The Drought (The hilarious laugh-out loud comedy about dating disasters!) (14 page)

A hushed silence falls over the
crowd. For a brief moment, victory is sweet.

But this is soon replaced by
the reality of the utter ridiculousness of my statement. Who in
their right mind would refer to masturbation as self-sex? I might
as well have just pulled out my penis right there-and-then and
started to stroke one out to the rhythm of the crowds roaring
laughter ringing in my ears.

My mum bursts into tears at the
realisation of her worst fear – her little boy is in fact a
perverted little wanker. She buries her head into my dad’s chest,
who simply stares at me, disgusted in the knowledge that I am his
spawn.

*

“
Tickets
please,” the ticket inspector roused me from my sleep. I handed him
the ticket and watched as he scribbled a strange scrawl on to it
before handing it back and making his way down the
carriage.

I shook my head and rubbed my
face to wake myself up. It had been over two months since I had
last seen my parents at Christmas, and I decided a nice break out
in the sticks would do me good.

I had pretty much kept a low
profile over the last few weeks since the Valentine’s Day disaster,
especially as I was now in hiding from Stacey’s new knuckle-head
boyfriend. Being the arsehole ex-boyfriend wasn’t enough for me; I
had to go and add chatting-up his schoolgirl sister and attempting
to shag his mum to the list of reasons of why Dave wanted to kill
me. Kicking his dog can’t have helped either.

Yeah, a bit of home cooking and
some pampering from mum was just what the doctor ordered. After
dinner perhaps I could stroll down to the village pub for a pint or
two with the old man.

My parents had moved to the
small village just outside of Horsham in West Sussex while I was
still at university. Instead of returning home from university to
the hustle and bustle of inner city life I had left behind, I
returned to fields of green for as far as the eye could see. The
familiar sound of police sirens, traffic, and drunken ramblings I
had become accustomed to outside my bedroom window had been
replaced by deathly eerie silence. It was like being stuck in a
Walt Disney cartoon with all the ducks, pheasants, geese and deer
strolling around.

It took me about 15 minutes to
walk from the train station to my parents’ house. I spotted my dad
in the drive washing the Range Rover he had bought when they moved
here because he felt it would suit the rural landscape. What he
hadn’t banked on was the tiny country roads.

“
Hello boy,”
my dad greeted me, his roll-up cigarette hanging from his
mouth.

“
Hello dad,” I
said and he patted me on the arm. I had always been close to my
father. Growing up, he had been my source of inspiration. He was
also the first person who offered me my first real insight into the
world of the fairer sex. He would often say things like:

Women are like parking meters;
if you don't feed them with enough money you face serious
consequences.

Women are like refrigerators;
they're always cold and never seem to have a beer when you need
one.

Women are like blue jeans; they
look good for a while but eventually they fade and have to be
replaced.

I remember when I was about 16
he took me to one side and gave me what I guess was his version of
that classic father-son contraception talk.

“
Son,” my dad
started with his hand on my shoulder. “When you meet a girl,
whatever you do don’t tell her your real name. That way if you get
her pregnant she won’t be able to find you.”

Of course, he had a back-up
plan in case that little nugget of gold didn’t help me out.

“
If you are
stupid enough to knock someone up, then I have a little money set
aside for an emergency, and we’ll fly you out to Spain where you
can lay low for a couple of years until it blows over.”

That was my dad. He had
solutions and advice for real problems and real situations. He
finished hosing the soap off the car. “How have you been, son?”

“
Not bad,” I
told him. It was a lie, but my father was a real man’s man and not
the type of man that would react well to knowing that in the last
two months I had run away from a fight with a girl, and had tried
pulling a schoolgirl and her mum in the same night. Actually, he
probably would have been quite impressed with the
latter.

“
Good, good,”
he said taking his rollie out of his mouth and stubbing it out on
the floor with his foot. Suddenly his face went dead serious and he
put his hand on my shoulder. “Look, I’ve got some bad
news.”

This wasn’t
good. The last time my dad had started a conversation with me like
this was the time my pet goldfish Chips had died. I loved that
little fella. Luckily my dad had eased my pain with four
Ghostbusters
action
figures. I would later find out when I was older that my mum had
grown bored of having to clean the tank all the time and had
flushed Chips down the toilet, thinking he would be flushed out
into a river somewhere. My dad would often make the crude joke that
Chips was down there in the sewer somewhere holding on to a
‘
Richard the
Third’
for dear life and paddling to
safety.

But this time
there wasn’t a Peter Venkman or Egon Spengler figurine in sight.
This had to be bad. Maybe my grandmother had died, or the dog had
been run down. Maybe a 10-foot goldfish had been found in the
sewers and was hell-bent on revenge against the family that had
cruelly discarded of him down the toilet all those years ago. Some
fish hold grudges. Did you ever see any of the
Jaws
sequels?

“
Hey, what’s
up
cuz
?”

No, this was worse. Much
worse.

I stood completely still, not
knowing what to do. I looked at my dad for help, but he just
shrugged his shoulders and went back to leathering off the car.

“
Hey
cuz
, I said what’s
up?”

There it was again – a voice
that conjured up an abundance of emotions that boiled deep inside
me. A voice that cut through me like an icy blade. A voice that
made my teeth itch.

“
Cuz?
”

A voice that belonged to my
cousin Charlie.

“
Hey Charlie,”
I said turning to face the boy who had once replaced all of the
cream from my Oreo cookies with toothpaste. The boy who spun me on
the roundabout for 11 minutes straight causing me to throw up four
times. The boy who once handed me a tampon and let me unwittingly
pretend it was a cigar so I could be Hannibal from
The A-Team
.

“
Good to see
you
cuz
.”

The boy who
called me
cuz.
I
hated it when he called me that. But what I hated the most about my
cousin Charlie was that he always had to go one better than you. If
I bought the latest Eminem CD, then he had just got front row
concert tickets. If I had front row concert tickets, then he had a
backstage pass. If I had a backstage pass, then he had actually
performed with the man on stage and knew him well enough to call
him Marshall, or Marsh for short. I actually did get a backstage
pass to an Eminem gig once and to this day Charlie still has a fake
number in his phone assigned to Marsh.

Charlie was four years older
than me and the most pretentious idiot I had the misfortune of
knowing, let alone being related to. He was the type of guy that
wore sunglasses to a nightclub, and wore big fake diamond stud
earrings. He would boast of his many conquests with girls. To
complement his overbearing personality, he was also a compulsive
liar. He once told me he had given the Pope a lift home after his
“Pope mobile” had broken down in Bethnal Green.

He reckons the Pope needed to
get to Catford.

And he was wearing a denim
jacket.

A
sleeveless
denim
jacket.

We made our way inside where my
mum greeted me with a big hug. “It’s lovely to see you, dear,” she
said.

“
You too,
mum,” I replied and then whispered into her ear through gritted
teeth. “What is
he
doing here?”

“
Your aunt and
uncle called and asked if they could pop by,” she pulled away and
shook her head apologetically. “It was all very last
minute.”

I said my hellos to my Aunt
Maggie and Uncle David. Maggie was my mum’s sister; a slim woman
who smoked too much and always seemed to smell of cats. David was a
heavyset man who had the ability to rub my father up the wrong way
just like Charlie was able to do to me. Like father, like son.

“
Everyone sit
down,” my mum ushered us towards the dining table. “Lunch will be
served shortly.”

My dad came back into the house
as my mum served up generous portions of lamb, roast potatoes,
cauliflower cheese, and vegetables, all smothered in lashings of
thick onion gravy. The small talk concentrated around the usual
subjects: the incredible snowstorms that had brought the country to
its knees, how the banks had screwed the economy up for everyone,
and a story that had appeared in the local paper story about the
three-legged dog that had saved his owner from drowning. My mum was
a sucker for pet stories.

Of course, the men talked about
sport; it was a safe subject. My mother tried getting involved by
commenting how much she thought Andrew Flintoff looked like his
brother Freddie when she had seen him interviewed earlier that day
on the news.

But secretly, I knew my mum had
been dying to grill me more about the Stacey situation and it
wasn’t long before she subtly brought the conversation round to my
now infamous break-up.

“
So, I was
telling your Aunt Maggie that you and Stacey are not courting
anymore,” was about as subtle as my mum got.
Courting.
It was such a parent word
to describe relationships. It was up there with
mating.
Nobody used words like that
anymore to describe relationships or sexual experiences. In fact, I
am pretty sure that words like that died out the day swimming pools
took down the
No Heavy Petting
signs.

“
Yeah, what
happened
cuz
? Did
Stacey finally see sense?” Charlie laughed, nudging me in the arm.
I smiled and resisted taking the bait. “So, how does it feel being
single again?”

I thought about it for a
second. What word would best sum up my re-entry into my newly found
unattached status? Distressing? Disastrous? Desperate? Whatever
word it was to describe how I felt obviously started with a D.
“It’s been okay,” I lied. “I have been out on a few dates and
meeting new people.” Technically part of that was true. I had been
on one date, albeit an unsuccessful date, but a date nonetheless.
The actual details weren’t important.

“
That’s nice,
dear,” my mum said. “I’d hate to see you lonely.”

“
I’m not
lonely, mum,” I reassured her.

“
Leave the boy
alone,” my dad said waving my mother away. “Your mother was a
little upset when she found out, but I told her you were too young
to settle down.”

“
Especially
when you see the way some of these young girls dress today,” my
Uncle David said, inhaling and shaking his head with a disturbing
smile on his face.

“
When I was a
boy, you were lucky if you got a grope after walking her home
before her old man chased you halfway down the street,” my dad
shared with us, laughing. “I was born too soon,” he said picking up
a piece of meat with his fork.

“
I know what
you mean,” my Uncle David butted in. “I used to tell Charlie that
if you sneak any girls into the house, don’t let me catch you
because I’ll make you share.”

“
And he did
once!” Charlie said grinning and then high-fived his dad. It was an
awkward moment. I glanced towards my Aunt Maggie but she just
shrugged with this
what can I do
look on her face. “Boys will be boys,” she said
and then went back to her conversation with my mum.

“
Hey
cuz
,” Charlie started
nudging me on the arm again. “I saw this bloke chatting up a
cheetah the other night. I thought to myself, he’s trying to pull a
fast one!” He burst out laughing. “You love it, don’t ya,” he kept
saying, still nudging. “Yeah, of course you bloody love it,” he
finished off rustling my hair like I was a five-year-old, with a
mouthful of roast potato spilling from his mouth.

We finished the rest of the
meal with my dad doing his best to avoid any conversation with my
Uncle David, while Charlie insisted on prodding and jabbing me
every five minutes with some quip.

“
Why don’t you
take Charlie down to the pub in the village,” my mum said as she
cleared the table. I stared at her in disbelief. This is the woman
who carried me inside her womb for nine months. The woman who put a
plaster on my knee when I tripped and fell. The woman who used to
sew my name into the back of my underwear. Here she was, selling me
down the river.

“
Get your
coat,
cuz
,”
Charlie said before I had the chance to answer. “You’ve
pulled.”

*