I position myself at the bottom of the stairs, pointing the camera up at her. ‘You’re wasting your time on me,’ she says, not irritated but not really interested in the camera either, the way some people are. ‘It’s reality TV,’ I say. She pauses a moment and runs a hand across her face, wiping it dry. ‘How come you’re always around the house when I’m cleaning?’ She knows. She must do. ‘Do you like to get in my way?’ I want to say yes. I want to say, ‘Lucy, I think you’re amazing. Please come up to my room and let me touch you.’ I stare up at her, forgetting about the camera. As she leans forward over the vacuum on the stairs, her dress hangs from her. I feel hot, flushed, almost paralyzed with fear or something as I see a nipple brush against the fabric inside and disappear back into the darkness. I force myself to speak. ‘It’s better watching you work than doing anything myself,’ I say, desperate for her not to see what an absolute moron I am. She twists her mouth, frowning at me as the vacuum head sucks noisily at the worn stair carpet. ‘Lazy little sod.’ She looks away, dismissing me from her thoughts. ‘Do you think you could get me another drink, or would that be too much effort?’
I get it, my mind only on the image of ice cubes sliding down against that small dark nipple. I run a cube over my forehead and chest, feeling its cold edge draw a sharp line across my skin, then watch it bob in the glass, believing that by this feeble, not entirely hygienic, magic I might communicate to Lucy what I seem totally unable to say.
I must spend ages over all this, because by the time I get back to her, Lucy has finished the stairs, gone back up to the top and has vacuumed the better part of my room.
My room doesn’t look like my room—I have so far refused to admit to any permanence in terms of being here—but there is one magazine picture stuck on the wall by my bed, a two-page spread of some kids in Afghanistan, ripped down the middle and taped together.
‘You’re a strange boy, aren’t you?’ Lucy remarks, looking at this as I come in. She takes her drink, turns off the vacuum for a moment. ‘What do you want a picture like that for on your wall?
’
I glance at it, the bombed-out village, the fresh blood on the ground, the fear and doubt on the children’s faces seeming both a lot like I feel and like an antidote to the blandness of my life.
‘I thought it might annoy Mum and Dad,’ I say, feeling strangely guilty all of a sudden. Lucy makes me feel as if I’m using the picture, using their suffering, which I suppose in a way I am. ‘It didn’t work,’ I add. ‘They don’t seem to mind.’
I watch Lucy drink, unsure what to do next. She’s here in my room and there seems to be some point of contact between us, but I feel ridiculously young. I turn to go.
‘You’ve caught the sun, haven’t you?’ she says, before I can leave. ‘Your shoulders are all red. You should get your mum to put something on them.’
‘She’s got Jake to look after.’
‘Jack. Jake doesn’t suit him.’ I look at her, standing rolling the ice cubes—my ice cube—around
in her glass. ‘Are they really red?’ I ask. ‘Maybe you could help? I’d do it myself, but it’s difficult reaching behind…’ She watches me curiously. I catch my breath, not quite believing this is going to get me anywhere. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Let me finish my drink first. You’re just lazy, Tom, aren’t you? You think anyone’s going to put up with this when you’re older?’ I don’t care, not now, not at the moment. I run down to the bathroom to get some cream, noticing the smudgy black footprint Lucy has left in the bath. I glance out the kitchen doorway at Mum. Jack has gone back to sleep and she is reading again, headset on. Then I race back upstairs, back to Lucy, who has the vacuum going again and is just finishing my bedroom. She switches it off. We sit on the bed and she uncaps the tube. Suddenly I know nothing is going to happen, nothing more than her massaging aftersun muck into my back. I don’t know what I expected, but I feel disappointed. ‘God, you’re going to peel,’ she tells me as she rubs my shoulders. It feels wonderful, cool and burning at the same time. ‘How did you let yourself get like this?’ ‘I don’t know. Do you sunbathe much?’ It’s a stupid question, in keeping with my mood now. ‘I don’t get the time.’ I twist my head around at her. ‘You must, sometimes. Weekends?’ ‘I work in a pub, weekends. I’m trying to save enough to go and live with my aunt in France for a year.’ I don’t want to know this—not because it means she might leave at some point, but because it reduces everything to normalcy, to the quiet pattern of everyday life. ‘Why don’t you work in London? Wouldn’t you get more money there?’ ‘London’s full of people like you,’ she says, squeezing my shoulders hard, sending a bolt of pain through them that stuns me. ‘Out to make trouble.’ I look around again. She stares at me—a look which makes me feel as if I’ve just leapt through about ten years. ‘I’ve got to get on,’ she says, getting up, leaving me sitting on the bed with the most incredible erection I’ve ever had, aching to do something yet literally in shock, unable to move. She taps my belly with the knuckles of one hand just above my hard-on, just where my stomach is wrinkled over my tightened shorts. ‘You’re getting fat.’ She smiles, recapping the aftersun cream ‘Too much sitting around. You don’t want a paunch, do you?’ She walks out and two rival waves of emotion slap into me. The first sends the details of my Devon room—the few I’m aware of to start with—spiraling into outer space. I might as well be in Kabul, the smallpaned windows seem so foreign. My bed could be an old mattress in a shelled doorway; the razor wire begins just over there, right by that bombed shopfront and that gloomy old chest of drawers. I’d rather be in an Afghan street right now, waiting for the bullet or the bomb blast, the flying glass, nothing. Sitting here, sitting in safety, in the bizarre heat of an English summer day, it all seems meaningless, the choices don’t matter—even if it isn’t you who make them. The second wave is my normal response, my hearty, ‘Fuck this!’ attitude that I know I can rely on. I bounce off the bed and go to the door. Lucy is in Jessie’s room, the lead of her vacuum snaking around Jessie’s door from the point on the landing. My door is half closed. I take a chance. Hidden behind it, I toss off—awkwardly, hurriedly, energetically—into a wad of Kleenex. Halfway through, I freeze when I hear Lucy pulling the plug out. I look around the door, debating whether to cram my hard-on back inside my shorts. I don’t. I want her to see me, but she doesn’t and my hand just works harder with her in sight, retreating down the stairs. I finish and shove the balled tissue under my bed, reminding myself that I must remember it later. Dad’s voice downstairs makes me jump—I didn’t know he was back. He is talking to Lucy when I go down, showing her the bag of barbecue charcoal he has bought, as if she could possibly be interested. Jessie is carrying in a box of food topped with sausages and steaks. For the briefest moment, she looks like a teenage housewife—one of the saddest sights known to man. It’s only the gaping square hole cut out of the seat of her jeans, revealing pale blue boxer shorts underneath, that gives the lie to this vision of Jessie and Dad as an oddly matched but small-horizoned provincial couple. I don’t give it a second thought. Maybe I should.
A nuclear summer’s evening and we are in a foreign land—well, it’s familiar enough to us by now, but we’re the foreigners, Jessie and me, we don’t fit in, we’re not entirely trusted yet
and why should we be?
Voices swim in the hazy golden air, laughter mixing with car exhaust and cigarette smoke and the richer, sicklier smells of dried sweat, worn leather and the grasping flowering plants which snake up and around the old stone walls of the alcove we’re crammed into. We’re with the hard boys, the local yobbos, Jessie’s crowd, admirers all, working their nuts off to make sure she notices them. There’s a couple of village girls with us, too, drinking and joking, somehow recognizing that they can’t fight Jessica, she’s got to win, so they might as well learn from her.
Half the populace seems gathered here outside the local watering hole, beer-bellied phantoms flitting past my range of vision, alcohol slopping from over-filled glasses, dark blurs moving at their feet like dogs from hell.
I’m wasted, I realize that, it’s one of the perks of having Jessie as an older sister. I get a bit of stick from the bunch we’re with now, but they’re all a good few years older than me and basically they treat me OK. Better to be crushed between four drunken bikers and their girlfriends than standing with Mum and Dad at the side of the road where the overspill is, talking to some of the local dead about church fêtes, income tax and point-to-points. Mum and Dad don’t fit in, either. I can see from here the strain involved in talking to these people, the occasional wild-eyed glances in our direction. But that’s their problem; they wanted to come down here.
At least the mob we’re with have some life in them, a few years of madness left before they buckle down. Only a couple of them have jobs, because there’s nothing much to do locally except work for the grocks, the tourists—us (except Jessie and I are just about beginning to lose this taint)—and they’d rather die first.
Caz, the heavy, punky girl across the table from me, did it for a while and hated it. She actually prefers working on a register in the supermarket in Sidmouth. John, the hard-looking, big-nosed, cocky bastard next to me who keeps deliberately shoving his elbow in my ribs, is a trained mechanic, but lost his job a month ago for telling his boss to fuck off when the boss kept on about him coming in late.
Nick, the one who’s winning where Jessie is concerned, is the quietest and also the youngest, yet he’s somehow acknowledged as in control, the one the others listen to and follow. He’s on some government training scheme which pays for his lodging (he’s from North Devon) while he works as an apprentice at the local forge. I didn’t even know what farriers did until I met him, and I’m still not sure, but Jessie goes for that quiet, individual determination, and obviously so does everyone else.
‘Did you hear about Potter?’ The greasy-haired toe-rag on my right, the other side of me from John, is trying to get everybody’s attention. My mind is sharp for a moment, but as he speaks it all begins to swim again. I try to fix on Caz, concentrating on her mouth and the spiky black make-up around her eyes in an effort to stop my head from sliding under the table. They think Jessie’s a punk, this lot. Even though she doesn’t go for the obvious trappings like Caz, that’s the only way they can figure her out. They think that’s still pretty dangerous.
‘Potter and Martin,’ Toe-rag continues (I’ve forgotten his name—I think I’ve forgotten mine), ‘only go and break into Dr Arnold’s surgery the other night, didn’t they? Totally rat-arsed, they were, drunk about a gallon of Guinness each, and Martin’s dad’s been in to see the doctor the day before. So they thought they’d have a bit of fun, mix his urine sample up with someone else’s or something. Anyway, they’re in there about twenty minutes, nobody bothers them, so they’re pissing about when the fucking Bill arrives. Really heavy, they were. Thought they’d gone in there to score drugs—Potter! He’d shit himself if he took two aspirin. Anyway, Martin’s got about two weeks’ dole money on him, because he’s been painting and decorating a bit, so the Bill think he’s taken that too. Questioned them both for hours, they did, in separate rooms and everything. Bastards!’
‘Who was it?’ the girl next to Caz asks. ‘Sergeant Collis?’ ‘No. No one they knew, that was the problem. Took them to
Colyton. Kept them there half the fucking night.’
‘Potter’s a walking disaster,’ says John, draining his glass and knocking me in the ribs again. Drunk as I am, I bring my shoulder up quickly and make contact with John’s arm, cracking the glass against his teeth. His head spins around as he checks his teeth with his tongue. ‘Fucking little—’ ‘Want another one, John?’ Nick dives in, convincing John that I’m not worth bothering about while sending Jessie all the right signals. ‘I’m going to have one more, then let’s go. Let’s do something.’ Nick gets up and I try to do the same, sensing an urgent need somewhere between my stomach and my mouth. ‘Here, Jessica,’ a weasel face—or is it a weasel voice?—says somewhere behind me, beneath me, whatever. ‘Your brother reckons he used to drink in London. Is that right?’ Caz smiles across at me. ‘He doesn’t look too brilliant.’ I manage to inch my way around the alcove toward her. ‘You look like you’ve swallowed a bucket of worms.’
‘I think I have.’ I steady myself on the shoulder of Colin, I think it is—a fat-faced wanker who’s the hanger-on of the group. ‘I’ll be back,’ I manage through a clogged mouth.
The next few moments are a dreamlike journey, weaving through the tiny pub garden, banging into everything there is to bang into and doing about three unnecessary circuits as I try to keep out of range of Mum and Dad. I get a vivid, whirling picture of the whole village falling down three hills toward this focal point, where an uneven mass of increasingly noisy drunks straddles the road, lit sporadically by the sick white or slow red of cars’ reverse and brake lights scarring the growing darkness as they move in and out of the car park around the back.
It’s here that I’m headed, too, stepping right in front of an oncoming Hummer in my struggle to reach the toilets in time. I almost don’t make it, feeling my mouth fill with something vile and fluid as I stagger up the step, into the welcoming stench and silence of the gents. My gut pushes upward, like a drum hit from the wrong side, my mouth falls open and I throw myself over the urinal as a torrent of vomit comes out, nearly choking me as I gasp for air.
There is a quiet that follows throwing up, a sense of peace and achievement matched by an incredible lightness of the stomach. Only your mouth tastes like shit. The rest of you is elated, alive to the freshness of a world unsullied by waves of nausea. Every detail is pure, from the echoing drip of the cistern overhead to the graffiti by the condom machine, like a torch shone on someone else’s mind: ‘Helen—we want to screw you. MM. NH. TF. Clelia can swallow it whole.’
I’m feeling great by the time I get back outside, ready for anything—even Jessie’s friends. The trouble is, I’m with them, they’re not really with me, and as I walk back around from the car park, I have a momentary doubt as to whether I should call it quits now and leave them to it. They’re still there, jammed into the stone alcove by the entrance to the pub, glasses on the table, stoned expressions all around.