‘Is it Mr Blubberhead paying us a visit?’ said Jon, and I could have kicked him because it’s just the sort of thing Dino might get pissy about, but he just giggled and blew snot down his nose, so it was all right. It went on for ages, him telling us another bit and then cracking up and crying some more and then blushing because he was being so wet and then crying some more.
Afterwards, he walked back to his place on his own. We wanted to go with him but he said he wanted to be alone. It was just me and Jon. I looked at him and he looked at me.
‘What about that, then?’ I said.
‘Well, it was a privilege,’ said Jon, which was about right. We both loved him for that, for losing it so completely with us there. He tries so hard to be Mr Cool, Numero Uno, but underneath he’s just a really nice guy. Somewhere. If only he knew it. I can’t tell you how much I’d like to be able to do that – just to sit down and tell them everything that’s happened, and then break down and let it all out, the whole filthy mess. Instead of having this bloody secret.
Secrets. What’s the point? This one’s doing my head in. If I did talk about it – that’d be telling, wouldn’t it? She’s always going on about it. ‘Oh, you never told anyone, Ben, you never boasted, never said a word. That’s so mature of you.’ What’s so grown-up about cutting yourself off from everyone else? It’s not like it’s illegal, I am over sixteen. I just want some advice. Jon or Dino or someone. A friend. The way she goes on, that’d be like high treason.
It’s what people do with little kids, isn’t it? This is our secret, just you and me, you must never tell or awful things will happen. So what’s that all about?
Secrets are dangerous. They turn on you. You think it’s all nice and snug, just you-and-me, our private place – and then suddenly you can’t get out.
Do you want to hear the latest? She loves me. What about that? Lucky old me.
We’d just had this lovely big long session and we were dozing away, and she said, ‘I love making love to you, Ben.’
That was a bit odd to start with, because it wasn’t what I thought of as making love. It was shagging. There’s a difference, isn’t there? Now I come to think of it, we’d been doing less of the raunchy shaggy stuff and more of the slow sessions in bed sort of thing lately. Which was fine by me, I preferred it like that. In fact, it might have been all my fault because I think I might have suggested it. Anyhow, so then there’s this pause and then she says,
‘I love you. Do you know that?’
Everything went very still. Actually, perhaps it was me going very still. I suppose I didn’t want her to know how shocked I was. I was scared. But at the same time I had this stupid urge to tell her that I loved her too. I almost did say it, which would have been a disaster because it’s completely untrue. It was just like it was the polite thing to say. Do you think that happens in real life? Do you think people spend their whole lives pretending to be in love with someone just because it’s good manners?
I waited a bit more, and then she said, ‘Did you hear me? I said I love you.’
I said, ‘Since when did love come into it?’
She sat up and looked at me with a crooked little smile. ‘That’s not the reaction I was hoping for.’
‘What was?’
‘I was hoping you might be flattered. Or even pleased,’ she said. Then she folded her arms and looked cross.
‘You never said you loved me before,’ I said.
‘Well, I’m saying it now. Just because I’m a teacher and you’re a student doesn’t change how I feel about you.’
‘It’s not that, it’s …’ And then I bit the bullet. ‘It’s … well. It’s that I don’t think I love you.’
I turned to look at her and she was staring at me as if I’d slapped her. For a moment I thought she was going to flatten me, but she just looked away and slid back down into the bed.
‘That’s hard for me, then, isn’t it?’ she said.
There was a nasty silence. You know, when you hurt someone? It’s horrible. I didn’t want to hurt her.
I leaned forward in bed. ‘It shouldn’t have gone this far,’ I said. I thought about it a bit and then I said, ‘I think I’d better go.’ I pulled back the sheet and got out of bed. She lay there with her back to me.
‘You don’t pick who you fall in love with, Ben. It just happens to you. I was just hoping it might have happened to you at the same time.’
‘I’m really sorry, I’m really, really sorry,’ I said. I got dressed, thinking to myself, Well, that’s that. I mean, things had gone too far. We were going to have to call a halt to it, that much was obvious even to me. And you know what? I was pleased about it. My heart was going away like the clappers, but I was pleased. It was over. I was out of there.
She turned round to look at me. ‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ she said.
‘I think I should,’ I replied.
She turned over to face the wall. Just as I was going to the door she said, ‘See you on Tuesday, then.’ I paused. My heart sank. I didn’t want to see her on Tuesday! But I didn’t say. I’d just hurt her once – how was I going to do it again right away? I just couldn’t.
‘OK,’ I said. I waited a bit, then I let myself out. I felt awful. I didn’t see her the next day at school, and I didn’t see much of her on Tuesday either, but she did get in a wink in the corridor as I was going to a lesson. ‘See you later,’ she mouthed. She looked quite cheerful, which I thought was weird. Wasn’t she supposed to have a broken heart or something … or maybe that’s just me being romantic. It made me feel better, seeing her all cheerful. I hated hurting her. So I went round there and – it was OK. We had a bit of a heart to heart. She said she understood. She wouldn’t put any pressure on me, I was still very young, all that sort of thing. She still wanted to see me. The annoying thing is, I went round there determined to say, Right, that’s it, but when it came to it I couldn’t. I don’t know why, I always thought of myself as quite a straightforward sort of person. I think I was just so pleased she wasn’t angry with me.
‘I still want to see you,’ she said.
‘Even though I don’t love you?’ I asked.
‘It’ll happen,’ she said. ‘One day the penny will drop.’ As if it was some kind of lesson I was being thick about.
She brushed her skirt down over her legs. ‘Don’t tell anyone about this, will you?’ she said.
‘Do I ever?’ I said.
‘I’m relying on you,’ she said. Then she leaned over and kissed me.
I did get some advice the other day. Not from where you might think. In fact, it’s embarrassing, it’s such cobblers. Really cheesy. It’s the sort of sad thing that happens if you don’t have any real people to talk to. You remember that remark she made, about how falling in love was something that just happened to you, as if it was like a stone falling off a cliff, or a car accident, or being struck with lightning, you know? Shit happens. She was always saying those kinds of things. Like she’d had an abortion once, and that had just happened. I mean, how’s that? She didn’t want it, her boyfriend didn’t want it, so it went, like she had no choice.
‘You could have had it if you’d wanted it enough,’ I said at the time.
‘No one wanted it, you can’t keep a baby no one wants, that’s horrible,’ she said. Which is true but it’s not the point. I mean, she could have, couldn’t she? If she’d wanted it. If she’d wanted to want it – you know what I mean? There is a choice. And doing drama was because she got on well with her drama teacher at school, and going out with me had been this spur of the moment thing. It was like her whole life was something that just happened to her, which didn’t add up at all to me, because as far as I could see, she just does pretty well exactly what she likes. You try stopping her. So what’s she got to feel so helpless about?
Right, so this is the embarrassing bit. I really hate this, but it’s true, so there you go. It was my brother’s birthday and I was in a shop getting a card for him. It was one of th
ose big card shops, with gimmicks and mugs and loads of cards. There was a section with those signs you put on your wall. You know the sort of thing. ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.’ Or, ‘Just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ Crap really, but sometimes there’s a good one. Well, why not? I guess it doesn’t cost any more to print something true than it does to print crap, except the market’s probably smaller. Anyway, it went like this:
‘Love isn’t something that happens to you. It’s a decision you make.’
What about that? It just caught me right between the eyes. I stood there staring at it. It felt so – well, I don’t know if it was true or not but it fitted in so perfectly with what I was feeling about Miss at the time.
‘It just happens,’ she says – and there it was in black and white. No it doesn’t. You do it. And – this is the thing – there was no way I was going to fall in love with her. No way. I’d have to be off my head to fall in love with her. But she’d decided to fall in love with me. You see? It didn’t just happen. She was doing it. Not necessarily on purpose, I don’t mean that. But she was doing it; and she hadn’t done it with me. She’d done it to me.
Maybe that’s fairly obvious, but it was like a revelation to me. It just shows what a state I was in. I hadn’t realised I could say no.
See? I told you it was crap. No one to talk to, you start taking advice from greetings cards. That really is the pits.
‘No,’ I said to myself. It felt good. It felt great. I walked home saying it over to myself. ‘Love is a decision that you make.’ No, Miss Young. No, Alison. Oh, no. Thank you very much, but no.’ It sounded so good.
She never asked me about anything, right from the start. I couldn’t think of one single occasion when she’d been doing sex with me in those weird places, you know, the stockroom, backstage, in empty classrooms – not a single one of them where she asked me what I wanted.
‘No,’ I said again. Then I started to imagine saying it to her, and you know what? It already sounded a bit weak.
30
jonathon
It’s the night before the big day. Mr Knobby’s in fine form, polishing his head until it shines, arranging his shirt around his neck at a jaunty angle.
‘You lucky, lucky boy,’ he croons, looking at himself at various angles in the mirror. As Mr Knobby’s personal trainer and physiotherapist, I’m giving him plenty of massage and exercise – not so much as to wear him out, of course – just enough to keep him on form, so to speak.
That’s how it should be anyway.
It’s begun to hurt. That should be the final proof, but of course it’s no proof at all. The pain might be psychosomatic. I spend hours every day focusing on the afflicted area, trying to work out if the pain is real or not, which is actually the worst possible thing to do. Did you know that cancer is the final, terminal stage of neurosis? I read that somewhere. The mind and the body are one. If you feel good about yourself you get healthy. If you’re depressed you get spots and colds and ’flu and things. And if you worry too much, that gives you problems too – heart attacks, ulcers – and cancer.
You see? The sheer neurotic force of concentrated anxiety for hour after hour on my willy will make it go cancerous in the end even if it wasn’t in the first place! Yet another vicious twist to the trap. Every minute that I spend worrying about it is a step closer to malignancy.
I hardly dare even think about it any more. When I do, I try to concentrate on being positive but it’s not easy. I’ve tried those visualisation things that people do – you know, you imagine that the stricken part of the body is being attacked by arrows and Cruise Missiles and things, or rays of calming, healing energy. But it doesn’t work. It can’t work because I’m neurotic, and as a neurotic my attention is about as healing as a bucketful of plutonium.
See? I worry about it even when I’m trying not to. I reckon all this worry these past few weeks has already made it go bad. Pretty soon it’ll be so swollen with tumours I won’t be able to get it out of my flies. And then – off with the whole dirty job, knobectomy, chemo, the lot. And they’ll all be running around saying, ‘Why didn’t you say? Knob cancer is one of the most easily treatable cancers so long as you get an early diagnosis. If you’d only said a few weeks ago we could have saved your knob, your dignity and your life.’
It’s at the point really where nothing else seems to matter. I just go through the motions. Deborah keeps asking me what’s wrong and I can’t tell her. I actually envy Dino – imagine that, envying the Lozenge! That shows how low I’ve sunk. All the time I’m trying to cheer Dino up I’m thinking, Caught shoplifting? Easy. Try having your knob cut off, mate – that’s suffering. Parents split up? Piece of piss. Lost your girlfriend? Tough. Try losing your knob, see how that feels.
He’s lucky. At least his problems are real. His girlfriend really has left him, his parents are actually splitting up. He has been done for shoplifting. Whereas with me, it’s all in my imagination. Not only that, but I know exactly how to sort it out, and I can’t do it. I’m literally dying of embarrassment. But it’s just a vein! Can’t you see that? Just the biggest little vein in the world.
And what about poor Debs? I’m going to have to dump her, it’s no good. It’s not fair to her. I could tell her I was gay or something – anything to avoid having to stick it in and make it go really malignant. Either that or she’s going to chuck me. I really am pissing her off at the moment and you can’t blame her. Just as I was getting to like having her as my girlfriend! Actually, I probably ought to chuck her for her own good. What if cancer is catching? When she gets some spunk on her skin, she might catch it. My spunk is bound to be terribly carcinogenic. Or in her mouth. She might get mouth cancer and it’ll be all my fault. If I actually do manage to get it up, I could give her cancer of the minge. You see what a shit I am? I pretend to be supportive to Dino when really I don’t care. I don’t tell Debbie that she might already have the early stages of cancer – she’s had enough of it on her in the past few weeks, that’s for sure. And I don’t even feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for me!
On the big day there was to be no forgetting. It was there when he woke and stayed all day until Deborah rang him at twelve to give him the all-clear.
He kept hoping. It was embarrassing going up the stairs and embarrassing again getting undressed and sitting side by side on the double bed, shivering slightly in the cool air. He wanted to look at her naked, but he was too scared. Mr Knobby vanished up inside him. Under the covers, he kissed her and pressed her up against him, and tried to remember how he wanted it to be like. He wanted to spread her and stroke her and bang her and roll her over and gobble her all up like the lovely big banquet she was. But there was no movement. Mr Knobby had gone into a coma, hanging down there like a piece of scrap meat discarded by a low-class butcher as being unworthy even of the cheapest sausages. All he could do was cling helplessly to her breasts like a shipwrecked sailor. After a little bit she fetched a blow heater to warm things up and gave him a massage to help him relax. After she’d done his back she did his stomach. Jonathon was horribly conscious of his microscopic member. He kept trying to get little glimpses of her body, but whenever she met his eyes he looked away in embarrassment.
‘It’s all right, you can look,’ she told him, but all he wanted to do was hide his face in his hands.
At last they gave up. Deborah went downstairs and came up in her gown, with tea and toast, which felt like cardboard in his mouth. Afterwards he made an excuse and left, even though they had planned on spending the night together.
‘It’s all right, it’s not the end of the world, it happens to loads of boys, it’ll come back,’ she told him. Jonathon smiled a tight little smile. She showed him out, sympathetic but disappointed, and very hurt that he wasn’t staying; and he couldn’t even tell her what was wrong.
31
thaw
Dino had spent the weeks following the disaster in a fog
of misery and incomprehension. He was the golden boy, things like this didn’t happen to him in the first place, and if they did, it didn’t matter. Somehow he always came up smelling of roses. He’d lost his girlfriend, his parents and his self respect all in one day. He was heartbroken about Jackie – he truly loved her in his own way – felt helpless and confused with what was happening at home, and just plain used by Siobhan. If he forgot one misery, another came flying up to sting him. One of the most unbearable things was the way it had made him feel like a nerd – one of those insecure, uncertain speccy kids who wander round on the edges of things never fitting in. It was just awful.
It took a while for it to sink in that it really was over between him and Jackie. She’d come back to him, she always did. He sulked for a couple of days – it was a bit much just chucking him after what he’d been through, after all. When she showed no signs of contrition, he tried to speak to her and was rebuffed like a pair of dirty underpants.
Ben and Jon were both being fantastic – that was the only good thing that came out of the whole episode; he hadn’t realised what good friends they were. He asked their advice about what to do about it, and was pissed off that they both thought he should leave it. After further pressing, they suggested begging forgiveness and declarations of love, so he tried bombarding her with emails, but after the first one, when she replied she was going to delete any others, he got no replies. He tried ringing her. She never answered her mobile and after a couple of poisonously hissing replies from her outraged mother, he gave that up too. He had no stomach for further humiliation.
It began to sink in. She didn’t want him any more. And it wasn’t just her. The whole school had turned against him. Suddenly the magic was gone. It was like going blind. Even complete strangers seemed to know that he’d become a tosser. Girls in shops showed no interest in him whatsoever. He’d become so used to them smiling and laughing and fluttering and chatting up to him, he’d just accepted it as something that happened. Now, they served him without a smile and moved on to the next customer as if, he, Dino, was just anyone.