You’ve got to stop thinking about this, says the voice that helps me out when I’m wankered. What if it happens tonight?
Fuck. Now I’m panic stations go. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. But it won’t, will it? Rainbow, as we know, is classy.
Well, the voice murmurs, classy but unpredictable.
Look, I argue back, she is not a simple Langrick bird. Her accent is posher … Fuck. I realise with a sudden jolt of marijuana-induced alarm (the type of alarm where a piece of information thus far clouded in pot smoke rises from the fog like an epiphany, only about half an hour too late to be helpful) that I don’t even know where she’s from. I know she’s just moved to Ness, in the house next to Ella, but what about before that? What if someone asks and I can’t tell them? Jesus shit Jesus. What if someone asks her last name?!
Flick, chill out, says the voice. As long as we’re not getting fucked, nothing can go that horribly wrong.
We turn into Dildo’s road.
‘This is where his place is,’ I hear, coming remarkably calmly from my mouth. ‘You want me to walk you home?’
Rainbow turns into Dildo’s drive and looks back at me. ‘No, I’m okay, thanks,’ she smirks. ‘I’m coming in.’
I gulp audibly.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she says sweetly. ‘I’m not going to have sex with you. We’ll just do kissing.’
‘Oh …’ I follow her in through the door. ‘Okay.’
‘Yeah,’ she says, skipping up the stairs. ‘And other stuff.’ She stops, looks back at me, winks and smiles knowingly.
And with that my brain melts in my skull and dribbles out of my ears.
13
Call My Bluff
It is dark. I’m hot and flustered. I can feel my heart beating in my throat. I can smell musky perfume and pizza and cigarettes. I swallow, lean in, my tongue touches another and my lips softly bite another plump lip. I put my hand around a waist that almost fits entirely inside my palm. It is soft and warm. Rainbow, smiling, parts her legs. She takes my right hand gently and slides it up the inside of her thigh, which is milky white and so smooth I shiver and close my eyes for a second. I want to push my face into her thighs and squeeze them. We are in a tiny box room in Dildo’s house. It belongs to his eleven-year-old brother, who is away on a sleepover. Beside us is a half-drunk bottle of peach schnapps, the only thing we could raid from Dildo’s mum’s cupboard, and under the bed is a battered condom I stole from Ash (just in case).
‘Will?’ I look up through a dark haze at her gorgeous face, honest and bold and sweet and questioning, and I swallow myself back to a higher state of consciousness. She smiles at me and I smile weakly back. I’m so fucking helpless. I want to cry in between her legs. She leans in and slides her tongue into my mouth. I hold her bottom lip, full and delicious, between mine. I’ve forgotten where my hand is and suddenly I touch something hot, like a pie just out of the oven, but wet too, so I can slide my hand around freely. I let out an ‘Oh’, and the tip of my middle finger glides easily into her.
It occurs to me for a moment that I might not be very good at fingering. My last two girlfriends weren’t very vocal about anything – I tend to go for shy types – and Sam, who it happened with once on someone’s sofa at a party, was gobby about everything: ‘FUCK! You’re so HOT, Flick’, ‘My last boyfriend was twenty-five so I’m a fucking MASTER’, ‘I’m gonna FUCK you like a DOG’, ‘OH YES, FUCK ME!’
I didn’t, and we don’t speak any more.
Rainbow slips her tongue into my ear and I’m back in the room, like the hypnotist’s victims in Little Britain, with Rainbow hypnotising me with her eyes. Then suddenly I’m gone again into a different place, where there is no thought, only the moment we exist in, the heat of her pussy and an indescribable tingling in my ear.
‘Fuuuuck.’
And I realise that this is it. This isn’t reported, I’m not listening to someone else’s story. This is my life, me and Rainbow, and at this second I wouldn’t trade it for anyone else’s. This is exactly where I want to be. I feel more present at this precise moment in time than I have felt for my whole life up until now. Another first. I peel Rainbow off me and hold her face in my hands. She’s beautiful. Suddenly shy, I don’t say so. Instead I smile and go a bit red, and my vision blurs at the edges. When I pull her towards me, and our lips touch, I sigh a massive breath, part satisfaction, part relief. Soppy twat. I feel like laughing. So I do.
We spend the night together, in the dark, in each other. I only regain a semblance of consciousness at one other point in the night when, with my lips red and swollen from kissing, I shyly and hornily tell her that if she wants anything from me, anything, just to ask. She parts her equally swollen lips and with a sweet and so-sexy smile whispers: ‘Go down on me, Will.’ Holy shit.
PART TWO
1
Space Time Continuum Warp Factor School
In the way that only happens when you’re in school and repeating the same monotonous gobshite routine every day, time runs away from me. It is difficult to understand how one day can seem so ridiculously slow, but months seem to pass where very little worth mentioning occurs. I’m sure in part it is due, in this case, to being young and in love or whatever you’d care to call it, because when you are young the details matter so much and this creates a paradox. On the one hand, as you’re watching for every detail you are very much in the moment, time seems to go out the window and all you are left with after the affair is a rosy glow of something sweet, innocent and faintly remembered, a glow in which you happily bask. On the other hand, the tiniest moments can hurt like a knife (like seeing her hold someone else’s gaze or break from your own) and become so important, burned on your retina, that it can be unbearable (hence the pot, because we’re all so tortured, *sob*).
On a more general note, however, this seemingly simultaneous speeding up and slowing down of time appears often to come hand in hand with being In School. My hypothesis (since I know you’re so interested) is that, in an education system largely based on exam results, there ends up being little to do for the rest of the year. This is also given that if you’re smart or have a good teacher you tend to pass the exams, and if you’re not, and you don’t, you’re fucked. Thus they pack the less important eleven months with pointless coursework that, although it does add to our final grade, basically offers no sense of fulfilment as we all know most of the tasks we’re set are utter crap, would never happen in the real world and are geared solely towards proving yourself to an instructor and a certain system of grading, and definitively not towards proving to the individual his or her own worth, intelligence or ability. This, my friends, is why every Year Eleven, though in particular the more able, just after receiving their results become puzzled and bewildered over one question. Why is it that during the GCSEs everything is a struggle and you’re up ’til 4am every night doing the work (I speak here for the people that actually do it; I’ll not shy away from the fact that although I am generally up until 4am, I tend to be mainly wanking and/or watching Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps), then in the exams, which you didn’t revise for, you’re sat there worried you’re missing the point ’cause the supposedly hard questions seem very ABC level, then on results day you get way better grades than you thought you were going to get? Well, hold on to that curve you’re graded on because I’m about to give you the Holy Grail of answers to this Mother of questions. It is because (drum roll please) the level of knowledge and intelligence needed to pass a GCSE is very little, but the amount of work is mind-shatteringly overwhelming. And so, when people do not pass a GCSE it is not because they are thick (because they would have to be very thick to not realise that repeating the Very Simple Textbook Answer to all the Very Simple Textbook Questions asked will get you full marks), but it is because they have not put in the hours to revise for exams/complete all the coursework. Their work is incomplete more often than it is crap, and when it is crap, it is because it took very little time. And thus whether it is laziness, a mis
understanding of this most basic principle of the curriculum, or whether you are just that little bit too stoned to find what you’re reading (or what you’ve written) coherent, the work piles up, you find yourself being chased down corridors by ancient cross-eyed women (Ms White, who the fuck are you looking at?) spitting on their cardigans with rage because you haven’t handed in a piece of work they knew you weren’t going to do. They threaten you with suspension because there are only five lunchtime detention slots in the week and you’ve racked up sixteen and then you find yourself doing more work than you planned on doing, you’re working the man hours, your hands are tied and suddenly two weeks of your life are dead and buried and you’ll never get your misspent youth back again.
GCSE students, here is my advice: do the coursework, but don’t do anything else. When exam time cometh, ask for a copy of the curriculum and revise from that (except for in English, where you will need either to be naturally smart or to make notes). It will make little difference to your life in the long run. If you want to do anything academic you will need a good degree, so work out which course you want to do, get enough to get on to it, and then put in the work. Or choose one of the many different paths they never tell you about in school. I’m serious. You will never be sixteen again. Throw caution to the wind, cast off the mainsail, do/kiss the girls/boys you always wanted to do/kiss but never did. You know who I mean.
And I hope you heed that sincerely meant advice.
2
Basking in the After-Gnor
So time flies and I find myself, a fortnight after GNOR (the Glorious Night of Rainbow, hallowed be her name) walking home from the school bus stop through Osford centre, with an old mate of mine, Angie, who now works at our village’s one and only pub. Again, she’s someone I went to playschool with and we ate dinner together every night for about three years when we were in single digits because our mothers worked in the same supermarket and used to take alternate shifts so they could babysit us. I haven’t spoken with Angie since before GNOR, as it shall now formally be known, so I’m happily boring her with every detail of the things she has missed, right down to the composition of Rainbow’s irises (very dark blue with a slash of gold through each). I like Angie because she’s one of the guys without being too butch and she’ll listen to you without trying to get off with you. Plus she always lets me drink for free, even if Rob, the grumpy manager, is watching. She picks at her nose-stud while I struggle to describe the exact curvature of Rainbow’s bum.
‘So.’ Angie flicks dried nose skin to the kerb. ‘D’you click with her then?’
‘Yeah, I think so. I actually asked her and she said most of the time, clicking takes a while, y’know, you have to get into the other person’s rhythm, but she said we fitted instantly, like jigsaw pieces, which I thought was wicked.’
‘Completely, I know when I first started seeing Jamie we took a while to click but now when we’re together it’s awesome—’
‘Yeah—’ I attempt to butt in. Jamie isn’t actually Angie’s boyfriend by the way. They have a weird and complicated relationship based on sleeping with each other and being best friends – the downside of being a ‘matey’ kind of girl. I’ve had words with Jamie about it, but he says Angie knows the score and if she hasn’t got it from the things he’s said to her about wanting to sleep about a bit before ‘settling’ for someone, then she’ll probably have got it from watching him sleep about a bit with practically all of our mates. I don’t agree with his approach but I have a certain amount of admiration for his big, hairy balls.
‘—and there’s no awkwardness any more. When we wanna say something we just say it—’
‘—yeah, like—’
‘It’s so simple now.’
Grrr, let me talk about Rainbow, let me talk about Rainbow, let me talk about Rainbow. I’m holding my jaw tight with impatience. She knows I’m not listening so I don’t know why she bothers. I bite at my nails. I have to get my sentence out or I’ll die, thinks my brain.
‘Jamie said to me the other week … Flick? Are you shaking? Oh, for fuck’s sake, talk about Rainbow then.’
Ahhhh good. ‘Okay, so I said to her did she want a drink and she said …’ Wicked. I get it all out. By the time we get to our estate I’m still not finished so we sit on the pavement and I talk her ear off for another hour before there’s no more to tell and then I go home, eat dinner and have a wank. Bliss.
3
Friends
My time-equals-school-over-disinformation equation proves true, and another pointless couple of weeks go by with little to report. We stay in, go out, shake it all about, drink and shout. Ash shags people and cries, I take a few lines, Daisy gets dumped, we camp in the woods, Mike gets bottled in the face late night near Daisy’s place, Ella and Josh fight and make up and fuck loudly next door and I call Ash a whore, always unheard, and we get wankered and Jamie fucks a skank, and I wank and wank and I fail one more test and pass two and flirt my way out of the former and get stoned round the corner. There’s flashing lights and later nights and one full moon and nothing new over and over again with no discernible end and all the time, in the back of my mind, I’m seeing colours, lips, tits, hair that flicks, a rainbow of Rainbow.
It’s been a fortnight since our first rendezvous and Rainbow is proving as elusive as her namesake. I’ve got her number and msn off a mutual mate but my casual and, I’d like to think, smooth texts go unanswered, and since I’m reluctant to appear anything but my usual cool and unflappable self I can’t beg her for another meet up, but I let it slip that I’m very interested to certain notorious gossips (such as Fat Sal) and I wait for news.
Privately I allow myself to remember her by saying her name. Just once each time, quietly, so as not to jinx it and longingly, because I need, now I know what it means, to feel alive again.
All my friends seem to be ghost versions of themselves. We sit out and smoke up on the field at the back of our school one lunchtime. Gav joins us with a cheery grin, as he sometimes does when there’s money to be made on the school field, and starts rolling joints for Josh and telling him about this PCP murder he saw on Without a Trace. I can hear him from where we’re sat, about ten feet away on a small grassy bank with a good view of the school, saying something about stabbing and laughing like an excited toddler. I suck in the pot and hold it thoughtfully. Dildo starts telling me a story about his sister and I grunt at pauses and think about Rainbow.
‘We went to Poz’s on … on Sunday … no, Saturday, ’cause it was the day of that boxing match. So we went to Poz’s for a line and that stupid dyke was there, being sick in his toilet, right?’
Grunt.
‘So I tell her to go home because our mam doesn’t know but our dad said not to let her go to Poz’s until she’s fourteen and that’s not ’til August but she’s such a fucking whiny little bitch with a face like, “urrr”, like a cat’s arse, you know, you know Bex, don’t you?’
Grunt.
‘So she’s falling off her shoes and her tits are falling out of her top and that’s not pretty.’ He lights the joint he’s been rolling, I throw my dead one away, and we share his cosily. ‘Y’know, like, I don’t wanna see that, do I? So she starts getting ready to do another line and I say get some water down you, ’cause she’s fucking puked up everything she’s had in her stomach and I know for a fact all she’s been drinking all night is Cherry Lambrini ’cause it’s so cheap it’s the only thing they’ll buy, right?’
Grunt.
‘So, she’s fucking telling me to get fucked and I say do whatever you want then you fucking slag and she downs some vodka and she does another line, joins in on the joints, which I’m not happy about ’cause she starts talking to Katy, who I’m trying to get with and then she goes and fucking gets off with Danny –’ (Danny’s Dildo’s best friend) ‘– and I can see them out the corner of my fucking eye, and she’s got her skirt up round her waist and his arse is going at it like that Jane Fonda “Buns of Steel” video.’
<
br /> I laugh. Dildo looks offended. It clearly wasn’t the right time to laugh (and I’m clearly not listening). Maybe someone died in the story.
‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘I think, “fuck this”, and I go to Poz’s bedroom with Katy. And I’ve been going for Katy for months, you know that, and finally, finally I’m in there, and she sucks my dick and then I turn her around and I’ve got her arse, so fucking hot, and I push my dick in her from behind, not in her arse, like, y’know, like, her cunt, right?’
‘Mmm.’
‘And I’m fucking away at her and her big tits are jiggling, man, and it’s wicked and, FUCK, man, the door opens and Poz puts his head round the corner and goes, “Dildo, you’ve gotta get your sister, she’s well out of it and I can’t have her here like that,” and you know, I fucking understand his point, ’cause it’s his house, right, but if he’s got a thirteen year old there, and she’s clearly fucked, then it’s, well, that’s trouble, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So I zip up, apologise to Katy, I go out the room, and there’s fucking Bex …’
Rainbow.
‘Mascara and that shit all down her face.’
Her beautiful face.
‘Coke-ringed fucking nose.’
Her beautiful little nose.
‘Tits falling out …’
Her beautiful chest cuddled to mine.
‘… skirt ridden up above her pussy …’
Her beautiful pussy in my face.
‘… Danny looking a fucking smug twat …’
Me and Rainbow, Rainbow and me.
‘… stroking her …’
Pushing myself into her.
‘… KISSING HER NECK …’
Flick: A Novel Page 5