Doing It (4 page)

You lucky bastard, he thought to himself. You lucky, lucky bastard.

Going out with Jackie is the best thing that ever happened to me. The best. I knew it was going to happen. It felt right. By the time she said yes I felt like I’d been waiting for ever.

‘It might be right for you but it certainly isn’t right for me,’ she said once before she realised, and there were her and her mates laughing away. But it can’t be like that, can it? With those sorts of feelings, it can’t be right for one person and not for the other. That would be wrong.

The main thing about Jackie is, she’s gorgeous. People look at her all the time. When I’m walking along and she’s holding onto my arm, she makes me feel like I’m on a red carpet in front of the world. As long as I can remember, she was always out there, growing up ahead of me. She was always the one everyone fancied, even at Primary School. And now here I am, watching her long fingers pop open the top button on her jeans for me while I stroke her tits in the rhododendron bushes down Crab Lane on the way home, and it makes me feel so fucking good.

‘Not here, don’t be daft,’ she says in a little while, but both of us are panting like steam engines by then. Wow! I mean! I stood back and watched as she did up her zip and pushed the button back into place.

‘You should wear a skirt,’ I said. It felt like my blood had turned into boiling hot soup. That’s what she does to me. I felt like a cow in the slaughterhouse with a bolt going through its head.

‘More accessible,’ she said.

I can be a bit of an arse sometimes. I admit it. I’m my own worst enemy. I couldn’t help it. I stood there watching her zipping up, I was almost mad with lust and I was thinking how she never wore a skirt or a dress for me. I was thinking, This is how it’s gonna go. We’ll go home to my place, I’ll strip her to the waist, we’ll get our hands down each other’s pants and spend about an hour writhing around like a pair of earthworms … and that’s it. That’s as far as it was going to go. Her jeans would not go below her hips.

You know? It’s been a month now, a whole month and I’m still a virgin. I mean, it’s practically like I was saving myself for her, because there’s loads of other girls I could have had. You ask anyone, there’s loads of girls would love to go out with me, they’d shag me tomorrow if I just went up and asked. It’s like that. You get my point? And she won’t. So what’s that all about?

You don’t know Jackie. She’s as stubborn as a brick in a wall. She smiled at me and walked out of the bushes and onto the road, and I knew I should have kept my mouth shut but I just started before I even had time to think about it.

‘I’ve got some contraceptives,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Jackie. Then she added under her breath, ‘Not this again.’

‘But you want to, why not?’ I asked. I slid my hand down her arse and tickled her crack.

‘Get off me! Not here.’ She wriggled away. ‘I’m not a bloody dog or something.’

‘What’s up with you? You didn’t mind a minute ago.’

‘That was in there.’

‘You’d sleep with me if you loved me.’

‘Dino, stop it!’

‘It’s true.’

‘What’s love got to do with it? You don’t love me.’

‘I
do
love you,’ I said.

‘Dino!’

‘I do!’

‘You don’t know what love is.’

That’s how she goes on at me. Like I’m some sort of kid. As if I’m ten years old and she’s about twenty-something.

‘But don’t you love me, then?’ I said.

She looked at me closely. ‘I like you very much.’

‘Is that all? Like? Just
like
?’

‘Anyway, even if I did love you, I wouldn’t sleep with you.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘I want to know. I’m interested,’ I whined. I could hear myself whining, but I still couldn’t stop myself. ‘I just want to know. I mean, is it me? Is there something about me you don’t like? Is there something wrong with me?’

‘It just doesn’t feel right.’

‘It felt pretty good with Simon.’

‘Leave it!’

‘So what was so great about Simon? Why aren’t you going out with him? What’s the difference between him and me?’

‘Well, he was eight years older than you for a start.’

‘Oh, right. I’m too young, am I? Not mature enough for you?’ I was really pissed off but I knew I shouldn’t be going on like that, I was really blowing my chances. I just can’t help it sometimes. ‘I get it. I’m stupid. I’m just a kid. You’re all so grown up and I’m not!’

‘You’re behaving like a kid,’ said Jackie coldly.

‘I don’t behave like a kid – you do!’ I yelled.

And that was it. She was off, pulling her coat around her and storming off down the road. I thought, Shit! Why do I do this? I mean, I don’t mind having a row. I don’t mind throwing tantrums and sulking – it was pretty bloody unreasonable of her not to sleep with me, after all. But why did I have to do it
then
?

I ran after her, shouting, ‘Sorry – please don’t go, don’t go!’

But it was too late. She pulled her arm away from me and shouted, ‘Just fuck off!’

I froze. I was furious. Shouting at me like that. Right in the middle of the street! I could see people looking.

Listen – no one tells me to fuck off.

‘Fuck you too!’ I yelled. I stood on the pavement watching her, furious with her and furious with myself too. I mean, all right, she won’t shag but she’ll do almost anything else. Almost anything else isn’t shagging, but it isn’t bad and now I wasn’t even getting that. I’m such a dick! I just can’t help it. She drives me mad. I just want – you know. I just want to do it with her so much.

As he walked sadly back home alone, Dino distracted himself by imagining that a mighty power-beam grew out of each of his temples, destroying everything they touched. All that lay behind his step was crushed by his passing. Trees, houses, lampposts, even small hills were all reduced to trash or broken neatly off where the beam struck them. If he stood on tiptoe, he could peer over the devastation. The world below his nose was a tangled mass of rubble and destruction.

He’d been doing this as he walked along ever since he was about six. It was very childish, but it passed the time and since no one in the world knew about it, who cared?

Slowly, he turned in a circle and cut a kilometre-wide circle in the surrounding houses. Rising up on tiptoes, he peered over the allotment fence tangled with ivy, over the cabbages and beans and the brown earth on this blue afternoon to where his own house stood, miraculously preserved amid the devastation. The house stared back out of the window on the second floor and said, ‘You think it’s gonna be fun? Do ya? Do ya?’

As he approached the front door Dino failed to notice the strange car, which had in any case been parked up the road as a precaution. He walked straight up to the door and just as he was about to put the key in the lock, he looked sideways and caught a beautiful view of his mum in a clinch with a man through the bay window. They were kissing passionately. Her blouse was open. She was wearing a red bra which hung loosely off her breasts. The man was slowly hitching her skirt up from behind.

‘More accessible,’ whispered Dino to himself.

He watched in slow motion as the skirt hitched up right above her bum and the man’s hand began to ease its way down the back of her tights. Then, before they turned their heads and saw him he fell on the spot to his knees, bruising them painfully on the hard plastic shoe scraper. He suppressed a howl of agony into a choked grunt. He glanced behind him to make sure no one was watching from the street. Right in front of the window! How could they? The neighbours! But in fact they were behind the wall; it was only from his position by the front door that they could be seen. As he crouched, Dino realised that he hadn’t looked at the man’s face at all. All he had noticed was his mum’s mouth moving hungrily on the strange lips. There had been a moustache, he felt. Somehow, the fact that his mum had been getting another man’s facial hair in her mouth made it even worse.

Dino scuttled rapidly backwards so he could get out of sight, stood back up and walked boldly up to the door again, this time staring straight ahead as he noisily put his key in the hole and opened it up. He ignored the alarmed scurrying sounds from the front room and walked through to the kitchen to get a drink. He flung his bag on the floor with a thud.

‘Who’s that?’ called his mother in a surprised voice from the front room.

‘Mum?’ said Dino, also in a surprised voice. ‘It’s me.’

‘What are you doing home?’ she asked. Her voice sounded heavy. Dino had a vision of her standing there doing her bra up.

‘History was cancelled. What are you doing home?’

‘English was cancelled,’ said his mum, and laughed. Her laugh sounded like china dropping to the floor. Dino walked through and opened the front-room door. His mum was standing there on one side of the coffee table and on the other was Dave Short, a teacher at his mum’s college. He was smoothing down – or perhaps wiping – his moustache. Dave taught technology, Dino remembered.

‘Was technology cancelled too?’ he asked. To his surprise, Dave Short blushed as pink as a boy. Dino blushed back.

Dino spent a lot of time that evening in his room trying to think of nice things like Jackie or football or a good film, but all his mind would show him was his mum sucking Dave Short’s moustache, in vivid, spitty close-up. The image was ghastly beyond belief. What was going to happen? Was his family going to break up? Did his little brother Mat have any idea what was going on? His mother was old, how could anyone want to kiss her? Did he have to tell his father? Did his mother know that he knew, did she suspect – or had he fooled them both completely?

As for Dave Short – I could blackmail the bastard, thought Dino, and at once, he realised that he was on to a good thing. Dave Short was a balding man with a dense, badger-coloured moustache and a fair amount of badly placed fat on his stocky little frame; utterly repulsive, the last sort of man you’d want as a stepfather. So repulsive, in fact, that Dino couldn’t believe that his mum actually wanted to be doing sex things with him at all. Probably
he
was blackmailing
her
! So that was it! Blackmail! The bastard!

His mother needed rescuing.

Then he thought about the way she’d kissed him. Perhaps she did want to be doing sex things with him after all.

That just meant he could get both of them. Why not? The bitch was trying to ruin his life. Just because she was his mother …

But first that bastard Short. He sat down at his desk and began to compose a blackmail note. He got through a couple of drafts before he was called down to tea.

Knives and forks rattled on the plates, but Dino was miles away, thinking about money. Soon he’d be rich. He’d be able to get a car, at least. Maybe life would be
better
because his mum was having an affair, not worse.

As the word ‘affair’ rebounded in his head he looked guiltily up. No one seemed to notice he was thinking the unthinkable. For a moment, he became acutely aware of his ability to think things with no one knowing what he was doing. Deliberately, he began to conjure up the filthiest thoughts he could manage about Jackie – and they really were pretty filthy. No one seemed to notice. It was bizarre that you could sit there innocently eating mash next to your little bruv while your head was immersed in the most depraved filth man could dream up. It was disturbing but fun, until his mind began, quite against his will, to imagine the same filthy thoughts about his mother.

Bad mistake. He felt ill with anxiety and disgust. At that very moment, Dave Short might be eating his dinner with his family and thinking the exact same kinds of things about his mum – and he’d be
enjoying
it! Even worse, maybe his mother was thinking filthy thoughts about Dave Short. Sitting there, all alone in the middle of his family, Dino blushed a bright, bright red.

‘What’s up with you, wet your pants?’ asked Mat. Mat was only nine. Dino sneered at him and looked away.

He began thinking about all the money he was going to earn again, when his dad’s voice interrupted him.

‘… going away for the weekend.’

‘What?’

‘Me and your mum are going away for the weekend.’

‘Where?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

‘What for?’ asked Dino.

His dad laughed. ‘What do you mean, what for? To go away for the weekend, that’s what for.’

‘You’re so dumb, Dodo,’ sneered Mat.

‘Mat,’ said his mother mildly. ‘We haven’t been away together on our own for ages,’ she explained. Dino stared at her. She smiled fondly at his dad. She looked like a woman with no secrets at all.

‘Mat’s going to stay with Gran …’

‘No!’ wailed Mat.

‘You haven’t been for ages. It’ll be OK, she’ll get some vids out.’

‘It’s boring!’

‘So you’ll be on your own, Dino. Do you reckon you can manage it? You
must
be old enough to be responsible now.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Dino. ‘Do I look like a baby? You go. Have a nice time.’ He didn’t mean it but it came out all sarcastic.

‘What’s that for?’ his dad asked him.

‘Nothing. Everything’s fine, isn’t it?’ Dino glanced at his mum who smiled and – was it his imagination? – avoided his eye. Then, as if to prove him wrong, she turned and looked at him so directly that Dino almost started to blush again. But he didn’t, he just smiled straight back. He thought, I can be as innocent as you can. It went on for too long, though, and they both looked away suddenly in confusion.

I could blackmail you, he thought, you bitch.

After dinner, as he was wiping the pots, Dino found himself staring down at his mother’s back as she bent to the dishes in the dishwasher. He could see her bra strap through her blouse. It wasn’t red any more, it was her usual off-white job. Built for comfort, she used to say. She was quite well stacked upfront.

As he looked down at her, a number of thoughts flashed through Dino’s mind. One was the memory of a story she often told about him, how when he was about five or six he was curious about breast feeding and had apparently asked her if she had any milk in them now.