Becoming Nancy

by Terry Ronald

  Quite suddenly there’s movement: definite, tangible movement. Am I deranged with fatigue or did Maxie just shunt closer to me? Then, closer again … then … oh, God! There is no kiss. A kiss was anticipated, expected almost, but there is none. He’s tugging gently at my hand – guides it downward and on to his … oh good grief … that’s ridiculous on a boy his age, surely! That’s just silly! No kiss still. Well, I suppose that’s not what a teenage football captain wants, is it? He doesn’t want romance and kissing; he wants someone to play with his dick. Isn’t that what I want? Isn’t that what I was hoping for too? And anyway, let’s face it: beggars can’t be choosers, can they? This is actually happening. It is actually … Oh! I’m not very good at this. It’s tricky … difficult doing it to someone else; it’s a whole new manoeuvre. You have to get your arm in a whole new position and … it’s stressful. Maxie’s breathing is quickening now and … his arms are around me … he’s moving over me, I can feel his thighs around mine and … he’s making a noise like he’s … Ah! And there’s the kiss!

  When Debbie Harry smashes the tennis ball at me hard, it comes with heaps of top spin.

  ‘So now what?’ she shouts across the grass court.

  ‘Well,’ I grunt, whacking it back with the sun fierce in my eyes, ‘at least I know he’s into me now, right?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ Debbie laughs, hitting an offensive lob that I am forced to chase down. ‘You could look at it like that, but now you gotta keep it going and that’s the hard part. What happens tomorrow? That’s where the real work starts, baby.’

  To be honest, at this point – match point – my peroxide idol’s platitudes about love and gay romance are wearing a little thin, and the fact that she’s playing tennis so very adroitly in high-heeled shoes is just adding to my exasperation. Besides that, it is scorching hot and I am dry and flagging in this vast and unoccupied stadium. I manage, despite all this, to wallop the ball high, just by the skin of my teeth.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I yell across the grass court persuasively. ‘I know what I’m doing, even in a tennis skirt.’

  Why is it that I am always dressed in women’s clothes in my dreams? Anyway, Debbie heads for the high-flying ball and comes back with a slam that thwacks the ball down just my side of the net as I dash forward – racket outstretched – too late!

  ‘Fuck it!’

  My knees hit the grass in a burning skid, just as the ball comes down for a second time.

  ‘You have to expect the unexpected,’ Debbie Harry says, walking towards the net. ‘Robinson’s Barley Water?’

  Eleven

  A Beige Hatter

  October 1979

  To look at us you’d think we were love’s young dream, Maxie and me, since that night in Moira’s bedroom just over a week ago. Well, perhaps not exactly that, but as good as, at a pinch. For instance, at rehearsals for the now rapidly approaching school production, there had been an effusive quantity of enduring stares across the dolly cart, and a fair few premeditated and what I took to be lascivious hand-brushings between us when we thought we could get away with it. Almost every time, in fact, that we even passed one another at close proximity or rehearsed a scene together, there had crackled a discernible current that I’d sense from my head to my toes. And what’s more, the grand illicitness of the whole thing made it all the more exhilarating to me, and, it appeared, to Maxie. As the days went on, and even under the watchful, dogmatic eyes of Bob Lord and the discriminatory gaze of Jason Lancaster, Maxie would find a way to pat me audaciously between the thighs or press himself suggestively against me in the costume cupboard, his face slicked with the filthiest of grins. It was all very Benny Hill but I loved it … and I loved him. To be honest, the only entity that was absent from this otherwise marvellous panorama was actual sex! Yes, Maxie certainly appeared to be looking through the eyes of love at me, it was true. Yes, he’d walked me home every evening last week after school, carrying my bulky sociology textbooks as if he were Jim-Bob Walton and I was Ike and Corabeth’s adopted daughter Aimee, but that’s where it ended. Flirtation, it seemed, was fine, but Maxie hadn’t once come up to my bedroom to listen to Blondie records since that night at Moira’s, and it was starting to get to me.

  ‘Well, you hain’t hardly sixteen yet,’ Frances Bassey had ruthlessly reminded me over a Bender Brunch at the Wimpy Bar on Thursday. ‘Perhaps the two a you shouldn’t be damn well havin’ sex yet, bwoy! It’s nasty!’

  And she shrieked into her lime milkshake, while I glared at her with pursed lips.

  ‘No, seriously,’ she said once she’d stopped giggling. ‘You’ve had more time to think about all this. I mean you were building up to it, weren’t you? Perhaps, to Maxie, it came as a bit of a shock. Perhaps he isn’t ready for the whole full-on gay thing – d’you know what I mean?’

  I nodded earnestly as Frances sipped her drink, thrilled that she seemed at last to be viewing my dilemma with at least some semblance of seriousness.

  ‘Besides,’ she continued, breaking into a snigger again. ‘Havin’ you do all ya bizness all over d’ poor bwoy is enough to send anyone ronnin’.’

  And she laughed so hard that she spat fluorescent green liquid all over the table – very much like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Only black.

  The horrendous truth of it is, though, that Frances was probably right, damn her! Although Maxie did seem, on the exterior, to be fine and dandy, who knew what sort of ghastly inner tumult he might be harbouring? Granted, he had certainly seemed at peace with himself on the Monday morning after our blissful dalliance at Moira’s place. He’d even enthused about the sheer brilliance of the whole previous day, as had I – though we didn’t mention, and have not since, the actual dirty deed. But then I suppose it’s a big step, isn’t it? Going from captain of the school football team to full-out bender in one fell swoop, and after my own experiences of coping with the many and varying complexities of burgeoning fairydom, how could I expect him to be embracing the concept with open arms after only a few days? It was très difficile, and there was no getting away from it. Still, Maxie didn’t seem to be on the verge of any sort of imminent nervous collapse, and for that I was profoundly grateful. I just wanted to get him alone again, wanted to feel him against me again, and I desperately wanted him to want that too. So, although jamming himself up against me by the costume rack when nobody else was around is all very nice, it isn’t enough! It just isn’t enough!

  * * *

  Still, there is more than a faint flicker of hope that things might change: in fact, on this very afternoon. Especially after last night, when Maxie turned up, most unexpectedly, at the Lordship Lane Working Men’s Club during my bar shift.

  ‘Maxie! What are you doing here?’ I beamed, rather ludicrously.

  I was virtually swinging on a crescent moon with elation.

  ‘Just thought I’d pay you a visit,’ Maxie said. ‘Me mum and dad are parked in front of the telly watching Tales of the Unexpected and I can’t stick that, so I thought I’d come and see you.’

  He was in a black Harrington jacket, with a blue plaid button-down shirt and dark jeans; his blond hair fell sexily over his forehead. He looked adorable.

  ‘Well, that’s great,’ I gushed, loading some dirty pint pots into the glass-washer. ‘Really great! I’m hoping we won’t be too busy tonight, so I might have a bit of time to chat.’

  No sooner, though, had I uttered those words than an uncouth but all too familiar voice bellowed from the stockroom behind me.

  ‘Oy! Gertrude! Pull your fuckin’ finger out; I can see the customers waitin’ from ’ere!’

  Maxie looked confused.

  ‘It’s my boss, Marty,’ I explained, rolling my eyes to the heavens.

  Maxie continued to look bewildered.

  ‘Why did he call you Gertrude?’ he said.

  ‘Because he’s a cunt,’ I smiled, just as Marty marched out into the bar in a West Ham top with a cigarette dangling from between his teeth. ‘I’d bet
ter go see to these customers.’

  I pottered along the bar to serve Mackeson Maude, so called because the only words she ever uttered to anyone were, ‘I’ll have a Mackeson.’ She’d only very recently been allowed back into the club on a trial period, as she’d pissed herself in the snug on Maundy Thursday, and Marty had had to sloosh the place round with Dettol before the cribbage match could start.

  ‘I’ll have a Mackeson,’ she said, which, as you might imagine, didn’t surprise me: I had one ready open for her with a half-pint glass to go with it.

  By the time I got back to Maxie, Marty was chatting to him across the bar and my heart sank. What the hell would Marty say about me? He was always taking the piss about something or other.

  ‘Just been chewin’ the fat with your little pal, flyboy,’ Marty said to me, nodding towards Maxie, who looked very slightly afraid.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said uneasily.

  ‘Yeah!’ Marty said. ‘He’s a good-lookin’ lad, ain’t he? I bet he bags most of the snatch when yous two go out on the pull, eh?’

  Then he roared with laughter and pinched my arse as he headed back to the office.

  ‘What’s he been going on about?’ I whispered, handing Maxie a free Pepsi once Marty was well out of the way.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Maxie said. ‘He told me to watch myself in case you tried to get into my pants.’

  And he laughed.

  ‘Bit late for that, ain’t it?’ he said.

  And there it was: concrete acknowledgement from Maxie that something corporeal had happened between us. Joy!

  ‘I was thinking about coming round tomorrow, to your place, after school,’ Maxie went on as I buzzed around trying to look busy. ‘What do you reckon?’

  More joy! Did he actually mean that he was going to cross the threshold of my bedroom? Be alone with me for the first time since Moira’s?

  ‘Well, yeah, that would be OK, I guess,’ I said, trying not to sound overly hysterical. ‘I’m sure me mum would do us a bit of tea; she’s been asking why you haven’t been around for the last week or so.’

  Maxie looked down at the floor, but said nothing.

  ‘In fact,’ I went on, ‘haven’t we got study period all tomorrow afternoon, cos Miss Jibbs is off with her nerves? We could go to mine at lunchtime if you like; there’ll be no one in.’

  ‘Oh!’ Maxie blushed. ‘Nobody in at all?’

  I panicked, and had to think fast.

  ‘Yeah, I mean … what I mean is, we can play music as loud as we want, or watch a video even – we’ve got a video, you know – and my dad’s got an illegal copy of The Amityville Horror, or, if not … The Muppet Movie.’

  Maxie smiled and nodded.

  ‘That sounds good. I like the Muppets.’

  ‘Great! So do I!’

  He gulped down the rest of his Pepsi, leaving a nice frothy line around his lips. Panic over. I was happy.

  ‘You fuckin’ fancy him,’ Marty laughed as he and Denise helped me tidy round the bar at the end of the night.

  Denise had just dragged herself down from upstairs to close the bar – she was in her apricot housecoat and fluffy mule-slippers, and had topped the ensemble off with three or four unstrategically placed hair curlers. She rolled her eyes at me as if to say ‘he’s off again’.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What you going on about now, Marty?’

  ‘That boy that was in ’ere earlier: your mate,’ Marty smirked. ‘I saw the way you was looking at him. You were all girlie – you got a little crush on him, ain’t ya?’

  Marty threw a sopping bar towel at me and it hit me full in the face, causing me to flinch and fall backwards against the till, which, consequently, rang up two pounds forty. I almost laughed, and was about to summon up a suitably spiteful retort when Denise jumped in, doing the job very succinctly for me herself.

  ‘Oh, why don’t you shut your stupid fuckin’ gob, Marty Duncombe,’ she spat. ‘You don’t ‘alf talk some shit, you truly do!’

  But then something happened; something unexpected, unprecedented, in fact. I turned around to face the pair of them, straight-backed, and I said, ‘Maybe I do fancy him. Maybe he fancies me. So what?’

  Marty and Denise just stood there, her with a G & T at her lips, and him with a full drip tray.

  ‘Really?’ Denise said. ‘Well, there’s a turn-up.’

  She had a gulp of her gin, and I looked over at Marty who was just glaring at me with a ridiculous half-grin, scratching his stomach.

  ‘Well, if you fancy ’im, you fancy ’im,’ Denise said breezily, wiping down the bar. ‘We’ve ‘ad other queer friends, ‘aven’t we, Marty? It’s no skin off of my arse, darlin’, what you like and what you don’t. Good for you for shoutin’ up for yourself.’

  Marty nodded slowly.

  ‘I knew you was a brown hatter,’ he said softly. ‘Or maybe it’s only a beige one at your age – but I bloody knew it.’

  ‘Marty!’ Denise snapped. ‘Your fuckin’ mouth’s disgustin’.’

  But I just shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘He might be bisexual, anyway,’ Denise said, stepping forward and pushing past her old man. ‘Are you bi, Dave, is that what you are?’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I said, fiddling with a tea cloth. ‘I do like Lindsay Wagner. I … I’m not sure …’

  All of a sudden it had dawned on me what a truly dire and frightful mistake I might have just made, telling Marty – my dad’s best friend – that I might well be a raving poof. I stared fixedly at the beer pump that read ‘Courage Best’ but all my courage had evaporated rapidly; my previously proud shoulders had sunk, and I must have looked anxious or upset suddenly, because Denise rushed over and flung her arms around me.

  ‘Don’t worry, darlin’, it’s all right!’ she said squeakily.

  ‘You won’t say anything to Eddie, will you?’ I urged. ‘Either of you? I’m not sure he’s ready.’

  Marty laughed loudly.

  ‘Fucking right I won’t say anything to Eddie! Not if I value me own life: your old man won’t thank anyone for that piece of news.’

  ‘We won’t say a word,’ Denise promised, still hugging me tight. ‘Not a word. Now you get off home, lovey, go on.’

  Then she sighed lengthily and looked me straight in the face, her doe-brown eyes misting over slightly.

  ‘I suppose at least you won’t be getting any of the little slags round ’ere up the duff, will ya, darlin’?’ she said.

  Twelve

  Whoops!

  I’m almost beside myself with elation about Maxie’s impending visit this afternoon. I mean, could this be it? Are we going to proclaim and cement our love finally and for all perpetuity? Are we going to at long last unleash our pent-up ardour and have fervent and unbridled sexual relations on my Bionic Woman duvet cover?

  ‘Perhaps you’re just going to watch The Muppet Movie,’ Frances suggests mordantly as we bundle out of the art room – she can exhibit a nasty streak, that girl, when she’s a mind to.

  ‘We’ll see,’ I say, winking at her.

  It’s a crisp day, and for the first time I notice the leaves on the playground trees turning – I hate it when summer ends.

  ‘It’s too cold to sit out here,’ I grumble at Frances as she drags me towards the currently uninhabited football field. ‘And I’m really fucking tired! Dad and Mum were at it till all hours last night – arguing, that is – and I’ve barely slept.’

  Frances seems indifferent to any grievance I might have, and marches on.

  ‘I don’t know what’s so important that it couldn’t keep till tomorrow, anyway,’ I say. ‘I’ve got tons to do before this afternoon. Me Auntie Val’s made me a lemon meringue pie for when Maxie comes over, and I’ve got to get that from me nan’s, and then put the Scotch eggs that Mum’s made into the oven for fifteen minutes, and then run around me bedroom with a tin of Mr Sheen. I’ll never get it all done by half past one when he comes.’

  Frances huffs.

  ‘You�
��ve got an hour and a bit yet, Juliet,’ she says. ‘Anyway this is important.’

  And she parks herself down by the goalposts and fishes a bag of pickled-onion-flavour Ringos out of her satchel.

  ‘Do you want one?’ she says, proffering the packet.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I laugh, ‘thank you very much. I want to come over all minty-fresh when I swoop in for my and Maxie’s first proper kiss. I don’t want to respire all over him with breath you could strip a lavatory door with, do I?’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ says Frances.

  Then she goes quiet … for ages.

  ‘Well?’ I snap at her eventually, ‘are you going to tell me what this is all about, or not?’

  I can’t be doing with this today. Not today. Frances puts her Ringos down on the grass in front of her.

  ‘When I was a little girl …’ she says.

  ‘Oh, fuckin’ ’ell!’

  ‘When I was a little girl, I had a friend …’

  ‘Well, that’s more than you’ll have in five minutes’ time if you don’t get on with it,’ I guffaw.

  ‘His name was Toby, and he lived along the street from us,’ she says. ‘His mum used to chat to mine over the gate – you know how mums do when they’re on their way to or from shopping, and my mum liked her: said she was the only white lady that gave her the time of day down our street – well, it was very ruched curtain round where we lived, wasn’t it? Anyway, sometimes Toby used to climb over the wall of our front garden when our mums were talking and chase me round and round Dad’s Johnson’s Blue geranium – I suppose we were about four or five then …’

  I must say I’m unmoved thus far, but Frances carries on despite my marked lack of interest.

  ‘He went to the same nursery as me – this Toby – and every day as we walked through the door he’d hold my hand as we went in, because on the first day I’d cried and cried and my mother could barely get me through the bloody door, but Toby said he’d look after me, and he did. He looked after me every day. When it was milk time, he didn’t just fetch his own milk, he’d fetch mine as well, and he’d say, “I got you two straws, Frances,” because he knew I liked two straws instead of one.’