Demons (10 page)

‘
Priapus of course,’ Becs
cackled.

‘
Who
?’ said Sarah.

‘
You
know
.’

‘
No. Does
anyone?’

We shook our heads as I’m sure Becs
expected

us to.

‘
Priapus. God of fertility.
The one with the great big dick.’

Predictably, everyone cracked up. Becs had
been all the way to Greece with her parents during the summer
holidays. That was why she had mentioned the Acropolis as if no one
else would ever have heard of it. Apparently she’d also bought
herself a souvenir statuette of this Priapus without letting on to
her parents.

‘
I’ll bring it to school
tomorrow,’ she said.

Clearly she’d been hoping for just this
opportunity. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d enrolled in
classical studies just to savour the moment. She was as bad as the
boys.

And the next day she did bring it. She
showed us ahead of Ms Shapiro and the boys arriving. Knowing Becs,
I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d decided to wait for them.
It was a small statue of Priapus, hands aggressively on his hips
with, as Becs had so slangily said, a dick out of all proportion to
the rest of him.

‘
Gross!’ said
Di.

‘
Imagine
!’ shuddered Roxy, without
feeling the need to elaborate.

‘
Is that what all the
tourists buy these days?’ asked Sarah.

‘
Not just today,’ said
Becs. ‘They sold them way back when. I saw one in a museum. I
reckon . . .’ she started to say when sharp-eyed Ms Shapiro walked
in unexpectedly and spotted it. She wasn’t easily shocked. ‘Mass
produced,’ she commented. ‘I

thought you would have had better taste,
Rebecca, and perhaps bought one in marble.’

Becs sneered at Ms Shapiro behind her back.
‘Lesso,’ she mouthed at us.

‘Yeah, like how
big
do you reckon
he
is?’ Becs asked,
continuing the conversation after class. ‘Our Greek
god.’

‘
You’ll have to find that
out,’ said Liz, ‘and tell us later on.’ They all shrieked
again.

‘
What
do
you
think of
Chris?’ Becs asked me. Maybe she was more perceptive than she let
on.

‘
Can’t say I really noticed
him particularly,’ I lied.

She shook her head. What else should I have
expected, was what her look seemed to say.

Maybe she, and the others,
had decided to put me into the same camp as Ms Shapiro. I could
have been lesbian for all they knew, except I wasn’t. My one and
only experience with Robbie hadn’t put me off

boys in general, just delayed my interest in
them. I was certainly never going to admit to them that I’d started
fretting about Chris the moment I’d laid eyes on him. Was it my
turn at last?

Getting to know Chris

I wanted it to happen. I wouldn’t have
minded initiating things to make it happen if I’d known how to go
about it but I was unexpectedly shy, and inexperienced.

However, it seemed to happen quite
naturally, if that’s the right word. Maybe the sort of hints that
the other girls threw at Chris frightened him so much that he
defaulted to talking to me. That was my first thought. Afterwards,
of course, I knew that hadn’t

been the case at all.

The seating arrangements in Ms Shapiro’s
class continued pretty fluidly. With the numbers being so small it
didn’t matter much where anyone sat. The boys moved up from the
back row mixing and matching it with the girls, trying us out for
size, just as Becs, Liz, Sarah and Roxy weighed them up. It was all
a game really.

Chris showed he wasn’t
interested in trying. He came to sit beside me on day two and
refused to give up his place to anyone. Mind you, neither of the
other two boys tried very hard to displace him. They sensed I
didn’t want to know them and kept their distance. Chris didn’t say
much to his friends either. I soon clicked that they weren’t really
his
friends
.

We were sitting together before class on day
three, unsure of where to go from here, when he came out with the
sentence, ‘They’re only here to check out the menu.’

‘
The
what
?’

‘
To see what’s on offer.
Amazingly for a private school we don’t have classical studies at
Year 13 level. Not enough takers, would you believe? So it’s an
opportunity, one of the few things we can join in with you guys.
That and French.’

‘
So
are
you
here to
“check out the menu”?’ I asked, turning cold.

‘
No. I’m here for the
classics.’

I nodded, wanting to believe him.

‘
And you?’

‘
I’m interested in
history,’ I said. ‘Not ancient history especially but I’d rather do
that than a science subject.’

‘
Fair enough,’ Chris
said.

‘
What about you
then?’

‘
Me? What about
me?’

‘
Well, do
you like classics,
really
like classics or just
like
it?’

Chris grinned. ‘I’m a complete social
misfit,’ he said. ‘I love it. I’m a classics geek.’

‘
Yeah? Don’t put yourself
down.’

‘
If I don’t someone else
will. It’s inevitable.’

‘
Why?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Not very manly is it,
classics, unless you’re after the women?’

I looked at him. ‘You know, you’re something
different,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind that. I went out once, and I mean
once, exceptionally briefly, like thirty minutes, with a ‘manly’
guy. Can’t say I enjoyed

the experience.’

‘
So, you’re different too,’
he said. Not a question but a statement.

‘
Me? I’m
ordinary.’

‘
I don’t think you
are.’

He said that so sincerely that I felt myself
turning red. Because of my pale skin he was sure to notice. It made
me feel momentarily irritated, with him as well as with myself.

I came out with ‘Is that your regular chat
up line?’ before I knew I was going to.

‘
I don’t have one of those.
Honestly. I just say what I mean.’

‘
OK,’ I relented equally
quickly. ‘I believe you.’

‘
Good.’

‘
But let’s change the
subject,’ I suggested.

‘
Fine with me. You going to
uni after this year?’

Until he mentioned it I hadn’t given it a
proper thought. Still too far off. And, as I’ve said, I felt I was
drifting a bit, just treading water, marking time.

‘
You should,’ he said.
‘You’d be good.’

‘
Don’t
tell me what I
should
do,’ I said

snappishly, again surprising myself as much
as him. ‘How would you know?’

‘
Forget it.’ He rummaged in
his bag for his books. ‘Told you I was a social misfit.’

And I felt instantly sorry for him and
ashamed of myself. It was probably true. Like me, he found fitting
in hard.

‘
Sorry,’ I whispered as the
rest of the class came in, shepherded along by Ms
Shapiro.

‘
No worries.’

Then we had to escape the present to travel
back in time. But before we did, Chris turned to me with the most
surprising question. ‘Are you a Catholic?’ he said.

An extract from Chris’s notebook

Dear Andrea,

You asked me why I asked you that
question.

Well, I couldn’t believe I had. I came out
with it just like that. I’d been wondering how I’d broach the
subject but I decided you were a pretty upfront sort of girl. Might
as well be upfront with her, I thought. So I asked.

I could have explained, told you the truth
then, but I didn’t. I would, later on, I reassured myself, when I
knew you better. If I’d said I’d seen you, three years ago, coming
out of St Brigid’s church, you might have thought I was some sort
of spying pervert and tossed me back onto the reject pile then and
there.

So I fudged it and told you it was just a
random notion. Something about your name, your look, suggested
it.

You looked at me as if you were trying to
read my mind. I felt on edge, wondering what your reply

was going to be. Yes. No. Maybe. Mind your
own business.

But what you said in response was another
question, not a statement. You asked me if it would make any
difference to me, what your answer would be?

It put me onto the back foot.

‘
No,’ was the first thing
that came out of my mouth. ‘ It wouldn’t.’

Then I asked: “Difference to what?’

You turned red for the second time that
morning. ‘I don’t know,’ you said. ‘I’m not sure why I asked
that.’

At least we blundered on equal terms.

It was a good day.

Blunders

Why did I say that? God!
It implied all sorts of things. I’d been annoyed with him for
telling me what I should do and here I was telling him,
suggesting
, that I . . .
that we . . . I don’t know what made me say it. Avoiding a direct
answer I suppose was what got me into that embarrassing
situation.

His question about me being a Catholic
certainly threw me. I could have, should have, been honest about
where I stood on that but I wasn’t.

Not until later did I
realise I’d reacted the way I did because, in asking me if I was ‘a
Catholic,’ Chris had been trying to attach a label to me and I
didn’t want to be ‘a’ anything. I’d left the Church because I
wanted, for once, to be
me
, whoever I was or was
becoming.

An extract from Chris’s notebook

I believed at that moment that I was telling
the truth,

that it wouldn’t have made a difference. OK,
like Dad I’m not religious, I can’t help that, it’s part and parcel
of my makeup, I’m a disciple of rationality as exemplified by some
of the ancient Greeks but I’m no

bigot. A non-believer yes,
but anti, no. People are entitled to their beliefs, hare-brained
and irrational though they are. In any case, she didn’t say
she
was
Catholic.
Maybe she’s reserving judgement. Maybe she’s got too old to believe
in fairy tales. I hope so, I surely do.

Dark horse

The other girls quickly got pissed off.

Liz: ‘You’re a dark horse.’

Roxy: ‘Yeah, you said you weren’t interested
but now you’re all over him.’

Sarah: ‘He’s all over you.’

Becs: ‘When’re you going to find out if he’s
stud material?’

I went ballistic. ‘We’re not all as crude as
you Becs. Besides, I don’t control who he talks to.’

‘
You could share him around
a bit, that’s all.’

‘
Maybe you lot frighten
him.’

‘
Frighten him. Are you
kidding?’

‘
Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t
own him. I don’t control him. He can sit where he likes, talk to
whoever he likes. If he wanted to talk to you, I wouldn’t
mind.’

‘
Trouble is he doesn’t,’
said Roxy

‘
And who
are
you
kidding?’
asked Becs. ‘
You
wouldn’t mind? Really?’

Yeah, who was I kidding?

Going out

Chris asked me out. I hesitated. His
question about

whether or not I was a Catholic kept
beeping

intermittently in my head, like a nearly
flat battery in a smoke alarm. I didn’t know what its noise was
alerting me to only that I would, in some vague, indefinable way,
be taking a risk by going out with him. On the other hand I already
knew I liked him a lot.

I’d thought I didn’t want to be like
everybody else. Like Becs, Roxy, Sarah and Liz. Boy mad. Sex crazy.
But this time . . . well, things were working out differently.
Which was fine by me.

I decided at last. Everything’s a risk one
way or another I told myself. Going out with Chris was definitely
what I wanted to do.

‘
OK,’ I said, when he asked
me a second time.

‘
Tomorrow?’ he
asked.

So soon!

‘
What’s
tomorrow?’

‘
Saturday.’

‘
It is too. When
tomorrow?

‘
I thought maybe we could
spend the day together?’

‘
The whole day?’

‘
Yeah. Don’t you like that
idea?’

I had imagined a movie maybe. Something at
night.

‘
It’s a little different,
that’s all,’ I said.

‘
We
are
different, remember?’ said Chris. ‘That’s what we like about
each other, isn’t it? Besides, I’m not into nightclubs, that sort
of thing.’

‘
You’re not into
Trance?’

‘
No. Are you?’

‘
I could have been, once,’
I said. ‘But these days I just go for wild Irish parties that last
into the wee small hours.’