Different world

Here I am, in my ‘different world.’

I’m writing this in my room at 44A Jervis Terrace; it’s nearly one o’clock in the morning and all is quiet. Pete and Mo are in the front room but silence reigns.

Today’s day of travelling was a little farcical once we had reached Watermouth. Dad dropped me at the station and shook my hand before returning home to Mum and Nanna P. Lee rolled up as the coach was preparing to leave, his Mum wet-eyed and full of tearful goodbyes. When we left Easterby the weather was dull but it picked up the farther south we travelled, and soon I was sweating in the full blaze of a glorious day, magnified through the coach window.

We got into Watermouth at teatime, getting off the coach at Wessex Road. It was chaos for a little while—indecision over what to do, where to go and how to cope with Lee’s huge amount of luggage. We eventually got a taxi from outside the aquarist’s shop near the bottom of Gaunt’s Hill View: I took my stuff to Jervis Terrace while Lee waited, but I discovered the flat locked and empty so I had to dump my stuff next door with a middle-aged neighbour and his doddering, ancient father.

I walked back to meet Lee and we got another taxi to Old Priory Road and Lee’s new home, the Varney Halls of Residence belonging to Watermouth College. Lee’s room was in a nearby block of ‘student residences,' in front of which were several pathetic-looking new students being helped by parents to unload possessions into unfriendly, sterile little rooms. I could sympathise. We found room 444, a white-washed, miserably small room with stone walls, a bed, a sink and wardrobe which made the rooms in Wollstonecraft Hall look spacious in comparison, and we lugged all his stuff up the several flights of stairs.

Lee seemed taken aback at his fellow inmates, who seemed to be engineers mostly. “I came here to escape tap-room lads,” he said as a pair breezed past wafting clouds of aftershave in their wake. We went down to the kitchen to have something to eat and the enforced friendliness and false cheeriness as everyone tried to make friends was painful to watch—spike-haired student in Killing Joke T-shirt setting out unwillingly to the local student pub with a couple of wanky engineers, etc. Lee would have none of this, and with glassy eyes and monosyllabic answers rebuffed an attempt at conversation by a mechanical engineering Lee Cooper type. The rest of the meal was conducted in silence.

I left Lee packing his things away and arranged to meet him in Watermouth at dinnertime tomorrow. Pete was in when I got ‘home,’ watching TV and supping duty-free French whisky. The house hadn’t been touched by Mr. Harrop, Crown Racing, Colin or anyone else—no repairs even attempted apparently, although the place looks a little cleaner and certainly smells fresher.

We filled each other in on all the details of our summers and shortly after, Mo arrived and we all hit the sack.