Starter for Ten

by David Nicholls

  “Dunno, Spence. Not my problem, is it?”

  And then I hear him say, quite quietly, almost to himself, “Go on then. Piss off,” so I stop and turn, expecting to see him sneering or grinning, but he's not. Instead he's standing quite still some distance away, under a streetlight, with his head tilted back, his eyes tightly closed and the heel of one hand pressed against his forehead, fingers curled up tight.

  He looks about ten years old. I have this sense that I should go up to him, or at least just stand a little bit closer, but instead I shout down the street: “You've got to go, Spence! By tomorrow morning. You can't stay in the house anymore. It's against the rules.”

  He opens his eyes, which are wet and red and tired, and looks at me levelly. “And is that why you want me to go, Brian? Because it's against the

  rules?”

  “Yeah. Partly.”

  “Right. Well. I'll go, then.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I'm sorry if I've … embarrassed you. In front of your friends.”

  “You haven't embarrassed me, I just … don't want you around. That's all.”

  I turn, and walk quickly away without looking back, and I'm sure, I'm convinced, that I should feel good, and defiant, and strong about having finally stood up to him for once, but for some reason I don't. I just feel hot and hollow and stupid and sad, and I have no idea where to go.

  I'm not sure how long I walk for after that. I'm vaguely aware that I've got the only keys to the house, and that the sensible thing to do would be to go home and let Spencer in. But he can always wake Marcus or Josh up; after all, I'm not my brother's keeper. I'll just give him enough time to find his way home and get to sleep, and give myself a chance to walk off the booze and the confusion, and then sneak back home and sort things out in the morning. But after an hour or so the drizzle starts to thicken into rain, and though it's really not my intention, consciously, anyway, I eventually find myself outside Alice and Rebecca's halls of residence.

  The front gates are locked at one in the morning to all but key-holders, so I have to clamber over the high old cast-iron railings. I manage to do so without setting off any alarms or impaling myself, but then almost immediately slip over on the smooth soles of my brogues and toboggan down the muddy wooded embankment, finally coming to rest underneath a rhododendron bush. I wipe the thick mud off my hands on wet leaf mulch, crouch under the bushes and wait for someone to come along the gravel path to the main entrance.

  Ice-cold water is dripping from the leaves and dribbling down the nape of my neck, and thick muddy water is starting to soak into my suede brogues, so that it feels as if my feet are wrapped in cold, damp cardboard. I'm just about to give up and head home when I finally see someone coming down the driveway to the house. I slip out of the bushes and walk a little way behind them, and when they've opened the door I shout “Wait” and they stop and turn.

  “Hold the door!” The man, who I don't recognize, regards me suspiciously. “Forgotten my keys! Would you believe it! And on a night like this!” He's looking at my shoes and trousers, which are caked with leaf mold. “Fell over! God, I am soaked !” but he's not moving, so I fiddle in my wallet with numb, slimy fingers, and show him my NUS card—trust me, I'm a student—and this seems to do the trick for some reason, because he opens the door and lets me in.

  I slap wetly down the dark corridors, leaving a trail of compost on the parquet, until I come to Alice's room. There's a narrow ribbon of orange light under the door, so I know she's awake. I press my ear against the door, and can hear some music—it's Joni singing “Help Me” from Court and Spark—and I can almost feel the warmth and light through the heavy wooden door, and desperately want to be on the other side. I knock gently. Too gently in fact, because she doesn't hear anything, so I knock again, and whisper her name.

  “Who is it?”

  “It's Brian,” I whisper.

  “Brian?” and she opens the door. “Oh, my God, Brian, look at you!” and she takes me by the hand and tugs me inside.

  She leads me to the center of the room and immediately takes charge of the situation, adopting the demeanor of a strict but kindly Edwardian housekeeper—“Don't sit down, and don't touch anything, not until we've dried you off, young man!”—and she starts to root through her drawers, pulling out a baggy green hand-knitted sweater, a pair of loose tracksuit bottoms and a pair of hiking socks. “And, here, you'll need this, too,” and she undoes the cord of her white toweling dressing gown, takes it off and throws it to me. Underneath she's wearing an ancient gray T-shirt, shrunk up to above her belly button, with a print of Snoopy lying on his kennel on the front, cracked and faded like a medieval fresco, a pair of big, battleship gray cotton knickers, and a pair of men's black socks rolled down to her ankles, and it occurs to me that this is without doubt the most sensual and erotic sight that I have ever seen in my whole life.

  “Look at you—your hands are shaking.”

  “Are they?” I say, and when I open my mouth to speak, I realize my teeth are chattering too.

  “Come on, get your kit off, or you'll get pneumonia,” she says sternly, hand outstretched. I'm a bit nervous about getting undressed, partly because the dumbbells haven't really had a chance to kick in yet, and also because I'm wearing one of my old school vests, so there's bound to be a slight wartime-orphan look about me. But I seem to remember that my boxers are in fairly good nick, and I am extremely cold, so I relent. She stands next to me as I start to get undressed, and notices that my hands are shaking too much to undo the buttons of my shirt.

  “Here, let me,” she says, and starts to undo them, top to bottom. “Why aren't you with Spencer?”

  “We had a bit of a f-f-falling-out.”

  “So where is he, then?” Why's she still talking about Spencer?

  “No idea—back at my house, probably.” The buttons are undone, and she backs away, so that I can take the shirt off. “I'm so sorry about all that …”

  “What?”

  “You know—Spencer, the p-punch-up …”

  “Oh, God, don't worry about that. I quite enjoyed it actually. I mean, I'd usually never condone physical violence, but in Patrick's case I'm prepared to make an exception. Wow, your friend Spencer can really fight, can't he?” Her eyes twinkling at the memory of it. “I know I shouldn't say this, but I do think there's something quite exciting about men fighting, you get a sense of the appeal, you know, like in ancient Roman gladiatorial combat.” I'm sitting on the edge of her desk now, trying not to get mud on it, unraveling the slimy mud-soaked laces of my shoe. “I once went out briefly with this guy who was an amateur boxer, and I used to love going to watch him train and fight. We always used to have the most amazing, animalistic sex afterwards; all the blood and bruises and everything, there was something really beautiful and sensual about it. The blood on the pillow afterwards …” And she stands there for a moment, with my moldy shoes in her hand, and gives a little involuntary erotic shudder at the memory. I start to gingerly peel my wet trousers off. “Of course, outside the bedroom and the boxing ring, we didn't have a lot in common, so it was doomed from the start really. Not a good basis for a relationship, is it? If you're only attracted to them when they're half-naked and beating someone's brains out. Have you ever hit someone, Brian?”

  I'm standing in my underpants and vest, so you'd have thought the answer would have been fairly self-explanatory. “Me? God, no.”

  “Or been hit … ?”

  “Oh, once or twice—you know, just playground bundles, scuffles in pubs. Thankfully I have a black belt in hiding under tables.” She smiles, takes my clothes off me, eyes averted, and starts shaking them out, folding them neatly.

  “So he didn't hurt you, then?” I say.

  “When?”

  “Spencer, in the fight.”

  “When?”

  “I saw him push you against the wall.…”

  “Oh, that was nothing, just a little bump on the head. Why, can you see a bruise?” Sh
e turns around, parting the hair on the crown of her head with one hand, and I stand close behind her, and pull the hair to one side and don't really look, just inhale. She smells of red wine and clean cotton, warm skin and Timotei, and I have this overwhelming urge to kiss the top of her head, the small raised area where the bruise is. I could get away with it too. I could lean forward now and kiss it and then say, “There you go, kissed it better!,” something along those lines, but I do have some pride, so instead I just place my fingers gently where the redness is.

  “Do you feel anything?” she asks. Alice, you have no idea …

  “There's just a tiny bruise,” I say. “Nothing much.”

  “Good,” she says, and starts hanging my clothes on the radiator. I'm still standing in my vest and underpants, and a quick glance down at my boxers reveals that it looks as if I'm smuggling executive toys, so I quickly pull on the tracksuit bottoms and the old sweater that still smells of her. “I've got some whisky. Want some?”

  “Absolutely,” I say, then sit on her bed and watch as she rinses out two teacups in the handbasin. In the light of the anglepoise I notice that the flesh at the top of her thighs is very white and dimpled slightly, like risen bread dough, and as she turns sideways-on against the light I see, or think I see, a little wisp of pale brown hair escaping at the top of her underwear against the small, soft bulge of her belly.

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  I snap to. “About what?”

  “Your friend, Spencer.” There she goes again—Spencer, Spencer, Spencer …

  “I don't know—talk in the morning, I suppose.”

  “So what are you walking around in the rain for?”

  “I just wanted to give him a couple of hours to go to sleep. I'll head back soon …” I say, and pretend to shiver.

  She hands me a teacup with an inch of whisky in it. “Well, you can't go back out tonight. You'll have to sleep here.…”

  This is my cue to feign resistance. “Oh, really, that's all right, I should head back …” I'm actually quite warm now, but try to make my teeth chatter artificially, which is actually a lot harder than you'd think, so I don't push it, but just quietly say, “I'll drink this and go.”

  “Brian, you can't go back out there, just look at your shoes … !” My ruined suede brogues are steaming on top of the radiator like hot pasties, and I can hear the rain being blown hard against the window. “I refuse to let you leave. You'll have to sleep with me tonight.” The bed is single. This is a very narrow bed. Very narrow. More like a ledge.

  “Oh, all right, then,” I say, “… if you insist.”

  31

  QUESTION: Discovered accidentally by the Dutch physicist Pieter van Musschenbroek in 1746, and also by the German inventor Ewald Georg von Kleist in 1745, a Leyden jar is a sealed glass container used for storing what?

  ANSWER: Static electricity.

  There are things that a nineteen-year-old man such as myself might reasonably be expected to have done by now. For instance, I think you should be able to assume that, at nineteen, I'd have traveled by plane, for instance, or ridden on a motorbike, or driven a car, or scored a goal, or successfully smoked a cigarette. By the age of nineteen Mozart had written symphonies, operas and played for the crowned heads of Europe. Keats had written Endymion. Even Kate Bush had recorded her first two studio albums, and I've yet to eat tinned sweet corn.

  But I have to say I don't really mind all that, because tonight I'm about to crack the big one. Tonight, for the first time in my life, I am about to spend a whole night in bed with someone.

  All right, I should qualify that a little. Last summer I shared a one-man tent with Spencer and Tone on Canvey Island, and that was pretty cozy. I slept in the same bed as Mum for the first couple of nights after Dad died. And the night before his funeral I shared my single bed at home with my Irish cousin, Tina, but of course this last one doesn't count because, leaving aside the somber circumstances and the incest taboo, cousin Tina was, and remains, a deeply violent person. To clarify, then, I've never, ever, in my life shared a bed as an adult for the whole night with a member of the opposite sex to whom I'm not closely related and/or afraid of. Until now.

  We stay up for an hour or so, drinking whisky, sitting on the bed next to each other and talking and listening to Tapestry and the new Everything but the Girl album. Because I know that I'm here for the duration, I relax a little and we start to have fun again, proper fun, reliving the party, the fight, the look on Patrick's face while he tried to remember Spencer's name. She sits right up next to me with her legs crossed in front of her, her T-shirt tugged down over her belly for propriety's sake, but when she's not looking I can still see the mottled pink and white smoothness on the inside of her thighs, the beginning of a dark hollow at the top of each leg.

  “By the way,” she says, “I've got something to tell you.”

  “What?” I say. I'm in love with Spencer or something, I expect.

  “I got some good news tonight,” she says, making a meal of it.

  “Go on …”

  “I … am … Hedda Gabler!”

  “Congratulations! That's brilliant news!” To be honest, I'd been secretly hoping that she wouldn't get the role, partly because it means she'll be rehearsing all the time, and partly because, like a lot of actors, she can frankly be pretty monumentally boring on the subject. But never let it be said that I don't have a huge talent for insincerity. “That's amazing! The eponymous Hedda! You'll be great! I'm so pleased!” I say, and hug her and kiss her on the cheek, because after all, I might as well get something out of it. “Hey, you are still going to do University Challenge, aren't you?”

  “Absolutely. I've checked. The dates don't clash, even if we do get through to the second round …”

  “Which we will.”

  “Which we will.”

  And then we both talk for an hour or so about the many and varied challenges involved in tackling Hedda Gabler, which isn't easy, because to be honest I've never read it, so I drift off and just look at her for a little while, and then she's saying …

  “… and the really great thing is that Eilert Lovborg is being played by Neil MacIntyre …”

  “Who's Neil … ?”

  “You know—he was that amazing Richard III last term?”

  “Oh, him!” I say, meaning “Oh, the twat with the tambourine!” Neil MacIntyre's the actorly bastard who spent most of the last term hobbling ostentatiously round the student bar on a pair of crutches to “get into character.” Many's the time I've been tempted to kick his crutches away, but Alice is obviously pretty fired up about the experience that awaits her because she's getting incredibly animated and passionate, waving her hands in the air, biting her lip, and pressing her hand against her forehead. In fact she's pretty much running through her whole performance scene by scene, so I try to stay awake by blinking heavily when she's not looking, and sneaking occasional surreptitious glances at the faded print of Snoopy on her T-shirt, rising and falling, or the pale skin on the inside of her thighs, taking little mental photographs.

  Finally, after Hedda's thrown her beloved Lovborg's manuscript into the flames, and committed suicide offstage, Alice says, “God, I'm bursting for a pee,” and pads off down the corridor to the communal toilet. As soon as she's gone I surreptitiously have an illicit roll of her Cool Blue underarm deodorant, and adjust the angle of the bedside radio–alarm clock in the hope that she won't see that it's gone three in the morning and start getting sleepy. But when she comes back to the room the first thing she does is yawn and say, “Time for bed,” then goes to the handbasin and starts to brush her teeth.

  “You'll have to borrow my toothbrush, I'm afraid,” she says, through a mouthful of foam. “Hope you don't mind.”

  “I don't if you don't!”

  “Here you go, then,” and she passes it to me, and I rinse it under the tap, but not too much, and then we stand side by side at the sink, and I brush my teeth while she takes her
makeup off with blue cleanser. There's a little bit of comic business when I accidentally spit on her hand as she reaches across the washbasin for a cotton wool pad, and we catch each other's eye in the mirror, and she laughs brightly as she swiftly rinses my minty flob off her wrist. And it occurs to me that there's something a little bit cozily domestic about the moment, as if we're getting ready for bed having just hosted a delightful and hugely successful dinner party for our closest friends, but I don't say this out loud, because I'm not, after all, a complete and utter cretin.

  I take the green sweater and tracksuit bottoms off in a way that doesn't seem too sexually provocative, and contemplate leaving the hiking socks on, for comfort's sake, but it's not a good look, underpants and socks, so I take them off and put them by the bed, just in case.

  “Do you want to be up against the wall, or … ?” she says.

  “Don't mind …”

  “I'll be up against the wall then, shall I?”

  “Okay!”

  “Got a glass of water?”

  “Yep,” and she gets under the handmade patchwork eiderdown, and I follow.

  To begin with we don't actually touch each other, not on purpose, and there's some shuffling round as we realize just exactly how small the bed is. Finally we adjust ourselves into what seems like a workable position, which involves lying curled up in parallel, like quotation marks, but with me not actually daring to touch her, as if she were a live rail. Which, in a way, she is.

  “Comfy?” she says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nifty-nift, Brian.”

  What? “‘Nifty-nift'?”

  “Just something Daddy used to say, you know, instead of nighty-night?” “Nifty-nift to you too, Alice.”

  “Turn the light out, will you?”

  “Don't you mean turn the ‘lift' out?” I say, which if you ask me is a pretty witty thing to come up with at 3:42 in the morning, but she doesn't say anything or make a noise even, so I turn off the light. For a moment I wonder if this will act as some sort of catalyst to make us lose our inhibitions and unleash our potent mutual secret longings, but it doesn't, it just makes the room dark. We lie exactly as before, in quotation marks, not touching, and it soon becomes clear that the actual muscular tension required to stay rigid and not touch her is going to be impossible to sustain, like holding a chair out at arm's length all night. So I relax slightly, and the top of my thigh comes into contact with the warm curve of her left buttock, and she doesn't seem to flinch or elbow me in the gut, so I assume it's all right.