Boys & Girls

by Paul Burston

  I don’t know anyone who’s ever got through to the Lesbian and Gay Switchboard. Then again, it’s not as if I’ve got k.d. lang, Guinevere Turner and Beth Jordache sitting in my parents’ kitchen, comparing notes on the subject. I’m wondering, as always, what I’d do if they answered – whether I’d state the facts calmly, perhaps discuss the weather – the unseasonal snow that’s presently caking my school skirt – or just start screaming.

  When I dial this number, I’m not always so resigned. Some nights, a film with a gay character (usually ending in death, violent death, AIDS, really violent death, or even worse, eternal chronic celibacy as the wise best mate or unrequited lover of a fortysomething fag hag) has sent me upstairs, trailing the phone behind me – Wendy! What you doing up there, love? – crying in the silent, staccato sobs of the old-movie divas my friend Aidan worshipped.

  Aidan Meeks was the only other one I knew, but we lost touch when I changed schools last year. He wasn’t in my classes – I was Set One, he was pure Four, but we found each other in Drama, in the music block, on the Tube home. It wasn’t just that he loved musicals and divas in big meringue dresses. It was the way he walked, the way he touched his hair, the uncertain sprawl of his mouth and the black eyes that his stepdad doled out generously. Poor little git, Dad said as Aidan glided down our garden path like it was a catwalk. It’s written through him like a stick of rock.

  It’s written through me too, but on the inside. Even as a child, I didn’t look like the tomboy I was, and was forever being told by adults that they’d expected better of me. My face is old-fashioned, a medieval illustration touched lightly with gold leaf. Ironed blonde bob, toffee eyeshadow and lip gloss, high heels and hiked-up school skirt. I pass. I pass through the corridors and changing rooms, unremarked. I am Scholarship Girl, a swishy-haired secret agent with only one secret.

  Sometimes I think I’d rather be Aidan and get slammed into lockers than stand next to them trying not to look at breasts. Particularly the breasts of Sadie Thornton, who has the locker next to mine. She also has skin like hot milk dusted with nutmeg, a satin bra the old-world pink of dried roses, and a holy medal nestling between her C-cups that I’d happily change places with for all eternity. Not that I’ve been looking.

  ‘Wendy! You gabbing to Catherine again? I don’t want to think about that bill, you two banging on about which of them dancing gaylords you fancy this week…’

  Big bloke, my dad, cab-driver’s paunch Mum nags him about, brown jumper under his suit jacket. He points at my skirt. ‘What you been doing, making snow angels? Bit old for that, aren’t you?’

  I stand up, brushing at it. ‘Some wankers from St. Jude’s snowballed me by the church. There was loads of them, all yelling. They said school was great without me.’ That last bit just slips out – I hadn’t meant to tell him. It was the only part that embarrassed me. It was the only part I was scared was true.

  He’s half out of his jacket, but starts struggling back into it. ‘Right. You reckon they’re still there?’

  ‘Dad! You can’t! I’m fifteen, for God’s sake.’

  ‘You’re right, sweetpea. They’re just jealous. That Catholic loony bin’s never gonna be great for anyone.’ He takes his jacket off. ‘Good day apart from that?’ He always wants it to be a good day.

  ‘Yeah. Quite funny, really, Duncan asked me to be part of this Blind Date thing the boy’s school’s doing for charity. Me, Nicola, and this other girl Lizzie King. They reckon she’s had most of the boys’ Upper Fifth already, so it’ll be either me or Nicola going to Pizza Hut with some spotty freak-child. ‘Confident, good-looking girls with a sense of humour,’ Duncan said they wanted.’

  ‘What they doing with you, then?’

  ‘Laugh? I thought I’d pee my pants.’

  Dad chortles, a Sid James smoker’s laugh. I keep talking, trying to impress him as always. ‘I’m debating against the boys tomorrow, something daft about smoking. Just cause Steve Larson-Smythe’s being suspended for sparking up in front of the staff room window. That debating society’s crap, we never talk about anything that matters. No nuclear disarmament, no immigration, nothing-it’s always about whether we should wear these manky uniforms or not, and whether soap operas are useful social commentary or epic bollocks.’

  ‘Well, you and Catherine like that soap with all the whinging Scousers.’

  ‘Brookside, Dad. And the body under the patio stuff was classic. Even you were into that.’

  ‘You are still friends with Catherine, aren’t you?’ I nod, staring out of the window. ‘Good. I mean, Nicola and them are nice, but don’t forget who your real friends are.’

  According to Dear Anita’s page in Chic, ten per cent of people are gay. I need that statistic on the days when Catherine doesn’t return my calls and Sadie Thornton won’t look my way. I sit in class wondering who else is in that ten per cent, scared they’re all in Manchester or New York or San Francisco, that the party’s already swept on, leaving me here. The last lame kid in Hamelin, a forgotten Lost Boy in a short skirt.

  Mum has a thing about Peter Pan. That’s why I’ve got this ridiculous blonde name to go with my hair. There’s a couple of Peter Pans in her china cabinet, pointy-chinned, twinkly and outnumbered by females in crinolines and tutus. No Amazons. No soldiers. No Lost Girls in this house but me.

  The new poster on Catherine’s wall – Amanda Kay, lead singer of Trash, in a scarlet boob-tube and mini-skirt, lips wet, cayenne-red hair striping her face – is a bit sexual for a straight girl, surely.

  From my sleeping bag on the floor, I’ve been looking up at Amanda Kay and telling Catherine about Duncan Perry, the boy who asked me to be in this Blind Date fiasco. He’s small and neat, with the kind of lashes they say are ‘wasted on a boy,’ and if you ask me, his dark flop of hair and fine-grained, feverish complexion are wasted too. I’d take them off his hands any day, but like Sadie, his skin and bones are too aristocratic for me. If I’m pretty, it’s in the same way as the bus-stop girls with their buggies are, smoking their cheap, perfumey fags, ponytail fountains pulling their spines straight. The girls who don’t look at me any more and mutter furiously when I walk past in my new uniform, like a swarm of pissed-off bees.

  ‘I think he might be a bit of a bender,’ I admit reluctantly. ‘He’s got me debating with him about this thing, Section 28. You heard of it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, but something tells me not to push her on it. She’s a bit prudish when it comes to sex, still sneaks her bra off under her shirt before bed. ‘So this Duncan, do you fancy him?’

  I’m not sure. I think he must be gay, to suggest that subject for this week’s debate and to work so hard on it. As we sit in the library of Westfield Grammar, the school across the street, the boys work themselves into a libidinal frenzy at my presence and paper-planed equations are launched at our heads. I want to squeeze Duncan’s smooth hand when he looks up and shakes his head at them. My partner in crime. I don’t fancy him of course, but it would be nice to be liked, especially by such a pretty boy. I like the way he nods slowly when I throw him a useful statistic, how he pinches the bridge of his nose when he’s tired. On the way home, I imagine myself as a lawyer in a sharp suit, making impassioned speeches, clattering anonymously through airports in stilettos. Still passing, but because I choose to this time. A luxury, a burden, a betrayal – the ability to pass can mean so many different things. I’m starting to see that.

  ‘How come you don’t fancy any boys at the moment?’ I blurt out. ‘It’s not like there aren’t any at St Jude’s. And what’s with the poster, anyway?’

  The two of us stare at Amanda Kay like she’s going to tell us.

  ‘I just like her,’ she says. ‘You know I do.’

  ‘Yeah. She’s gorgeous, yeah. Do you…you know. Like girls?’ I feel invulnerable somehow in the dark. The silence is thick as incense.

  ‘Just one,’ she says. For a weird minute, I wonder if it’s me. ‘Amanda, that is. I know it’s just a phase. I’
m not worrying about it.’

  It’s OK to have a crush on a poster-girl. Even Judy Blume says so. It is not OK to sit in class imagining what you’d do to Sadie Thornton if the Bomb was about to drop. When she gives me chewing gum on the bus it is not normal to take it out of my mouth later, mould it into a tiny jade heart and keep it in a box under my bed with cut-out letters from magazines beginning, ‘Dear Anita, I like boys but I think I am…’

  ‘Wendy? I used to wonder if you were gay. But you’re not, are you? If you like this Duncan?’

  ‘He’s all right.’ I know she wants to hear more. ‘But I…if I tell you something, do you promise never to tell anybody? Even if we had a massive fight?’

  The room’s soft darkness seeps into my blood. I’m safe here, in a way I’m not at school under the carved roll-calls, or at home with the china ballerinas and Dad booming from room to room, or in the streets with snowballs flying at my skull.

  I don’t know why I’m telling her. Perhaps I feel I owe her something for leaving her behind. I don’t go into details about the Switchboard, my end-of-the-world sexual fantasies starring Sadie or the times I sneak into the bargain bookstore and dare myself to shoplift The Art of Lesbian Love because I’m not exactly sure how to do it. But I tell her enough.

  ‘Did you know?’ I finish.

  I know she’ll say yes. She does.

  ‘You don’t think we’ve fucked up our friendship forever, do you?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Course not. No. Did you see Brookside?’

  ‘Say hello to Number Three!’ bellows our MC, a cocky little sod called Edward Reece who looks like the Artful Dodger, rattles with Ritalin and was presumably chosen because he’s one of the three Westfield boys who can talk to girls without being sick – Duncan Perry and Steve Larson-Smythe, the Staff-Room Window Smoker, being the other two.

  Steve is our suitor today, the one I have the honour of a pizza with if I win. Duncan is at the front, staring up at me while I try to brace my thighs against the seat of my stool so they simultaneously look narrow, keep me upright and conceal my gusset. I may have to forget one of these options but I can’t decide which.

  Half the crowd have been chanting, ‘Three! Three! Three!’ since I tottered onto the stage. The others are shouting for Number One – Nicola, my sort-of-friend. Brunette, horsey teeth, handy with a tennis racket.

  No one is shouting for Lizzie King, who has her skirt rolled and folded in half at her waist, clinching her wishbone thighs, and is chewing gum like a serial killer.

  I can’t concentrate. It’s too much. It’s too much because when I arrived, Duncan came up and told me he was sorry, the Section 28 debate was cancelled.

  ‘Just too controversial,’ he said in that light, posh voice. ‘Besides, one of our teachers is totally bent and he wasn’t keen on it at all. Thought it would bring him attention, so I had to…anyway, sorry, Wendy. They’ll get rid of it anyway, you know that. It’s all over bar the shouting.’

  It’s too much because yesterday, on the way home, two St. Jude’s kids started yelling at me again. With a practised posh-girl flip of my hair, hoisting my book-bag higher, I strode on, but then I heard that word again and again, that nasal insect buzz. Lezzer.

  Catherine had told them. No snowballs this time, just insults. I tried to hold my face together, not to break into a run. In the kitchen, I dialled the Switchboard’s number. I knew Catherine’s number by heart too, but I didn’t call it.

  In the still kitchen with the dial tone humming, I heard myself speak. ‘This house believes that Section 28 should be abolished.’ By the time Mum and Dad got home, my tears had dried and I was word-perfect, but I’d barely had time to think about Blind Date-which, of course, had not been cancelled. No one gets offended by girls being auctioned off. Harmless fun.

  ‘Number One,’ says Steve, clearly itching for a fag. ‘My favourite subject is Maths because I like putting two and two together. If you gave me extra tuition…’ groans from the crowd, ‘…what subject would you choose, and why?’

  ‘Well,’ chirps Nicola wholesomely, ‘everyone knows I love Games!’

  Roars from the crowd. She makes a little moue at them. ‘So why don’t you put away those books and work up a sweat with me on the field?’ Unbridled baying from the Westfield boys. You wouldn’t think she had it in her. Maybe we’ll be proper friends some day.

  ‘Number Two?’

  ‘French,’ growls Lizzie. ‘My grammar’s not great, but I know about kissing, and I like getting my tongue round unfamiliar things.’

  The roar becomes an avalanche. The teacher at the back looks like he’s about to intervene, but then thinks better of it. I bet he’s the gay one.

  ‘Number Three?’

  ‘Well,’ I burble, ‘Lady Barbara’s girls are all domestic goddesses, so I’d give you a crash course in cookery and a little light housekeeping. I’ll heat up your crumpets, you can chintz up my bedroom – and you know how housework is, just a couple of months later we’ll have to do it again.’

  The crowd cracks up. I plant myself more securely on the stool, look down into the audience, and see two things that shake me-one, that Sadie is looking fixedly at me. The kind of look I got from the old ladies of my childhood who’d Expected Better. And two, that little Duncan, perfectly groomed in his rich spotted silk tie, is not looking at me. I can’t see Steve Larson-Smythe, but Duncan can, and he’s making the most of it. Interesting.

  We keep on batting away pointless questions with cheery innuendo like blazered Club 18–30 reps. What objects do we always carry? How do we relax? If we were a film, what would we be? (Nicola’s Four Weddings, I’m True Romance. Lizzie is Basic Instinct).

  Final question. ‘As you may know,’ Steve says portentously, ‘I’m a bit of a freedom fighter.’

  ‘You’re a wanker,’ says a boy whose recently broken voice makes him sound like a stoned opera singer.

  ‘Give us a fag, Steve,’ another one yells. Clearly they take his debates as seriously as I do.

  ‘What cause would you fight for, and why? That’s to Number Two.’

  ‘Binge drinking,’ says Lizzie. ‘I think it should be mandatory.’

  ‘Number One?’

  ‘The RSPCA. I love animals. And if you choose me as your Blind Date, you’ll find that I’m a bit of an animal too.’ Cheers and whoops.

  My heart pounds. What do I believe in? ‘Well, Steve,’ I hear myself say, ‘I reckon I’d abolish Section 28. I mean, as long as it’s around, we’re going to have politicians talking about how upstanding young men like you are going to be ‘sucked into a gay lifestyle,’ with no hint of irony. Also, why would we want to imitate our teachers-like, are you wearing tweed and leather patches? You know what else I’d fight for? Gays in the military. Your school would be a lot less crowded.’

  Silence, then a rustle of scared laughter. I swing down, probably flashing the front row.

  ‘We’re not finished yet,’ Edward Kay stage-whispers.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Just…oh bugger it…right, Ladies and Gentlemen!’ Edward brings the lucky bachelor forward. Duncan shouts, ‘Three!’ The girls join in, even Sadie Thornton. They won’t agree with me, but they acknowledge I’m good enough to date. It’s something. It may be all I’m getting.

  Unsurprisingly, Steve chooses Nicola. Lizzie sashays past Steve and gooses him. When it’s my turn, I put my arms round him gracefully, smiling like it’s Oscar night.

  I don’t think any gay teacher cancelled the debate. Seeing Duncan’s face as he looked up at Steve, enjoying a moment’s anonymity, the excuse to look and love without accusations-it reminded me of me. He bottled out. Poor little git. It’s written through him like a stick of rock.

  As my higher-than-regulation heels carry me back into the crowd, I know Duncan Perry is going to ask me out. And I know I’m going to say no, but perhaps he’d like to come over and watch old movies some time.

  ‘Wendy!…Catherine’s on the phone.’ I just sta
nd there, all my bravado gone in the time it took to open the door. ‘Go on, girl,’ he says impatiently. I shake my head. ‘What? You two had a row or…she’ll call you back, Cath.’ He puts the phone down. ‘What is it, sweetpea? Those little scrotes from your old school upset you again? Go on, you tell me.’

  Here he is, the man who washed my back in the bath, taught me to drive on North London’s industrial estates, and held me in the pool while I wriggled and clung. He holds me like that now, but I feel like a mannequin, painted and steely, so heavy I might knock him over.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks again. ‘Spit it out. It can’t be that bad. Not compared to what I got up to at your age.’ He pauses. ‘You’re not…you’re not in trouble, are you?’

  ‘No. God, no. Um, do you reckon…do you think we could go and sit down? Could you get Mum?’

  I can’t quite believe I’m doing this. But still, it’ll be all over soon. Bar the shouting.

  Dad calls up the stairs and I fill the kettle, marvelling at the steadiness of my hands. I have five minutes of my old life left. I clear my throat, prepare myself, breathe. This House Believes.

  It’s five in the morning, the light thick and backlit blue. Never-Never Land.

  It’s not my frilly girl’s name that made me hate Peter Pan. Not even my mother’s tacky ornaments. It’s the end of the story. Peter, ageless, heartless ready to party, comes to Wendy’s daughter’s window-and, of course, she goes with him.

  I’m going too, one of these days. I’m going to find the other lost ones. I’m going to be in a bar one day and look over at a soft-mouthed boy, glitter on his cheekbones like an angel’s finger traced them, and say, Aidan? Aidan Meeks? Is that you?

  Dad looked ten years older and kept saying it didn’t matter. Mum shook her head. ‘It’s so hard,’ she said. ‘These people, they’re messed-up, mental. I don’t want you with one of them.’

  I sat watching my tea grow cold, wondering when I’d last cried in front of them, and why I couldn’t stop.