Vince and Joy (2 page)

Vince smiled and half-toyed with the idea of lying, just to gratify his friends, but then he looked at Natalie’s soft face, glowing in the candlelight, one arm draped lovingly around her drunken husband, and decided he’d tell the truth.

‘The night I lost my virginity,’ he began, ‘was the most brilliant night of my life.’

There was a second’s silence broken by Tom. ‘Oh, give over,’ he said. ‘No one enjoys losing their virginity.’

‘But I did,’ said Vince, simply. It was perfect. Just – perfect.’

The group fell silent as they absorbed this unconventional statement. The men looked slightly disappointed, while the women around the table looked at him enquiringly.

‘Go on, then,’ said Claire. ‘Tell us. Who was it?’

‘It was a girl I met in Norfolk. When I was nineteen. Her name was Joy.’

Vince threw his bag on to the bottom level of the stale-smelling bunks, pulled apart the papery curtains painted with ugly brushstroke daisies, and saw her for the first time.

She sat in a deck chair, her knees brought up to her chin, holding a magazine in her right hand while she picked absent-mindedly at black-painted toenails with the other. Her hair was dark brown and to her jaw, with a slight curl that kicked it across her cheeks like wood shavings. She wore all black – a sleeveless vest, oversized army surplus shorts, a frayed canvas ribbon in her hair.

‘Vince – give me a hand with the gas, mate.’ Chris popped his head around the cream melamine door and winked at him.

‘Yeah. In a minute.’ Vince turned back to the window and lifted the curtain again.

She was turning a page and rearranging her neat limbs. She fiddled with a small silver cross on a leather thong that hung around her neck and curled her toes around the frame of the deck chair.

Bangy, bang, bang.

A hairy fist thumping at the window disturbed his reverie.

‘Come on, mate.’ Chris’s face loomed into view.

‘Yeah. OK.’ Vince let the curtain drop, and straightened up.

Shit.

There was a beautiful girl. In the caravan next door. Where for the previous four years there had been three boys, two Staffordshire bull terriers and a couple called Geoff and Diane from Lincolnshire. He stared at his reflection for a minute in the mirror above the gas fire in the living area. He was thrown. He hadn’t factored the possibility of a beautiful girl into the prospect of two-weeks-on-a-caravan-site-in-Hunstanton. There’d never been a beautiful girl here before. Just an ugly girl. An ugly girl called Carol with an even uglier mate called Theresa who threw poorly phrased insults at him, then tried to get off with the sinewy guys who strode across the moving platforms of the Waltzers on Hunstanton pier, pretending to fancy ugly girls as they spun them masochistically in painted cups.

When Vince first came to Hunstanton with Chris and his mum, there’d been other kids of his age to hang out with. They’d gang together and mooch around the fairground, even went to a nightclub once. But as the years passed, they stopped coming. They stayed at home to hang out with their mates or their girlfriends, or they went on holiday with friends to places you needed a passport to get to. Even ugly Carol and Theresa seemed to have something better to do with their summer this year, evidenced by the drawn curtains of their caravan across the way.

Outside, Vince could hear Chris making friendly conversation with the mysterious girl. Fearing that he was missing out on something or, worse still, that Chris was embarrassing him in some way, he pulled his hands
through his James Dean hair, ran a fingertip across the angry red scars beneath his jaw line and headed outside.

‘Just outside London,’ Chris was saying, ‘Enfield. What about you?’

‘Colchester,’ she said, sliding the silver cross back and forth across the leather thong. ‘You know, in Essex?’

‘Aye,’ said Chris, ‘I know Colchester. Oh, look who it is.’ He turned to look at Vince. ‘Vince,’ he said, ‘come and meet our new neighbour. This is Joy’

She was even more beautiful close up. Her skin was alabaster white, but there was something about her features that suggested something far-flung. Her nose was small and chiselled, and her cheekbones were set high in her face, but it was her eyes that held clues to the uncommon. Compact and wide-set, flat-lidded and framed with dense, dark lashes – the eyes of a painted china doll.

‘Hi,’ he said, smiling his new, stiff smile.

‘Hiya,’ she said, resting her magazine on her lap and sitting on her hands.

He noticed her eyes stray to the scars on his jaw, and turned his hands into fists to stop them wandering protectively towards his face.

‘So,’ she said, ‘are you two mates?’

Vince looked at Chris in mock horror. ‘God, no,’ he said, ‘Chris is my stepdad.’

‘Really? How come?’

‘Well, he married my mum.’ He and Chris exchanged a look and laughed.

‘Oh, right. Of course. Just you look kind of the same age.’

‘Yeah – everyone says that. Chris is ten years older than me, though. He’s twenty-nine. I’m nearly nineteen.’

‘Right,’ she said, looking from one to the other, almost as if doubting their story. ‘And where’s your wife? Your mum?’

‘She’s at the Spar,’ said Chris, hauling the gas canister out of the little wooden cupboard and blowing some cobwebs off it. ‘Getting us some tea. Should be back in a minute. Oh, talk of the devil, here she is.’

Kirsty’s green Mini pulled up alongside the caravan and came to a halt with a crunch of gravel under rubber.

‘Give us a hand, you two,’ she said, heading for the boot.

Chris instantly dropped the canister and went to his wife’s assistance. Vince nodded at Joy and rubbed at his scars.

‘God, is that your mum?’ said Joy.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘She’s gorgeous.’

Vince turned, expecting to see Beatrice Dalle or someone standing there, but, no, it was just his mother.

‘How old is she? She doesn’t look old enough to have a son your age.’

‘Thirty-seven, I think. Thirty-eight. Something like that.’

‘Bloody hell. She’s younger than my mum was when she
had
me.’

They both stared at Vince’s mum for a while, and Vince tried to think of something to say. This was officially the longest dialogue he’d ever exchanged with a girl who wasn’t either in his class or going out with one of
his mates, and the conversation felt like a flighty shuttle-cock he was trying to keep in the air with the force of his will alone. He wanted to ask her something interesting. Something about music maybe, or her intriguing slanted eyes. Or what a beautiful girl like her was doing on a shitty caravan site like this. A dozen potential conversational openers formed in his head and were discounted in a nano-second – too personal, too naff, too boring, too much.

The silence drew out like a held breath.

Vince looked from Joy to his mum’s car and back again while he tried to think of the next thing to say. You staying long?’ he managed eventually, with a rush of blood to his head.

‘Another fortnight,’ she said, ‘worse luck.’

‘What happened to Geoff and Diane?’

‘Who?’

‘The people who own your caravan.’

‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Mum and Dad are renting it off someone or other.’ She pulled her hands out from under her and turned them upwards in a gesture of ignorance. She obviously didn’t care about Geoff or Diane, or whose caravan she was staying in. He was officially the most boring man in the world.

‘Right,’ he said as silence descended again. Joy rustled the pages of her magazine and Vince felt a deep blush developing in his chest area.

‘So,’ he said, his hand rising subconsciously to his scars again, ‘I’ll see you around then?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I guess you will.’

Her eyes were already dropping to her magazine. He’d
lost her. But then, mused Vince, as he took a cache of carrier bags from his mother and mounted the stairs to the caravan, he’d never really had her. Of course he hadn’t. He was Vincent Mellon. Or Melonhead, as he’d been known at school. He’d been stupid to think that some operation, some bit of surgery, was going to change that. He couldn’t talk to girls when he was ugly, and he couldn’t talk to girls now he was supposedly ‘good-looking’ either.

When he came out two minutes later, the deck chair was empty and the girl called Joy was nowhere to be seen.

Vincent Mellon had been born with an underbite. It hadn’t really shown up until he was a few years old, but from that point on he’d resembled a very small, hairless bulldog. As he got older it transpired that Vince didn’t just have an underbite – he didn’t have a small but charming imperfection that added character to his face – but that his bottom jaw protruded so far ahead of his upper jaw that he couldn’t actually chew properly. Anything that required being fed into the oral orifice and bitten through – a doner kebab, for example, or a custard cream – was out of bounds. Things needed to be cut up and transferred into the very back of his mouth, bit by bit, with a fork or spoon. Not only that, but because of the misalignment of his upper and lower teeth two of his molars had started to erode as well, and eventually anything chewier than a tender piece of chicken had become virtually impossible to deal with.

Vince’s underbite, in other words, was not just an aesthetic blight and a total embarrassment; it was also a significant physical disability. Which was why after years
of treatment and check-ups, the NHS had finally paid for him to have corrective surgery last year. Too late to save his schooldays from being a complete washout, or to do anything about that fact that he was still a virgin at the age of nearly nineteen, but just in time, he supposed, to give him a chance in hell of getting a girl to French kiss him before his twenty-first birthday.

No girl had wanted to kiss him with the underbite. No girl had even wanted to
talk
to him with an underbite, unless they really had to. And by the time he’d had surgery, he’d left school, hence severing the only contact he ever had with girls.

The surgery itself had been a nightmare: months of agony, of mouth braces, pureed food and painkillers. He’d made a recluse of himself, unable to face the world looking like Jaws and feeling like a cripple.

Oh, my goodness,’ his mum had squeaked when the final braces were removed two months ago. Oh, my God, look at you.
Look at you.
Oh, heavens – you look so…
handsome?

Vince had stared at his new reflection in the mirror and tried to make sense of what he was looking at. He saw hazel eyes in shadowy sockets and he saw the soft wide boxer’s nose he’d inherited from his dead father. And just below the nose he saw a whole load of new stuff: a strong, solid jaw, a full shapely mouth with lips that met and a good-shaped chin. He’d pulled his lips apart and stared in awe at his teeth as the upstairs set finally made the acquaintance of their downstairs neighbours. Then he’d turned his head slightly to view his new profile. His lips had an almost regal curl to them and his
nose now formed the peak of his facial contours, instead of his lower jaw. He no longer looked like a bulldog. He looked like… like…

‘You look just like your dad,’ his mum had said, finally peeling her hand away from her mouth. ‘Just like him. It’s… uncanny. It’s like, like…’ Then she’d started crying.

Vince’s dad, Max, had died on his motorbike when Kirsty was eight and a half months pregnant with Vince. Vince had seen his dad only in photos, a big, strong, long-haired man in jeans and leather who seemed so far removed from him in every way that he’d never even considered the possibility that he might look like him.

He’d tried to bring Max’s face to his mind in the consulting room that day, tried to mentally superimpose it over his own. But he couldn’t. All he could see was a tall, skinny bloke in a black polo neck with a face that didn’t quite look familiar, an image he would never be able to reconcile with that of his macho, moustachioed dead father.

Vince had vowed that he wouldn’t go to Hunstanton again after he left school. Last summer was the last time, he’d promised himself. He was booked in for surgery this time last year; had envisaged that come the following summer he’d be far too busy having sex to come back here with his mum and Chris. But it hadn’t quite worked out like that. His social life, if anything, had diminished since the surgery as he’d lost touch with his school friends. And here he was, five days off his nineteenth birthday and stuck on a bunk bed in a damp old caravan with his mum, her husband and a chemical toilet. Still, on the bright side, he’d just bought himself a Sony Discman
and five new CDs, the sun was shining and there was a beautiful girl next door. A really, really beautiful girl.

All he had to do now was miraculously turn into an interesting, sexy, vibrant and irresistible man whom said beautiful girl might have even the slightest interest in talking to and this experience might turn out OK after all.

‘Shit,’ said Joy, dashing back into the caravan and fanning her face with her magazine, ‘shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.’

She slammed the door closed behind her and leaned against it breathlessly, taking a moment to catch her breath before heading for the mirror.