Rotten in Denmark

by Jim Pollard

  At another table, Jenny was chatting to a familiar gaggle of girls. Fingers flouncing through hair, a kiss of fuggy air, a swill of Screwdriver. We’d seen them in here quite a few times since. We had learned that they came from Bromley which was arguably even duller than Beech Park and because the drinks were cheaper, they popped into The Roebuck as a fuelling stop before going on to a club.

  Cal brought his empty pint jug down on the table like a gavel. ‘OK, Terence, what do you want to know?’

  He’d never risen to the bait before. Of course, I’d told the others what had happened between Cal and Jennifer in the beer garden - he would have expected no less - but whenever the subject was raised, he side-stepped it like the winger the Beech Park PE department had always hoped he’d grow into: off on another path before anyone had drawn a breath of anticipation. It was ‘no big deal’, he’d always imply. Terry was so taken aback he had no idea just what he did want to know. He opted for a moment or two of clarification.

  ‘So you’d never met her before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you sang “Blockbuster”?’

  Charlie laughed - he’d heard our ‘Blockbuster’.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Cal.

  ‘And you just went over and asked her if she wanted to come outside?’

  ‘Yes. So what do you want to know?’ Cal repeated.

  ‘Well, to put it simply, chum, how the fuck you did it?’

  Cal smiled. ‘Well, to put it simply. Young Frank here was so distracted by the female form and all its felicitations that he performed like a left tit.’ He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘And so in order to support my contention that the birds and the bees are a delightful accompaniment to life rather than its whole point of no return, I pursued the said female and,’ he shrugged his shoulders and laughed, ‘made my point.’

  ‘Yes but how?’ asked Charlie. Terry was bouncing on his stool.

  ‘Did you not attend Miss Shag-nasty’s biology classes, Charlie?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I just asked her,’ he said picking up his glass. ‘I just asked. Now, does anyone want another pint?’

  With that he was away. Charlie looked at me expectantly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘But the guy is tiny. This is the only fucking pub in the world where they don’t ask him his age so how in the name of buggeration does he get a shag?’

  ‘Size isn’t everything,’ said Terry, sadly.

  ‘Well, have you lost your Brian?’ Charlie demanded of him. Brian Ferry - cherry. (In The Roebuck they still served snowballs with a glacé Brian.)

  ‘Not exactly though there is this bird who comes in for Paraffin and a gallon of three star...’

  ‘Quite. Nor’s Frank and nor have I and,’ Charlie looked up and smiled, ‘nor I imagine has he.’ I turned around and saw Jonathan push his way through the pub - his sports jacket older than his years. He was all angular - elbows and knees and chin - juggling his car keys and chatting to Cal as the smaller, stockier figure walked towards us with a tray of drinks. Cal’s hands only permitted him to carry two pints at a time which, now we were five, would have meant three trips to the bar. Definitely less cool than carrying the tray which he now plonked down in the middle of the table. Jon was still fiddling with his keys like a Catholic with beads. ‘Evening chaps,’ he said, picking up his pint but not sitting down. Cal too remained standing. Terry was looking at him pleadingly - he hadn’t attended Mrs O’Shaunessy’s biology lessons.

  ‘Look,’ said Cal, he took a sip of his beer and placed the glass on his beer mat. ‘This is how it is: knowledge begets confidence begets charisma. End of story.’ He sat down. ‘You been practising Jon?’

  ‘It may be the end of the story, Cal,’ interrupted Charlie, ‘but what about the beginning of it. The little epigram is all very well but where did you beget the knowledge?

  ‘It’s simply part of one’s general education,’ said Cal, primly. ‘Perhaps you should regard your continuing virginity as more a reflection of the quality of your education than of yourselves as people.’

  ‘Ok, then,’ said Terry, ‘educate us.’

  And this, over the ensuing few pints and a less than inspired set by a group called the Love Pump Monsters, was exactly what Cal did: most popular sexual positions for males; most popular sexual positions for females; how to reconcile the two amicably; how to stimulate the clitoris (‘Stimulate it? Terry can’t spell it,’ said Jonathan); how to use a condom (‘They’re for poofs,’ opined Terry). It was raucous stuff. Amazement, laughter and horror in equal measure. Our heads hovered only inches apart like a gang of scheming criminals. How to practise oral sex; how to do it for real; the difference between a vaginal and a clitoral orgasm (‘What about the fucking penal orgasm?’ asked Terry); how to increase your staying power (‘What would I want to do that for?’ Charlie this time with a laugh.); finding the G-spot... ‘Where’s that?’ asked a female voice from out of the ether. We were bellowing now to make ourselves heard above the tired, uninspired but deafeningly voluminous heavy metal riffing of the Monsters.

  ‘It’s an absolute myth, darling,’ the voice continued. ‘Devised by the publishers of glossy women’s magazines.’ We all sat up sharpish as if a seance had been successful.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ squeaked Terry. Women over forty in peach coloured two-piece suits and wearing perfume that didn’t smell like the eel-counter at MacFisheries were rare in The Roebuck.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ said Cal.

  ‘Calum, your father and I are off now.’ She had just a hint of lipstick. ‘We hope to be back early next week. If you and your friends are tedious enough to insist on having a party, please be good enough to invite your sister.’ She smiled. ‘And tidy up afterwards. Jonathan?’

  Jonathan rose and accepted the offered arm. ‘I’m running Mr and Mrs Carter to the airport,’ he explained.

  ‘I’m so sorry to drag you away Jon, dear,’ laughed Mrs Carter. ‘Now you’ll miss foreplay.’

  I guess Cal had what my own mother would have called modern parents. As his mum and Jonathan descended the steps to the main body of the pub, Cal proffered the rest of us his empty glass. ‘Lucky I haven’t passed my driving test yet really.’

  I stood up - it was my round. ‘Better make this the last,’ said Cal, looking at his watch. ‘We’ve got a party to organise.’

  I noticed that Terry had disappeared. ‘He’s probably gone for a wank,’ said Charlie.

  But Terry hadn’t gone for a wank. Jonathan told us later that he’d seen him sitting on the bench outside. Terry Chambers was making notes.

  That night we did have a party and, no, Cal didn’t invite Wendy. I’m glad about that because even with my new found knowledge I don’t think I would have fancied my chances with her. I’d seen her twenty first birthday party from Cal’s bedroom window with the Fender Telecaster strapped round my neck. It had been a garden party. A very adult affair with canapés and vol-au-vents and not a lot of lager. There were Cal’s parents and a lot of other people who looked like them wearing dinner suits and frocks. I watched Wendy share a glass of champagne with a man who used Brylcreem and turned my amp up loud. Not my kind of party. As it was, Jenny Barclay was perfectly happy to sleep with me just as she had been perfectly happy to sleep with Cal previously. She seemed grateful almost because Cal, you see, was no longer interested. Jenny’s friend, the spotty blonde one who had come to look for her that evening, had lost her spots, put on a stone in weight and looked fantastic. It was she, dressed in something tight, black and almost big enough to be a dress, who Cal invited to the party not Jen. Her name was Linda Sadler and Cal went out with her for a couple of years afterwards.

  While Charlie went home to raid his father’s drinks cabinet, Cal and I walked back up the hill to Cal’s house, starting on the only bottle of take-out whisky the landlo
rd was prepared to let us have. Jack Daniels. The group of girls arrived later - swollen on the way by a few more females faces and a brace of boyfriends. One tried to look like John Travolta. The other was more Maurice Gibb. Cal slipped into the role of host, putting on the language and behaviour of his mother like a coat.

  ‘Glad you could come,’ he said, kissing cheeks and shaking hands. He helped Linda with her coat. Jenny was still wearing hers. It was a black satin tour jacket. Aspirational but a bit flash for me.

  ‘Hi,’ I said to her. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Frank,’ said Cal, handing me a couple of parkas and a donkey jacket, ‘Do you and Jen want to take the coats upstairs.’

  The Carter’s stairs were broad enough to climb two abreast. This we did but in silence and looking straight ahead. I pushed open a couple of partly ajar doors - one I knew was Cal’s room. I wasn’t quite sure where upstairs Cal had in mind.

  ‘Is this the master bedroom here?’ said Jennifer, as we turned the hall corridor. The heavy pine door, stripped and finished, was shut but not locked. Inside the room smelled of Mrs Carter’s perfume. It was much the biggest bedroom I’d ever been in with two of everything: dressing-tables, full-length mirrors, wardrobes and even two double beds. I dropped the pile of coats onto one of them.

  Jenny ran her finger down one of the three ties hung over the top of the furthest of the mirrors. ‘Silk,’ she said. Then she took her own coat off and tossed it on top of the others. ‘Do you think they have orgies in here?’ she asked indicating the acres of bed spread.

  I grinned gibbonly. ‘I shouldn’t think so, not knowing old Mr Carter,’ I said. Not that I did know old Mr Carter. I sounded like someone else, like the besuited buffoon in black and white comedies or Kenneth Connor in the Carry-Ons, shuffling from one foot to the other.

  ‘Do you want to see if they’re comfortable?’ I asked, taking a step forward. Now I sounded like a different someone else: a booming kind of person with robotic moving habits.

  Jennifer sat on the coat-free bed and I joined her. Something in her suddenly girly manner told me that I had taken the initiative. I wanted to be honest, wanted it to be clear where we were going so I helped her off with her red jumper - a bit impatiently, rather like a mother with a child who is slow to undress. She wasn’t quite what my father might have called a sweater girl. Sitting there in her bra, she looked a little as if she may have been expecting a preliminary kiss. I leaned over and touched her neck, allowing my fingers to fall down her flesh and follow the curve of her body. Then cupping a breast, I did kiss her. Gently as I could manage. I was frantically trying to swallow the bubble of panic in my throat but I kept getting her tongue instead.

  We had tumbled back now. She was lying on the bed with my hand between her and the burgundy satin counterpane. We were still kissing. Time was running out. I didn’t want our lips locked for twenty motionless minutes like 13 year olds and I was up against a technical problem. Cal’s lecture had rather skimped on the preliminaries and undoing bra straps had been taken as read. It wasn’t easy to move my hand anyway. We were still kissing but I could sense her tongue tiring. I flexed my fingers: half caress, half catch-seeking probe.

  ‘It’s here, babe,’ she said, coming up for air. With an easy movement, Jenny unclipped her bra from between her breasts - the cups falling away like wrapping paper.

  I could feel my jeans getting tight. As my hands caressed her tits, her hand fell to my crotch, the other struggling with my belt. I became aware of another imminent problem - the presence of my Dr Marten boots. These took the best part of five minutes to remove at the best of times. In a frazzling first-time frenzy, God knows how long it would take.

  Fortunately Jennifer didn’t seem over concerned about the niceties - footwear and so on. I’d heard that socks in bed were a no-no but, for Jen, at least, DMs didn’t appear to be a major concern. She still had her own wedge heels on. She’d got my trousers and pants down to my knees and was tugging at the zip on her skirt. I had my hand on the crotch of her knickers but I couldn’t really feel much - particularly through the layer of nylon. This stimulation stuff was a lot more complex in practice than Cal had made it sound in theory. What would the clitoris feel like - the bulls-eye on a dartboard?

  Suddenly, I could feel a weight against my head as if the ceiling were coming in. It was Jen’s hand. She was pushing my head down between her legs. I looked up like a scuba diver. The skirt had come undone and she had somehow wriggled out of it. With the other hand she was snatching at her knickers. I could feel the underside of my cock grating up and down on what appeared to be a surprisingly coarse choice of carpet for a bedroom.

  Now with full visuals in place, it was easier to get a handle on what Cal had been talking about. I tried to be gentle with my tongue, tender, but Jen kept pushing me in. Judging by her noise, things were going well. I was wondering what colour vaginal juices were and laughing (nearly choking) in case they tasted like coca-cola or Aunty Anne’s coffee. At seventeen even thoughts such as these cannot dampen your erection.

  ‘That’s gorgeous, Frankie,’ panted Jen. She was pulling me up by the hair now.

  Despite the best efforts of the carpet my cock was still hard, albeit red raw. I was the wink of her belly button as I came up and the soft mounds of breast. I fell on top of her and just slid inside her. There was none of the fiddling about by both parties that I later discovered was so characteristic of this business. None of that adult version of the getting the right shape in the right hole game. She sighed and so did I. It felt so small inside, like a child’s tiny finger swallowed and tender. It was my seventeenth birthday and I’d just lost my virginity.

  Later, when, in Wendy, I finally met a woman to whom I was close enough to talk about these things, I discovered that some of what Cal had told us was less than accurate. ‘Part of that fantastical, mysterious conspiracy that unites pornographers and pimps with publishers of women’s magazines and romantic fiction is the idea that somewhere with someone in some place in some position it can and will be perfect,’ she said. In truth, I think Calum Carter had the same approach to the location of the clitoris as Captain Scott had to the north pole - it’s around here somewhere, I’ll find it if it damn well kills me and when I do I’ll stick a flag in. Perhaps, Cal’s epigram needs rewriting a little. It’s not knowledge that begets confidence, it’s belief. Conviction.

  ‘It’s like pin the tail on the donkey for most men,’ Wendy said.

  ‘And a fair few women,’ I replied.

  That would have been about 1980, I guess. We were lying in bed, where we had been for the best part of three days, contentedly eating ice cream. It was Wendy’s Paris flat - trés joli, trois pièces, 50m2 - the one that’s currently on the market for 180 million Francs.

  ‘It wasn’t all rubbish though, right?’ I said dropping a dollop of M. Berthillon’s cassis flavour ice-cream on Wendy’s navel. ‘Cal’s love-making lecture?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ she gasped, rolling over - the scoop of lemon sorbet in her hand was dangerously poised. ‘Just rather heavily embroidered.’

  The ice cream I’d cruelly deposited slid down her tummy and soaked into the crumpled white bed-sheets like blood. ‘Hey, I was eating that,’ I said.

  ‘You know he got it all from a prostitute,’ said Wendy, motionless for a heartbeat. Then she dropped a scoop size boule of lemon sorbet onto my cock from a height of three feet.

  ‘I know,’ I uttered like a scream.

  20

  Beech Park Crematorium, the present day

  On this the sunniest and brightest of autumn days, I try to comprehend the absence of light. The blackness that is in these ties and tones of voice, in and beneath these eyes, in these tins of soot for a soul. I think of it and I don’t like it. This is where we all go - a fact which no intellectual contortion, not even Calum Carter’s finest, can cheat.

  There are the flowers, sligh
tly more than I expect and there are the cars, slightly fewer. I am standing by the crematorium door as the mourners arrive. It too is black and its design Gothic but it’s not even as old as the body in the coffin. Those churchly features that are present in this soulless place appear to have been chosen from some ecclesiastical catalogue. The brickwork reminds me of the Bevan Estate - something produced on the hoof, on the cusp, just after the planner’s enthusiasm ran out and just before the money did the same. Arranged on the grass are the flowers for this and today’s other funerals and nearby are the urns, still vacant.

  There’s none of the fuss of a cemetery, nothing so dirty as dirt and the unregulated elements and the sad, stooping stones marking another patch of neglect. Nothing so stark. Here you disappear in a puff of smoke like a rabbit. The curtains close and it’s ‘more whisky, vicar?’ time. For a moment I yearn for something more flamboyant than this cheap magician’s fancy. Like the Taoists with their ancestor worship - no problems with words unspoken there - or even those pretty, pictured plots like they have in Père Lachaise, for God’s sake. There’s Wendy smiling at Jim Morrison’s graffiti splattered tomb: ‘You can’t really do that with an urn of ashes, can you?’ she said, her arm through mine. ‘Not unless you call in the engravers.’ It was that first time in Paris but much later - just before we came back. 1982?

  I don’t have my sun-glasses on this time and it’s useful. Squinting into this sunlight produces a suitable display of emotion. As the mourners pass from the daylight into the black hole in which our service of remembrance will be held, the occasional palm pats my back or grips my hand. There’s the odd damp, dull peck on the cheek. I keep looking straight ahead.

  I’m not thinking of the man lying in that box. I’m thinking inevitably of an earlier funeral. While the tears, at least, were genuine that day, so much else about Cal’s funeral seems as unreal as a dream - all bizarre mismatches. For so many of the congregation it was just another event like the Reading Festival or the Living Marxism conference: the punk rockers, musicians and wannabes, the hangers on. This time all of the faces are familiar to some degree. There are no gate-crashers or death groupies.