Doing It (7 page)

Stand up with you,

Lie down with you,

All over yoou-hooooo-hoooo.

Kirry-kirry oooooooo.

The trouble was, when
were
they going to arrive? Everything was set by five o’clock in the afternoon. Jackie had come round again in the morning to help get things ready, then disappeared for the afternoon to get her homework done and get ready. Ben turned up about lunch time, Jonathon at about three. They drank Coke and watched Dino check on his mobile to make sure everyone knew exactly what to do that evening: be there. Jonathon started nagging to open the beers and get stuck in.

‘There’s not enough as it is,’ said Dino. ‘We don’t want to get too pissed before the party’s even begun.’

‘Don’t we?’ said Jonathon, who seemed genuinely surprised.

Ben wagged his finger at him. ‘What about the girlies, Jon? We don’t want to be out of action for them.’

Jonathon, uncomfortable with a subject he felt unequal to, nodded and shrugged and tried to look cool.

Fasil turned up at six to drop off his famous party tapes, and then incurred Dino’s ire by clearing off to get on with his training and homework.

‘You can’t, I’m having a party,’ explained Dino, but Fasil was unmoved.

‘There’s no such thing as a party at six o’clock in the evening,’ he said. The door closed behind him, and the long wait began again.

‘I’m scared,’ admitted Dino an hour or so later, just after Jackie arrived. ‘In fact,’ he added about an hour after that, ‘I’m terrified.’

‘Calm down,’ advised Ben. ‘It’s going to be a great party.’

‘I’m having a good time already,’ said Jonathon.

The rest of the gang from school arrived shortly afterwards, but Dino cheered up only briefly. The main bulk were surely going to turn up any second now; the party needed to get hot. He kept running in and out of the front room putting the Hand Dogs on in case the first guests turned up, but by the time it’d played about ten times everyone was begging him to take it off.

Dino was laughing and loafing about, but inside he felt sick. What if no one came? He’d have emptied the house for a handful of mates and they’d all feel sorry for him. At nine Fasil turned up and began DJ-ing. The party had been started so many times that Dino was getting attacks of
déjà vu
and had to go into the garden to calm down with Jacks.

They wandered up past the lawn towards the patch of garden where his father grew vegetables. The music sounded tinny at this distance, nothing to do with him, almost. They had a snog. Jackie stopped him mussing her hair and made promises for later on. After the music. After the dancing. After the drink and the smoke and the sweat. After the noise, there would be love. Dino began to feel better.

‘Perhaps it’d be better to just wait out here until it gets going,’ suggested Jackie, but Dino was anxious to watch the agony of his party’s birth pangs.

By ten, he was in despair. He was in the kitchen talking to Jackie and Sue and pretending to be cool when two things happened. The music went off. There was a long, loud silence in which the doorbell rang.

Dino ran excitedly down the hall, looked out of the window and saw about six thousand people clutching bottles, standing there like snowmen outside an eerily silent door.

‘Wait! Wait!’ he hissed. ‘Don’t let them in …’ He burst into the front room. The hardcore were all in there dancing like maniacs to no music.

‘What’s this, you freaks?’ he screamed. ‘What are you
on
?’

‘Are you deaf?’ sneered Snoops. Everyone started to make out that the CD player was on full blast and that Dino was the only one who couldn’t hear it, yelling things at one another and pretending they could hardly make it out. And – this shows what a state Dino was in – for a second or two he was ready to believe them.

‘Huh?’ he said. ‘Huh?’ and he was staring at the player trying to work out how come he could hear them and not it. They all hooted at him like baboons and began pogoing to no noise again. Dino blushed his deepest, most crimson red. Behind him, someone opened the door and a long queue of people came in. Two or three of them stood and stared in amazement at the collection of freaks head-banging to the silence. Outside in the corridor, Dino could hear the others, their voices booming and squeaking in an embarrassed way in the silent house.

One look at the happy little faces of his friends proved anything he wanted to know. They were already off their heads. Useless! He’d issued instructions not to Not to NOT TO before the thing was going, but here they were, peaking like Linford Christie already.

‘Can’t anyone here even think?’ he groaned. Then Fasil walked in, strutting about like he was the only one with a clue in the world and pressed the button. A deafening soup of thick, chunky noise hollered out. At last! Dino poked his head out down the corridor. Everyone was standing still, heads turned to the opened door that was suddenly bellowing music at them.

‘Drink, drink, drink!’ he instructed them. If he got them drunk or stoned or something no one would even know whether they were having a good time or not. He herded them along to the kitchen and as soon as he was wedged into the corridor, someone turned the music up. It was so loud he couldn’t talk to his guests even a hallway and a room away. The bastards! His own mates! They’d reached two o’clock in the morning while everyone else was still at 5 p.m. Dino was furious. The crowd was so thick in the hallway he couldn’t even get back to the dance room without a fight. It was awful. Hang your coats there, no, put them in the boxroom, drinks, smoke in the garden please. He was turning into someone’s mother, for God’s sake! People were milling about in little groups not knowing what to do, it was pathetic. He felt like screaming at them, What’s wrong with you, don’t you know how to have a good time? Do you need
lessons
?

Suddenly he’d had enough. He fled the kitchen – leave the bastards to it – and made a dive for his friends in the dance room. He hid in the thick wall of music, drank a bottle of Ice Head quick, had a toke on a spliff and tried to relax. It didn’t work, so he rushed across the room, seized hold of Jackie and gave her a good snogging in a corner for ten minutes.

It was perfect. It silenced conversation utterly. No one likes to interrupt a good, hard snog. By the time he’d done, someone tapped him on the shoulder, he was feeling cool already. Jackie hung in his arms, her face turned up, ready for more – ready for anything by the looks of her. Dino answered the question about coats, and gave it to her again.

‘Oh,
Dino
!’ She pushed herself right up against him and stroked his face and whispered right in his ear, ‘That was some kiss. Oo-oo-oo …’ she panted, which made Dino feel very good indeed. The next time they came up for air again Dino was ready for a look around. It was getting there. The music was down so you could hear people if you screamed, the dance floor was moving, people were talking.

He’d done it. He’d survived by snogging with a good-looking girl in the corner of the dance floor. Cool or what? And now it was safe to go and mingle. Jackie had other ideas. She was thinking, Right, right. She could see Sue scowling and trying not to look at her over people’s heads, but she’d made up her mind. Tonight was the night. She just had to shag Dino. She was going to do it right now. She’d take him upstairs and ride him like a …

‘Come on,’ she said, pulling him into her. But Dino was already turning away.

‘Just a bit …’

‘Dino! Where are you going?’

‘Got to go see, Jacks. Won’t be long.’

‘Dino!’

But it was too late. Dino was out of the door and off to socialise. He had no idea how close he’d just got. Furious, Jackie looked over at Sue, who was talking loudly in a corner and refused to meet her eye.

Dino did the rounds, shaking hands, five high, five low, great do! How are you? Things were looking good.

‘Welcome to the Guesthouse Dinoroso,’ he whispered to himself, and imagined that he was walking on air and that everyone was looking at him shyly, out of the corners of their eyes. He elevated his power-beams to a foot above everyone’s head so they had nothing to worry about. Fasil was doing great with the music – he didn’t have to worry about that. He didn’t have to worry about anything.

What did you expect? Yeah – Dino did a great party. He walked up the hall and around the kitchen. He snogged Grace by the back door – it was a party, it was what people did – and coolly resisted her suggestion to go for a walk. Back inside, as he passed down the hall, he met with Ben in the hall, staring at something on the stairway. As Dino came up to him he saw what it was, an amazing sight – Jonathon enjoying a feeding frenzy with Deborah Sanderson on the stairs.

Jonathon had no idea how it had happened. They’d been talking at the bottom of the stairs and it was bit embarrassing because every time someone went up or down they had to squeeze past and Deborah had to push right up against him. That was a bit obvious, Deborah being a bit of a plumper. Jonathon was embarrassed – partly for her, but mainly because he didn’t want to be seen squashed up against her like that. He got teased enough about his friendship with her without that.

The kiss had come out of nowhere – he couldn’t even remember how it started. He had wondered so often how you actually knew when it was right to kiss a girl, that even as he was doing it, he was trying to work out what had happened so he could use it next time with someone he really fancied. Then, once it had started, it just went on. Deborah sighed, closed her eyes, pulled him almost on top of her and let him sink into her. Immediately, he was overtaken with a rage of hormones. Deborah felt his erection against her stomach and smiled up at him. She grabbed hold of his bum and moved him gently from side to side so that it rocked against her, twitching like Frankenstein’s monster in an electric storm. He let his hands creep round her to cuddle a breast. They half fell, half walked a couple of steps up the stairs and collapsed. Jonathon slid his hand under her top and stroked her bra.

Not having known how it started, he had no idea how to stop it, either, even though he was embarrassed to be snogging a fat girl on the stairs where everyone could not only see but had to squeeze past in order to get up and down. Under her loose clothes he felt her all over – every bit that he could get to, anyway. Only when he began to ferret under her knickers did she open her eyes and whisper, ‘Not here.’ She smiled a languid, warm smile at him and her eyes drifted up to the landing. Terrified, Jonathon closed his eyes and kissed her again, more deeply than ever. He didn’t want to be doing this. Or did he? Traitorously, his penis had turned to super-hard concrete in his jeans. Deborah was surreptitiously rubbing it with the back of her hand and he felt so good, he thought he could happily die.

‘But I don’t fancy her!’ Jonathon tried unconsciously to explain, but Mr Knobby Knobster grinned his woozy little hard man’s smile and said, ‘Yeah? But I do.’

It seemed to go on for hours. He was curled up almost on top of her and they were taking big, long, syrupy slurps of each other’s face. A steady stream of people were squeezing past on their way up and down the stairs. In the course of half an hour or so, everyone there would have seen what he was up to, and who it was with. He was feeling more and more uncomfortable, but he had no idea how to extricate himself.

‘Jonathon. I see you’re having a good party.’

He opened his eyes and saw Dino and Ben standing at the bottom of the stairs watching him. Dino was smiling like a flint. Ben was staring at Deborah, fascinated by this sudden glimpse of the woman sunk in a sexual trance. Deborah’s face hung beneath him, her eyes closed, her lips wet, half open, relaxed, hungry. She opened her eyes and looked sideways at Ben. Ben smiled, made a ‘Hi,’ face, but she just smiled slightly at him before closing her eyes and held her face back under Jonathon’s to be kissed. Lowering his, he began to feed. When he peeked out again a moment later, they were gone.

Jonathon came to a sudden decision.

‘I need a wee,’ he said, and immediately panicked at the thought that she might want to come with him up the stairs. ‘Out in the garden, the queue’s too long,’ he finished quickly. He leaped off her; the image came into his mind of a small raptor leaping off the carcass of a dead sauropod. Wincing, he jumped down the stairs and ran out into the kitchen.

Behind him, Deborah got up and rearranged her clothes. She fancied Jonathon something rotten but never thought she stood a chance. They had so much in common. She and Jon spent ages happily chatting together at school but they’d never seen each other out of it. She’d dreamed that something might happen at the party, but never thought it would. The way he’d leaped on her! She’d actually gasped with surprise. It might have been just a party snog, but he’d been so enthusiastic – it had to mean something. No one had ever told her that a stiff knob means a stiff knob and no more.

‘It was just a snog,’ Jonathon told Dino in the kitchen a little later.

Dino pulled a face. ‘I don’t know how you could do it, that’s just gross,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Gross.’

‘What’s gross about it?’

‘She’s fat.’

‘She’s not that fat,’ he said, and Dino replied,

‘Fat enough.’

Jonathon tried to be dismissive. ‘A snog’s a snog, so what?’ he said. He thought of suggesting she had nice tits – something he’d heard people say dismissively about a girl they’d been with they didn’t fancy – but he just couldn’t do that to her.

‘She still has feelings you know,’ said Ben severely. ‘Just because she’s overweight …’

‘Fat,’ said Dino. ‘She’s fat.’

‘She’s plump,’ said Ben. ‘Some people find that very attractive.’

‘People like Jonathon,’ said Dino, and Ben snorted in amusement.

‘Better than Jackie the beanpole,’ said Jonathon.

Dino rolled his eyes. Who did he think he was kidding?

‘She’s a nice person and she’s very fond of you, just don’t hurt her, that’s all,’ said Ben.

‘Fat’s fat. That’s all there is to it,’ pointed out Dino.

‘She has feelings.’