Starter for Ten

  “Better not. There's usually dog shit in there,” she says.

  And I have to admit, she's probably got a point.

  Shortly afterward we get back to Kenwood Manor. She's held on to my arm all the way, which has to count for something, so feeling emboldened I say, “Hey, what are you doing next Tuesday?”

  Only a highly experienced eye like my own would spot the fleeting moment of panic that passes over Alice Harbinson's features, but it's there all right, if only for a moment, before she pulls a quizzical look, and taps her chin with her finger. “Next Tues … day? Let me think …” she says. Quick, Alice, think of an excuse, quickly, girl, come on, come on, come on.…

  “It's just it's my nineteenth birthday, you see. The big one-nine! …”

  And I pause just long enough for her to stroll blindly into my trap.

  “And you're having a party! Well I'd love to come …”

  “Actually, not a party, I don't really know enough people for a party. But I thought maybe we could just go out for … dinner or something?”

  “Just me and you?” She smiles. Is the word “rictal” or “rictusly”?

  “Just me and you …”

  “Okay,” she says, as if it were two words. “O. Kay. Why not? Yes! That'll be great! That'll be fun!” she says.

  And it will be great. Great and Fun. I'm determined that it will be both Great and Fun.

  12

  QUESTION: Lanugo, vellus and terminal are all terms used to describe the different developmental stages of which part of the human body?

  ANSWER: Hair.

  Today is a special day, because not only is it my nineteenth birthday, the last year of my teens, the beginning of a new and excitingly adult, mature phase in the life of Brian Jackson, but it's also the day of my romantic dinner for two with Alice Harbinson, and as a special birthday gift to myself, Alice and the world, I've decided to completely change my image.

  This has been due for some time, frankly. A lot of great artists, like David Bowie or Kate Bush, stay on the cutting edge by constantly changing their attitude and appearance, but I think it's fair to say that I've been caught in a bit of a style rut lately. I'm not going to do anything extreme, I'm not going to start wearing knitted leotards, or get into heroin or become bisexual or anything, but I am going to get my hair cut. No, not just cut. Styled.

  Hair has always been a bit of a bone of contention, to be honest. Like using gel or washing your face or wearing slip-ons, having your hair cut was always considered a bit effeminate at Langley Street Comprehensive. This means that up until today I've been lumbered with this sort of nameless, formless thing that just flops lankly over my eyes, curling unhygienically over my collar and sticking out over the ears so that in silhouette my head looks a bit like a large bell or, as Tone would have it, the end of a knob.

  But all that's going to finish today, because I've been eyeing up Cutz, a unisex salon—not a barber's—that I like the look of. It's modern without being avant-garde, and quite masculine, and clean, with copies of The Face and id to read, rather than a dog-eared, hairy pile of Razzle and Mayfair. I've spoken to a nice man called Sean, with a flattop and an earring and a boys-y demeanor, who says he's going to do me at ten.

  It is, of course, massively expensive, but I've got the fiver Mum sent me in the post this morning (tucked in a card with footballers on the front— “Don't spend it all at once!”), and a fiver from Nana Jackson to go toward the romantic dinner for two tonight, so I'm feeling pretty uptown and ritzy as I stroll nonchalantly into Cutz, the first customer of the day. I approach the small group of staff, all hanging round the reception desk, drinking coffee and smoking Silk Cut.

  “Appointment for ten o'clock? With Sean? Name of Jackson?”

  They all look up, at my clothes and my hair, then look back down in a “don't-get-involved” way, except for the receptionist, who strolls over and checks the appointment book. I can't see Sean, though. Where's my new friend Sean?

  “Sean's not in today,” she says.

  “Oh, right … ?”

  “Nicky can do you, though. He's the apprentice. Is that all right?”

  I follow her gaze to the corner where a skinny boy is halfheartedly sweeping up last night's trimmings. Is that Nicky? He looks about six.

  “An apprentice?” I whisper.

  “He's the same as Sean, he's just a bit cheaper,” says the receptionist chirpily, but even she knows it's a gamble.

  You know in Westerns, when the gang go to a brothel, and the main cowboy has to pick the prostitute that he likes the most, and there's always a sexy one with a beauty spot, the one that's clearly much more attractive than the other prostitutes, who are all fat or skinny or old, or have a wooden leg, or a mole on their lip, or a glass eye, and of course the cowboy always picks the sexy one? Well, I can't help worrying about the other prostitutes' feelings. I know that prostitution is wrong, but there's a kind of resigned, disappointed shrug that the rejected prostitutes give as they head back to their chaise longue or whatever, that shows that while they'd rather not have loveless sex for money with a strange cowboy, it still would have been nice to be asked. And that's the look Nicky the Apprentice gives me. I can't reject Nicky, because Nicky is the prostitute with the wooden leg.

  “I'm sure Nicky will be great!” I squeak, and Nicky shrugs, puts down his broom, picks up his scissors and gets ready to do me.

  They make me up an individual proper coffee in a sort of jug with a plunger, and we have what I think is called “a consultation.” This is a tricky one for me, because I don't really have the vocabulary. I thought about bringing along a photograph as a sort of visual aid, but if I turn up with a picture of David Bowie or Sting or Harrison Ford, they're just going to laugh in my face.

  “What d'you want then? The usual?”

  “I don't know. What's the usual?”

  “Short-back-and-sides.”

  No, that can't be right—sounds too old-fashioned. “Actually I was thinking more of sort of keeping some of the length on the top, with a loose parting on the left, and sort of combed back, and short over the ears, and at the back.”

  “Shaved at the back?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Like in Brideshead Revisited ?”

  “No!” I laugh, meaning yes.

  “Well, like what then?”

  Be cool. “Ummmm.”

  “… Because what you've just described there is a short-back-and- sides.”

  “Is it? Okay then, a short-back-and-sides.”

  “Want it washed?” he asks, lifting a lock distastefully between finger and thumb, like someone picking up a dirty tissue. Will that be more expensive? “No, no, no, I think it's fine, thanks.”

  “You a student?”

  “Yes!”

  “Thought so.”

  And so it begins. Young Nicky's actually pretty deft with the scissors, considering that the last pair he used were plastic and round-ended, and pretty soon he's hacking away with something like enthusiasm, as “Purple Rain” plays loudly over the stereo. Meanwhile I sit and read The Face and pretend I understand it, and that I'm not worried about my hair, oh, no, not at all, even though Nicky's the apprentice. The apprentice what? Apprentice plumber? Apprentice electrician? Apprentice lathe operator? I'm staring at an article about skateboarding without really taking it in, so instead just look at the models in the fashion shoots, who are all skinny and androgynous and topless and languidly postcoital, and all sneer up at me, as if sneering at what Nicky's doing to my hair, and the electric razor's out now, and he's shearing the back of my head. Apprentice shepherd? I look up from The Face, look at the mirror, and it looks … quite good, actually, clean and fresh, structured yet natural. I look all right. In fact, I think this might actually be the one for me, the perfect haircut, the haircut I've been waiting for all my life. Nicky, I am so sorry for ever doubting you.…

  But still he keeps cutting. Like when you do a great painting at junior school, and the teach
er says “Stop now, or you'll spoil it”—Nicky's spoiling it! He's carving out great shaved strips over my ears, he's shaving so high up the back that the long hair on top looks like a toupee. Apprentice lawn-keeper? Apprentice butcher? I want to reach over and yank the power cable out of the wall, but I can't, I just look dumbly back at The Face, something about break-dancing in Basingstoke shopping centers, and wait for the buzzing to stop.

  Finally he stops. “Gel or wax?” he asks.

  God, gel or wax? I don't know. Is “bag” an option? I've never had wax, so I say wax, and he opens a little shoe-polish container, rubs what looks like lard on his hands, and drags his fingers through what remains of my hair.

  It's clear that I'm a long, long way from Brideshead here. I look like Winston Smith. I look like a shaved rabbit. I look skinny and wide-eyed and consumptive and a bit mad. Nicky gets a mirror and shows me the back of my head, where the electric razor has uncovered a Martian landscape of scars and boils that I didn't even know existed until now, one of which is bleeding slightly.

  “What d'you think?” Nicky says.

  “It's perfect!” I say.

  Now that I've ruined my hair, it's time to pick a restaurant for our romantic dinner for two. Once again, no one teaches you how to choose a restaurant, and I've never been to a proper restaurant with just one other person before, just cafés and curries and Chinese with Spencer and Tone mainly, where more often than not, the traditional end to a meal is not a cognac and a fine cigar, but Tone shouting “Run!” So I'm working on instinct rather than experience, but sticking to a few basic rules of thumb.

  First of all, no curries, just in case things get amorous. Also, there's nothing particularly attractive about sitting there with the object of your devotion, wafting your hand in front of your mouth going “Bloody hell, that's hot!” Secondly, try to avoid restaurants that are located within large department stores or supermarkets. I once treated Janet Parks to a slap-up sit-down lunch in Basildon British Home Stores, and I don't think it went down that well, actually. Carrying your own food back to your table on a tray, generally speaking, is to be avoided; remember, waitresses are not a luxury. Thirdly, don't be too flash. Impulsively, I told Alice that I'd take her to Bradley's Bistro, which is pretty swanky, but I went to look at the menu and it's way out of my league, so we're going to have to go somewhere which combines fine cuisine with value-for-money. Even with Nana Jack-son's fiver taken into account, I've still only got £12.00 for dinner for two, to include wine, two courses and a dessert with two spoons.

  Walking around town, looking in restaurant windows, I keep catching sight of my new haircut, my face looking haunted and afraid. That hair wax is a rip-off too. They make you think it's going to give you control, but all it's done here is make the fringe cling lankly to my forehead, like an oil-slicked seagull. Maybe it'll look better by candlelight. As long as it doesn't combust.

  I browse the restaurants in the chintzier village-y part of town, and finally make my decision—a traditional Italian trattoria called Luigi's Pizza Plaza. It does burgers and ribs too, and deep-fried whitebait, and has red-check tablecloths, and candles in wine bottles under great red Vesuviuses of congealed wax, and complimentary breadsticks and gigantic pepper mills on every table, so I book the table for two, eight-thirty, name of Jackson, from a red-faced man with dirty fingernails who may or may not be the eponymous Luigi, then head back to my digs.

  13

  QUESTION: A durable blue twill taking its name from serge de Nîmes; the exuded sap of the tree Hevea brasiliensis; and woven filaments from the genus Bombyx. Name the three materials.

  ANSWER: Denim, rubber and silk.

  I'm meant to be doing an essay on “Nature Imagery in John Donne's Holy Sonnets,” but I've been looking for a week now and still can't actually find any.

  My pencil notes in the margin don't help much either; I've written things like “the Annunciation!” and “irony?” and “cf. Freud” and “here he turns the tables!,” and I can't remember why, so instead I pick up Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. It occurs to me that there are six ages of book-reading. The first is picture books, then (2) books with more illustrations than words, then (3) books with more words than illustrations, then (4) books with no illustrations, just a map maybe, or a family tree, but lots of dialogue, then (5) books with long paragraphs and hardly any dialogue, then (6) books with no dialogue, no narrative, just great long paragraphs and footnotes and bibliographies and appendixes and very, very small writing. Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology is very much a book of the sixth kind, and, intellectually speaking, I'm still stuck somewhere between ages four and five. I read the first sentence, flick through in a fruitless search for a map or photo or illustration, then fall asleep.

  When I wake up, I suddenly realize it's 4:30, and I've only got three hours to get ready for dinner. I head to the bathroom, but Josh has been using the bath to soak a load of dirty denim in detergent. I have to scoop the clothes out of the cold, blue stew, and pile them in the sink before I can run the bath, and it's not until I get in that I realize that I haven't got rid of all the washing powder, and that I am, to all intents and purposes, giving myself a 70-degree nonbiological cotton/polyester wash. So the bath isn't quite the relaxing experience I'd hoped for, especially as I have to rinse myself off with cold water through the shower attachment to try and prevent the worst of the chemical burns. Looking in the mirror, I notice that I've turned slightly blue.

  I transfer the wet denim back in the bath, then in a spirit of righteous vengeance, I nip down the corridor to Josh's bedroom door, and when I'm sure he's not there, I nip in and steal his Apri facial scrub, which basically is grains of ground-up apricot stone in soap that you rub your face with. I do so, and get a pretty satisfying lather going, but when it comes to washing it off, the results aren't good. It looks like I've been through a plate-glass window. Either that or someone's rubbed my face very hard with ground-up apricot stone. There's a lesson to be learned here, I suppose, and it's this: acne doesn't rub off.

  Tight-faced now, and scared to smile in case my face starts to bleed, I go back to my room, where my futon is up against the wall, drying out, put my dirty clothes away, and carefully choose what books to leave lying around just in case Alice comes back “for ‘coffee’”or, more likely, for coffee. I go for The Communist Manifesto, Tender Is the Night, The Lyrical Ballads, The Female Eunuch, some e. e. cummings and the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, just in case things get steamy and I need some lyric poetry to hand. I'm in two minds about The Female Eunuch, because even though I'd like her to think that my sexual politics are progressive and radical the illustration on the front cover, of a disembodied naked female torso, has always seemed a bit sexy to me, so much so that I used to have to hide it from Mum.

  Then I put on some brand-new black briefs, my best black slacks, a new secondhand dinner jacket, bought from the vintage clothes shop Olden Times, my best white shirt, a bow tie and my new black braces. I arrange the dead seagull on my head, then splash my face with Dad's vintage white porcelain bottle of Old Spice, which makes me smell a bit old and spicy, and stings like hell. Then I check my wallet for the condom that I always carry with me in case of a miracle. This particular condom is number two in a proposed trilogy, the first of which met its poignant fate in the wheely-bin at the back of Littlewoods. This one has been in my wallet for so long that it's stuck to the lining, and the foil wrapper has started to tarnish round the outline of the condom, like some grotesque brass rubbing. Still, I like to carry it with me, in the same way as some people like to carry a St. Christopher's medal, despite the fact that I have about as much chance of using the thing tonight as I have of carrying the infant Jesus across a river.

  On the way to Kenwood Manor I have to stop every hundred yards or so, because the metal clips on my braces refuse to gain a purchase on the waistband of my black slacks, and keep pinging off and snapping against my nipples.

  I'm reattaching them for about the twentieth t
ime when a voice behind me says, “Someone stolen your teddy bear, Sebastian?”

  “Hello, Rebecca, how are you?”

  “I'm all right, the question is, are you all right?”

  “What d'you mean?”

  “Well, what's happened to your hair?”

  “Don't you like it?”

  “Makes you look like Heinrich Himmler. And why the fancy dress?”

  “Well, you know what they say—clothes maketh the man …”

  “… look uncomfortable?”

  “I'm taking someone out to dinner, if you must know.”

  “Wooooooo!”

  “It's just a platonic thing.”

  “And who's the lucky lady? Not bloody Alice Harbinson, I hope.…” I look innocently up at the sky. “Och, I don't believe it. You boys, you're sooooo predictable. Honestly, if you want to play with dolls, why don't you just go out and buy a doll?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Hey, you'd better get a move on, Jackson, or you'll miss the boat.”

  “What d'you mean by that?” “I just mean that she's clearly a very popular young lady, that's all. We're on the same corridor, and every night there's this long queue of drooling rugger-buggers snaking out of her door, all clutching bottles of warm Lambrusco …”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. And she's got this habit of strolling down the corridor to the communal bathroom in her little black knickers and bra. Though for whose benefit that display's for, I really couldn't say.…”

  I bat the image out of my mind. “You sound as if you don't like her.”

  “Och, I barely know her—not cool enough for that crowd, am I? Besides, I don't think she's what you'd call a girl 's girl, if you know what I mean. Personally speaking, I don't see the appeal of the kind of girl who still draws a smiley face in the middle of her letter O's but, hey, that's just me. So, where you taking the lovely Alice?”