Flick (5 page)

SNATCHED FACTS

I notice a lot about Rainbow that night. When I think back to it, I noticed more about Rainbow in those first few brief, snatched meetings than I did even in the following few weeks. I've wondered since if it was like that for everyone. I remember how she seemed so forward and honest, but at the same time reserved and private. Maybe it was that she was honest with me and reserved with everyone else. I noticed how she always drank with a straw, took lime in every drink; I watched the way she walked, a slow, sexy wiggle when she was relaxed and then, if walking to get to somewhere, the same long movement but sped up. She always looked like she had long legs, but she was only five foot three, and her body always seemed to belong to a small woman rather than a large child if you know what I mean. Curvier legs than Ash, real muscles in her calves and thighs, a good bum, a slim waist, not simply malnourished from a diet of mini Mars bars and canteen burgers, I'm talking healthily slim, toned. She had thin wrists and long thin arms, blue eyes, not baby blue like most people, but this dark troubled ocean blue. Her hair and whole aura gave off a hippieish quality. She didn't smoke or drink much, and she was always happy unless she was gripped by mini-depressions, which she had occasionally. She said it was down to hormones and took some herbal stuff for it. She was polite and incredibly well mannered and thought of manners as kindnesses. And she was always asking me about myself. I'd never been with anyone who wanted to know what I wanted to do for a living, if I wanted to travel, what my passions were. What my first kiss was like. That first night after we kissed in the club she made me lay my head on her lap in a corner of the carpeted back room and asked me if I had any brothers or sisters. I had never had anyone before who thought to ask things like that. She would question me too. The first time she saw me light up she said, “Hey, you know, I heard something about cigarettes, apparently they're bad for your health.” I smirked to make a joke out of it and she held my gaze, not disapprovingly but sincerely, quietly challenging me to dare to do better, until someone asked us the time and my mates started jumping on me, bailing me out of the conversation.

Rainbow has an ethereal quality, like a pixie standing in the center of a crowd, winking at me. She winks at me a lot.

WHEN THE SUN AND THE RAIN OCCUR AT THE SAME TIME; OR, PROS AND CONS OF THE FIRST GIRL

When the club empties its dubious inhabitants are thrown out onto the pavement like vomit from the double doors and, by way of thinking about my first night out in Langrick when I was sick all over my right leg and walked the mile home wearing only boxers in the middle of November, I start having a ponder about first times. I'm about to turn to Mike and have a natter about it when Dildo, the oldest of us and playing the big-brother role, herds us all together sheepdog-style and we head on down the coast road towards the northern outskirts of the town. The gang is staying the night at his place, 'cause his parents are away visiting family, and Rainbow walks up the road with us. Ash runs on ahead with Daisy, screaming and twirling each other about, tits falling out of their tank tops; Dildo and Jamie stride behind them, Dildo laughing as Jamie holds court; and Ella and Josh follow, arguing viciously. You can see Ella's spit as she hisses in the lamplight. It's a typical picture-perfect moment of our gang and I seek out Danny's gaze and grin wryly at him. He winks back, whacks Mike on the back of the head with the palm of his hand, says, “Come on, gingertits, let's leave the two bloody lovebirds alone,” and they jog off after the others, leaving Rainbow and myself bringing up the rear, side by side.

I do a sort of backwards swing with my arm, touch her hand to ask her a question, “D'you want a palmo?” and then keep hold of it. Not the suavest of movements, but a brave effort. A palmo, by the way, is basically a local delicacy. Its full name is chicken Parmesan, and it is comprised of a pizza-base-sized slab of chicken covered in bread crumbs, with some sort of vegetable sauce thrown on it, then topped with cheese. It looks like lasagna but shitter, though after a night out on the tiles it tastes, I swear, like
heaven
. Apparently someone's dad invented it about forty years ago, though that might be an urban legend. It's our way of life. We work in steel and eat palmos. This is why all Sandford players are crap.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. When you're first with a girl, everything is a first time. First kiss, first hand-hold, first fuck. These all have to be negotiated, worried about. (Or so I would assume with the fucking aspect of things, not having been privy to that debacle yet. We'll walk that plank when we come to it. I've given myself an aim of five minutes and from what I've heard that's pushing it.) I shake my brain in my head.

You've got to stop thinking about this
, says the voice that helps me out when I'm wankered.
What if it happens tonight?

Fuck. Now I'm panic stations go. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. But it won't, will it? Rainbow, as we know, is classy.

Well
, the voice murmurs,
classy but unpredictable.

Look, I argue back, she is not a simple Langrick bird. Her accent is posher . . . Fuck. I realize with a sudden jolt of marijuana-induced alarm (the type of alarm where a piece of information thus far clouded in pot smoke rises from the fog like an epiphany, only about half an hour too late to be helpful) that I don't even know where she's from. I know she's just moved to Ness, in the house next to Ella, but what about before that? What if someone asks and I can't tell them? Jesus shit Jesus. What if someone asks her last name?!

Flick
, chill out, says the voice.
As long as we're not getting fucked, nothing can go that horribly wrong.

We turn into Dildo's road.

“This is where his place is,” I hear, coming remarkably calmly from my mouth. “You want me to walk you home?”

Rainbow turns into Dildo's drive and looks back at me. “No, I'm okay, thanks.” She smirks. “I'm coming in.”

I gulp audibly.

“Oh don't worry,” she says sweetly. “I'm not going to have sex with you. We'll just do kissing.”

“Oh . . .” I follow her in through the door. “Okay.”

“Yeah,” she says, skipping up the stairs. “And other stuff.” She stops, looks back at me, winks and smiles knowingly.

And with that my brain melts in my skull and dribbles out my ears.

CALL MY BLUFF

It is dark. I'm hot and flustered. I can feel my heart beating in my throat. I can smell musky perfume and pizza and cigarettes. I swallow, lean in, my tongue touches another and my lips softly bite another plump lip. I put my hand around a waist that almost fits entirely inside my palm. It is soft and warm. Rainbow, smiling, parts her legs. She takes my right hand gently and slides it up the inside of her thigh, which is milky white and so smooth I shiver and close my eyes for a second. I want to push my face into her thighs and squeeze them. We are in a tiny box room in Dildo's house. It belongs to his eleven-year-old brother, who is away on a sleepover. Beside us is a half-drunk bottle of peach schnapps, the only thing we could raid from Dildo's mum's cupboard, and under the bed is a battered condom I stole from Ash (just in case).

“Will?” I look up through a dark haze at her gorgeous face, honest and bold and sweet and questioning, and I swallow myself back to a higher state of consciousness. She smiles at me and I smile weakly back. I'm so fucking helpless. I want to cry in between her legs. She leans in and slides her tongue into my mouth. I hold her bottom lip, full and delicious, between mine. I've forgotten where my hand is and suddenly I touch something hot, like a pie just out of the oven, but wet too, so I can slide my hand around freely. I let out an “Oh,” and the tip of my middle finger glides easily into her.

It occurs to me for a moment that I might not be very good at fingering. My last two girlfriends weren't very vocal about anything—I tend to go for shy types—and Sam, who it happened with once on someone's sofa at a party, was gobby about everything: “FUCK! You're so HOT, Flick,” “My last boyfriend was twenty-five so I'm a fucking MASTER,” “I'm gonna FUCK you like a DOG,” “OH YES, FUCK ME!”

I didn't, and we don't speak anymore.

Rainbow slips her tongue into my ear and I'm
back in the room
, like the hypnotist's victims in the TV show
Little Britain
, with Rainbow hypnotizing me with her eyes. Then suddenly I'm gone again into a different place, where there is no thought, only the moment we exist in, the heat of her pussy and an indescribable tingling in my ear.

“Fuuuuck.”

And I realize that this is it. This isn't reported, I'm not listening to someone else's story. This is my life, me and Rainbow, and at this second I wouldn't trade it for anyone else's. This is exactly where I want to be. I feel more present at this precise moment in time than I have felt for my whole life up until now. Another first. I peel Rainbow off me and hold her face in my hands. She's beautiful. Suddenly shy, I don't say so. Instead I smile and go a bit red, and my vision blurs at the edges. When I pull her towards me, and our lips touch, I sigh a massive breath, part satisfaction, part relief. Soppy twat. I feel like laughing. So I do.

We spend the night together, in the dark, in each other. I only regain a semblance of consciousness at one other point in the night when, with my lips red and swollen from kissing, I shyly and hornily tell her that if she wants anything from me,
anything
, just to ask. She parts her equally swollen lips and with a sweet and so-sexy smile whispers: “Go down on me, Will.” Holy shit.

PART II

SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM WARP FACTOR SCHOOL

In the way that only happens when you're in school and repeating the same monotonous gobshite routine every day, time runs away from me. It is difficult to understand how one day can seem so ridiculously slow, but months seem to pass where very little worth mentioning occurs. I'm sure in part it is due, in this case, to being young and in love or whatever you'd care to call it, because when you are young the details matter so much and this creates a paradox. On the one hand, as you're watching for every detail you are very much in the moment, time seems to go out the window and all you are left with after the affair is a rosy glow of something sweet, innocent and faintly remembered, a glow in which you happily bask. On the other hand, the tiniest moments can hurt like a knife (like seeing her hold someone else's gaze or break from your own) and become so important, burned on your retina, that it can be unbearable (hence the pot, because we're all so tortured, *sob*).

On a more general note however, this seemingly simultaneous speeding up and slowing down of time appears often to come hand in hand with being In School. My hypothesis (since I know you're so interested) is that, in an education system largely based on end-of-year exam results, there ends up being little to do for the rest of the year. This is also given that if you're smart or have a good teacher you tend to pass the exams, and if you're not, and you don't, you're fucked. Thus they pack the less important eleven months with pointless coursework that, although it does add to our final grade, basically offers no sense of fulfillment as we all know most of the tasks we're set are utter crap, would never happen in the real world and are geared solely towards proving yourself to an instructor and a certain system of grading, and definitively not towards proving to the individual their own worth, intelligence or ability. This, my friends, is why every sixteen-year-old, though in particular the more able, just after receiving their results becomes puzzled and bewildered over one question. Why is it that during the GCSEs everything is a struggle and you're up 'til four a.m. every night doing the work (I speak here for the people who actually do it; I'll not shy away from the fact that although I am generally up until four a.m., I tend to be mainly wanking and/or watching
Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps
), then in the exams, which you didn't revise for, you're sat there worried you're missing the point 'cause the supposedly hard questions seem very ABC level, then on results day you get way better grades than you thought you were going to get? Well hold on to that curve you're graded on because I'm about to give you the Holy Grail of answers to this mother of questions. It is because (drum roll please) the level of knowledge and intelligence needed to pass a GCSE is very little, but the
amount of work is mind-shatteringly overwhelming. And so, when people do not pass a GCSE it is not because they are thick (because they would have to be
very
thick to not realize that repeating the Very Simple Textbook Answer to all the Very Simple Textbook Questions asked will get you full marks), but it is because they have not put in the hours to revise for exams/complete all the coursework. Their work is incomplete more often than it is crap, and when it is crap, it is because it took very little time. And thus whether it is laziness, a misunderstanding of this most basic principle of the curriculum, or whether you are just that little bit too stoned to find what you're reading (or what you've written) coherent, the work piles up, you find yourself being chased down corridors by ancient cross-eyed women (Ms. White,
who the fuck are you looking at
?) spitting on their cardigans with rage because you haven't handed in a piece of work they
knew
you weren't going to do. They threaten you with suspension because there are only five lunchtime detention slots in the week and you've racked up sixteen and then you find yourself doing more work than you planned on doing, you're working the man-hours, your hands are tied and suddenly two weeks of your life are dead and buried and you'll never get your misspent youth back again.

GCSE students, here is my advice: do the coursework, but don't do anything else. When exam time cometh, ask for a copy of the curriculum and revise from that (except for in English, where you will need either to be naturally smart or to make notes).
It will make little difference to your life in the long run. If you want to do anything academic you will need a good degree, so work out which course you want to do, get enough to get onto it and then put in the work. Or choose one of the many different paths they never tell you about in school. I'm serious. You will never be sixteen again. Throw caution to the wind, cast off the mainsail, do/kiss the girls/boys you always wanted to do/kiss but never did. You know who I mean.

And I hope you heed that sincerely meant advice.