You know how, after a big night out, you lose consciousness with deep satisfaction, knowing that this is life and you’re living it? But the next morning, some different you awakes, a trembling shame-gremlin, full of remorse and suffering from flashbacks – crystal-clear replays of the stupid, bolshie things you said the night before?
I’ve started getting those, but ones from my adolescence. Memories I had forgotten drop suddenly into my mind in excruciating detail. I’m suffering with these remembrances of things past not only because I used to be foolish and fanciful but because I used to be a liar – a bad one, an unbelievable one. But no one ever told me, so I thought I was getting away with it.
I relive my memories, powerless as my past self tells a girl at my new secondary school that I have a horse. I wanted to impress Laura Crosshunt. She was the richest person I’d ever met: her house had three bedrooms, her kitchen was so big that it had a table in it and her sister wasn’t a bitch.
“I love horses,” Laura says. “Can I come and meet yours?”
I assure her nonchalantly that of course she could. “Why are you so calm?” I scream silently, 20 years in the future. My past self doesn’t know how this ends up but I do.
I was 13 and loved horses. I was addicted to a series of books about them called Pony Club: I’d read them in the school toilets when no one would talk to me. My other favourite books were Point Horror, ’cos I liked danger, and Forever . . . by Judy Blume (the name Ralph still turns me on).
So, Laura tells her parents that the new girl has a horse and that we are going to ride it at the weekend and they say that they will come with us. I didn’t cancel the trip because although I didn’t have a horse, I really wanted to have one.
I had once met a friendly horse in a field that let me stroke his nose. I walked Laura’s family through Hornchurch Country Park but when we got to the field where the friendly horse lived, it was empty.
“MY HORSE HAS BEEN STOLEN!!!”
I flipped out: Laura’s dad had to carry me back to the car while I demonstrated the acting skills that have landed me bit-parts in over two BBC programmes. When we got to their three-bed mansion, I made some fake phone calls: one to my mum, one to the stables and one to the horse police, reporting the theft.
Because of my reading matter, I knew all the lingo. Thanks to the Pony Club books, I knew the correct terms: bridle, stirrups, legs. Because of Point Horror, I knew my horse was probably murdered by a jealous stagehand who wanted to be in the school play. Thanks to Judy Blume, I knew how to caress a penis. I see my former self, over and over, like a horror movie I can’t switch off.
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This article appears in the 04 May 2016 issue of the New Statesman, The longest hatred