Hunter’s watching our parts come together. He lets out another, ‘Oh my god’, rising in tone as he thrusts faster. He takes my arm and pushes it above my head, then holds it there. He seems to smell my shoulder. He puts both hands in my hair again, stroking it, tousling it, and moans, rocking back and forth. My hair’s really soft. He used to stroke it like that, when we were little. I didn’t think anything of it. Everyone strokes my hair.
I look at him, look at the ceiling, look across the room to my posters – the England Football Team, Dakota Fanning, Saoirse Ronan, the Hemingway Area 1st Football Team’s Junior League victory with me in the centre front row next to Marc and Carl. I look at my DVDs. I look at the dismantled LP player me and Carl found in a car boot sale that we’ve been trying to get to work for over a month. I look at the TV and the tangle of wires that lead to the Xbox live, Wii and old Sega, which is funny to play when you’re drunk late at night. Halo 4 is on the floor, out of its case, next to a pile of dirty boxers and T-shirts.
‘Oh, Max,’ Hunter groans and ruts at me, his eyes closed. I feel my skin ripping more and squeak, gasp, let out an ‘aah’, pull the pillow over my head, trying to be quiet. His arms enclose my body. I roll to my right a little. He sits up, stops for a moment and takes hold of my legs.
Now he is above me, his torso at a right angle to the bed. I hear the smack of his thighs hitting against mine. A horrible squelching sound is getting louder. He’s sliding in and out freely now, but still roughly, because I’m too tight and small for this. Not made for this. Pain travels up my legs and numbs my toes. I’m embarrassed at the way my body bends, embarrassed at the way it shakes and opens for him. I’m embarrassed and confused as to why I care that I feel ugly, why I want to put my hands over my penis and stop it lolling around. The pain is sharp at the entrance point and dull further inside me. I worry. I wonder what it’s touching. It seems to hit against my stomach. The disbelief and shock shake off a little and the pain mutates into something so strong I have to speak. I slowly take the pillow off my head and grip it tightly above me on the mattress. My throat opens and my voice joins the cacophony of quiet sounds.
‘Oh my god, please!’ I beg him, earnestly. ‘Oh my god, please. Hunter. Please.’
‘Shh, shh,’ he breathes, not looking at my face, his mouth open, his hips moving fast, a strange, confused, flickering spark in his eye. Intent. Excitement. Curiosity. Awe. Desperation. Embarrassment. Realisation. Shame. Want. Need. That opaque gleam. Then, the furious frown and movements of someone who wants to get something over with, get it done. I can hear a slapping sound, I can hear wetness, I can hear the whomp whomp whomp of concave things hitting other concave things and the air passing between them. I can hear the quiet creak of the bed. I can hear and smell and feel Hunter’s breath on me.
‘Oh my god,’ he murmurs to himself. ‘I’m gonna . . .’
His body buckles and crouches over me. Hunter lets out a long, low moan. His face is against my chest. His arms stretch out, feeling blindly for my shoulders, then hold them. I wait, while he hugs me.
Maybe twenty seconds pass, and he looks up, not quite meeting my eye. He looks surprised, tearful, and kind of grateful. Grateful and desperate. He wipes a shaking hand around his face.
‘Sorry,’ he mutters. He moves up the bed. I’m lying on my back. He lays on my left side, still inside me, his arm across my chest, his face turned towards me on the pillow, lips next to my ear. I am staring at the ceiling, but I can feel him watching me.
I frown, my breathing slowing, and look down my body. ‘Did you come in me?’
I look over at him, and I see him panic again, then that cloak of anger going up. The petulant lip comes out. ‘What do you care?’
Hunter moves down the bed. He pulls his penis out of me quickly and I let out an ‘errr’, a strange, sick, stuttering, reproachful, apologetic noise. He buckles up.
‘What are you complaining about?’ He pulls on his jumper, which he gets out of his bag. ‘Don’t tell and I won’t tell about you. Don’t tell your mum, either. She’s got enough problems with you and your spacker brother to begin with.’
For some reason, I shake my head and whisper, calmly: ‘I won’t.’
Hunter packs up the empty beer bottles.
‘He’s not a spacker,’ I say.
Hunter looks at me like he’s five years old again, like I’m being mean to him in the playground. It’s his look for when I’ve done something he doesn’t like.
‘Whatever,’ he says.
Then Hunter isn’t there anymore, and it’s just me, lying, legs apart, like a dead bug, flattened to the mattress by pain, and blinking rapidly with my mouth open. Like I can’t believe what just happened, happened. Like I don’t know where I am. Like I am in some alternate reality where there is a possibility that Hunter is a bad person, that my average little bedroom is the scene of a crime, that I could be quietly forced into something so abhorrent I can’t even think the word in my mind and that it could all be over in five minutes.
I hear the creak of the stairs as Hunter’s shoes tap down them. The living room door opens, letting a gale of laughter drift upstairs. I let my aching legs lower to the mattress.
I can hear him saying something to Mum and Dad and Uncle Charlie and Auntie Cheryl, thanking them, saying goodnight, making a joke. They burst out laughing again, my dad’s deep voice roaring beneath my mum’s high-pitched giggle. I hear his mum and dad shuffle out with him, call goodbye. Then the front door closes and footsteps walk down the gravel drive, the gate creaking, the sound of an engine starting, and the crunch of tyres on gravel signals his departure.
A lorry rumbles by on the road outside. My posters are on the walls. Halo 4 is still on the floor. The night still passes behind the blinds. I am still and quiet and dizzy and shaking. I feel cold and wet and a draft between my legs. I feel sick and vomity. I feel embarrassed and strange and in pain. Voices drift up the stairway.
I sit up slowly, painfully, and pull the covers over myself, with my eyes tight shut.
Daniel
Dad and Mum and Auntie Cheryl and Uncle Charlie and Auntie Leah and Uncle Edward are still going on downstairs and talking and stuff. I don’t understand what they have to talk about. Everything they do is so boring. It’s all law and rules and court cases and I told Mum she should do something fun like play video games otherwise she just has a boring life and is boring all the time and then she shouted at me. I don’t understand that woman. I wasn’t being rude. I was being helpful.
They are being so loud it becomes difficult to sleep, so I secretly play my game in my room with the sound turned down. It’s a very complicated game, and it is actually for ages ten and up, but I’m extremely advanced at computing, so it’s easy for me. There are sounds outside my door twice but no one comes in. Sometimes I think they all forget about me. I get angry with them a lot. Max doesn’t forget about me, but sometimes I get angry with him anyway because Mum and Dad think he is so much better than me. They think I don’t know, but I do. I’ll show them when I’m older and am a billionaire robot engineer like that ugly little geek in that film. I won’t be ugly or a geek though. If I am a billionaire I’ll do the smart thing and use my powers to build myself into a super-robot, then buy really cool friends.
There, they are laughing again. It sounds like screaming, like on level thirty when you get to the massacre and take out all the aliens.
Well, if they are going to forget about me I am going to stay up and play my game. So I play and play and play until I hear the cars going home and I get to level twenty-two before I am so tired I cannot play anymore, and I also kill a total of three hundred and thirty-five evil dwarflords.
Sylvie
My head hurts from the music at Toby’s all night. He lives in Oxford and goes to the uni. I made him drive me back but he was totally stoned. It was pretty scary.
I don’t do drugs. I tried a few when I was younger, but only idiots like Toby spend their entire lives stoned. I’m dumping
him tomorrow. I’ll call him up.
Tonight I made him drop me at the church, because he’s the type that, if he knew where I lived, would come round and play guitar badly outside the window. I’ve been there before and I don’t think my parents can take it again. It’s best, I always think, to compartmentalise.
It’s really quiet at night, and the town looks like someone has sketched it in black and white. All the living people sleep just like the dead, and we share the quiet. I’m in the graveyard. The graves look so sweet in the dark. They’re not scary. They’re not eerie or anything. They’re weird and cute and freaky. I like hanging out here, but you can’t talk at night, because you wake the spirits, and you can’t step on a grave, because that is sacrilege. You don’t want to wake the dead. They sleep on, just like the living. Well, all the living people sleep apart from me, I guess.
A car drives past. I hear the engine humming when it’s still out of sight and I sink into the shadow of a grave.
The car swerves a little on the road, slows, speeds up. I’m close enough to see through the glass, and the car is going slow enough through the town centre for me to recognise the face. It’s a dark-haired guy from the sixth form college. He’s hot. I remember him from parties but I don’t know his name. A man is seated beside him. He looks like a smaller, older version of the driver so it’s probably his dad. A woman is in the back.
Somehow the car spooked me, appearing so suddenly, and when it’s gone I slip out of the church gates and start walking home.
I wish I wasn’t like this. So scared all the time. I feel like the older I get, the more scared I become. I think it’s because you realise, as you grow up, that the world is a worse place than you thought when you were a kid and the worst thing was being pushed by a bully or peeing your pants in class. Now I realise there’s a lot more to fear than that. I get scared of walking around on my own in the dark, scared of guys lurking in the shadows, too scared to live fully, freely. There are all these things that I want to do before I die, and what if I die now, or soon? Another thing that scares me is my life taking shape and solidifying. We’re taking our GCSEs and deciding on AS Level options this year, and in two years we’re off to uni. What if I make the wrong choices?
I get these panic attacks sometimes. I keep a brown paper bag by my bed. That’s why I sometimes stay out at night on my own, like this. It’s to prove to myself that the night is only the world in shadow, that my fears can’t control me, that I have courage.
The dark isn’t even a loss of visibility. It’s just a change of colour, of tone. It’s the same as day, it’s just a different hue.
You need courage to do anything. It’s the same courage you need to take an exam or make choices or write a poem when your last one was shit, as it is to go out at night without feeling terrified. If you fear, you’ll never live. You need courage to do it.
Before I turn into my lane I hear the car one last time: a squeal of wheels and the engine of the car cuts through the stillness of the night as it turns left on Grove Street. Tyre burn. Dude thinks he’s cool. Idiot.
Karen
It’s this time of morning, just before dawn, that I love the most. It’s the quiet. I didn’t used to notice it, when I was a child, or at college. Now these minutes are the only ones during my day that are not full of noise. It’s funny what we miss about being young, but I miss the proliferation of silence, unfolding before me on a long Sunday afternoon. I remember in our first house in Hemingway, slipping downstairs for a glass of water and looking out the bay window as the sun moved across the garden, or sitting propped up against my pillows in bed, still in the silent waking of the morning, just before the birdsong began and woke Max up. I remember the silences in the flat we used to have just after finishing uni, in the early days of my pregnancy, my bare-chested new husband reading next to me, while I read cheesy crime dramas and thrillers – my guilty pleasure – enjoying the peace before I started my daily ritual of throwing up and aching.
I try to imagine Steve that young, that skinny. Imagine Steve as a lanky boy in those old ripped jeans with no hair on his chest. I can’t quite do it.
I rub my head to stave off the slight hangover I feel brewing from last night’s dinner party. We used up the last of the wine Cheryl brought us from France this summer.
Life turned out differently from what I had predicted. I do understand what my own mother meant now, that you give up things for your children’s sake, and perhaps there are lines that I wouldn’t be able to cross in terms of sacrifice, but I haven’t reached them yet and I hope I don’t. I wanted my family to be close, like my childhood family never was, and it is. I’m not always the best parent, but I try very, very hard.
The greatest difference between how I dreamed my life would be, and what it became, has everything to do with what I didn’t know about love. I saw it as romantic, something apart from me. I didn’t realise how much it would take as well as add to my life, how completely drained of it I would feel, how I would have to plumb reserves I didn’t know I had to nurture it. I had no idea when I was younger about what love really was, what it does, how it moves, how it grows, what it feels like, why you value it.
How I feel about my children, in particular, is different from how I imagined it would feel to have children. I don’t think I had thought it through well enough. I did not understand that my body and soul were about to be entirely claimed, that I would feel physical pain when I heard them crying, and that I would love them beyond all reason, even when they were being terrible. I’ll admit that I wasn’t ready. Being a parent meant having to make definite choices, rather than meander around possible options. It means having to live the way you wanted to live but could never be bothered to, prioritising things you never used to consider – boundaries and rules and plans. It means living in a school catchment area and saving for university. It means constriction in your chest, and worry all the time, and if not all the time, at least once a day. It means feeling responsible for the every move of two autonomous beings that I cannot control.
Particularly now that they are older. I keep waiting for something to happen, something to come in and crush us all.
Last month, a girl in Max’s school, a couple of years older than Max, killed herself by jumping off a bridge. One of Daniel’s classmates died during during an asthma attack the other summer. Am I giving them too much milk to drink? Am I one day going to get a call at work about drugs? Sex? Drunken violence?
Is it strange that I think of Daniel, my nine-year-old, when I worry about drugs, sex and violence?
Max has never done anything like that. Still, I have worried about Max every day since he was born. He must have lived in an atmosphere of constant panic for the first five years of his life. It was because of his problem. You hear about things going wrong during a birth, but when you’re pregnant and in labour, you never think it will happen to you. No one thinks theirs will be the baby with the problem. And then it was my baby, and it made me worry all the more acutely for the rest of his life, because I had been right to worry before, because when it had been time to give birth, to do the most important thing I could do for Max, something had gone wrong. And I could not shake the feeling, despite logic and reasoning and common sense, that it had been my fault. And I wondered what else I would get wrong in the years to come.
But as he grew up, Max himself never did anything wrong. Not really. Sometimes I think the one problem was enough with Max. Sometimes I think we bore our burden; we had the terrified early years when we didn’t know how he was going to grow or what would happen, and now we just get to enjoy him.
This is how the business of the day first breaks into my beautiful silence and sweeps me forward: these fretful thoughts, combined with a sharp tinge of a headache breaking through to my consciousness from last night. I look over at the wardrobe, where today’s suit is hanging, pressed, ready.
The suits. I get caught up in the suits. I always liked fashion, but this is an obsession. Sourcing them
, buying them, pressing them, fitting into them, throwing out the old suits to make space for the new ones – it all takes up far too much of my time. I suspect I am aiming for the perfect wardrobe for my roles in life, to make up for the fact that I am never quite sure what these roles require of me. On the left-hand side rail in the built-in wardrobe are the Good-Barrister work suits; on the right, there are the Good-Mother casual clothes, mostly slim-fitting trousers with plain blouses or T-shirts or casual but expensive white shirts with blazers to go over them. I wear the Good-Mother outfits to PTA meetings, cake sales, football matches, play dates. I am a Good Parent, and you can tell by my Good-Parent suit. Slim-fitting jeans work well. People can see you keep yourself healthy, you keep your kids healthy, you set a good example. A white T-shirt, tucked in, is sexy and cute but still conservative. Your outfit has to say: I took a while deciding on this because my house was clean and my kids were fed and mentally stimulated, so I had plenty of time to pamper myself. A cardigan is appropriate; a jacket is better. No hoodies. No jumpers. No bulk that says you have gained weight.
Today’s suit stares me down.
I get up at six. I run. We have a gym in the basement. I wanted it upstairs so I could look out the window while on the treadmill. Steve couldn’t understand: why would his crazy wife want the treadmill upstairs? Why would she need to look out the window?
It’s boring! Running and running on the same spot and not going anywhere, ever, is boring! I wanted to scream this at him, not angrily, just loudly enough so he would hear, but he had a conference call and I had a case going to court to prepare for and there was Max’s football gear to iron, and something with Daniel, and so it goes, and so I didn’t scream at him. We don’t scream at each other anymore. It sets a bad example. The heated arguments are held in now, and then we forget about them later, too tired to remember how irritated we were with each other. We slide into bed after the lights are out, turn to each other ready to continue to bicker, and then both sigh, bereft of energy. We still make love most nights. It’s always been good. That has never changed.
Golden Boy Page 3