What If?. Shari Low
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did go to university. The thought of having to dress constantly in black, wear eyeliner out to my ears and spend my life in the Student Union discussing the scourge of capitalism was too awful to contemplate. Incidentally, I’ve no idea if that’s what University is really like, but I can see now that I painted that picture in my mind because four years at university meant four more years staying at home, and that was the part of the equation that really did fill me with horror. I loved Callum. I loved Michael. But a drunk dad and a highly strung mother who could barely stand the sight of each other didn’t make for a fairy tale existence for the rest of us.
More importantly, I was desperate for excitement, fun and adventure but didn’t have a clue where to start.
‘What should I do, Callum?’ I implored of my sixteen year old brother, as we sat huddled on my bed with four packets of Golden Wonder pickled onion crisps and two Yorkies to sustain us. My younger sibling, Michael, thirteen now and all gangly limbs and freckle-faced cuteness, was lying at the foot of the bed, his head on my shins, but he was wearing headphones, eyes closed as he listened to his favourite Guns and Roses tape on Callum’s old Walkman.
Callum’s reply came with an eye roll and a shoulder nudge. ‘Give it up, Carly. You’ve been asking me the same thing for weeks and I still don’t know. Just make a decision and go with it.’ Insightful, emotional chats weren’t his strong point. He made up for it with killer bone structure and brooding good looks.
His argument had merit though. I had been in the same room, having the same conversation, eating the same junk food ever since my mum had grounded me because I wouldn’t go to university. I didn’t even have pals on hand to break me out of domestic jail, because, as planned, Jess and Sarah had both left for their respective universities in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, Carol had gone to London to try to get some modelling work, and Kate was working fourteen hours a day as a junior hairdresser. Callum was the only one brave enough to risk my mother’s wrath, not to mention the barbed wire around my bedroom door and the threat of land mines in the hallway, to sneak in to talk to me.
All I had was a fourteen inch portable TV for company, the only channels were BBC1, BBC 2, ITV and, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, the stars were aligned and I managed to bend the aerial to some kind of angular perfection, I’d get Channel 4 for about ten minutes at a time, before the screen would go fuzzy again. There were only so many times I could listen to my limited album collection and I’d read every Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Shirley Conran and Jilly Cooper novel in the library. It was as close to house arrest as possible without turrets and an armed guard, and I was bored rigid.
‘Mum and Dad won’t let you stay here unless you go to uni, sis.’
‘You’re right, I need to move out, but where? I want to travel, to do something different.’
‘How much money do you have?’
‘About two hundred pounds.’
That was a fortune to me, the result of working overtime at the posh café and the fact that my family had all given me money for my birthday a couple of months ago. Well, there was no point buying me clothes, they’d be out of fashion by the time my parents released me from my bedroom. Besides, unless Miss Selfridge started doing a natty line of prison pyjamas, I didn’t have much call for new togs.
‘I want to be sensible about this though. I don’t want to blow it and have to come back begging to Maw and Paw Walton downstairs.’ The Waltons was one of my favourite TV shows. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia during the Great Depression, the Walton family consisted of a Maw, a Paw, grandparents, about sixteen kids, and every episode had some kind of tragedy that made my gran and me sob into our chocolate digestives.
‘Sensible? None of this is sensible, Carly. Sensible would be uni and a boyfriend called Jeremy who collects stamps. It’s just not you.’
Callum was right. It was time to be assertive.
Next morning, I dressed, waited for my parents to leave for work and then charged down to our local travel agent.
‘I want to go away,’ I blustered to the insipid looking woman behind the desk.
Her default customer service setting was clearly ‘patronising and wholeheartedly indifferent’. ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, with treacly condescension, ‘and where would you be wanting to go?’
‘I’m not really sure. I want to leave tonight, I want to go abroad, one way, and it’s got to cost less than sixty pounds.’ A travel agent’s nightmare. I could see her visibly inhale, straighten up and sneer all at the same time.
‘Well, dear, the only options I can suggest would be by coach and ferry, and there are two leaving from Glasgow today. One is to Paris and one to Amsterdam.’
I contemplated. Paris sounded great, but wouldn’t it be crowded with couples being nauseatingly romantic and tourists with huge video cameras that make you feel like you’re in the middle of a BBC outside broadcast?
‘I’ll have a one way ticket to Amsterdam, please.’ If all else failed, I could always buy a feather boa and get a job as a go-go dancer.
I’m ashamed to say, I took the coward’s way out. Maw and Paw Walton were informed of Mary Ellen’s defection by a shamefaced John Boy later that night, when I was safely mid-Channel. Callum was a star and persuaded them not to immediately round up a posse and track down their prodigal daughter. I’d left Michael my entire stash of Wham bars, so he was nonplussed by the whole situation.
I arrived in Amsterdam the following afternoon, exhausted, bedraggled and feeling like I hadn’t washed for a month. I made for the tourist information office and enquired after the cheapest hotel in the city. And cheap it was. Nestled behind the Grand Hotel Krasnapolski on the Damstraat, the gateway to the Red Light district, was the Dam Central Hotel. Or the ‘You’ve got to be damn well joking to call this a hotel’, as it’s better known.
I humped my bag up four flights of stairs, dodging the holes and empty beer bottles to a room that made the tatty apartment in Benidorm look like the Hilton.
After unpacking my clothes, I flopped on to the bed, ignoring the puff of dust that rose around me. I kept thinking I should be terrified, but I wasn’t. I was smiling like a Cheshire cat and feeling, well, exhilarated. I felt like the world was at my feet, alongside the ancient carpet that had more holes than a colander and some extremely questionable stains.
That afternoon, I trawled the streets of Amsterdam, stopping in every café and bar to enquire after work. By early evening, reality had begun to dawn as I absorbed a few unassailable truths. I knew no one in this city who could help me. I had no work permit, so I was officially unemployable. And I wasn’t desperate enough yet to get my kit off and sit in a window.
I was starting to feel despondent. What if this was a gargantuan mistake? What was I doing in Amsterdam with no job, no friends and only enough money to buy baked beans for a week? How insane was I? The only experiences I’d had of Holland, prior to giving up my whole life to come here, were clogs and bloody tulips. Not a firm foundation for a life altering decision.
I trudged back to the hotel and had just turned the corner in to the Damstraat when a large gold sign illuminated above an impressive carved door caught my eye. ‘The Premier Club’, it said. It must have been closed when I passed earlier because I hadn’t noticed it. I checked it out. No women in windows trying to tempt business inside. No tacky lights. Just an expensive looking black stone façade and white spotlights that gave it an edge of glamour.
I was about to walk on by when I summoned one last burst of energy. I marched up to the door, only to be stopped by a bouncer who made Lennox Lewis look undernourished.
‘Can I help you, mam?’ he enquired in an American drawl.
‘I’m here to see the owner of the club,’ I replied boldly.
‘Is he expecting you?’
‘Yes, he told me to come here tonight,’ I retorted indignantly.
‘Just one second, mam.’