by Patrick Gale
‘And I won’t have to sit Common Entrance!’ Eustace told her.
‘No,’ his father said. ‘There is that. Though you’ll keep doing the classes right up until exam time. Might as well still get our money’s worth.’
This earned him a quick glare from his mother, who then said, ‘But because you did so well today, we’ve agreed to send you on the holiday course in Scotland, with Miss Gold’s old teacher. You remember the one she mentioned? Because it does sound amazing. And there’s absolutely no question of you stopping your lessons with her or selling your cello or any nonsense like that.’
‘Unless you would prefer to stop,’ his father said, earning himself a further glare.
‘Maybe later on,’ Eustace told him with a rare sense of wielding a little power.
And the odd, shattering evening ended on a giddy note because his parents no longer felt so bad. His father turned on the radiogram and played Charles Trenet to remind his mother of their honeymoon and Eustace enjoyed the unusual sight of them laughing together and looking younger than they had earlier, and the whole bottle of wine was drunk, with Eustace having a second glass without either parent noticing while they were having a little dance together to La Mer .
Alone in his room again soon afterwards he felt terribly giddy, saw black spots before his eyes and was sick into his bedroom sink. He saw macaroni in there and mandarin segments and red wine, which made him sick some more. The smell was awful and he had to use his toothbrush handle to mash the bits through the plughole. It was like flushing away the whole, ultimately toxic day and its fears and tensions and empty little triumph and catastrophic embarrassment.
He pulled on his pyjamas and brushed his teeth and climbed into bed to think about the mysterious Jean Curwen. She was a legend, Carla had said. He was going to learn from a legend.
CHAPTER NINE
The business of not being able to take up the scholarship, of hearing he was not going to have to sit Common Entrance after all but could drift through the rest of the school year, represented a dramatic slackening of pressure. Eustace still practised his cello but the edge of obsession had gone. It was a little like waking from a long sleep, and he found he emerged out of step with his contemporaries. He was not developing at the speed of Vernon and the others, which didn’t bother him especially as, from what he could tell, puberty was a messy business and, in any case, inevitable as a speeding car. But he disliked feeling childish and he realized that all the shutting himself away for the hours of practice his cello demanded had left him outside the circles of the boyish norm and in danger of being left behind, the irritating child who couldn’t keep up.
Without warning, Mr Payton, A2’s form master, announced one morning that he was suspending their usual classes for the next two periods in order to give them a special course he called How To Succeed as a Teenager . During this he expected them all to take notes.
‘I don’t expect all of this to make sense entirely to you now,’ he told them. ‘But if you note it down, you’ll find it better imprints on your memories and then, when occasion arises at your big school, as it surely will for you all in the next few years, you’ll be more likely to remember what I’m telling you and benefit from it.’
The solemnity and anticipation were rather thrilling. Eustace exchanged a glance with his desk partner, Snell Major, a nice enough boy, though with no sense of humour. They each turned to a fresh page and gravely wrote How to Succeed as a Teenager . Eustace underlined the title in a different colour then paid close attention.
Mr Payton began with an excruciating talk on bodily change. It was hard to imagine he had ever been young. It was a talk that would have been more useful, arguably, a year before, which was when most of Eustace’s contemporaries began to gain dramatically in height, to sprout hair in places formerly smooth and to smell strongly, often of the deodorant they were ostentatiously using to counteract their own odours.
‘You won’t all develop at the same rate,’ he said. ‘Some of you – Higgs for instance – have probably already finished growing. Others may have yet to start. Entirely to be expected. You’ll all get there in the end. And you won’t all develop in the same ways. Some men are hairy everywhere – arms, chest, even back – some hardly at all beyond their groins.’
There was a chortle at groins , of course.
‘You’re laughing because you’re embarrassed,’ he told them. ‘All perfectly normal. So, while you’re laughing, here are some pictures to give you an idea of the variety to expect.’
He opened his briefcase and took out a handful of colour photographs of completely naked men – blond, dark, hairy, smooth – which had been carefully cut from porn magazines and mounted, perhaps by Miss Packard, the broad-hipped school secretary, on to tidy pieces of white card and sealed under layers of sticky-backed plastic. He handed them to Higgs, the head of school, who sat in the desk nearest the door (six foot two, already quite hairy), and gestured for him to pass them around. Eustace’s desk was in the farthest corner from Higgs, so he swiftly calculated that the pictures would reach him last and then stay on his desk.
‘What about girls?’ some idiot asked.
‘Yes, sir?’ Higgs asked, magnificently innocent. He had already passed the pictures on and the images travelled fairly swiftly, as though nobody liked to be seen to retain them for longer than anyone else. Eustace found their progress so distracting that he had difficulty taking in what Mr Payton was saying.
‘How many of you have sisters?’ Mr Payton asked and almost everyone but Eustace seemed to put up a hand. ‘So you’ll know that girls develop in much the same way, although your sisters may have been modest and done their best to hide it from you. At around the age of twelve they grow in height, they develop breasts and hips, with much the same variation in speed and size as the development among boys. And they grow pubic hair, of course. They also begin to have their menses , a Latin word meaning . . . ?’
‘Months,’ everyone called out with a kind of groan and one of the class swots added, ‘From mensis , month, third declension, sir.’
‘From which we derive which English verb?’
‘Menstruate?’ somebody suggested and there was a laugh.
Suddenly the photographs arrived, all together, on Eustace’s desk. He had seen fully naked men before, sometimes caught windblown glimpses on the beach or dunes when they performed that comically modest dance to replace trunks with pants beneath a clutched towel, but his father had always been almost obsessively secretive about his body. Apart from the deep disappointment of the few men he’d glimpsed over other boys’ shoulders in Health and Efficiency , he had never before been given them to gaze upon, under instruction even, except in art lessons and it was difficult to relate the saints and soldiers of Renaissance paintings to the hairy, sweating reality.
There were four photographs, and he took care to look at each in turn and not to linger unduly over any, although he was utterly fascinated. There was a Swedish-looking blond man, with very blue eyes and almost white eyebrows, posing with a striped beach ball under one arm. His body was almost hairless, like an overgrown boy’s and had a pronounced scar where his appendix had been removed. There was a redhead with flaming tufts in armpits and groin and a rueful expression. There was a brown-haired model, locks to his shoulders, girlish as any Renaissance saint, whose genitals seemed curiously undeveloped beneath their tidy little thatch.
Lastly there was a black-haired man with a drooping cowboy moustache and an unbuttoned checked shirt. His big legs were as thickly haired as his chest. His cock stood to attention unlike the other men’s and he gazed at the camera unsmilingly in a kind of challenge. Eustace stacked the pictures on the corner of his desk, with the black-haired man on top, then realized he was staring so flipped the stack over so the pictures were hidden and was startled in the process by his neighbour passing him the female equivalents he had not even noticed Mr Payton put into circulation, and had to fumble for all eight pictures on the floor. He
looked dutifully at the naked ladies but as briefly as possible as he sensed he had an angry blush.
‘Good,’ said Mr Payton. ‘Now that I’ve got all your attention, we need to talk about self-abuse.’ Eustace had never heard this term before and had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Contrary to what you may have read or heard, it will not make you blind or mad or give you hairy palms.’
A burst of nervous laughter here and Bailey, who was excitable, howled like a wolf.
‘It’s not a patch on the real thing but you’re all several years off being legally old enough to enjoy that. And it’s kinder on your sheets and pyjamas than wet dreams. But practice moderation. Don’t get obsessed with it.’
Self-Abuse , Eustace wrote on his otherwise blank page. Don’t get obsessed with it.
‘You have already covered human reproduction in your biology classes. What you won’t have covered is the law, and the law is very clear about this. Sex under the age of sixteen is illegal and you need to be eighteen before you can marry without your parents’ consent. However, I’m not naïve. Your bodies are already awash with sex hormones and so are those of the girls you’re likely to meet in the next few years. Just remember you only have to do it once to get a girl pregnant. So don’t go all the way, however much she might lead you on.’
Eustace thought about obediently writing down this last command but nobody else was doing so and it frankly seemed a bit silly.
Then, to electric effect, Mr Payton added, ‘There is a world of pleasure you can give one another with hands and mouths.’ He said it quite drily, as they had heard him describe the formation and application of gerunds or summarize the different meanings of ut paired with subjunctive or indicative verbs. He was not a teacher even remotely associated with pleasure and Mrs Payton, a wintry fellow-classicist, appeared to have adopted disappointment long since as her default emotion, and yet something in his words had the salt savour of experience. A world of pleasure . Hands and mouths .
Mr Payton continued to lecture them, and Eustace continued to take notes, on contraception, on tobacco, on alcohol, on hormones and their effect on temper and energy levels, on the importance in one’s teenage years of avoiding too much free time as apparently it was during idleness that one might fall prey to the many things that would make a teenager fail. It was a double period and a great deal of territory was covered but, like a wasp to spilled syrup, Eustace’s mind kept returning to mouths, hands, a world of pleasure .
CHAPTER TEN
Eustace and Vernon had long established two places outside where they could go after school or meet at weekends. They had been going to them together for so long that it was rarely a matter for discussion. They would head to one or the other while deep in conversation. If it was wet, there was a dilapidated Victorian shelter in the network of paths on the edge of Prince Consort Gardens, which overlooked the remains of Birnbeck Pier. This had pretty stained glass, distant views across the water only visitors mistook for the sea and, because it had that telephone kiosk reek of piss and cigarettes, was rarely occupied by grown-ups. But their more usual haunt was the Fort, up its long flight of steps above the same headland grandly signposted Ancient British Encampment .
Vernon had grown so much recently that they no longer looked the same age and Eustace liked to think that old ladies they politely greeted in passing took them for older and younger brothers. Vernon’s voice had broken during the holidays and he now had a thick layer of fluff growing along his jawline. He complained that all the growing he was doing made it very hard to wake up in the mornings and often gave him cramps. Two or three times he had very politely asked Eustace to massage away an ache in his shoulders or thigh, which naturally Eustace had done for him. He had been rather proud when Vernon said that cello-playing had given him a penetrating grip. He had never owned a dog or cat but now that Vernon was growing bigger than him, it was a little like having a large pet.
Naturally he told Vernon about Mr Payton’s lecture on How to Succeed as a Teenager .
‘I took notes,’ he said.
‘Let me see,’ said Vernon and sprawled with a weary sigh across their usual heavily carved bench. Eustace sat across from him on a tree stump and dug out the relevant exercise book from his satchel.
As Vernon read, chuckled and murmured, ‘Priceless,’ his new favourite word, Eustace noted, where his outgrown trousers had ridden up above his socks, that he was sprouting black hairs on his legs as well now.
It turned out that all that year’s school leavers had been given similar talks that morning but that the content and manner was left to the initiative of the speaker.
‘Grenyer just showed us a film,’ Vernon said. ‘Actually not even that. It was one of those spacky wind-on reels, like the scripture lesson ones with the bible scenes, but with rubbish drawings instead of photographs. And there was a recording to go with it, so Grenyer could just press play then hide his blushes in the darkness and wind on to the next picture when a little ping on the tape told him to.’
‘So what was in it? Drugs? Sex?’
‘Neither really. Love and marriage. John and Mary fall in love over a game of tennis and get married. Then he lies on top of her to make a baby. Pretty off-putting really, though you got to see her breasts and everything as there was a pretty weird cross-section diagram after the romantic moonlight shot, showing how his cock fitted inside her lady parts.’
‘Her vulva and vagina,’ Eustace supplied, imitating the scrupulous W sounds of Mr Payton’s Latin Vs, which made Vernon chuckle as he knew it would. ‘Vernon?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t laugh at me.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘But what is self-abuse exactly? He went on and on about it and everyone else seemed to understand, so I felt a bit stupid.’
‘Wanking,’ Vernon said, stretching back in the sunshine with his hands behind his head. ‘The solitary vice that never disappoints.’
‘Ah.’ Now or never , Eustace thought. ‘So . . . do you do it, then?’
‘Of course,’ Vernon said. ‘Don’t you?’
Eustace was lost for words for a moment then had a brainwave. ‘I’m not sure I’m doing it quite right.’
‘It’s not hard. Pardon the pun.’
‘Yes but . . . nothing seems to happen.’
‘You don’t come?’
It seemed safest simply to shake his head and look blank. Vernon frowned thoughtfully. ‘You’re not circumcised, are you?’
‘You know I’m not.’ They’d pissed side by side often enough, up there against the trees or in the sulphurous, oddly competitive urinals at St Chad’s.
‘Well look and learn.’ Vernon glanced around then swiftly unzipped his trousers and tugged out his cock, which rapidly became hard so that veins stood out on it. Eustace stared. ‘Impressive, huh?’ Vernon drawled, in his Sean Connery voice. ‘It’s easy with a foreskin. We’re lucky. You just take a firm hold and do this.’
He demonstrated the movement which Eustace realized he had seen countless times when older boys were mocking one another and which suddenly made insulting sense. Vernon seemed at once proud and touchingly bashful.
‘You can have a go,’ he said. ‘If you like,’ and he made a small gesture of invitation that had Eustace tumbling to his knees and taking hold. Vernon gave a little moan. ‘You can hold harder,’ he said. ‘If you like.’
‘Like this?’
‘Oh. Oh God. Yes.’
Eustace moved his grasping fist as he had seen Vernon do, glancing around to check they were thoroughly hidden from the main path. If anyone came, he decided, he would pretend to have dropped something. He could feel a stirring in his pants. Luckily Vernon had his eyes closed.
‘Faster,’ Vernon muttered. ‘Oh. Oh yes. Oh God.’ And he lurched to one side of the bench so as not to make a mess on Eustace’s school blazer.
Eustace sat back against his log and watched, intrigued, as Vernon spent himself prodigiously then tidied himsel
f up with a neatly ironed blue tartan handkerchief.
‘Thank you for that,’ Vernon said at last, not meeting his eye.
‘Here,’ Eustace said and offered him a Cherry Drop from the packet in his pocket before helping himself. They sucked in companionable silence for a minute.
‘I can’t believe you’ve never done that,’ Vernon said at last.
‘Neither can I,’ Eustace told him. ‘It doesn’t hurt, or anything? You looked as though you were in pain . . .’
‘Far from it. The first time you think you’re going to piss, a bit like when you have a wet dream, you know? Only it’s so much better.’
Eustace nodded, although wet dreams were as yet still a mystery to him as well.
‘But you don’t pee,’ Vernon explained, ‘you just, well . . .’
‘Yes. I saw.’
‘Do you want me to . . . ?’ Vernon gestured towards Eustace’s trouser area.
‘Er. Thanks, but better not.’
By unspoken agreement they stood and walked back through the Fort and down the steps to where they had padlocked their bicycles together. Unthinkingly Eustace scratched his nose and smelled the alien tang of Vernon on his fingers. It was foxy, like the strong smell of stinging nettles in flower, and not unpleasant.
‘Well done on the scholarship, by the way,’ Vernon said. ‘Even if you can’t take it up.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It won’t be so bad at Broadelm. You’ll see.’
‘I know.’
‘Just try and, you know, grow a bit taller before we start there.’
Eustace laughed and play-kicked him as they pedalled back downhill.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The encounter with Vernon – Eustace called it that in his mind, he could think of no other way of describing it as it had been like meeting a new Vernon he hadn’t seen before – changed the flavour of everything overnight. Not only did he find he couldn’t stop revisiting its every detail in his head, the feel of Vernon in his hand, the gruff little gasps he had made, the colour and consistency of the stuff he produced, but he found it changed his view of everything.
