Stars

I did have tremendous luck. Once I’d made a joke about a bear and a mugging, the loss of my phone was kind of bound to happen. And it did. Multiple times.

The first time wasn’t that much of big deal, because I didn’t particularly need it and I could live without my phone - if the one person I used to contact with it was near by. The first time I lost it was right after we’d officially finished rehearsals and the whole cast was given 2 weeks off before the opening performance. The guy I was living with went on holiday to Ireland literally an hour after we finished for the night and he took my phone instead of his. Luckily, I’d arranged to meet Tom at the train station a day later.

He stayed over for a night – we watched Pulp Fiction and fell asleep. We both woke up and realised it was four AM and the DVD menu had been playing for three and a half hours, Tom said, “Damn it, we missed the Diner Showdown?” He then pouted, rolled off the sofa and onto the floor, grabbed around for the DVD controller and skipped through two hours of film (apparently scene selection was too much hassle) until he saw Samuel L. Jackson confronting Tim Roth, to which he pressed play and clambered back up onto the couch like an excited child, lifting up my legs and sliding himself under them.

I fell back to sleep after John Travolta came out of the bathroom, but I woke up at eleven, in my bed, alone. But there was a note placed carefully between my lips (had managed to become stuck to my bottom lip) saying ‘There’s only green tea in this house. Gone to purchase the real thing.’ When he came back, I was sitting at the end of my bed, drinking strawberry milk through a straw, reading Heat magazine and listening to Radiohead.

He didn’t judge me too much when I gave him information on Katie Price and Peter Andre’s impending divorce. He asked me if their divorce was the reason I was so “teary eyed”, I smacked him lightly on the arm and rolled over, holding my strawberry milk high in the air as not to spill it and muttering something about death, Leonardo DiCaprio and my entire life’s work into the thick duvet. He laughed at my muffled complaint and sat himself down, passing me my post which included a Amazon package, which contained a DVD I planned on watching when it got dark. We were meant to be leaving for seven days, so I just propped the case against the TV and went to get dressed.

We were going to Paris as both of us had only been on overnight trips with school (obviously Tom had seen much more as Eton can afford anything and so can the patrons, whereas I’d sat on a coach for 26 hours) and we’d agreed that it’d be fun for us to go together.

He watched TV (The Jeremy Kyle Show) whilst I finished packing. Naturally, I wanted to find out who stole the Sat-Nav and ended up watching half an hour of Jeremy Kyle. I decided that if we were to get to Heathrow on time, I’d do my makeup on the train.

I didn’t do any, except for mascara and lip balm because I asked Tom about his rich boy public school days and I watched him talk for twenty minutes. The tale he told I found rather relevant as it was set in Paris. I did that beautiful snort-laugh type thing, which he seemed to appreciate. I guess one of the true reasons he became an actor was due to his marvellous story telling abilities.

His eyes seemed to light up when he started to speak, “A lot happened at school, it would honestly – you do spend the whole of your developing life there. Relevantly, one of my most vivid memories of secondary school was on our French trip. The teachers had decided it’d be a good idea to stop the coach and show us the Moulin Rouge, walk around it and such, but a small group of us, five sixteen year old boys, wondered off. The coach had to refuel anyway, so we had 20 minutes to marvel at the windmill. Needless to say, we spent fifteen of those twenty minutes in the dirtiest sex shop we could find in that section of the Paris Red Light District. I believe I started a game of spot the prostitute.”

He paused briefly, “I didn’t win, a boy called Lucas did with a fantastic seventeen, whereas I only managed to get fourteen. But I digress; we’d managed to get into a sex shop with… gimp masks hanging… in the window. The shop smelled of shame, sex and quite like what I’d imagine oh, let’s say, Lemmy from Motörhead to smell like – kind of, grimy and seedy. We’d gotten through the section consisting of latex and leather clothing items without drawing too much attention to ourselves.

“Of course various people in the shop had noticed five public school boys in blazers and speaking the Queen’s English, but Joe had walked ahead of the four of us and had found the BDSM sex toys. It all went rather downhill from there. He’d picked up something from a shelf and was reading the information on the back with wide eyes and a mouth to catch flies. He started to make a squeaking noise and dropped the item on the floor with a bang. I didn’t see, but apparently there was a diagram on how to use the claimed ‘item of torture’ as I think Freddie had put it. Freddie had screamed after seeing the diagram and that drew the attention of the old woman who presumably owned the shop. She looked a little like Cruella de Vil and was chasing us out of the shop with one of her whips whilst shouting at us in French.”

He stopped to take a sip of his coffee and looked at me, laughing rather loudly, “She then marched us to our teachers and long story short; we were given a week of 2 hour detentions for ‘Absence Without Leave’ – I was quite pissed off, not about the detentions but the reason for it. It wasn’t World War I and we weren’t being court martialed, so, I didn’t see the need. But I got a lot done during that week of detentions and I do believe those were the reasons I got full marks in my English, History and Drama courses.”

After the story, we’d noticed the entire carriage was silent, minus a few whispers. I let out a witch-like cackle, which was awkward and with shifty eyes and a blush worthy of a lobster, I got out my iPod and put it on shuffle, grinning wildly at the first song that came on. Tom turned to me and mouthed, “You really like the Smiths.” I nodded and began to mime the words to him. He mimed them too, the both of us getting dramatic when the ‘if a double-decker bus, crashes into us’ bit came on. The conductor walked by for our tickets as we acted out ‘to die by your side, is such a heavenly way to die’. He didn’t ask for our tickets.

We were given strange looks the entire rest of the journey. We managed to creep people out on the plane too, but on a smaller scale. To be honest, my day was completely made when the air steward asked us to stop singing Pearl Jam because the lyrics were scaring some of the passengers. I felt I’d accomplished something huge that day and I’m sure Tom did too.