He Is Mine and I Have No Other

by Rebecca O'Connor

  ‘We’ll have those later, right Mar?’

  She nodded. I knew if I’d said that we should just go home she’d have jumped at the chance, but there was no way we were going anywhere but in. Anyway, she’d nothing to be nervous about as far as I was concerned – she wasn’t the one who was going to ask a strange boy to dance and then God knows what.

  We followed the crowd, making our way to the back of the building – down dark blistered steps, wet from the rain earlier, leading into a puddled courtyard which ran the whole length of the school and was lit by the boys’ classrooms along one side. At the end of this yard was a door into a fuzz of noise and dark. Just how I had imagined it. Mar put her arm in mine. We walked slowly. I was careful not to look directly into the bright classrooms in case I should catch the eye of some boy staring out at us. I didn’t for a minute think that my boy would be gawping in that way, but I didn’t want to look all the same.

  The priest at the door looked blankly at the pair of us.

  ‘That’ll be two pounds each, ladies.’

  I thought I noticed a glint of recognition in his eyes, which made me go puce as I fumbled in my too-tight jeans pocket for the money. I was sure he’d be on the phone to my parents.

  ‘Come on now, we haven’t got all day,’ he said, his sneery head bobbing ever so slightly from side to side. Why was it all priests had black hair, I was wondering to myself. One of the coins fell through his fingers and he looked at me like I was an awful fool.

  ‘Come on now, ladies, that’s it, in you go.’

  I looked back and he was busy assessing the length of the queue. Not interested in us at all.

  The hall seemed empty as we stepped inside. Groups of boys and girls huddled against the walls on either side. The boys on stage were bashing out some REM cover – the lead singer, who was decked out in pyjamas, had the microphone in his mouth so you couldn’t make out a word. The drummer looked like it was past his bedtime. As I got used to the dim light I could see that the older boys were loitering to the right of the stage; the younger ones fidgeted in the darker corners at the back of the hall; and girls of all ages filled the wall space between the two. The fumes from the aftershave were deadly.

  A couple of young priests were selling soft drinks down the back, winking at their students affectionately and serving cans of soda to the girls with a reverential nod of the head, as if they were eternally grateful to us for offering a distraction to the boys for an evening. I noticed a couple of the neighbours who I used play with as a child but hadn’t spoken to in years. Some of them looked like men now. One in particular, I remembered myself and my cousin being nasty to. He was smaller than us then, and very quiet, and we used to order him about for hours, then send him home whenever we got bored, shouting names at him. He nodded at me as we walked past, and I smiled and looked down at the ground.

  We found a discreet place to stand, behind some older girls we didn’t know. We didn’t bother with the soft drinks just then, as we would have had to walk the entire length of the hall to get to the priests’ makeshift stall. I couldn’t help but notice boys looking in our direction. They were looking at Mar. She’d taken off her jumper and knotted it round her waist. It’s funny how I hadn’t really noticed before how beautiful she was: her dark shiny hair, her flawless skin, her breasts. How could boys keep their eyes off her? I couldn’t, until she caught me staring at her and asked me if I was okay. It was so noisy she had to put her mouth right up to my ear.

  ‘It’s bloody loud, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure is. Do you want to go outside and get those beers?’

  ‘No, not yet. We only just got here.’

  My ears were itchy inside with the vibrations of her voice. Then I noticed her whole body tauten, like the prairie dogs I’d seen in the zoo once on a school tour. Following her eyes I found a very pretty boy at the far side of the hall, about her height, maybe a little taller, with fine blond hair that flopped onto his bony face. He had vanilla-coloured skin. His shoulders were slightly hunched, and he had both hands firmly rooted in the pockets of his trousers. His eyes were glued to Mar.

  ‘He’s lovely,’ I whispered, pulling her to me.

  ‘Who? Oh, him? Yes, he is, isn’t he. He’s on my bus,’ she said, her eyes flitting from mine to the other side of the room like she had bloody astigmatism. She was standing in such a way – back arched, hand on hip, head slightly tilted towards me – that allowed him a great view of the curve of her hips, her pert breasts, the wishbone curve of her chin, her flushed cheek. She couldn’t stop herself grinning. I was done for then. She’d be off with him in no time, and I’d be left. There was no sign yet of my boy. He might not even show up. What would be worse? I couldn’t be sure.

  Her fella was at the older end of the hall. He must have been sixteen or seventeen. He was gawping right at her, and nudging his friends to do the same. And she didn’t mind one bit. She chatted to me about this and that – stupid stuff I knew she didn’t care about – pretending she hadn’t noticed, or if she had she couldn’t have cared less. She must have been used to boys staring at her: she went on that bus every day, after all, where all the boys would have copped a good eyeful.

  It was getting very hot.

  ‘How’s it you didn’t mention him before, Mar?’

  She didn’t answer me.

  ‘You’ve perked up, haven’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She gave me an evil look, then turned away again. ‘Look. His friend’s looking at you now, Lani. I’m sure he is,’ she said, using her elbow to point.

  I glanced over quickly and sulkily cast an eye over some boys jumping up and down to the music, near head-butting one another. Mar’s boy wasn’t moving. He was poised, much as she herself was, leaning slightly into the friend next to him – a lanky boy with dark hair and white skin. My boy. I caught the glare of his eyes (it looked like contempt), and quickly looked away. The room started to swim.

  ‘Let’s get those cans outside,’ I said, my tongue going all big and hairy in my mouth.

  ‘But he’s cute. And he likes you. And anyway, I don’t want to lose sight of them. Let’s just go get a Coke or something, all right?’

  I mutely agreed. We sidled our way through the crowd, which by that stage had grown considerably so that girls and boys were forced to mingle in the middle of the floor. The girls were hovering in little circles, showing off dance moves they’d practised for years in their bedrooms – like I’d done, watching my elephantine shadow gyrating on the ceiling and walls. The lads were getting more reckless, bumping into girls they fancied, pinching arses. It seemed like a bad idea once we’d started walking. Mar was right – we didn’t want to lose sight of them. What if they thought we weren’t interested? What if he met someone else in the time it took us to get from one end of that hall to the other?

  ‘It’s him,’ I shouted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s him.’

  She smirked. It irritated me, that smirk. It was deflating. She was too preoccupied with her bloody blossoming romance to care. It’s funny, when I’d rehearsed this evening in my head it had never occurred to me that I’d be tetchy, or that Mar would have more important things to think about than the state of my bulging body. It did feel like it was bulging – like I was Alice in Wonderland and I was growing. I was going to break this school hall open with my huge limbs, and have all the girls and boys flee in terror or be crushed. Already I seemed to be at least a foot taller than everyone else there. They could all see me. I was a leaning tower that everyone could see from wherever they were in the hall. I was there at the corner of their vision. This must mean, then, that he could see me too. I stooped a little more. Even the priests we bought drinks from were smaller. One of them peered up at me. Christ, she’s tall, he was probably thinking.

  Mar was delighted with herself. ‘Well, that’s perfect.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That they’re friends! It’s fate. It must be!’

  I
t wasn’t so bad, sure, I reasoned with myself. At least he was there. And between us, me and Mar, we’d have those boys right where we wanted them – by standing at a safe distance, but within sight, ignoring them, and waiting. They’d know what to do next, and we’d know what to do once that happened. I swigged my Coke triumphantly as we made our way back to the exact spot we’d occupied before. It fizzed in my nostrils, making my eyes water.

  There was no sign of them.

  We waited. The band finished their set, and the disco music started. The hall was packed now, heaving with bodies. The walls were wet with condensation. Mar remained cool: she was sure they’d be back from wherever they’d gone. Still, I couldn’t help feeling sick. I wanted to be in the cemetery, where I could watch him from a safe distance. Or at home, looking from behind the curtains in our front room.

  One of the boys from the buses approached Mar. She talked easily with him, laughing, touching his arm, her face and neck reddening slightly as he walked away.

  ‘He wants me to dance with him at the slow set. He just sent that fella over to ask me. His name’s Eoin. He’s on my bus.’

  ‘You told me that already.’

  She didn’t hear me. The excitement was too much. We both watched the boy walk over to Eoin, put his hand on his shoulder and pull him closer so he could talk directly into his ear. My boy appeared beside him, looking bored. I suppose that must have been how I looked.

  Everyone stopped talking as the next song came to an end – all seemed to instinctively know that it was time. The hall fell silent and then, from out of this came the first chords of Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’. No one dared move for a couple of seconds, then gradually a kind of slow-motion panic set in: a room full of evacuees with no exit, in danger of suffocating. Then the light-headedness from lack of oxygen as one, two, three couples made it to the middle of the dance floor without tripping or blushing. Mar pinched my arm as Eoin approached.

  I was left alone before I even had time to catch her eye. I skulked further into the dark. My boy was still there. He didn’t look like he was inclined to ask anyone anything. The music changed – still slow, but to something less arresting, I can’t remember what now – and I felt myself being propelled across the room, towards him. ‘I hope you don’t mind – I’ve seen you up near my house – I was wondering – I’ll understand if you – would you dance with me?’

  He smiled, shrugged his shoulders and said he wouldn’t mind. I was surprised to hear him speak. His voice sounded beautiful, I thought. He took my hand in his own and led me out to the floor. He was taller than me. He didn’t smell artificial like the other boys. He smelled faintly of sweat, and greasy unwashed hair.

  ‘Tell me your name.’

  He pulled me to him so our groins were touching. I couldn’t quite figure where to put my face so that we weren’t breathing into one another, so I tilted it to the side, and glanced up at him, then away, quickly as I could.

  ‘I’m Lani Devine,’ I said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Leon Brady. Haven’t you heard of me?’

  I shrugged. He squeezed his hands a little tighter around my waist. I should have been offended, but I couldn’t be. All sorts of little fireworks were going off inside me, which made me even surer that I’d been right all along to fall in love with Leon Brady. I knew that if I looked long or hard enough at him he would kiss me, so I held my face to the side for another song. We didn’t speak. Then he loosened his grip a little, I looked up at him, and his face moved towards mine. Our swaying stopped. The room went quiet, and he pulled me in, even tighter this time, and kissed me slowly on the mouth. I moved my hands from his hot back to the dark downy hair on his neck. Then the music speeded up again, and we were the only people standing still.

  He’d no qualms about leading me directly outside after that. I had to breathe in short, shocking little breaths so he wouldn’t hear me. The veins in my wrists and temples were pulsating so wildly I thought I might have a heart attack, and how embarrassing would that be, to die of a heart attack at the age of fifteen, just because a boy had danced with you and kissed you for a minute, and was taking you outside for a shift. The only other time I’d been kissed was by this bog-hopper wearing a Bon Jovi T-shirt when I was about twelve. He smelt faintly of sheep. My older cousin put me up to it. I didn’t understand a word he said. I didn’t even catch his name. And there was no one more surprised than me to find his cold slobbering tongue in my mouth. But this. This was exactly as I’d meant my first kiss to be. This became the official first kiss.

  He didn’t even make eye contact with the priest at the door, though I could see him looking at us disapprovingly. I wondered if he’d called my parents yet, though I knew it was stupid to think he would. Right then, anyway, I didn’t really care what he or anyone else did.

  It was cold out there, especially after the humidity of the hall. My clothes shrank icily onto my skin. Leon put his arm around my waist, which felt good, better than anything.

  We were walking towards the playing fields then, at the back of the school, up the steps, past the bike shed, past the squash court – a dark concrete chasm where I could see the outlines of couples kissing, like shrimps in dark water – then along a path that cut between a football pitch and some tennis courts. The path was muddy, and there was a biting wind. It must have taken two or three minutes to get that far, and we hadn’t said two words to each other.

  I broke the silence.

  ‘I’ve seen you before.’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘Yeah, up near my house.’

  ‘I like to keep an eye on you.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  I was shivering. He took off his jumper and offered it to me. It was damp with sweat: I thanked him and wrapped it around my shoulders. We sat on a bench near the goalposts at the far end of the pitch.

  ‘I go up there to see my mother,’ he said. ‘She’s buried up there.’

  The only person I’d ever known who died was Lazy Bones, and that was when I was nine or so. I don’t remember feeling sad. All I remember was the purple and yellow bruise on his forehead, and the grown-ups in the room mumbling decades of the rosary, and a desperate desire to go outside and play with the neighbours’ children. Lazy Bones’s death reminded me of summer; of golden straw bales we climbed on in the fields behind my grandparents’ house; and the wall we used to walk on, pretending we were tightrope artists.

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ I said.

  I didn’t know what else to say. People never do, they’re not supposed to, are they.

  ‘That’s all right. She died when I was very young.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ I said, wanting desperately for us to change the subject, but not knowing how to without seeming rude or insensitive.

  ‘She was from England. You ever been to England?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘So how’s it you asked me to dance?’ he said then, all brazen.

  ‘I don’t know. Because I wanted to.’

  And he pulled me to him again, pressed his mouth to mine, and kissed me long and dark. A dark kiss. One cold hand moved up under my T-shirt and slipped under my bra, pinching a nipple until it stung slightly. The other was grappling with the belt on my jeans, and my whole body tingled with fear and excitement. I pulled his hand from my belt, and he moved it down between my legs. I could feel the warmth of his palms on my thighs. I grabbed a clump of his hair, and we sank into each other. When we both came to he held my gaze and kind of mumbled we’d better head back, that the disco would be over soon, and that I was beautiful. Only my mother had ever told me I was beautiful. He wanted to see me again, but couldn’t tell me when. That was the happiest I’d ever been, that I could remember.

  We found Mar and Eoin waiting for us at the main entrance at the front of the school. They moved apart as they saw us approach, both of them folding their arms, and Eoin and Leon grinning at one another. Mar and I didn’t know where to look.
Her cheeks and lips were pinker and plumper than usual. I returned Leon’s jumper and we snogged quickly, embarrassed in front of the others, and said our goodbyes. Mar and Eoin did the same, and then Mar was jaunting along beside me – up the steps, and down the driveway towards the main road and home.

  ‘That was my first kiss, you know,’ she said, all pleased with herself, as we stepped onto the road. She told me how she’d gone to the squash court with him, where she could hear the snorting of other couples shifting but couldn’t see them in the dark. How Eoin had unzipped his trousers and pulled her hand down so she could feel his willy, hard as anything. How he made her move her hand up and down it. And how he pushed it against her.

  ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’

  She laughed. ‘What if we did?’

  I didn’t tell her about Leon pushing himself up against me, and putting his hand up under my T-shirt, and how much I’d liked it. I felt it must be wrong to like it so much.

  We were quiet the rest of the way home, lost in our own thoughts.

  Mam and Dad had forgotten to leave the light on in the front porch. We tippy-toed around the side. A broad band of light lay across our path as we turned the corner to the backyard. It was from my bedroom. Dad was standing directly under the bare light bulb, staring at my unmade bed. His face was pale, his expression pained and fixed. It was like I’d died or something. Mar grabbed my arm, startled, and her whole body froze. We stood in the shadows, just to the left of the window, watching, whispering.

  ‘Jesus, Lani, what’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. What the fuck are we going to do?’

  I was horrified. This was something I didn’t want Mar to see – my father distraught, confused.

  Her face looked odd. It was like she had a bone stuck in her throat. Then I thought maybe something had happened to Gran. I jerked forward, out of the shadows, and Dad glanced out at me, squinted a little, and turned and left the room. It was like I was a ghost, my room a brightly lit tomb.