Lobsters

by Lucy Ivison

  I don’t really like telling people I’ve got a place at Cambridge. It makes me sound a bit up my own arse.

  ‘I’ve … sort of got a place at Cambridge but I’m not sure if I’ll get the grades.’

  Everyone says they’re not sure if they’ll get the grades.

  ‘Wow. That’s really impressive. To do what?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘Hey, me too.’

  I was just about to ask which uni she was going to when suddenly, from out of the dance tent, I saw Panda and her mates making their way merrily towards us. They must have been in there all night. They hadn’t seen us yet, but it was only a matter of seconds before they did.

  Without thinking, I flung back the curtain on the Fortune Teller’s booth, and yanked Hannah inside with me.

  ‘Ah! Welcome travellers!’ murmured a heavily made-up middle-aged lady with a thick Eastern European accent. She was wearing a long silk robe, and a makeshift ‘turban’ that was quite clearly a tie-dyed bath towel. ‘You wish to know your fortune, I presume?’

  The inside of the booth was only slightly less cramped than Stella’s Harry Potter cupboard, and the sickly sweet smell of incense was overpowering.

  ‘Sam, what are we doing?’ whispered Hannah, understandably a little confused by proceedings.

  Through a gap in the curtain, I saw Panda and her friends ooh-ing and aah-ing over a hemp yoga mat at the stall opposite. We weren’t going back outside any time soon.

  ‘Er, yes,’ I said to the lady, ‘we wish to know our fortune.’ Then, turning to Hannah, I shrugged. ‘I just thought it might be funny.’

  She wrinkled her forehead at me. She clearly wasn’t convinced. I didn’t blame her.

  ‘Excellent, travellers,’ muttered the lady. ‘But first, you must cross my palm with silver.’

  ‘How much silver?’ I asked. I didn’t want to bump into Panda, but I also wasn’t hugely keen on handing over the rest of my festival money to a woman with a bath towel on her head.

  ‘Five pieces of silver each, so it’s ten for the both of you.’

  ‘And how much is ten pieces of silver?’

  ‘Ten pounds.’

  ‘Ten pounds?’ I protested. ‘But pounds aren’t even silver!’

  ‘It’s a figure of speech.’

  I glanced through the crack in the curtain again. Panda was still right outside, trying on a bright green headscarf.

  ‘What do we get for ten pounds, then?’ I asked.

  ‘You get a glimpse of your future, my dear,’ whispered the lady, dramatically.

  ‘Yeah, but are you going to tell me good stuff or bad stuff? I don’t want to give you a tenner and then find out I’m going to get mugged or run over or eaten by a shark, or something.’

  ‘Eaten by a shark?’ said Hannah, raising her eyebrow.

  ‘It could happen,’ I said, raising an eyebrow back.

  ‘It could indeed,’ purred the lady. ‘All you have to do is cross my palm with silver and all will be revealed.’

  ‘You mean all I have to do is give you ten pounds and you’ll make some stuff up.’

  The lady’s enigmatic smile dissolved into an irritated frown. ‘Look, love, if you’re not going to pay up, can you piss off? I’ve got other punters waiting.’ Her exotic Eastern European drawl had given way to a broad Geordie accent.

  Before I could protest, Hannah thanked her politely for her time, swept back the curtain and pulled me out into the sunlight.

  Panda and her mates were just leaving the stall, armed with their ludicrous purchases. Thankfully they didn’t see us, but Hannah saw them.

  ‘Erm, Sam, isn’t that the girl you were with yesterday?’ she asked, watching Panda and her friends as they wandered off.

  ‘Who?’ I said, pretending not to understand the question.

  ‘The girl? From yesterday? When we first saw you in the crowd …’

  I squinted in the direction of Panda’s back. ‘Er, yeah, it might have been her. I can’t really be sure from this distance.’

  Hannah glanced at the fortune teller’s booth and then smiled at me.

  ‘Sam, you could have spoken to her if you wanted. I wouldn’t have minded.’

  I don’t know what it was – maybe the fact I was still half drunk, or weary from lack of sleep, or maybe just because Hannah looked so fit at that moment, smiling up at me so brightly under the morning sun – but I just decided to tell the truth.

  ‘I didn’t want to speak to her. I only pulled her yesterday because all our mates were pulling each other. I didn’t even particularly want to. She’s called Miranda but she calls herself Panda because it rhymes with Miranda and she loves pandas.’

  Hannah giggled. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘I knew you would find it funny! Literally no one else found it funny except me. Even Robin said it was a cool way to show support for an endangered species. I guess I …’ I paused, trying to summon the bravery I needed from somewhere inside me. ‘I guess I would rather have been with you. I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about you since Stella’s party. I’m sorry, that’s a shit thing to say when I know you’ve got a boyfriend, but I can’t help it.’

  Her smile widened, and she blushed a little.

  ‘I thought you liked Stella,’ she said, quietly. ‘Why else did you go on that date?’

  ‘Because my mate Robin would have killed me if I hadn’t! Stella just came up and started pulling me at the party – I didn’t really know what was going on. I tried to find you, but I guess you’d already left with your boyfriend, maybe.’

  The ‘maybe’ hung in the air, like an echo in an underpass. Hannah laughed and shook her head.

  ‘Yeah, the thing is, Sam … Some of the things I said about my boyfriend weren’t strictly true.’

  ‘Which things?’

  ‘Well …’ She looked me straight in the eyes. ‘All of them.’

  I felt confusion and elation jostling for position inside me.

  ‘What do you mean? So, you’re not with anybody?’

  She shook her head again. And then, not under an impossibly beautiful starry sky, but in the midst of dreamcatchers, incense sticks and fortune-telling rip-off merchants, I kissed her. And she kissed me back.

  When me and Robin and Chris talk about pulling girls, we always talk about the mechanics of it, the cold facts: their technique, how much they use their tongue, how wide they open their mouths. But kissing Hannah I realized that none of that actually mattered. What mattered was how you felt about the person. That’s what made this the best kiss I’d ever had. It was just … right. There was no other word for it.

  ‘What shall we do now?’ I said, once we’d finally come up for air.

  ‘I’d better go back and find the girls.’

  We wandered back to the field Hannah was staying in, but it turned out she couldn’t remember where her tent was.

  ‘What does it look like?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know – it’s a tent.’

  ‘That’s not going to narrow it down in a field full of tents. What does it actually look like?’

  ‘Erm …’ She pointed to a tent. ‘It looks a bit like that one.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In that it’s a tent.’

  ‘Oh, good. With deduction skills like those, we’ll find it in no time.’

  She pinched me on the forearm and grinned.

  Eventually, she spotted a mud-spattered little tent with a flowery design that was just visible beneath the dirt.

  ‘I think that’s it!’

  She ran over, unzipped the entrance and crawled inside. I followed her in.

  The floor was littered with apple cores and Rizla packets and empty cider bottles.

  ‘You absolutely certain this one is yours?’ I asked.

  ‘Erm … no, actually,’ said Hannah. ‘We’re in someone else’s tent.’

  We both cracked up. She looks so fit when she smiles. I pulled her towards me and we dropped down o
n to the (slightly manky) sleeping bag and started kissing. It was muggy in the tent – that kind of aggressive, claustrophobic heat that can only come from zipping yourself into a tiny polyester igloo under the blazing morning sun – but that did nothing to kill our passion. With our lips still stuck together, we wriggled sweatily on to the blow-up mattress, reaching under each other’s T-shirts and she moaned gently – a good kind of moan (I hoped).

  I was beginning to regret having used the Febreze in the back seat of Robin’s car as deodorant. But since I’d left my roll-on at home, I didn’t really have much choice. Anyway, the various unorthodox odours already inside the tent were doing their best to mask my Alaskan Springtime scent.

  We writhed about, ignoring the yawns and groans and shuffles of people waking up in the tents around us. Totally oblivious to everything except each other.

  We were moving fast. She started to unbutton my jeans and sat up while I pulled her T-shirt over her head. We lay back down, breathlessly, and kept pulling.

  ‘Sam,’ she whispered, as I kissed her earlobe to try and divert attention away from my fumbling inability to undo her bra. ‘Sam …’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said, giving up on the apparently unconquerable bra clasp for the moment and hoping she hadn’t noticed.

  ‘It’s just that … I should tell you …’ She breathed heavily as I decided to try my luck on her jeans button instead.

  ‘What?’ I gasped.

  ‘I’m … This is my first time. I’m a virgin.’

  I sat bolt upright, nearly exposing my very obvious boner. This was her first time! She hadn’t got ‘jiggy’ with twat boy Freddie! She hadn’t got ‘jiggy’ with anyone! She was … She was just like me! I cupped her face in my hands and kissed her.

  It briefly entered my mind to try to play it cool, like I had with Erin. To tell her that I’d shagged two or three girls, and she shouldn’t worry because I knew exactly what I was doing. But I couldn’t contain myself. It was like a weight had been lifted. I came up for air from the kiss and smiled at her. ‘It’s my first time too.’

  A brilliant grin broke across her face, and she pulled me back towards her. We were moving even faster now, hardly thinking about what we were doing. I went for round two with the bra clasp as she unzipped my jeans and edged them down until they rested around my ankles. This was it. This was actually it – and it didn’t feel scary or weird or stupid. It felt amazing.

  Then, from nowhere, there was rustling and coughing and laughing right outside the tent. Hannah and I froze and stared at the entrance. The rustling got louder, and suddenly the zip started moving upwards. Someone was coming in.

  I slid out of the sleeping bag – fully exposing my very obvious boner this time – and yanked the zip back down to the ground. Hannah let out a howl of laughter, and quickly slapped a hand over her mouth to silence herself. The zip was wriggling in my hands. The tent’s owners were still trying to get in.

  ‘Oi!’ we heard a girl shout outside. ‘Is someone in there?’

  Hannah couldn’t stop. The nerves and general ridiculousness of the situation had got to her. She was paralytic with giggles. Still holding the zip in place, I chucked a sleeping bag over her to muffle the sound. It didn’t do much good. People in the next field would still have heard her hissing and snuffling.

  ‘Let us in our fucking tent!’ screamed the girl outside. ‘We’re really hungover!’

  I couldn’t see any way out, except to try and cut a hole in the lining and crawl out the back, so I accepted defeat.

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘We’re coming out. Sorry.’

  ‘You’ve got ten seconds!’ said the girl.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Or what?’ I asked.

  Another pause.

  ‘Yeah … I don’t know. That seemed like an appropriate thing to say. Just be as quick as you can, please.’

  I pulled my trousers back up and Hannah put her shirt on and (eventually) managed to stop laughing/hyperventilating. As I was about to unzip the entrance she suddenly said, ‘Stop! We should leave the place in a decent state, don’t you think?’

  I laughed. ‘Yeah. OK.’

  We smoothed out the sleeping bags on the airbed and collected up the apple cores into a discarded plastic bag – even though they weren’t ours. And then, once we were happy with the condition of the tent, we unzipped the door and crawled out.

  The commotion had drawn a crowd. About thirty hungover-looking people were standing around the entrance. As I poked my head out, they all started laughing, cheering and applauding. Hannah emerged behind me, and the cheering and clapping got louder.

  ‘Let’s hear it for the shagging couple!’ shouted someone in the crowd. ‘Let’s hear it for the tent fuckers!’

  Hannah and I looked at each, shrugged, and then smiled and raised our arms, taking in the adulation. No tent fucking had actually happened, obviously, but the fact we were finally together felt like an achievement in itself.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ we said, shaking the dozens of hands that were being enthusiastically thrust at us.

  Even when we’d walked to the next field we were still laughing about it. It hadn’t sunk in that I’d just missed my best chance ever to lose my virginity. It just seemed hilarious. And anyway, it didn’t feel like the chance was gone. I felt sure Hannah and I would be in a similar situation soon. Just not in someone else’s apple core-strewn tent.

  ‘I’d really better find Stella and the girls now,’ said Hannah, smoothing down her tousled hair. ‘They’ll be worried.’

  ‘Yeah. I guess we’ve been gone nearly twelve hours now.’

  I pulled her towards me and hugged her.

  ‘Let’s meet back at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring Stella and Grace and Tilly. You bring Robin and everyone.’

  ‘OK. See you there at, like, nine?’

  She nodded and smiled.

  As we kissed goodbye, I could still hear the cheering and applause in my head.

  12

  Hannah

  I finally found the tent and crept in. I lay next to Stella, waiting for her to wake up. I couldn’t bear it. I kept coughing to speed up the process. Stella is the only person I have ever met who wears a satin eye mask to bed. In a muddy, earwig-infested tent it seemed even more ridiculous.

  ‘Are you awake?’ I knew she wasn’t. I stopped trying to be subtle and gave her ponytail a yank. ‘I pulled Sam.’

  She pulled her eye mask up and found my face right opposite hers.

  ‘Fuck off!’

  And then she screamed. In a nearby tent, we heard someone shout, ‘Shut up!’

  I love how Stella gets involved like it’s her own life.

  ‘Oh my god. Tell me everything! Like a film. From the beginning. I knew you’d met him. I told Grace you had. She was all like “Oooohhhh, she’s been stabbed in a mosh pit.” But I knew. It was my bestie sixth sense. It was speaking to me. It was saying “Hannah’s getting laidddddd!”’

  And then she got on to her knees still in her sleeping bag and fell on me.

  ‘Hannah’s getting laiddddd!’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh! I need to wee and I can’t face the queue.’

  She picked herself up and fell on me again.

  ‘Stop! You’re hurting me.’

  ‘You’ll be hurting more later when you’re getting lai—’

  We were both hysterical.

  ‘Don’t laugh, Stell. I’ve found The One. Sam is my lobster. Fact.’

  The tent was so hot we wiggled outside still in our sleeping bags and lay on the grass, eating crisps and talking about Sam. About how he had changed his hair and was a bit tanned and looked even fitter than before. About what Stella would wear to be bridesmaid. About how big his willy might be and whether I should take paracetamol before doing it like Grace had.

  Stell was surprised when I told her he was a virgin.

  ‘But he’s so tall.’

  ‘And?’

 
‘I don’t know…’

  Grace and Tilly emerged from their tent and then we were all discussing it. We said our names out loud.

  ‘Hannah and Sam, Sam and Hannah.’

  ‘Sannah!’ said Grace.

  Stella snorted. ‘Sannah’s shit. It should be Ham.’

  All I’d felt with Freddie was nerves. But not good nerves. More fear. Or embarrassment. I wanted him because I wanted what he could give me. A box ticked, maybe. A sort of cast iron proof I was OK. Because I pulled people who were cool and who pulled fit girls. Getting off with him had never physically felt like anything really. Just like someone putting their tongue in my mouth. Or touching my boobs. Or whatever.

  I actually wanted Sam. Not because he was fit, even though he was. Just because I really wanted him. I could actually imagine being his girlfriend. Not in a shit, meet-at-Westfield-and-get-off-with-each-other fourteen-year-old way. Getting off with him in the tent didn’t feel like any other time I’ve been with a boy. I wanted to touch him. I wasn’t having an out-of-body experience and pushing myself to be brave and do stuff. I wanted him to touch me. I wanted him to be close to me. It was mental that I’d only just experienced that. Maybe everyone always felt like this when they pulled someone. But I never had. Until now.

  If those people hadn’t come back to their tent I would have let him, I think. I would still have been shit-scared but I wanted him to. Before he kissed me, he pushed my hair behind my ears and kissed my cheek. Like he really liked me.

  Tonight is our night.

  Grace lent me her black bra. I didn’t have any nice knickers though. In the end I had to wear my Moomin ones because they were the newest and my other ones said ‘KISS MY ASS’ on the back and I would die of embarrassment if he thought it was instructional.

  We got to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party earlier than the previous night so people weren’t really acting crazy and dressing up yet. We sat on the big cushions and drank gin and tonic out of teacups. I was wearing denim cut-offs and a silk camisole and a flower garland headband. Grace had drawn flowers and butterflies in glitter all over our bellies and shoulders and around our eyes. Thank god it wasn’t raining.