Vince and Joy (9 page)

‘Thank you,’ smiled Kirsty, handling the compliment like a true professional. ‘It’s having a toy boy.’ She winked at Chris. ‘Keeps me young.’

Alan chortled. ‘Oh, yes, yes, yes. I can see that it would. All that blood pumping through your system, eh?’ He winked. ‘Nothing better for the skin than a healthy sex Ufe.’

‘ALAN!
’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,
what?!
I’m just stating fact. It’s well known that an active sex life keeps you young. Isn’t that right, Kirsty?’

‘Absolutely right, Alan,’ Kirsty agreed gamely.

‘And it’s an excellent form of aerobic exercise, too. Or so it would appear.’ He cast an appreciative eye up and down Kirsty’s trim, toned legs. ‘Not an extra ounce on you. Like a young girl’

Kirsty laughed politely, but an uncomfortable silence was descending elsewhere.

‘Nice to see’ he continued, obliviously, ‘a woman on the cusp of middle age, taking such good care of herself. Very nice to see.’ He smiled at her, revealing burgundy-tinged teeth.

‘Right,’ announced Joy, grabbing Vince’s hand and hoisting him to his feet, ‘we’re going for a walk.’

The adults turned and looked at them in surprise.

‘Yup,’ said Vince, getting obediently to his feet, ‘off for a walk.’

Before anyone had a chance to protest, they strode into the caravan, picked up Joy’s bag and a couple of beers, bade a forceful good night to everyone and walked as fast as they could away from the tragic sound of drunken middle-aged revelry.

‘My father is the most heinous creature known to mankind.’Joy took an angry gulp from a can of Heineken. ‘God. Your poor mother. How totally embarrassing.’

‘Oh, Mum can handle herself,’ he said, squeezing her hand reassuringly. ‘She’s had plenty of practice at that kind of thing.’

‘That’s not the point. It’s just, you know, in front of Mum, in front of me, in front of Chris – it’s… it’s
psychotic,
’ she shuddered. ‘You know, as if your mum would be interested in
him.
When she’s so pretty and she’s got Chris and everything. But he’s so fucking vain that he really thinks he’s in with a chance. You know. As if if he really switches on the charm, she’s just going to fall
swooning
into his arms…
Aargh!
’ she cried out in frustration, letting herself flop backward against the grass.

They’d wandered away from town, out towards the country lanes and found themselves in a small moonlight-dappled field. Vince glanced down at the prostrate and angry Joy, and smiled.

‘Do you know what I like best about you?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said grumpily. ‘What?’

‘Everything.’

She let out a loud snort of laughter.

‘Do you know what I like best about
you?
’ she said.

‘No. Tell me.’

‘This,’ she said. And she grabbed him by the shoulders, pulled him down on top of her and stuck her tongue in his mouth.

Vince’s head began to swim.

Their kisses were becoming more and more passionate, and Joy’s hands had started roaming wildly around his body, pulling at the fabric of his T-shirt. It dawned on him eventually that she was actually trying to pull his T-shirt off, so he adjusted his pose while she yanked it roughly over his shoulder blades and flung it to one side.

Joy’s sudden and unprompted passion was so overwhelming that it left Vince in the strange position of feeling pleasantly disengaged from the proceedings, as if he were sitting in the branches of a tree overhead, watching, munching on an apple, maybe.

Objectives, he thought, as her thigh passed over his shaft, I need objectives here. He concentrated on the rhythm of his tongue in her mouth for a while, trying to build up a twirly, swirly massaging motion. And then he decided.
Breasts.
Breasts would be his next objective. He tugged at the buttons on her shirt, feeling the little pearly discs slipping around underneath his fingertips. Fuck the buttons, he thought, fuck them. He concentrated on getting the loose-fitting shirt off over her head. He’d worry about the bra once that had been accomplished. But he didn’t need to worry about the bra because, the moment the shirt was off, Joy’s hand crept round her back and unclasped it, and now it was slithering around between them, untethered, like something alien and nonsensical. He pulled at it and it fell to one
side, and now here they were, a man and a woman, topless. Together. They embraced again, and Vince felt his bare flesh against her bare breasts, and at that point he lost all objectivity and went completely fucking mental as all the blood that wasn’t supporting his astonishing hard-on rushed to his head.

Joy whimpered and gasped into his ear as they rubbed against each other, but then she took his hand from her breast and he thought, here we go, we’re slowing it down now, too fast, too fast, back off, but even as he was thinking it she was leading his hand elsewhere, down below her waist, towards the loose waistband of her shorts, slowly past her soft abdomen, and then, like an electric shock, he felt it – Joy’s pubic hair.

His ears started to buzz with excitement.

She brought his hand down further until it cupped her entirely, and suddenly he was on the threshold of a whole new world.

‘Are you sure?’ he whispered urgently in her ear.

‘Mmmmmm.’ He felt her nodding vigorously against his shoulder.

And as he started to make the acquaintance of this whole new world, to feel gingerly and cautiously around the folds and mounds and floppy bits, to absorb the textures and wonder what he should do next, Joy moved the game along again. She was fiddling with the buttons on his 501s, pulling apart the denim, her hand in his trousers, in his shorts, and now here they were, topless, inside each other’s trousers, in the moonlight, miles from anyone. Vince tried to concentrate on the myriad things he was supposed to be doing, the kissing of the mouth,
the caressing of the breast, the feeling of the whole new world, the hand in his own trousers, grasping him like a warm, soft kiss.

Just as Vince was thinking that things had gone as far as they could possibly go, that this was what they were doing,
all
they were doing, she was tugging at his jeans, tugging at his shorts, tugging them down his thighs, and it seemed as if she was trying to undress him, undress him completely so that he’d be naked, and he had no idea if it was what she wanted or not, but he didn’t want to be the only one naked, the only one vulnerable, so he moved his attention to removing her shorts, her knickers, and then they were completely bollock-arsed-naked and they were rolling around on the grass together,
completely naked.

And this, Vince couldn’t help feeling, was the exact point at which he needed to start asking questions.

‘Urhm,’ he murmured, trying, with some difficulty, to detach his mouth from hers, ‘erhm, hold on, hold on, hold on.’

‘What?’ She pulled away from him, her hair streaked across her face, her lips swollen and red in the moonlight.

‘Well, what, what are we doing exactly?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said breathlessly.

‘I mean, are we…?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said again.

‘Because I need to know, because…’

‘I’m on the pill,’ she said.

‘Right,’ he said.

‘For PMT.’

‘What?’

‘I’m on the pill for my PMT. Not for… I’m still a virgin.’

‘Yοu are? But I thought…’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. You’re a virgin,’ he said.

‘Uh-huh.
Are you?
’

‘Er, yeah. I am.’

‘And do you… do you want to?’

‘With you?’ he said.

She nodded.

‘God. Yes. Please. Do you?’

She nodded again. ‘I really do. Really, really do…’

‘Are you sure?’

Yes. Are you?’

‘Yes.’ Vince gulped. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

They walked back across dry, shorn fields and dark, empty country roads. Joy felt raw and used between her thighs, like she’d been riding a very big horse all day. Her face was taut with dried saliva, and her mouth was sore and felt twice its normal size. Vince had his arm round her shoulders, and she had her arm round his waist.

Her knees had given way when she’d first tried to stand upright a few minutes ago. Gone like jelly. Collapsed to her knees in hysterical giggles. Vince had pulled her back to her feet, wrapped her in his arms and kissed her again.

She’d done it. They’d done it. Done everything in fact. They’d both wanted to try everything, everything they’d never done before. They’d done it in every possible position; from behind, her on top of him, even up against a tree. They’d given each other oral sex, too. Joy had never thought for a moment that she’d want to put a man’s penis in her mouth, but the minute Vince suggested it, enthusiastically, as if it was a new flavour of ice cream, nothing could have stopped her. She hadn’t had an orgasm – it was too uncomfortable for that – but doing it, having sex, losing her virginity to this strong, handsome man who made her feel so comfortable and so self-assured, had been the most exciting experience of her life.

‘Can we do that again tomorrow?’ she said, squeezing his waist.

‘Yeah,’ said Vince, ‘why not? And how about the day after?’

‘Definitely. Of course, we’ll have to do it on Tuesday because it’s your birthday.’

‘Of course. I have to get my birthday shag. It’s a tradition.’

She laughed. ‘And then – after this, after Hunstanton – can we do it in Colchester?’

‘Uh-huh. And Enfield.’

‘Oh, yes – Enfield. I’ve always wanted to do it in Enfield.’

‘I think we should just do it for ever. You know, just keep on doing it, indefinitely. Everywhere. Travel the world, just doing it. Nonstop.’

She nodded and squeezed his waist again. He suddenly stopped and turned her towards him and looked at her really intensely for a moment.

‘You know that was the best thing that ever happened to me, don’t you?’

She smiled. ‘Me, too.’

‘And you know that, God, I’ve wondered for so long if it would happen, how it would happen, when it would happen, who it would be with. Years and years of just, you know,
imagining,
and nothing that went through my mind came close to that. Really. Nothing.’

‘Me neither.’

‘And, when I said that I thought I was falling in love with you, back there, I wasn’t just saying that because – you know – because of what was happening, because I thought it was what you’d want to hear. I said it because… I am. Completely.’

Joy smiled. All those years, all the pain, Kieran,
Miranda, Toni Moran, the overdose, the hospital, losing her place at Bristol, all those years of
existing
without
being
— all of it faded away into meaninglessness. She’d started to leave that girl behind the minute she first set eyes on Vince three days earlier, but standing here, in the Norfolk countryside, her hands in his, hearing him tell her that he loved her, the rawness of her lost virginity still ringing between her legs, she could almost see that girl fading away into a small smudge on the horizon.

‘Are you really?’

‘Totally. I mean it.’

And then Joy told him that she loved him, too. And for the first time in her life, she meant it.

Everything was quiet and still when they got back to the Seavue. The blankets, the paper plates, the screwed-up bits of kitchen roll had all been cleared away. The barbecue still gave off a feeble glow of warmth. All the lights were off in Joy’s caravan. The flickering cathode glow of a black-and-white TV lit the interior of Vince’s.

They kissed and said good night in whispers, and Joy took off her shoes and held them in her hand while she mounted the steps to her caravan.

‘See you tomorrow,’ she whispered, kissing the palm of her hand. ‘Sleep tight.’

‘You, too,’ he whispered back. ‘And thank you.’

She blew her kiss at him, grinned, then disappeared from view.

There was a strange atmosphere inside his caravan – Vince picked up on it the minute he walked in.

The TV was on, but neither Chris nor Kirsty was actually watching it. They were sitting facing each other across the dining table, Chris clutching an empty mug, Kirsty stubbing out a cigarette into a full ashtray. Kirsty had a stiff look about her, as if she was trying to hold something back. They’d obviously been deep in serious conversation.

‘Everything all right?’ he said, reaching for a glass from a shelf in the kitchen.

‘Yeah. Fine.’

‘How come you’re both still up?’

‘Night went on a bit late.’ ‘Yeah?’

Yeah – couldn’t get rid of the bastards.’ Chris laughed without sounding relaxed.

Vince filled his glass with water from the tap and sat down next to his parents. ‘Why are you two being so weird?’

‘Weird?’