Sweet Sorrow

the greatest lie that age tells about youth is that it’s somehow free of care, worry or fear. Good God, doesn’t anyone remember?

Like I said, I’m fine. I don’t ever think of her.’ And I didn’t ever think of her, except from time to time.

Perhaps all families have these fleeting moments when, without ever saying as much, they take each other in and think, we work and we fit together and we love each other, and if we can remain like this, all will be fine.

...but first love, I think it’s like a song, a stupid pop song that you hear and you think, well that is all I will ever want to listen to, it’s got everything, it’s clearly the greatest piece of music ever written, I need nothing else. ’Course we wouldn’t put it on now. We’re too hard and experienced and sophisticated. But when it comes on the radio, well, it’s still a good song.

... and it occurred to me then, just as it does now, that the greatest lie that age tells about youth is that it’s somehow free of care, worry or fear.

You can’t see it at the moment, ’cause all these things have just gone wrong, and you’re nervous and angry about things you can’t control and which aren’t your fault. But if you … hang on, Charlie. I don’t know. I just think there’s something inside you and I love it...

And there it was. She'd said it and now I could say it back, the most banal and brilliant exchange of dialogue, which we'd repeat, over and over, for just as long as we meant it.

I thought about it, about what I felt, about this, and I don’t want to get mawkish or anything,’ she said, ‘but first love, I think it’s like a song, a stupid pop song that you hear and you think, well that is all I will ever want to listen to, it’s got everything, it’s clearly the greatest piece of music ever written, I need nothing else. ’Course we wouldn’t put it on now. We’re too hard and experienced and sophisticated. But when it comes on the radio, well, it’s still a good song.

But love is boring. Love is familiar and commonplace for anyone not taking part, and first love is just a gangling, glandular incarnation of the same. Shakespeare must have known this; take a copy of the world’s most famous love story and pinch between finger and thumb the pages where the lovers are truly happy; not the build-up that precedes it, not the strife that follows, but the time when love is mutual and untroubled. It’s a few pages, a pamphlet almost, the brief interlude between anticipation and despair.

In two more years they’d leave this town and migrate to cities famous for their nightlife and music and culture, their lively political scene and cafés. In candlelit bedrooms, they’d have meaningful talks, making friends who’d introduce them to more friends, then more and more, loosening the old ties to make way for the new in a branching tree of friendship, of connections and opportunities.

This summer’s a bastard, isn’t it? Sun comes out, sky’s blue if you’re lucky and suddenly there are all these preconceived ideas of what you should be doing, lying on a beach or jumping off a rope swing into the river or having a picnic with all your amazing mates, sitting on a blanket in a meadow and eating strawberries and laughing in that mad way, like in the adverts. It’s never like that, it’s just six weeks of feeling like you’re in the wrong place with the wrong people and you’re missing out.

The notion that these had been the best years of our lives suddenly seemed both plausible and tragic and I wished that school had always been like this, our arms around each other, filled with a kind of hooligan love, and that I’d talked to these people more and in a different voice.

Perhaps it was nostalgia, but I doubted it; nostalgia for the pencil cases filled with liquid soap and the snap of wet towels? More likely it was regret for the things that had not happened, changes that had failed to take place. A caterpillar forms a cocoon and inside that hard shell, the cell walls dissolve, molecules churn and reorganise and the cocoon breaks open to reveal another caterpillar, longer, more hairy and less certain about the future.

All around me, kids were adjusting their personalities with the same deliberation that they gave to changes in clothes and haircuts. We were plastic, mutable and there was still time to experiment and alter our handwriting, our politics, the way we laughed or walked or sat in a chair, before we hardened and set.

Time had crawled through five long years and now in the final weeks, then days, an air of elation and panic, joy and fear began to take hold, along with a crazed nihilism. Letters home and detentions couldn’t touch us now, and what might we get away with in this world without consequences?

I both hated and loved my father more than anyone in the world, the strength of the first emotion proportional to the second. I could only hate him like that because I'd only loved him to the same degree.

Years later, when I heard friends speak sentimentally and lyrically about their place of birth, of how they’d been shaped by Northumberland or Glasgow, the Lakes or the Wirral, I’d find myself envying even the most hackneyed, stereotyped expressions of ‘belonging’. We had no sense of identity, no authentic accent, just a kind of cockney learnt from TV, applied over a slight country burr. I didn’t hate our town, but it was hard to feel lyrical or sentimental about the reservoir, the precinct, the scrappy woods where porn yellowed beneath the brambles.