‘Then it’s dark and we’re still naked, still connected, as we tell our stories. He’s not surprised when I tell him my age and I’m not surprised when he tells me the yacht belongs to his fiancée’s father, and that she will be arriving the next afternoon.
‘It is a small window that has opened and then closed, and I don’t even turn to say goodbye as I swim back through the darkness. I have the memory. Anything else would only weigh it down.’
Charlotte stopped talking but her stare didn’t let go of the camera. Her eyes shone bright with the pictures still rolling inside her head.
‘Cue final credits,’ Malcolm said.
‘Oh good, so you do understand. I knew you would.’
But the only thing Malcolm understood just then was the yawning gap between the man on the yacht and his own pitiful store of talents, nautical or otherwise. Her story had been both insistently arousing and profoundly deflating, and when Charlotte tried to make more conversation Malcolm lied to her, inventing an appointment he had to hurry to. This was one woman he had no right to approach. He was going to have to look elsewhere.
Elsewhere came looking for Malcolm, dressed in Juliet’s clothes. When she popped in the next afternoon, on the way to the gym, Malcolm noticed something he had never noticed before. Juliet was a woman. Still a friend, the way she had always been, but a woman too. And as soon as he saw that, he understood what he had to do.
It made sense, surely. Things between them had always been so simple, and simple would be good, at least to start with. Juliet wouldn’t expect a fully equipped yacht on a moonlit bay. And friends did each other favours all the time. That’s what friends were for. It made such good scientific sense, to ask a friend.
Then he saw her face and the look on it sent the idea running back to where it had come from.
‘Any other phone calls?’
‘Nah, and that guy was creepy. We need a new idea.’ She opened the fridge. ‘Pizza, cool. Want some? Camille in?’
‘Nah, working. Yeah, I’ll have some.’
‘Oh, actually the second piece is tiny. I’m starving and I have to go straight to the gym after this. Do you mind?’
‘Nah.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Tell me why you need the money. I might be able to help then.’
Juliet, always a ferocious eater, was destroying the two pieces simultaneously. They both looked fairly large to Malcolm. He’d cut them himself and he never made mistakes with angles.
‘Nah, don’t want to talk about it.’
They were both sitting on the couch. Juliet swung her feet round so they rested on Malcolm’s lap and surveyed the room, as if on the lookout for something else that was edible.
‘I came round here to be cheered up. How’s the research going? Got any more material?’
‘Yeah. It’s all starting to take shape now. I still need more interviews though. I want to vary it a bit. I thought I might ask Mum. It’s sort of fascinating don’t you think, the thought of your own conception? And maybe our principal, Mr Ramsay. It could be a good idea to include somebody of standing in the community, to lend credibility.
‘I still have to check out copyright laws too, because I want to get some short pornography montages and splice them into the action, to give it more impact. The judges said that last year you know. They said my entry lacked visual appeal.’
Juliet was laughing and came dangerously close to jiggling her feet on his genitals in her amusement.
‘God, you’re priceless. You know that don’t you? Absolutely priceless.’
It was the moment, the window of opportunity as Charlotte had put it, or at the very least a loose louvre.
‘Um, actually Juliet, it’s good you think that, because, well, I was sort of going to ask you a bit of a favour.’
‘Sure, no problem. What do you want?’
‘Well, I was just wondering whether you might consider…’ They were such simple words, yet somehow Malcolm’s mouth was incapable of shaping them. Juliet saved him the effort, her eyes widening with understanding.
‘You want me to…Oh, of course. Matey, no problem. I was wondering when you’d ask me.’
She checked her watch and Malcolm felt his pulse push past 150.
‘Look, I don’t have a heap of time right now, but…no, I should be okay. Where then? Your bedroom I suppose. Let’s go.’
She bounded up the stairs and Malcolm followed at a frightened distance. So this was how it would be. Him and Juliet. It was going to happen. He rounded the doorway, wondering if she would be naked already, and whether it would be a good idea to start undressing himself. Instead he found her fully clothed and standing facing the camera.
‘Okay then, I’m ready. Roll camera. My first time eh? Gee, I have to warn you, it’s really rather tacky.’
Malcolm’s partial relief was quickly swamped by a more substantial anger. How could the world be such a tease? He felt a childish wave of tears and ducked his head down behind the camera before he had to explain.
‘Hang on. I’ll just check out the focus. Yeah, Okay.’
He tried not to listen. He tried to block out the words, stop them penetrating the wounds of his disappointment. It was no good though. He was still a researcher and sex was still fascinating.
‘Okay. You know Todd right? Well, no you don’t, but you know who he is. I’ve told you about him before. We do kickboxing together, only he doesn’t turn up so much these days. Anyway, last year, me and him were going out.’
‘You never told me that.’
‘Thought you weren’t meant to interrupt.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Right. Well we were, but I didn’t tell anyone, because it was just our thing, sort of. Anyway we had been together five months I guess and at first it went pretty well. But then he really started to want to have sex with me, and looking back maybe I should have just said yes and been done with it, but I wasn’t sure I liked him that much, and it was sort of fascinating seeing the lengths he was prepared to go to. Hiring motel rooms, planning weekends away for his parents, long walks in the country, getting a key to that tacky caravan those guys have hired down at the camp ground—you’re not really all that dignified are you, boys?
‘Anyway, the harder he tried the more fun it was resisting. I got to the point where I was sure that I’d be a bit of a let-down anyway, after all of the buildup. Also, I have to be honest, it was pretty cool having so much control.
‘But then, one day, the strangest thing happened. We were training together in the gym, doing some sparring, and everybody else had left. For some reason, all that exertion perhaps, the sweat in the air, I don’t know, something anyway, I started to feel drawn to him. Here I was, ducking and blocking, when all I wanted to do was jump him, you know what I mean?’
Behind the camera Malcolm nodded. He had a fair idea.
‘I tried to fight it, by concentrating on fighting him, but the more hard-out I went the worse it became. I still remember the startled look on his face when I floored him with a footsweep and then jumped right on top of him.
‘“You got those condoms here?” I asked, and his eyes were wider with fear than excitement as he shook his head.
‘“Go get them,” I told him. “You’ve got five minutes.”
‘He was out of there so quickly I was sure he was never coming back, and there was so much energy pumping through me, I pummelled the bag the whole time he was away.
‘Todd tried to look calm and in control when he walked back in, but his face was red with panic and he was still puffing away from the run, and anyway, I’m bigger than he is. I pushed him back into the changing rooms and lay him down on one of the little benches, like I knew exactly what I was doing. It was ridiculous. The space was so small and I ended up falling off at the worst possible moment. I had a bruise on my arse for weeks.’
‘I remember that.’
‘It was good though, in a funny sort of way. I don’t know why exactly. I felt so powerful, so close to so many different possibilities. I remember afterwards looking down at him, all limp and confused, and almost feeling a tiny bit guilty.
‘A week later he rang to tell me he’d found another girlfriend and like I say, he doesn’t come to kickboxing all that much any more.
‘Oh, but listen to me rambling. This isn’t what you want at all is it? You’ll be more interested in the technical details, like the way—’
‘No, no! That’s fine,’ Malcolm shouted. He’d had all the detail he could bear. ‘Battery’s almost out.’
‘Oh, okay then. Well, guess I should get to the gym then. Almost got me going there you know, with all that sex talk. You were lucky.’
She grinned and gave him another peck on the cheek, then she was gone.
Malcolm played the interview back, hoping the pain might help him focus. It didn’t work. No matter how he looked at it sex with Juliet seemed almost as frightening as sex with Charlotte. The Science Fair was looming and he was running out of options.
Kevin’s cleaning job gave him the option of working after school or coming back in the evening. He preferred the late shift. School at night was interesting, and there was no one there to hurry him.
He only ever lit the room he was working in, pretending the silent darkness of the corridors stretched forever. Vacuuming the classrooms was less a chore for Kevin, and more a piece of performance. He covered the surface of the much abused carpet in a rhythm of spirals and swirls, humming along to the vibration of the machine, at one with his task.
In the corridors he danced with his broom, in the girls’ toilets he set off the flushes at carefully spaced intervals, so that the sounds of emptying and filling sang to him.
In the gym foyer he flicked the lights on and off, in a message of code only he could interpret, and in the Biology lab he cleared the board one letter at a time, until the words ‘I love you Brian’ emerged amidst the jumble of notes on osmosis.
While other cleaners were often finished by eight-thirty, Kevin was still going at eleven, and he didn’t mind at all. There was only the admin block left to complete. Its entrance was shielded from the outside security light by a large tree, making it the darkest area of the school. Kevin rushed towards the door, stooped over, the pipe from the vacuum cleaner wrapped around his neck like a piece of military hardware.
‘Almost in,’ he whispered into an imaginary headpiece.
‘You’ve sixty seconds,’ the headpiece crackled back.
Kevin fumbled with the keys, finally found the required master and then sliding quietly inside, waiting a moment more before giving the game away and feeling for the light switch. Terror came first.
Kevin liked to think he was the sort who didn’t frighten easily. If shit would happen it would happen, he figured. There were better things to worry about. Only now, as far as he could tell, shit was happening, and it was happening rather close.
The noise that bounced along the trophy-cabineted corridor was like none he had ever heard before. It was a groan of sorts, but so unearthly and unexpected that at first Kevin couldn’t be sure it wasn’t inside his own head. To add to the horror, a blinding flash of light exploded out of the staffroom office, second door on the left. Then there was darkness once more, and silence.
Fleeing was an obvious option, but curiosity is a strong emotion. Kevin put down the tools of his trade as quietly as he could and, dropping to his knees, crawled slowly forward. There was another groan, and then a third, the most blood curdling of them all, followed by a second flash of light.
Kevin’s resolve was weakening but still he crawled on, until he knew he was at the very edge of the doorway. He tried to tell himself he was prepared for any vision. An alien abduction maybe, or the climactic sacrifice of a satanic ritual. He was ready. But imagination is not always big enough for the world it inhabits, and the scene which greeted Kevin in the brief moment of the third flash twisted his stomach and throttled his mind in a way he could never have anticipated.
He recognised both people immediately, despite the strangeness of their underlit pose. Mr Ramsay, the fifty-something-year-old principal, trousers and boxers around his stumpy ankles, perched vigorously atop Ms Charters, the much feared school secretary, who was in turn precariously arched over the school’s new, self-sorting, digital photocopier. The light emanated from the machine itself, pressed into action each time Ms Charters tried to correct her balance, thus illuminating the entire grisly scene.
Kevin had seen such a thing once before, on a DVD Brian had made him watch. At the time he had been uninterested, now he was more disturbed. In fact he was quite certain this was the single most repulsive and unnatural act he had ever witnessed.
‘It isn’t natural you know,’ Camille called from the laundry. ‘A boy your age moping around, looking so miserable.’
‘I don’t know,’ Malcolm replied, wandering through so he could talk to her. ‘I think it’s quite normal actually. That’s the problem really. I think I’m becoming like everybody else.’
Malcolm’s mother was an enthusiastic cleaner. In fact she attacked most tasks with unrestrained energy, including the guidance of her only son.
‘I know that look.’ She pulled a pair of Frank’s y-fronts from the basin and inspected them against the light. ‘You had it when you were born and it’s been there on and off ever since.’
‘I don’t remember. You should have got it on video.’
‘I was busy.’
‘Dad could have held the camera.’
‘A steady hand isn’t one of his better qualities I’m afraid. So, what exactly’s on your mind?’
‘Sex.’
‘Oh dear, that is quite normal.’
‘Exactly. It’s getting so I can hardly think of anything else,’ Malcolm confessed. ‘I’ve had every book on the subject out of the library, including one in German which I got for the pictures. The librarian has begun to look at me quite strangely. And the worst thing is, the more I read, the more complicated it gets.’
‘Don’t worry so much. Complicated becomes straightforward soon enough, and then straightforward slips into routine without you even noticing. Complicated is probably the best bit. Have you decided yet, who it is you’d like to have sex with?’