Losing It (10 page)

As I start to dress, I begin to think that this strange episode might indeed be connected with my new and amazingly improved manhood. But questions can come later, there are other pressing matters to consider now, such as whether my pants will stretch to accommodate such a serpentine beast? I consider going commando, but I can see immediately that creating a really good packet to be admired by all depends on the wearing of a pair of pants. It’s all a matter of support. I select my lucky black briefs, which have never actually been lucky for me up to now (though all that is surely set to change very soon) and slip them on, coiling my new appendage into them. I pull on my jeans but then I can’t resist doing something I’ve always found amusing in pictures, which is to liberate my cock from my flies, pull my pockets inside out and perch a pair of sunglasses on the top of my penis, so that it now looks like the trunk of a very cool pink elephant, with an afro.

And then I’m walking down the high street, no, strutting is the better word, and meeting every glance with a cocky grin that says yes, get over it, I’ve got a big one. My sense of balance is affected: it feels like I’m wearing a heavily-filled bumbag or a
front bustle. I also find myself in the grip of an exhibitionist urge I’ve never had before. What’s the point of having the goods, I’m thinking, if you can’t put them on display? But it’s hard to see how I can advertise my wares without becoming an all-out flasher and I don’t know where you can get a dirty old raincoat these days – not since Oxfam went upmarket, anyway. I think about all kinds of new possibilities which have suddenly opened up for me: I might become a model for men’s underwear, Homme or someone like that. I rather fancy seeing myself and the bulge adorning a massive billboard. This pleasant thought lasts as long as it takes me to realise it’s not all a matter of bulge. It’s also bronzed skin and flat stomach, a six-pack too, usually. And though I’ve got the packet, I haven’t so much got a six-pack as a party seven.

Or maybe I could become a male stripper. How hard would that be? The equipment is cheap and probably tax-deductible. All I’d need would be a few cans of whipped cream and a capacious thong. But dangling my bits in front of sex-starved hen parties sounds dangerously like throwing a sausage to a pack of hungry dogs. Or I could be a life model in an art lesson; that sounds much classier. I could be Rodin’s Thinker. (No chance of being Michelangelo’s David now!) But having a lot of arty girls who will probably look a bit like Ros staring at my penis, could easily have unexpected results. And do I really want blokes with beards taking a studied interest in my tackle? Maybe I should just find a public place and streak, like they did in the seventies. At Wimbledon, possibly: I could leap the net on Centre Court and be escorted off with a policeman’s helmet covering my bits and appear in all the papers the next day. But there’s the cost of a Centre Court ticket these days and besides, I’d probably end up with Andy Murray’s racket up my arse – he looks a bit handy, for a tennis player.

As I near the Casablanca, I realise that no one has actually given me a second look. There have been no furtive glances at my
prominent package, no eyes popping or tongues lolling, even though I spent over five minutes at Tesco’s big plate-glass windows pretending to read the special offers while waiting for the checkout girls to turn and check me out, which they didn’t. Now I’m hoping the girls who sit in the corner will be at the cafe today, the two dumpy blondes, the cute little one with red hair and big tits and Carole, I think she’s called, who has the dirty laugh and shows her thong whenever she reaches across the table. Perhaps they’ll check me out when I walk in:
Hey, big boy
(that’ll be Carole),
what are you packing?
And I’ll tell them I could show them but I’m like a Gurkha who never unsheathes his weapon without using it, at which they’ll shriek with laughter, and then ask me what a Gurkha is.

But the only person in the Casablanca today is Faruk’s sister Deniz, who is sitting at a table by the counter, having a fag beneath the No Smoking sign. She looks up from her copy of
Chat
long enough to mutter ‘All right, Brian?’ And though I’m standing there right in front of her, on the pretext of asking her if she’s seen Faruk, she isn’t giving my big new packet a second look. From where I’m standing, I can see right down her low cut top and I’m sure I can feel stirrings down below, but when Deniz looks up again, it’s just to say, tetchily, ‘Are you still here?’

The rest of the day is no better. I go down the leisure centre, ostensibly for a swim but really to try out an old pair of Speedos which I bought rashly one summer, wore once and never wore again. But now, seeing my reflection in the mirror in the changing room, I have to say, I’m well pleased. But not as pleased as a middle-aged bloke who sidles up to me, squeezes my bicep and says I’m a very big boy for my age, aren’t I?

Then I run into Diesel with Faruk at Faruk’s brother’s garage, but they’re more interested in seeing the new carburettor installed in the Green Dragon than life-changing enhancements to their best mate’s physique. Clive checks me out as I pass his dad’s yard but he always does, bless him, and he doesn’t seem to
see anything out of the ordinary. Maybe if I jogged across town with my dick hanging out of my jeans I might get some attention. If I got arrested, it would at least mean someone had bothered to take notice. This is not at all how I imagined the world of big dick.

Then it gets worse. I arrive home to find that Mum is holding one of her teas for the Church Roof Funding Committee. Mum’s a member, but only because she finds it impossible to turn down a request from anyone wearing his collar back to front. The geriatric committee takes turns to hold teas at each other’s homes, both domestic and institutional, where they talk about – well, you can work it out for yourself. Today Father Patrick, in his familiar threadbare tweed jacket and equally threadbare bonce, is sitting at the head of our dining table, where four very elderly ladies are gathered, awaiting starter’s orders to devour a plate of French fancies and a Battenberg cake. Iris Alsop and Minnie Middleton, who used to play tuba and cornet respectively in the Salvation Army brass band – you’ve probably paid them to fuck off at Christmas – are shaking their heads and tut-tutting about something.

Father Patrick is passing cups of tea down the table and saying that it, whatever it is today, is a very sorry state of affairs indeed. Aggie Sharpe, who volunteers in Oxfam and has put on some airs and graces since, as I mentioned, it went upmarket, says that they – whoever they are today – want punishing the way her generation was punished, when she was a girl. There’s much nodding of grey and blue-rinsed heads and rattling of beads and bones, and teaspoons in Mum’s best china. It’s only taken me a moment to see all this and I’m ducking out in favour of my room and my Xbox when Aggie Sharpe says, ‘Can you spare us a moment, Brian? We need a young person’s opinion.’

‘I’ve got a ton of homework to do,’ I lie. ‘I’ve got my exams soon.’

‘Fiddlesticks!’ Aggie says. ‘This won’t take a moment. Come
and sit by me, dearie.’

‘Yes, Master Johnson, do take a pew,’ Father Patrick says, smiling at his little witticism as he jerks out the spare chair between himself and Ancient Aggie. The others eye the cakes hungrily and wave me to my seat. I flash Mum a ‘do I have to?’ glance, but she just gives me a sympathetic smile and I know I’m stuck here for the duration.

‘We’re talking about the dreadful blight of vandalism that’s hit the neighbourhood,’ Father Patrick tells me.

‘Terrible, terrible,’ Iris and Minnie say together.

‘It’s not nice,’ says Doris Binder, who’s learning to live with dementia. ‘Is it?’

‘It is a plague on our house,’ Father Patrick says, which sounds familiar to me, somehow.

‘It’s sheer, wanton destruction,’ Aggie says. She has a face like Satan’s scrotum, I notice.

‘The devil,’ says Father Patrick, seeming to pick up on my thought, ‘has found work for idle hands.’

‘What vandalism is that, exactly?’ I ask. I’d be quite interested to know. There aren’t any more phone boxes to trash and the Eccleshall estate looks like it’s been trashed already. Anything being broken in Laurel Gardens would be fixed before a vandal had finished breaking it.

‘Those horrible daubings on the bus shelter,’ Iris says.

‘Terrible, terrible.’

‘It’s the writing on the wall,’ Doris says, tapping her nose.

‘And in the gentlemen’s toilets by the bus station,’ Father Patrick says.

‘And on the side wall of Trollope’s the bookshop,’ Iris says.

‘I think that’s a mural,’ Mum says. ‘I think that’s art.’

‘And the words they use!’ Minnie says. ‘I was shocked, shocked!’

‘It’s the young generation,’ Father Patrick says. ‘When they have too much time they are but tools in the hands of Satan.’

‘They want tools in their hands,’ Aggie says, conjuring up an entirely inappropriate image. ‘Apprenticeships, that’s what they want. That’d keep them off the street corners.’

‘Bring back National Service,’ says Minnie.

‘And hanging,’ Iris says.

‘That’s right, some of them should be hung,’ agrees Minnie.

Some of them are, I can’t help thinking.

‘And what does our own young man say?’ asks Father Patrick.

But I’m too busy trying to remember which were our graffs and which were the work of chodes from the estate. About the time Banksy started making money from drawing on other people’s property, we Four Horsemen started to develop our own interest in street art. Well, actually, I don’t think any of us could claim to have elevated what we did to that status, but we all felt that when we went out with our spray cans and our stencils and tagged something, that we were making a statement of some kind. Mostly, the statement had to do with being bored and too lazy to think of something more constructive to do, but, hey, it rocked while it lasted.

What makes me sure that the Committee is talking about the work of rivals is that we never had the bottle to do our graffing anywhere very public. Our work, which generally was executed on a small scale anyway, can be found on the underside of bridges and culverts, on walls in obscure alleys and on the backs of some forgotten sheds in a corner of the park. The other thing that assures me I’m on safe ground is the spelling. I know the bus shelter graff and the one in the toilets too, though I only go there in emergencies, as it’s a bit notorious. Both of these very basic apprentice pieces have omitted the “k” in the word “knob”. Because of an elemental error worthy of Clive, Jack D is a nob just looks like someone whinging about Jack D’s social status, while Jack D likes Nob End might conceivably be saying that the same person takes an interest in the Nob End lock system on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury canal. (Seriously, that’s what it’s
called, as you’d know if you had Googled as many dirty words and phrases as Diesel and I did one afternoon.)

‘Brian?’ someone interrupts. ‘Are you listening?’

‘We were just saying that young people seem to lack a purpose these days,’ Father Patrick tells me.

‘They need a taste of what we got when we were naughty,’ Minnie says.

‘We were spanked,’ Iris Alsop says. ‘Soundly.’

‘My father used to take his belt to me,’ Minnie says.

‘And teachers weren’t afraid to use the cane.’

‘Six of the best,’ Father Patrick says. ‘Never hurt anyone.’

‘What do you think, Brian?’ Mum says.

It’s time for my expert witness look. If I wore glasses, now is the time I would take them off and polish them. ‘I think we have to be aware of the widely varying socio-economic backgrounds these young people spring from,’ I say. ‘And of how certain environments will inevitably produce an underclass who feel very much alienated from mainstream society and who can make their plight known to the rest of us only by resorting to what we mistakenly interpret as meaningless acts of violence and destruction.’

Well, this is the sort of thing I would have said if they’d given me a little more time to prepare.

As it is, I have to make do with, ‘I dunno, it’s all so random.’

This earns me a round of uncertain looks and maybe the flicker of a smile from Mum, who goes off to the kitchen, saying something about a Viennetta in the freezer. Thinking I’ve offered a solid contribution here, I try to rise, but Aggie sinks her bony fingers into my thigh and says, ‘You stay where you are, young man.’ And so I sit there, bored out of my tree as they rattle on about young people today, how it was in their day, what cats won’t eat and whatever’s become of someone called Paul Daniels. Fuck all about the church roof, you notice. And my mind begins to wander, as it will always do under such circumstances.

Once my neighbour’s claws have released my thigh in favour of another cup of tea, I’m looking around the table at these envoys from another time and I’m trying to imagine what each of them might have been like at my age. Hard to unwrinkle that skin, re-colour the hair, add a few more marbles in Doris’s case and a couple of inches in stature in Minnie’s, and reinvent them as real people who must once have been objects of desire and about whom the blokes of their generation must actually have fantasised. It is an appalling thought, but no matter, I’ve had worse. I wonder which of them would have been the fit one? If I had to say, and I’m bored enough to accept my own challenge, I’d say it was Iris. I bet she was a fox back in the day, in her nylons and suspenders, the naughty little minx.

And what about Aggie? I steal a glance at Aggie’s craggy profile. She does have a little sparkle left in her eye – actually, now I look closely, it’s only the left one, which looks like it’s glass anyway – but her legs aren’t too bad, from a non-medical perspective, anyway, and of course she wouldn’t always have had the zimmer. Doris is three parts bonkers and her cheeks look like they’ve been rouged by a drunken mortician but even she must once have had something to trouble the trousers of whoever used to slip her the sausage. Thinking of that, I have a funny, familiar feeling which seems somehow wrong and which I can’t quite identify.

I dismiss the thought that there might be trouble in my own trousers – impossible under the circs – and try to pay attention to the conversation, which now seems to be cribbed entirely from naughty postcards. I’ve not had any for years. My Dick was big. You need something wet and warm inside you. My pussy hates getting wet. And in my mind, I’m putting each of these volatile phrases into the scarlet-lipsticked mouths of the past lives I’ve created for each of the girls at the table: Aggie the slim, haughty babe who fucked more Spitfire pilots than the Luftwaffe; Doris
the busty blonde with the big arse who gave knee tremblers in the black-out; Iris the voluptuous brunette who went like a train after a couple of port and lemons; and Minnie, the hot little redhead who was always being slipped a little extra meat by the butcher. I stop suddenly, a cold, clammy horror creeping through me: I’m not mistaken, there is something going on in my pants. Against every natural law, I am getting a hard-on, and a big one at that. This is so wrong. I try desperately to divert my train of thought into the sidings. ‘I see they are getting on with the new church roof,’ I say.