Doing It

by Melvin Burgess

  ‘Yeah. Let’s give it a bit of time. There’s no hurry. Maybe you have a problem in that department. Maybe there’s some sort of experience you had once.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Dino,’ she replied carefully.

  ‘You must have covered it up. I dunno. But yes, you’re right. Let’s leave the sex for now. Is that what you wanted?’ he added anxiously.

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’ exclaimed Jackie. Her hand was shaking so much she had to put her coffee carefully down on the table to avoid spilling it.

  ‘God!’ Dino clutched his chest. ‘You gave me a fright. I thought you were chucking me there for a moment.’

  ‘No no no.’

  Dino shook his head. She really had scared him. He looked closely at her. ‘You don’t look very pleased,’ he complained.

  ‘Oh, I am. I really am.’

  But the truth was, her first reaction was one of disappointment. She’d been thinking, that was it. No more worry and anxiety and fighting her better judgement. No more bullshit. Dino was going to behave like an arse and that was that. Instead, he was just terrified that she was going to chuck him.

  ‘You’re sure about this?’ she asked.

  ‘You are chucking me, aren’t you!’

  ‘No. But …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just that, you know … I really thought you wouldn’t want to know.’

  ‘What do you think I am? Some sort of arse? No, if that’s how you feel, sure. I mean, of course.’

  ‘Oh, Dino!’ The disappointment passed. She was so pleased she jumped up and wrapped herself round him. She’d underestimated him! He loved her after all! See? Suddenly they were in a clinch on the settee loosening one another’s jeans.

  ‘Ooooo, that’s nice,’ said Jackie. She was just so grateful, so happy that Sue had been wrong. She sort of let go. After a bit, someone knocked the coffee table and one of the cups slopped over. Jackie got up to clean things up and Dino came up behind her and seized her from behind. He pushed her forward until she jammed up against the back of the settee. Jackie bent over it and he began banging himself against her bum. He was looking down, trying to imagine that the thin layers of jeans and knickers were gone, but he was still a good six inches from where he wanted to be. Jackie lay there and soaked into her jeans. At the back of her mouth the words formed,

  ‘Go on then – take them off.’ She could feel the sentence moving inside her. She whispered it soundlessly just to see what it felt like and it felt just so gorgeous, so salty and sexy and true, that she wondered if, despite everything, she might actually say them.

  ‘Go on then – take them off,’ she heard herself saying.

  Dino paused in his bangings. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Go on.’

  She raised herself slightly off the settee while he felt underneath her for the zip. The zipper slid down with a growl. He tugged. Jeans and knickers came suddenly down and she felt the cool air on her bum.

  ‘No!’ she shrieked. She jumped up, spun round and tugged the jeans back up. ‘Don’t do that!’ she snapped.

  ‘But you said,’ complained Dino.

  For a second they both stood staring at one another.

  ‘See?’ she told him. ‘I’m mad. I need looking after. Next time I tell you to do that – just don’t, OK?’

  ‘God,’ said Dino. She put her hand to her mouth and started to shake with the giggles, while Dino stood watching her, lust vying with frustration vying with wanting to be sweet. Every time she looked at his face she laughed more. She kept expecting him to join in, but Dino just stood and stared at her with a wry smile on his face while she shook with hysterics. It went on for ages, until he got fed up with it and stalked out into the kitchen. Alone, she came suddenly to her senses, walked three times round the room and ran out to him to apologise. Amazingly, he was OK about it. More proof! She really had misjudged him.

  They sat back down with their coffees. Jackie was delighted. He was sweet! He really was sweet. He hadn’t a clue what she was going through, but he was respecting it because she’d asked him to. And here she was still being an arse! That was pretty bloody good, wasn’t it? Her initial instinct had been right after all – there was more to him than met the eye. Under the bullshit was a kind, sweet boy.

  Dino leaned back on the sofa, basking in her approval. On the spur of the moment, he told her all about his mum and Dave Short. He hadn’t planned on it. He had no idea why. He just found himself saying it.

  ‘I was just remembering,’ he said. ‘My mum’s having an affair with someone from her school. I caught them at it the other day in the front room.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know …’ He looked sideways at her. ‘She’s having an affair.’ Dino smiled at her. He meant it to be amused, but his smile was a terrible grimace. Suddenly it sounded awful – exactly what he didn’t want it to be. He stopped smiling and scowled at Jackie, daring her to be appalled.

  Jackie scowled back. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Just before the party,’ admitted Dino, closely watching her face.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know. The party and everything. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter?’ Jackie was desperately trying to work it out. Had his unexpected compliance got anything to do with this? She stood up and pulled her jeans up, as if they were still on the way down. She sat down again. ‘OK. Go on.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell, really,’ said Dino. And then he told her everything – everything, that is, except for the fact that he had been alternating between total amnesia and utter turmoil about it ever since.

  ‘I don’t think she even knows I saw them,’ he lied.

  ‘If she didn’t, she does now. After what you said to your dad about Dave Short going away with them for the weekend.’

  ‘That didn’t mean anything,’ insisted Dino irritably. It was so typical! He’d been so understanding and grown-up and now look. Far from reassuring him, she was trying to make out it was some sort of disaster.

  Jackie decided to take it at face value and be outraged. ‘Well, how could she do that to your dad? And to you! In your own house! And she hasn’t even come to speak to you about it. Oh, Dino, you must feel awful.’

  ‘Not really,’ he told her coolly. ‘It’s their business, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s your business too! Well, if she won’t talk to you about it, you’ll have to talk to her about it.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Can’t you? How awful.’

  ‘No. It isn’t that bad.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Jackie looked carefully at him. It was happening: he was getting upset with her. He was looking to one side, pulling a face, sneering at her concern. She could watch it happening. Dino was rushing into denial.

  ‘Dino?’

  ‘Bollocks,’ he told her, and turned away.

  Jackie grabbed him by the arm and swung him round to face her. This was important. He needed her, and here he was vanishing in front of her eyes.

  ‘I care for you,’ she hissed. ‘How dare you just vanish on me. Dino! Look at me!’

  Dino looked at her and began to sneer but before he finished it his eyes filled with tears. He was amazed. Tears? Where had they come from? What had he got to be upset about?

  ‘Oh, Dino.’ She put her hand gently on the side of his face. His whole face wobbled with sorrow and amazement. Then he took her in his arms, buried his face in her hair and sobbed.

  An hour or so later, after she closed the door behind him, Jackie went to look at herself in the mirror in the front room. Her hair was still damp on one side where he had wept on it. Somewhere in the back of her mind a little voice – Sue’s probably – was muttering away that there, see, he’s done it again. Just as she thought he was being understanding and thoughtful it turned out he had an agenda of his own. Well, maybe – but Jackie didn’t care. He’d clung tight like a big baby sobbing his hear
t out. He’d given her his bleeding heart. He needed her.

  ‘I’ve never cried like that before,’ he said to her afterwards. ‘I don’t think I could with anyone else.’ And so he had wrapped her into his heart more tightly than ever.

  Shortly after, the phone rang. It was Sue wanting to know how she got on.

  ‘It was amazing,’ said Jackie. ‘He took it!’

  ‘He what?’ demanded Sue.

  ‘He took it! He accepted the deal!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course I’m sure. He said he understood.’

  ‘Understood?’ asked Sue incredulously. Since when had Dino understood anything? ‘What exactly did you say to him?’

  ‘What we said. I told him. I said I needed more time to be sure of what we felt for each other, and he said that he agreed with me.’

  ‘He agreed?’

  ‘Yes,’ insisted Jackie. ‘He said he thought that we should just forget about sex for a while.’

  ‘Dino said that?’

  ‘Dino,’ said Jackie.

  ‘He’s up to something.’

  ‘Why do you have to be so suspicious?’

  ‘Aren’t you suspicious?’

  ‘No,’ said Jackie, in an offended voice. ‘I mean, he’s making all the right noises, isn’t he? That was the deal, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose the least you can say is, he knows the right noises to make. I wouldn’t have even given him credit for that before.’ Could it be that Dino was actually being clever? Surely not? But even that unlikely possibility was more believable than that he was being genuinely caring.

  ‘He’s up to something.’

  ‘Don’t be cynical. He was sweet.’

  ‘It’s better than his usual grunting, I suppose,’ agreed Sue. ‘But it’s not like him, is it? Or are you going to give me some crap about this being the real Dino, the Dino beneath who has been waiting to emerge?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be patronising,’ snapped Jackie. But although she would never admit to anything so foolish, really she did hope that it might be so. She had no idea of the depths of deceit that Dino was prepared to stoop to.

  Before she put the phone down, Jackie hesitated. There was more to tell, but she knew exactly what Sue would say if she ever found out that Dino’s mum was having an affair and that Dino had more or less grassed her up at the dinner table the week before. She put the phone down, Dino’s secret kept, but she could hear Sue’s voice ringing in her ears even as she put the phone down.

  ‘Sucker! Why are you doing this to yourself?’

  He needs me, thought Jackie in reply. He was like a six-foot teddy bear, right down to the sexy little growl when he whispered in her ear. He needed her. But did she need him?

  22

  dino the destroyer

  Back home, Dino went straight up to his room. He felt calm inside, but his whole body was vibrating as if a perfectly balanced mechanism was spinning rapidly inside him. One jolt and he’d blow to pieces. He was furious with Jackie for making such a fuss. Look at the state he was in!

  Below, he heard his mother’s step on the stairs. He’d been dying for her to talk to him about it, but what good did talking do? He’d just talked about it to Jackie and look at him now. Talking just made it worse.

  Her foot sounded on the creaky steps. The creaking paused, then restarted. Then paused. Then with a firm tread, she came upstairs. A knock. Dino flung himself sideways on the bed and closed his eyes. The door opened.

  ‘Dino?’

  Pause.

  ‘Dino? Are you awake?’

  ‘Uh. What? Mum?’

  ‘Did you have a good day?’

  ‘Yeah. All right, why?’

  ‘You look …’

  ‘I’m tired.’ He glanced over to her through screwed-up eyes as if he was unused to the light and saw her watching him as if he was something you could open up, a box, a purse, and she could just pick out and throw away the bits she didn’t want in there.

  ‘Do you …? Is there anything …?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anything bothering …? Anything …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘… you want to talk about?’ Dino suddenly couldn’t work his mouth. He lay there and stared at her hopelessly until she gave in.

  ‘Would you like a sandwich?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes!’ That was more like it. Mother.

  She smiled back at him, and for a second the two of them were complicitous in pretence, mother and son doing their mother and son stuff.

  ‘Fried egg?’

  ‘And ketchup.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum!’ he called after her. He meant it. He was so relieved, so pleased with her. All the business she had with him was a fried egg sandwich. He lay back down, exhausted.

  ‘Things aren’t as straightforward as they seem,’ muttered Dino to himself. You ain’t kidding. He closed his eyes and tried to blank everything out.

  Ten minutes later, Kath Howther came upstairs, knocked gently on the door and went in with the fried egg sandwich on a small plate. Dino lay on his bed, fast asleep.

  ‘Dino?’ No answer. She went up close, put the plate down on the little table next to his bed and looked down into her son’s pale face.

  ‘Dino.’ She said his name like a statement, as if she was testing to see if it still fitted this handsome, long man, who had been her baby son of just a few years ago. What was it like to be mother to a grown-up? How good would she be at it? She had thought it was going to be so much easier now, but look, she’d let go and thought of herself and here she was suddenly and hopelessly out of her depth. She had so much wanted the whole thing to work for them all – family, childhood, Mum and Dad. She loved him so much and here he was, already passing beyond her and her own feelings were suddenly too big, too soon.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. She tiptoed out. She waited outside his door listening to see if he was awake really, but there was no sound.

  One of the worst things about the whole mess was not knowing how long it would go on for, but she found out the answer to that very soon, when Dino destroyed his family the next morning accidentally, like a man with a shotgun pointing it at someone’s head and pulling the trigger whilst suffering from a temporary illusion that he was really holding a feather duster. It started with an outrageous argument with his mother. Afterwards, he couldn’t remember what it was about until she told him, much later on. It was socks. He had no clean socks. He called down asking where they were, and she yelled back up, ‘Just a moment, Dino, I’m dealing with the cat.’ Next thing, he was storming downstairs.

  ‘Oh, the cat, the cat, the cat’s all right, then. Always the bloody cat before anything else. You’re mad about that bloody cat, I don’t know why you don’t marry it.’ He burst into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and furious.

  ‘Don’t speak to your mother like that,’ yelled his dad. First thing in the morning – not the time to start up. Before he could stop it, Dino’s mouth opened and out it came.

  ‘She might as well marry the cat, she’s just a tart anyway. Come and get it, here it is. Pussy pussy pussy pussy pussy.’

  In the silence that followed he watched his father’s face change shape. He wasn’t even conscious of being outrageous. It was true, wasn’t it? His mother stood there with a tin of Katkins in her hand and her mouth open. Mat stared at him as if he was made of horror, a piece of toast halfway to his mouth.

  ‘Just a tart,’ Dino insisted in a squeaky voice. ‘Pussy pussy,’ he repeated. He couldn’t understand what they were being so appalled about. His mother knew, his father knew – didn’t he? They’d been arguing ever since he said that thing about Dave Short. The only person who was being kept in the dark was him. What did they expect?

  His dad was rising to his feet and pushing the table out of the way. Dino was going to get hit. His mouth filled with wet, salty liquid. He smacked his lips, expecting to taste blood already. Now his father’s mouth was openin
g and a stream of rage poured out of it.

  ‘Fed on shit!’ yelled Dino. He prepared to run for it, but then he remembered how small his father looked these days. He’d often had fantasies about beating the shit out of him. Well, maybe now was the time. He was fit and young; his father was a sad old bastard who couldn’t even stop his wife shagging creeps like Dave Short in his own living room, probably in his own bed if Jackie was right and she usually was. Dino bent at the legs and moved his hands forward. His father was pushing the chairs out of the way. One went over. The milk spilled on the table. Mat jumped back.

  It was all happening in slow motion but suddenly something broke out of the frame. His mother. It felt afterwards as if she’d jumped right over the table to get at him. She leaped on Dino, grabbed him tight, wrapped her arms round his neck and hugged him so hard it hurt.

  Dino caught sight of his dad changing direction in mid-murder, face popping, swinging his arms to keep his balance and stop himself from colliding with them. His mother kept her face deep into his neck, just like Jackie sometimes did. His dad ricocheted off the edge of the work surface and banged his fist violently into the breadbin. His mother lifted her face to Dino’s ear and whispered right in there, in words that sent a shiver and a tickle down his side until he squirmed, ‘Don’t do this to me.’

  ‘Ah, oh, all right,’ he yelled, wriggling and jumping because of the tickle.

  ‘I’ll speak to you about Dave. OK?’

  ‘Right,’ he said in a quieter voice.

  She let go of him.

  The room had escaped by the skin of its teeth. Mat suddenly ran out of it and up the stairs. Chairs down, milk spilled, tea slopped out of the cups, toast and crumbs everywhere. The air was ashes. It was amazing how much damage you could do in just a few seconds if you stopped bothering not to knock things over. His mum was already straightening things on the table, but his dad just stood there. He looked older, more wrinkled, smaller and more useless than ever. He seemed to have shrunk and his mother seemed to have grown.

  She brushed herself down and said, ‘But first I’d better tell your dad, don’t you think?’

  ‘I thought he knew,’ said Dino.