High Fidelity

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. Pe

Pe

I can imagine what sort of person Pe

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. Pe

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 Pe

And in any case, maybe I didn’t want to put my hand under Pe