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I was offhand with her the next time we went out, and when she went to kiss me at the end of the evening, I shrugged her off. “What’s the point?” I asked her. “It never goes anywhere.” The time after that she asked whether I still wanted to see her, and I looked the other way. We had been going out for three months, which was as near to a permanent relationship as you could get in the fourth year. (Her mum and dad had even met my mum and dad. They liked each other.) She cried, then, and I loathed her for making me feel guilty, and for making me finish with her.
I went out with a girl called Kim, who I knew for a fact had already been invaded, and who (I was correct in assuming) wouldn’t object to being invaded again. Pe
I felt the room spin round.
“You never got so much as a bit of tit in three months, and I shagged her the first week!”
I believed him; everyone knew that he got whatever he wanted from whomever he saw. I had been humiliated, beaten, outperformed; I felt stupid, and small, and much, much younger than this unpleasant, oversized, big-mouthed moron. It shouldn’t have mattered so much. Thomson was in a league of his own when it came to matters of the lower body, and there were plenty of little jerky creeps in 4b who had never so much as put their arm around a girl. Even my side of the debate, inaudible though it was, must have appeared impossibly sophisticated to them. I wasn’t losing that much face. But I still couldn’t understand what had happened. How had this transformation in Pe
I expect Pe
3. Jackie Allen (1975)
Jackie Allen was my friend Phil’s girlfriend, and I pinched her off him, slowly, patiently, over a period of months. It wasn’t easy. It required a great deal of time, application, and deception. Phil and Jackie started going out together around the same time as Pe
I’m not too sure why I wanted to fuck it all up for them, and for everyone who needed them to go out together. You know when you see T-shirts piled up in a clothes shop, beautifully folded and color-coded, and you buy one? It never looks the same when you take it home. It only looked good in the shop, you realize too late, because it had its mates around it. Well, it was kind of like that. I had hoped that if I went out with Jackie, then some of that elder-stateswoman dignity would rub off on me, but of course without Phil, she didn’t have any. (If that’s what I wanted, I should perhaps have looked for a way to go out with both of them, but that sort of thing is hard enough to pull off when you’re an adult; at seventeen it could be enough to get you stoned to death.)
Phil started working in a men’s boutique on Saturdays, and I moved in. Those of us who didn’t work, or who, like me, worked after school but not on weekends, met on Saturday afternoons to walk up and down High Street, spend too much time and too much money in Harlequin Records, and ‘treat ourselves’ (we had somehow picked up our mothers’ vocabulary of postwar abstention) to a filter coffee, which we regarded as the last word in French cool. Sometimes we called in to see Phil; sometimes he let me use his staff discount. It didn’t stop me from screwing his girlfriend behind his back.
I knew, because both Alison and Pe
I tried not to run Phil down too much—I felt bad enough as it was, what with screwing his girlfriend and all. But it became unavoidable, because when Jackie expressed doubts about him, I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.
And then one night at a party I saw Phil and Jackie huddled together in a corner, and Phil was obviously distressed, pale and near to tears, and then he went home, and the next morning she phoned up and asked if I wanted to go out for a walk, and we were away, and we weren’t doing things in secret anymore; and we lasted about three weeks.
You’d say that this was childish, Laura. You’d say that it is stupid of me to compare Rob and Jackie with Rob and Laura, who are in their mid-thirties, established, living together. You’d say that adult adultery beats teenage adultery hands down, but you’d be wrong. I have been one point of a triangle several times since then, but that first point was the sharpest. Phil never spoke to me again; our Saturday shopping crowd wouldn’t have much to do with us either. My mum had a phone call from Phil’s mum. School was, for a few weeks, uncomfortable.
Compare and contrast with what happens if I make that sort of mess now: I can go to different pubs and clubs, leave the answering machine on, go out more, stay in more, fiddle around with my social compasses and draw a new circle of friends (and anyway, my friends are never her friends, whoever she might be), avoid all contact with disapproving parents. That sort of anonymity was unavailable then, though. You had to stand there and take it, whatever it was.
What perplexed me most of all was the feeling of flat disappointment that overtook me when Jackie called me that Sunday morning. I couldn’t understand it. I had been plotting this capture for months, and when capitulation came I felt nothing—less than nothing, even. I couldn’t tell Jackie this, obviously, but on the other hand, I was quite unable to show the enthusiasm I felt she needed, so I decided to have her name tattooed down my right arm.
I don’t know. Scarring myself for life seemed much easier than having to tell Jackie that it had all been a grotesque mistake, that I’d just been messing about; if I could show her the tattoo, my peculiar logic ran, I wouldn’t have to bother straining after words that were beyond me. I should explain that I am not a tattoo kind of guy; I am, and was, neither rock’n’roll go-to-hell decadent or wrestling-team muscular. But there was a disastrous fashion for them at our school around that time, and I know for a fact that several men now in their mid-thirties, accountants and schoolteachers, perso