Doing It (8 page)

‘Just fat feelings, though,’ said Jonathon, who was utterly unable to resist a joke; and then felt awful the way both of them looked at him. His head was whirling. At that moment Jackie and Sue emerged meaningfully out of the crowd and cornered him.

‘Are you serious about Debs?’ asked Sue.

‘What?’

‘Are you serious about her?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t keep saying “What!”’

‘Do you really fancy her?’ asked Jackie severely.

Jonathon was horrified. Part of him refused to give Dino the pleasure of thinking that he didn’t fancy Debs merely because she was fat; part of him was scared of Ben and the girls thinking he was just using her; and part of him genuinely liked Deborah and didn’t want to hurt her. He just didn’t fancy her, but he wasn’t sure he had any right not to.

‘Well? Do you?’

‘You’re being a bit quick, aren’t you?’ said Ben.

‘She’s really fond of you, do you know that? She really likes you,’ said Sue. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are, she’s such a nice person. You’re not just stringing her along, are you?’

‘No, of course I’m not …’

‘Do you fancy her then?’

Jonathon writhed, caught between Dino, Ben and these fearsome young women. ‘Well, yes of course I fancy her, I was kissing her, wasn’t I?’ On the tip of his tongue were the words, ‘But that doesn’t mean …’ But somehow they couldn’t emerge.

‘Good.’

‘You’ve done it now,’ said Dino after they’d left. ‘They’ve probably gone to tell her that you want to go out with her.’

‘I didn’t know you felt like that,’ said Ben.

‘Neither did I,’ said Jon. He pushed his way through the crowd to escape. He was definitely not in control of the situation.

‘So you like fat girls too, then,’ Dino told Ben, leering at him. Ben smiled blandly and slipped away to the back door.

The fact was, Ben was jealous. Not of Deborah herself, although he liked her. He was jealous of the sort of relationship she and Jon could have together. They got on well together. He thought how comfortable they’d looked on the stairs. He wished them well.

Bollocks, he thought to himself, as he stuck his head out into the garden and gulped down the cool air. All these lovely girls. All those lucky boys getting off with them, snogging with them, sleeping with them, feeling them up – and he couldn’t do it. As she’d said, Ali would find out somehow and give him hell. Ben was a popular and good-looking boy, there were any number of attractive girls who would have got into a clinch with him, but he didn’t dare. There wasn’t anyone he could talk to. Stupid though it was, for someone who was getting quality sex from an expert, he was feeling left out.

Oh well, he thought. One thing anyway, at least the old harpy can’t come here. The thought made him shudder.

Apart from having to watch one of his friends kiss a fat girl, Dino had ordeals yet to come: he spotted Jackie snogging Fasil in the kitchen. Suddenly, all the feel-good drained away out of the hole in his bottom. Out of order, or what?

Dino didn’t mess about; he interrupted.

Fasil did the right thing. He grinned meekly, abandoned all hopes of single number status for the rest of his life and scuttled off. But Jackie turned round and eyed him aggressively.

‘My girlfriend. My party,’ said Dino. ‘You snog me.’

‘I snog anyone I want.’

The thing that really pissed Dino off wasn’t just that they’d snogged. It was that they’d snogged in public. There was his girlfriend snogging one of his friends in full view of everyone. It was all cut and dried. Except …

‘You were snogging Grace, you two-faced bastard,’ Jackie snarled. It was true. Dino blushed. He’d been a twat, but that just made him angrier than ever. The one thing he really couldn’t bear was to feel like a twat.

He bent down and hissed in her ear, ‘Shut up, will you? Everyone’s going to think I’m a right twat.’

‘Is that all you’re worried about?
Looking
like a twat? You
are
a twat! Twat!’ she bellowed, and off she shoved, leaving Dino standing there feeling more twat-like than he had ever done before.

Dino was furious. ‘Slut,’ he called after her. ‘Slapper,’ loud enough for everyone to hear.

She turned round all little girlie and squeaked in a stupid voice, ‘Oh, Dino, I was only practising so I could kiss you better later on. Everyone knows you kiss soooooooooo goooooooood.’ And she said this in such a way that indicated – can you believe this? – that Dino was a crap kisser. Then she flounced off.

He stood there like a bare arse. He could feel his cheeks flushing redder and redder. Everyone had heard the whole exchange. He began, ‘Don’t give me that bollocks, everyone knows I kiss like a …’ And then he had to stop because now he was putting his foot in it very badly indeed. Boasting about how well you kiss! God, that was so childish.

Having no idea what else to do, he just turned round and walked out. Right out. Out of the room, out of the hall, out of the house. He was blind with rage and humiliation. Let them have fun! Let them enjoy themselves, the whole lot of them. He didn’t want anything to do with any of them.

Dino got halfway home before he remembered that he’d been at home in the first place. There was nowhere else to go. For a moment he thought about going back to the party and throwing everyone out, but even as he thought it, he realised it was impossible. That would not be a very cool thing to do.

He walked back. From outside it sounded as if the party was going like a bomb. He lurked, wondering what to do. It was a while before he realised the way out. Thank God! He’d been in the wrong! All he had to do was admit it. Admitting you were in the wrong was a cool thing to do. It made you more human, somehow. He’d been snogging people, so had Jacks. So what was the problem? Of course, he’d much rather not have stormed out, or lost his cool; and he’d
very
much rather Jackie had never snogged with Fas. But what was done was done.

He hung around a bit longer, plucking up courage. He practised laughing at himself. Then he took the plunge and went to ring the doorbell. It really was pretty funny, after all.

‘I went home,’ Dino told Stu, and started laughing and laughing. ‘Outta my head!’ he howled. Stu grinned back, and Dino knew he was going to get away with it. Once he’d recovered laughing at how out of his head he’d been, he went to look for Jackie and apologised. She forgave him at once.

‘OK?’ he said and she said,

‘OK.’

Dino leaned in and whispered, ‘Sorry.’

‘Yeah, so am I.’

‘No more snogging other people, eh?’

‘No more snogging other people.’

Dino thought, I’m still in. ‘I’m still in? Later?’ he said.

‘Mmmmm … OK. If you’re good.’

But it had been a close thing. He found Fasil and – this was really cool – had a chat with him about nothing much, just to show no hard feelings. But warned him off as well.

‘I reckon I’m in with Jackie after,’ he said.

‘Mmm,’ said Fasil.

Dino leaned up right close to his face and breathed, ‘Virgin hole,’ right in his face. Fasil moved his head back and stared at Dino with a horrified expression. Dino winked and leered.

The party went from quiet to friendly, to busy, to loud, to frantic. Dino had a few smokes and a couple more Ice Head beers and gradually a holy, rosy glow started to hover around him. It was a good party. He was a saint, really. All these people having such a good time, just because of him. His Holiness Pope Dino the First, he felt like, as he went from group to group, bestowing his benedictions upon them. The hardcore were like a bunch of apes by comparison, they were all jiggering about and shouting. They had indulged in something a bit stronger than a few spliffs. Dino himself declined. He didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with his session with Jackie later on. That, after all, was the main event of the evening. He didn’t want his vital parts shrivelled up like a frightened slug. He wanted big, stiff parts for that night’s action.

People were rushing up and down the stairs shrieking. People were yelling in the kitchen and having fights over the limited quantities of alcohol. Couples had moved into the bedrooms, or, if the bedrooms were full, into the garden and under blankets in the downstairs room. A row of them were snogging up the stairs.

‘What’s this, the queue for the bedrooms?’ bellowed Jonathon up at them. Standing in a group three metres and about fifty people away, Deborah looked at him and laughed far too loud. Jonathon pretended he hadn’t noticed. A crowd in the sitting room discovered that if they all danced up and down hard enough they could make the piano next to the door advance on them. It looked threatening and stupid at the same time, and someone christened it Dino’s Dad, because it looked like it was coming to chuck them all out.

A girl called Sam made love in Dino’s parents’ bed with a boy called Robby, who was sick on the sheets next to her as soon as he’d finished. They covered it up with the duvet and went home. Next door in the boxroom a kid called Simon Tiptree pretended to pass out on top of a pile of coats. When he was left alone, he began systematically to go through all the pockets and bags, looking for money and valuables. At about the same time downstairs in the kitchen, a thin girl in a tiny pink dress was opening the fridge door. She stared rapturously inside. Treasure! Cheese, pork pie, cold cooked sausages! Paradise. Cream cake! What comes next on the ladder up after cold sausage paradise? Cream cake paradise, of course. Without even pausing to moan in pleasure, she reached in and seized an oozing triangle of pleasure, and bit in.

At that moment Jonathon entered the kitchen, trying to duck out of sight of Deborah. It was getting severe. So what if he’d snogged her? Sod it, why couldn’t he have a snog just because she was a tubber? Now she was following him. It was awful. And so public! Whenever he lifted his head, there she was, looking at him, walking towards him, eyeing him sideways, craning her neck in between people to try and spot him. Jonathon was being hunted. By good fortune he turned up as the slight girl was opening the fridge door, just in time to duck behind it out of Deborah’s sight. The thought, ‘Never hide from a fat girl in the fridge’, crossed his mind, but there was nowhere else to go. He lowered his head as if to peer inside.

‘Yum,’ he said to the girl standing next to him. She waved a wedge of cream cake at him.

‘No’ bad,’ said the girl thickly. The little pink dress was so short she showed her knickers every time she bent over or lifted her arms; a pussy pelmet, as his dad would have called it. It occurred to Jonathon that it would be a good thing if Deborah saw him in close-up with a pretty girl like this. She might get the message.

‘I’m Jonathon,’ he told her, moving in, something he’d never have dared to do unless he had another reason other than to get close.

‘Zoë,’ she said thickly. She waved her cake into the fridge, generously inviting Jonathon to help himself. Jonathon reached in and took out one of the cold cooked sausages lying on a plate inside. He held it between his fingers, and on a sudden impulse – ‘May I?’ – reached across and dipped the tip of the sausage into the cream of the girl’s cake, wiping it along so it had a big dollop on the end. As he did it he had a nasty feeling he might regret it. He held the sausage up in his fingers and waited.

‘You disgusting thing,’ said Zoë, but even as she spoke she burst into laughter, snorting around her cake. Jonathon bobbed the sausage up and down like a little finger puppet.

‘Mr Porky is wearing a white hat today,’ he began. He was about to launch into a puppet show, but the girl laughed in surprise right through her mouthful of cream cake and sprayed all over the inside of the fridge. Everything was covered.

‘Jesus, sick in the fridge,’ said Jonathon. The girl was delighted with him, it was great. But at that inopportune moment, Fasil turned up.

‘What is this? What are you doing?’ he asked them. He looked in amazement at the sausage and then angrily at the girl’s handful of cake. Then he saw what looked like sick sprayed all over the inside of the fridge. Despite being caught snogging Dino’s girlfriend, Fasil was a man of principles.

‘That’s his fridge! That’s his food. You can’t do that!’

‘Who’s this?’ asked the girl. ‘Someone’s dad?’

‘What are you doing?’ Fasil asked Jonathon.

Jonathon smiled weakly. ‘It’s just a sausage …’

‘Look at that, she’s got half his cream cake there,’ complained Fasil. ‘She’s spat it all over the fridge and you’re encouraging her.’

‘Is this how you
party
?’ the girl asked. ‘Is this how you have
fun
?’ Fasil was pulling the fridge door shut on them. Revealed to the kitchen, Jonathon looked round. Sure enough, Deborah was there, right there. Two steps and she was on him.

‘Oooh,’ she said. ‘Sausage and cream. My favourite.’ She reached forward, took the sausage off Jon and licked the cream off the end of it.

‘I see,’ said Jonathon.

Taking advantage of the distraction, the girl in the pink dress dodged out of sight, past Fasil, who was staring at Deborah and her sausage as if he’d just seen a cat lay an egg, and out into the hall, where she leaned against a wall and finished off the cream cake greedily.

Zoë had started out the night before in a bar called Kas the Wanderer, drinking Red Bull and vodka with a group of friends. She’d done a load of e at another party, stayed up all day watching TV at a friend’s house before going to Dino’s. One of her friends was going out with one of Jackie’s, which was how they’d found out about it. The others had had enough fairly early on and gone home, but Zoë had nowhere better to go. She hung around in the hope of doing a bit of looting. She’d had nothing to eat all day and she was starving hungry and exhausted.

That guy with the sausage had been nice. She liked funny boys.

When she’d finished she picked up a drink someone had left on a windowsill and took a swig. Snakebite – cider and lager. She whacked down the glassful, pulled a face. She put a hand behind her to steady herself against the sill. Her head was swimming. She decided to have a look upstairs, see if she couldn’t find a place to get her head down right now. The stairway was solid. The first room she found was the boxroom, where Simon Tiptree had to quickly pretend he’d passed out on his back on a pile of coats. Zoë watched him closely, staring at him for a full minute, listening to his breath, until she was sure he was asleep. She went up and prodded him with her foot. He didn’t stir.