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At Poynton, Clare met boys. Helly belonged, improbably, to the Methodist youth club, which seemed to have nothing to do with religion but was a sort of cover operation for disaffected teenagers. There was an intimate core of girls who ran things and then a number of boys moving more loosely on the periphery: like planets, unconsciously exerting their huge gravitational pull upon the center. Some of them, like Helly, were bussed into the selective schools in the city, but most of them went to the local school, and it was with these boys Clare fell in love: cocky, teasing, irreverent, dangerous. The grammar-school boys kept apart in a different set and were too superior and sophisticated to bother with Clare and Helly; also, there was a kind of embarrassment of recognition, the clever girls and boys looked at one another, knew they had all bought in to the same system, and did not particularly want to be reminded of this outside of school, where they were pretending to be something else.

Helly and Clare would spend an hour or more in Helly’s bedroom dressing up and putting on makeup, then they walked self-consciously along to the church hall, without the coats that would spoil the effect, however cold it was. There they played table tennis or badminton or hung around in the kitchen making powdered coffee and taking part in some repartee that was usually sexual teasing. The boys outdid one another in outrageous suggestions and boasts, often involving sexual disgust at the exploits of some girl not present.

— She was fucking desperate; she was all over me.

— Man, she was gasping for it; and she’s fucking huge; I was suffocating, her big tits were in my face, I wanted air.

The girls responded as required with a certain kind of fending off, a demure immunity of slow-burning smiles, avoiding eye contact with the boys, glancing blazingly at one another, then down again, as if they moved flexibly and slowly inside a sexual shape of the boys’ words’ making, exciting but dangerously capable of shaming them. Clare found it felt very womanly to be spooning out coffee and boiling kettles of water at the same time as the teasing, capable and impatient (“Wait! That one’s not got sugar in it yet!”). And there was a certain kind of dry bold loud derisive remark that made you strong in your resistance, which the boys particularly admired: Helly was good at these.

— David Taton, you were so keen to get your trousers down, you didn’t care who it was!

— So what do you expect if you suffer from wandering-hands trouble, Stuart Hopkin?

Clare wondered at their complex ironic other selves, suddenly insignificant and tiny; none of the languages they had used before had ever seemed as powerful as this coarse one. She was not quite sure what reality it represented: were these boys really doing half, or any, of the things they boasted of? Where did such things happen? How did they begin? Sometimes couples disappeared around the back of the church hall, but they were never left alone long enough — surely? — to be having intercourse. Helly was evasive: she wasn’t sure; things happened at parties.

The boys would break off from time to time into scuffling fights, more or less serious, flares of violence raging out of nowhere. The girls split up into factional gossip. Clare feared some of these girls more than any of the boys; the boys mostly ignored her, the girls smelled out right away that she was an outsider. Two of them, two short fat girls with blue eye makeup whose names often figured in the boys’ stories, took Helly outside to talk about her. Was she pregnant? (That was something to do with the way she stood and the dress she was wearing.) “Pregnant” was a sexual word in their talk, like other ordinary words suddenly electrified: “fancy,” and “talent,” and “touching up,” “sucking” and “hard” and “coming,” all these words revealed other, explosive selves. That it could be thought she might be pregnant! She was excited and humiliated.

Helly and Clare walked home; sometimes some of the boys walked part of the way with them. A different mood would settle on them all. The walk from the youth club back to the Parkins’ could make you think you really were in the country: there were dark fields and trees with birds rustling in them, a few cottages with televisions flickering in rooms with turned off lights. Their voices were quiet and intimate under the high starry spaces of night, dreamy because they were invisible to one another. A kind of gallantry came out in the boys, they confessed their ambitions, which turned out to be rather honorable and stirring: one wanted to be an Air Force pilot, one wanted to work relieving poverty in Africa, one of them wanted to draw cartoons. All of these goals seemed improbable to Clare; the parents of these boys were car mechanics or worked in supermarkets or the local meat processing plant, and she had in those days, for all her socialism, a rather fixed idea of who got to be pilots and artists. (She was wrong, about the pilot at any rate.)

But the improbability made the boys’ ambitions all the more poignant; afterward, upstairs in Helly’s bedroom, the girls talked about them tenderly.

— Imagine, said Clare, if it was like the First World War. (They had been studying the war poets at school.) Imagine if they had to go off and fight, and we were going to say goodbye to them at the station. Imagine how they’d look, in their uniforms, all brave and solemn. We’d be desperate to stop them, they’d be sort of fatalistic and stubborn. Stuart Hopkin: although he’s so small, he’s sweet, he’s really intense; imagine the look he’d give you, just as the train began to leave.…

She had real tears in her eyes, real pain in her heart.

— Imagine how we’d kiss them, said Helly, if they might not come back.

The idea of kissing hovered over those walks home, the sensation of the possibility of it brushed them for moments with its panting heat, unspoken. They might kiss where the boys turned off to go a different way. Mostly it didn’t happen. Once or twice when Clare was there it happened to Helly. There was a movement with which a boy chose you, separated you off; even the rehearsal of that movement in her mind, its astonishing predatory decisiveness, could make Clare melt: that he could be so sure he wanted that, and from you! She could only imagine the total acquiescence of the flesh at such a tribute. Then he bent over you and put his arms around you and the kiss was taken while others watched and jeered, long and slow, and there were names for this too: “snogging,” and “French kissing”—techniques you were afraid you might not know.

— It’s weird, said Helly. Not exactly nice, having someone else’s tongue in your mouth.

— Like what? said Clare.

Clare and Helly in their bedrooms tried out kissing on each other, and sex. “Imagine if he did this,” they said, “and this.” They took it in turns to be Mr. Garrick, the French teacher (the only male teacher at school), or David Taton from youth club, or Elvis Costello. Sometimes it was into this trying out that Helly’s father’s voice intruded through the wall, telling them to be quiet and go to sleep. It never occurred to them to wonder what he thought they were doing, rustling and murmuring and squealing with giggles in the same bed together. Clare was astonished sometimes thinking about it afterward that they had no adequate sense of how they should conceal what they were up to. Partly they simply assumed that their teenage secrecy was impenetrably dark and deep; it was unimaginable that adults could know anything about their lives. Also, Helly had a friend in the village whose father had subscribed to a sex encyclopedia in weekly issues; everything they read in there — and avidly, of course, devouring its initiations, such as that you might pass out with the pleasure of orgasm, or that the male organ when erect could be twelve inches long — seemed peculiarly preoccupied with reassuring them that there was nothing they could do that they need feel ashamed of. They took the encyclopedia’s word for it; blithely and with no burden of embarrassment, they did what they liked.