Half Plus Seven (5 page)

Take two I had less to do with. Everyone had a friend of their mother's they fantasised about. It was a rite of passage for all young men, like being sick off cheap liquor or growing a particularly bad bum-fluff moustache and thinking it added years to your age when in reality it gave you the look of the Saturday boy at a dusty Mexican filling station. You know,
the
friend, not the one who baked succulent cakes or organised the Parent Teacher Association. The one whose look would linger on you a little too long as you brought her an ashtray as she drew on a cigarette at your mum's Tupperware party. Dark red lipstick framing the trail of smoke. Well, it wasn't her. But by Christ I wish it had have been. Instead it was Rosie Jenkins, who lived four doors down from our house and was a pretty big wheel on our Neighbourhood Watch committee. There had been a party at The Jenkins' house to celebrate their eldest daughter Sylvia getting the grades she'd needed to go to Oxford. They were that kind of family. Well all apart from Scott, who was a year younger than me, and highly impressionable. The party, if you could call it that, had been Dullsville 5000. Proud uncles. Goofy kids. Local busybodies nosing through the kitchen cupboards. Lame with a capital L. Until I told Scotty that drinking whisky put hairs on your balls and that he should see what his daddy had locked away in the cellar. To really lay it on thick I pulled out a pube. Social proof. Sure enough he returned with a 3/4 full bottle of Glenfiddich and 5/6 later I'd passed out under the coats on the Jenkins' matrimonial bed.

Now Mr Jenkins was a dog and had his eye on my mother that night, trying to impress her with his tales of Indian railway rides and his insight into Hemingway's short stories, moving just a little too close to hear her reaction on the Calcutta to Bombay Express. When she tried to escape him, leaving the marquee they'd erected to mark the special occasion for some fresh air and a menthol cigarette, he'd followed, cigar cutter in hand. Not being much of a drinker herself and unable to see her husband, Mrs J retired up the wooden hill, thinking it best to leave the rest of the night to Sylvia. It was her night after all. Moving the Barbours to one side to find a body in the bed, she whispered,

‘Come on Albie, let's do it like old times. Our little girl's all grown up and going to college…'

And so I let her ride me. I had a raging hard-on from dreaming about Mrs Brannigan, my mother's friend with the dark red fuck-me lips. We'd been doing it on a craps table in Vegas, while a crowd of ice-blonde Russian double agents and Texans in 10 gallon hats watched on aghast but aroused. Coming round to being mounted by a 40-something plump lady, while initially disconcerting, was still as rare as hens' teeth for me so I kept as quiet as I could. The old girl didn't usually hit the sauce and was so gone on Babycham and gin she didn't seem to notice. I managed to last longer than with Laura, which I think I have the whisky to thank for. She soon tired, rolled off and started snoring. Sobered up mentally if not physically, I got the hell out of there. The party had died down by then and I managed to escape unnoticed. I even managed to knock one out thinking about the Vegas situation when I got back. Right in Ivana Kickarlakov's apple martini. I was getting better at this.

Ever since that night I kind of took Scotty under my wing, making sure he wasn't picked last on street football teams, that he didn't catch hell off the kids on the school bus. Apparently his old man hit the fucking roof about the missing whisky but it was Sylvia's then-boyfriend who got the blame. They never did think he was good enough for her anyway, what with her going to Oxford and all. There's a lesson for Mr Jenkins in there: try to fuck my mother, I'll fuck your wife. And drink your whisky. Not a bad mantra to live by, that one.

Third time was most definitely not lucky. After the incident with Mrs Jenkins I'd gone through a bit of a dry spell. Which for a 16-year-old who's just been introduced to the reality that other people could help you get your rocks off is a bit like telling a dope fiend they've won a muffin factory in a raffle and then hiding their ticket. It was tough. I figured the only way anyone was going to have sex with me again was by investing the time in a girlfriend. The lucky fuck I'd had was like a lottery win, albeit one in a developing country. Finding a girlfriend wasn't going to be the easiest task for a spotty little smoker like me. Sure, Laura had gone for that routine, but she was pretty wild. I don't mean sexually, just in her outlook. What I needed was a nice girl. One to take home to my mother, which I certainly couldn't do with Mrs Jenkins.

I was clearing about ten fags a day now, and was struggling to pay for them through my measly pocket money and occasional gifts from well-meaning aunts. There was a particularly sharp card racket being led on the 512 bus by an entrepreneurial kid by the name of Tony Bonano, but my hand rarely came up. So I got myself a Saturday job at the local pet superstore. Petsworld: Where Pets Are Friends.

The first time I saw Trisha she was in the dog grooming parlour, wearing a red all-in-one shell boiler suit, blow-drying a particularly vicious poodle. She remained patient. She was caring. She seemed kind. A giver. Just what I needed. I'd yet to realise that these qualities in a 16-year-old girl equalled frigidity.

We endured what my grandfather would have referred to as a long courtship. If I'd have been a fish I'd have wiggled my tail so much my scales would have fallen off. But I wasn't. I was a cashier at a large domestic animal emporium. The equivalent of my waggle-dance could be finding the price on a tin of dog food, giving her the coppers from my float or dealing with difficult gay couples returning dog chains with guilty faces. Anything to build up enough good will for some form of physical contact. I had to be her work bitch for six whole months before she'd even see me outside of my yellow uniform. Oh, and not like that. Not out of my clothes, just in a non-work situation. Where the same routine picked up. For dog food prices see helping with homework, for float fiddling see walking her home from work, for rent-boy refunds see chaperoning to awful fucking chick flicks.

But good things come to those who wait. That's what decades of Guinness advertising taught me. Unfortunately, while Trisha looked good in the glass, the drinking certainly wasn't quite as good as a pint of the black stuff. Similar iron content, but mostly from the blood that seeped out of her pussy, down my legs and all over my boxfresh Adidas Trimm Trabbs. They were ruined, and so was she. It was her first time. As someone with two stripes on my shoulder already I'd quickly become unsympathetic to the traumas of the newly christened. ‘Doing It' hadn't turned out to be what Trisha was led to believe by glossy magazines, late night shows and sluttier friends. And after becoming a virtual pariah to get a fuck, I now couldn't give one. Next.

Anyway, enough of those early scores and back to the one who actually meant something once, somewhere in the deep and dark distant past. Her name was Deborah. The three year honeymoon period afforded by a slack degree and slacker attitude to knicker elastic had been glorious, but as with all good things, I had too much, too soon. A weariness snuck in, a plateau had been reached. After the Kodak moment of throwing our caps in the air on the steps of some ancient limestone building paid for by the slave trade, a very real, tax-paying, putting the bins out on a Monday existence had had to start. No more 2-4-1 nights, no more long lazy naked afternoons. The honeymoon had become a retirement cruise, only with less buffet lunches. Like meeting up with a holiday romance who seemed less exotic when the backdrop shifted from palm trees to pallid streets, once removed from the carefreeness of college, our relationship seemed a trick. This wasn't what I signed up for. I was just glad of a shag, and got carried away. I always get carried away.

When the rat race replaced the sack race, we had excuses to see each other less and less. Carving out some kind of crappy career got in the way, but frankly work became a welcome reason to keep out of her way. Take away the fucking – which she was – and the girl who'd helped me hit my sexual stride was boring, staid and dull dull dull.

Fun was a box-set. A new recipe. A farmer's market. A visit from her parents. As a 20-something, I still wanted my life to be ripe with recklessness to feed my inner raconteur. Not a patchwork quilt, Pecan pie and E fucking R. One day. Perhaps. I'd rather drink in the pub, making friends with strangers. I'd climb into our bed later and later, with no explanation asked for or offered. She'd resigned herself to not wondering what we were doing that weekend. She already knew. She was sitting in, alone. I was out, somewhere, anywhere but there. Crawling from park bench to party to strange beds to her. We were in a circle so vicious it had teeth. Something had to give.

And that was when she asked me the big question. My answer confirmed what 12 months of Byronesque behaviour had illustrated. I was in love with the idea of her. I was also in love with the idea of the three day week, free bars and blow-jobs on the National Health Service but often the 2 + 2 of the ideal and the reality made 76. I couldn't face the months of perpetual groveling and not being myself that was the by-product of easing the conscience after an indiscretion. Which would inevitably lead to others. It was time for a spring-clean. This, for a messy fucker like me, was damned hard work. Luckily, cleaning of any kind was not high on the agenda in my new place of residence.

After leaving Deborah I'd floated around on stained sofas and friends' floors for a while until I took a room with a couple close to the Turkish part of town. Now, I don't mean that it looked like Constantinople. More that every other shop front showed off a grotesque picture of a doner kebab. The area was less up-and-coming, more been-and-gone. I'd met Craig and Connie in one of the many pubs I frequented and they'd seemed idealistic, environmentally aware, in love and short of cash. Fuck knows why they thought I'd make a good housemate but the pursuit of money pushes people into very strange situations. I'd thought that for a couple of hundred a month I could perhaps learn something about relationships from them. Either that or split them up. One of the two. Time would tell.

The house was from the Victorian period and retained much of the era's ambience. The living room was very well lived in, the walls and upholstery taking on a nicotined hue that could well have been a desirable shade had Keith Richards been an interior designer. A barefooted walk on the carpet was a lucky dip with prizes of burnt roaches, ring-pulls or pizza crusts. The
piece de resistance w
as a poster of a ginger cat clinging by its claws for dear life from a broken branch, underneath the bubble-written advice to ‘Hang On In There'. Sitting on the sofa and looking at it felt like being in a post-apocalyptic Athena.

My bedroom would certainly never fall foul of the Trade Descriptions Act. It was a room, with a bed, and no space for much else. This spartan approach to my quarters felt like a well-earned penance for leaving my cosy flat and cold girlfriend behind. Who needed Ikea side tables, feature mirrors and retro lamps anyway? Just more stuff to throw in the heat of an argument. It was fair to assume that it was best if I kept the lights switched off when bringing company back.

The bathroom had the unusual feature of a secret passage, which led downstairs. Although it wasn't so secret. There was no need to pull on a dusty tome on a bookshelf for it to be revealed. At the toilet's three o'clock was a gaping big hole which looked out directly over the kitchen sink. This made shits perhaps more interesting due to the conversational possibilities on offer, but certainly more self-conscious. The stench caused by my body repelling the red wine and Guinness I saw fit to constitute lunch wafted down to the kitchen, rarely being drowned out by the smells of the cheap nutritional non-entities those poor fucks I lived with served up each and every night. It was a wonder the three of us didn't catch scurvy.

Chapter 6

‘Carter Road… number 35. Which side is that? On the right? Ahhh. I used to see a girl who lived in the first road off there on the left. When I was in University, that was. Cracking girl. Cracking girl.'

He looked wistfully to his shelf of certificates and family portraits.

‘Never did know what became of her. That was way back in the seventies.' He looked at the records on the computer screen. ‘Before you were even born, lad. Anyway, what can I do for you?' My eye scanned the room and rested upon his shelf. Old medical prizes and photos of kids, horses, holidays. One photo looked at me. 1976-2004 read some gold lettering at the bottom of an Olan Mills style portrait. I looked back to Dr Edwards. Same wavy hair, but greyer. Same apple shaped head. Same monobrow. Fuck. If the son of a practicing medical professional could peg it before thirty, what chance did I have?

‘Anyway, lad, what can I do for you?'

‘Well it's a bit of a delicate matter to be honest, Doc…'

‘Come on lad, my business is delicate matters. There's nothing on God's green earth I haven't seen twice in this room.'

‘It's to do with my…'

‘Penis? Your old boy?

‘Erm… yes.'

‘Right, well let's have a look at him then. Come on, don't be shy. Mrs Walters is waiting to see me next and the poor old girl's got chronic bronchitis. Over on the table there….'

‘Okay.'

I'd never before undone my belt under the watchful eye of a moustached middle-aged man. It was all very procedural. I imagined this is what being bummed in public school was like. Very matter of fact.