Читать книгу It’s Not Because I Want to Die - Debbie Purdy - Страница 8

After leaving school I led a nomadic lifestyle, never staying in one place for long. My short attention span and love of adventure meant that once I felt I’d experienced a situation, I was ready to move on. This quality used to get me into trouble back at school and college, but after the MS diagnosis I felt grateful for it. Sometimes when fear and grief for my lost life got too much, I would hide in bed, pull the covers right up over my head and cry. I’d sob my heart out, feeling desperate and helpless, but then I’d hear a story on the News Channel (it’s been permanently on in my bedroom for years, only turned off at night if Omar is at home) that would make me gulp back the tears. It’s hard to feel devastated by your problems with walking when you can see the effects of the tsunami in Southeast Asia, people caught in the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina or bombs dropping on Gaza. The footage of those disasters showed people in unimaginable situations dealing with their lives as best they could, and I guess it put my problems into perspective. I could turn on the tap and get fresh, clean water to take my prescription painkillers, just phone a friend for a chat or use the computer to contact friends further afield. I will always need to mourn the ‘me’ that I’ve lost, but the desperate face of a mum who has lost her child to the war in Iraq makes me so grateful for the ‘me’ I’ve still got and not want to miss out on the things I can do.

My schoolteachers always used to complain that I didn’t apply myself, and none of them would have been surprised that by the age of 30 I’d done umpteen different jobs but never had what you might call a ‘proper career’. I took A levels in maths, economics, government and politics, and sociology, because since the age of 13 I had wanted to be prime minister. (I took maths because I was good at it and figured it would be useful if, as prime minister, I could at least balance a chequebook.) There were always lively political discussions at the dinner table at home, and with the arrogance of youth I thought I could solve the world’s problems by making the political system more fair and inclusive. I joined the Liberal Party and committed a lot of time and energy to the causes I believed would improve the world – as well as the ones that looked most fun.

I spent a couple of years knocking on doors campaigning for local councillors, and I learned wheelchair basketball and helped out at Sports Association for the Disabled. I planned to change the world by improving my corner of it. However, the more I learned about society, the more I realised that tweaking the existing status quo would be harder and less effective than building a new one. I began to read more political literature, and the more I read the more I considered myself a Marxist.

I took two of my A levels at a further-education college in Windsor. I remember my time there mainly for that first parachute jump with the Territorial Army, back in 1981, sparking my lifelong addiction to adrenaline rushes. About fifty of us, male and female, had signed up for the jump. During a couple of days away from college, I thought better of it and returned planning to drop out, but I discovered that of our original fifty, only six remained, all of them boys. That made me the last girl standing and I felt I had to do it as a matter of feminist principle.

I moved to London to do my other two A levels at a college near Old Street, and I lived in a squat – rather a nice squat, an old vicarage – with a fantastic bunch of people: a city stockbroker, a Buddhist with a motley collection of stray cats and, the reason I was there, some Marxist revolutionaries. I learned a lot, not least about choosing the battles that were most important and not being sidetracked by every little injustice you perceive. I went to Kingston Polytechnic to study sociology. Then, after a term and a half, I moved to Birmingham to read humanities (economics, politics and sociology). I made the move to Birmingham because of politics rather than education (although I think my involvement in politics was the best education available). I worked a few nights a week as a nightclub hostess, greeting people at the door and checking they conformed to the dress code (on the way in, anyway), and if we had live bands on, we had to frisk people if they looked suspicious.

In Birmingham, I decided that I wouldn’t graduate. I thought I was learning more from living, arguing and listening than I was from lectures. I bought my first house in Lozells, Birmingham, back in the days of 100 per cent mortgages, when buying was cheaper than renting. My bank manager said I should definitely go for a job selling advertising space for Thomson Directories because I had convinced him to lend me the £11,000 for the house while still a student! (These were the days when houses were homes, not investments.)

Nowadays you need a degree to become a toilet cleaner, but in the 1980s you didn’t, and when a man I met at the club offered me a job selling advertising space it seemed like a good idea. The money was better than a student grant (a historical anachronism), and although I’d had many jobs since the age of 14 – including working in a farm shop, plucking Christmas turkeys, mucking out stables and working as a hospital cleaner – this would be the first real one. It seemed about time I had a job that meant I’d stay clean, warm and dry, and that I needed to dress properly for.

I was something of a fashion victim in those days, but the phases never lasted very long. I was punk for a week or so, but found the look too uncomfortable and got impatient with the amount of time it took to get ready in the morning. For a while I had a short back and sides with tufts of differentcoloured hair – orange and blue and pink – and I’d wear tight little black dresses, making me look like a parakeet.

I started the telesales job in Birmingham, but when some friends were moving to Edinburgh I went too and found a field sales job for the Scotsman. Then, within a year, I got a job with Yellow Pages. I loved the variety of working as a field sales rep: at 9 a.m. I could be at the stylish offices of a multinational corporation, at 10.30 in a draughty barn talking to a farmer about his plant-hire sideline, and at noon I might be at a local tanning salon. I met loads of wonderful people and travelled all over Scotland and the north of England, feeling energised by my life and the people in it. Even so, I still found myself hankering after change.

My dad had been working a lot in the United States for most of the last decade, leaving my mum at home in Britain, but in 1985 he took a contract in Oslo. The following year I decided to go out and stay with him for a while. We’d only seen each other sporadically while he was in America and I missed him. We spoke on the phone, but it wasn’t the same as being part of each other’s lives. In fact, on arrival, I realised there was a rather major piece of news he hadn’t shared with me – a girlfriend called Eppy, who had two kids, aged about 12 and 15. He had never mentioned this part of his life and I was surprised, to say the least.

The night I arrived in Norway, Dad took me to stay with some Norwegian friends so he could explain to me about his living arrangements on neutral territory. He wasn’t sure how I would react, but he told me that his marriage to Mum had been unhappy (what a surprise!) and that he had been with Eppy for several years. The children were hers, not his. I was sad that he hadn’t been able to share this with his children sooner. Despite his free-thinking scientific brain, he was still conditioned by society to keep up a pretence and avoid admitting that his marriage had failed.

I must be jinxed! Not long after I arrived, the company Dad was working with went out of business, so he wasn’t needed and returned to the States. I loved it in Norway, even in winter temperatures of minus 20 degrees, and I decided to stay. I got a job selling jewellery on a market stall, which turned out to be virtually the only stall in the area that had a licence to trade. There were dozens of illegal stalls, and when the police came by, everyone would quickly load their goods under my stall and disappear.

Lots of different nationalities lived side by side – Palestinians, French, Algerians, Germans, Americans – selling jewellery, trinkets and dodgy records. There was a great community feeling. The Norwegian company Dad had worked with had paid the lease on his house for almost another year, so I stayed on when he left and shocked the neighbours by letting a few of my bohemian friends move in. One of them taught me to ski, which I took to straight away. Living in Oslo was fantastic. Great cross-country or downhill ski runs were only a short bus, tram or boat ride from the city. To me, getting there was as much fun as being there. They weren’t flashy slopes with smart restaurants and multiple chairlifts, like you find in the fashionable resorts in the Alps – just clean, family-oriented spaces. That didn’t cost anything.

A girl I met while working on the jewellery stall took me to the Café de Paris one night and I immediately loved the friendly atmosphere. The owners were a Norwegian-Algerian woman and her French husband, both of whom treated the club like an extension of their home, rather than a place of business, and it worked. It had such a warm, welcoming atmosphere, and it was a second home for a lot of foreigners – French-speaking Africans, African-Americans from the NATO base and of course a wide-eyed English girl. When they offered me a job behind the bar, I decided to accept. I continued working on my jewellery stall by day and took up residence behind the bar of the Café de Paris by night. If they hadn’t paid me to be there, I would have spent all my money on the other side of the bar. It was home-from-home and my time there would prove to be one of those rare life-changing experiences because I met loads of people who would become friends for life: my best friend Vera, Greg (the friend who was with me the day I collapsed in Bradford), Chris Merchant, who was an English singer, the American club manager Dwayne, and Mildred Jones, the singer who eventually coaxed me to Singapore.

Meeting Mildred for the first time was kind of scary. She was larger than life at over 6 feet tall, yet she wore vertiginous high heels, glamorous dresses covered in seed pearls and glitter, full make-up and long lacquered nails – and that was just for breakfast! On stage she was a colossus: incredibly imposing, oozing sex appeal and with the voice of a diva. During her long career, which started in the late 1950s, she had been instrumental in encouraging clubs to open their doors to black artists. She had toured Russia with B. B. King and had played all over Scandinavia, as well as in her native America. She wrote her own songs, full of double entendres, and always had love-struck admirers milling around. She was in her 50s by the time I met her and didn’t encourage these men (some very young). I once overheard her say, ‘Honey, I’ve got underwear that’s older than you!’ But they were like flies to flypaper.

When Omar first met Mildred, he thought she must be a man, due to her stature and deep voice. Singapore was home to lots of lady-boys and it took me a long time to convince him that she was 100 per cent woman under the seed pearls and glitter. Too much woman for most men to handle.

Mildred was playing in the piano bar at the Grand Hotel, just down the road from the Café de Paris. She was usually starving when she finished her set at 1 a.m., so Dwayne would send up a plate of food covered in silver foil. It became my job to take up her late-night supper, and when she noticed that I had fake nails too, she asked if I would come back the next day to help repair hers: she would batter them nightly on the piano and nail salons were crazy money. My hand was trembling the first time I squeezed out the little blobs of glue and positioned the nails in place, but somehow they didn’t go wonky, so I acquired another (unpaid) job. I was in awe of her for ages, until I got comfortable with the astonishing presence and came to appreciate that beneath the glitz she was a down-to-earth southern belle with a filthy sense of humour and a raucous laugh.

Greg was a drop-dead gorgeous American who worked for NATO, and we nicknamed him ‘GQ’ because he was always so impeccably dressed. I dated him briefly, but it’s weird going out with someone who has more hair products than you and takes much longer to get ready to go out in the evening. We drifted easily into friendship and I lived platonically in his flat with him for a couple of months when I needed somewhere to stay.

Vera was working behind the bar in the Café de Paris the first week I was there. I heard it was her birthday and I took a cake from the pantry, but I couldn’t find any candles, so I stuck in a light bulb with ‘Happy Birthday’ scrawled on it. I left it in the fridge for her to find and she thought it was funny. We just clicked. Like me, she loved travelling and music (she plays piano beautifully) and, of course, men. Unfortunately her taste was a bit dodgy in those days and she fell for the club doorman.

Despite (or rather because of) the fact that we were the only girls working at the Café de Paris, at one time Dwayne, who was a gay, black American, used to make us do all the heavy work. He said he didn’t want to risk injuring one of ‘his boys’ and would get our names mixed up. When it was pointed out what our names were, he’d dismiss us with an imperious wave, saying, ‘You all look the same to me.’ He was wonderfully eccentric, very stylish, always strutting around in a long, flapping coat and Cuban heels, and I absolutely loved working with him.

I stayed in Oslo for a couple of years, longer than I had stayed anywhere in my adult life at that point, but then things began to change at the Café de Paris as my friends upped and moved. Mildred had gone back to her hometown of Houston, Texas, and she called and invited me to work there with her for a while. She said she needed someone to help her sort out the copyright on her songs. I reckoned I could manage that, and of course I wanted to see more of the States. My dad was living there again, so I’d be able to squeeze in a visit to see him and Eppy (whose real name, I found out, was Ethel).

I spent a few months with Mildred in Houston, learning some facts about the music world that would stand me in good stead later on, and I grew to love Americans. After leaving Texas, I planned to continue westwards round the world to visit my uncle Tony, who was working in Hong Kong. The plane had to stop briefly in Tokyo, and though I very much wanted to see the city, the cost of breaking my flight was prohibitive, so it was straight on to Hong Kong. When we landed in Tokyo, though, an announcement was made. It seemed the plane was overbooked, so they wanted to know if anyone would be willing to stay the night in Japan, all expenses paid, plus $200. Of course my hand shot up at lightning speed. The next day was the same, and the one after that. I was staying in a much nicer hotel than I could afford, with all my meals paid for, and by now I had received more in compensation than my ticket had cost. By the time they had space on the onward flight, I’d met some people and been offered a job dancing in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, so I decided to stay for a while.

The men I came across were very respectful. I loved dancing and European girls did well in those bars, where if you had even the slightest bit of rhythm they thought you were Janet Jackson.

By day I had a few jobs making conversation in English with Japanese businessmen so they could polish up their language skills. I lived well enough, sharing a flat with another girl, but after about seven months I felt it was time to go. The wanderlust took over and it was off again, this time to Hong Kong.

I arrived to find that Uncle Tony wasn’t there any more, but on my very first night I went to the bar of a hotel where I planned to stay and there was Chris, the English singer I’d met in Oslo. I stayed with him and his wife while I looked for a job and found my feet.

A girl called Jane, who had been working with my uncle Tony before he left Hong Kong, helped me find a job. While looking though her photo album after dinner one night, I was stunned to see a photo of my ex-flatmate Joss, with whom I’d lived for a while. We compared notes and realised I had taken Jane’s old room when I moved in with Joss.

I did a couple of different jobs in Hong Kong. Jane introduced me to an ad agency based in the building where she worked, and I started working for them selling corporate sponsorship for a road-safety project called Constable Care. I had more time (and enthusiasm) than anyone else in the company, so ended up running it. Because of the experience I gained there of bringing together the Government Information Services (GIS), the police, army, kids with corporate sponsors and the media, I ended up helping Ogilvy & Mather PR set up and run the Keep Hong Kong Clean campaign. (The first taught me the power of the media, the second to deal with failure.)

When I’d got myself settled, Vera came over to join me from Oslo and she moved into my flat for a few months. She was now studying sociology and managed to get a grant. We figured that living in Hong Kong and reading her textbooks would probably be good study. The exchange rate and difference in the cost of living meant she could get by in Hong Kong for the academic year.

It was a brilliant place to live, with 24-hour music and parties. It was obsessed with money and hedonism, probably a bit like the City in London but with a better climate.

I lived in Hong Kong from 1988 to the end of 1990, and I was there when the students protested in Tiananmen Square and Chinese troops opened fire on them. Information wasn’t getting through to the Chinese public, who didn’t have access to Western media, so the South China Morning Post printed cut-out A4 pages explaining the situation and anyone who could faxed them to contacts on the mainland. The massacre caused consternation in Hong Kong because the 1997 handover had already been arranged and was fast approaching and locals were worried that this might be the way they would be treated under Chinese rule.

Meanwhile, back home, Mum’s health had been deteriorating over the years and she was now finding it difficult to look after herself. She was overweight, and that probably contributed to her lack of mobility, but it was also the reason why she wouldn’t ever consult doctors. ‘They’ll only tell me to lose weight,’ she complained, and I’m sure she was right. Unfortunately it meant that her diabetes was never diagnosed. Uncle Frank, the husband of Mum’s sister Beryl, was diabetic, so Mum would clip recipes out of magazines that would be suitable for him, while still eating sugary foods herself. She didn’t complain much about her health, but she needed someone to help her with shopping and housework and anything that required much energy. Carolyn had been doing it for years, and I now felt it was time I helped.

I flew back from 25° sunshine to cold, grey, rainy Bradford, a city I’d never lived in before and where I knew no one apart from Mum and Carolyn. I got a job in Leeds with a recruitment agency, Michael Page. I initially went to ask them to find me a job, but they laughed and offered me a job with them instead. I bought a house near Mum’s, a tall, narrow terrace on a steep hill. Mum was happy to have me at home, and I was happy to be able to spend time with her. I was nearly 27 years old and had had more than a dozen careers to date, so maybe it was time for me to settle down just a bit.

I really enjoyed getting close to Mum again, but we were to have limited time together because in 1992, just over a year after I came back to Britain, she died very suddenly. The shock left me reeling for the next couple of years. I couldn’t decide what to do with myself any more. I felt unbalanced, like a tree without roots or a house without foundations.

Dad came back and took a job in Cheltenham. I took a marketing job in Redditch, near Birmingham, and was able to live with him during the week and drive back to Bradford at weekends. The work was fine at first, but I soon got frustrated. When you keep changing profession, as I did, you never get a chance to work your way up to the interesting jobs at the top. No one’s going to offer you a massive new opportunity when you have a track record like mine. Some people stay with the same employer for decades and climb the ladder – my brother worked for the BBC for over twenty years – but it wasn’t in my nature to put my head down and work. So when Mildred rang and invited me out to Singapore in September 1994, I was ready to change jobs, homes, continents, everything.

Within a week of arriving, Mildred had introduced me to Peter and I’d got the job with Adventure Travel, a company that offered adrenaline-fuelled package breaks to expats living throughout the Far East. They needed someone who knew where the apostrophes should go and I persuaded them that punctuation was my specialist subject.

The job was like a dream come true for me, especially when Peter said he’d like me to go and check out some of the sporting activities and write copy myself – except that my MS diagnosis came only a few months after I’d started. Would I still be able to do all the things they needed me to? I was utterly determined that nothing would stand between me and my newfound love of scuba-diving, so in April 1995, soon after I returned to Singapore, I went to review an Indonesian dive site.

I could still swim and breathe in the mask, so I didn’t think there would be a problem. After a dive one day, though, I swam to the shore and was walking up the beach when I looked down and saw I’d left a trail of bloody footprints all the way up the sand. My feet had been cut to ribbons on the sharp coral and I hadn’t felt a thing. That was a bit of a shock. I was going to have to take a little more care of myself.

Peter sent me on a number of other trips: white-water rafting down rapids on the edge of a jungle in Borneo and more scuba-diving, but I learned to keep an eye on my legs because I couldn’t trust that I was feeling sensations in them accurately. They weren’t responding the way I’d been used to. I never thought I’d be doing this job for too long, but I’d figured a bit longer than this.

Writing about music gave me the chance to meet and interview lots of fascinating people, and gave me free access to Singapore’s buzzing music scene, but the late nights were becoming harder to cope with (even before my MS diagnosis).

My next job – one I’m still doing today, albeit a bit differently – was managing Omar. It’s not something I actively chose in the beginning, but I was living with a houseful of musicians. Their talent lay in making music and mine lay in organisation, so we all just did what we could. They also each did what they could to make my life easier (except getting places on time).

It was incredible luck that I met Omar and the Cuban Boys when I did. The timing was impeccable. They needed managing and they met me, and I became friends with a bunch of people who were able to make me laugh at things that would otherwise have made me cry. It was through them that I worked out how to deal with the disease. Because of them, I was able to take my neurologist’s advice and get on with everything I wanted to do for as long as I could.