Read Online (2003) Overtaken by Alexei Sayle - Free Book Online Page A

Thunderbirds impression just
frightened them.
    Still,
not to worry, I thought, knowing for certain that I would make friends once
college started. I’d always had no trouble making friends, I was the popular
guy.
    Except
that my uneasiness about being away from home seemed to infect everything
around me. Normally you would expect each day in an unfamiliar situation that
things would become less unfamiliar. I mean that’s like a law of science or something,
but for me every day of college was still accompanied by the same disturbed
strangeness as I’d experienced on my very first hour there. Nothing about the
place seemed to stick in my memory: the college building was as impenetrable a
labyrinth on my last day as on my first. The cleaners began to suspect some
strange voyeuristic motives when they found me for the fourth time crouching in
their stores cupboard waiting for an art history tutorial to begin. I often
couldn’t even recollect where the place was and would catch the tube to some
district where I was fairly certain it was situated, then wander the streets
looking for it.
    On the
odd occasion when I did find my way to the college and then found the studio
space where I was supposed to be doing my work, things were no better.
Painfully I’d manage to get going on a painting, scratching a few reticent
marks each day until at least there were some tentative beginnings on the
canvas, then a visiting lecturer would come along, he’d look at my painting for
a second or two and then say to me, ‘No no no, that’s complete fetid rubbish,
it’s weak weak weak, derivative and weak. Anyway, carry on, I’ll be back again
in nine months.’ I mean my art teacher back at school had been really
encouraging, telling me how good I was and inviting me round to his house to
look at art books and listen to records, but here the staff seemed to regard
their primary role as being to stop you painting. I told one of the weeping
Africans that I was starting to suspect the staff weren’t interested in
students unless you were a pretty girl they could shag or your work was exactly
like theirs but not as good.
    And
then if that wasn’t bad enough there was the city of London itself. That
Underground they’ve got down there, the map’s supposed to be dead clear, isn’t
it? A miracle of graphic design, they say, but I never got the hang of it the
whole time I was there. Sometimes I’d catch a train on a yellow-coloured line,
change three times on to routes of various hues, then walk for miles along
smelly tiled corridors only to emerge above ground and see the station I’d
started off from about a hundred yards up the road. On other occasions I would
get on the tube in the middle of London, travel for perhaps only a stop or two,
then it would halt and all the power would glimmer off. I’d look around and see
I was alone in the carriage, so get off to find I was at a country halt with a
white picket fence, hanging baskets of geraniums and big zinc milk churns
stacked on the platform. I never even attempted to take a bus.
    Then
there were my fellow students at the art school who. were as impenetrable to me
as the tube network. They were either incredibly posh or, if one of the few
working-class kids, then they were crude unconvincing stereotypes, like English
characters played by American actors in a US sitcom. I recall I did get to a
few art history seminars: there would be about twenty-five of us sitting in a
circle in an airtight room. I remember this one time the tutorial was about Van
Gogh and the lecturer showed. us a slide of a painting and he said how you had
to see it in a gallery because you couldn’t conceive of the richness of the
colours from a reproduction and a girl I’d been thinking of maybe talking to
one day sitting next to me said, ‘You don’t have to go to a gallery. Oh, I know
that painting; it’s hanging in the entrance hall in our flat in Rome. Yes, it
really is lovely, the colours really are …’