The orchestra was made up of musicians from the University of East London. Apparently, the conductor was retiring after forty years and this was his last concert. Everyone sang ‘Hallelujah’ at the end and I recorded it secretly on my Walkman, just like I used to do at Jeff Buckley concerts.
I’d been doing this for years now: just recording sounds—birds singing, or even the drone of air-conditioning units or a whistling kettle—and then listening back to them at night and writing songs over the top. I thought this made me a bit of a weirdo, so I kept it to myself. Tapes and tapes of sounds and half-songs, all stacked in a box under my bed at home. Would I ever write anything good enough to share?
I’d been fiddling, actually, with the list I wrote before I left for London, the one about the amazing life I wanted to live. I didn’t really have a chorus yet, not anything I was happy with, but I did have a melody and a little bit of finger-picking that seemed to work quite nicely for the verses. It went:
You want to write a novel
Make beautiful music
Act in the theatre with inspiring humans
Learn a language
Run like the wind
Help people fit in
Travel to every country
Make a million dollars
Smile when your children have babies
Make the heart your home, inviting and warm.
You want an amazing life …
That was all I had so far.
Later that month, after I saw Patti Smith play live at Shepherd’s Bush and was blown away by her rock, I tried to play my ‘Amazing Life’ song back to myself, but somehow became embarrassed at how soft I was.
Why was I so soft?
Why couldn’t I be strong, like Patti Smith?
The voice in my head told me that it was probably best I just put that awful song away and never think of it again. Imagine what Patti Smith would say if she heard it. She’d think I was such a fucking loser.
It didn’t really matter who I was comparing myself to, the voice in my head told me again and again in no uncertain terms that I would never, ever match up. Why are you even trying?
One morning at breakfast, I did some calculations and realised I was almost out of money already. I’d thought my savings would last much longer but the Aussie dollar was in a bad way. I felt it growing tight inside me, this thought, this worry, about what I was going to do about money. I hadn’t really expected to be feeling like this so soon. After a coffee with Libby, I went out on my own and somehow ended up at McDonald’s for a second breakfast, which was not on the diet plan.
It was a Sunday. I was missing my mum. I went out looking for a church and entered the first one I passed. I figured it was Greek Orthodox because the guy at the front was wearing a crown and people were kissing his hand. I didn’t understand anything they were saying or doing; I started to wonder if I was allowed to be in here. People were looking at me strangely—or maybe I was looking at them strangely? I didn’t know.
It felt, all of a sudden, like air was thick in my throat, and I just couldn’t seem to get enough of it, no matter how hard I tried, so I just stood there in the foyer, crying and gulping for air, and telling myself loudly in my head to stop being such a fucking idiot! PULL IT TOGETHER! A moment later, when a lady approached me, asking me if she could get me anything, I tried to speak, to tell her I was fine, but the only words I could choke out were ‘Thank you’. And then I was so embarrassed, I just … fled, back down the steps, out onto the street, leaning over in the sunlight, crying and trying to catch my breath.
This was not like me. I never cried in public. Not like this. I mean, I cried when I was a kid but it was always for a particular reason, like I grazed my knee, or someone called me a mean name. This crying felt like it was for a million reasons and, at the same time, I couldn’t pinpoint even one. This crying felt like there was no use talking about it because it wouldn’t make any sense, ever. Maybe I was missing Joffa? Or maybe I was just disappointed to discover that it was true what everyone said: it doesn’t matter how far you run, you really do take your feelings with you.
All I knew was I needed to work this out. I had not come to London to cry. I was here to start my amazing life, for fuck’s sake!
Further down the street I found a seat, pulled out my diary and a pen and did what I always liked to do when I needed to get my life under control: I made a bloody good plan.
How many months until February? Six months. Okay. If I worked from now until December and saved some money, I could then spend two months travelling through Ireland, France, Italy, the Czech Republic and Spain, then maybe stop in India on the way home, where I would enrol in the course that Libby had done: the Bachelor of Creative Arts at Melbourne Uni. This sounded really, really good, I thought. Good. Good. I wrote list within list within list and, soon, this was looking like a plan. I was beginning to feel better.
But what about my diet? I needed a new plan for that, too, because whatever I’d been
