‘Not funny,’ he said to Larry. ‘You’ll be sorry you said that.’
2.
I was seventeen and in mourning for a first love gone awry.
Jessica and I had only gone out for three months, but it’s wrong to measure first relationships in units of time. So I’ll put it this way: when we broke up, it felt like I lost thirty pints of blood. Am I being over the top? Yes. But in the aftermath, I genuinely felt drained and unwell. I watched Man on the Moon six times in three days, and – in a severe bout of confusion – I believed I was the American comedian Andy Kaufman. (Rationally, I knew I wasn’t him, but part of me suspected I was. It was a strange doublethink, like being six years old and recognising my sister’s handwriting in Father Christmas’ letters, and yet still believing.) Anyway, after the break-up with Jessica, I had – in my Kaufman-confusion – arranged a town wrestling contest where I fought women and only women. On a big patch of grass beside Caerphilly Castle I assembled a makeshift wrestling ring, and each Saturday would charge £1.50 for a female to wrestle me. I pasted posters to the windows of long since closed-down shops, and advertised in large lettering the prize: £50 and an offer to organise the winner’s finances.
And I happened to be very good at the wrestling. I made £27 on my first day of bouts, and a further £75 in the weeks after. But it all came to an end one shiny-wet May evening when a large woman fell on my collarbone, and snapped it in two.
I spent the next month-and-a-half in a sling.
3.
I should explain what preceded the attempted arrest.
Gareth had wanted to leave town for the weekend. His cousin Robert had just died from blood poisoning, and he – Gareth – had, in a dark alley beside the chip shop, taken the virginity of a fifteen-year-old girl and was convinced he now had AIDS. He booked an STI test, but it was going to take four weeks before the clinic would put the cocktail umbrella down his penis.
He had called with the plan. We were to meet outside his aunt’s home (he was living there after falling out with his father again) and then walk to the hills to camp for the evening.
Lacking an airbed, Larry decided to bring a dinghy.
‘A sleep fit for a fish,’ he said to me in a text message.
Gareth and I were content to sleep out on the ground. It was a hot summer – they always were then – and I’d read and seen countless stories and films where kids slept outside under starlit skies.
But when I arrived at the aunt’s home, I found Larry crouched down behind a Jeep, with the dinghy and oar on the pavement. He put his finger to his lips and signalled with his other hand to join him. I thought he was only messing, and I walked towards the front door. He grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me back behind the car.
‘The neighbour’s gone mad,’ he whispered. ‘He’s kicked the door in.’
‘The neighbour?’ I said.
‘Yeah, he’s a nutcase.’
He pointed towards the aunt’s house, to the broken glass on the patio floor – scattered like breadcrumbs left out for the birds – and before it, the dark hulking shape of a man gone mad.
4.
A few weeks before all this, when I started crying in a maths lesson because of stories involving Jessica and a local bus driver, Larry had put an arm around me and said, ‘A good wank is what you need. A good wank and some tits in your face.’
He took me to St Martin’s school party at the rugby club, and because we were all so intimidated by the beauty of alien flesh, Larry insisted we play Pull The Bull.
‘Tenner for whoever gets the ugliest,’ he said.
‘But how will we decide?’ I asked, picturing the first time I watched Jessica put her clothes back on in the morning, her pale legs mapped with little white scores. ‘Is beauty or its opposite not a subjective thing?’
‘Public vote,’ he said.
We lined up on one side of the dance floor, like men in BBC Jane Austen adaptation dances, and looked for misshapen faces, buck teeth, and poorly applied mascara.
Gareth was first to thrust himself into the evening, kissing – Larry’s words now – ‘a five out of ten’ and giving us the finger behind the girl’s back, convinced the £10 prize was coming his way. I approached a pale girl with dark hair who reminded me of Jessica, but when she asked me my name I couldn’t speak – the sounds got stuck between my tongue and teeth.
Then Larry, driven by his usual dickishness, sashayed onto the dance floor with a short, stubby girl. The ensuing commotion confused me, but when she turned around it all made sense. She was one of the St Martin’s girls’ older sisters. She had Down’s syndrome, and Larry and her were dancing – hand in hand, hips touching, his crotch rubbing against her leg. I watched him move his face closer and closer to her face, move his hand to her cheek, and stroke her auburn hair, her red rose bobble. He dipped his head, and within seconds they were kissing.
After we’d been kicked out, and Larry collected the money off us, he pleaded his case.
‘I don’t discriminate,’ he said. ‘Plus she was one of those that go to college and study how to look after themselves. She can catch buses and everything.’
We walked into the cold dark night, my recently healed collarbone aching, and Gareth arguing that his girl was still uglier. I was thinking too much about Jessica to realise there was anything wrong with what we’d done.
5.
From behind the Jeep, Larry and I watched the neighbour climb back over the wall and calmly disappear into his own house like a button passing through a hole.
When I knocked, I heard Gareth stop dead in the hall. I shouted through the front door – half the glass had shattered anyway – that it was me, to let me and Larry in.
‘He went mad,’ Gareth whispered, as we sat in conference in the living room. ‘I was playing music, nothing too loud, and then…’
‘The door went smash,’ said Larry, standing up. ‘His foot, his head, his shoulder. The door went smash.’
‘He used to be a copper,’ said Gareth. ‘Got thrown off the force for using too much force.’
‘Well, what should we do?’ I asked.
‘We should get the hell out,’ Gareth murmured. ‘Before he comes back to finish me off.’
‘Do you reckon he will?’ I said.
‘I dunno,’ Gareth said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. ‘His wife left him a week ago and he’s been a fucking psycho ever since. He stays up till six in the morning listening to country and western songs. I can hear him singing “Blue Moon” through my bedroom wall.’
Larry swiped the air with the oar.
‘If he comes back, I’ll bash him,’ he said. And we all laughed, giddy with the fear.
‘My aunt’s going to go nuts about the front door though,’ said Gareth. ‘She warned me to keep the music down ’cos of him. Seriously, she’s gonna kill me. Well, if the AIDS don’t get me first.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Larry. ‘You don’t have AIDS.’
‘I do,’ Gareth said quietly. ‘I can feel it in my dick.’
He didn’t want to leave our stuff in the house, so we settled on taking the bags, the dinghy, and the oar, and running to the nearest phone box or friendly stranger.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But I need a piss first.’
In the bathroom, above the toilet, I saw a photo of Gareth as a child, his arm resting ever so slightly round the neck of his now-dead cousin. I looked down at my penis and felt sad for its loneliness.
When I returned to the living room, Gareth had his boxer shorts over his jeans.
‘My idea,’ explained Larry, doing up his coat. ‘It’s a confusion tactic. If the guy is out there, he’ll be stunned by the boxers. And in that split second of confusion – BAM! – oar to the head.’
We laughed again, geed each other up and, after many aborted beginnings, finally ran out the front door.
That’s when we heard the sirens and thought we were saved.
6.
The things I cannot
shake: the walk to the bus depot, the erections so stiff and the fear that the foreskin would never unroll, the fingering of vomit in a circular motion down a sink. The anti-bacterial soap Jessica carried in her bag, the cleaning of her hands after every meal, every cigarette. The toothbrush she left in my bathroom and the deodorant which I started using, sniffing myself in maths lessons. The fifteen-page letter I wrote, and the four-line reply. The anger on the women’s faces as they lay in the shadow of the castle, pinned to the ground by a seventeen-year-old boy.
7.
‘Why won’t you tell us your name?’ the bald policeman asked through the half-opened window. ‘What are you hiding?’
‘I have a – uh – uh – sssstammer,’ I answered, then took a breath as deep as a bucket. ‘Nay-nay-names are the most dih-dih-dih-difficult things for a stammerer to say.’
‘Is that so?’
‘I can write it duh-duh-duh-duh.’ My voice was like a locked gate, so I took a singing breath and bounced the words off one other: ‘I-can-write-it-down-for-you-though,’ I said.
‘Get the cocky one over here,’ the bald cop called to the Elvis quiff. And quicker than a mistake, Larry was sitting beside me in the back of the car.
‘He can’t talk tidy,’ Larry said. ‘He’s a bit thick.’
‘I’m not thick.’
The smirk of the bald. The pulse of the vein in his temple.
‘And his name?’
‘Reg Harrison, sir.’
‘Reg? A fifteen year old named Reg?’
‘I’m seventeen,’ I said. ‘And my nuh-name isn’t Reg.’
Baldilocks shook his head and walked off.
‘Gareth’s shitting it,’ said Larry.
‘Aren’t you?’ My stammer was like a well-trained dog: it knew who to bark at.
Larry laughed. ‘He reckons they’re gonna search the bags. He just told me he’s got the T-shirt from last week in there. The one covered in blood.’
‘Blood?’
‘You know, the one he was wearing when he shagged that girl. He wanted to burn it up the mountain tonight. Doesn’t the one with the quiff look like Elvis?’
‘Fuck,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He’s scared they’ll trace the blood and arrest him for being a paedo.’
‘Shh,’ I said. ‘What if they’re recording everything we say?’
‘Screw them,’ he said. ‘We’ve done shit-all wrong.’
And that’s when Larry found the police hat in the back of the car.
‘Dare me to put it on,’ he said, poking me with one long finger.
‘No.’
‘Aw, go on. I bet Elvis would love to see me in his hat.’
‘Fuck off,’ I said.
He leaned over the seat and slipped it on, then looked at himself in the rear-view mirror. He curled his lip, and out the side of it, he sang: ‘Aha-ha, I’m all shook up.’
8.
I’d known it was love when Jessica confessed that she wanted to have a black friend. I too had known this feeling, had wanted to prove myself in our small, white town.
We were at a house party, and when she asked my name I answered like I’d never stammered in my life.
We left the party early, broke into a park, and lay on the grass, dry-humping for at least an hour. She allowed me to touch her breasts and she felt me through my jeans. She tasted of smoke and spearmint, and by the end of the humping my dick was sore from all the chafing. But when she washed the mud off her hands with her mini bottle of soap, I felt the gush of new blood that comes with first love. We kissed a little more, and then I walked her to the bus station, the streetlamps glowing like electric lunchboxes. The next day we started going out.
It’s not my place to go into the stuff she had going on, but it’s enough to say she was depressed. I couldn’t see it at the time, not because I was shallow or didn’t care – I wasn’t, and I did – but a lot of my friends were cutting themselves, even Gareth, so it didn’t seem like a big deal. Of course, it seems stupid to say that now, but I think it was important to her that it didn’t bother me. In a way, I think that’s why she liked me.
But because of her depression, at the beginning, she was the one in control. She’d also had sex before, and knew about bands and films and real sadness, and next to her I sometimes felt like a catalogue model – clean-cut, without history.
She was also a hundred times more gifted than me. She played the harp, and I’d watch and listen to her play in the living room for hours at a time, her fingers doing all sorts of mad things on the strings.
We’d spend whole afternoons in her bedroom as she smoked dope and told stories about lucid dreaming, ex-boyfriends, and the time she got so stoned she couldn’t talk for a day. In the evenings, we’d sneak into Caerphilly Castle and go up one of the tall towers to smoke weed. A few weeks in, she made me climb over the barrier and stand on the ledge. She climbed over, too.
‘If you held me from behind it’d be like that scene in Titanic,’ she said. ‘But a bit less shit.’
We could see all of Caerphilly: the shopping centre, Tesco, and the mountains all around. The Welsh flag flapped wildly in the wind, and I felt outside and above myself, like I was watching us in some made-for-schools film about the dangers of drugs. But when the wind got stronger and I wanted to get off the ledge, she insisted we stay. We looked down at the moat – it was as black as her hair – and she pointed at an upturned shopping trolley jutting out in the shallows.
‘Looks like a ribcage, doesn’t it?’ she said, lighting a joint. ‘God, imagine being that thin.’
‘As thin as a shopping trolley?’ I said.
‘You know what I mean,’ she said, and went to pass the joint, but I shook my head.
She looked at me, smiled, pretended to fall, then actually slipped. I caught her, but the lighter dropped into the moat with a plop.
‘Oh my,’ she said.
I looked at her face, and then she intoned in a funny deep voice: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the lighter.’
On an afternoon when we both should have been in school, she finally took my virginity. In my childhood bed, with the peeling-faded stickers of Mr Men and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles on the headboard, she guided me, showed me what to do. At one stage I could have sworn that Michelangelo, pizza in hand, gave me a little wink.
Afterwards, as she dressed, and her scarred arms vanished into long black sleeves, she smiled and said thanks.
‘Thanks for what?’ I said.
‘Thanks for not being a dick.’
9.
Oh how those women tumbled on the grass in front of the castle!
10.
The Quiff was in the driver’s seat, and Larry and I were in the back, silent. Every now and then a woman’s voice would come over the police radio, and the Quiff would nod his head knowingly. Gareth was still outside, sitting against the garden wall, as the bald one strolled to and fro on the pavement, asking questions and writing things in a notebook.
‘How long have you all known each other, then?’ said the Quiff, staring at the mad neighbour’s house.
‘Since nuh-nuh-nursery,’ I said. ‘And then we all went to the same primary school and now-now-now we’re all at the same secondary school too.’
His hat lay at Larry’s feet.
‘That’s nice,’ said the Quiff, still looking out the windscreen, as if the street and houses were a TV show. ‘Yeah, it’s good to have old friends.’
The detective arrived in an unmarked car, and the Quiff got out to talk to him. The detective was tall and thin and had a big nose. He shone a flashlight beneath the Jeep and the beam fell upon the oar – discarded by Larry when the sirens first sounded. With a tentative scooping of an outstretched leg, the Quiff pulled back the oar.
‘Bingo bango,’ said the bald one. ‘We have a weapon.’
‘Great stuff,’ said the detective. ‘Case closed.’ He got back into his car and left.
&nbs
p; I felt a clutch at my ribs, a sagging of my lungs.
Outside my window, the moon was full as an egg.
11.
We saw each other every day and I became part of Jessica’s family. On weekends she played the harp at weddings, and I’d sit in the back pews feeling a mixture of pride and distance, as if her talent would always keep us separate. After each performance, she’d buy a bag of weed with the money she’d earned, and apply superglue to her cracked and bleeding fingers. The first time I touched her glued fingertips, they felt unreal.
‘No prints,’ she said, moving her fingers in the air. ‘I’d make the perfect thief.’
She grew more comfortable with me, and in turn became more confident. She started wearing short-sleeve tops, and didn’t even care when Larry asked her what had happened to her arms.
But once my virginity was gone I grew hungry with the loss, and I’d try to turn every innocent kiss into the start of foreplay. And as she became more confident in her body, I (believing myself to be responsible for her transformation) became cocky. And when that happened, the balance between us shifted: as I became the confident one, she became clingy. And I grew attached to being needed and abused the feeling. On evenings when she was really down, I feigned illness, fatigue, anything that would elicit her desperation. I would leave her house early, to have her beg me to stay.
I started speaking with girls in chat rooms, on webcams, anywhere I could. I thought of doing things to these other girls, of exotic positions, of so many different breasts. I had had sex with one person and now I was ready to have sex with the world. And though I was in love, I mourned the fact I wasn’t single. So I boasted to Gareth and Larry about oral sex and the frequency with which I received it. I knew it was ungracious but it bubbled up inside me like bile.
New Welsh Short Stories Page 9
