Second year starts as it was always likely to. Frank Green is pissed on Creme de Menthe again.
Which would be fine, if we hadn’t volunteered for barbecue duty at the faculty orientation sausage sizzle. Fine, if his naughty-French-maid apron didn’t keep flapping so close to the heat beads.
‘It’s how to meet ’em,’ he said, when he volunteered us for it weeks ago. ‘Be the man with the tongs. Save the biggest snags for the spunks and offer them up with some witticism.’
And he was about to move right into the witticism, I could tell, so I held up my hand and said, ‘Save a little magic for the day, Frank. It’s got to sound fresh.’
‘Sure,’ he said, the magic already on his mind. ‘Mate. First years.’ Said like a carnivore talking about gazelle flank. ‘First years.’ Said as though he was telling me right then he’d be rooting himself stupid by sundown.
First years. I was far too scared when I started first year to think that sex might actually happen. But deciding to be a lot less scared lately hasn’t made it any more likely, and that doesn’t seem fair. Hanging around with Frank was, I thought, a bit of a plus. Now I’m not so sure.
‘So how long’s it been since you’ve been close to a root?’ Frank says, eyeing off the herd of grazing first years, as though he’s doing it on my behalf. While reading my mind, but maybe it’s easily read.
‘Dunno,’ I tell him, which is a lie, since it’s no problem to add nine months to my age and come up with something just over nineteen years.
Already, I’m thinking today will not be the day that changes my luck. Already I’m thinking that maybe my best possible outcome would be that we both miss out. Then at least I won’t have to get the phone call from Frank in the morning. The lurid, sweaty detail. I just hate imagining Frank naked. I wish he didn’t feel the need to call.
He takes a sip of his tall green drink and the ice cubes clink against the sides. He’s famous for it now, his Creme de Menthe. And its strategic implications. ‘Much quicker than beer,’ he’s said regularly. ‘You’d be a fool to try to get pissed on beer once you know the green drink.’
So we’ve swapped, in a way. I’m okay with beer now, a few beers. And with the barbecue fired up and a few dozen sausages to turn, I’m on my second light for the afternoon, alternating with water. Which reminds me. Today I was gone before I started, really.
My mother drove me here, never a good beginning to an event.
‘But I’m heading that way, Philby,’ she said.
And I said, ‘No you aren’t.’
And she half-pursed her lips and said, ‘Get in the car.’
And I sat there in the traffic in the foul sun, every second talking myself closer to ruin. Sweating and wanting to stay home and wallow in the pool. Hating barbecues and preferring watermelon and feeling the mad fluttering of trouble let loose once again in my stomach as I thought about the next few hours.
She talked on and on, in vague and offensively encouraging tones, but didn’t quite say anything encouraging enough that I could go off at her about it. She’s getting better at me being a loser, and the only thing worse than that is, so am I.
‘It’s stinking hot today,’ she said as I peeled myself from the passenger seat upholstery and climbed out of the car, trying not to hear her say things like ‘tenner for a cab home’ (though I took it, of course) and ‘I’ll make a bed up for Frank, shall I?’
I just wanted her to go away, go away, let me sneak away from her privately, and I’d made it as far as the refec steps when I heard her shout, ‘Be careful, Philby. Watch your fluids.’
And I ignored her utterly, but the world knew just whose mother she was, and I got several pieces of good advice about fluids over the next half-hour or so.
It’s my confidence problem, and it just isn’t going. And putting a name to it’s only made it seem like some disease I’ve got, and helped me to anticipate everything it puts me through.
Any time I’m in the vicinity of a heterosexual female of approachable age, I get a bit edgy. I think I’ve been saving myself for a little too long without ever meaning to. I am comprehensively inexperienced. I am stuck at the stage just before the conversation stage, and I know enough to know that that’s very stuck, and far removed from the main game.
It’s all down to attitude, I know that, and I’ve worked on it. I rehearse in my room, saying plenty of clever things quietly into my pillow, factoring in a range of possible girl responses and working out where I might take the conversation from there. And my mother thinks my sensitive side’s a plus and my pillow thinks I’m a right charmer, but in the real world I’m like a pencil-drawn outline of my better self.
I go to the faculty functions. Frank makes me. I’m the man with the plan (he makes me say that, over and over), and soon enough, I’m as dynamic as paint in there. Silent and desperately two-D up against the wall and wanting to try again some other night. Or never. Looking around at the casual talk and the coupling and realising I’m so seriously behind in this faculty that I have to have some form about me first time up, and practice (verbal or otherwise) just isn’t going to get me there.
I thought this’d get better. It’s got so bad my mother even told me that she’d thought it’d get better. It’s so bad she offered to buy me a book on it, and in that instant it got much worse.
I think the eighteenth century was good, plenty of other centuries were probably good. I think you could write poems for girls then (or sometimes even just quote someone else’s), and make them love you before you even met. At least, in some cases. I’d be up for that. I write the odd poem.
Frank doesn’t. Well, occasional limericks, but only when he can find two rhymes for ‘hornbag’, and that’s not the same thing. But it works for him. He keeps the limericks for the guys and gets the girl action he wants, better than 30 per cent of the time, and he never gets stuck in a relationship.
We work the barbecue and heat wells up from the beads and the sun flogs us from behind, through the spindly trees that grow out of the rockery. And there’s not much enthusiasm today for meat.
Frank toys with a fat ten-inch sausage and says, ‘This beast’d be mine,’ any time a first year (female) comes up to the barbecue area, but it usually only costs him eye contact and doesn’t get him far.
He’s surprisingly resilient though, when it comes to things like this. He calls it ‘the numbers’, reckoning he’s got nothing to lose, a 2 per cent chance of success each time and an awful lot of sausages to serve. Frank’s more strategic than he looks. Frank knows intercourse never happens by chance, even though you have to make it look as though it does.
‘Never had a root I didn’t have to work two hours for,’ he once told me, as though it was advice.
I ask him if he wants just a plain water next, and he says, ‘Nuh.’ Quaffs a mouthful of green. He points out possibles in the crowd, telling me, ‘I’d go her. I’d go her in a flash. Sizzle, baby, sizzle,’ he says, staring shamelessly, poking his now-favourite sausage with the tongs and giving a bit of a jiggle of his hips.
‘Those three over there,’ he says. ‘Those three. Second-year physios, aren’t they? I’ve seen them at a few of these things before. I’m giving them heaps of eye, mate. You can even have first pick and I’ll take the other two. Can’t say fairer than that.’
And he slurps Creme de Menthe, gives me a dirty man’s wink. Frank Green is the only person I know who expects to both get drunk and have sex every time he leaves the house, and that ends up giving him a great outlook on life. Even though most of the time he only manages to get drunk.
But he’s going to get lucky today. I can tell. He’s got the confidence going, more than usual even, mainly because of the sausage. He doesn’t often get to operate with the aid of such an overt symbol of his penis. People like confidence. Frank told me once, or several times, that someone had described him as ‘fully self-actualised’, and he’s quite proud of that. Sometimes he even tells girls. Sometimes he explains it to them as meaning that he’s ‘pretty much 100 per cent horn, baby’. On two occasions known to me, he has alleged that this claim has led to intercourse, reasonably quickly.
There are days when Frank Green’s whole world scares me, even though I’m a part of it. Days when I know the maths is stacked against me, and I know that I’m only about 20 per cent self-actualised, and feeling no more than fifteen.
‘So pick,’ he says. ‘Which one?’
‘The one with the nose,’ I tell him, but I know that I’m fucked.
I slip into a tail spin and sludge a few onions around on the hotplate. I like the smell of onions cooking. I like it when people don’t talk to me or when they just go, ‘Hey, great onions.’ I like the idea of someone wanting you, in a nice way, wanting to be with you and things, and other things arising as a consequence. I like days that are not dominated by performance anxiety and fear of the unknown, and I have them sometimes. Most recently, there was a day two weeks ago just like that.
I serve more onions, to low-key acclaim.
Meanwhile Frank has spiked his massive sausage with a fork and is passing one end of it in and out of his mouth in order to attract attention.
So far, no attention.
Frank, again, has managed to be the first person at a faculty function to have far too much to drink. So his Creme de Menthe theory’s holding up.
And I’m here, the loser onion boy in the rain shadow of Frank’s dumb porn display, and it’s more than possible that we could both be looking like idiots.
‘Put it down,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll never have sex in my whole life if you don’t put that down.’
‘Oh,’ he says, a little surprised. ‘Okay, sorry.’
And my outburst costs us a customer, but it had to be said.
Then for quite a while nothing happens. Frank stares at the same three physio students, continues to deliver them heaps of eye. They laugh and show him the finger and stay right where they are, squirting more cask red into their plastic cups and looking impressively unenticed.
‘Jeez, we’re not doing so well,’ Frank says, swigging a mouthful of Creme de Menthe right from the bottle and swaying subtly to the left and then back again.
‘I think people have enough meat for now. There’ll be some back for seconds.’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
And the day’s about to get easier. He’s about to join me in the tail spin. His confidence has risen to foolish heights and he’s about to do the Icarus thing. It’s a semi-regular pattern, and I can pick when it’s going to happen. From Greek mythology, Frank has learned nothing.
‘I can’t believe we could both leave here today without pulling some action,’ he says, totally believing it. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. What’s going on?’
‘The usual. The 70 per cent of the time for you 100 per cent of the time for me usual, dickhead.’
‘Might have to pick up a mag on the way home. Would you be up for that?’
‘What, buying you another porn mag?’
‘No. Go you halves. The usual.’
‘Frank, this is very depressing. No one even wants our food any more.’
‘What is this?’ he says. ‘It’s still only the fucking afternoon. I can’t believe we’re gone already.’
‘Yeah, but it’s too hot. Too hot to eat this stuff.’
‘I don’t care if they eat it or not. We’re not cooking it so people can eat it. Will you stop talking about the fucking food?’
I’m finding it easier to deal with in terms of the food, but all of a sudden Frank’s finding nothing easy. A shitty kind of silence seems to descend upon us. The three women, now no longer being worked on by Frank’s eye, seem to have noted the substantial semi-circle of space in front of us, and seem to be smirking. He tips a couple of steaks and another tray of sausages onto the barbecue, but half-heartedly and only so that he’s got something to do.
And I actually like Frank better when he’s depressed, but it’s not as though I don’t feel guilty about it.
Fat spits and the sausages sizzle and one of them sticks on the hot metal and rips and Frank mutters something that begins with, ‘Can’t even fuckin’ . . . ’
‘It’s okay,’ I tell him. ‘I quite like the crunchy bits. That one can be mine.’
At the edge of the crowd, one of the three women (the one with the nose) crushes their empty wine cask under her foot and starts to make her way over to the bar. And then the other two start heading our way. They must have seen Frank put the new stuff on. I give him a nudge, and his instincts have kicked in by the time they get to us.
‘Can I tempt either of you ladies with my meat?’ he says, mustering his most seductive patter from somewhere and emphasising the word meat as much as possible.
‘Not really,’ one of them says and smirks again. ‘Not our scene.’
‘Can’t believe you’ve come all this way for Philby’s onions,’ he says, and I could kill him for it, but it’s already too late.
‘No. Listen,’ she says. ‘We were just thinking. You guys, you’re working hard, and you’re not looking too cheery. Specially you.’ Looking at me. Which is bad, since Frank’s still looking pretty glum. ‘We were thinking, you’d be due for a break round about now, wouldn’t you?’
‘For sure,’ Frank says, as though all the eye work’s paying off and the day’s finally starting to make sense.
‘Yeah. That’s what we were thinking. And, well . . . ’ she pauses, looks at the one who hasn’t spoken, and gets a nod. ‘We were feeling like a bit of a break from this ourselves, hey Lisa?’
‘Yeah.’
And even Frank is gawking at them, at the possibilities of this, and how easy it’s looking for both of us. Even Frank doesn’t think he’s this good with the eye, and knows it’s the kind of scenario he normally only lies about when we’re driving to uni, not something that actually happens. And even though, in the usual way, I don’t expect I’ll be able to speak for the next couple of hours, it might not be a problem, since I guess I’m with Lisa, and she doesn’t seem like much of a talker.
‘So what have you got in mind?’ Frank says, pretty sure of what they’ve got in mind.
Am I ready for this? No. No way. Can I stop it? Can I go home now? Could I please meet someone nice, and have some say in what happens to me? My hand pokes around with the tongs, and shakes. I imagine Lisa without clothes, and me in the vicinity. The shake gets worse.
‘Well, this is the interesting bit,’ the non-Lisa one says. ‘You know that totally bullshit guy fantasy? The one about getting to watch two lesbians?’
And Frank says, ‘Yeah,’ just as I’m saying ‘What?’
And she looks at me and says, ‘That fantasy. The one about watching two women doing it. Well, we just thought, we were feeling kind of sorry for you. And sometimes we quite like to be watched.’
And she’s saying this right at me, so I have to say something back, but all I can say is, ‘God. Are you serious? Isn’t it kind of a private thing?’
She gives a shrug. ‘All right. Just asking. Just thought it could be, you know, fun.’
‘Um,’ Frank says, to stop them going, as he makes a big deal of turning a steak that doesn’t need it.
‘Yeah?’
‘You’d be thinking, like, now? Inside somewhere?’
‘Yeah.’
He turns the steak again, two or three times.
‘Oh, I could be up for it,’ he says. ‘It’s getting hot out here. And I reckon we’ve fed everyone. Hey Phil?’
And now I remember a few times when we’ve bought the mags. And how we often, well, usually, end up with one featuring an alleged lesbian scenario. And that whenever Frank’s made me chip in, the lesbian scenario always ends up in his half. There may be a pattern at work, and one not quite covered by Frank’s usual explanation of, ‘Hey Philby, twice the norks.’
‘Um,’ he says, in a way that makes it clear there’s more to it than um. ‘Any chance of one of you, you know, giving me a bit of a working over?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, you know, physically. Whatever. Nothing funny. Just, like, with something. Like a belt, or . . . ’
‘Aw, yuk. What do you think this is?’
‘Hey, just asking.’
And Lisa says, quietly but firmly, ‘I think I could.’
‘And could you, you know, talk and stuff?’
‘Not much of a talker.’
‘I’m not looking for anything fancy.’
‘Maybe, then. But, you know, it’s not totally sexual. To be honest, you really shitted me off all last year at any of the faculty things we had. So, you know, I’m up for it.’
‘Look, if we’re being honest, I don’t mind if you hate me,’ And he passes me his tongs and says, ‘You’ll be right?’ And I nod and he says, ‘Well. Girls. What are we waiting for?’
He picks up his bottle of Creme de Menthe, and the three of them walk off into the crowd, like people on their way to a lecture, no hint of what they’re planning.
And now that I think about it, all the leather and pain stuff tends to end up in Frank’s half of the mag as well. Actually, it’s possible that we’ve never bought a mag that hasn’t had at least one alleged lesbian scenario and something to do with riding crops, but the whole pain thing makes me very uneasy, so I’ve never complained when Frank guts the raunchy bits and I end up with only the articles. Which, come to think of it, always seems to be the way.
And the third of the women, the one who went inside first, the one with the nose, is now out again with a jug of red wine, and she comes over to me.
‘So they’ve gone, have they?’ she says.
‘Yeah. Frank and your two . . . friends? Yeah.’
‘Not your thing, hey?’
‘Well, no, to be honest. I don’t actually get it.’
‘So what do you get?’
‘God, not much really.’
Somehow it’s easy to say this to her, so I tell her I’ve never had brilliant results with girls, much as I’d like to. It’s almost like talking to a guy, talking about girls with a lesbian, and knowing there’s nothing at stake. So I tell her, sort of as a joke, that I think it must have been easier in other centuries, and I run my poetry theory by her. And she laughs, but nicely. I’ve never told anyone my poetry theory before.
And I say to her, ‘Maybe you can help me. I’ve got this thing. This thing where I can’t get started. It’s like, I can’t even start a conversation with a girl, a straight girl, in case it doesn’t work out. Frank says I should play the numbers, and not care if it doesn’t work out, but I just don’t think that’s me, because I do care. And I’d like to, you know, get to know them a bit. I can’t start the conversation maybe partly because I like it. I like the talking. I like the idea that one thing leads to another when you’re ready for it to, but I don’t think that’s how things work. It’s a dumb idea.’
‘Is this some line?’ she says, and laughs.
And I laugh too, since we both know how useless a line would be. ‘No. I’m not that dumb.’
I ask her her name, realising I can’t keep thinking about her as Lesbian Number Three, and it turns out it’s Melissa.
It also turns out that I like her and, without the possibility of sexual tension, that’s much easier to do than usual. In other circumstances, though clearly not these, I could find her attractive. But even as things are we could be friends, which wouldn’t be so bad.
I can make her laugh, and she seems to like it. I certainly do.
She takes Frank’s tongs and we cook the food together for the people who want seconds. She tells me a few things about girls, straight girls, and I don’t mind listening, even if she is making them up.
Demand dies down again, and it’s just the two of us, turning things.
‘You’re looking a bit sweaty there,’ she says.
‘Well, yeah. It’s thirty-seven degrees and I’m stuck behind a barbecue.’
‘You know what? I think it’s somebody else’s turn.’
‘Probably.’
‘A swim’d be good.’
‘I’ve been thinking that all day.’
‘Yeah, but I live in a flat a couple of streets away, and we’ve got a pool.’
‘Oh, that’d be great. So are you going to round up a few people?’
‘No, I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I was thinking you and me. It’s not a big pool, but it’d be nice. And No one ever uses it. And maybe we could have something to eat other than this shit,’ she says, turning a steak I’m in the process of thoughtlessly charring.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
She pours herself more red wine from the jug, takes a sip.
And I’m thinking, can you actually ask someone if they aren’t a lesbian? Can you actually get someone to confirm right now that they’re the lesbian you’d thought they were, so that you can relax again and get back to the conversation.
‘Yeah. Just us,’ she says. ‘A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou,’ in a voice that turns self-consciously Elizabethan at the end.
She shuffles a few crispy onion bits.
‘Oh right. Once more into the breech, dear friends,’ I say in something like panic, then crash internally as I contemplate simultaneously the sudden strange obstetric overtones, and the fact that I think the next line has something to do with our English dead. ‘Sorry. I . . . ’
‘It’s fine. I like Henry V. It was a bit of a surprise, but . . . ’
‘Can I’ve another go?’
‘Sure. Got anything less war-like?’
‘That’s the plan. Um . . . give me a sec.’ Someone wanders up and I dish out another couple of overdone sausages, thinking frantically, thinking till I’m in such a knot it almost hurts. But there’s nothing. Nothing that’ll work. And, damn it, I’ve come so far. Tail spin. Nose dive. Warning. This woman may not be a lesbian. ‘No,’ I tell her, and then I hear myself continue, ignoring the loud internal voice that’s shouting, idiot, idiot, shut up you stupid dumb virgin, ‘I’m stuck. I’ve got one from Marlowe, but it’s a bit much. For just having a swim.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘Even with the wine and bread. And the thou. A bit much.’
‘It’s okay.’
Frank lurches out from behind the building, waving his empty bottle and stumbling down the stairs. He staggers over our way, lifts up his apron front and shows me welts.
Where his shirt’s gone, I don’t know. And his shorts too, unfortunately. And did Lisa get his underpants as part of the deal?
‘Snug fit you’ve got down there, Frank,’ I tell him, but he just says ‘Woo-woo, woo-woo,’ jerking his right hand up and down as though he’s pulling on something round about shoulder level. ‘Woo-woo.’ Like The Little Engine That Just Did. ‘And they reckon rubber doesn’t show,’ he shouts. ‘They should try the tubes on the Bunsen burners in Two Twelve.’
‘They’ve practically perished. They’re pretty grungy. They’d sting.’
‘Oh, yeah. And she really fucking hated me. You too.’
‘What?’
‘I kept saying to her, it’s Frank, it’s Frank, but all she wanted to scream was “All men are bastards”.’ He burps, in a dangerous kind of way, as though there’s much more than gas at stake. ‘Fuck,’ he says, in a deep, spooky voice. ‘I smell mint.’
And he scrambles for the rockery.
‘The man’s an idiot,’ Melissa says, as we listen to him turning most of his internal organs inside out among the cacti. ‘Why would anyone . . . he’s an idiot. Sorry, he’s your friend, isn’t he?’
‘Yeah, but . . . Let’s go for that swim. Let’s go now.’