There are some people who say, ‘I’m optimistic’, or ‘I don’t like change’ or, ‘I’m a chocoholic’. I’m not one of those people. Maybe they just say these things to feel grounded and safe, which is fine I suppose. But there is a chance that they really mean it, which makes me feel so different and strange and sad.

I suppose the only consistent thing about me is that I’m changeable…and that’s a really nice way of saying it. I’ve been called chaotic and mad, plenty of times. And I am all that and worse, too. I mean, for starters I’ve got no idea whether I like stuff or not, or whether I’m an optimist or a pessimist or what kind of man I fancy. Things just happen to me, I feel it and then do it. Take smoking for instance. Now that’s meant to be really addictive. But I don’t even know if I smoke or not. I mean, sometimes I do, for weeks at a time, forty a day or something, and then all of a sudden the thought of a cigarette will make me feel so sick and I’ll waft smoke out of my face in bars and make coughing noises. I think it’s the commitment I don’t like…I don’t want cigarettes to feel like me and them are too-good-a friends.

Anyway, that’s the kind of person I am. So you can imagine I’m a bit difficult to be around sometimes. Being fun and spontaneous is one thing, but being mental is another. That’s what I’ve been told by plenty of people. And that’s why I left really. It was just too much for my family having this crazy daughter. And Katie, I mean, I could see I scared her. She loved me, perhaps more than the rest of them, but it wasn’t good for her to be around me, not when I was so up-in-the-air, and she had school and growing-up to do.

I’m not so selfish that I’d go away all-together, although I often feel like it…so I thought the next best thing is to make myself scarce…move to another country, tell them all I’m safe and just get on with staying alive. It’s not a bad plan. If your in a similar situation yourself, I’d recommend it.

You see I’ve always been one for grand gestures, you do something dramatic and that’s all you can think about for a while. You know when you're at school and the fire alarm goes off and everyone pretends to be scared but they’re actually really excited? Well, I don’t think people change that much. They pretend to, though. I think maybe I just pretend less. So whenever something bad was going on, as a kid, I’d just do something mad - like break a window, or cut off all my hair, or run away. Doing that kind of stuff makes you feel really free and it’s pretty addictive.

So when all this shit was happening with Mum and Dad, and I started scaring myself by getting pretty violent, I had to go one better. There’s no point shaving your head if you’ve already done it five times. So I just packed a bag, went to the station and got on a bus to Heathrow. I mean I was only eighteen so I’d no idea that it’s the expensive flights that go from Heathrow - if I was going to do it now, I’d go from Stanstead. Anyway, I bought a little bottle of vodka from the shop in the bus station, this was still in the days when that was an unusual thing for me to do, and just sat on the bus swigging it and crying and making up poems. It all sounds pretty lame written down I suppose. It took along time to get to the airport and I was cold - they always put the air-conditioning on too high - and it was all old people who kept looking at me and I wanted to punch their stupid old faces.

I cheered up when we got to the airport - I really, really love airports - and went straight to the pub. It was some fake Irish pub and I had a sit down and got talking to this London cabbie. I said I was in an arranged marriage and was going to meet my husband for the first time. He was surprised I was drinking Guiness if I was so religious, but I said I was an alcoholic which was why I was getting sent off. I think he’d drunk quite a lot because his eyes filled up and he bought a bottle of champagne.

So after all this I was a little bit pissed, not enough for anyone to notice though, but it did make me feel quite full of myself, and like I should travel in style. So I went the British Airways desk and spoke to some stuck up tart. She thought I was skint but I wasn‘t….I’d taken my Ma’s cash card and stolen some funds the day before. It was round the time of all this bombing and stuff, and she didn’t suppose I wanted to go to the middle east…but I said yes straight away, a bit of danger suited me fine. I got on the plane and slept like a, I won’t say a baby because I was too messy for that. No, I slept like a smelly old tramp, and woke up in Tel Aviv, ready to start my life. Bam!

So I’m in Israel. I’m not stupid, well not that stupid, but I honestly thought Israel would be all sand and camels and seriousness and not much actual fun at all. I just kind of went because it was kind of a random stupid thing for an eighteen year old catholic girl to do. What I discovered is they’re obsessed with it being all green and nice so there are sprinklers everywhere, and I only saw camels once - and they were for tourists. But the best thing was, because everyone things they’re going to get bombed all the time, they spend lots of the time drinking and going out and having loads of fun, which was pretty brilliant. I mean, people who don’t think about tomorrow are my kind of people, because if I was thinking about tomorrow all the time I’d probably just want to sleep and not wake up.

So first up I went to this hostel in Tel Aviv, and booked myself into this mixed sex dorm. To be honest I think I was hoping for a bit of romance. I’m pretty much always hoping for a bit of romance, actually. Well, I went out for the night with these Columbian guys, which was looking hopeful, but they turned out to be a bit creepy and not much fun at all.

The next day I got some work through the hostel cleaning up the beach. It was pretty shitty work and I realised I wouldn’t be able to do it for more than a couple of days, being as I’m so lazy and have zero tolerance for pretty much any kind of work, so I needed to find something else to do. Turns out they fired me that afternoon anyway because they caught me smoking a joint in the toilets with this funny little Russian cleaner girl called Betty. Betty’s brilliant. She's tiny and dark and very pretty, but not annoying in the way that some small girls are. I mean, I bet she hadn’t been a sweet little girl, I bet she’d been runty and ugly looking, so she wasn’t all self obsessed and needy like some small-ish people I know. Also, she had this weird American accent she learnt from films and sounded just like Madonna in ‘Who’s that Girl?’…a bit like Minnie Mouse or something. Well, they fired her too and she told them to ‘fuck off ’ which was something I might have done, so I pretty much fell in love with her right then. She’d heard about this kibbutz thing, where you just turned up and did some work and they gave you your food and stuff, and the beer was cheap. So we went back to the hostel and picked up our stuff and started hitching. I’d never hitched before, and Mum had always told me it was a sure way to get yourself killed, so you can see why the idea was so attractive to me at that point in time.

It took us five hours to get there and I think it should have taken about one, but the feeling of having got somewhere without paying a penny is a pretty good feeling. If you ever get a chance to hitch then I suggest you do it. If you get murdered though, don’t blame me.

So we got there and I was feeling pretty good. It was hot, and I was with my new friend Betty, and hitching was my new favourite thing. And because of all the bombing and stuff they hadn’t had so many volunteers turn up, so there was room for me and Betty to start right away. I remember I just sat on the ground, leaning on a tree. I was reading some shitty book with some stupid-arse woman in it, but I felt really good. I thought, I should be in hell for all the trouble I’ve caused, but it feels like I’m in heaven. And then I got worried because pride comes before a fall, and you shouldn’t count your blessings before they hatch, and stuff like that, which is pretty uncharacteristic because I normally have no problem with feeling good.

The guy came and he told us about how it all worked, how we’d be in this factory making soap, and when we had to turn up for meals and stuff. We met some of the other volunteers who all seemed a bit weird, although I don’t know who I am to talk. I mean, it seemed like they’d all got something they were escaping from, or maybe that was just me and Betty. Because Betty was escaping too, you see. There was one American guy with loads of tattoos who seemed a bit up-his-own-arse, and a South African girl who had a squashed up face and was really touchy. There were a couple of Korean boys who seemed nice enough but didn’t speak English and two English girls who seemed stupid and boring and obviously wanted to my be best friends. I told them I was vegan but wanted to join the army so I could shoot at people and that I had a seventy-five year old boyfriend. None of that was true, by the way, although I did try to be vegan for a little bit when I was fifteen. Anyway, they didn’t try to be friends with me after that which was a relief. So we sat around and got pretty drunk, and I bought a pack of these Israeli cigarettes called Mustang, and smoked the lot to try and get used to them, which worked because soon I was smoking nothing else. And I woke up the next day and went to the factory and discovered I quite liked making soap, which was a real surprise to me I can tell you.

So there I was, working in a soap factory in a place I couldn’t find on the map. Funny how life turns out, isn’t it? Well, me and Betty spent a lot of time hitching into Tel Aviv, taking all kinds of shit, dancing our arses off to this terrible trance music, and generally causing chaos. I’d pretty much given up on meeting any decent, normal people as most of them just liked smoking shishas (which are lame and don’t even get you stoned) and being fake and stupid and annoying.
Betty had told me some mad stuff about her life. About how her Dad and died and she’d had to sleep with some man for money to keep her family all right. She’d got pregnant and got rid of it which it had broken her heart, but she couldn’t bear to have this old blokes baby, and who could blame her? She felt really bad about it though, which I can understand. Anyway, she just flipped out and came here, she’s Jewish so she got citizenship, which is good because it’s hard to find somewhere to live if your Russian, she said. She just left a note telling her Brother he’d have to look after her Mum. He’s only seventeen so she feels bad about that too. Some people feel bad about a lot of stuff that’s not their fault. Me, I feel bad about a lot of stuff but it pretty much always is my fault.

One day we went to Haifa for a change, which was a mistake as it’s really boring, so pretty much all we could do was go to some old-men bars and get pissed before hitching back. Betty got pretty brave, being drunk, and started trying to analyse me. She told me I was weird, like it was a fact, which it practically is, and started guessing all this shit about me, like I was abused, or that my parents abandoned me. I got really angry about that and felt like punching her but I didn’t which was good - maybe I am growing up. So I told her straight away that my parents loved me, and so did my Grandma, and that we had money, and I went to a good school. I was a little bit drunk too. So I started telling her my theory that some people are just cursed. I said:
‘My greatest fear is that I’m going to murder someone.’
I’d never told anyone that before. I always thought they’d think I was over-dramatic or something. But she believed me. She looked scared. She told me:
‘Have you been to counselling? Have you been to see someone?’.
She sounded so stupid and American then that I really wanted to punch her, but instead I dug the zip on the sleeve of my jacket really hard into my arm, so it bled a little bit.
‘Have you?’ I asked her.
‘Well…no…but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to murder someone.’
We both realised then she was thinking about her dead baby so I wanted to change the subject but I knew she wouldn’t let me.
‘Things don’t have to be like this Ida, you can do whatever you want. You have parents who love you, you’re clever, you’re English, so you can live practically anywhere…you need to stop feeling bad..’
I just nodded and hoped she’d stop. How could I ever stop feeling bad? I was bad, the way some people have black hair, or red hair, it’s just a fact of life.
‘No-one blames anyone anymore, for anything,’ I said,
‘ My Dads a social worker and I see it all the time. Oh, she fed methadone to her kids, oh well, her parents abused her, oh! He raped his daughter, well he was raped himself…’
I realised I was getting a bit loud but I didn’t give a shit.
‘Well the thing is, it has to start somewhere! Once, there was one person who had everything normal, and they were just bad…and that person is me. For fucks sake Betty you stupid bitch…that’s just the way it fucking is.’
I threw my glass on the floor and stormed out of the bar. I hate myself for doing it but I always storm out of places. Betty ran after me and hugged me from behind, like a little dog or something, and I stopped being annoyed with her pretty soon after, and we went to another bar and drunk lots more, and fell asleep in some park.