7

Boys Are Not Virgins

‘You think you’re sensitive, but you’re not: your sensitivity only works for things that people do to you. Touchy and vain, yes, but not sensitive.’

Dixon to Bertrand in Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

I have a baby sister.

Derek pops his head around my bedroom door while I’m energetically dancing to ‘Smooth Criminal’. I turn it down, annoyed. His fag smoke is drifting into my room.

‘Well, Robbie, y’know y’mum said y’might be getting a little brother or sister? Well, you are!’

I try to make my face look pleased. ‘Oh, good,’ I say, followed clumsily by ‘well done’.

Derek nods, smiling, and disappears. I open a window and look at myself in the mirror to find out what I think. My face doesn’t offer much encouragement.

So – not the youngest any more. Not the youngest. Mum will have a new priority. That’s fine, I’m a teenager. I shouldn’t mind. Why do I mind?

I do slightly mind. But Mum seems chuffed, especially when she finds out it’s a girl. I spend her pregnancy trying to be nice. When she has to swap stretchy jogging bottoms for a full-blown maternity dress, she registers my ill-concealed alarm. ‘Mum’s going to look a bit of a funny bugger for a while,’ she says to me. I try to wave it off with an awkward series of nods, grins and actual waves. She looks at me and I get that she gets it. Things are changing. She’s out to reassure me and I’m out to reassure her. It gets done, more or less – we just can’t quite do it with words.

It all happened when they got back home after her fortieth birthday party, she says.

Blimey. Show me a teenage boy who can contemplate such an event with equanimity and let’s make him Prime Minister. I’m partly amazed because Mum and Derek spend so much time arguing. Mainly about the central heating. Warm as I think of her, she’s always cold. Derek’s big and doesn’t feel it. And there’s never enough money. So the arguments often centre on the boiler – they have done for years.

We knew people who were worse off and I never dreamt of questioning anything as normal as ice on the inside of windows. Where else was I going to practise my autograph? But Mum also had friends who were better off. And she did question it. She questioned it for England, especially on Sunday afternoons.

Sunday afternoons. Just . . . bloody hell.

I know I’m not the only one. In fact, saying that I dreaded Sunday afternoons as if this is interesting puts me in the same company as people who say ‘I just don’t like hospitals’.

Still, they sucked. When I was little, I spent every weekend at the Golf Club with all the plastic swords, Lego, Tiswas and sandwiches with the crusts cut off as I could handle. And Sunday teatime signalled the re-entry into the normal world: the smell of congealing gravy from a roast that Derek had complained about, and Mum in the middle of another outpouring of disappointment and gin. Derek would take his weekly ear-bashing like a man – in near total silence, occasionally mumbling passive-aggressive retorts over his shoulder as her voice pursued him from room to room. And there weren’t many rooms.

‘I don’t know anyone else who has to put up with a twenty-year-old cooker,’ she would say. ‘I don’t know anyone else who sits on a three-piece suite that’s a thirty-year-old hand-me-down from her mum and dad. Other people have husbands who go out to work every day instead of sitting on their arse doing the bloody racing. Other people have husbands who don’t mind turning on the bloody heating in the middle of bloody February, and who don’t moan about my gravy every bloody day . . .’ She could keep this up for a good hour. Everything she said was fair enough, but obviously I kept the hell out of the way.

Almost worse was the calm after the storm. He would retire to the living room to watch a Grand Prix; she would stay at the kitchen table, a hand nonchalantly supporting one side of her face, watching her cigarette smoke rise towards the yellowing ceiling and listening to Elkie Brooks singing songs about thwarted women. Jesus.

The stereotype of the Nagging Wife has proved very useful to those of us who are often the primary cause of all the nagging: the Useless Husband. Because these days, women who find their domestic situation deeply unsatisfactory won’t just need to complain, they’ll need to apologise for the complaining. Times change: the gin has given way to Pinot Grigio and nagging has gone post-modern.

When I was behaving like a useless arsehole of a husband and father, circa 2009–13, I would experience a temporary wave of guilt as, once again, I heard Abbie say something like, ‘I don’t want to be some whining bitch but . . .’ or ‘I don’t want to go on like some fucking harpy but . . .’ and I’d think to myself, ‘That’s unlucky, that. It’s really unfair that she has to negotiate the cliché as well as put up with me being next-to-shitfaced by 3 p.m. most weekdays.’¹

Mum didn’t complain every day, just every Sunday. I had a dim sense that the bungalow really did contain some kind of . . . injustice. I didn’t try to help exactly because helping definitely wasn’t my area. Should I ask how to use the washing machine? Fine for my own clothes, but then what? Should I go into Mark and Andrew’s bedroom and pick up their underwear? Or Derek’s? Or my mother’s? Where would it end? I think not.

I wasn’t asked to help and I didn’t. But I made token gestures like always thanking her for tea, not dissing her controversial gravy and at least carrying my plate to the sink even if I had no intention of washing it up. For these minuscule concessions, Derek would tease me for being a ‘goody two-shoes’. These days the term would be ‘virtue-signaller’.

But someone did help the situation and that was Anna-Beth Limb.

Suddenly there’s a purpose and cheerfulness about Mum and Derek that’s long been missing. My baby sister is gorgeous – I love her instantly and for all time. I’ve never been a big brother before but I hope to grow into it. Mark and Andrew finished school at sixteen and both have jobs – Mark left home a while ago and Andrew now follows. So now we are four, Me, Mum, Derek and little A-B. The pack has been shuffled. We are, for the time being, a happy little unit.

*

My penis, on the other hand, is a less-than-happy little unit. I distract myself from mooning over Will and Daisy by developing the world’s most urgent obsession with one Tessa Rampling. I’ve given up fancying her younger sister, Tiffany. It’s obvious that Tiffany will never go out with me. So, naturally, the thing to do is to Fall In Love with her older sister in the Upper Sixth Form because, as we know, if there’s one thing more likely to happen to a teenage boy than a beautiful girl his own age wanting to get off with him, it’s a beautiful girl two years his senior wanting to get off with him. A better-conceived plan is hard to imagine.

Maybe the best way to get to Tess is through Tiffany. Since Tiffany made her lack of sexual regard for me abundantly clear about a hundred years ago, the tension has eased and we’ve somehow become quite good friends. How to describe Tiffany? She’s a sort of adolescent Louise Mensch, but then so is Louise Mensch so that doesn’t get us very far. Tiffany is like Mensch but with a good excuse. Tiffany is sixteen.

I find her capricious and difficult and massive fun. Her rebel alliance with Zelda Linseed is still intact and she’s a middle-class girl on the war path. She’s beginning to despise her hippy, liberal parents and soon she and I will have huge rows about politics: ‘Socialism!? Ugh, let me tell you, Rob, on my French exchange they were all socialists and they were eating their dessert on the same plate as their main course. It was disgusting.’ For now, Tiffany seems to have identified me as interesting. It will have to do.

There’s no point fancying her anyway because she’s going out with an older guy called Gary who she met in a pub. She loves his earthiness, his authenticity and that he has a car. I’ve seen Gary around at parties. Gary is, in my view, a thug and a moron. On a good night, Gary’s brain can just about coordinate a blink. Mainly, he just stares. But Gary is eighteen and treats girls appallingly and is obviously therefore something of a catch.

One lunchtime, at the end of our fifth year, Tiffany confides that she recently had dreadful sex with Gary. She also shares the information that Gary didn’t like it when Tiffany put on ‘When 2 R in Love’ for the occasion, didn’t appreciate her joss sticks and didn’t remove his socks, trainers or jeans. In fact, the only thing that Gary wasn’t wearing which he should have been wearing was a condom.

I nod through this, thinking about what a spectacular lay I would probably be compared to Gary. It’s always possible that this would be a good time to say some nice things to Tiffany, who is relating the kind of encounter a jury would have to call ‘consensual’ but which was in every other way an obviously horrible experience. But mainly, hero that I am, I’m thinking about how I could have both warned her and saved her. All she had to do was put her hand down the front of my pants at some point over the last two years and all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided.

Now Tiffany’s telling me she’s worried she might be pregnant. You can tell how shit Gary is in bed by watching him dance, I think to myself, as Tiffany dries her eyes with a hanky she’s found. Yes, the bloke is just fundamentally ungenerous.

Tiffany’s just saying how she daren’t confide in her mum.

I mean, ‘When 2 R in Love’ isn’t my favourite track on that album, but if a girl wanted me to have sex with her and that song was playing in the background, I would actually keep the beat. I’d probably ejaculate ‘on the two’. What is it with these Garys and Deans and Jasons, with their socks and monkey eyebrows and no johnnies? They’re all wankers! What’s wrong with ME?! WHAT IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM HERE? My red and grey ski jacket is as good as anyone else’s ski jacket! My jeans with pleats in are short enough to show my white socks! My white leather tie works with my lemon V-necked jumper obviously! For fuck’s sake!

‘So, what do you think I should do, Rob?’ Tiffany is suddenly asking.

‘Er. Dump him.’

Tiffany puts her hanky away and blinks at me. ‘I’ve just told you I’ve dumped him already.’

‘Yes,’ I say, recovering, ‘but does he know he’s dumped? You should make it clear. Probably write him a letter or something.’

She sighs and looks away. I try again. ‘I see the problem, though. He can’t actually read, can he?’

Tiffany stares back at me. She’s either going to laugh, slap me or just walk off. It seems for a second like she might do all three. It’s very much up to her and I feel what is now the usual rush of adrenaline. Never a dull moment with our Tiffany. She covers her face with her hands and her shoulders start to vibrate. Then she pulls her hands away and the silent laugh turns into a full-throated howl. Christ, it wasn’t that funny. Maybe she’s got her period. Oh no, she’s anxiously waiting for her period, that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Crikey. Girls.

‘You make a bloody fair point, Rob. Bloody fair. He’s a fucking Orc, isn’t he?’

‘He really might be, as you say, a fucking Orc.’

She laughs and the emotion almost visibly disappears as she blows her nose again. I remain on high alert. This could still go anywhere.

She contemplates her snotty handkerchief and seems to come to a decision. She’s going to do one of her turns on a sixpence. She quickly mutters, ‘Probably not preggers anyway and Mum can fuck off,’ and then suddenly, ‘NOW THEN! What about you, young Mr Bobs, how’s your love life? I hear you’re on the shark for my sister, n’est-ce pas?’

I shrug. God, this is exciting.

‘You know she’s going out with Eric?’

Eric? Who the fuck is Eric? ‘Yeah, I know,’ I say.

‘And she goes round to his flat and bonks him senseless whenever she feels like it, the old slag.’

I nod a ‘yeah’ quietly. He’s got a flat? Oh, terrific. Game over.

‘But she does like you, young Webbington – she likes the revues and assemblies and all your other artistic conundrums.’

I don’t mind being called ‘young’ by someone six months my junior and I certainly don’t care what the hell she means by conundrums. The news is: Tess has seen the revues and she likes them! Even my savage take-down of Rick Astley, probably! This is massive.

‘Well, never mind all that,’ I say, giving Tiffany an awkward rub on the shoulder, ‘as long as you’re all right.’

She looks at the hand on her arm and then to my face and starts laughing again. ‘God, Rob, you’re such a stupid bastard!’

Eric. There he is in the Angel. Pete Garvey and I are by the jukebox and I get a good look at Eric across the room. In fact, I’ve seen him in here quite a few times – I just didn’t realise he was called Eric or that such a person could get within ten square miles of Tess Rampling. What’s he doing in here, anyway? This pub is for hard-drinking children – that’s been the rule for generations. He should be in Old Nick’s Tavern with all the other geriatrics.

I’m sixteen and I have a name for my pain: Eric. This is no time to be reasonable.

He’s about twenty-three, tall and scrawny. He doesn’t drink snakebite and black, obviously – why would he? – he’s got his own flat. Guinness. He sips Guinness and gets the foam on his ferrety little beard. He has a personal style that we might call proto-grunge, which is to say that he’s ahead of his time in looking like he doesn’t wash. He plays pool like it’s snooker, plodding around the table, lining up safety shots and chalking his cue interminably. I listen to him. He thinks Neil Kinnock has betrayed the Labour movement. He gets into arguments and says ‘infer’ like it’s a posh word for ‘imply’. He points his pool cue at people who disagree with him and says in his reedy voice things like ‘Walk a mile in my shoes, friend. Walk a mile in my shoes.’ He wears tiny little Trotsky glasses. He sucks up to the landlord at closing time, having made sexist wisecracks to the female bar staff all night. He’s taken the fall of the Berlin Wall personally. He’s always in shorts and sandals. His fingernails are such a disgrace I daren’t look at his toes. His whole personality seems to comprise an uninterrupted series of failed gestures and stupid remarks.

He’s a cunt. A more open-and-shut case of a cunt I could barely imagine.

‘All right, Eric?’ says Will, returning from the bar with a glass of brandy.

Of course.

Eric is pondering an especially difficult choice of pool shot, one quite distinct from the traditional getting the balls in the fucking holes approach. ‘All right, Will,’ he says distractedly.

Of course Will knows him and is friendly with him. Perfect. Will joins us at the jukebox to inspect what we’ve chosen. ‘Michael Jackson?! Whose idea was that?’

‘It’s fine, it’s from Off the Wall,’ I say quickly. ‘So you know him, do you?’

‘It is not fine! The minute bloody “Rock With You” comes on, I’m disowning you both and going to Old Nick’s.’

‘You won’t get served. You know him, then.’

‘Know who?’

‘Fucking . . . Eric.’

Will glances at the pool table. ‘Course I know him, he’s a good chap. What’s the matter?’

Pete Garvey is grinning to himself. ‘I think p’haps our Bobby’s a bit perturbed that Eric’s going out with his darling Tess.’

‘Pete, shut up and eat your crisps,’ I say. Pete crams a large handful of Walkers Cheese and Onion in his mouth and eyeballs me with amusement.

Will puts 50p in the jukebox. ‘Bobs, at some point you’re going to have to face the fact that you’re about as likely to have sex with Tess Rampling as I am with bloody . . . Trevor McDonald.’

‘I didn’t realise you fancied Trevor McDonald.’

‘I’m saying it’s unlikely.’

I turn to Pete. ‘Did you know he fancied Trevor McDonald?’ Pete nods.

‘I’m saying it’s unlikely,’ Will repeats, sipping his brandy and keeping his eyes on the jukebox. He runs a careless hand through his hair in a way that makes me want to jump him right here and right now and says, ‘Although, it’ll probably be Daisy first.’

‘Have you fingered her yet, then?’ enquires Pete through another gobful of crisps.

‘Honestly, Peter, don’t be so crude,’ Will replies, putting his brandy down and producing a soft-pack of Lucky Strike out of his black 501s. ‘Of course I’ve fingered her. She’s lovely.’

I’m trying to level myself with this news when Tess Rampling walks in.

She’s with her friend Susan, who goes to the bar. Tess moves slowly through the room in a khaki-green poncho with oversize jeans and heavy boots. It’s August. She ought to look ridiculous. She does not. Anyway, you don’t look at her clothes, you look at her face.

Somehow she doesn’t need to change expression all that often because literally nothing could surprise her. Her default attitude is faintly amused and ironic. You get the feeling that she can’t take anything seriously because she alone understands how sad the world really is. Tiffany says the Tiananmen Square massacre made her cry – I marvel at the way she genuinely gives a shit about things on the news. She has fierce brown eyes and clean, scruffy brown hair that just about covers her ears. She is, to me, easily the most beautiful woman the universe will ever dare to create.

She reaches Eric and kisses the pubic hairs growing out of his chin. I hear her cut-glass contralto say, ‘I’m going to help Suze with the drinks. D’you want another Guinness?’ Eric is just contemplating a safety shot on a ball I could pot with one arm. ‘Yeah, all right, doll,’ he says.

I mean, for fuck’s sake. All right what? I wait for him to put his hand in his pocket and offer some money. He does not. He’s got a flat and a full-time job involving some kind of van but he’s going to let his girlfriend get the drinks in.

I struggle with this for about eight seconds. My brain is hosting one of the first contests in what will become a regular fixture – Feminism versus the Patriarchy Where Feminism is at a Disadvantage Because the Referee is My Erection.

It goes like this. Obviously, Tess has every right to buy him a drink. Girls (correction, young women) are allowed to buy drinks and it would be wrong to criticise Eric out of some ancient and reactionary sense of gallantry. Tess has a summer job and her own money. Of course she should do what she likes with it and of course she should go out with whomever she chooses. It’s charming that she wants to buy her boyfriend a Guinness. No, not charming, natural. Completely normal. Of course it is.

On the other hand, Eric is a shit and I hate him. Eric gets to sleep with Tess and should therefore be lashed to a cruise missile and fired into the sun. End of argument.

At home I listen to ‘Slow Love’ by Prince and think of Tess. I listen to ‘I’m Not in Love’ by 10cc and think of Will. It’s difficult to know which one to have a hopeless wank about first. I try to look on the bright side – at least the way I feel about Tess proves that I’m not gay. Rationally, I can see that being gay is fine, but it looks like gay men have to put up with a whole world of stupid nonsense that straighties with a one-off fixation get to ignore. And, if I’m honest, the way I lust after Will feels not only dangerous and exciting but also shameful and wrong. The Sovereign Importance of Early Homophobia has done its work. It’s like I’m left with a closet homophobia – a Farage in the garage. Or, as I would have pronounced it at the time, a Farridge in the garridge.

It could be worse. At least Will and Tess are not going out with each other.

*

‘Is there any romance greater than the one a teenage boy has with his own loneliness?’

That, I’m afraid, is the kind of thing that starts cropping up in the diary I begin to keep after my seventeenth birthday. The author is clearly quite pleased with the question and decides not to spoil it by offering an answer. He also doesn’t seem to notice that ‘loneliness’ is itself quite a romantic way to describe what is really just a combination of jealousy, insecurity and, above all (or rather, beneath all), massive, head-swivelling, ball-bulging sexual frustration.

By the beginning of the sixth form, my virginity weighs me down as if I’m walking around in a pair of lead knickers with matching iron stilettos and a concrete tiara. It’s emasculating. Teenage boys are supposed to be at it. If you’re not at it, then you’re not really a boy, never mind a man. ‘Men think about sex every seven seconds’ is a meme knocking around at the time. We didn’t call them ‘memes’ obviously; we called them ‘old wives’ tales’. This, I suppose, is progress of a sort.

I think – really? Every seven seconds? But then, what do I know? Maybe other blokes really do think about it every seven seconds . . . maybe I’m still a virgin because I just don’t think about sex often enough! I mean, Jesus, it feels like I think about it QUITE A LOT but . . . seriously? It takes me seven seconds to tie my shoelaces. Did I think about sex while I was tying my shoelaces? I doubt it. But maybe I should have.²

I was certainly thinking about sex quite a lot while writing in the diary. Reader, I spared you the poetry because it was bad without being entertainingly bad. A bit like when someone retweets something by Piers Morgan and I think, ‘Oh great, he’s going to say something enjoyably shit.’ And then he says the shit thing but it turns out to be shit in a way that’s not fun at all and just shit. And everything’s the same except now you’ve got this bit of shit in your head. It’s disappointing.

But the diary, I hope you’ll agree, is badly done in a way that’s informatively, if not amusingly, bad. So in October 1989 (I’ve just started the sixth form), I have this to say. Apart from [square brackets for clarity], I promise I haven’t edited to make this any better or worse. Here we go then.

I rang Will and we decided to go to the flicks. It was Young Einstein which was FUCKING CRAP. Yahoo who calls himself Serious. The lady doth protest too much methinks. I [am] definitely becoming more critical of comedy, although maybe it was just objectively bad, n’est-ce pas? Anyway, him, me and Clive walked out halfway through and then he [Will] hit me with it. He started talking about how he’s shagged Daisy on Friday night while watching a video of Krull. Of course it was a deliberate wind-up but of course it hurt me very badly. Surely he knows that repeatedly underlining his success and my failure is an act of breathtaking insensitivity surely.

Yes, surely. The next five closely written foolscap pages are about fancying a girl at Gateway called Jill – then finding out she has a boyfriend, asking her out to a party, getting very excited that she said yes, not getting off with her at the party and getting told that she ‘just wants to be friends’.

I walked her back to Craig’s house and waited for her mum to collect her. There was no question of a goodnight kiss. That was so clear from the start. As for the future, I don’t know. Jill might fancy me a bit: it’s so hard to say. The next step will be the Gateway staff party on Jan 6th.

While I’m waiting for the Gateway staff party and its next step, there’s a Christmas concert featuring local school bands Communion (lead singer, Daisy) and Underpants (bass guitar, Paddy, Tiffany’s new boyfriend who plays the bass line to ‘A Forest’ by The Cure). Isabel is a lovely girl, also in the Lower Sixth. Marina is another lovely girl, but in the fifth year. I fancy Marina more than Isabel but not as much as Jill. Jill isn’t there.

Isabel said hello and we started getting on really well, e.g. I made her laugh like a spaz. And then after a Bacardi or two, we sort of started getting off with each other. After that, we were sort of ‘together’ all evening, you know, holding hands and stuff. It was all a bit mushy for my liking especially since I hardly fancy her. Well, later in the evening I nearly fell over when I saw Marina getting off with RUSSELL MACALLEN! CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE IT? I was so fucked off. How can a nice girl like her get off with a social incompetent like him? Plus, he was totally fucking sloshed after about 2 vodkas. UNBE – fucking –LIEVABLE. Obviously I was manically depressed and so totally ignored Isabel for the rest of the evening.

The sensitive young man finds time to make a macho comment about Russell’s alcohol tolerance (just as I despised Eric’s caution at the pool table) and takes it out on Isabel. Which is nothing compared to how he will take it out on Marina. This is where it gets a bit dark. There follows a ten-page narrative in which it turns out that Marina – who recently turned fifteen – does fancy me after all (I have it directly from her older sister! ‘Chloe said Marina was crying afterwards because she thought she’d upset me. She didn’t want to snog Russell but was too polite to say no.’), but her mother has reasonable concerns. On 19 February 1990, Little Lord Hard-On is highly vexed.

I always suspected her mum would be a problem but didn’t imagine she’d be such a stupid bitch. Every weekend since 7-1-90 I’ve asked Marina round and she’s said, ‘I’ll see what my mum says’ and mummy dear invariably says FUCK RIGHT OFF DEAR. Everyone knows how Chloe has turned out, right? You’d think that Mrs Kay had got the message about telling her daughters ‘no you can’t’. But apparently not. What a fuckhead. Now it turns out she’s telling her ‘he’s too old for you’ and ‘you’re not to have a serious relationship till you’re 16’. We all know what she means by ‘serious’, right? If Marina actually liked me enough, you’d think she’d put up more of a fight but apparently not. So that’s it. It fucks up again. It always fucks up. It always will fuck up.

Aside from Mrs Kay’s outrageous desire for her child not to break the law, I love that brief lecture about Chloe’s promiscuity. The big sister is damned for having sex, the younger one damned for not having sex, the mother damned for exercising a fairly run-of-the-mill duty of care. But despite the three-sentence burial hymn at the end, our hero won’t take no for an answer until he hears the magic words.

If I thought I was depressed on Thursday, that’s nothing compared to when the events of last night sink in. After an hour in the Angel, we went to the Town Hall. I knew Marina would be there and Russell was on the shark for Nancy Tanner although God knows why. Well, Marina was there, obviously drunk, obviously having a good time with her friends and obviously ignoring me. And then she pulled her master card. [I think this is either meant to be ‘ace card’ or ‘master stroke’ – at no point did Marina try to get rid of me by waving a Mastercard.] I mean what’s the worst and I mean the WORST thing she could possibly have said? That’s right. After about ten minutes, short Sally, her friend who’s always fucking around with her hair, came up and said ‘Marina says she just wants to be friends’. The words pierced me like a javelin. Anything, anything would have been better than ‘let’s be friends’. It stinks of patronising indifference which, let’s face it, is how she has always regarded me. Obviously I just walked out.

Obviously. And somehow negotiating the doorway despite being pierced by a javelin. The author then hits on a particularly terrible idea.

My natural reaction is to write her a fucking acidic letter. She’s hurt me and she ought to bloody well know about it. But I remember how much I regretted doing that with Louise. Generally it’s just a rather spiteful and childish thing to do.

Phew! Yes, let’s not write the letter. Louise had been a girl in the year above who actually let me feel her breasts before suggesting that we might be ‘just friends’. I wrote her a letter detailing how offensive this was of her. She never spoke to me again. So, good thing we won’t write the letter. But not so fast because –

I’d love to. I still might.

Nooooooo! Sweet Mother of Jesus, let’s see if I can even type this.

Of course it would put any chance of us getting together next year beyond question and I have enough doors slammed in my face without closing them myself. But the time I wasted on her; her total absence of contribution; her arrogance in the way she finished it; her lack of vision, and her obvious and total incomprehension of any of my feelings make me simmer with something close to hatred.

DUDE, WE HAVE A SAYING IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY – ‘SHE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU’. YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR MIND AND YOU MUST NOT WRITE THAT LETTER!

3-4-90. Well, I sent the letter. It wasn’t half as bad as it could have been. She belatedly sent it back with a reply. I spoke to her sister and she said Marina read the letter on Saturday and spent all morning crying. This was quite a shock – I certainly didn’t mean to upset her.

You idiot.

There was a quiet dignity in her reply which I found rather impressive.

You patronising idiot.

I wonder if I really am guilty of the charge of ‘selfishness?’

Hmm, good one. Let’s think.

I really can’t bring myself to admit that. I know the letter was vindictive but I was hurt and I had to hit out at someone.

I give up on this dick. Or rather, I would if I didn’t know that something else was going on.

Early in March, a couple of weeks before the blameless Marina said ‘let’s be friends’, I’d written this:

My concern for Mum deepens. I’m quite ashamed to realise that this is the first reference in this diary to worrying about anyone but myself. Mum has been in hospital since last Friday with what was supposed to be a chest infection. In fact she has a few cancerous cells on her lung. She might have to have chemotherapy. Jesus Christ I’m so worried – I love her so much. I must resolve to be less selfish, to talk to her about things more often. Life without her is unthinkable. Literally unthinkable.

And then, at the end of the same entry where I talk about Marina’s reply to the spiteful letter –

Found out for sure, the week before last, on Wednesday March 21st, that Mum definitely isn’t going to recover. She has about four months. I don’t want to talk about it. Even to you.

I found out that Mum had cancer in early March, and three weeks later, I found out that she wasn’t going to survive it. And it was after that I sent Marina the letter because, ‘I was hurt and I had to hit out at someone’.

In other words, the girl picked up the bill when the boy turned fear and grief into anger.

And that Wednesday teatime conversation – the one where I found out that the best person in my life was about to vanish – all the seventeen-year-old can find to describe it is those four words: ‘found out for sure’. For once, I don’t blame him. It is not a boy’s job to write about such things.

That day, I arrived home from school and felt a sudden tightness in my chest. Dad’s van was parked neatly outside the bungalow.

________________

¹ You can safely assume we’ll return to me as a domestic screw-up later.

² The seven-second myth is, of course, mythical. Nobody knows where it came from, but it’s often attributed to the 1948 Kinsey Report: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Alfred C. Kinsey and his co-authors make no such claim.