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True Story

Contributed by Bridgeen Gillespie on 31/01/09

This is a true story…He and I moved to Brockley in 2002. The cartoon campervan ‘lived’ on our street. It was there from the very beginning. I was so excited when I saw it, recognising tank girl immediately, painted on its rear doors. It reminded me of a friend from home, who as a teenager painted a huge mural of her on his bedroom wall surrounded by friends’ phone numbers. I took it as a friendly omen of good times ahead. This is a true story…

When we first met I raided his comic collection. So many independent titles I’d never even heard of, Yummy Fur, Peep show, Dirty Plotte, comics that dealt in real life not super heroes. Their confessionals were excruciating, painful and surreal, I was addicted. And like witnessing an accident I couldn’t look away. Here were all the weird things you shouldn’t tell anyone (but that most of us have secretly thought) plain as day in black and white on the page. This was the medium I’d been searching for to find my own voice. But now he’d put these all away. He was a professional digital artist, who didn’t do small press anymore.

The camper had other characters daubed on it too, Scooby doo (an obvious nod to the Mystery Machine), and a graphic silhouette of a girl in black, white and red á la Frank Millar’s Sin City, amid stranger half drawn things. Black claws leaving tears down one side of the van, and glowing eyes peeking out of a dark crevice on the other. It was clearly a work in progress and I looked forward to what was to come….

It was obvious to everyone how much we had in common. We loved the same comics and movies and rock music. ‘A Northern Bonnie and Clyde for the new millennium’ my brother grandly called us. ‘Soul mates’, his mum said… “You’re his ‘Ideal girl’, he used to draw you before he met you!” his dad used to joke. Funny how he never said any of this. This is a true story….

We lived there for 5 years together. In that time I produced comics of my own, careful to move away from the personal material that made him unhappy. I changed jobs a few times, had my first foreign holiday, and saw good friends come and go. For all my progress I was treading water. He was a 3D games artist now.

I kinda became a widow though his work. The commute ate his time, but not as much as the job did, which he brought home every night. He became a master of multitasking, every thing was research, even watching T.V. Nothing just was for fun. There was no such thing as down time. The computer game was king. I began to feel like my whole life was waiting. Waiting for him to come home, waiting for him to finish a game, waiting for my future which lay suspended. And waiting is wasting for people like me.

Since this is a true story, when the change came I wasn’t expecting it. Although, in retrospect I’m surprised it hadn’t come sooner. When I left, the campervan was still parked on our street. The artwork with all its promise remained uncompleted. In all the time I lived there, I never saw anyone driving it, never saw it parked in a different space. I see it now for the empty husk that it was, with everything going on on the outside. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen that went nowhere.