Sweet Sorrow(6)

‘Don’t mind me,’ said Helen.

I think I might have puffed my cheeks and blown out air. ‘All right then,’ I said and hopped down.

‘Don’t slip in the vomit, lovebirds,’ said Helen as we walked onto the dance floor.





Slowies


I held out my arms and for a moment we found ourselves standing with gripped hands out to the side like pensioners at a tea dance. Emily corrected me, placing my hand on the small of her back, and as we began our first rotation I closed my eyes and tried to identify an emotion. The artificial starlight suggested I ought to feel romantic, the rasping saxophone, an awareness of her pelvis and the clasp of her bra should have been enough to spark desire, but embarrassment was the emotion I recognised and the only longing I felt was for the end of the song. Love and desire were too tangled up with ridicule and, sure enough, at the edge of the hall Lloyd was waggling his tongue lewdly while Fox turned his back, crossed his arms and caressed his own shoulder blades. I adjusted my right hand so that only the middle finger showed, which seemed pretty witty to me, and we revolved away as the saxophone played on. Say something, say anything …

Emily spoke first. ‘You smell of boys.’

‘Oh. Yeah, it’s old games kit. It’s all I had. Sorry.’

‘No, I like it,’ she said and snuffled into my neck and I felt a wetness there that might have been a kiss or the dab of a damp flannel. Grandmothers aside, I had kissed, or been kissed, twice before, though it might be more accurate to describe those events as facial collisions. The first occasion was in a darkened audio-visual exhibit on a history field trip to Roman remains. There’s no reason why anyone should instinctively know how to kiss – like snowboarding or tap-dancing, it can’t be learnt from watching – but Becky Boyne had taken her instruction from Disney fairy tales, pursing her lips into a tight, dry bud that she tapped around my face like a bird getting nuts from a feeder. Films had also taught us that a kiss was not a kiss unless it made a noise, and so each point of contact was accompanied by a little lip-smacking sound as artificial as the clip-clop that represents a horse. Eyes open, or closed? I kept them open in case of discovery or attack, and read the wall display behind her. The Romans, I noted, had pioneered under-floor heating and on it went, the tap-tap-tap becoming harder and more insistent, like someone trying to unblock a stapler.

Kissing Sharon Findlay, on the other hand, was an angry, open-mouthed frenzied shark attack, both of us jammed down the back of a sofa. Harper had a den, a concrete bunker in the basement of his house that held a certain notoriety and on Friday nights resembled the Playboy Mansion’s fallout shelter. Here Harper presided over exclusive, high-rolling ‘DVD parties’, doling out own-brand lager spiked with soluble aspirin – the olive in our martini – to be drunk through a straw and potent enough to send us behind the sofa, kissing amongst the dust balls and the dead flies. I had never been more aware that the tongue was a muscle, a powerful skinless muscle like the arm of a starfish, and when my tongue tried to fight back against Sharon’s they had wrestled like drunks trying to squeeze past each other in a corridor. Whenever I tried to raise my head it was ground back down onto the dusty underlay with the same kind of force and motion required to juice a grapefruit. I retain a certain memory that when Sharon Findlay belched, my cheeks puffed out, and when we finally pulled apart, she wiped her mouth along the entire length of her arm. The experience left me shaken and sore-jawed, with two small rips in the corner of my mouth, a third in the root of my tongue, and nauseous, too, from what must conservatively have been half a pint of someone else’s saliva. But I was also strangely excited, as if after some harrowing fairground ride, so that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it again immediately or never again in my life.

This dilemma was taken out of my hands when she paired up with Patrick Rogers later that same night. We passed them now on the dance floor, devouring each other beneath the institutional glitter-ball. I felt another damp patch on my neck, then a murmured sentence that I failed to hear over the music.

‘Sorry?’

‘I said …’ But she was mumbling into my neck again, and I could only make out one word, ‘bath’.

‘I can’t hear you …’

Again, something-something-bath, and I wondered, had she said that I needed a bath? If only they’d turn the volume down. ‘Sorry, one more time?’

Emily mumbled.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘last time.’

Emily took her face from my neck and glared at me with real anger. ‘F’fuck’s sake, I said I think about you in the bath!’

‘Oh. Do you? Thank you very much!’ I said, but this seemed insufficient, so – ‘You too!’

‘What?’

‘You too?’

‘No, you don’t! Just … oh, just forget it. Oh, Jesus!’ She groaned and settled her head once again, but there was rage in our slow-dance now and we were both relieved when the song came to an end. Self-conscious in the sudden silence, the couples stepped away, faces glinting and grinning. ‘Where you going afterwards?’ said Emily.

‘Not sure. Meant to be going round Harper’s.’

‘To the den? Oh. Okay.’ She slumped her shoulders, pouted with her bottom lip and blew up at her fringe. ‘I’ve never been to the den,’ she said, and I might have invited her but Harper’s door policy was ruthless and inflexible. The moment passed, then she gave my chest a single hard push – ‘See ya.’ I had been dismissed.