‘OK,’ she says. ‘Let me finish my drink first. You’re just lazy, Tom, aren’t you? You think anyone’s going to put up with this when you’re older?’
I don’t care, not now, not at the moment. I run down to the bathroom to get some cream, noticing the smudgy black footprint Lucy has left in the bath. I glance out the kitchen doorway at Mum.
Jack has gone back to sleep and she is reading again, headset on. Then I race back upstairs, back to Lucy, who has the vacuum going again and is just finishing my bedroom. She switches it off.
We sit on the bed and she uncaps the tube. Suddenly I know nothing is going to happen, nothing more than her massaging aftersun muck into my back. I don’t know what I expected, but I feel disappointed. ‘God, you’re going to peel,’ she tells me as she rubs my shoulders.
It feels wonderful, cool and burning at the same time. ‘How did you let yourself get like this?’
‘I don’t know. Do you sunbathe much?’ It’s a stupid question, in keeping with my mood now.
‘I don’t get the time.’
I twist my head around at her. ‘You must, sometimes. Weekends?’
‘I work in a pub, weekends. I’m trying to save enough to go and live with my aunt in France for a year.’
I don’t want to know this – not because it means she might leave at some point, but because it reduces everything to normalcy, to the quiet pattern of everyday life.
‘Why don’t you work in London? Wouldn’t you get more money there?’
‘London’s full of people like you,’ she says, squeezing my shoulders hard, sending a bolt of pain through them that stuns me. ‘Out to make trouble.’ I look around again. She stares at me – a look which makes me feel as if I’ve just leapt through about ten years.
‘I’ve got to get on,’ she says, getting up, leaving me sitting on the bed with the most incredible erection I’ve ever had, aching to do something yet literally in shock, unable to move. She taps my belly with the knuckles of one hand just above my hard-on, just where my stomach is wrinkled over my tightened shorts. ‘You’re getting fat.’ She smiles, recapping the aftersun cream ‘Too much sitting around. You don’t want a paunch, do you?’
She walks out and two rival waves of emotion slap into me. The first sends the details of my Devon room – the few I’m aware of to start with – spiraling into outer space. I might as well be in Kabul, the smallpaned windows seem so foreign. My bed could be an old mattress in a shelled doorway; the razor wire begins just over there, right by that bombed shopfront and that gloomy old chest of drawers. I’d rather be in an Afghan street right now, waiting for the bullet or the bomb blast, the flying glass, nothing. Sitting here, sitting in safety, in the bizarre heat of an English summer day, it all seems meaningless, the choices don’t matter – even if it isn’t you who make them.
The second wave is my normal response, my hearty, ‘Fuck this!’ attitude that I know I can rely on. I bounce off the bed and go to the door. Lucy is in Jessie’s room, the lead of her vacuum snaking around Jessie’s door from the point on the landing. My door is half closed.
I take a chance. Hidden behind it, I toss off – awkwardly, hurriedly, energetically – into a wad of Kleenex. Halfway through, I freeze when I hear Lucy pulling the plug out. I look around the door, debating whether to cram my hard-on back inside my shorts. I don’t. I want her to see me, but she doesn’t and my hand just works harder with her in sight, retreating down the stairs.
I finish and shove the balled tissue under my bed, reminding myself that I must remember it later. Dad’s voice downstairs makes me jump – I didn’t know he was back. He is talking to Lucy when I go down, showing her the bag of barbecue charcoal he has bought, as if she could possibly be interested. Jessie is carrying in a box of food topped with sausages and steaks. For the briefest moment, she looks like a teenage housewife – one of the saddest sights known to man. It’s only the gaping square hole cut out of the seat of her jeans, revealing pale blue boxer shorts underneath, that gives the lie to this vision of Jessie and Dad as an oddly matched but small-horizoned provincial couple.
I don’t give it a second thought. Maybe I should.
9
A nuclear summer’s evening and we are in a foreign land – well, it’s familiar enough to us by now, but we’re the foreigners, Jessie and me, we don’t fit in, we’re not entirely trusted yet and why should we be?
Voices swim in the hazy golden air, laughter mixing with car exhaust and cigarette smoke and the richer, sicklier smells of dried sweat, worn leather and the grasping flowering plants which snake up and around the old stone walls of the alcove we’re crammed into. We’re with the hard boys, the local yobbos, Jessie’s crowd, admirers all, working their nuts off to make sure she notices them. There’s a couple of village girls with us, too, drinking and joking, somehow recognizing that they can’t fight Jessica, she’s got to win, so they might as well learn from her.
Half the populace seems gathered here outside the local watering hole, beer-bellied phantoms flitting past my range of vision, alcohol slopping from over-filled glasses, dark blurs moving at their feet like dogs from hell.
I’m wasted, I realize that, it’s one of the perks of having Jessie as an older sister. I get a bit of stick from the bunch we’re with now, but they’re all a good few years older than me and basically they treat me OK. Better to be crushed between four drunken bikers and their girlfriends than standing with Mum and Dad at the side of the road where the overspill is, talking to some of the local dead about church fêtes, income tax and point-to-points. Mum and Dad don’t fit in, either. I can see from here the strain involved in talking to these people, the occasional wild-eyed glances in our direction. But that’s their problem; they wanted to come down here.
At least the mob we’re with have some life in them, a few years of madness left before they buckle down. Only a couple of them have jobs, because there’s nothing much to do locally except work for the grocks, the tourists – us (except Jessie and I are just about beginning to lose this taint) – and they’d rather die first.
Caz, the heavy, punky girl across the table from me, did it for a while and hated it. She actually prefers working on a register in the supermarket in Sidmouth. John, the hard-looking, big-nosed, cocky bastard next to me who keeps deliberately shoving his elbow in my ribs, is a trained mechanic, but lost his job a month ago for telling his boss to fuck off when the boss kept on about him coming in late.
Nick, the one who’s winning where Jessie is concerned, is the quietest and also the youngest, yet he’s somehow acknowledged as in control, the one the others listen to and follow. He’s on some government training scheme which pays for his lodging (he’s from North Devon) while he works as an apprentice at the local forge. I didn’t even know what farriers did until I met him, and I’m still not sure, but Jessie goes for that quiet, individual determination, and obviously so does everyone else.
‘Did you hear about Potter?’ The greasy-haired toe-rag on my right, the other side of me from John, is trying to get everybody’s attention. My mind is sharp for a moment, but as he speaks it all begins to swim again. I try to fix on Caz, concentrating on her mouth and the spiky black make-up around her eyes in an effort to stop my head from sliding under the table. They think Jessie’s a punk, this lot. Even though she doesn’t go for the obvious trappings like Caz, that’s the only way they can figure her out. They think that’s still pretty dangerous.
‘Potter and Martin,’ Toe-rag continues (I’ve forgotten his name – I think I’ve forgotten mine), ‘only go and break into Dr Arnold’s surgery the other night, didn’t they? Totally rat-arsed, they were, drunk about a gallon of Guinness each, and Martin’s dad’s been in to see the doctor the day before. So they thought they’d have a bit of fun, mix his urine sample up with someone else’s or something. Anyway, they’re in there about twenty minutes, nobody bothers them, so they’re pissing about when the fucking Bill arrives. Really heavy, they were. Thought they’d gone in there to score drugs – Potter! He’d shit himself if he took two aspirin. Anyway, Martin’s got about two weeks’ dole money on him, because he’s been painting and decorating a bit, so the Bill think he’s taken that too. Questioned them both for hours, they did, in separate rooms and everything. Bastards!’