Vince and Joy (5 page)

Her last contact with a real man hadn’t even been with a real man. It had been with Kieran Saunders, an acne-stricken seventeen-year-old from Dagenham she’d met at a bus stop when she was fourteen. He’d strolled past, in a fringed leather jacket, stringy legs in black denim and oversized feet in enormous DMs. He’d done a double take when he saw Joy sitting there in her school uniform. She’d watched him wander up the road away from her, turning back every now and then to glance at her, before suddenly doubling back, plonking himself down and offering her a cigarette.

Joy’s first impression of Kieran was that he smelled – of cigarette smoke and clothes that had dried forgotten in the washing machine. And she’d been mesmerized by
one pimple in particular, a red one on the underside of his jaw with the ripest-looking yellow head she’d ever seen. She had agreed to give him her phone number mainly because she was too polite to say no and too slow off the mark to give him a false one.

He’d arrived at her house to pick her up for their first date the following week. He stood on her doorstep in leather and denim, fuchsia Crazy-Color combed through the peroxide of his cockatiel hair and a large bunch of matching chrysanthemums in his scuffed hands.

He told her he loved her after their third date and bought her an engagement ring from Elizabeth Duke six months later. It was gold with three small sapphires and two tiny rubies embedded in the band. She’d worn it because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

‘How come you never tell me that you love me?’ he’d asked one evening. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’

She’d looked into his big, tender eyes, felt every shred of his nervous and unadulterated love for her and realized that there was only one thing she could possibly say to him.

‘Yes,’ she’d said, smiling and taking his hand. ‘Yes, of course I do.’

It hadn’t even occurred to her that she could say no.

They had spent hours on his single bed kissing and caressing. Joy didn’t enjoy the feeling of his slick tongue inside her mouth or his bitten-down fingernails on her flesh. As their fumblings progressed from over clothes to under clothes and from under clothes to inside clothes, Joy enjoyed it less and less. But she never denied him anything. She even let him guide her hand into his trousers
one wet afternoon, and on to his clammy testicles. Once there she had no idea what to do next, and Kieran was too shell-shocked to find himself with Joy’s hand on his balls to push things any further, so she’d cupped them with as much enthusiasm as she could muster until she’d felt it was polite to remove her hand and place it somewhere less personal.

Joy didn’t permit Kieran’s fumblings because she felt sorry for him. It wasn’t an act of charity. Nor did she permit them because she was intimidated in any way. And she didn’t permit it because she felt she should be grateful, either. She permitted it, purely and simply, because she didn’t believe she had the right not to. If she’d said no to Kieran at any point, she would in effect have been suggesting that she was better than him. And although anyone looking at Joy and Kieran objectively would have seen in a flash that she was way out of his league, although her parents were openly nauseated by the well-intentioned but unsavoury Kieran and the thought of him laying a finger on their beautiful, delicate girl, Joy just didn’t see it that way. She wasn’t anything special, so she had no right to deny other people the things they really wanted.

Luckily for Joy, Kieran never asked her for her virginity. He’d treasured Joy’s virginity almost as much as Joy had been baffled by it; had held her hand in his while his eyes welled up with tears when she told him that she’d never had sex with anyone. As far as Kieran was concerned, Joy’s virginity was such a precious jewel that no one in the world, least of all him, should be allowed to take it away.

They’d split up after two years when Joy had got to
the end of her tether with the incessant hours of unful-filling canoodling on Kieran’s single bed and had realized that ending the relationship was the only way to make it stop. He’d cried so much that snot had bubbled out of his nose, but been otherwise dignified. He’d brought her yellow flowers and a nylon bear on her birthday a week later, then she’d never seen him again.

On her first day in the sixth form, Miranda, one of the school bullies, took a sudden shine to her. She plied Joy with cigarettes and spliffs and little blue pills until one autumn evening, two months into their new ‘friendship’, sitting on the banks of the M25, watching the setting sun and halfway through a bottle of Wild Turkey, Miranda had suddenly pinioned Joy to the grass and stuck her tongue down her throat.

Joy allowed Miranda to explore the inside of her mouth and the contours of her teeth, to her heart’s content. She even allowed Miranda to pull up her T-shirt and lick her nipples, but as neither of them really had any idea what happened next in an encounter of this kind it never really went any further. The friendship had fizzled out when Miranda met a proper grown-up lesbian at half term who taught her how to do things properly and since then Joy had remained completely untouched.

Joy didn’t really understand the concepts of sex or desire. She’d never in her almost eighteen years met anyone with whom she could contemplate having sex; never felt her loins stir or tingle. The idea of being penetrated felt alien to her, like swallowing a hardboiled egg whole, or threading a piece of string through her head,
from ear to ear. She’d had crushes on pop stars and actors, and she’d had crushes on the unattainable boys from the grammar school down the road, but she’d never, ever felt pure carnal desire in her life.

Up until now.

She watched Vince walking back towards her, across the pub, clutching two pints of lager. She liked his hair, thick and light brown, curling naturally into a soft quiff at the front, military short at the back and sides. He was wearing a black Fred Perry tucked into black gabardine peg-fronted trousers. His neck was heavy and smooth, and his shoulders were wide and strong. His big, handsome hands made the pint glasses look insubstantial. He was the man she wanted to lose her virginity to. From nought to sixty. Just like that.

‘So,’ she said, breathing him in as he sat down next to her, ‘tell me about the scars.’ And that was the other thing about this Vince person – he made her feel as if she could say anything she wanted.

He smiled and touched them. ‘Aah,’ he said, ‘the scars. Do you really want to know?’

‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded.

‘OΚ. Well, I had some surgery. A year ago. I had some bone taken out of my jaw, pins put in, that sort of thing.’

‘What – really? How come?’

Vince shrugged. ‘To de-ugly me,’ he said.

Joy laughed. ‘What do you mean, “de-ugly”?’

‘I mean, I was weird-looking. I had an underbite, like this… ‘ – he pushed his lower jaw out a little to show her – ‘and it was affecting my eating and my teeth and
everything, so I had corrective surgery That’s where they went in to get to the bone.’ He pointed at the scars.

Joy winced. ‘Did it hurt?’

‘God, yeah. It was fucking agony. I couldn’t eat properly for months after – lost loads of weight. I was under ten stone by the time they took the braces off. Looked like a skeleton. It was like hell, you know, couldn’t talk, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t move my jaw. All I did for a year was take painkillers and listen to music. It was a total nightmare.’

‘God, you poor thing. Is it OK now?’

‘Yeah. Well, sort of. It still aches a bit, still feels stiff when I wake up in the morning, and yawning and stuff can be quite uncomfortable.’

‘And did you… were you… I mean how ugly
were
you, exacdy?’

‘Well, the kids at school seemed to think I was pretty hideous. Melonhead, they called me.’

‘Melonhead? Why Melonhead?’

‘That’s my name. My surname. Well – the “melon” bit, anyway.’

‘Your surname is Melon?’

‘Uh-huh. With two ls.’

‘No way’

‘Yeah. Mellon. Could have been worse. I could have been a girl with enormous tits.’

‘I think it’s a beautiful name.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes. It’s pretty.’

‘Hmm. I never thought of it like that before. I even thought about changing it after Chris and mum got married – changing it to Chris’s surname.’

‘Which is?’ ‘Jebb.’

‘Oh, no.’ She frowned and shook her head. ‘Mellon’s much nicer.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Oh, God, yeah. I’ll swap with you, if you like.’

‘Why? What’s yours?’

‘Downer. Nice, eh?’

‘Oh. It’s not so bad. Especially with your first name. They kind of cancel each other out.’

Joy smiled. ‘I guess so,’ she said. ‘But the therapists had a field day with it.’

‘Therapists?

‘Yes. Therapists.’ Joy breathed in. She wanted to tell him. She wanted him to know her. Τ suppose it’s only fair for you to know that you’re sitting in a pub with a nutter.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘No, seriously. I spent four weeks in hospital earlier this year. I had a nervous breakdown.’ She stopped and smiled tightly, waiting for his reaction, knowing already that he would understand.

And then she told him everything – all the things she’d vowed never to tell anyone because they were so sordid and so seedy. She told him about the day she’d got back from school and found her father sitting on a chair in the kitchen with his trousers around his ankles and Toni Moran from across the road sitting astride his lap and how Toni Moran had carried on pumping up and down obliviously for a full five strokes after she’d walked in, while her father stared at her in mute horror over her shoulder.

She told him about how her father had given her £500 in crisp £
10
notes not to tell her mother and how she’d spent it all on clothes from Kensington Market which she’d taken back the following weekend because she’d felt so guilty and how she’d then hidden the £500 in a shoebox in the bottom of her wardrobe and how for weeks afterwards she’d had to watch her mother kowtowing to her father, cooking his dinner, polishing his shoes, rubbing his feet on the sofa at night, in the full knowledge that he was still conducting his affair with Toni Moran. She told him how much she’d wanted to tell her mother but hadn’t dared, too scared of the repercussions which she could only imagine would impact harder on her mother than on her father, and how she’d learned to recognize the smell of Toni Moran on her father when he came home from the golf course or a committee meeting.

She told him about the awful sense of complicity that her father had tried to foster between the two of them, as if the duplicity was some great adventure they were sharing and how instead of getting easier it had become harder and harder to keep the secret locked away inside.

It had all come to a head while she was going through the stress of university interviews, dragging a twenty-pound Α1 portfolio around the country in the middle of an unseasonal heatwave, sitting outside offices with a dozen other candidates, knowing that they were all better than her, wondering why the hell she was even bothering.

She began to get this unsettling, panicky feeling all the time, as if her body was nothing to do with her.
She’d forget how to walk, sometimes, how to make her legs move. And other times she’d forget how to breathe properly and her heart would stop, then start racing, then stop again. She spent so much time focusing inside herself, existing inside a strange, tinny little bubble of self-obsession, that she became absent-minded and distracted to an almost comical extent. She left things everywhere she went, forgot entire conversations, and failed to turn up for prearranged appointments. But she didn’t know how close she was to falling apart until one spring afternoon when she turned up for an interview at Chelsea School of Art – without her portfolio. She didn’t realize she’d left the portfolio at home until the interview panel had asked to see it, at which point she burst into tears and ran from the room. She got on the wrong train at Fenchurch Street and ended up in Norwich. She didn’t have enough cash on her to buy a ticket back to London, so her mother had driven all the way from Colchester and brought her home.

The following morning the postman delivered not one but three letters of rejection from her top three choices of university, and Joy decided that it would be better for everyone if she wasn’t around. This revelation cleared her head for the first time in a month, and it was with an amazing sense of clarity that she sat cross-legged on her bed and ingested twenty-three paracetamols and a third of a bottle of peach schnapps.

Her mother found her half an hour later and rushed her to Colchester General, where they pumped out her stomach with salty water until she felt like a wrung-out flannel.

In retrospect, Joy knew that she hadn’t really intended to kill herself. She’d known her mother would find her; she’d known she hadn’t taken enough. She just wanted to go home and forget that it had ever happened. But everyone involved took it very seriously – seriously enough to do something about it. She was admitted to a psychiatric ward the next day.

The day after that she received a letter from Bristol University offering her a place on their Graphic Design BA degree course. Her mother wrote back on her behalf to explain why she wouldn’t be able to take it up.

She couldn’t really remember much about the next few weeks. It was a blur of pills and questions. Somewhere along the line she must have told someone about her father and Toni Moran because by the time she finally came home, four weeks later, her father was a in a state of high contrition and everything felt different. Hence this holiday. Hence the atmosphere of forced geniality that hung over everything they said and did.