Doing It

  ‘I just wanted you to know because I thought you might be worried about it. So you don’t have to be, because I never told anyone. OK?’

  They drove on a bit further in silence. Ben was scared. Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut.

  ‘I appreciate that, Ben. I appreciate you telling me that. I thought you must have told at least a few people.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t.’

  ‘No one at all?’

  ‘No one, not one.’

  ‘Well, I believe you. Do you know why I believe you?’

  ‘No,’ said Ben.

  ‘Because you brought it up. You told me without me asking. If I’d asked you if you’d told anyone, of course you’d have said no. You’d have to. So I know it’s true. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I see,’ said Ben nervously, although he wasn’t really sure at all.

  ‘You were worried about me worrying,’ she said.

  ‘I could tell you were worried by the way you were looking at me, that’s why I said,’ said Ben.

  She laughed, he had no idea why. ‘You’re a very grown-up boy, you know that? Very grown-up. Very mature.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ben. He knew that. He was more mature than Dino or Jonathon, both of whom were just kids in one way or another. But it was nice to have someone say it for him.

  ‘More mature than me in some ways,’ she added.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you never showed me your bum, did you?’ she said, and then added, ‘More’s the pity.’ She looked sideways at him and smiled. Ben smiled back and his heart started beating, beating, beating in his chest like some kind of alarm machine.

  Miss Young was in a hurry at Straelers, the theatrical suppliers. She rushed through the choice of gels that they’d spent so long talking about earlier, and on the way back she suggested that since they were early, they could stop off at her place to have a cup of coffee.

  Ben sat awkwardly on her sofa drinking the coffee she’d hastily made, while she continued to be impressed by his honesty and faithfulness.

  ‘It’s a question of trust,’ she told him. ‘You kept our little secret.’

  Afterwards, Ben spent many, many hours trying to work out how many clues there had been to what was going to happen next. He decided that there were about six hundred thousand at least, but he was still surprised every single time it happened. She started talking about boys and girls, and then Ben and girls. Having discovered that he had no girlfriends, she wanted to know what sort of sexual experiences he’d had. Ben, by now hopelessly out of his depth, told her that surely this was private stuff, wasn’t it? She nodded approvingly. Then she stood up, brushed down her little skirt and smiled at him.

  ‘Sorry, but I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. Ever since I showed you my knickers,’ she added. Then she leaned down to him and gave him a dirty big snog. Ben responded with his tongue and she almost fell on top of him, running her hands over his face and up under his sweatshirt. Blinded by a sudden rush of hormones he put his hand on her hip, then let it slide down to the side of her bum. She pulled up her blouse, and Ben slid his hand up and cupped a breast. He thought he was going to faint with lust and had to sit up.

  Miss Young – ‘Call me Miss’ – pulled him back onto the cushions and kissed him even more deeply, making little moaning noises deep in her throat as though she was eating something surprisingly delicious. Her hand caressed his thigh and stroked the bulge in his school trousers. Ben heard himself muttering, ‘Jesus,’ three times, one after the other. They carried on kissing. She unzipped him. Mad with lust but terrified by authority, Ben suddenly froze up and couldn’t think what to do next, but that didn’t seem to bother her.

  ‘I guess I’m going to have to take the lead, aren’t I?’ she said. She reached behind and undid her bra, pulled her jumper up so that only the thin material of her blouse was covering her breasts. He could see the deeper colour of her nipples showing through. She took his hand and placed it on her breast.

  ‘Go on,’ she told him.

  As he did as he was told, Ben found himself thinking that this was how young girls must feel when they are seduced by an older man. He was so bewildered and sexed up he could hardly think. There was no question of him having any choice about what was happening.

  When she began to peel his trousers over his feet, he panicked.

  ‘I’ve never done this before,’ he told her. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. Or was it, ‘Please, Miss?’ He could never remember.

  ‘Ben,’ she said. ‘I’m your teacher. Do as you’re told.’

  Ben did as he was told.

  An hour later he found himself deposited back at school, fixing the new gels to the lamps while Ali, who had transformed herself back into Miss Young like some sort of dark fairy, sorted out a group of Year Sevens who needed to learn how to walk in step. He thought to himself, I just lost my virginity during school hours. To a teacher. He felt immensely proud and privileged. I sucked Miss’s tits, he thought. I know what colour pubes she has. He wanted so bad to boast about it to someone, but he knew he never could, not for years and years, maybe even never. But who cared? Even though he’d just come three times in the previous hour he was still more horny than he had ever been before. OK, the whole thing had been awkward and embarrassing as well – but it was easily the nicest half an hour he’d ever had in his life. Fleshy, filthy and holy. It had everything.

  You lucky bastard, he thought to himself. You lucky, lucky bastard.

  4

  dino

  Going out with Jackie is the best thing that ever happened to me. The best. I knew it was going to happen. It felt right. By the time she said yes I felt like I’d been waiting for ever.

  ‘It might be right for you but it certainly isn’t right for me,’ she said once before she realised, and there were her and her mates laughing away. But it can’t be like that, can it? With those sorts of feelings, it can’t be right for one person and not for the other. That would be wrong.

  The main thing about Jackie is, she’s gorgeous. People look at her all the time. When I’m walking along and she’s holding onto my arm, she makes me feel like I’m on a red carpet in front of the world. As long as I can remember, she was always out there, growing up ahead of me. She was always the one everyone fancied, even at Primary School. And now here I am, watching her long fingers pop open the top button on her jeans for me while I stroke her tits in the rhododendron bushes down Crab Lane on the way home, and it makes me feel so fucking good.

  ‘Not here, don’t be daft,’ she says in a little while, but both of us are panting like steam engines by then. Wow! I mean! I stood back and watched as she did up her zip and pushed the button back into place.

  ‘You should wear a skirt,’ I said. It felt like my blood had turned into boiling hot soup. That’s what she does to me. I felt like a cow in the slaughterhouse with a bolt going through its head.

  ‘More accessible,’ she said.

  I can be a bit of an arse sometimes. I admit it. I’m my own worst enemy. I couldn’t help it. I stood there watching her zipping up, I was almost mad with lust and I was thinking how she never wore a skirt or a dress for me. I was thinking, This is how it’s gonna go. We’ll go home to my place, I’ll strip her to the waist, we’ll get our hands down each other’s pants and spend about an hour writhing around like a pair of earthworms … and that’s it. That’s as far as it was going to go. Her jeans would not go below her hips.

  You know? It’s been a month now, a whole month and I’m still a virgin. I mean, it’s practically like I was saving myself for her, because there’s loads of other girls I could have had. You ask anyone, there’s loads of girls would love to go out with me, they’d shag me tomorrow if I just went up and asked. It’s like that. You get my point? And she won’t. So what’s that all about?

  You don’t know Jackie. She’s as stubborn as a brick in a wall. She sm
iled at me and walked out of the bushes and onto the road, and I knew I should have kept my mouth shut but I just started before I even had time to think about it.

  ‘I’ve got some contraceptives,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Jackie. Then she added under her breath, ‘Not this again.’

  ‘But you want to, why not?’ I asked. I slid my hand down her arse and tickled her crack.

  ‘Get off me! Not here.’ She wriggled away. ‘I’m not a bloody dog or something.’

  ‘What’s up with you? You didn’t mind a minute ago.’

  ‘That was in there.’

  ‘You’d sleep with me if you loved me.’

  ‘Dino, stop it!’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘What’s love got to do with it? You don’t love me.’

  ‘I do love you,’ I said.

  ‘Dino!’

  ‘I do!’

  ‘You don’t know what love is.’

  That’s how she goes on at me. Like I’m some sort of kid. As if I’m ten years old and she’s about twenty-something.

  ‘But don’t you love me, then?’ I said.

  She looked at me closely. ‘I like you very much.’

  ‘Is that all? Like? Just like?’

  ‘Anyway, even if I did love you, I wouldn’t sleep with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘I want to know. I’m interested,’ I whined. I could hear myself whining, but I still couldn’t stop myself. ‘I just want to know. I mean, is it me? Is there something about me you don’t like? Is there something wrong with me?’

  ‘It just doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘It felt pretty good with Simon.’

  ‘Leave it!’

  ‘So what was so great about Simon? Why aren’t you going out with him? What’s the difference between him and me?’

  ‘Well, he was eight years older than you for a start.’

  ‘Oh, right. I’m too young, am I? Not mature enough for you?’ I was really pissed off but I knew I shouldn’t be going on like that, I was really blowing my chances. I just can’t help it sometimes. ‘I get it. I’m stupid. I’m just a kid. You’re all so grown up and I’m not!’

  ‘You’re behaving like a kid,’ said Jackie coldly.

  ‘I don’t behave like a kid – you do!’ I yelled.

  And that was it. She was off, pulling her coat around her and storming off down the road. I thought, Shit! Why do I do this? I mean, I don’t mind having a row. I don’t mind throwing tantrums and sulking – it was pretty bloody unreasonable of her not to sleep with me, after all. But why did I have to do it then?

  I ran after her, shouting, ‘Sorry – please don’t go, don’t go!’

  But it was too late. She pulled her arm away from me and shouted, ‘Just fuck off!’

  I froze. I was furious. Shouting at me like that. Right in the middle of the street! I could see people looking.

  Listen – no one tells me to fuck off.

  ‘Fuck you too!’ I yelled. I stood on the pavement watching her, furious with her and furious with myself too. I mean, all right, she won’t shag but she’ll do almost anything else. Almost anything else isn’t shagging, but it isn’t bad and now I wasn’t even getting that. I’m such a dick! I just can’t help it. She drives me mad. I just want – you know. I just want to do it with her so much.

  As he walked sadly back home alone, Dino distracted himself by imagining that a mighty power-beam grew out of each of his temples, destroying everything they touched. All that lay behind his step was crushed by his passing. Trees, houses, lampposts, even small hills were all reduced to trash or broken neatly off where the beam struck them. If he stood on tiptoe, he could peer over the devastation. The world below his nose was a tangled mass of rubble and destruction.

  He’d been doing this as he walked along ever since he was about six. It was very childish, but it passed the time and since no one in the world knew about it, who cared?

  Slowly, he turned in a circle and cut a kilometre-wide circle in the surrounding houses. Rising up on tiptoes, he peered over the allotment fence tangled with ivy, over the cabbages and beans and the brown earth on this blue afternoon to where his own house stood, miraculously preserved amid the devastation. The house stared back out of the window on the second floor and said, ‘You think it’s gonna be fun? Do ya? Do ya?’

  As he approached the front door Dino failed to notice the strange car, which had in any case been parked up the road as a precaution. He walked straight up to the door and just as he was about to put the key in the lock, he looked sideways and caught a beautiful view of his mum in a clinch with a man through the bay window. They were kissing passionately. Her blouse was open. She was wearing a red bra which hung loosely off her breasts. The man was slowly hitching her skirt up from behind.

  ‘More accessible,’ whispered Dino to himself.

  He watched in slow motion as the skirt hitched up right above her bum and the man’s hand began to ease its way down the back of her tights. Then, before they turned their heads and saw him he fell on the spot to his knees, bruising them painfully on the hard plastic shoe scraper. He suppressed a howl of agony into a choked grunt. He glanced behind him to make sure no one was watching from the street. Right in front of the window! How could they? The neighbours! But in fact they were behind the wall; it was only from his position by the front door that they could be seen. As he crouched, Dino realised that he hadn’t looked at the man’s face at all. All he had noticed was his mum’s mouth moving hungrily on the strange lips. There had been a moustache, he felt. Somehow, the fact that his mum had been getting another man’s facial hair in her mouth made it even worse.

  Dino scuttled rapidly backwards so he could get out of sight, stood back up and walked boldly up to the door again, this time staring straight ahead as he noisily put his key in the hole and opened it up. He ignored the alarmed scurrying sounds from the front room and walked through to the kitchen to get a drink. He flung his bag on the floor with a thud.

  ‘Who’s that?’ called his mother in a surprised voice from the front room.

  ‘Mum?’ said Dino, also in a surprised voice. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘What are you doing home?’ she asked. Her voice sounded heavy. Dino had a vision of her standing there doing her bra up.

  ‘History was cancelled. What are you doing home?’

  ‘English was cancelled,’ said his mum, and laughed. Her laugh sounded like china dropping to the floor. Dino walked through and opened the front-room door. His mum was standing there on one side of the coffee table and on the other was Dave Short, a teacher at his mum’s college. He was smoothing down – or perhaps wiping – his moustache. Dave taught technology, Dino remembered.

  ‘Was technology cancelled too?’ he asked. To his surprise, Dave Short blushed as pink as a boy. Dino blushed back.

  Dino spent a lot of time that evening in his room trying to think of nice things like Jackie or football or a good film, but all his mind would show him was his mum sucking Dave Short’s moustache, in vivid, spitty close-up. The image was ghastly beyond belief. What was going to happen? Was his family going to break up? Did his little brother Mat have any idea what was going on? His mother was old, how could anyone want to kiss her? Did he have to tell his father? Did his mother know that he knew, did she suspect – or had he fooled them both completely?

  As for Dave Short – I could blackmail the bastard, thought Dino, and at once, he realised that he was on to a good thing. Dave Short was a balding man with a dense, badger-coloured moustache and a fair amount of badly placed fat on his stocky little frame; utterly repulsive, the last sort of man you’d want as a stepfather. So repulsive, in fact, that Dino couldn’t believe that his mum actually wanted to be doing sex things with him at all. Probably he was blackmailing her! So that was it! Blackmail! The bastard!

  His mother needed rescuing.

  Then he thought about the way she’d kissed him. Per
haps she did want to be doing sex things with him after all.

  That just meant he could get both of them. Why not? The bitch was trying to ruin his life. Just because she was his mother …

  But first that bastard Short. He sat down at his desk and began to compose a blackmail note. He got through a couple of drafts before he was called down to tea.

  Knives and forks rattled on the plates, but Dino was miles away, thinking about money. Soon he’d be rich. He’d be able to get a car, at least. Maybe life would be better because his mum was having an affair, not worse.

  As the word ‘affair’ rebounded in his head he looked guiltily up. No one seemed to notice he was thinking the unthinkable. For a moment, he became acutely aware of his ability to think things with no one knowing what he was doing. Deliberately, he began to conjure up the filthiest thoughts he could manage about Jackie – and they really were pretty filthy. No one seemed to notice. It was bizarre that you could sit there innocently eating mash next to your little bruv while your head was immersed in the most depraved filth man could dream up. It was disturbing but fun, until his mind began, quite against his will, to imagine the same filthy thoughts about his mother.

  Bad mistake. He felt ill with anxiety and disgust. At that very moment, Dave Short might be eating his dinner with his family and thinking the exact same kinds of things about his mum – and he’d be enjoying it! Even worse, maybe his mother was thinking filthy thoughts about Dave Short. Sitting there, all alone in the middle of his family, Dino blushed a bright, bright red.

  ‘What’s up with you, wet your pants?’ asked Mat. Mat was only nine. Dino sneered at him and looked away.

  He began thinking about all the money he was going to earn again, when his dad’s voice interrupted him.

  ‘… going away for the weekend.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me and your mum are going away for the weekend.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘What for?’ asked Dino.

  His dad laughed. ‘What do you mean, what for? To go away for the weekend, that’s what for.’