The Last Weekend

by Blake Morrison

  ‘Pick you up at eight?’ I say, in a last-ditch move.

  ‘OK,’ she says, rushing off with a bag over her right shoulder and her left hand holding the beret on as she runs.

  ('You were like a terrier with a stoat,’ she said later. ‘And I was afraid of being locked out of the lecture. So I said yes.')

  I buy a denim shirt for the occasion, and some deodorant, and (just in case, though I’ve never used one before and know there’s no chance really) a packet of condoms.

  The meal is an Italian: she has gnocchi with salad and me pizza and chips. Conversation is awkward — until the Chianti kicks in and we find some common ground. She’s Leeds and I’m Manchester. Different cities, true, but we’re both from working-class families, we’re both only children, and we’ve both come straight to uni from inner-city comprehensives. Daisy confesses she feels ill at ease among the other first years in her hall, with their tales of backpacking in South-East Asia. I reciprocate with a parody of these Vietnam vets — middle-class kids who parade their gap years like battle scars. Daisy laughs. We talk about our parents, and how narrow their lives seem, and Daisy says that her parents’ marriage is so grim that she knows she’ll never marry, and I’m already so infatuated that hearing her say it comes as a disappointment. We describe our bedrooms at home, and name the books we’ve read and the bands we’ve seen, and recall the teachers who wrote us off as university material because of where we came from. A sense of alienation draws us together. We are a pair of ducks among geese.

  ('Excuse me. I’m no duck. All you’re saying is we found a couple of things we had in common.')

  This time, back at her hall, Daisy does ask me up (not up, strictly speaking, but inside and along, since her room lies on the ground floor). She goes off to make coffee in the communal kitchen, while I dither in her room between the only two places to sit, the plastic chair under her built-in desk or the edge of the bed. I’m worried the former position will look wimpish and the latter presumptuous, but finally settle on the bed — if I just perch on the edge she won’t take offence, I decide. And really the bed is all edge: its narrowness prohibits more than one (slender) person from lying on it at one time. It’s the right choice: when she returns carrying two mugs with lurid pink elephants on them, she plonks herself down next to me, and we chat while drinking the coffee until, mug drained, she switches position, sitting with her knees bent and her back against the bedhead, a switch that leaves her left foot close to my left hand, and though my first touch is involuntary (as I twist round to talk to her my index finger brushes her red-painted big toe) she doesn’t take fright, and presently I touch her again, resting my hand casually on her left arch, and then stroking it, and then, less surreptitiously, running the hand from her toes to her ankle, in a gentle massage which she seems to like and which gives me the courage, when she closes her eyes, to stretch across (no easy manoeuvre, so contorted is my posture) and kiss her on the lips.

  She kisses me back. ('No, I didn’t. I just let you kiss me.’ ‘Rubbish, you were enjoying it.’ ‘I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it but I stayed passive.’ ‘Not the next time you didn’t.')

  The next time is a week later, after the cinema (not Platoon but Manon des Sources), and the venue is her room again, and this time we succeed — God knows how — in lying alongside each other, hip to hip, or rather (since she’s so small) hip to stomach, in which position our mouths are level and our lips can’t help but meet. Far from not kissing me, she puts her tongue in my mouth, which no girl has ever done to me before, apart from Tracey Shindler, as an experiment, when we were thirteen.

  Kissing and being kissed by Daisy is amazing. We’re in love. ('You were in love. I was weak.')

  Love demands that I see her every day but she says she wants to take things slowly. I don’t doubt her sincerity but I know that taking things slowly will work against me — that as time passes, and the disorientation and loneliness of being a fresher pass with it, she may decide our relationship is a mistake, just as joining the Archaeology Society and the Mountaineering Club were mistakes, and that if she’s going to make the most of university, and meet new people, she needs to drop me, like a dog dropping a slobbery old tennis ball, and instead, as Ollie would put it, play the field. I also know she has underestimated her attractiveness — I’ve seen other men looking at her when we go out, and though I’ve tried to stop her seeing them the day will come when I’m not there and someone moves in on her. And since that somebody will be richer and better-looking than I am, odds are she will welcome his attentions. If she were committed to me, such problems wouldn’t arise. But she refuses to accept me as her ‘boyfriend', though I describe myself as such to anyone who asks and several who don’t.

  ('You were so possessive. It got on my tits.’ ‘Whereas I got nowhere near your tits.’ ‘Come on, you’re exaggerating — I wasn’t that mean.')

  True enough, she isn’t that mean. Though the drawback of her narrow bed is that we have to lie on our sides, with no movement except hand and mouth movement, the advantage is that our bodies touch at all points (if they didn’t one of us would fall out). And sometimes, instead of lying face to face, we lie with our backs to the wall, me hard up against it with Daisy cradled in front of me. She says she feels safe like that, with her back pressed against my chest and my right arm wrapped round her waist — so safe she usually falls asleep, which can be uncomfortable (my left arm, squashed, gets pins and needles), but is also in some ways a relief: asleep, she’s perhaps not aware of my hard-on. I sometimes think how nice it would be to lie on top of her. But that’s more than she will allow. And in effect we’re equally intimate sideways, whether spooned or lip to lip. Though we keep our clothes on, both of us get very excited. It’s chaste but extremely hot.

  ('Hot because the central heating was on, maybe. But I don’t remember getting excited. If I had been, I’d have had sex with you. It’s not as if I was a virgin.’ ‘I thought you were.’ ‘I tried telling you but you were so jealous you wouldn’t listen.’ ‘Me, jealous?’ ‘Yes, you, Ian. Very jealous indeed.')

  One night, after a month or so of this, we go to my place for the first time. I’d have asked her earlier but for a fear she’d be put off — with five men as tenants, the house is fairly squalid. (Don’t imagine the Japanese postgrads are any more domesticated than we are: they leave their empty beer cans everywhere.) From coffee in the living room, we proceed to my bedroom. On the bed, which though a single is eighteen inches wider than Daisy’s bed, we do our usual immobile, sidelong thing, front-to-back followed by mouth-to-mouth. In between the kissing, she asks me to tell her what I’ve been reading or watching on television, another routine of ours and one which always turns her on. ('I liked hearing you talk, that’s all — you made me laugh.') Then she rolls over and lies flat, allowing me to perch between her thighs and rub my hands over her body, as I’ve never been able to before. Midway through this, my circling hand movements now focusing on her breasts and a second button already undone, I hear the front door slam, and footsteps clump upstairs, then Ollie’s voice call out ‘Ian?’ For a horrible moment I think he’s going to walk in, but I keep silent and after a pause the footsteps continue, and the door to his bedroom opens and closes, and then music — U2 — starts up on the other side of the wall. ‘Who’s that?’ Daisy asks. ‘Just Ollie,’ I say. ‘I like his taste in music,’ she says, and laughs, and kisses me, and sits up and unclips her bra at the back, and I finally get to feel her naked breasts, and to kiss her nipples, and all the time U2 are streaming through the wall and desire is streaming through Daisy, and though she won’t allow me inside her jeans, grabbing my hand as I try to unzip them and whispering, ‘Not today, chuck,’ I’m far from discouraged, since ‘Not today’ isn’t a refusal so much as a ‘Maybe next time', when she isn’t having a period.

  ('I wasn’t having a period. I just didn’t feel ready. I don’t think I’d ever have felt ready. But I had to say something.')

  Though she won’t t
ake her blouse off, I’m excited enough anyway and feel amazed that we’re together when a girl like Daisy could have her pick of men. I even feel grateful to Ollie, but for whose re-immersion in sport and estrangement from me I might never have met Daisy — and whose arrival and choice of music tonight have undoubtedly played a part in advancing our sex life, even if it hasn’t advanced to sex itself.

  The sense of gratitude lasts as long as the time it takes for Daisy to kiss me, say she must get back, straighten her clothes, open the bedroom door and step out onto the landing. Had I opened it, the door would have made less noise, because I know how to turn the knob so it doesn’t rattle. Even so, I’m surprised Ollie could hear it above the music, which he must have done, because before we’ve reached the stairs, there he is standing in the door frame of his room, bollock-naked.

  I doubt Daisy’s giggle is meant to be flirtatious. But that’s what she does, giggle. And though Ollie looks embarrassed, and mumbles, ‘Sorry, just wondered what was going on,’ he’s not as quick to go back inside his room as he might be. How much time Daisy has to clock his genitalia is beside the point: since she’d not seen me naked, she can’t have been making comparisons. What is important is that Ollie had time to clock her. Granted, he would have seen her eventually; I couldn’t expect to keep her a secret for ever. But that he saw her then, in the semi-darkness, with her cheeks glowing and her eyes burning and (frankly) sex coming off her in waves, made all the difference.

  ('Sex wasn’t coming off me in waves. We were just having fun.’ ‘Fun?’ ‘Yeah, Ian, fun — remember fun? It was never serious between us, but you were fun to be with back then.')

  When I return from walking Daisy to her hall, Ollie’s waiting for me, on the landing, not naked now but in a silk dressing gown with a tasselled belt. And his words are pretty much the same as Daisy’s were earlier, bar a change of tense and the insertion of enraptured italics: ‘Who was that?’

  As I say, my memory sometimes lets me down. But I’ll never forget those first few weeks with Daisy.

  ‘Global warming?’ Ollie said. ‘Give us a break.’

  ‘Come on, what else could it be? Look at the weather we’ve had. Floods, droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes.’

  ‘Next thing you’ll be on about the ozone layer.’

  ‘Absolutely, because —’

  ‘And the melting of the polar ice caps.’

  ‘Yes, they’re becoming a major —’

  ‘And rising sea levels.’

  ‘The experts say —’

  ‘A bunch of hippies working for Greenpeace aren’t experts. The real scientists take a different line.’

  ‘Which scientists are those?’

  ‘The ones you lot don’t bother to read.’

  Ollie cast his eyes around the table and grinned, implicating us all. It was four against one — a relay team against a solitary athlete — and he was enjoying himself. At university, he’d had only me to steamroll. Since then he’d swung whole juries. Four against one was easy.

  We were outside, on the terrace, at the metal table, with candles and tapers brightening the muggy dark. Daisy had told us that the meal would be simple, and perhaps by her standards it was: red mullet soup with saffron followed by saddle of lamb with couscous (cheese soufflé was the veggie alternative). Preparing the meal had taken her all evening. But Daisy prided herself on looking after friends. More than once she nervously asked whether ‘everyone’ — meaning one person in particular — was enjoying the meal. Ollie twice chided her for ‘fussing’ and, though he showed no signs of resenting her special guest, I certainly did.

  An owl tooted its horn from the fields. It was good to know, after this morning, that there were still owls.

  ‘Global warming is a fact,’ Milo said, taking the baton. ‘Only the oil companies and their stooges deny it.’

  ‘I deny it too,’ Ollie said.

  ‘Bumblebees in January can’t be right,’ Em said.

  ‘Nature changes. It’s called evolution.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Daisy said, not-so-gently mocking him.

  ‘More than you think.’

  I strained to catch an undertone. But if he suspected Daisy’s relationship with Milo, he wasn’t letting on. They were next to each other, close enough to paddle hands or play footsie. But Ollie’s only concern was to win the argument.

  ‘One hot summer and everyone says the planet’s fucked,’ he said. ‘There were hot summers when I was a kid. When we came here in ‘76, it didn’t rain once.’

  ‘Rainfall’s not the issue,’ Milo said, prompting a vigorous my-word-no nod from Daisy. ‘We’re talking about rising temperatures and the long-term effect of greenhouse gases.’

  ‘Read the research and you’ll find there’s no consensus. Anyone heard of tropospheric cooling?’

  We all shook our heads. Ollie paused to savour this triumph — ignoramuses! — before going on.

  ‘The troposphere is the lower level of the atmosphere — the first twelve miles or so, below the stratosphere, where all the weather comes from. Anyway, these two guys have done some research and they’ve found the troposphere isn’t hotting up, it’s getting cooler. Which blows the global-warming theory out of the water. Meanwhile, another scientist has found the glaciers aren’t receding, they’re advancing. And others even argue that carbon dioxide emission has had a beneficial effect — it’s made the planet more lush for plants.’

  ‘So you think we should sit back and do nothing?’ Em said, looking to me for support — in her view, to deny global warming is as bad as denying the Holocaust. I sipped my wine and turned away. It would have been easy for me to rebut Ollie. But why give a cancer victim a hard time? Besides, I was enjoying seeing him get the better of Milo.

  ‘Man shouldn’t play God with the climate,’ he said. ‘I think we should know our place.’

  ‘Know our place and wait for Armageddon,’ Milo said. ‘Deny my girls the chance of a future. Deny your Archie a future. Deny yourself a future. That’s a great solution.’

  No one should resort to sarcasm in a debate. I can remember Ollie wiping the floor with me on the few occasions I made that mistake. But with Milo he simply smiled and said: ‘If you’ve a better solution, I’d like to hear it.’

  The monologue that followed was predictable: wind farms, solar energy, carbon management, blah-blah — we didn’t need some crappy artist to regurgitate it all. Yet Ollie listened respectfully. It took me a while to work out why: that phrase about being denied a future had sent a chill through him.

  Finally Milo wound up. Darkness brushed against the windows. An awkward silence fell.

  ‘Dessert anyone?’ Daisy said, breaking the spell.

  As Em joined Milo in condemning the wickedness of plastic bags and cheap air travel, Daisy and I carried the plates inside.

  The washing-up bowl was full of hot water, and though she said she would do it later, I insisted. We took our places at the sink, me with a dishcloth, her with a tea towel, like a couple from the 1950s.

  I saw no point beating about the bush.

  ‘Archie told me about not going to school,’ I said.

  ‘We should have told you long ago,’ she said. ‘It upsets Ollie to talk about it, that’s all.’

  ‘I noticed the tensions between them.’

  ‘Ollie finds it hard. Archie can be horrible — to me as well. He’s all anger and hormones.’

  ‘I was the same at his age.’

  ‘Me too. But my parents were crap. We’ve tried not to be.’

  ‘You’re wonderful parents,’ I said, though they hadn’t been: children need time and attention, and Ollie and Daisy were too absorbed in their careers to set consistent standards. With a different partner and lifestyle, Daisy would have been a good mother. But I could hardly say that, so I tried to be positive instead.

  ‘Coming on holiday is bound to help,’ I said.

  ‘We had to drag him here. He wanted to stay in London.’

  ‘I’m su
re he’ll sort himself out,’ I said. ‘He used to be such a sweet kid.’

  ‘I’m surprised you remember.’

  ‘Of course I remember. When he first started walking, for instance, and …’

  Back and forth we went over the sink: I’d pass her a sudsy plate and she’d dry it, and we’d recall the happier times when Archie was little.

  ‘We make a good team,’ I said, passing her a bowl with cherries painted round the rim.

  ‘We do,’ she laughed, before lowering her voice. ‘By the way, what do you think of Milo?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ I said, trying my hardest, ‘who could fail to like him?’

  ‘I’m sorry Bianca’s not here. She’s a textile artist. She dotes on him. They’re a lovely couple.’

  ‘I’m sure they are,’ I said, though I wondered how exclusive Milo’s coupling was.

  ‘He’s so great with his kids, too,’ she said.

  Too? What else did she think he was so great at? Not wanting to know, I dumped the last few knife blades on the draining board, shook the froth from my hands and headed for the bathroom.

  Daisy and Ollie met that night outside my bedroom, then. Need I go on? Still, what looks inevitable in hindsight did not appear so at the time. For instance, how am I to know, when I meet Daisy for a drink in a bland off-campus pub that I’ve specifically chosen because of its lack of appeal to students, that Ollie will be waiting for us, alone at the bar, a ‘coincidence’ he has planned after sneaking a look in my diary, in which I foolishly set down the time and venue alongside Daisy’s name? And should I see through Daisy’s deceit when she turns up at the house the following week not at seven, as arranged, but at six, with Ollie not yet out for the evening and me not yet in, a ‘mistake’ that allows them an hour alone together? Because I’m in love with her, and he’s my friend, I want to think the best of them. But the best, as far as they’re concerned, is to be with each other, with me nowhere in sight. I don’t think they actually do it until the Saturday night, four weeks later, when they break it to me that they’ve been ‘seeing’ each other; doing it is their reward to themselves for being honest with me, never mind that they’ve been dishonest for the previous month. I’m even willing to acknowledge their ‘sensitivity’ in not doing it in Ollie’s bedroom, where I would have heard them. Still, they betrayed me: what other word will do?