Bluebird On Fire

Chapter 1

I don't like reading but I have read a few books, like, to improve my understanding of life or something. What I don't like about them, well, those that actually say something, is that the protagonist is always a writer, or a frustrated writer, or the kid at school that wrote political graffiti on the tables, or works for a publishing company, or failed every class at school except English. It annoys me because I get the impression that writers only write books for people who are into literature and English, so they miss out the important bits: life itself.

I hate books and I hated English classes. Poetry and novels just seemed like polished slices of life, so gleaming that anything of the real had been hoovered out of them. So I've come to the conclusion that what I'm looking for, and aren't we all searching for something, won't be in a book or a film or a conversation with anyone else for that matter.

You see: I'm looking for freedom.

Sure, books and films and music have a place, but no one seems to interpret them like I do. For example, at school, Shakespeare tells us that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and the girls crying when Claire Danes wakes up to find a dead Leonardo Di Caprio supports Billy's view. But R + J don't strike me that way. When I watched the final scene my eyes were gleaming; I only saw freedom as a comet collided with a truth that I just couldn't articulate.

School was a weird, existential scheme – all these gargoyle-like faces zooming in and looming in front of me, lecturing me, mouths opening and closing within drained dispositions and me – floating in and out of consciousness, phrases washing over an unstimulated mind: 'fixed-mind set', 'potential', 'the future', 'GCSES' until one day my butterfly-mind was engaged by the librarian:

'...books that don't have inappropriate things in.'

'What things?' I asked.

30 pairs of eyes focused suddenly sharply on me. I think they were surprised to hear the perpetual day dreamer contribute to class discussion for the first time in four years.

'Things that are inappropriate for a child,' she'd replied.

I mulled this over this phrase for a while until it troubled me and I thought about it all the time. There was this world rotating way above my head – there was a language and a beat that I knew nothing about and I wasn't sure that this wasn't the freedom I so desired, but at the time it was merely a nebulous impression, no, not an impression - a feeling growing within till it might burst without. Perhaps.

But I couldn't put my finger on it. Something was going on that I wasn't a part of - there was a hidden world and it was 'inappropriate' and I couldn't help thinking that this hidden and inappropriate world had some magical key that would unlock the door to possibilities that might just set me free.

I knew that sweating my guts on my mum's underwear shop on the market every Saturday for £50 to spend on spray tans and gel nails wasn't freedom. But I wasn't so stupid that I didn't think I'd have to earn a living the day I finished school.

Mum didn't look too free - up to her eyes in tax returns and working like a bitch, struggling to pay the mortgage and heating bills.

The girls I hung out with thought they were free. Extra, they'd said. Enlightened by love on the dancefloor. But hobbling ungainly on legs caricatured by crazy high heels, tottering to the toilet to desperately reapply highlighter to molten faces didn't look free to me either.

I thought about modelling. That looked easy and well paid. And money we're taught is some kind of highway to freedom. People told me I had 'the look': edgy, aloof, cool. I didn't see it that way. It was just the way I was made: long mousy hair - very long, straight, centre parting, untouched by dye or straighteners. My eyebrows were untouched too, thick and slightly raised, I'd noticed, in the same way models in the 80s took Quaaludes, and, perhaps, models today do Botox to look all starry eyed and surprised. My lips were full and cushiony; my skin pale and clear. Result! You might think, but I'm wired up wrong. Oh I had the look alright – salt-stained ballet shoes, white shirt, waistcoat and black magician gave me Instagram-able cool, but I had a test shot and was awkward, unable to pose. God or someone hadn't blessed me with grace or co-ordination.

"Can't you sort your legs out," I remember the photographer saying with a grimace. But I just couldn't seem to.

We were all looking for a quick fix to stardom. I watched Britain's Got Talent and the X-Factor and there was something creepy about those shows. They reminded me of the Hunger Games – all that crazy laughter and desperation to be a someone while the rest of the districts sweated in low-paid jobs to fund these lifestyles of the rich and famous. I'm no political activist or anything like that, but I do like to feel the ground under my feet. Besides, I'd see some young talented kid that had written a song and had a voice from the angels to do it justice, but I had the impression that they'd need to live life fully to develop a soulfulness completely absent from most of the pop chart. Talented and potentially poignant kids were snapped up by Cowell's glitzy paradise leaving them with no experience to draw on to write amazing songs. Like Ed Sheeran for example. 'The A Team' is amazing, but would he have been able to write a song like that if he'd been groomed by the Syco hit machine? Me thinks not.

I wanted a quick fix to freedom. But I wanted freedom with a capital F. Like Cipher in 'The Fast and the Furious'. He tells Dom that the best thing in his life is: the ten seconds between start and finish when all he's thinking about is being free. That's what I wanted – to be so free that I didn't even have to think about it or anything else. Is that too much to ask? But how or where would I find that kind or pure, unadulterated freedom? I knew it had nothing to do with money, fame or love – it was far beyond any of that: I just knew it.

I didn't enjoy my first job in a call centre. I was sold some sort of office-y job that would suit my lack of interest in any of my school subjects, my lack of interest in the professions and my lack of skills or qualifications. So I turned in each day, taking it all in, watching the minutes on the bottom right hand-corner of my plasma screen blink towards death. It was frustrating. Like school. I wriggled in my seat all day, ants in my pants, just waiting to be released.

Lunch time was a release from the monotony into more monotony down Starbucks with the girls.

I chugged my tepid concoction of sugar and milk and spilled the tea:

"I just booked a Brazilian blow-dry on Friday night. They're half-price at Brambles at the moment, does anyone want the link?"

"There's a scout from Love Island at Tribeca at the weekend. We can get priority tickets if we Tweet this ad."

"Wow! Message me the link, I'm well up for that."

I blew up: "Why d'ya wanna go on a crappy show like that. You're worth more than that? You're worth more than this," I'd motioned towards the oppressive concrete quad we were sitting in, all tanned up and perfumed and dolled up for what? "We're worth more than this Primark shit too,' I said hurling the cheap court shoes that had been pinching my feet all day towards a bin and replacing them with the worn ballet shoes I'd been carrying in my bag.

"That's what we love about you, BB – you always speak your mind."

"No. That's what you hate about me," I replied bitterly, walking away and jumping the bus.

I rode that bus route up and down for hours with a burning anger and sense of injustice which, like that growing sense of my search for something I could believe, I was unable to articulate. Maybe that's why the people that did well in English and liked reading books always wrote the books worth reading, I thought.

Still, nothing made sense.

Those girls. They really thought they were living the dream. There. Surrounded by the glass and concrete and plasma that I watched growing from the bus window to form my metropolis, I had a moment of clarity. I wasn't criticising those girls. They at least had friends, but I just got the underlying message that all of us wanted to get out there, get somewhere, make something of our lives.

Everyday my city was looking more like New York City – the biggest apple – the capital of the world. Every city trade-marked and fighting for attention along the new democratic skyline. I looked at it mushrooming – an artificial environment moving faster than we were.

I wasn't going to dull my senses in some second rate city in some fourth rate job to buy cut-price blow-dries and cheap shoes that pinched my feet. I just wasn't going to do that.

I decided right then that I was going to find this freedom that I knew we all wanted, that I knew was on the horizon, that I knew existed. I leaned forward full of the static stars of a girl with purpose. I didn't think that I'd ever sleep again.