Hush Hush (18 page)

Conor had been in danger of
leaving university a virgin when he met Kate. By that time, well into
the third year of his engineering course at City University in
London, he and his two mates, Iggy and Tommo, were united in a
frustrated quest to lose their cherries. Conor had blamed their
continuing innocence on membership of the Catholic Society, otherwise
known as CathSoc.

All three had joined up at
freshers’ fair. Conor was a native Dubliner, while Iggy and
Tommo were second-generation Irish. They’d all reckoned it’d
be easier to bond with girls from a similar background.

Plus, if Conor was honest, he’d
expected to lose his cherry more or less immediately in the fervid
immorality of university life, and preferred to lose it to a girl
with some point of moral reference.

Most CathSoc members were
second-generation Irish. The blokes wore their badge of Irishness by
drinking Beamish and cheering on England’s opponents in Euro
and World Cup qualifiers. The girls had sad, mellifluous names from
Celtic mythology, long Titian hair and cuttings from
The Irish
Post
featuring their Irish dancing triumphs.

Conor was scared of these girls
for the same reasons he’d sought cultural safety in their
numbers. Nice Catholic girls did not go in for one-night stands. He
wasn’t sure he’d be able to get it up with one who did.
The only boy and the youngest in a family of four girls who’d
petted and spoilt him, he was, at twenty, still dogged by the
madonna/whore analogy. It would take Kate to impress upon him that
women were not two-dimensional beings, neither shadows cast by a
religious icon, nor the passive non-beings in porn
.

He, Iggy and Tommo analysed their
virginity relentlessly and crudely. One evening, after a piss-weak
beer too far in the student union bar, they made a musketeer pact to
boldly go where no man of them had gone before, that very night.

Infused more with the pioneering
spirit of conquistadors than romantic sensibility, they’d set
off for the student union golden oldies night, held in an
unprepossessing Portakabin half a mile away.

Their dreams were not to be
fulfilled. Iggy passed out while resting his head on the shelf-like
embonpoint of a bored, big-breasted girl who’d agreed to a slow
dance. Conor, deciding to leave within half an hour of arriving, had
felt his arm clutched as he swayed towards the body-choked doorway.
‘
Walk out of this
place with me!’ hissed a female voice in his ear.
‘
Just
to shake off that dickhead behind us!’

Conor glanced round to see Tommo
bearing down with a glassy but determined smile. He didn’t have
time to make up his mind. His arm was wrenched and he half-fell out
of the Portakabin, blinking in the sudden darkness.

Beside him, female breath exhaled
harshly.
‘
Think that
did it,’ she hissed.
‘
Thanks.’

His eyes adjusting to the light,
he caught a glint of red hair, like the flash of a tropical bird’s
underwing. She struck a match and soft, incandescent light
illuminated the waxy perfection of her skin, the dark brows lowered
in concentration as she lit her cigarette. She reminded him of a
church statue of Mary, purity of expression dancing in the light of
candles clustered round her feet. Only this vision was Madonna and
ciggy.
‘
Bloody hell,
you’re beautiful,’ said Conor with both
spur-of-the-moment admiration, and a hint of reverent awe.

She laughed and looked at him
properly for the first time.
‘
You’re
not so bad yourself,’ she said.

After all those months spent
working out chat-up lines and gleaning
‘
how
to pull’ tips from nudge-nudge-wink-wink men’s mags, it
seemed that girls responded to that over-rated quality of
‘
being
yourself’. He’d made a mental note to tell Tommo and
Iggy.

That night, they just had coffee
and talked, back at her place. Kate, an art student, shared a dingy
flat with a chain-smoking medical student. The place was a proper
student den with peeling posters of poncy modern artists he’d
never heard of
,
and cushions, bean bags and empty bottles covering every inch of
carpet. Kate explained that her flatmate liked to recreate chaos out
of any order that Kate herself imposed. She didn’t mind too
much, as long as the bathroom stayed clean. Conor felt embarrassed
that he lived in a hall of residence, sharing a fridge and a bathroom
with five other blokes who labelled their milk cartons and left damp
socks to mildew over communal radiators.

Sex never entered his head that
night, or successive nights. Just to touch Kate seemed an honour and
a violation. When he pulled away from a goodnight kiss that night, he
expected to see his fingerprints bruising her perfect skin.

Two weeks later, Tommo bounced
into his room at four a.m., eating a post-coital cream cracker with
Marmite. He’d done the deed.

‘Julia Flynn!’ he
revealed.
‘
She’d
have gone for you, Conor, if you’d stuck at it. She loves a bit
of Irish inside her, ho ho. Got your leg over that posh tart yet?’

He hadn’t. For all his
reputation as a hard man (at least among other blokes who thought he
must play rugby), he was shy and Kate was scared. Her father had made
her scared of men, she apologised. He was a bully, a racist and a
born-again Christian, pastor to a small bunch of rabid torch-bearers
for true, Papist-free Christianity. She’d defied him by going
to university in London. He’d wanted her to stay up in
Northumberland, where he could keep an eye on her.

Besides, Conor and Kate were
friends first, putative lovers second. Conor had never been friends
with a girl before ‒ unless he counted collecting frog spawn in
jam jars one summer with Jeanie, the friend of his sister, Grainne.
At the time, Jeanie had been the same as any male friend because she
hung upside-down from the monkey-bars at school with her skirt tucked
into her pants, laughed loudly at her own jokes, ridiculed his
frogspawn-catching technique compared to her own. She hadn’t
behaved like a girl. She had behaved, Conor realised during his first
months with Kate, like herself.

As Kate became herself to him, he
braved the stumbling block of sex as a matter of concern between best
friends. He suggested that he start off by inserting his little
finger, then build up to two fingers,
‘
the
width of your average love truncheon’, according to Tommo. But,
however hard she tried, Kate tensed up when the moment came.

Patiently shelving the
two-fingered entry approach, Conor had then posited starting with a
pencil and working up to a cucumber ‒ one of the smaller, less
prickly varieties. He showed her how to put a condom on a cucumber
she had shrivelling in the bottom of her fridge.

This had left Kate unimpressed.
‘
I think the
correlation of vegetables to sexual organs is deeply unsatisfying,’
she’d said, with an art student’s sense of the
aesthetically valid.

She’d convinced herself she
was a freak of humanity ‒ until she read something on a problem
page.

‘I’ve got
vaginismus,’ she proudly informed a disheartened Conor.
‘
It’s
all because Daddy’s bullied Mummy all her life, and I associate
sex with the brute force of men, taking and despoiling, trampling the
female will underfoot.’

‘That’s bollocks,’
Tommo told Conor.
‘
I
bet she still wears jam rags so her hymen’s still intact,
that’s all. Sex is bound to hurt a bit at first, Julia says, if
you’ve never put a tampon up there.’

There came a night, however, when
he and Kate decided to go for it. The chain-smoking medical student
was away for the weekend, the telly on the blink, and London
shimmered in an evening heat haze, heavy with portents and
expectation.

Conor returned from the
cash-and-carry on the corner, laden with condoms and a six-pack of
potent beer. He and Kate sat on adjoining bean bags, gulping down
beer with fear and determination. They made a pact.
‘
What
about if we try it,’ said Conor,
‘
and
I ignore you when the screaming starts, but if you scream
“
Stop,
stop!
”
more than
twice, then I really will stop?’

He undressed her slowly on top of
her bed, massaging her with something rich and oily from her dressing
table and investing in a lot of stroking foreplay that immediately
made Kate tense up because, she said, she couldn’t bear to
disappoint him after so much effort.
‘
If
it took this long every time, the bloke would nod off before he got
round to it,’ she gasped into Conor’s broad shoulder.

‘Sssh,’ he murmured,
‘
here I come, ready
or not. Geronimo!’

Kate didn’t scream too
loudly and never more than twice. She was determined, she said
afterwards, to see it out to the bitter end. Like Columbus sailing on
to prove that he wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world, she
wanted proof of her girl friends’ insistence that the
eye-watering pain slid eventually into seamless ecstasy.

Ecstasy didn’t come into it
for either of them, but the elation of having done it was orgasmic in
itself.

Afterwards, Conor lay in her arms
and fell sleep from sheer relief.

Kate, fastidious as a cat,
slipped out of bed without disturbing him and took a shower, then
returned to bed. When he awoke, he realised that she smelt different.
The warm, musky, after-sex smell had been replaced by ashes of roses
bath oil. He’d felt a twinge of disappointment.

After that, they got better at
it. Kate never got out of her tree with ecstasy, but on the third
occasion, she felt a definite ping, she said, a small explosion of
delight that had to be the much-vaunted orgasm. They were best
friends having sex. Life was good.

That
December,
he and Kate sped northwards by train to announce
their engagement to her parents.

‘Best to get it over with!’
Kate had said, hugging her plastic cup of coffee in the packed, sunny
compartment.
‘
I’ve
only said over the phone that I’m bringing a friend for the
weekend. We’ll lull them into a false sense of security with
the pressies we’ve brought, then hit them for six with our
news.’

Conor felt a growing doubt.
‘
They’re not
that bad, are they? I know your dad’s a bit fierce and you hate
his guts. But he’ll come round at this news, surely? And your
mum
…
?’

‘
H
is
bark’s worse than his bite!’ sang Kate, almost glowing.
She gripped Conor’s knee, then inched her hand along his thigh
and towards his balls, in full view of other travellers. Conor
grinned. He came from a normal family with its normal complement of
bust-ups and shameful secrets. He’d be able to handle Kate’s
da.

Kate must’ve known what was
coming, though, because she told the taxi to wait while they picked
their way over frozen puddles and knocked on the prissy little door
of the prissy little house. Kate’s mother had answered.

Kate beamed, said nothing, and
prodded Conor forward.

‘Mrs Stanton?’ Conor
held out a large, firm hand.
‘
I’m
Conor McG
…’

‘Oh dear, no!’
quivered tiny Mrs Stanton, fixing pale dormouse eyes on her daughter.
‘
What were you
thinking of, our Katrina, bringing a lad? You’d better go
straight away before there’s any trouble. There’s a
love.’

The door was suddenly flung open
and a preposterously small, scrawny-necked man, a turkey cock no
less, shoved Kate’s mother aside.

Kate’s beam almost split
her face.
‘
Daddy!
I’ve brought my boyfriend, Conor, from Dublin. He’s a
Catholic!’

‘Get off my doorstep!’
yelled the turkey-cock. Conor leapt off the step. But his mind,
snapping in several directions at once, was already thinking, I can
take you, you auld bastard. You’d better not lay a finger on
Kate.

Turkey-cock slammed the front
door. Unfazed, Kate lifted the letterbox.
‘
Yes,
a Papist, and there’s nothing you can do about it. We’re
getting married! I’m pregnant with his Papist offspring, and
I’m going to have a football team for the Pope and have them
all serving Mass with bells and burning handbags and candles lit to
Mary and ‒’

A rifle muzzle poked through the
letterbox. Kate withdrew just in time.

‘I’m going to count
to three,’ snarled the malevolent voice inside.

They were back in the taxi by
two-and-a-half. Kate was laughing.
‘
Don’t
worry, it was just for show. It’s a blunderbuss from Cromwell’s
day or something. Can’t fire birdseed.’

Conor was shaking with rage and
shock.
‘
You did tell
them about me! Beforehand, I mean.’

‘No, I didn’t.
Turning up unannounced with any member of the male species who wasn’t
a pre-picked member of the brethren, was a red rag. I was hoping he’d
die of apoplexy on the spot.’

‘You said you were
pregnant!’

‘I’m not, so chill
out. Just gilding the lily a bit. Might as well be a pregnant
fornicator if I’m going all out to be the whore of Babylon.’

Conor’s mind was atangle
with more questions. But the least relevant one burst out.
‘
What’s
a burning handbag?’

She
sat back as the taxi swung away.
‘
That
incense thing you lot swing on the end of a rope. Exactly where I
wish he was.’ She jabbed her head back at the house. Her
red-gold hair was braided with the dewy fretwork of damp vapour from
the cold December air. Her eyes danced with Jack Frost merriment.
Conor thought she looked mad. And wonderful. Only later ‒ a
whole week later
‒
came
the realisation that women could use men. He’d assumed it only
worked one way. And with that realisation came the first fissure in
their friendship.