Authors: Kate Eberlen
‘Nervous?’
‘Yes.’
I wondered why we were whispering. We were the only people in the house.
‘Have you ever done it before?’ she asked.
‘Not really . . .’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means no,’ I admitted.
Her laughter loosened the grip of my fear.
‘Me neither.’
‘We’re medical students,’ I said. ‘We should know about anatomy and stuff. Tell you what . . .’ I propped myself up on my elbow, ‘. . . shall I examine
you?’
‘OK . . .’ she agreed, uncertainly.
‘Just relax, and tell me does this hurt?’ I kissed her ear.
‘No!’ She laughed again.
‘How about this?’ I kissed her shoulder.
‘No!’
‘And this?’
I kissed the top of her breast.
‘That’s nice,’ she sighed.
‘Let’s have a better look.’
I pulled the duvet down an inch to expose the lacy edge of her bra, then kissed her there. She smiled and closed her eyes.
I burrowed under the duvet, my tongue travelling down the centre of her belly towards the elastic of her panties, and I kissed her there just above the line of her pubic hair.
Suddenly her arms and legs were around me, her mouth on mine, as we grappled to get naked. As I closed my eyes and felt her opening for me, I remembered her face in the light of the bonfire, all
golden with wonder, and fireworks started exploding in my head.
Afterwards, we lay in each other’s arms, skin against skin, breathing each other’s breath. My eyes took in the neatness and girliness of her room. The curtains had a pattern of
old-fashioned pink roses, the white dressing table matched the white fitted cupboards; on the pink carpet, there was a pair of oversized slippers in the form of two fluffy grey rabbits.
Lucy followed my gaze. ‘Christmas present. Actually, they’re really warm!’
‘Hope they don’t breed . . .’
She giggled.
‘How long have you been on the Pill?’ I asked, before I could stop myself.
‘Two months.’
Two months! I tried to think back. November. Bonfire Night.
‘Helen said if I wanted to, I should be prepared.’
She’d discussed it with her older sister!
‘With me?’ As soon as I asked, I realized that there was no way she was going to say, ‘No, with someone else.’
‘Of course with you, silly!’
‘I wish I’d known!’
‘Did you want to?’
I smiled and gave her a squeeze.
‘Sure did.’
‘When?’
‘From the first moment I saw you,’ I told her, which sounded like the sort of thing Ross would have said.
Was it true, I wondered, as we started kissing again? Or had I just said it to make her happy?
Our second time was more exploratory and sustained, and left us in a dreamy drift of satisfaction, unaware of time passing.
When we suddenly noticed that it had become dark outside and her parents would soon be back, it was a race to get dressed and out of the building.
Lucy drove me to the station and I had to run for the train to London.
Tomorrow, we decided, breathlessly, between kisses, she would come back too. We would revise for the January exams together.
She ran along the platform as the train pulled away, holding my hand for as long as she could, before letting go and waving.
‘I can’t wait to do some more
revision
!’ I called.
From then on, it would be our special code word.
I sat in the carriage staring out into the night, the heater blowing ineffectively around my feet. I could still smell Lucy on my skin and feel her in my groin, and when I closed my eyes, I
could still hear her sharp little breaths. In the rattling, draughty compartment, life suddenly felt bearable. The reflection of a face in the window smiled at me, and, for a moment, I didn’t
recognize myself.
‘You’ve struck gold!’
My friend Marcus and I, sitting at an outside table in the beer garden of the Gloucester Arms, watched Lucy, in a denim miniskirt and pink vest, disappear inside the pub to get another
round.
For some unfathomable reason – Marcus didn’t say this, but I knew it was what he was thinking – this near-perfect example of femininity had fallen for me. His undisguised
approval made me even prouder of my girlfriend, not just because of her pretty face and great body but because of the attentive way she’d been drawing him out about his course and his life in
Bristol, where he was reading Law. His university experience seemed to have a lot to do with debating societies and drinking. The tongue-tied boy I knew had become almost chatty in response to her
questions.
After depositing two more pints in front of us, Lucy left us to spend the evening together. She’d arranged to go to a movie with a couple of her girlfriends.
‘I’m sure you’ve got lots of catching up to do,’ she said.
We both watched her walking away, her hair bright gold in the early-evening sunshine.
Inside the pub, the World Cup semi-final was on a big screen, the air suddenly full of cheering. We craned our necks to see who had just scored a goal. One all.
‘Do you think it’ll go to penalties?’ Marcus asked.
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘Brazil have to win, don’t they?’
‘You’d think so.’
Our friendship was founded on shared reticence rather than conversation. Both more naturally inclined to observe than participate, we’d met at the back of the dinner queue our first day at
boarding school, sized each other up and discovered that we were both Arsenal supporters, although we’d quickly learned not to celebrate that allegiance in public. At our school, football was
for chavs and wusses; real men played rugby. On the field, my speed and Marcus’s skills helped us avoid the worst of the mauling. In the dormitory and showers, we looked out for each other
and weighed in on each other’s behalf. The fact that my big brother was Head Boy that year had offered me no protection from random violence. Ironically, Ross was always an enthusiastic
proponent of the what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger philosophy. As in most male friendships, there was always an element of friendly rivalry between Marcus and me. Assessing him with
the benefit of a year’s distance, I suspected I’d grown up more than he had. As sixth-formers, we’d envisaged wild student parties where females would roll into bed with us and
roll out again in the cold light of morning when they saw the mistake they’d made. Now I started sentences with ‘we’ and knew about clitoral stimulation, and not just from my
textbooks. I gathered that Marcus’s Ibiza relationship hadn’t been a great success, and though he’d slept with a couple of girls since, he had yet to find a serious girlfriend and
still called sex ‘shagging’.
Medics are renowned for playing as hard as they work, but Lucy and I were ridiculously middle-aged. Almost every Saturday morning, I awoke to find her handing me a mug of coffee before squeezing
back into the narrow bed and giving me a kiss that tasted of toothpaste. Lucy did sex like she did most things, with a lot of thorough research. All the magazine articles she had read on the
subject advised talking openly about what you liked, so we had become fairly expert at giving each other pleasure. Occasionally, Lucy asked if I had any fantasies, and I always said I was happy
with things just the way they were because I was sure that was the correct answer.
Obviously, I didn’t tell Marcus any of this.
For his second year, Marcus had made plans to rent a house with a bunch of guys from his hall; Lucy and I were going to be sharing a flat.
‘So, it is lurve?’ Marcus asked a little wearily.
Lucy and I called sex ‘making love’. We were allowed to say things like ‘I love how that feels’ or ‘I loved this evening’ or even ‘I love you when
you’re funny/silly/serious’. However, the words ‘I love you’ on their own remained unspoken, as if they had the power to cast an irrevocable spell on us. Once, I thought I
heard her breathe the words over a particularly undulating orgasm, but I wasn’t sure and could hardly ask for clarification.
‘Whatever “lurve” means!’ I replied, trying to show Marcus that I was cool about it.
The truth was that I didn’t know if I loved Lucy. I liked her enormously. She was very easy to be with and cared about me much more than anyone else in my life ever had, noting things I
said, even tiny inconsequential things like preferring crunchy peanut butter to smooth. Perhaps that was a girl thing? I didn’t know because she was my first girlfriend. I felt constantly
surprised and fortunate that she was interested in me. Was that love? In the ensuing silence, Marcus and I both took long, serious gulps of our lager.
‘I haven’t told Lucy about Ross,’ I suddenly confessed.
I couldn’t work that one out either. Was it really because I didn’t want her to get all sympathetic and insist on talking about it? Or was I harbouring some irrational fear that Ross
still had the power to ruin the things I treasured, like my selection as Lower School goalkeeper, which I’d had to relinquish when he dislocated my shoulder, and Toffee, my guinea pig, whose
hutch he’d ‘accidentally’ left open.
Marcus considered the statement for so long I was beginning to wonder whether he’d actually heard. Then he finally said, ‘No reason to, I suppose.’
The relief was immense.
‘A new chapter for you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Ross was such a psycho,’ said Marcus. ‘RIP, obviously.’
The match had gone to penalties.
Conversation was suspended while we watched Brazil go through to the final.
‘You still playing squash?’ I asked.
‘Yup. You still running?’
‘Every morning.’
My usual route – and it was important to have a usual route so that thinking didn’t intrude on the meditative vacuum that running delivered – took me down through the grimy
main streets of Camden, up Parkway, and through the gate into the quiet paradise of Regent’s Park. In winter, frost on the grass, a pinkish tinge to the dawn sky, the delicate structures of
trees, blurred by my misty breath, gave the landscape the feel of an Impressionist painting. In spring, I found myself noticing smaller-scale beauty like the stone urns, spilling over with tulips,
in the formal Italian gardens near the Euston Road, and the wax-like petals of magnolia blossom. Summer brought swags of roses on the pergolas of the Inner Circle, which my route circumnavigated
before a long straight sprint across the fields, past the giraffe houses of the zoo, over the canal and back across the lower slope of Primrose Hill.
On sunny days, cafe owners would be setting out tables and chairs along the wide, curving street which took me back to the railway bridge. It was one of those chichi areas of London where
traditional businesses could no longer compete with the demand for coffee and fresh, delicious food. Over the course of the year, I’d watched a launderette being gutted, renovated and
reinvented as an Italian canteen.
One day the owner, who’d done most of the work himself, was struggling on a ladder as I passed. I stopped and offered to help steady the sign, which said
PIATTINI
. Since then
we’d exchanged a friendly
buon giorno!
as he chalked up the day’s specials on a folding blackboard. The descriptions were unadorned –
polenta con funghi trifolati,
salsiccia al finocchio, granita alla mandorla
– the smells filtering out from the kitchen, mouth-watering.
The day I noticed the words
WAITER REQUIRED
above the menu, I ran past, as usual, then stopped, turned, and ran back. Salvatore gave me an evening’s trial after which he paid me for
the hours I’d worked and asked if I’d like a job. I think I was probably prouder of that achievement than I was of passing my first-year exams.
‘So you’re staying in London for the summer?’ Marcus asked.
‘That’s the plan.’
The flat Lucy had found for us became available at the end of the academic year, and now that I had a job, I wouldn’t have to go home at all.
‘How are your parents doing?’
‘OK, I think.’
I called them every fortnight or so. Since I was last home, my father had re-tiled the downstairs cloakroom and installed a movement-sensitive security system, both projects, I suspected,
designed to keep his mind from thinking about more intractable problems. My mother had taken up quilting. When they asked me if everything was going well, I said yes. The only way I could imagine
of giving them any small pleasure was to qualify as a doctor. A photo of me in a mortar board on the living-room mantelpiece would be something to show their friends. Left to my own devices, I
probably would have foundered under the pressure of the course, but Lucy made sure we both stuck to the work, nagging me to keep my portfolio up to date, and helping me with my reflections on
practice.
‘It’s not a philosophy essay,’ she said, when I was making a meal of it. ‘All they want to know is what you could have done better. You’re training to cure sick
people, not change their lives.’
‘What about you?’ I asked Marcus. ‘Do you have any plans?’
‘I was thinking of Interrailing,’ Marcus said, with a shrug that made me realize that was why he’d come to see me. For a moment I was tempted by the thought of going back to
Italy, enjoying the holiday we hadn’t managed the previous year. But the need to earn my own money was more pressing. Though my parents never mentioned the cost of my education, I was
determined to be as independent as I could.
Lucy gave Marcus a hug when we saw him off at Paddington station. As he turned to offer me a formal handshake, I half-wished men were allowed to hug too. I had male friends at
college, like Toby, although we’d seen each other less since Lucy and I got together, and Jonathan, the serious guy I’d met on the interview day, who I sometimes went for a drink with
when he wasn’t playing chess, but there was no one who knew me like Marcus. Nash was the closest I got to a confidante, but my friendship with her made Lucy uncomfortable. The most critical
thing I ever heard Lucy say about Nash was that she was ‘a bit much’; Nash was far more explicit, especially when drunk, accusing me of settling for the easy option of someone who
didn’t challenge me, to which my answer was, ‘And your problem with that is?’