Doing It (12 page)

But I did have another idea. OK, it was no sex life, no shagging. I was doomed to descend to about Number One Billion. Even Jonathon was better off than I was and he was with a fat girl. But, you know – it was still a pity to waste the chance.

‘Can I have a look?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You know.’ I nodded down the bed. Jackie used to let me touch but she was always scared to let me take her knickers off in case things went too far. I once tried to have a peek by pulling her knickers to one side, but she had her jeans on and couldn’t open her legs. I wanted to see a proper spread.

‘Have a look?’ she repeated.

‘Yeah. You know. I’d like to … see it.’

She giggled and grabbed hold of the bedclothes. ‘I’m shy!’ she screeched.

‘Oh, right.’ I backed off, but Siobhan seemed to be pleased for some reason. She was slapping out at me and screeching as if I was tickling her.

‘No! Don’t, don’t!’ she giggled, pushing me away, even though I wasn’t doing anything, so of course I grabbed hold of the covers and tried to pull them down. ‘Stop now!’ she said, so I did. She held the covers tightly round her neck and thought about it. ‘It’s not very pretty,’ she said.

‘I don’t mind.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t mind?’ she scolded.

‘I mean – I dunno.’ I made as if to lift the covers at the bottom and she grabbed hold of my ears and screeched again.

‘NO! I tell you what. Stop it. You can get – no, stop it. Stop! Under the bedclothes and have a look if you like,’ she said.

‘Can I?’

‘Yeah. If you like.’

‘I won’t be able to see anything …’ I began, but even as I spoke I found my eyes drifting across to the little bedside lamp.

‘NO!’ she howled, reaching out to grab my arm, but I fended her off.

‘There’s no point if I can’t see!’

‘No!’

‘Yes!’

‘But I’ll be in the dark,’ she complained.

‘I won’t.’

She let go of my ears and lay back in the bed. Down I went, under the covers. She didn’t stop me when I pushed her legs apart and bent up her knees.

‘All right?’ she asked shyly. But I couldn’t say anything. It was just … I mean, I’d seen pictures but they give you no idea, really. The real thing! It was bigger than I thought, and redder and hairier and it was just stunning. It had this amazing spicy, pee-y smell. It was pure sex. I pulled it open and my knob began pulsing like some sort of atomic weapon.

‘Wow,’ I said. It was awesome. The pictures don’t tell you anything, really. Still staring, I wormed my hand out towards the bedroom table.

‘What you doing?’

‘Looking for a condom.’

She laughed at me, but I didn’t care. It must have been really weird for her, with the light on her fanny and me under there examining her. But you know what? I think it turned her on. She found one and handed it down to me. I struggled under the covers to hold the lamp, put the condom on my vast, iron hard stiffie, and keep looking at it all at the same time.

I tented the covers and came up for air. ‘I never saw anything like that before,’ I told her. I held her and kissed her, hooking her leg up with one arm. She smiled up at me and reached down to guide me to the right place with her hand, and I just slid in.

It was nearly eleven by the time I got out of bed, so I was late for starters. Had a shower. Couldn’t face breakfast. Got my footie gear together. Her birthday present, a CD, ‘The Handsome Cult’. I was planning on bringing something else for her – my old school uniform.

I’d got it all together. The blazer was at the back of my wardrobe – Mum had kept it in case my brother Neil ever needed it spare but he kicked up such a fuss about getting it second-hand, he never used it. The polo and sweatshirt were in Neil’s cupboard – spares again, glad I’m not a younger brother – and so was a pair of trousers. I found the shoes right at the back of the cupboard in the end, all dried up. I’d cleaned them up a couple of nights before and they still fitted. I’d been kidding myself that I’d grown over the past year, but evidently not in the foot department anyhow.

But in the end I left it behind. I felt too ill. Just the thought – yuk. I just stuck my footie gear in my bag and cleared off.

‘See you!’

‘Where are you going?’ yelled my dad.

‘Footie.’

‘Have you had breakfast, you need breakfast if you’re playing sports,’ yelled my mum.

‘Yes,’ I lied, and left the house. I felt sick, my head hurt. I just wanted to go back to bed.

That school uniform thing. She’s always on at me about that. She put on a maid’s uniform once. Sat me down in an armchair with a beer and waltzed around the flat doing the dusting, leaning over me so I could see down her top and bending over the table so this tiny little skirt rode up. No knickers. You know? Then I had to tell her off for missing bits. I was supposed to order her to do all sorts of jobs so I could get an eyeful but I wasn’t very good at it. Too self-conscious. She didn’t seem to care. She flitted around a bit, took all my clothes off, just the same as usual, except she called me ‘Sir’ as she did it. God knows what she’ll get up to once she gets me dressed up like a schoolboy.

Kinky. I don’t mind the uniform stuff and games and all that, but some of it really gives me the twitches. She does stuff at school – does that count as kinky as well? It wasn’t too bad at first. She used to take me out to the store cupboard and give me a big snog and I’d feel her tits. That was pretty good actually, but it was still scary. There was this time she got me backstage, pulled up my top and her top, popped herself out of her bra and gave me this big, wet snog, skin to skin backstage with half the cast of
Toad of Toad Hall
just the other side of the curtains. I thought I was going to die. It was still pretty amazing though.

But it’s getting out of hand. I think the thing is, she likes the risk. She always used to do things like grab my packet when I was standing behind her and there were other people in the room – you know, shielding me with her body so no one could see. Then she started giving me detentions so I had to stay behind after school. It was outrageous – right in front of the whole class. She said I was doing something stupid – I wasn’t doing a thing. It was all so obvious. I thought she was going to make me shag her, but it was worse than that. She got me backstage behind the curtains, took my jeans down and gave me a blow job. The sick thing was, she made me face the curtains so I could peer through the curtains and see people in the hall coming and going.

‘You’ll have to keep an eye out in case people come,’ she said. I tried to stop her but – I don’t know, I just don’t seem to be able to say no. She always gets it her own way. It’s not fair.

At first he thought she hadn’t heard the bell, but just as his finger was lifting towards the buzzer again he heard someone shuffling towards the door in such a way that set his heart beating fearfully, even though he knew that it wasn’t, say, a wounded water buffalo or a starving tiger that was coming towards him, but Miss. She opened the door to reveal herself, hair in a rumpled mess on the back of her head, face a crumpled mess on the front. The air stank of stale drink, tobacco smoke and polish.

‘Ben,’ she groaned. She held her hand to her head and turned away. He followed her into the flat.

It was all wrong. For a moment he thought that he’d come by some impossible chance to the wrong flat and she happened to be in it – with a new lover …? But it wasn’t that. It was the flat itself that had gone crazy.

Miss’s flat was always messy. She kept her clean clothes and her dirty clothes in separate heaps on the floor and didn’t touch the washing up until there was enough to bother with. Dusting wasn’t her thing, she was waiting to find a window cleaner, wiped the surfaces only when something sticky refused to dry out, and only did the kitchen floor when it stuck to the soles of her slippers. Every now and then she had a blitz, but what had happened here was something else. The place was spotless. More than spotless; it was sterile.

‘What happened?’ asked Ben, as she waved a despairing hand around, but he already knew the answer.

‘My mother gate-crashed my birthday party. Put the kettle on,’ she replied and shuffled back to the bedroom.

There are many different sorts of mothers depending on what they make you do or feel. There are love-mothers and hate-mothers, guilt-mothers and sad-mothers, rage-mothers, glad-mothers, sleep-mothers, mania-mothers, laughter-mothers, fear-mothers, hit-mothers, tear-mothers, bore-mothers, sick-mothers, work-mothers and safe-mothers, to name just a few. It works for dads too. Alison Young had a lobotomy-mother. Whenever her mother visited her she spent the rest of the day walking around like a narcoleptic zombie.

Ben had seen it before. He’d come round one Sunday a couple of months ago and found her like this, in bed with what seemed like a huge hangover because of her mother visiting. It looked at first as though she had a drunk-mother, but it wasn’t that. Her mother made her feel like a great lump of shit.

He made his way into the kitchen to make coffee and found, just like last time, that the place had been totally rearranged.

‘Where have the cups gone?’ he asked.

‘Wherever that fat bitch put them,’ said Ali. So it was. The cups were where the tins had been, the tins were where the bowls had been, the bowls – who knew where the bowls were?

‘She pretends she does it by accident,’ murmured Ali, sipping her coffee a little later. ‘She empties everything out so she can clean in the cupboards and then puts them back somewhere else
better
.’ She leaked tears and leaned across for a tissue.

Ben already knew a whole host of stories about Mrs Young. How she’d convinced Ali to have a fourteenth birthday party, swore she’d keep out of the way and then stayed anyway and forced everyone to play party games.

‘Blind Man’s Bluff. Postman’s Knock! Imagine being forced to play Postman’s Knock when you’re fourteen by your mother. Being locked in the cupboard like that …’ raged Ali.

How, when Ali had her first period, her mother had taken her up to the bathroom to sort her out and then come back down and announced it to the whole family at tea. And for the week after, to anyone who happened to come into the house.

‘“She’s having her first period!” she’d say, and she’d point at my crotch. I swear it. And, of course, people would look down there for a second, just following her finger. I felt like they could see it!’ wailed Ali.

This time, Mrs Young had travelled down to surprise her daughter on her birthday. Ali had had a few friends round. They’d gone out for drinks and then come back for more of the same.

Mrs Young marched in unannounced – Ali had no idea she’d got keys cut for herself. She didn’t look too happy, according to Ali, to find other people there, but she made the best of it by serving drinks and snacks. She didn’t do small talk. She left the ‘young people’ to it and went into the kitchen to begin her ritualistic clean. After she’d emptied all the cupboards onto the floor and made the kitchen impassable, she changed her mind and came out to begin on the living room, starting quietly by vacuuming in the corners but gradually moving into the middle until she’d achieved her objective, and people made their excuses and left.

Ali had asked her if that was what she wanted and they’d had a huge, blazing row that she could bear for about five minutes before bursting into tears and rushing hysterically to her bedroom in tears while her mother mercilessly cleaned and shouted at her over the vacuum. It was so humiliating. Why couldn’t she
stop
her? Why did it
get
to her so much? Wasn’t she pathetic? Why did it have to happen to her?

Ben listened in sympathetic amazement. Part of him was appalled, part of him was amused. Ali seemed a pretty effective sort of person – why so helpless with her own mother? It seemed all wrong. After she’d drunk her coffee, she flung herself sideways in the bed, pulled the blankets up and buried her face on the pillow. Ben stood by the edge of the bed feeling awkward.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’ll be OK.’ But she didn’t look OK.

‘Are you going back to sleep?’ he asked hopefully.

She glanced up at him. ‘You can give me a cuddle if you like.’

Ben hesitated a moment. He wanted to say he had things to do, but she knew he hadn’t, so he slipped off his shoes and made to get into the bed.

‘Not like that, I want some skin,’ she complained. He pulled off his jeans and shirt and slid in next to her. She pushed her back up against him, and he put his arms round her and squeezed.

‘Hmm,’ she said. He wondered if he was supposed to make love to her. Although he’d felt exhausted on the way round and had wanted to get back to bed, he felt wide awake now. He felt like getting up and rushing busily around. In a minute she turned round and nestled her head on his shoulder. ‘Mmm,’ she said again, and closed her eyes with a sigh. As he lay watching her he noticed for the first time two very straight, white scars running neatly from one side of each of her wrists to the other. Then he fell asleep.

The girl Dino knew as Siobhan was really called Zoë by doting parents whom she despised. When she woke up the night after the party in bed with Dino, she smiled with pleasure at the thought that she’d spent the night with a boy who thought she was someone else. Over breakfast, without thinking or caring why, she’d started to tell him more lies just to amuse herself.

Her dad was a vet who specialised in reptiles. She was seventeen years old, the youngest of five. An accident, her parents didn’t want her. They hated and controlled her in equal measures. If they knew she was having sex they’d go mad. They’d probably kill the boy. It would be better for Dino never to call her at home.

Dino believed everything.

In fact, Zoë was only fourteen but she had for many years had an irresistible appetite for trouble. She loved it, lived it, was it. The imaginary father she conjured up for Dino wrestled with alligators with toothache and giant pythons with sore backs, trying to get them to take their medication. The real one supervised a production line in a yoghurt factory. He kept his hands so clean, the skin cracked through over-washing. He’d have run a mile at the sight of anything in scales. She thought of reptiles, partly because her father was one, but also because he’d gone ballistic only that weekend when she’d tried to sneak out of the house dressed only in a tank top and pair of skin-tight snakeskin pants.