Golden Boy (4 page)

I look at him, look at the ceiling, look across the room to my posters – the England Football Team, Dakota Fanning, Saoirse Ronan, the Hemingway Area 1st Football Team’s Junior League victory with me in the centre front row next to Marc and Carl. I look at my DVDs. I look at the dismantled LP player me and Carl found in a car boot sale that we’ve been trying to get to work for over a month. I look at the TV and the tangle of wires that lead to the Xbox live, Wii and old Sega, which is funny to play when you’re drunk late at night.
Halo 4
is on the floor, out of its case, next to a pile of dirty boxers and T-shirts.

‘Oh, Max,’ Hunter groans and ruts at me, his eyes closed. I feel my skin ripping more and squeak, gasp, let out an ‘aah’, pull the pillow over my head, trying to be quiet. His arms enclose my body. I roll to my right a little. He sits up, stops for a moment and takes hold of my legs.

Now he is above me, his torso at a right angle to the bed. I hear the smack of his thighs hitting against mine. A horrible squelching sound is getting louder. He’s sliding in and out freely now, but still roughly, because I’m too tight and small for this. Not made for this. Pain travels up my legs and numbs my toes. I’m embarrassed at the way my body bends, embarrassed at the way it shakes and opens for him. I’m embarrassed and confused as to why I care that I feel ugly, why I want to put my hands over my penis and stop it lolling around. The pain is sharp at the entrance point and dull further inside me. I worry. I wonder what it’s touching. It seems to hit against my stomach. The disbelief and shock shake off a little and the pain mutates into something so strong I have to speak. I slowly take the pillow off my head and grip it tightly above me on the mattress. My throat opens and my voice joins the cacophony of quiet sounds.

‘Oh my god, please!’ I beg him, earnestly. ‘Oh my god, please. Hunter. Please.’

‘Shh, shh,’ he breathes, not looking at my face, his mouth open, his hips moving fast, a strange, confused, flickering spark in his eye. Intent. Excitement. Curiosity. Awe. Desperation. Embarrassment. Realisation. Shame. Want. Need. That opaque gleam. Then, the furious frown and movements of someone who wants to get something over with, get it done. I can hear a slapping sound, I can hear wetness, I can hear the
whomp whomp whomp
of concave things hitting other concave things and the air passing between them. I can hear the quiet creak of the bed. I can hear and smell and feel Hunter’s breath on me.

‘Oh my god,’ he murmurs to himself. ‘I’m gonna . . .’

His body buckles and crouches over me. Hunter lets out a long, low moan. His face is against my chest. His arms stretch out, feeling blindly for my shoulders, then hold them. I wait, while he hugs me.

Maybe twenty seconds pass, and he looks up, not quite meeting my eye. He looks surprised, tearful, and kind of grateful. Grateful and desperate. He wipes a shaking hand around his face.

‘Sorry,’ he mutters. He moves up the bed. I’m lying on my back. He lays on my left side, still inside me, his arm across my chest, his face turned towards me on the pillow, lips next to my ear. I am staring at the ceiling, but I can feel him watching me.

I frown, my breathing slowing, and look down my body. ‘Did you come in me?’

I look over at him, and I see him panic again, then that cloak of anger going up. The petulant lip comes out. ‘What do you care?’

Hunter moves down the bed. He pulls his penis out of me quickly and I let out an ‘errr’, a strange, sick, stuttering, reproachful, apologetic noise. He buckles up.

‘What are you complaining about?’ He pulls on his jumper, which he gets out of his bag. ‘Don’t tell and I won’t tell about you. Don’t tell your mum, either. She’s got enough problems with you and your spacker brother to begin with.’

For some reason, I shake my head and whisper, calmly: ‘I won’t.’

Hunter packs up the empty beer bottles.

‘He’s not a spacker,’ I say.

Hunter looks at me like he’s five years old again, like I’m being mean to him in the playground. It’s his look for when I’ve done something he doesn’t like.

‘Whatever,’ he says.

Then Hunter isn’t there anymore, and it’s just me, lying, legs apart, like a dead bug, flattened to the mattress by pain, and blinking rapidly with my mouth open. Like I can’t believe what just happened, happened. Like I don’t know where I am. Like I am in some alternate reality where there is a possibility that Hunter is a bad person, that my average little bedroom is the scene of a crime, that I could be quietly forced into something so abhorrent I can’t even think the word in my mind and that it could all be over in five minutes.

I hear the creak of the stairs as Hunter’s shoes tap down them. The living room door opens, letting a gale of laughter drift upstairs. I let my aching legs lower to the mattress.

I can hear him saying something to Mum and Dad and Uncle Charlie and Auntie Cheryl, thanking them, saying goodnight, making a joke. They burst out laughing again, my dad’s deep voice roaring beneath my mum’s high-pitched giggle. I hear his mum and dad shuffle out with him, call goodbye. Then the front door closes and footsteps walk down the gravel drive, the gate creaking, the sound of an engine starting, and the crunch of tyres on gravel signals his departure.

A lorry rumbles by on the road outside. My posters are on the walls.
Halo 4
is still on the floor. The night still passes behind the blinds. I am still and quiet and dizzy and shaking. I feel cold and wet and a draft between my legs. I feel sick and vomity. I feel embarrassed and strange and in pain. Voices drift up the stairway.

I sit up slowly, painfully, and pull the covers over myself, with my eyes tight shut.

D
ad and Mum and Auntie Cheryl and Uncle Charlie and Auntie Leah and Uncle Edward are still going on downstairs and talking and stuff. I don’t understand what they have to talk about. Everything they do is so boring. It’s all law and rules and court cases and I told Mum she should do something fun like play video games otherwise she just has a boring life and is boring all the time and then she shouted at me. I don’t understand that woman. I wasn’t being rude. I was being helpful.

They are being so loud it becomes difficult to sleep, so I secretly play my game in my room with the sound turned down. It’s a very complicated game, and it is actually for ages ten and up, but I’m extremely advanced at computing, so it’s easy for me. There are sounds outside my door twice but no one comes in. Sometimes I think they all forget about me. I get angry with them a lot. Max doesn’t forget about me, but sometimes I get angry with him anyway because Mum and Dad think he is so much better than me. They think I don’t know, but I do. I’ll show them when I’m older and am a billionaire robot engineer like that ugly little geek in that film. I won’t be ugly or a geek though. If I am a billionaire I’ll do the smart thing and use my powers to build myself into a super-robot, then buy really cool friends.

There, they are laughing again. It sounds like screaming, like on level thirty when you get to the massacre and take out all the aliens.

Well, if they are going to forget about me I am going to stay up and play my game. So I play and play and play until I hear the cars going home and I get to level twenty-two before I am so tired I cannot play anymore, and I also kill a total of three hundred and thirty-five evil dwarflords.

M
y head hurts from the music at Toby’s all night. He lives in Oxford and goes to the uni. I made him drive me back but he was totally stoned. It was pretty scary.

I don’t do drugs. I tried a few when I was younger, but only idiots like Toby spend their entire lives stoned. I’m dumping him tomorrow. I’ll call him up.

Tonight I made him drop me at the church, because he’s the type that, if he knew where I lived, would come round and play guitar badly outside the window. I’ve been there before and I don’t think my parents can take it again. It’s best, I always think, to compartmentalise.

It’s really quiet at night, and the town looks like someone has sketched it in black and white. All the living people sleep just like the dead, and we share the quiet. I’m in the graveyard. The graves look so sweet in the dark. They’re not scary. They’re not eerie or anything. They’re weird and cute and freaky. I like hanging out here, but you can’t talk at night, because you wake the spirits, and you can’t step on a grave, because that is sacrilege. You don’t want to wake the dead. They sleep on, just like the living. Well, all the living people sleep apart from me, I guess.

A car drives past. I hear the engine humming when it’s still out of sight and I sink into the shadow of a grave.

The car swerves a little on the road, slows, speeds up. I’m close enough to see through the glass, and the car is going slow enough through the town centre for me to recognise the face. It’s a dark-haired guy from the sixth form college. He’s hot. I remember him from parties but I don’t know his name. A man is seated beside him. He looks like a smaller, older version of the driver so it’s probably his dad. A woman is in the back.

Somehow the car spooked me, appearing so suddenly, and when it’s gone I slip out of the church gates and start walking home.

I wish I wasn’t like this. So scared all the time. I feel like the older I get, the more scared I become. I think it’s because you realise, as you grow up, that the world is a worse place than you thought when you were a kid and the worst thing was being pushed by a bully or peeing your pants in class. Now I realise there’s a lot more to fear than that. I get scared of walking around on my own in the dark, scared of guys lurking in the shadows, too scared to live fully, freely. There are all these things that I want to do before I die, and what if I die now, or soon? Another thing that scares me is my life taking shape and solidifying. We’re taking our GCSEs and deciding on AS Level options this year, and in two years we’re off to uni. What if I make the wrong choices?

I get these panic attacks sometimes. I keep a brown paper bag by my bed. That’s why I sometimes stay out at night on my own, like this. It’s to prove to myself that the night is only the world in shadow, that my fears can’t control me, that I have courage.

The dark isn’t even a loss of visibility. It’s just a change of colour, of tone. It’s the same as day, it’s just a different hue.

You need courage to do anything. It’s the same courage you need to take an exam or make choices or write a poem when your last one was shit, as it is to go out at night without feeling terrified. If you fear, you’ll never live. You need courage to do it.

Before I turn into my lane I hear the car one last time: a squeal of wheels and the engine of the car cuts through the stillness of the night as it turns left on Grove Street. Tyre burn. Dude thinks he’s cool. Idiot.

I
t’s this time of morning, just before dawn, that I love the most. It’s the quiet. I didn’t used to notice it, when I was a child, or at college. Now these minutes are the only ones during my day that are not full of noise. It’s funny what we miss about being young, but I miss the proliferation of silence, unfolding before me on a long Sunday afternoon. I remember in our first house in Hemingway, slipping downstairs for a glass of water and looking out the bay window as the sun moved across the garden, or sitting propped up against my pillows in bed, still in the silent waking of the morning, just before the birdsong began and woke Max up. I remember the silences in the flat we used to have just after finishing uni, in the early days of my pregnancy, my bare-chested new husband reading next to me, while I read cheesy crime dramas and thrillers – my guilty pleasure – enjoying the peace before I started my daily ritual of throwing up and aching.