Sweet Sorrow(116)

‘Helen—’

‘But what’s this?’ She tapped my shot glass.

‘It’s just a chaser.’

‘A chaser?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘You’re too young to have a local. Honestly, Charlie, fuck that. You need to move away, just for a bit. You can come back, but you’ve got to do something else. Try at least. There’s plenty of time to hate your life. Do it when you’re middle-aged, like everyone else.’

‘I don’t “hate my life”.’

‘But you don’t love it, do you?’

‘Why, do you?’

She laughed. ‘Yes! Yes, yes, finally, I fucking do! And you could too, if you weren’t so scared.’

‘I’m not scared.’

‘Well, good. That’s good to hear. Because it brings me to my next point …’

Mariah Carey was singing ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’, and now Alex was back, sitting the other side of me, pinning me in. ‘Have you told him yet?’ he asked.

‘Told me what?’

Helen took a deep breath. ‘We’ve got a spare room.’

‘In the house in Brixton.’

‘It’s a shit-hole really. In the basement; it’s dark and damp.’

‘But it’s free.’

‘Well, shared bills.’

‘But you could get a bar job, or temp or something.’

‘And in September – go back to college.’

‘I’m not going to do that.’

‘No, but you are.’

‘You know you are, so why fight it?’

‘I can’t. Dad—’

‘You said he was better.’

‘He is for now, but—’

‘Well it’s an hour and a half away, Charlie, it’s not New Zealand.’

‘But I can’t just walk away.’

‘You wouldn’t walk. We’d give you a lift.’

‘We’re taking you with us.’

‘On Boxing Day. We’ll wait until seven.’

‘Charlie,’ said Alex, ‘all we want for Christmas, is you.’

In September 2003, at twenty-three years of age, I went back to school. Technically, I was a mature student, though there was very little maturity on display, just a great many false starts, wrong turns, hangovers and missed deadlines. First, I had to fill in the gaps left by my bodged exams, then complete the equivalents of A-levels, then find a university that was open-minded enough to overlook the great blank expanses on my CV, all of this while working weekends and nights in bars and restaurants where the end of the shift marked the beginning of the party. Those years were a kind of second adolescence, the obligation to work hard rubbing up against the desire to do no work whatsoever, and my education began to resemble an immense, unfinished jigsaw that’s been left out on the table for far too long. The temptation to abandon the project and sweep the whole thing back into the box was extremely strong. I would not have got through it at all without Helen and Alex, urging me on, checking the homework, ensuring that I filled in the forms in time, and it occurs to me that the good luck we have in school, in our work, is nothing to the great good luck of friendship.

Two qualifications – Computer Science and Art – provided the shaky foundations for all of this. At a party in August 1997, a stranger had told me that the trick in life was to find the thing you’re good at and go for it, but computers and art were like onions and chocolate; there was no way to combine the two. At university, I learnt that I was not academically bright and never would be. I was not a gifted programmer and had never felt like an artist, but my tutor suggested that I take a course in visual effects and animation, and I learnt how to use software with imposing names like Premiere and Fusion and Nuke. I spent my bartending wages on the most powerful home computer I could afford, and taught myself compositing and rendering, wire-frame modelling and matte painting and while I assembled all these skills, something happened to the culture around me.

The zombies and vampires, spaceships and aliens that I’d loved to draw took over, and those years spent watching movies and playing Doom were revealed to have been part of an unwitting apprenticeship. I already knew how to draw an eyeball dangling from a skull socket and now, with the right software, I knew how to make it glint and sway repulsively, and how to turn a crowd of twenty into two hundred thousand, and how to shave the years off the leading man. And so now that’s what I do: visual effects. Computer Science and Art.

Chasing the work, Alex Asante went to Los Angeles. We still see him all the time but mainly on TV, playing cops or ambitious young lawyers who’ll do anything to win the case, including break the law. He’s quite well known, though never quite as well known as he’d like to be.

No longer students, we moved out of the student house. I met Niamh, exchanged restaurant work for full-time post-production and then, not so long ago, set up a company with colleagues. Occasionally, we’d be invited to the premieres of films that I worked on, finding our seats at the very rear of the auditorium, and peering down at the actors, distant and alien, taking their bows.

Helen met Freya, fell in love and moved to Brighton ‘like a complete stereotype’. Walking on the beach there, she told me they were getting married and asked me to be her best man.