Adrian – A better poet than an Anxiety A level student. Drinker of red wine and maker of unusual sentences. Ozone layer-destroying hair and spray-on jeans. Inspiration: goths called Adrian.
Aileen – Bar staff at The Anchor pub. Irish? Possibly, but with a good dose of the rest of the UK. Lives upstairs from Bae. Other than that is none of your business. Inspiration: uncertain, but also Dexxy’s Midnight Runners.
Bae – Student of English Literature, Sociology and Pure Maths at the college. She has a short bob of blond hair. Natural? Bleached? No-one knows. Not a princess. Owns an IBM fax machine. Inspiration: visually, Bae from NMIXX, but otherwise she is her own invention.
Bus Driver – Regular guy who might be a dick on any other day of the week, but who choses not to be that guy today. Inspiration: maybe me, maybe you.
Dave Carlisle – College head lecturer in Computer Science. Wears too much aftershave and has dubious skills in shirt and tie colour choices. Went to Thames Poly with Bae’s aunt. A dull bully. Inspiration: insecure 1970s men.
Deborah – Retail staff at Our Price Records, expert on all that is cool, and judge of bad music choices. Wears carefully destroyed Doctor Martens. Low voice. Inspiration: far less than she thinks she has.
Eloise: Library staff at the college. Makes mixtapes. Inspiration: goth girls who don’t give a shit everywhere, and that single by The Damned, of course. (goto 69)
Frazer – Bae’s cat. Named after either Liz Frazer of the Cocteau Twins or Sir James George Frazer, the author of The Golden Bough. Possibly both. Inspiration: yes.
Frazzle – Inventor, genius and idiot, but occasionally a useful source of obscure technological peripherals. Inspiration: hardly any.
Grim – Goth pool table tutor who isn’t actually grim. Inspiration: goths as they are rather than how you imagine them.
Epson Moore – Named after a common brand of printer in 1989, and for the feeling that Epson could always be much more. Epson’s pronouns are “you” which is normal for a choose-your-own-adventure protagonist. Inspiration: Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Franz Kafka and anxiety.
Jinge – Ostensibly a stoner or a raver, but also hangs out with the goths and… well, probably everyone else. Less dim than he lets on, although the more observant locals may have noticed this. Likes a few gasps of the devil’s cabbage of an evening. Something of a social butterfly. Inspiration: the very spirit of 1989.
Karl – Another goth at the pub who plays pool with Grim. Inspiration: all those people who we never had a chance to really get acquainted with.
Mabel – The refectory angel. Don’t piss off this sort of menial serving staff, right? They’re doing all the real work around here, and besides, they know your mum. Inspiration: they really are.
Rugger frat-kid – Okay, I understand that they have rugby here, but fraternities? WTF. Inspiration: writing too fast early on.
Sharon – Terrifyingly bubbly and enthusiastic retail staff at WH Smith. Why does she have a receipt printer in her face? Inspiration: a library colleague.
Sparrar – Wideboy, stoner, man-about-town, Jack the Lad. Sparrar reckons himself and his own sheer front. While he might appear to be some kinda alpha male, working class hero, his sheer insistence on this self-image betrays that he’s probably a conservative middle-class boy underneath who is deeply afraid of becoming irrelevant. Inspiration: I know that guy and you know him too.
Spider – Inspiration: all huge front garden spiders in Walthamstow.
Trish – Front desk gatekeeper. Inspiration: personal experience.
Vic Vic – Sociology lecturer, wearer of corduroy jackets. In the 80s, after Thatcher’s statement about “no such thing as society”, sociologists were the butt of popular jokes, and as such they were the vanguard of the resistance. Inspiration: that lecturer at Mid-Kent who looked a lot like Kurt Vonnegut.