pub, and I got talking to a very cute man who was a friend of one of the other actors. As closing time approached, one by one everyone started to say their goodnights. Finally there was only me and Cute Guy left. I remember looking around, wondering who he was waiting for, and then the impossible dawned on me – I was the one he was after. This was the biggest sexual compliment I had ever been paid. Thank God I was still in a foul mood with Ashley so that I could somehow morally justify this bit of adultery. ‘Well, if he doesn’t care about me, etc.’
Cute Guy took me back to his flat. We got into a big wooden bed which for some reason he felt he needed to tell me had belonged to his now dead Granny. As we rolled around I became aware that something very unusual was going on. For I think the only time in my life, my cock seemed to be talking to my heart, and between them they had decided that cheating on Ashley was not the thing to do – I could not get a hard-on. What a great night; what else could go wrong? What indeed . . . After he managed to come, Cute Guy burst into tears because I was the first person he had been with since his boyfriend had left him. I lay there with a limp cock and a stranger sobbing on the pillow next to me and thought about Ashley and the dead Granny who had owned this wooden nest of sadness. Adultery hadn’t been like this on Dallas .
I went back to Ashley the next day and we discussed the situation. Ashley’s plan to go home would go ahead, but nowit was slightly modified. I would follow him during my long summer holiday from drama school, and then Ashley would return to London and we would set up home together properly without the lost tribe of New South Wales sharing with us. Things returned to normal.
Finally the day dawned when I would start at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Ashley gave me a packed lunch and waved me on my way. After all the anticipation, it was a strangely underwhelming moment when I actually saw the other twenty-five people I was going to spend the next three years with. I’d spent hours wondering who my contemporaries were going to be, and suddenly this was it. I had two shocks. The first was that someone I knew from Cork was in my year, Dan Mullane who I had met through the drama society at university in which I’d dabbled. I thought this was wildly unfair. Central was supposed to be my new beginning where I could reinvent
T HIS WAS MY BEAUTIFUL LIFE . I was going to go to one of the top drama schools in Britain, and I was living with a man I loved. It almost felt uncomfortable. I was so unused to things going my way that I just assumed that this couldn’t last. I was right. Well, as a pessimist once said, ‘a pessimist is never disappointed’.
Shortly after I got accepted by Central, I was hanging around the Australian dorm we called home, heating up more sausage rolls, when Ashley casually mentioned something about booking his ticket home. Now, I knew that when we had met he was only staying in England temporarily, but I had somehow assumed that meeting me had changed his plans. Home is where the heart is, and surely that was in London with me. For some reason at moments of emotional shock I tend not to cry but instead to get very angry, and this was no exception. I turned into a windmill of tea towels as I stormed around the flat. ‘Do I mean nothing to you? Don’t you think you should have discussed this rather than just present it as a done deal?’ As far as I was concerned, he was a selfish bastard and I was a heaving, bosomed heroine wronged by her man.
I stomped out of the flat and went to the Oval in South London where I was taking part in some awful fringe playabout the Irish in Britain. Ashley couldn’t come because he was on nursing duty through the night for a rich old lady in order to earn some extra money – presumably to help pay for his airfare.
After the play the cast went across the road to the pub, and I got talking to a very cute man who was a friend of one of the other actors. As closing time approached, one by one everyone started to say their goodnights. Finally there was only me and Cute Guy left. I remember looking around, wondering who he was waiting for, and then the impossible dawned on me – I was the one he was after. This was the biggest sexual compliment I had ever been paid. Thank God I was still in a foul mood with Ashley so that I could somehow morally justify this bit of adultery. ‘Well, if he doesn’t care about me, etc.’
Cute Guy took me back to his flat. We got into a big wooden bed which for some reason he felt he needed to tell me had belonged to his now dead Granny. As we rolled around I became aware that something very unusual was going on. For I think the only time in my life, my cock seemed to be talking to my heart, and between them they had decided that cheating on Ashley was not the thing to do – I could not get a hard-on. What a great night; what else could go wrong? What indeed . . . After he managed to come, Cute Guy burst into tears because I was the first person he had been with since his boyfriend had left him. I lay there with a limp cock and a stranger sobbing on the pillow next to me and thought about Ashley and the dead Granny who had owned this wooden nest of sadness. Adultery hadn’t been like this on Dallas .
I went back to Ashley the next day and we discussed the situation. Ashley’s plan to go home would go ahead, but nowit was slightly modified. I would follow him during my long summer holiday from drama school, and then Ashley would return to London and we would set up home together properly without the lost tribe of New South Wales sharing with us. Things returned to normal.
Finally the day dawned when I would start at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Ashley gave me a packed lunch and waved me on my way. After all the anticipation, it was a strangely underwhelming moment when I actually saw the other twenty-five people I was going to spend the next three years with. I’d spent hours wondering who my contemporaries were going to be, and suddenly this was it. I had two shocks. The first was that someone I knew from Cork was in my year, Dan Mullane who I had met through the drama society at university in which I’d dabbled. I thought this was wildly unfair. Central was supposed to be my new beginning where I could reinvent
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