Lobsters

by Lucy Ivison

  In my daydreams, I went to uni and Sam was the person in the room next to me in halls. But he didn’t recognize me at first, because I had my bob and my new wardrobe. So he fell in love with me. And we moved to California.

  It was like Stella could sense my thoughts by osmosis.

  ‘Do you ever think about Toilet Boy?’

  ‘No. I think I was just drunk.’

  ‘And you call me fickle? You said he was your lobster. What happened to you hunting him down?’

  ‘Us hunting him down.’ Grace interjected, all slow and sleepy. ‘I was totally up for it.’

  ‘All for one and one for all.’

  That’s our motto. We’ve been saying it since Year 7. There’s a photo of us dressed as musketeers and we’ve each got a keyring with it on.

  ‘Yeah, and about that,’ said Tilly, sitting up for dramatic effect. ‘When is this blowjob lesson actually happening?’

  Tilly was phobic about doing it wrong and had been begging Grace to give her lessons.

  Grace just rolled over. ‘Not now, that’s for sure. I’m tired.’

  ‘You are so not a team player. You are the only one who is actually having sex and knows how to do stuff and you just lie there and keep all your sex secrets to yourself,’ Tilly said.

  Stella sat up. ‘Well, she’s not actually.’

  Stella and Tilly being sat up in the dark made me feel like I should sit up too, to mark the occasion.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I did it with Charlie yesterday.’

  That made Grace leap up as well. And there in the dark Stella had her moment. Which left Tilly in limbo and me as officially the last virgin on Earth.

  Sam

  Every summer, me and my parents go to visit my gran in Sark. Sark is one of the Channel Islands – between Guernsey and Jersey, just a few miles north of France – and it is absolutely tiny. You can walk from one side of it to the other in about twenty minutes.

  There are no cars and there is no mobile phone reception. It’s an idyllic haven of unspoilt pebble-strewn beaches and sweeping, majestic cliffs. The dusty roads throng with cheerful, ruddycheeked men on horseback, pulling carriages full of elderly, camera-wielding American tourists. The lush, verdant fields are lined with huge old chestnut trees that bend and dance crazily in the blustery ocean wind.

  Basically, what I’m saying is, Sark is beautiful. However, like many other beautiful things – Kate Middleton, for example – it is also massively fucking boring.

  There are about two hundred people living on the island and two hundred is also their approximate average age. My dad (forty-nine) is frequently called ‘young man’ by the old women who run the village shop.

  The majestic cliffs and dancing trees kept me entertained for about ten minutes when I was eight. Now that I’m seventeen they’ve lost their appeal completely. There’s no internet. You can’t even get Channel 5. Not that anyone watches Channel 5, obviously, but it’s like a life jacket – you might not need it but it’s still reassuring to know that it’s there.

  Anyway, this year’s visit to Sark promises to be even more massively fucking boring than usual, because it represents my crazy, hedonistic post-exams summer holiday.

  It’s a real shame that me, Robin and Chris didn’t organize a proper trip together. Back in January, we decided we’d go to Crete in July for a two-week piss-up. Every day, one of us would ask, ‘Has anyone looked into flights yet?’ or ‘Any news on accommodation?’ Then, July came and no one had looked into flights yet and there was no news on accommodation.

  So, I ended up bound for Sark, as usual. Robin was in Florida (for purely Potter-related reasons) and Chris was visiting Berlin with his parents.

  Still, at least we had Woodland Festival coming up. Two days of music, camping and getting pissed in a field in Devon. That was going to be our real chance to celebrate.

  As I sat in the kitchen with my parents, waiting for the taxi to take us to the airport, I started thinking about Hannah. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about her since that awful evening in Westfield. I don’t know why. She said she had a boyfriend, so I guess that’s that. But if she was so into this boyfriend, why did Stella say she was ‘literally in love’ with me?

  I was wrestling internally with these questions when my mum, who doesn’t cope well with travel anxiety, interrupted my train of thought by starting to polish the mantelpiece so hard I was worried it would collapse.

  ‘I thought the cleaner was coming later?’ I asked.

  ‘She is.’

  I waited for further explanation but nothing came.

  ‘So, why are you cleaning then?’

  ‘Because I don’t want the place to look like a pigsty when she gets here,’ she replied, scrubbing some invisible dirt off an old school photograph of me. ‘I don’t want her thinking I can’t keep my own house tidy.’

  ‘The very reason you employ her suggests that you can’t keep your own house tidy. What’s she going to do when she gets here and finds that’s everything’s already clean?’

  ‘That’s her business,’ she said, dusting a drawing of a giraffe that I did when I was five. ‘Now, have you packed all your books?’

  My mum was becoming increasingly obsessed with my Cambridge reading list. For her, any moment I wasn’t staring intently at Paradise Lost was a moment wasted.

  ‘I’ll do it now,’ I sighed and went upstairs to squeeze half my bookshelf into a rucksack.

  A cab ride, a flight and a stomach-churningly rough boat trip later, my parents and I stepped out on to Sark’s cobbled harbour.

  As we climbed the hill that leads up to the village, I noticed a hot girl ahead of us. This was a pretty big deal, as she was the first hot girl that I’d seen on Sark since the village shop mistakenly ordered a few copies of ZOO Magazine six years ago. Which made her the first three-dimensional hot girl I’d ever seen on Sark.

  She had long, black hair and a delicate, doll-like face. Her lips seemed to be frozen in a permanent Instagram pout. Even though they were partially obscured by the straps of her extremely large rucksack, I could tell her tits were amazing. She was lagging behind her parents, looking even less happy to be on this tiny island than I was. As her mum pointed out a particularly attractive clump of flowers, she turned and caught my eye.

  She flashed me a smile and carried on walking.

  My stomach bubbled. I watched her as she disappeared over the top of the hill, her rucksack bouncing gently against the top of her bum.

  I felt the splat of raindrops on my hair and yanked the hood of my coat up. There is only one thing more boring than three days on Sark, and that’s three days on Sark when it’s raining.

  Hannah

  Going to Kavos was supposed to be all about us doing a last special thing together before uni. But like all things always, it just turned out to be about boys.

  Greece was not how I thought it would be. I knew the others were only bothered about clubs and the pool and getting tanned, but I thought it would be beautiful. With donkeys decorated in flowers, and old women dressed all in black, and brilliant white buildings with blue roofs. I don’t know why Odysseus was so bothered about coming back here. He probably thought it was going to be like Mamma Mia! It’s not.

  Kavos is basically just one street with a beach. Our hotel was exactly like the hostel we stayed in when we went to Dartmoor in Year 8. Just two single beds in the room and a tiny en suite bathroom. There was no air conditioning. We got in at 1 a.m. and went straight to bed. All I could hear was booming music from the million bars that lined the street. They played it all night. That’s what they do to prisoners of war. I couldn’t sleep. ‘Maybe I’ll get used to it,’ I thought. But they played it all day too. I could hear it underwater in the swimming pool.

  It was my idea to go on the boat trip. A man came up to us by the pool and told us about it. You sail all round the island and can dive off the boat into the sea and explore caves. And they cook fresh fish and serve cocktails. It sou
nded glamorous and more along the lines of what I had thought this holiday was going to be. We were all up for it.

  Tilly said she’d got seasick on the ferry when she went to Ireland, but Stella said small boats are different and don’t make you seasick, so we booked. It was quite cheap considering all the stuff you got.

  When we got to the meeting place and were waiting in line we could see all the other people going on the trip. I think everyone there was our age or maybe a year or two older. Loads of people who had just finished exams too.

  The last people to arrive were a group of boys. There were four of them and they all had scruffy hair and looked like they had just got out of bed. They were all brown and casually perfect, carrying towels and not a lot else. They were above worrying about sunscreen and a top in case it got cold. In fact, they were exactly the kind of boys you daydream about being in a group of friends with. Because they were just unbelievably FIT.

  As soon as they arrived, the atmosphere changed ever so slightly. All the girls became more affected, fiddling with their hair and trying but failing to check the boys out without anyone else noticing.

  I knew without even looking at her how Stella would be feeling now. Because this is exactly the type of situation she loves. I can’t imagine being attractive like that. Knowing that without even doing anything, just by being, boys will be drawn to you.

  She got on to the boat and walked straight to the sun deck, where she laid out her towel, stripped off her white sundress, and stretched out. She was wearing a gold bikini and gold earrings and enormous sunglasses. By herself with the sea behind her, she looked like Cleopatra. Even sex-face H&M bikini girl would have been jealous.

  We laid our towels next to hers. I kept my dress on. I’d brought Mansfield Park from my York reading list but I couldn’t face taking it out of my bag. So I just lay there, feeling hot. Not Stella hot – sweaty hot.

  The fittest of the scruffy-haired boys wandered over and sat down by us. Boys who are that fit don’t need to think of any excuse to talk to you. He didn’t even try to make one. I knew he would start hitting on Stella so I took my book out of my bag and shuffled over to be nearer the others. But it was me he spoke to.

  ‘I’ve got that book. Is it good?’

  I could see Stella looking at me, inscrutable behind her sunglasses. I knew she would be pissed off that he hadn’t spoken to her first.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m only on page one. It’s on my university reading list.’

  He took off his sunglasses. His huge, green eyes were flecked with amber bits. He was the most beautiful person I had ever seen in real life. He was tall, but not gangly like most boys our age, just lean and muscular. The tips of his brown hair were blond where the sun had lightened them.

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ he said.

  Passing him the book made me feel self-conscious. He looked at the back cover for a bit.

  ‘It’s pretty weighty to carry around.’

  I laughed and didn’t know what to say. I was sort of bowled over by the situation; by his eyes and his love of books and the fact that he was talking to me.

  I was almost relieved when Stella sat up and started speaking. I didn’t mind that she’d got his attention. Because I could keep quiet and observe him talking and laughing. I could look at his brown belly and see the white line where his tan ended.

  I was constantly dreaming about sensitive, intellectual boys to fall in love with. Maybe they did actually exist.

  As Stella started telling him about where we were staying, Tilly tapped me on the shoulder. Her eyes were watering. She looked awful.

  ‘Han, will you please come to the toilet with me?’

  She said it almost desperately. I took her hand and helped her up. Stella didn’t even notice as we wobbled off the sun deck and inside the boat. The toilet was tiny and stank so badly of piss that I had to breathe through my mouth. I held Tilly’s mass of hair back as she puked her guts out.

  ‘Sorry, Han,’ she spluttered, between heaves.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘Clearly, Stella was full of shit about seasickness and small boats.’

  The boat rocked suddenly. Tilly missed the toilet bowl and a fresh jet of sick hit my foot.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered.

  I bent down and closed my eyes and wiped it off as quickly as possible, laughing. ‘Don’t worry. What is it with me and sick lately?’

  I led Tilly back to the deck and sat her in the shade. Stella was now lying horizontally with her head on the fit boy’s belly.

  A part of me felt jealous, that it was always her. But it made me proud too. If she could do this now, what might she be capable of in a time of national emergency? The other boys in the group were talking to a different group of girls. Obviously Tilly, Grace and me didn’t make the grade.

  The crew brought out shots for everyone. And more shots. And punch. And then there was a drinking contest. I felt a bit out of place in my dress with my book. I looked like my mum on holiday. I could still smell sick on my foot. When the boat stopped, Fit Boy got up and went to get his friends. I sat down next to Stella. She grabbed my arm and pulled me towards her.

  ‘He’s called Pax,’ she whispered excitedly. ‘It means peace in Latin. Is my make-up running?’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re wearing make-up.’

  I bent over and blended her foundation with my thumb. Fit Boy – or, rather, Pax – walked back over with his friends in tow. Tilly and Grace shuffled their towels over. Everyone was standing up except Stella. She was laid out before us like the main attraction.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’ Pax was looking at Tilly, all concerned. I hadn’t even realized he’d noticed us leave.

  ‘Yeah, honestly. I wasn’t really sick that much at all.’

  I looked at the splashes on the bottom of my dress and smiled at her.

  Other people on the boat started to dive into the water. Pax’s friends took their phones out of their pockets and Stella offered them her bag to put them in. They started to peel off their clothes and leap into the sea.

  ‘Come in!’ they shouted.

  Stella looked like she was thinking about it for a moment, ‘No, I want to lie in the sun. I’m more of a pool swimmer.’

  Tilly wouldn’t risk it after being ill and Grace was a bit pissed. I couldn’t go in alone. And I couldn’t go in with the boys. I didn’t know them. I wouldn’t know what to say.

  Pax looked at me. ‘Come on, Hannah.’

  How did he know my name? Hearing him say it made my stomach flip. It was like no one had ever said my name out loud before.

  ‘There aren’t any sharks, you know.’ He smiled broadly. His teeth were perfect.

  I wanted to tell him that I was actually a really good swimmer. That I swim in Cornwall in massive waves every year with my brother, and I can hold my breath underwater for nearly a minute.

  But I didn’t have time to do that, because he just walked to the edge of the boat and dived in. He didn’t even hesitate. It was one movement. He looked up at me from the water.

  ‘Come on!’

  He bobbed up and down in the water, smiling at me. I had been looking forward to swimming off the boat all day and there was literally no logical reason – or, at least none I could explain to him – why I shouldn’t.

  ‘OK, just a second.’

  He stayed there, treading water, and I realized I had no choice but to take off my dress with him looking at me. I knew I was going red. Taking my clothes off suddenly seemed complicated, and I felt a new and instant respect for strippers. I just wanted to get in the sea as quickly as possible. I felt exposed in my bikini. I was still so pale. I clambered down the ladder and he swam across to meet me.

  Swimming next to him was weird. I kept expecting him to try and find his friends but he didn’t. We drifted away from the rest of the swimmers and started treading water.

  ‘Are you going to do English at uni?’

  ‘Yeah. York is my first choice
and Sussex is my second.’

  ‘No way! I’m going to York. I’ve just done a gap year so we’ll be starting together.’

  Except that we probably wouldn’t be starting together, because I think I fucked up History.

  ‘You’re the first person I’ve met who’s applied there,’ I said.

  ‘Me too. But now we know each other.’

  He said it in such an offhand way. He wanted to know me. There was a chance he would be in my life, even if only to look at, for longer than just today, or this holiday.

  We swam a bit further and talked about English A level and what texts we’d done, and our exams and where we were from. He told me about his gap year and how he went to a Full Moon Party in Thailand. I nodded like I knew what that was.

  Then he told me about the town in Devon where he grew up. I suppose even really attractive people were just kids once, like everyone else. His looks didn’t seem to affect him. They were just part of him.

  By the time we swam back to the boat the sun was starting to go down.

  Stella was lying exactly as she had been before. Resplendent, copy of Cosmopolitan in hand, sunglasses still hiding whatever she might be thinking.

  I went to the bathroom and when I got back, Pax was talking to her and it was as if the last half hour had never happened. When it comes to boys she doesn’t have to try and win, she just does automatically. Not that it’s a competition. But her always winning sort of makes it one whether you want it to be or not. Like you’ve inadvertently entered the Olympics when you know you’re shit at P.E.

  Grace was deep in conversation with one of Pax’s friends. She kept laughing and touching his arm. Tilly started feeling sick again as soon as the boat moved. I went back to the toilet with her.

  Between hurls, she said, ‘What is Grace doing?’ Her voice echoed around the toilet bowl.

  ‘Just flirting. She won’t do anything. She’s in love with Ollie.’