I scrounged a fag off Mark Godfrey and went and sat on my own on the roundabout.
“Scrubber,” spat Alison’s brother David, and I smiled gratefully at him.
And that was that. Where had I gone wrong? First night: park, fag, snog. Second night: ditto. Third night: ditto. Fourth night: chucked. OK, OK. Maybe I should have seen the signs. Maybe I was asking for it. Round about that second ditto I should have spotted that we were in a rut, that I had allowed things to fester to the extent that she was on the lookout for someone else. But she could have tried to tell me! She could at least have given me another couple of days to put things right!
My relationship with Alison Ashworth had lasted six hours (the two-hour gap between school and Nationwide. times three), so I could hardly claim that I’d got used to having her around, that I didn’t know what to do with myself. In fact, I can hardly recall anything about her at all, now.
Long black hair? Maybe. Small? Smaller than me, certainly. Slanted, almost oriental eyes and a dark complexion? That could have been her, or it could have been someone else. Whatever. But if we were doing this list in grief order, rather than chronological order, I’d put it right up there at number two. It would be nice to think that as I’ve got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that has happened to me since; all my other romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one. Of course, I have never had to take that long walk again, and my ears have not burned with quite the same fury, and I have never had to count the No. 6 packets in order to avoid mocking eyes and floods of tears … not really, not actually, not as such. It just feels that way, sometimes.
2. Penny Hardwick (1973)
Penny Hardwick was a nice girl, and, nowadays, I’m all for nice girls, although then I wasn’t so sure. She had a nice mum and dad, and a nice house, detached, with a garden and a tree and a fishpond, and a nice girl’s haircut (she was blond, and she kept her hair a sort of sporty, clean, wholesome, form-captain mid-length), and nice, smiling eyes, and a nice younger sister, who smiled politely when I rang the doorbell and kept out of the way when we wanted her to. She had nice manners—my mum loved her—and she always got nice school reports. Penny was nice-looking, and her top five recording artists were Carly Simon, Carole King, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, and Elton John. Lots of people liked her. She was so nice, in fact, that she wouldn’t let me put my hand underneath or even on top of her bra, and so I was finished with her, although obviously I didn’t tell her why. She cried, and I hated her for it, because she made me feel bad.
I can imagine what sort of person Penny Hardwick became: a nice person. I know that she went to college, did well, and landed a job as a radio producer for the BBC. I would guess that she is bright, and serious-minded, maybe too much so, sometimes, and ambitious, but not in a way that makes you want to vomit; she was a version of all these things when we went out, and at another stage in my life I would have found all these virtues attractive. Then, however, I wasn’t interested in qualities, just breasts, and she was therefore no good to me.
I would like to be able to tell you that we had long, interesting conversations, and that we remained firm friends throughout our teenage years—she would have made someone a lovely friend—but I don’t think we ever talked. We went to the pictures, to parties and to discos, and we wrestled. We wrestled in her bedroom, and my bedroom, and her living room, and my living room, and in bedrooms at parties, and in living rooms at parties, and in the summer we wrestled on various plots of grass. We were wrestling over the same old issue. Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breasts that I would try to touch her between her legs, a gesture that had a sort of self-parodying wit about it: it was like trying to borrow a fiver, getting turned down, and asking to borrow fifty quid instead.
These were the questions boys asked other boys at my school (a school that contained only boys): ‘Are you getting any?’; ‘Does she let you have any?’; ‘How much does she let you have?’; and so on. Sometimes the questions were derisory, and expected the answer ‘No’: “You’re not getting anything, are you?”; “You haven’t even had a bit of tit, have you?” Girls, meanwhile, had to be content with the passive voice. Penny used the expression ‘broken into’: “I don’t want to be broken into yet,” she would explain patiently and maybe a little sadly (she seemed to understand that one day—but not now—she would have to give in, and when it happened she wouldn’t like it) when she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion … it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex—they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back.
Luckily, however, there were traitors, fifth columnists, in the opposing camp. Some boys knew of other boys whose girlfriends would ‘let’ them do anything; sometimes these girls were supposed to have actively assisted in their own molestation. Nobody had ever heard of a girl who had gone as far as undressing, or even removing or loosening undergarments, of course. That would have been taking collaboration too far. As I understood it, these girls had simply positioned themselves in a way that encouraged access. “She tucks her stomach in and everything,” Clive Stevens remarked approvingly of his brother’s girlfriend; it took me nearly a year to work out the import of this maneuver. No wonder I still remember the stomach-tucker’s first name (Judith); there’s a part of me that still wants to meet her.
Read any women’s magazine and you’ll see the same complaint over and over again: men—those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on—are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in ‘foreplay’; they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you can’t help feeling, are kind of ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren’t interested. They didn’t want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried. It’s not really very surprising, then, that we’re not much good at all that. We spent two or three long and extremely formative years being told very forcibly not even to think about it. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don’t, to something that women want and men can’t be bothered with. (Or so they say. Me, I like foreplay—mostly because the times when all I wanted to do was touch are alarmingly fresh in my mind.) The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year-old boy.
If somebody had asked me why I was so hell-bent on grabbing a piece of Penny Hardwick’s chest, I wouldn’t have known what to say. And if somebody were to ask Penny why she was so hell-bent on stopping me, I’ll bet she’d be stumped for an answer too. What was in it for me? I wasn’t asking for any sort of reciprocation, after all. Why didn’t she want her erogenous zones stimulated? I have no idea. All I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Durex.
And in any case, maybe I didn’t want to put my hand under Penny’s bra as much as I thought. Maybe other people wanted me to touch her more than I did. After a couple of months of fighting on sofas all over town with Penny, I’d had enough: I had admitted, unwisely in retrospect, to a friend that I wasn’t getting anywhere, and my friend had told some other friends, and I was the butt of a number of cruel and unpleasant jokes. I gave Penny one last try, in my bedroom while my mum and dad were at the town hall watching a local dramatic society interpretation of Toad of Toad Halclass="underline" I used a degree of force that would have outraged and terrified an adult female, but got nowhere, and when I walked her home we hardly spoke.