Boys and Girls (38 page)

Alan smiled, and poured more whisky.

‘I'm going to light a cigar. Traditional at nuptials, I believe.'

‘Oh good. I'll join you in a fag. Killing ourselves, I suppose. Still – can't be helped.'

‘Blackie … ask you something?'

‘Oh Lord …'

‘Don't worry. I am not in quest of lurid detail. Nothing of that sort. It's just, well … I wonder why you, um – well your hair, for instance …?'

‘Ah yes. The coiffeur. The grand pompadour that never quite was. Sad, isn't it? I know it is. How many people must have wagged their heads in wonder? You and Susie, how did you stop up your laughter? Amanda's reaction I can only shrink away from. And I can't now even remember … isn't it funny? Isn't it strange? I honestly cannot remember what made me even contemplate it. I mean I ask you … having divots of vile and scrubby fuzz from the back of your neck
plugged into your bloody scalp! And then painting in the pink bits, as if by numbers. I even tried a toupee, you know. Oh yes I did. On the grounds that at least it wouldn't fucking
hurt
 – because it does, you know, all that plugging. They say it doesn't, but they lie. It's not their head they're digging the holes into. But a toupee, well – don't have to tell you, do I really? What a complete and utter arse I looked. Just sat there like a rissole – and always the fear of it blowing away. And yet I never thought of myself as a vain man. But I must have been, I suppose, because then came the corsets. You will observe, Alan, that today I am sporting something of the, um – fuller figure? Why I'm still in a dressing gown, matter of fact. None of my clothes will fit without the armour underneath. Going to get a whole new wardrobe – can't be jailed by all that any more. My scalp, that can do as it damn well pleases. I'm leaving it to its own devices. You will notice too that when I rise you will be seen to tower. You were always a good deal taller than me anyway, Alan, but from this day forth, dear chap, believe me, you will tower. I couldn't give a damn. Not any more. Just to feel again the earth beneath my feet – to not be dizzy and aching, to walk across the room and not feel
precarious
 …! Joys to come. I am, Alan, undone. Undone, yes – though willingly. And, oddly, quite made up. Well there it is. There you are.'

‘Top you up, will I?'

‘Oh Jesus, Alan – I can't drink any more. Right-o, then.'

‘Well cheers, Blackie. The worst is now behind you.'

They clinked.

‘Cheers, Alan. Cheers. And, um – well thank you, really. For everything. I mean it. I think now I'll just pop off to the lavatory.'

And so that, dear Susan, is how I came to know. About it. All those months ago, when we were still, maybe, the three of us, raw, and yet untried. Would it shock you? To know I know this? I wonder if it would. Now, though, we are different. And somehow, just lately – no more than just the wisp of an unformed intuition, no more than that – but just lately I have been sensing that before very long, we are to be different again.

When she rang the doorbell, Amanda had heard the grating of a sash window from somewhere above her, and then its immediate closing. When she rang the bell again, there was nothing but silence. When she rang the fucking bell a-bloody-gain – leaving her finger there and jabbing repeatedly, her other hand beating at the knocker with a frenzied and staccato energy (and she was more than ready to holler obscenities through the letter box) – a light was distantly glimmering through the dappled glass panels of the door, and then the shadow of somebody looming.

‘Jesus, Amanda – what the hell are you doing here?'

‘What the fuck do you think, Harry?'

‘My
parents
are here …'

‘Like I give a shit.'

‘Look – go away, can't you?'

‘As
if
 …! You letting me in, or am I going to start screaming?'

‘
Jeez
 …'

Harry stood aside and very quietly closed the door after Amanda had barged her way into the hall.

‘Well – come up to my room, then.'

‘Don't want to go up to your poxy little room. We'll do it here. In your ghastly so-called, oh yuck –
lounge
.'

‘Jesus, Amanda – my parents, they're right next
door
 …!'

‘Well you'd better not make a noise, then. God – you are just so like
pathetic
. My parents! My parents! Jesus …'

‘Well go in, then – but for God's sake lower your voice.'

‘Why? What will they do? Will they, like – stop your pocket money? What is it, Harry? Don't they know that you're screwing a schoolgirl?'

‘
Jesus
 …! Just get in. Get in the room, OK?'

Harry bundled her into the room and firmly shut the door behind them. He could not begin to analyse the emotion that was jumping and jerky all over her face – where hurt maybe ended or collided with the anger – but he was aware of big hostility there, that was for bloody sure. And she looked a bit, I don't know – high, or something. Could be drunk.

‘I didn't know you were a –
kid
, fuck's sake. I feel – awful. Why didn't you tell me?'

‘Did tell you. Told you the very first time.
Before
the very first time. In this shitty smelly room of yours. You laughed. You didn't believe me.'

‘Yeh but then you said—!'

‘Yeh yeh. So I said. So fucking what? And how do you think I feel, Harry? How do you think
I
feel? Having my mother telling me you don't like fucking want to
see
me again? How do you think that makes me feel?'

‘Well … she told me you were … and that she'd fix it. Deal with it. I don't know. And I just said fine. It's best. Isn't it?'

‘You're a creep. You know that? You're just a low-life fucking
creep
.'

‘Fuck's sake keep your voice down! My—!'

‘Yeh, Harry – yeh I know. Your manky
parents
are just next door. Well maybe I ought to go in and talk to
them
. Seeing as
we all seem to be having meetings with each other's bloody
mummies
 …!'

‘She just came. Your mom. I didn't ask her. She thought we weren't, you know – using things. And I told her we were. I just can't understand how you can be—!'

‘Oh
Jesus
, Harry! I'm not. I'm not. I'm not I'm not I'm not! I just said that to her.'

‘You …! You're
not
? Well why the fuck did you—?'

‘Don't know. I don't know. I just said it. I do that sometimes. Just, like – come out with stuff.'

‘You're nuts.'

‘Yeh right. And you are so a creep.'

‘Look, Amanda … why don't you just go? Hm? Just go.'

Amanda was stung. Her face, when she glared at him, was as if it had been slapped.

‘Why? Why? I don't want to.'

‘Please, Amanda. Just go. I think you're drunk.'

‘
Why
?! Why do you want me to—?! Not
drunk
 – fuck off!'

‘
Quiet
 – Jesus! Keep your voice down, God's sake. Your mom was right about you – you can get kinda crazy.'

‘What is this with you calling her my “
mom
”? What's “
mom
”? And “kinda
crazy
”? Oh man. What are you – like some sort of a Yank now, or something?'

‘Amanda. Look. There's nothing else to say. Is there? Just go. Yes? Why don't you?'

‘You're a shit, Harry. You know? That's what my mother called you. My “
mom
”. A shit. And she's right. Because that's exactly what you are. A Grade A, like –
shit
.'

Harry was grinning. Stroking his chin.

‘I don't believe you. I don't actually believe your mom said
that to you. Our conversation, the way she came on, it just wasn't like that.'

‘The way she – came
on
 …?'

‘Yeh. Your mom – I think she's kinda cute.'

Amanda just stared at him.

‘Ex-
cuse
me …?! That is just
disgusting
. I
so
feel sick …!'

‘Amanda – piss off, can't you? Just
go
.'

She nodded, turned, and slammed her way back into the hall. Before Harry could even get near to her, she was pounding on the door panels of the room alongside.

‘Hey!
Parents
? You in there? Yeh? This is the fifteen-year-old girl your son's been screwing, and he's just told me to – get
off
me Harry, you fuck, just like get your bloody hands
off
me, OK …! Yeh – hey
parents
! He's beating me up now, so I'm going to go. He's a shit, your son. A real, like –
shit
!'

Harry was close to weeping in his quite frantic effort to drag her away and out of the house. Just before the front door was slammed in her face, she glimpsed the agitated bustle of two stupid fucking like
spastics
, OK, red-faced and all over the hallway. Harry's face was blazing at her wildly, so she punched it square and right in the fat shit middle of it, and then she turned and ran away up the length of the street, the heart within her hammering, rictus face a plaster of tears, wailing and nearly demented.

I am hardly the first to discover solace in the bliss of a garden. I was amazed to realise that I had never really had one before, not really – not, anyway, the sort of thing to which I could devote myself, become quite lost in. And Black, he's been really so terribly good – better than I'd dreamed of. Left me to hire a firm of professional landscapers, gave me complete carte blanche, the little sweetie – told me he had total confidence in the magnificence of the outcome. I've had great input too in the house itself, well of course I have – Alan and Black deciding on colours and the positioning of plug points? Not really there, is it? There was an interiors person, obviously, whom I didn't take to at all – dictatorial, basically, like the worst sort of hairdresser. So what I did was, I extracted from him all of his technical know-how – because it is astonishing really, when you're starting with a large and beautifully proportioned virtual shell, how much business there is in it all, how much nitty-gritty and undreamed-of arcana – and then quite joyously sacked him, the ghastly little man, and worked out all the rest of it with the help of the contractor, Mr Clearley, and a load of books and just piles and piles of
all these monthly house magazines. There are dozens, all of them seemingly touting just a couple of recipes – doing it with chic on the cheap, or splurging a fucking fortune, which they cleverly term as investment in the future. Yes well – I need hardly tell you that I went down the fucking fortune route, that fortune, I am ashamed to admit, closely followed by at least another one. He doesn't seem to mind, Black – he encourages it, in fact: so sweet. And he needs so very little in return, and I do find that endearing. He likes it when I wear a skirt, which sometimes I do, so he can slide his hand up – and he just adores to suck a bit on each of my breasts, can't get enough of them, just like a baby boy. I simply close my eyes, and it's quite all right then. I rub him against his trousers – you should see his little face. It's more than Alan gets, anyway. Poor Alan. He gets nothing – not from me, anyway. Hasn't for just ages. Not ever a conscious decision on my part, I don't think. Just how it all turned out. I sometimes wonder whether he minds. Still, however, I can't quite care enough about it. Which is more than a pity, it is actually rather a shame, because I know he loves me – more, lately, even more, and maybe far too much.

But it is in the garden, I think, that I really do feel I have come into my own. I would be foolish to say that now it is finished because some of the frustration and most of the joy will always come from the truth that a garden can never be that. The rolling seasons, the vagaries of the soil, the force or punitive absence of sun and then rain … one is truly prostrate at the feet of the gods, playing to one's best advantage the hand one is dealt, no more really than an earnest titivator, ever looking forward and simperingly delighted by whatever new and blossoming treats are thrillingly bestowed upon one. When I was a child, our garden was big enough, I suppose
– scope for skipping and running, a Wendy house, an alpine rockery that was said to be mine – but all it came down to really was an overgrown and sprawling lawn, a crab-apple tree and another one that every so often would grudgingly yield just a few damsons, sour and pappy – and a lovely old bent-over pear tree, Conference, the long ones, and I used to love the pears when they were still so hard I could snap them in half. Gardening, I suppose, in those days, it wasn't really seen in terms of design, as an art form or anything of that sort. Bedding, bulbs, a run-out with the mower from time to time – spot of weeding if you really had to. My father, he never lifted a single finger – just stretched out in the summer on a steamer sort of chaise-type affair looking quite mighty and even majestic, in my eyes. Poor Daddy. And Mummy though, I don't remember her doing anything either – there must have been a man, or something, but I honestly can't recall. There was evil at its perimeter in the form of stinging nettles – dock leaves, though, for the antidote – and viral-looking ferns sprouting from the very mortar in the bulging retaining walls. And I had a vision of him, Daddy I mean, in that garden, when just the other day I got a call from the people at the place he's in. They had just brought him down from the roof, they told me – wearing only one of the lady carers' pinnies and a paper hat from a Christmas cracker – where he had been chipping at a chimney stack with a small pair of nail scissors telling everyone and no one that the topiary had been very cruelly neglected, and further that his uncle was the Duchess of Argyll. None of the terrified staff who had been forced to clamber up there was allowed to descend until they had joined him rousingly in two choruses of ‘Yellow Submarine', and promised to give up cheese for the remainder of Lent. Oh
Jesus, I thought, he didn't really do all of that, did he? Oh God he can't have: not
again
.