Free So Me by Graham Norton Page A

because I had been her best friend in lover’s clothing.
    I was having a great time with Elizabeth, but at the end of my year in San Francisco, I felt it was time to go home. I’d given up on university and had failed to get a degree, and there was nothing concrete to go back to, but it was something I felt I had to do. The hippies all piled into Obo’s old blue van to see me off, and we posed for pictures in the airport. On the plane during take-off I stared out of the window at San Francisco and started crying. I could see the green flag of Golden Gate park, and from there I could work out exactly where Stardance was. So small and getting smaller. The tidy elderly lady next to me asked why I was going home. I answered that I was going home for my parents – they were worried about me being away for so long, etc. – but then I remembered that my teacher and friend Niall MacMonagle had given me some very harsh but sound advice years before: ‘Never do anything just for your parents; after they’re dead you are still going to have to live your life.’
    So why was I really going home? I knew that the year I had spent in San Francisco had marked some sort of beginning in my life. The slightly frayed jumble of hippies had taught me so much. I had finally learnt what my mother had meant on a good luck card for my exams when she had written, ‘You can only do your best, but do it!’ There is no shame in failure; the only shame is in not making the attempt. These are all obvious platitudes, the sorts of things you can read in any third-rate self-help book, but to be twenty-one and fearless is a very powerful combination. I decided then and there that I would head back to London, I would go to drama school, and then I would become a respected member of the acting fraternity – actually, fuck that, I would be a star!

4
    Acting Out

 
     
    L ONDON IN NOVEMBER 1984 WAS really not very different from what it is now. As a city it doesn’t really grow, it moves in circles. The trendy neighbourhoods may change, but there are always trendy neighbourhoods. When I arrived, the place to be was just north of Covent Garden. It was called Neal Street and it was a Mecca for the cool kids. The restored cobbles would be teeming with screaming girls from the suburbs desperate for a glimpse of Bros., whose management had offices there. Horny teenage boys soon caught on to this and started hanging around dressed up as the boys from the band in the hope that a lazy groupie might think to herself, ‘A tribute band in the hand is worth two nowhere near the bush.’ Today it is an odd area where you can only buy fashionable trainers or kites. Mmm.
    When I arrived in London I headed back to my old friends Julie and Harry. They had now moved into a squat in Camberwell that was struggling to become part of a housing association. The house was wedged up against the railway line, and sitting in the bath you were almost able to read the headlines of a commuter’s Evening Standard as the trains rumbled by. The vibrations gave the water a sort of low-tech jacuzzi effect. The lack of privacy was compounded by the lack of a door or indeed a wall on the other side of the room.Similarly the stairs just seemed to hang from the wall with no visible means of support. Mattresses of mysterious origin were the only recognisable pieces of furniture, though I was assured that a large wooden electricity cable spool in the kitchen was a table.
    I lay on my mattress that first afternoon looking through old copies of City Limits , a sort of politically correct version of Time Out , and two weeks in a row I noticed an ad in the gay section for a restaurant called Smiths on Neal Street. Now, I was still supposed to be going out with Elizabeth at this stage, even though she was still in San Francisco, but for some reason that idea of making money out of my sexuality had lingered on in my mind (never mind that I didn’t know what my sexuality was). I made my way to