Noughties (2 page)

Lucy was my secondary-school sweetheart. She’s a year younger than me and therefore, in school terminology, falls under the ominous label of “The Year Below,” such distinctions being vital in the zitty adolescent universe. We hooked up the summer before I went down to Oxford, three years ago now, and fast-tracked our way through the various steps of romantic training—an eight-week intensive in Sex Theory and Love Management.

I remember those early days vividly. She used to leave pieces of herself in the bed for me to commune with through the night: bittersweet surprises, proof of our love and decay. She’d douse the sheets in her secret smells, deftly scattering personal trimmings under the duvet and atop
the pillow: long brown hairs like fragile question marks, arranging themselves into the broken outlines of a sketch; minute bits of skin like the baubles on a damp towel; all those mysterious stains and pools of our concentric love.

On my last night at home—my final night before the horror-movie transformation into lager-lube student—everything still felt so new. There we lay, fallen creatures. The fledgling months, ah—

“Same again, mate?” asks Jack tentatively. I tilt my glass and soberly evaluate the contents … nearly empty.

“Yeah, cheers.” I drain the leftover. Jack’s heading off to the bar.

Where was I? Yes, the fledgling months … they’re the sweetest, are they not? Explorations into the unknown and no turning back. Discovering new creases and folds, hidden moles and scars, we marked up the cartography of each other’s bodies. Our greedy hands learned to the touch, molding and impressing, leaving imprints for rediscovery to be fitted into again and again. We puzzled over our astonishing elasticity, pioneering to establish ourselves.

Oh Lucy …

Not that everything was so profound on my “farewell” night. There was, for instance, the sexed-up playlist singing instructively in the background with all its hints and prompts: Vandross, Marvin, Prince, Boyz II Men, Bazza White, Sade … which must have had her thinking how white and unsexy I was in comparison, and how small my— no, no, no! You can’t say that kind of thing! All it had me thinking of, on the other hand, was my parents’ vinyl collection, forcing involuntary images upon me that I just didn’t need, that I just don’t ever need, believe me:
I do not want to have sex with my mum. And Dad, put that away RIGHT NOW!
Luckily Lucy did not take the lyrics as a
direct representation of my intentions (“You want to do what to my what?,” “You’re gonna spray your what all over my where?”), though there was considerable calamity when the iPod malfunctioned and switched of its own accord to
Reign in Blood
by American heavy-metal outfit Slayer (how’d that get on there?). I leaped from my bed to the thrashing riffs and commando-rolled across the floor, my buttocks flashing pale like two miniature moons, groping after the disobedient audio player. Eventually the sound track played itself out (coming in around the thirty-minute mark, which I have to admit was wildly ambitious on my part) and we snuggled down on the embarrassed bed.

Lucy peered up at me with inquiring eyes, her naked figure censored by the shelter of my side. Her dark brown hair, with its subtle sheen of ocher, fanned out over the pillow like an upended curtain tassel, and her heavy tan bolstered the already potent comedy of my fridge-white skin. I’m like a man wrapped in printer paper to look at in the buff. Weak-kneed from the cold scrutiny and paranoia that swallows you whole after orgasm, I was glad to be lying down.

“I don’t want this summer to ever end,” she whispered.

This was my cue. We’d begun our relationship under the promise to split come summer’s end, when I would leave for Oxford. Not my idea. Lucy, with her extra year left at school, thought it gallantly realistic and (mistakenly) what I wanted to hear. But then we were ignorant of adult complication. I begrudgingly accepted our relationship’s small print, secretly ambitious to violate this most restrictive clause. I didn’t care about rocking up to uni an available man. I really didn’t. I’d begun to revel in my not-for-sale status; in our private culture for two.

“But I guess it’s time,” she concluded, a lilt of martyrdom in her voice.

I would be leaving the next morning to become, as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby puts it, “an Oxford man”—whatever that means. The ruffled bed was surrounded by boxes brimming with my stuff—books (battered Dickens, partially read Shakespeare, unthumbed Joyce, Eliot, Wordsworth, Keats, straight from the uni reading list), DVDs (
Partridge, Sopranos, Curb
), clothes (flimsy tees and skinny jeans), CDs (the Stones, Leonard Cohen, Talking Heads, some old-school hip-hop, Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, D’Angelo). I stroked the top of Lucy’s inside thigh—that part of a girl’s body so exquisitely smooth and soft it feels like you’re about to slip off the earth.

“Suppose we don’t want to break up,” I risked.

Her eyes widened as she pulled closer, and I felt a flutter of clichés coming over me.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t really want to end this.”

“No, neither do I.”

“Will you come visit me next week?”

“Of course.”

I chewed on the inside corner of my mouth, creating that subtle metallic taste of silent concentration. I tried forecasting how the turn of the conversation might impact our futures, how it would actually unfold, but the vision was limited by the soft warmth of the body next to mine.

“Shall we just stay together then?” I asked.

Lucy has an adorable habit of nodding along in conversation, regardless of the content—a kind of ready agreeability—but this time it seemed thrillingly conscious: “Yes … I think we should,” she said.

“Awesome,” I said (a sublime note to end on, I thought).

“Great.”

The wallpaper in this joint is waxy; smoke-stained from times of yore. It’s lumpy and tactile, like a golden-brown resin caked over the top of dead insects: worm circles and cockroach grids, the patterns of nausea. The furniture is despairingly ad hoc: drippy tables and diverse races of chairs rubbing up against each other; tall and thin, short and fat, sunken, bony, flappy and slappy, and all else in between. These death-row seats, those unholy pews, don’t so much nuzzle our buns as butt them away.

“It’s proper muggy in here,” says Jack with an air of constraint, like he’s trying to dispel an unacknowledged awkwardness.

“Is it,” I concur.

I’ve been dreading this night for three years now, all of which have been spent looking the other way, hoping it would never come. But it finally has, with its big hairy balls dangling in my terrified face: the end of my student “career” (don’t you dare laugh!) as I pass into— no, can’t say it … 
mustn’t
say it.

Immediately to our right stands a harem of females, pretty, but clearly underage. It’s easier to sneak in on busy nights like this. They’re getting chatted up by some smarmy postgrads who should know better. Trouble is, they know they can’t
do
any better, punching above their weight and below the law.

“Been Pizza Express with the girls,” yaps the head teenager, twirling her hair and fluttering her lids in response to some tiresome questions-by-numbers, administered by the overeducated elders. The front man of the latter is a gangly
specimen of the DPhil variety—a red-faced piece of lank—and he plies the fairer sex with Smirnoff Ices and WKDs. He’s the type of bell-end who’ll order a half pint and pay for it by card.

“That’s so cool,” he says, an unfashionable turtleneck irritating his shave-sore jugular. The girls look like nervous peacocks, pastried over with gunky layers of makeup, debilitated by high heels and cling-film miniskirts. We grimace at each other knowingly as these older hard-ons work their desperate black magic. We roll our eyes and make obscene gestures.

Ella, Abi, and Megan arrive and join us by the quiz machine. My skin prickles and I can feel the color rising to my face. I can’t even look at Jack. “Evening ladies?” chirps Abi with the habitual rising intonation, like she’s asking a question. We grin sheepishly (ever seen a sheep grin?). And before you can shout that B: Joe Strummer (not D: Joe Bummer) was the front man of The Clash, they’ve been served. Fact: girls get served quicker than boys. They have a preternatural ability to make barmen bend to their every whim.

Guzzle, guzzle, chug.

Megan is pretty inconsequential as far as my narrative is concerned, but Abi and Ella deserve mentionable spots in the dramatis personae (Abi in the minor category, Ella in the major). Abi is all makeup and short skirt—the kind of girl who becomes increasingly fascinating in dark scenarios, supplemented by copious booze—while Ella is more inscrutable and weightier of soul. Ella’s got her big-night purple dress on and the matching heels to boot, which further compounds the sense of occasion. Our very last night? It’s hard to believe. Ella gives me a loaded look; just a glance, yes, but rammed with so much history and heartbreak. The
minute glisten in the corner of her left eye is enough to spark a personal revolt. (A girl bearing a pitcher of Pimm’s on her head squeezes past, granting me a second’s relief.) If only I had the words and colors to paint the visionary dreariness of my feelings for Ella. But I don’t. They are unknown to me. She means everything, and sometimes everything is too much … everything overwhelms and confuses, and what I need right now is distinction. There is such a crowding of thoughts, such an excess of emotions jostling inside of me, scrambling to get out. If only I had the words …

I dart my eyes away and sip my beer. I realize that I’ve got to face up to it all, but it still messes with me. And yes, I realize that now is the time to grow a pair. Whether or not I have the skills to do this is wide open. I feel like a puppy, poised and tense, watching the leaves flutter in the breeze as he learns the physics of the mysterious universe around him.

I know what the root of all this turmoil is though. It’s the one thing I know for sure. I am unbearably aware of what I’m running from. Michaelmas term of my second year, when I was—

“Photo!” screams Abi, waving her flash new camera in the air, putting me off my stride. Everyone groans with fake weariness while sorting their hair and straightening their outfits. We’re conceited little buggers. These’ll be on the Internet tomorrow—mugshot.com—verifiable and incriminating.

“One two three?” Abi counts down, wishing she was in the huddle too. A right cheesy one, I can tell; all pouts, grins, and carefully cultivated embraces. We’re pros at this stuff: the performance of a private life. Produced for all to have a gander, we make ourselves into mini-celebrities. We want everything to be known and we want to be bitten for
it. But that’s just how it feels, right now, so early in the century.

“Let’s see, let’s see,” we shout, inspecting our handiwork. We piss-take Sanjay’s half-shut eyes. Megan secretly rues her roundness and tastes a deep pang of dissatisfaction, suffering in silence. Minor characters, negotiating their self-loathing.

“Gross. Take another,” demands Ella.

Now, we all know that people judge ensemble pieces entirely on their own performance, so it seems doubly ridiculous for Ella to complain when she is obviously the stunner of the cast. Nevertheless, she strolls over to a group of lads, tossing her wavy blonde hair over a bare shoulder (the hair and neck you yearn to touch and nuzzle), and asks one of them to do the honors.

“Sure.”

Ella is an effortless ingratiator. Any one of these fellas would’ve clambered to push her button, simplified and softened by the measured attention. I remember my own initial encounter. It was the first night of university, a cocktail event in college, when the real world was but a drowning murmur far off in the distance. Lecherous second-years sharked about, scanning the fresh talent, mixing drips of Coke and lemonade into plastic storage boxes filled with cheap vodka and Bacardi. Ella and I waded our separate ways through the frantic mob of small-talkers (Hey what’s your name where you from what you studying what’s your name again?) to scoop our cups in the toxic vats. She caught my eye.

“This stuff tastes of arse,” I said.

“Mine’s not
that
good.”

I laughed. I was terrified.

“Here, try some,” she said.

Before passing the cup, she ventured an emboldened mouthful for herself, an elastic cord of saliva connecting the brim to her succulent lips as she pulled away. Stretched tight—tight as the chestline on her panting red boob tube—the string snapped, pinging with abandon into the drink. I took the cup and pressed my mouth against the lip-glossed rim, swigging her while she smiled at me. That drink, more than any (and there’ve been many), went straight to my head. It went charging, leaving dizzying shock waves in its wake …

We’re ready for photo take-two. The girls turn on their pouts (they’re hardwired for this shit), Jack points at Ella like a gimp, and Abi leans her head on my shoulder. I strategically fold my arms to make my biceps look bigger. Cheese.

“Would you rather sneeze every time you orgasm, or orgasm every time you sneeze?” asks Jack with considerable sincerity. He’s saved this ice-breaker precisely for the moment the girls arrive, I’m sure of it. Abi loves these games more than anyone.

“Give me a break?” says Abi. “The latter? Of course? Firstly, you avoid the embarrassment of sneezing in the bloke’s face every time you come? And secondly, who’s gonna complain about bonus orgasms?”

“I can just picture you,” says Jack, “dallying in wheat fields, staring at the sun, rolling around in the grass with no clothes on … probably lodging a feather up your nose …”

“But what if you want to protect the specialness of the orgasm?” interjects Ella, sweet and earnest. “Won’t it lose all effect and … meaning?”

“What, you’re just gonna sneeze up in the fella’s grill?”
says Sanjay, the repulsiveness of such an outcome intelligible in the scorn of his voice.

“What if you’ve got severe allergies? You’d be buckling at the knees all day long!” says Megan.

“What if you’re allergic to orgasms?” I add as a witty modification.

“That would suck cock?” declares Abi. The entire group nods in concurrence. We’ve all got one thing on our minds now … the one thing that’s always on our minds …