Vince and Joy (6 page)

It was Alan who’d put Joy in hospital. Alan owed them. And Alan was paying the price.

When the pub closed at eleven-thirty, they instinctively turned in the opposite direction to the Nelson’s and the Seavue Holiday Home Park, and headed towards the seafront instead. ‘Word Up’ blasted from the open windows of a spartan nightclub over an arcade on the promenade. They crossed the road and passed the open doors of the club. Hard-faced girls in sunbleached denim stood outside, smoking full-strength Marlboros and drinking half-pints of cider. Burly boys in nylon
bomber jackets drank beer from plastic cups and sneered at each other.

They wandered across the soft, manicured grass of the seafront promenade, past the neat pavilion and towards a bench facing out towards the sea. A few shadowy seagulls circled overhead, their angry cries merging with the ghostly din of Cameo still echoing from the club. The beach was completely empty.

They sat down in unison and breathed in the fresh sea air, and as the brine hit Joy’s lungs she felt herself swell up with happiness. She’d drunk too much and life had taken on a golden, blankety feeling she’d never thought possible. For the first time in her life Joy felt…
normal.

She was no longer daunted by Vince’s good looks and brooding aura. Vince wasn’t what he appeared. He wasn’t cool and moody. He wasn’t intellectual or hard. He wasn’t intimidating.

He was interesting and kind and funny.

He was human and generous and thoughtful.

He was awkward and a misfit.

He’d missed out on great big chunks of his youth.

He was just like her

Joy had never met anyone just like her before. She’d spent her life trying to bend herself to fit to other people’s shapes. For years she’d contorted herself into tricky positions, like those people who could fold themselves into boxes, but walking out of the Nelson’s that evening with Vince had felt like stretching her legs after a long journey, like rolling her head on her shoulders after too much studying. She didn’t have to pretend to be cool, pretend to be clever, pretend to be interested,
pretend to be aroused, pretend to be anything. It was a relief.

‘I think you’re great,’ she said, bringing her knees up to her chest and turning to smile at Vince.

He started, and a shy smile spread across his face. ‘Me?’ he said. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. You. Really’

She pulled his hand off his lap and, without even a moment’s hesitation or awkwardness, brought it up to her lips and kissed it.

‘I think you’re great, too,’ he said. He smiled again, picked up her hand and brought it to his lips and, as his mouth connected with her flesh, Joy’s whole body tingled like a sneeze.

And then they both laughed, reached for each other’s faces and kissed to the distant sound of teenage Hunstanton girls singing along to ‘Venus’ by Bananarama.

Vince was awoken the next morning by the sound of wood pigeons cooing from the trees.

He wiped away the thick condensation that covered the letterbox-shaped window, and as the view came into focus he considered the mist fogging the corresponding window of the next-door caravan. Was it the sweet, tangy morning breath of Joy Downer? Was it the visual accumulation of her night’s dreams, thoughts and movements, every droplet a moment’s sleep? Was she there now, on the other side of the brown aluminium siding, murmuring gently in her sleep, one leg outside the covers maybe, bent slightly at the knee? Or maybe she was just waking up, rubbing her eyes, stretching her arms, tousling her silky hair with bunched-up fists?

He brought his own fist to the window to wipe away the new layer of condensation he’d created, and as he did so the curtain opposite shot open, a meaty hand cleared the opaque mist from the window and a large, greasy face appeared, squinting into the morning sunshine.

Barbara.

Vince pulled his curtain closed and let his head fall upon his pillow, shuddering gently at the terrifying image left lingering in his mind’s eye.

He got out of bed and wandered through to the living
area. Chris was eating freshly baked bread spread with thick peaks of peanut butter, and Kirsty was still in her dressing gown, suggesting that Chris had been up first to do the breakfast run. There was a fresh pot of tea on the side, and Vince poured himself a mug and sat down. Half the curtains at the far end of the caravan were still closed against a dazzling sun that cast a dank orange light through the interior, highlighting the clouds of smoke from Kirsty’s cigarette. Radio 1 was on, some overexcited DJ shouting about the wonderful weather and introducing ‘Living Doll’ by Cliff Richard and the Young Ones.

‘Bread?’ said Chris, reaching for the bread knife.

‘Nah,’ said Vince, eyeing the crusty loaf and finding it strangely unappealing.

‘Lovesick?’

‘Eh?’

‘Lovesick,’ Chris repeated, nodding at Kirsty.

Vince tipped a teaspoon of sugar into his mug and grunted.

‘So, what time did you two crawl back last night, then?’

‘I dunno. One, two, something like that.’

Chris laughed. ‘One or two, my arse!
Three-thirty –
that’s what time it was. What the hell did you two find to do in Hunstanton until three-thirty in the bloody morning? Or shouldn’t I ask?’

‘We just talked – that’s all.’

‘Aaaah,’ said Chris, gouging another large knifeload of peanut butter from the jar and flopping it on to a slice of bread. ‘Talking, eh? That’s the ticket – best way into a girl’s drawers, that. Up all night talking – you’re halfway there, mate.’

Vince watched Chris’s peanut butter merging with the oily yellow butter already pasted on to his bread and felt his stomach wriggle. ‘It’s not like that,’ he muttered.

‘Course it’s like that.’

‘It’s not. Honest. Joy’s – she’s not that kind of girl. We’re just friends, that’s all.’

Chris shook his head and laughed wryly.

Vince caught the vibration of a look being thrown across the table from Kirsty to Chris. Chris closed his mouth against his next comment and dropped his gaze. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Friends. That’s grand, that is.’

A moment passed in silence, save for the hysterical babble of the Radio 1 Roadshow and the crackle of Kirsty’s tabloid as she peeled apart the pages.

‘So,’ began Chris, ‘your new “friend”. D’you think she’d like to come to the beach with us today?’

‘I don’t know,’ snapped Vince, beginning to lose patience. All he wanted to do was sit here and ruminate on the exquisite perfection of last night. He didn’t want to have to reconcile it with the reality of his circumstances. He didn’t want to consider the practicalities of his parents and her parents and the banality of making plans and arrangements. He just wanted to drift around in this state of rapture until he somehow floated his way back into her company again. Was that too much to ask?

‘I’ll ask her, if you want,’ said Chris.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake – just drop it, will you?’

‘Oh, come on, Vince. Don’t be like that. Don’t you want to see her in a bikini?’ He threw him a raised eyebrow and Vince cracked a smile. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll sort it.’

*

Great, thought Vince a couple of hours later, as he peered into the rear view mirror of his mum’s Mini.

A poker-straight Alan sat behind the steering wheel of his shiny Jaguar, negotiating the treacherous speed humps of the dirt track to the beach with strange, diagonal swooping motions. Next to him, barely visible above the dashboard, sat the overly radiant Barbara, mopping at her brow with a handkerchief and wearing some kind of hat. And there, in the back, pinioned against the door by the sheer volume of an oversized picnic hamper, sat Joy.

She had one elbow on the hamper and the other on the window frame, and stared pensively at the windswept landscape as the breeze swept her hair away from her face. Every time Alan performed one of his peculiar swervy negotiations of a speed bump, she gripped the window frame and grimaced slightly.

Chris’s plan had backfired somewhat. In the process of inviting Joy to join them at the beach, he’d inadvertently asked her parents, too.

Stupid bastard.

Holmes Beach was part of a nature reserve encompassing acres of fragrant, shady pine forests, endless tide-stippled beaches and undulating sand dunes. A ruddy man in a balsawood hut charged them 50p per car to take the ginger-dust road down to the beach. Every half a mile or so, Chris got out of the car, swung open a gate and gestured Alan’s car through after theirs with an exaggerated flourish and a bow.

The sky stretched endlessly overhead, sapphire blue and studded with tiny thumbprint clouds. Salty sweat
gathered in sticky pools between Vince’s thighs on the green vinyl seats of the Mini. He took a swig from a warm can of Coke and watched Chris’s thumb massaging the back of his mum’s slender, suntanned neck.

And then an image came to mind, an image of he and Joy on the seafront last night, of Joy’s lean fingers threaded through his hair, her breasts pressed up against his chest, her leg wrapped round his thigh. He remembered the alien, thrilling feeling of his tongue as it made its way around hers and how quickly it had felt normal. But most of all he remembered how passionate Joy had been, the little pants and whimpers that escaped from between her lips, the hardness of her mouth against his, the clash of teeth that neither of them acknowledged. She’d set the pace, guided his hand on to her bare breasts under her shirt, pressed her hand against his groin through the gabardine of his trousers, pushed herself closer and closer to him.

They’d kissed like that for nearly three hours.

People had passed them, thrown comments at them – ‘Oy-oy,’ ‘Go on, my son.’ But they’d remained oblivious, tied up together in a knot of frenzied passion.

When they’d finally pulled apart and decided to get back to the caravan site Vince had felt engorged with blood from head to toe – every last bit of him felt taut, swollen and ready to burst. As they walked back to the Seavue, hand in hand and slowly detumescing, he’d considered his first experience of sexual contact and decided that those three hours on a bench with Joy Downer at the age of nearly nineteen had more than compensated for everything he’d missed before. And as he said good night to
her outside the door of her caravan and felt her hands running up and down his bare skin underneath his T-shirt, he’d decided that this was it. This was the girl he was going to lose his virginity to.

The car park for the beach was full, and they found themselves stranded a hundred yards from the path to the beach. Alan pulled up beside them, rolled down his window and gestured ahead.

‘Just dropping the ladies off first, with the food. Back in a tick.’

‘Good idea.’ Chris and Kirsty waved him on his way, smiling widely until his car was far enough away to allow their faces to drop.

‘I really don’t like that man,’ said Kirsty, unclipping her seat belt and shuddering slighdy. ‘He gives me the willies. I’ll bet you anything he hits that Barbara. Probably goes to prostitutes, too,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘Blimey,’ said Chris, ‘and you’ve based all that on half an hour of conversation, have you?’

‘Yes,’ she said, defiantly, squinting into the distance at Alan’s car. ‘It’s just the way he looks at me. And the way he talks to his wife. He’s just creepy, that’s all.’

They emptied the Mini’s boot of beach towels, sun cream, carrier bags full of crisps and Tupperware boxes of varying sizes and shapes, and walked towards the path where Joy and Barbara waited in the sun with their ludicrous hamper.

They waited for Alan to catch up with them, then set off towards the beach in a strange convoy of oversized picnic equipment, mismatched beach towels and incongruous people. Vince quickened his pace to meet up with
Joy halfway down the wooden slatted path. She was wearing her black combat shorts again, with a khaki cheesecloth shirt that looked like it had originally belonged to a man. Her hair was tied in a messy pony-tail on top of her head. She looked as if she was on her way to scrape monkey faeces off tree trunks in Borneo.

‘What are you listening to?’ he said, gesturing to the Walkman peeping out of her shirt pocket.

‘Oh – just stuff,’ she said. ‘A compilation.’ She smiled at him and tucked her earpieces into her pocket.

‘Sorry about this,’ he said, sliding his sweaty hands into the pockets of his shorts.

‘What?’

‘This whole, you know – Chris dragging you all out to the beach. I told you he could be persuasive.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said lightly. ‘Dad was going on about coming to this beach anyway. And besides – we get to spend the day together.’

Vince glanced down at her to check she’d really just said that and felt pleasure rise through him when he realized that she had. ‘Cool,’ he said, ‘positive thinking. I like it.’

They wandered for a while, searching for the perfect dune that Chris had claimed as his own last summer.

Up and down sand dunes they wandered, the midday sun beating down on their heads, the dune grass tickling at their calves, until finally they found a dune that both Alan and Chris agreed was acceptable.

They laid out hairy blankets and lurid velour beach towels. Alan and Barbara spent ten minutes constructing a yellow-and-green-checked windbreak, completely
missing the point of settling in a sand dune, then they all began the slightly uncomfortable process of disrobing in front of total strangers.