by Mark Morris
Seventeen summers ago my main objective in life was to get Richard Prince to go out with me. He was in the year above me at school, and he looked like Simon Le Bon without the peroxided hair. My campaign manager in this venture was my best friend, Jenny Sayer. I looked up to Jenny. She was everything I wanted to be. She was blonde and bubbly, she had big boobs, and she was popular with the boys. I, by contrast, was mousey and shy and underdeveloped.
I did used to wonder sometimes why she went around with me, though it was nice to bask in the warm glow of her reflected popularity. In my more anxious moments I thought that she’d chosen me as her friend simply in order to make her look good, though there was certainly no evidence to back up my apprehensions. Indeed, Jenny and I spent most of our time together, and a great proportion of that when no one else was around – in the evenings after school and during the holidays. We always got on great, and I think it’s largely thanks to Jenny that I started to come out of my shell at around this time. Jenny was forever trying to convince me how attractive I was, was always telling me that this boy or that boy fancied me.
Jenny had six or seven boyfriends during the eighteen months or so of our friendship. The reason we weren’t friends for longer was because we’d gone to different primary schools, and had only got to know each other in the second year of senior school when she got moved up to my class following a reshuffle after the first-year exams. When her dad was offered a job in Holland a month or two into the first term of our fourth year, we wept in each other’s arms and vowed we’d stay in touch for ever. We wrote regularly for three months or so, and then, as our different lives and our new friends began to claim our attention, sadly lost touch.
That summer term, though, at the end of our third year, was the height of our friendship. We were both fourteen going on fifteen, and we were the coolest creatures on the planet. Once New Romanticism (if that was the right term for it; I never was sure) started to hit the charts in a big way, we ‘discovered’ it and made it ours. We were into Tears for Fears and Spandau Ballet and the Human League. My own personal fave, though, was Simon Le Bon out of Duran. To my fourteen-year-old eyes he was almost angelic in his perfection. The crush I had on him made me feel dizzy and weak and sick with longing. So enamoured of him was I that I didn’t even notice Richard Prince looked a bit like him until Jenny pointed it out to me.
‘No he doesn’t,’ was my instant, indignant reaction. I regarded it almost as a personal insult that she could think anyone could have even so much as a fleeting resemblance to the magnificence that was Simon.
‘Yes he does,’ she insisted. ‘He’s got the same cheekbones and the same eyebrows. If he grew his hair a bit and dyed it blond he’d be the spit.’
I continued to refute Jenny’s suggestion, yet over the next couple of days I must admit I saw more and more what she was getting at. Richard Prince didn’t look exactly like Simon, but he did look a bit like him, and in my book even a second-rate Simon had to be pretty scrummy.
‘I could ask around, find out what he does at weekends,’ Jenny suggested.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked, feigning indifference.
‘So that you can talk to him.’
‘I don’t want to talk to him.’
‘Yes you do.’
And it was true. I did want to talk to him. Almost solely through the strength of her personality and her powers of persuasion, Jenny had managed to convince me that I had a major crush on this guy.
For a while we shadowed Richard’s movements with no luck. We went to places we wouldn’t normally have been seen dead in, but received not so much as a nod or a smile. Whole evenings would drift by with me on the verge of going over to speak to him, but not managing it because the circumstances were never quite right. I felt terribly inadequate. I knew if Richard had been Jenny’s target and not mine she would have had him in her clutches by now. All the same, she was incredibly patient with me. She coaxed and cajoled, but she never bullied me or blamed me for another wasted evening or poured scorn on the pathetic feebleness of my efforts. Time and again I urged her to forget it, tried to convince her that we were wasting our time, that he wasn’t interested, but she was having none of it.
Spring slipped into summer, and as the holidays approached I began to feel a sense of relief. I was in turmoil, and saw the impending break from school as a chance to get my head together, to put distance between myself and the ongoing, agonizing Richard Prince situation. My feelings towards Richard at this time were oddly ambivalent. As he became (in my eyes) less attainable, so my crush on him seemed to increase exponentially, until it had reached a stage where he was all I could think of, where I would spend whole lessons dreaming of what our perfect date would be like, whilst idly doodling his initials, intertwined with mine, in the back of my exercise book. And yet another part of me wanted him to disappear, never to be seen again. He had derailed my life and I wanted to get back on track as soon as possible. If this is what love is all about, I thought, then I want no part of it.
Jenny, though, had other ideas. As soon as we broke up for the school holidays, she persuaded her dad to make us both members of the tennis club that Richard belonged to. She presented this information to me as though it was a gift I’d be rapturously thankful for, but I was horrified.
‘It’s OK,’ Jenny said, misunderstanding, ‘Dad doesn’t mind. He thinks it means I’m turning normal again. He doesn’t mind paying for you too either, because he thinks if I’ve got someone to play with I’ll stick at it longer.’
‘But I don’t—’ was as far as I could get before the last couple of months of hormone-induced tension overwhelmed me and I burst into tears. Jenny looked shocked and bewildered, but after a moment she wrapped her arms around me and held me close.
We were in my bedroom, playing Duran Duran’s Rio album. We were alone in the house. Dad was at work, Mum was down at the shops and Alex was out somewhere with his friend, Nige.
‘Don’t cry,’ Jenny kept saying. ‘What’s the matter?’ But it was a while before I could speak.
Finally I blubbered, ‘It’s all right for you.’
‘What’s all right for me?’
‘Well, you’ve had loads of boyfriends. But I never know what to do or say. What if I say something really stupid and he laughs at me?’
Her expression softened. ‘Come here,’ she said. With her arm still around me, she pulled me down so that we were no longer sitting on the bed, but lying on it, side by side, our noses almost touching, her hair tickling my forehead.
‘What you’ve got to learn, Ruth,’ she said softly, and her breath was sweet like bubble gum, ‘is not to take it all so seriously. It’s a game, a bit of fun. So what if he laughs at you? You just laugh right back at him. Boys are immature. Use ’em and abuse ’em, that’s what I say.’
‘It’s easy for you,’ I said.
‘It’s easy to do. Just try it.’
I was silent for a moment. ‘But you’ve had experience.’
‘So what are you saying? That I’m a slut?’ But she was laughing as she said it.
‘Course not. But what I mean is … all right, what if him and me started going out and he wanted to … you know … do it?’
‘Do you want to do it?’
‘No. I don’t know. Not yet.’
Jenny stroked my arm and shrugged. ‘Then don’t do it.
It’s up to you. It’s your body.’
‘But what if he chucked me because I didn’t want to do it, or because I was no good at it?’
‘Then he’d be a shit and not worth knowing anyway,’ said Jenny. She carried on stroking my arm for a minute, then she said, ‘We could practise if you like.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I could pretend to be Richard and you could be you.’
I giggled, but felt a little squirm of anticipation in my belly. ‘Don’t be daft.’
‘What’s daft about it?’
‘I don’t know. It just is.’
<
br /> ‘Up to you,’ said Jenny airily. ‘I was only offering you the benefit of my experience.’
We lay there for a bit longer, me thinking of what she had said, and unable to shake off that feeling of delicious anticipation, and then at last I said, ‘Go on, then.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s practise.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK, then.’ She wriggled a bit on the bed as if trying to get more comfortable and I felt her boobs pressing and moving against me. ‘First off,’ she said, ‘tell me what you’ve done so far with a boy.’
‘Not a lot.’
‘What does not a lot mean?’
I thought about it. ‘I’ve snogged.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How many boys have you snogged?’
‘Two.’
‘Tongues?’
‘No,’ I said, thinking of Reece Jarvis’s (the last boy I’d snogged at Tracey Quentin’s birthday party) tongue, and trying not to be repulsed.
‘OK,’ said Jenny. ‘Well, if you snog someone with tongues, it’s called a French kiss because that’s the way the French do it.’
‘I know that,’ I said.
‘They’re very passionate, the French,’ said Jenny. ‘A French kiss is like this.’ To my surprise she dipped her head and clamped her lips on mine. After a moment she broke contact and looked at me. ‘Well, open your mouth, then. I can’t show you unless you open your mouth.’
‘I didn’t know you were going to do that,’ I said.
‘Well, we can’t practise unless we do stuff, can we?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I suppose not.’
‘So open your mouth.’
I opened my mouth. Jenny leaned forward and kissed me again. After a moment I felt her tongue clashing with mine. I was alarmed, but it was a nice feeling too, thrilling and forbidden. I responded to her, my tongue wrestling with hers. We entwined our arms around one another and began to move together on the bed, our bodies gently wrestling as our tongues were. The music in the background seemed to recede as if someone were slowly turning down the volume control.
Then I felt her hand on the warm flesh of my stomach and I raised my head, our lips disengaging with a wet smack. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Ssh,’ she said, her eyes dewy, half-closed, her lips red and shiny-plump. ‘Just relax, go with it.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Something nice. Nothing that will hurt you. If you tell me to stop, I will.’
I settled my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes when her face came close enough to blur. We were kissing again, our lips sliding, our tongues moving constantly, but my mind was now almost wholly focused on what Jenny was doing with her hand. It was palm-flat on my stomach and she was stroking me gently, her fingertips moving in a circular motion across my flesh, leaving pleasurable shivers of sensation in their wake. And as her hand languidly circled my flesh, so it rose higher with each revolution, until her fingertips were stroking the material of my bra, and then her hand was gently caressing my breast.
I was in a dilemma, part of me wanting to blurt at her to stop, part of me wanting her to carry on. My head told me that what we were doing was wrong and dirty and sinful, but I liked it, I liked it a lot.
She slipped her fingers under my bra and cupped my naked breast, her fingers toying with my nipple. I tensed and shuddered, and whispered into her mouth, ‘Should we be doing this?’
‘What harm are we doing?’ she murmured. ‘I’ll stop if you want me to.’
‘I don’t want you to stop,’ I said.
‘Will you do to me what I’m doing to you?’ she asked me.
‘Yes.’
Later, when we were lying in each other’s arms, momentarily sated, Jenny said, ‘Do you ever touch yourself?’
I blushed and refused to meet her eye. ‘A bit. Sometimes. Do you?’
‘All the time,’ she said, and she looked at me with wide lustful eyes, making me shiver with apprehension and excitement. I felt as if I was moving into uncharted territory, into a place rife with both dangers and wonders. I didn’t know how to respond.
‘Are you shocked?’ she asked me.
I shrugged, tried to be blasé. ‘Nah, course not.’
‘Have you heard of the G-spot?’ she said.
I racked my brains, trying desperately to work out what she might mean. It was probably somewhere in town, a nightclub maybe, where you had to be eighteen to get in. Jenny probably went there on the nights when we weren’t together. She could pass for eighteen easy, if she wanted to.
‘I’ve heard of it,’ I lied, ‘but I’ve never been there.’
To my surprise, she burst out laughing, and once she’d started she couldn’t stop. After a couple of minutes I started to get irritated. I slapped her arm. ‘What? What, Jenny? Tell me.’ But she just laughed.
At last I got really angry, and I shoved her away from me and sat up. ‘Well, if you’re going to be such a horrible bitch,’ I said, ‘I’m going downstairs.’ I was nearest the wall, so had to climb over her to get out. As I was doing so she grabbed me and pulled me down on top of her.
‘Sorry,’ she breathed through her giggles. ‘Sorry, Ruth. I wasn’t laughing at you, honest.’
‘Yes you were,’ I said.
‘No I wasn’t. I was laughing at what you said, not at you.’
‘There’s no difference.’
‘Yes there is. It’s just that … well, the G-spot isn’t a place you go to. It’s here.’
Before I realized what she was doing, she had grabbed my hand and pushed it up between her legs. Because it was a hot day she was wearing a short skirt and no tights. Her pants were damp and warm, and she groaned as she applied pressure to my fingers, pushing them deeper into the softness of her crotch. A million little shocks went through my body, some of them jolts of alarm, most of them kicks of pleasure. She clamped her lips to mine and kissed me hard, then panted, ‘Will you keep your hand there?’ into my open mouth.
Too terrified and excited to do anything except what she told me, I nodded. She released her hand from mine, then dug me in the ribs with her elbow as she raised her arms slightly. I was so overwhelmed by what was happening that I didn’t realize what she was doing until I felt the material of her pants ruckle beneath my palm, followed by the sensation of wiry pubic hair beneath my fingers. She’s pulling her pants down! I thought, and again the thought was a yell of both thundering terror and heart-stopping excitement.
‘Put your finger in me,’ she said.
‘Which one?’ I asked stupidly.
‘It doesn’t matter. Here.’ She put her hand over mine again and applied pressure, and my middle finger slid inside her. She was slippery and roomy and fleshy, wetter than I’d ever been when I’d tentatively explored myself. Her back arched and she let out a little shriek. If her hand hadn’t been clamped on top of mine, holding me in place, I’d have pulled away from her, thinking I was causing her pain, even damage.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, looking at her screwed-up eyes, her panting mouth, her blazing cheeks. She reminded me of the woman in the film about childbirth we’d had in biology.
‘Ah, that’s so good. Push your finger in deeper, move it around a bit,’ gasped Jenny.
I did it until my wrist ached, until she finally let out a scream and grabbed me and clung to me, her grip like iron, her fingers digging into my shoulders.
‘What’s wrong, Jenny?’ I cried. ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’
It was a panic-stricken thirty seconds before she answered.
‘I’m fine,’ she gasped and sank back on to the bed. Her eyes were half-closed. She had a look of dreamy contentment on her face. ‘That was so good,’ she murmured.
‘Was that your G-spot?’ I asked.
She nodded slowly and raised her arms. ‘Hold me for a while,’ she said.
I’m not sure how long we lay t
here, but it seemed like ages. Jenny, her skirt still rucked up around her waist, her knickers round her ankles, snoozed happily, but I remained awake and tense, worried that Mum or Alex might come back at any moment. I was relieved when Jenny finally roused herself and reached down to pull her pants up.
‘Your turn now,’ she said.
I shook my head quickly. ‘No, it’s OK.’
‘But it’s not fair if I get all the fun,’ said Jenny.
‘It’s all right, honest. Mum or Alex might be back any minute.’
So we just talked, and Jenny told me about the G-spot, and about the clitoris, and about orgasms. She told me that G stood for Girl, because only girls knew about it, because it was our Big Secret.
‘Boys are pretty useless really,’ Jenny said. ‘They don’t know how to make us happy. Only we can do that.’
It was a long, sexy summer, a summer of awakening, of – thanks to Jenny – a burgeoning confidence in my own sexuality. Who knows where it might have led if she had not moved away? All I know is that my time with Jenny was tender and wonderful and massively, overwhelmingly exciting. Maybe it was the newness of it, the incredible sense of self-discovery, the feeling that we were doing something daring and forbidden, but whenever I think back to that time I still recall the thrill of it all, and, perhaps oddly, I get a warm, almost cosy flush of happiness, of nostalgia.
I don’t fancy women now. My experiences with Jenny have left no residual longings, no buried desires. The thought of sleeping with women doesn’t disgust me, but it doesn’t remotely appeal to me either.
However the thought of sleeping with Jenny again, with Jenny alone of all women, does appeal, or at least the thought of reliving those days, with sleeping with the Jenny that I knew. But of course the Jenny that I knew has gone for ever, and now even the Jenny that she became has gone for ever too.
Life, I discover as I grow older, is full of such disappointments. Happy times pass away, dreams gradually fade. Sometimes it makes me wonder why we carry on at all.
twenty-two
On the drive back from the school to the Solomon Wedge, I was struck by an almost epiphanous sense of realization. Despite what I had said to Liz about ringing her to arrange a meeting, it suddenly occurred to me that I wanted no further part in whatever was going on here. It was as though the thought had been introduced from outside myself, injected like a drug into my system. It jolted me, filled me with a sense of both alarm and excitement. My first instinct was to reject it out of hand, but the more I considered it the more reasonable it seemed. For the first time I realized that there was really no point in me staying in Greenwell any longer.