Summer 1998. I was seventeen-going-on-eighteen, a freshly minted high school graduate, and spending the summer living with my sister in London, in her cramped Earl's Court flat. There were five roommates, crammed into three bedrooms. I took over Lainey's spot, as she was away for the summer. They were all drama school students, my sister included -- she, who had always had a diametrically opposed personality to serious moi. I.e., she was outgoing and wildly emotional. The cliche about wearing one's heart on one's sleeve had apparently been coined for her.
I had always been too earnest, too serious, and completely self-contained. The forty-year-old trapped in the youngster's body. I started drinking coffee at fourteen because it was the "adult" thing to do, loathed fart jokes and Adam Sandler movies, and lapped up the opportunity to live in "civilized" London for several weeks. Any misstep I made grated on my overly sensitive self; in that sense, I hated to draw attention to myself.
I was determined to find something -- a job, volunteer work -- something to justify my presence there. I had some cash to tide myself over for a few weeks, thanks to generous parents and a small fund I'd saved up over the years. So I started calling around, trying to find non-profits that would take me. First stop: a charity bookshop in Hammersmith. The shop was dusty and musty and cramped. The register was one of those old-fashioned contraptions that rang out when the drawer opened and whose number dials rotated furiously when you punched in figures.
Clarence ran the shop. He was mid-sixties, with white hair, unfailingly polite and yet slightly awkward, and he religiously observed the afternoon tea break. There was a small electric kettle in the back, perched on top of the mini-fridge. There wasn't a proper kitchen and plainly no one had cleaned the kettle in eons, as whitish bits of lime scale perpetually floated around the bottom.
There wasn't a whole lot for me to do -- I shelved books, unpacked boxes, and occasionally minded the till. But spent plenty of time hunched over on a small wooden stool, reading whatever book caught my fancy that day. I was reading the Godfather on my fourth day in the shop. The sex scenes were horrifyingly embarrassing for someone like me -- an innocent, a romantic defective whose only real experience in the love department was reading Victorian and pre-Victorian literature whose love scenes were chaste at best, and mostly non-existent.
I had always been too earnest, too serious, and completely self-contained. The forty-year-old trapped in the youngster's body. I started drinking coffee at fourteen because it was the "adult" thing to do, loathed fart jokes and Adam Sandler movies, and lapped up the opportunity to live in "civilized" London for several weeks. Any misstep I made grated on my overly sensitive self; in that sense, I hated to draw attention to myself.
I was determined to find something -- a job, volunteer work -- something to justify my presence there. I had some cash to tide myself over for a few weeks, thanks to generous parents and a small fund I'd saved up over the years. So I started calling around, trying to find non-profits that would take me. First stop: a charity bookshop in Hammersmith. The shop was dusty and musty and cramped. The register was one of those old-fashioned contraptions that rang out when the drawer opened and whose number dials rotated furiously when you punched in figures.
Clarence ran the shop. He was mid-sixties, with white hair, unfailingly polite and yet slightly awkward, and he religiously observed the afternoon tea break. There was a small electric kettle in the back, perched on top of the mini-fridge. There wasn't a proper kitchen and plainly no one had cleaned the kettle in eons, as whitish bits of lime scale perpetually floated around the bottom.
There wasn't a whole lot for me to do -- I shelved books, unpacked boxes, and occasionally minded the till. But spent plenty of time hunched over on a small wooden stool, reading whatever book caught my fancy that day. I was reading the Godfather on my fourth day in the shop. The sex scenes were horrifyingly embarrassing for someone like me -- an innocent, a romantic defective whose only real experience in the love department was reading Victorian and pre-Victorian literature whose love scenes were chaste at best, and mostly non-existent.
