Clive dreamt of being a rapper and moving to London and making millions like Eminem. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t grown up in a trailer park with a drug-addled mother, married too young and lost everything he had to gambling. He could still feel their pain and reckoned he could still be a cultural marker of his generation. So he wore his trousers low, his baseball cap backwards and walked as if one leg had been shot and had to be propelled round his body as a stiff entity. Debbie followed suit, pushing her breasts up to her chin, bleaching her hair, shortening her skirts and exaggerating her make-up. They’d even had matching tattoos, which hovered above the crack of their bottoms, predictably a decorated D for him and a C for her. And they spoke in a gangsta slang, sucking on their teeth and using words they sometimes barely understood.
It wasn’t only their words that confused them, but also often the ideas they attempted to express which were as mixed and murky as a sludgy pond. He had an intense desire to ‘be someone’ and to have lots of money, although both ambitions were as flimsy as the miniscule lace underwear Debbie wore. Life, to Clive, was all about what you had and what people thought of you and it didn’t matter how you got there, as long as you didn’t have to work too hard. Open any of the magazines that littered the floor of Debbie’s pink bedroom and you’d see people exactly like him or her whose lives were followed in minute detail from year to year without any real reason. But reasons had ceased to matter a long time ago; for Clive and his people everything was about the here and now, the immediacy of existence.
Occasionally Clive would watch the news with his parents and see pictures of boys his age who had died fighting in a country he would be hard pressed to find on a map. Suckers, he would think to himself, as his father offered up silent prayers that you only knew he was making because his lips were moving. It wasn’t even as if soldiers got paid much and the only way they got their faces in the papers was once they’d died and what the hell was the point of that? His father often talked about the value of money and the pleasure of a good day’s work or a job well done but Clive would only roll his eyes into his head. It’s all bullshit, was one of his favourite phrases, something he and his friends would say to each other about any and everything. They were against the system, but never even considered that when something is knocked down something else has to be put in its place. A sense of righteousness and being owed pervaded them like the cheap aftershave they had recently taken to wearing.
Clive’s sister, Natalie, made no attempt to hide her disdain for her brother and his girlfriend, but his parents were annoyingly tolerant. They liked to talk about things like self-expression and individuality and respect for teenage boundaries, which made Clive bubble over with rage at the lack of things he had to fight against in his life. Not that he fully understood that this was the reason for the rage which seemed to overtake him so frequently. He could only identify his malaise in the simplest terms, by looking at those of his classmates who lived on the Cartertown estate or had only had one parent; a few had even been arrested. Clive found it stomach-churningly unfair that they should be given the opportunity of a life worth exploiting in song, whilst he had to put up with a vicarage, of all places, as well as understanding parents.
His parents’ understanding, however, crashed into a brick wall when they came back from the last parents’ evening of the lower sixth to be told that he was probably on course to fail maths A Level. Clive never should have taken maths, but his father had balked at politics, saying it wasn’t a proper subject, and Clive had relented and now it looked as though he’d only be getting two A Levels, which wouldn’t even get him into an ex-poly. We’ll have to get you a tutor, said his father, but Clive had stood up at this, twisting his baseball cap on his head; No man, he’d said, I’ll sort it, promise I will. And no more MTV Base or Xbox till your exams are over, his father had shouted as he’d stormed out of the room. Even Clive thought maybe he should cut down on the incessant porn he watched on the laptop in his bedroom if he was going to stand any chance of passing his exams.
Mavis Loveridge was easily the cleverest person in their year and maths was her specialist subject. Plus she was a geek, which meant she didn’t speak to any of his friends and so wouldn’t tell, and no doubt was in love with him, so would lick the gob off his shoe if he asked her to. Clive knew he had been right in his estimation when he cornered her in the playing fields one lunchtime and the look of exhilaration on her face had been impossible for her to hide in time. Of course she agreed to give him a few lessons, at her house, for free, no questions asked and telling no one.
Clive had gone to her house once a week and found her to be a great teacher. She talked about numbers in a way which almost made him wish he’d paid a bit more attention over the last six or so years. After a few weeks he realised that Mavis didn’t see numbers as boring stretches of problems, but as puzzles that were as intricate as some of his favourite lyrics. And she was pretty if you looked at her while she spoke and ignored her dreadful old school DMs and long skirts and ginger hair. She was also so accommodating, studiously avoiding him at school and not even glancing his way when Debbie shouted ‘Ginga’ after her as she waited for a bus.
So when she turned up to the sixth-form disco looking so unexpected Clive felt as if he didn’t have a choice. He wanted to tell her that she should always wear her hair up and that using an oversized man’s T-shirt as a dress was far sexier than all the other girls’ bum-skimming skirts and high heels that looked as if they might snap off their ankles. Besides, Debbie was being a prize pain that night, sulking because he’d gone to Taj’s house first to help with the tunes; generally dissing him and giving him the bum’s rush. No doubt it was her time of the month, he thought.
Initially he’d only started talking to Mavis and Dot because of all of that, but soon he found they were funny and before long an hour had passed and then Trev and Ketch had joined in the conversation because where he went others soon followed. Debbie flounced off around twelve, but Clive knew it was nothing he couldn’t solve in the morning, knew that she knew that her stock would plummet without him. His head was groggy from the vodka they’d smuggled in and, as he stood leaning against the wall of their school gym, he thought that if you took away the make-up and the hair and the pushed-up breasts and skin-tight dresses, maybe Debbie wasn’t really as fit as a page-three honey. Or maybe it was that page-three honeys weren’t that hot after all. And he found himself wishing harder than he had done since he was a child that he’d do well. Not that he thought any of those things for very long: his brain was too used to seeking out pleasure and easy routes and so starved of real ideas that it sucked any up like a sponge, not letting anything settle. Instead it fixed itself on Mavis, chatting brightly to Kai across the room, and knew what needed to happen.
Clive only had to ask Mavis once if she needed a lift home for her to accept. But then, annoyingly, she remembered her strange ginger friend as they were leaving and so Clive said he’d drop her off first. Dot was really drunk, staggering and swaying and Clive told her not to puke in his car or he’d go fucking mental and she seemed to agree. By then though there was no going back anyway. The desire to possess Mavis had lodged itself in every part of him because if you want lots of things you can’t have and if you live in a world of immediacy, it sometimes works to have something you don’t particularly want but can have.
Snoop Dogg spat out his bile as soon as Clive turned on the ignition, shouting about the things he’d do to his bitch in his private plane. The video started to play in Clive’s head as it did for almost every song he ever listened to: images of women in bikinis, their impossible bodies oiled and ready, lollipops stuck in their open mouths, whilst fully clothed men mouthed the words to their songs, as in control as they had ever been. Clive didn’t know that what he was feeling was sexual tension; maybe he hadn’t even heard of Marvin Gaye and all the forerunners to the music he thought he owned. He didn’t imagine making love to Mavis; he imagined fucking her senseless like th
e porn stars and rappers in his head. He didn’t imagine any other scenario other than that she would love it, opening herself up to him like a flower.
He had a hard-on by the time they reached Dot’s house and he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited impatiently for Mavis to see her friend to the front door. He rolled a steadying joint to avoid the premature ejaculation he was in danger of experiencing. When Mavis got back in she smiled and he offered her a toke, which she sucked deep into her lungs. The sweet Sensi, as he liked to call it as if he spent his days on a Jamaican beach rather than a windswept Welsh village, was having its desired effect, as if someone was spreading a warm blanket through his veins, and so he smiled back.
‘Where to now then?’
She shrugged. ‘I live on Bateman’s Road.’
‘I know,’ he lied. ‘D’you wanna go home then?’
She giggled and blushed. ‘I don’t mind. Do you?’
Clive put his hand on to Mavis’s leg and brushed it up under her T-shirt/dress thing. ‘Nah, man. You look well hot.’
‘We can’t go to my house.’
‘Nor mine. How ’bout Sayers Common.’ It had been one of those unusually warm Septembers and being naked outside wasn’t unappealing.
‘OK.’
Clive restarted the car, praising the weed now swirling round his blood, giving him time to get somewhere and show Mavis a thing or two. They left Druith behind in minutes, the lights from his headlights bouncing off the road so that he kept on having to remind himself that he wasn’t playing Need for Speed, which always happened when he drove at night. Clive turned off about halfway through the common. He couldn’t see any other cars but there were bound to be other people fucking nearby. He found the thought warmly erotic, being a young man as he was who lived in a world without sexual boundaries. He had learnt years ago that men, women, animals, dwarves and shit you’d never even dreamt of was no more than a mouse click away.
He shut off the car and the silence enveloped them, making him immediately turn the music back on. The moon was full and Mavis looked pale; he wondered if the skunk was too strong for her and hoped she wasn’t going to puke before she’d sucked him off. Clive stroked some hair off her face in an embarrassingly clichéd move, but which he felt safe with as he presumed he was the first person ever to have done this to Mavis. His skin prickled and he felt an urgency. He wished he could skip all this shit.
‘Do you come here with Debbie?’ she asked and Clive had to force himself not to shout at her because, man, what the fuck was the point of that question? He wasn’t going to stop but he didn’t need his girlfriend in his head.
‘Nah. Her mum’s cool, she lets me stay over whenever.’
‘Oh, right.’
He felt her tense beneath his touch. Don’t give me this shit, bitch, he imagined shouting, although of course he never would. For a second he even felt sorry for her, realised she was a nice girl who didn’t deserve to be treated like a ho. But then again, come on, he was Clive Buzzard, she was lucky to be about to be fucked by him. ‘You know what this is, right?’
Mavis looked at him and her eyeliner had smudged so he had to look away. ‘Are you saying you’re not going to leave Debbie and start going out with me?’ Then she laughed. ‘Of course I know that. It just feels weird.’
Clive responded to this in the only way he knew how; by pulling her towards him and kissing her hard on her mouth, sticking his tongue down her throat, feeling her breasts and eventually pushing her head towards his lap. By the time they were properly fucking Dr Dre was blasting out of the stereo and he felt righteous and perfect and on top of the fucking world, man.
Mavis didn’t grind into him the way Debbie did, nor did she moan or whisper in his ear that he was too big for her. But she seemed to have enjoyed it, she was certainly flushed and smiling when he dropped her off at her front door forty minutes later.
‘Thanks, yeah,’ he said as she got out of the car.
She turned round, looking puzzled, and he realised she’d misunderstood; he turned the music down so he could be clear. ‘I mean for all the maths shit. You’re a good teacher.’
She smiled at this. ‘Oh right, that’s fine.’
‘So, see ya at school then.’
‘Yeah. Thanks for the lift.’
Clive didn’t think about Mavis much after that. There was no need; he’d got what he wanted from her in all respects and life floated on as it was intended. Of course Debbie was fine with him the next day. In fact they were fucking in her bed less than twelve hours later. When he finished Clive rolled over to light a fag and wondered whether he’d had a shower between women. He didn’t think he had and the thought filled him with a great warmth, a real sense of achievement. Sometimes he regretted being Debbie’s friend on Facebook, a story like that was made to be shared.
Still, however, a residue of guilt must have been swirling somewhere in his body because Debbie had been dogging him out about having a joint birthday party for ages and he’d been knocking her back, but when she brought it up again that afternoon he agreed much too readily. Besides their birthdays were months away and so he put it to the back of his mind.
Time, however, is not stable, a lesson which Clive was learning with increasing regularity. Dates that seemed far away loomed up pretty quickly, ambushing you like a mugger. Like exams, when you worked out that you didn’t have enough hours to study every topic that you needed in order to pass. Although Clive did work much harder than he had expected; something played on in the back of his mind, which he never realised was a tiny memory of that night with Mavis, urging him to knuckle down and make sure he didn’t regret wasting his opportunity. And maybe he didn’t recognise the phrase for what it was because it so permeated the airwaves, usually when some dumb kid was wasting theirs on a reality TV show. Sucker, Clive would shout at the screen, using the same word for the desperate singers as the dead soldiers. But then again, what did it matter, none of it was real when you flicked that off switch.
Debbie wanted them to have their party in the Christmas holidays, which soon became a New Year’s Eve party. When he started protesting, she cried and in the end he threw his hands into the air and told her to go ahead and organise it, although obviously she was to have nothing to do with the music.
The next time he thought about Mavis was when he was sending out his text invites and he saw her name flashing out at him. Something tightened in his stomach and he included her in his send-out, deciding as he did so to ask her friend Dot so he wouldn’t have to actually speak to her on the night. He clicked the button and then it was gone, along with all his reasoning and thoughts.
Years later Clive would become the sort of person who thought intensely about other people’s reactions and responses. After university he decided that he wanted to work for more than money and retrained as a psychotherapist, taking a course on which he met his wife, a pretty brunette with short hair who had never even heard of Eminem. They moved back to Kelsey, not far from Druith, both running their practices from home and his parents have their two children three days a week so that Clive often finds himself grateful that they are such a solid good presence and that he has never lived on a trailer park. And they are great friends with Mavis and her family, in one of those ways that life twists and turns and, sometimes, lands you in the place you were meant to be. They meet for lunch in country pubs and their younger children play.
But all of that is yet to come; for now it doesn’t exist. It is as unreal as the future in which he becomes a rapper and marries a porn star. The Clive who sent out those invites never thought beyond the moment, couldn’t possibly follow his electronic communication down the wires and into the homes and lives of those he’d sent them to. He never considered how it might make Mavis feel, never felt embarrassed at the crudity of his own behaviour.
He wasn’t surprised that Mavis and Dot turned up to his party; it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would refuse their invitation. He imagined a woman with a
clipboard standing on the door of a club, framed by two burly minders, having to refuse all the legions of gatecrashers. The fact that they were actually in the cricket club made no real difference, it was going to be a banging night and everyone was going to be talking about it for weeks afterwards. He was momentarily surprised though by how Mavis looked. No T-shirt/dress combo tonight, just jeans and a baggy jumper, and she looked surly and angry and as if she hadn’t washed her hair in weeks. Then Debbie asked who the fuck had invited those two no-marks, pointing at them, and Clive wondered what the fuck he’d been thinking of, on all counts, and was about to say something, but then a banging tune connected with the MDMA in his system and he turned away to dance.
Clive woke the next day in Debbie’s bed, a thick hard pain lodged across his shoulders and up his neck. He knew that when he moved it would explode into his brain so his bones would feel hollow and shattered. His breath tasted of shit, not in a metaphorical way but literally, as though he’d licked the inside of a rodent’s cage. His back ached and his throat was swollen and sore; his lungs felt useless, as if he’d got them cheap in the Primark sale. He reached on to the bedside table to see the time on his phone: two-thirty. He had to get some water. He sat up delicately, but his brain still crashed into his skull, making him groan. Debbie moaned in reply; she was lying on her stomach, one arm over her face, her bra still on and her hair in livid clumps round her head. There was a smell of vomit, he realised, and when he stood up he saw that a neat pile of puke lay on the floor next to her side of the bed.
‘Shit,’ he said out loud.
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