Golden Boy (2 page)

Leah had moved to the suburbs, but I loved Oxford. The city was where I became a lawyer, where I met my husband, where we bought our first flat, where the buzz of energy took on a unique momentum and propelled even the most mundane start to an evening forward into something new, something different and unexpected. My boyfriend, Steve, was two years ahead of me in law school. After he graduated we would meet at the pub around six most nights, then either stay there until late, drinking and talking, or walk home together. He was from London, tall, leanly muscular, earnest, blithely good-looking and deliciously self-righteous. He was passionate. We argued a lot but had the same values. We both strove for independence and control, but somehow imagined success was already waiting for us. We were healthy and young and full of promise. We had no problems and no doubts.

We got married in Oxford a few weeks after I graduated. Afterwards we went for a meal at an Indian restaurant we both loved.

We found out I was pregnant just before we exchanged on the flat in Oxford, and we moved to Hemingway a few months after the birth of our first child. Steve was twenty-eight and I was twenty-six. The move was unexpected, but suddenly Oxford was too claustrophic. Our friends would drop by at all times, without calling ahead, and above all we wanted privacy.

We took a long time, a few weeks, to decide on a name for the baby. Steve kept suggesting ones I hated: Jamie, Taylor, Rowan. In the end he grew impatient with me, and starting calling the baby ‘Max’. After a while, it stuck.

Later, when we had Daniel, our second child, my sister moved to Hemingway to be closer to me. Cheryl’s life is very different from mine. She travelled instead of going to university. Cheryl has had several long-term boyfriends but only got married last year, at 38, to Charlie, who has a wide, boyish grin and wild, curly hair.

I know it sounds irrational, but sometimes I feel jealous of all the freedom and solitude she has experienced. As a barrister for the court and a mother of two, my own free time is precious. I spend it with my family, and when I get the chance I see Cheryl or Leah, but even these occasions seem to be few and far between. I call them both regularly but we only manage perhaps one lunch or dinner a month.

Perhaps because we made similar choices in life, Leah and I are closer than my sister and I. I know if anything happened to me, Leah would be there for my children, and if anything happened to Leah, I would be there for her son, Hunter, who, like many children without siblings, can be moody and controlling. I don’t share that thought with Leah, obviously, because we all like to believe that our children are perfect, and personally, I wouldn’t want to be disabused of that notion.

Despite Hunter’s bossiness, Max and he have been best friends since they were little, and Leah and I have always been glad of this because on shared holidays they are good at entertaining themselves. They are both resourceful, playing football together, exploring, swimming, surfing, fighting and making up without our input. Max is always the first, and sometimes the only one, to forgive, ever the peacemaker.

Leah was the first person I confided in about Max’s condition, and Hunter has known since he was four. He was young when he found out, sharing a bath with Max before bedtime, but he seemed to understand as much as a child could. We just told him Max is different. Max is special.

I
t is eleven-ten on a Sunday night in late September and I am meant to be asleep, but I’m not. My parents are having a dinner party. It is obvious, by the sounds of the dizzy, hysterical laughter that you start to exhale when you’re an adult and you have very few friends and only rarely have fun, that they are caught in a bubble of their own awesomeness, and won’t be leaving the living room any time soon.

So I’m not asleep. I’m doing what I suspect most 15-year-olds do when there’s a guarantee no parent is going to come into the room. I stroke a hand down my thigh, with my eyes closed. I’m thinking about kissing someone. This is all I’ve ever thought about when I’ve done this so far, in case I never get to go further than kissing in real life. I mean, obviously I want to. But, you know . . . I may never. Get laid, I mean. So I don’t want to really think about it.

Hence the dreaming about kissing. Kissing is good. I can definitely score kissing. I have had some awesome kissing in my time. Thinking about kissing does not come with twinges of ‘but what if I never . . . ?’ attached. I love kissing.

So in my head my lips touch someone else’s and I lean back onto the grass of the school playing field. My hands travel up my legs and roam around my crotch. I never know what’s going to make me come. Usually it’s really hard to get there, so I just settle for feeling good and a general touch around that area.

I roll over onto my side and my hair moves silkily across my face, and this is also erotic. I decide to do what I almost never do, and I suck my little finger, then reach down past my stomach.

It always gets me. Probably because I do it so rarely, and probably also because it’s quite new. It’s like a secret. I grin into my pillow and breathe harder.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Shit!’ I look over my shoulder and grab at my duvet.

‘Oh fuck!’ The figure silhouetted by the light from the hall stands in my doorway, lets out a low laugh and claps its hand to its mouth.

It pushes the door closed and walks forward into the light, where the figure becomes Hunter Fulsom, son of my parents’ friends Leah and Edward. Hunter attends the local sixth form college and we used to be on the same football squad, before he dropped out earlier this year. Now he just hangs around the town hall, where everybody underage goes to party, smoking weed and drinking. Leah told my mum that Hunter’s grades have dropped off and he was cautioned by the police for egging someone’s house over the summer.

I don’t smoke pot. I can’t anyway, even if I wanted to, because of Dad and Mum. They need me to keep out of trouble; to be good. They are lawyers, and they work hard and are in the paper a lot. There’s a certain amount of pressure being in my family. People would write about us if I did something like that. Mum and I call it ‘doing a Prince Harry’.

‘Don’t do a Prince Harry on me,’ she says.

I wouldn’t do it anyway. But it seems Hunter would, and has.

Hunter’s tall, dark and, I suppose, handsome. His eyes look hooded and in shadow in the relative dark of my bedroom. I see the outline of his features only due to the moonlight outside. Everything about him is either black or grey. He smirks at me.

‘Hey you,’ he says.

Hunter’s mum and my mum have been best friends since they were little kids. This makes Hunter a non-genetic ‘cousin’ and, purely by default, one of my best friends growing up. He knows all my secrets, including
the
secret, the one only my family knows, which means that, on some level, I always had to be on his good side when we were little. A year older than me, he was the one in charge in our relationship. He was the dark-haired, dark-eyed one who remained mysterious and guarded, and I was the sunny, blond one who was open and honest, and had inadvertently stumbled into a situation where I had to do Hunter’s bidding in all our childhood games, because he had info on me and I had nothing on him. Despite this, I always thought of Hunter as one of my best friends and, in a way, my hero, because he did the things I wanted to do, but first and way better. It was Hunter that I had wanted on my team when I read
Swallows and Amazons
. It was Hunter I thought of when I saw the young John Connor in
Terminator 2
. It was Hunter who hand-carved me a wooden boat to sail on the lakes when we visited the scene of our mums’ childhoods in Yorkshire, and it was Hunter who taught me to play pooh sticks, and held me in bed at night when the howling of the wind sounded like ghosts. He was a big brother for as long as I remained an only child and afterwards, a forever friend, for better, for worse, etc.

I’m surprised to see him now, though. We haven’t spoken in months, not since a drunken conversation about sex at New Year, when we were staying with our families on a skiing holiday in Switzerland and where, for no obvious reason, Hunter had become angry and subdued and told me to ‘fuck off, pretty-boy’.

‘How many people have you slept with?’ was the last thing I remembered saying to him. I was smiling conspiratorially, whispering this in his ear out of necessity – our parents were in the next room.

‘People?’ he asked suspiciously, then stood up and lurched for the door of the cabin that led outside. With a husky tone in his throat he had spat the words at me, ‘Fuck off, pretty-boy.’

It’s been nine months.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came to pick up my parents.’ Hunter holds a car key aloft. ‘They’re pretty drunk. So are yours.’

Hunter walks towards me. The darkness makes his gait appear threatening. He drops his hips in a strange, wolf-like way. He stops about a metre away from me, holding a black rucksack. ‘I said I’d say hi to you before I left. And your parents said it was alright.’

‘Oh.’

Hunter grins. ‘You were—’

‘No,’ I say, for no reason at all, because it’s so obvious.

‘I saw you.’ He is silent for a moment. He wets his lips. ‘Can you?’

‘Of course I can!’ I say crossly.

‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to insult you. It’s just . . . it’s more a boy thing to do, isn’t it?’

‘Oh,’ I mumble, blushing. ‘Err, I guess.’

‘It’s OK.’ He comes to sit on the edge of my bed, and I subtly try, again ineffectually, to move the duvet and sheet a bit more to cover my exposed leg. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed about.’

‘I know.’ I frown.

‘I meant touching the bit you were touching.’

‘What? How long were you at the door?’

He smirks. ‘Can I see?’

‘Um, no!’

‘Forget it,’ he laughs. ‘I don’t really want to. I just . . . ’cause I saw you touching it.’ He pauses, watching my face.

My throat tightens at the ‘it’ word. ‘It’ is not a word I like.

For a while, there is just the sound of both of us breathing heavily, and cautiously in the quiet room. A car passes outside.

‘I’m not going to tell anyone,’ he says, sounding threatening. I look up at him and he smiles.

‘Fuck off,’ I murmur.

‘Ooo!’ He holds his hands up in mock protest, then rests them on his knees and shrugs. ‘I’m just surprised. I just didn’t think you would touch yourself.’ He emphasises the ‘you’.

I think about this, shrug and colour red. ‘Oh. OK. Sorry.’ (
Why did I say sorry?
I think.)

Hunter looks around my room with the proprietary air he has always had regarding my life and possessions. He’s always been the leader and, sometimes, the bully. He’s tall and muscular and masculine. I feel small next to him, wearing just a T-shirt, covered by the duvet. Hunter’s wearing a T-shirt with a band logo on it and jeans, with a heavy metal key chain attached to his belt loops. His arms are strong and hairy. He smells of musky deodorant and beer. I probably smell of shampoo.

‘D’you want a Stella?’ he asks suddenly, as if he has been searching for something to say. ‘I have some in my bag.’

I shrug. ‘Sure.’

He takes two bottles out of his black rucksack and passes me one.

‘Are you alright drinking and driving?’ I say.

Hunter puts his left leg up on the bed and turns to me. I manage to get my leg under the cover and I sit up, sipping the beer.

‘It’s just Stella. Not everybody’s a complete lightweight like you,’ Hunter says, swigging from the bottle like it’s Coke.

‘So . . . what have you been up to? I haven’t seen you in ages,’ I say, careful not to bring up New Year.

Hunter just looks at me from under his eyelashes and rolls his eyes. ‘I grew up.’

I raise my eyebrows. ‘So getting stoned and egging houses is grown up now?’

‘Fuck off, what do you know?’ Hunter mutters, grumpily, but he shoves me as if we were playing, and he keeps his hands on my stomach and moves closer to me on the bed, curling up to me like we used to when we were little. ‘You haven’t changed,’ he says, tousling my hair. He leans on my shoulder.

I smile with the bottle in my mouth and feel beer wetting my bottom lip and chin.

‘Oops,’ I say. Hunter watches me closely, like he’s concentrating, while I wipe it away. ‘Are you drunk?’ I ask.

‘No.’ He looks down and chugs his bottle, then takes the tops off two more. ‘I’m really thirsty.’

I take the bottle he hands me and put it on my bedside table. I can already feel my head going woozy from drinking too fast. Hunter wriggles around on the bed and leans back against the wall, his legs on my lap pinning me down.

‘So . . .’ I try to think of something to talk about. ‘Are you still going out with Kelly Morez?’

‘We weren’t really going out.’

I wait. ‘And that’s all you’re gonna say about it? I know you did it with her, you told me at—’

‘Yeah, I know, at New Year.’ Hunter runs a hand through his hair. ‘It’s not properly sex if you don’t fancy the person.’

‘You didn’t fancy her?’

Hunter shrugs. ‘I like other people more.’ He takes another gulp of Stella. ‘How about you? Seeing anyone?’