I lost my virginity because my mother met Clint.
She’d probably known him less than three weeks when we all set off for Majorca. Looking back, her motivation is clearer – it was a failed attempt to recreate a foursquare family unit, five years after she divorced my father. Not surprisingly, it was an uncomfortable holiday, though the sea was sauna-warm and a multitude of semi-nudes were baked beautiful by a tumour-bestowing sun. My mother and Clint talked about nothing but behavioural management strategies, having met recently on Becksmouth College’s teacher training course, while I walked around Palma Nova draped in a teenager’s black sulk, assuming looking cool would keep me cool. Ryan tagged along behind, too young to talk to anyone on their level, too old to covet everyone’s attention.
Clint tried desperately hard to be the alpha, complete with Hawaiian shirts and the spouting of cod-Spanish in restaurants that only served British cuisine. Colonialism was alive and well, though looped episodes of Only Fools and Horses in the coastal bars looked daft juxtaposed with the lizards shinning up our hotel walls in their frenzied, zoetrope motions.
I had to share a twin room with Ryan, though we hardly spoke any more in those days than we do now. Most evenings, he played Sonic the Hedgehog on his Game Gear, or tried to convince me he could see dinosaurs or sailing boats within the autostereograms in his Magic Eye books. On the fourth night, I climbed out the window and moseyed into Magaluf.
I don’t remember much of the night after my fifth vodka, but certainly recall being dragged back to a beachside hotel by an English girl two years my senior.
Naturally, I equipped myself in a way customary to the first-timer and the magnitude of the occasion left me entirely sober. The physical, penile, aspect of the act wasn’t Earth-shatteringly dissimilar to masturbation (still a recently-discovered delight at this stage, and one temporarily scuppered by having to share a room with Ryan), but the female body was new, its folds and sweeps and swells, its pliability and scents. I remained awake all night, relieved. A prisoner pardoned. A graduate.
I was probably hard to get rid of the next morning, only quitting her bed upon guarantee of a further tryst that evening. Once I’d made my way to the correct hotel, I found a mother too intimidated by the notion of my autonomy to be angry about me slipping out during the night, and a father-in-waiting waggling Terry Thomas eyebrows. For the rest of the afternoon, I sat alone by the hotel pool, feeling like the King of the Fucking Universe as I watched poor excuses for men – balding men, overweight men, sunburnt elders well past their prime – plunge in and out of the water.
I waited three hours for her outside the souvenir shop on the seafront, until long after the sun slid down behind the glass of the ocean.
The rejection must’ve shown in my face that night because when I returned my mother and Clint seasoned my nightly scrambled eggs with an empathy I’d hitherto been unaware was within their spectrum. For the first time in five years, I experienced a moment of genuine domesticity.
On our last night, I saw my inamorata with another guy, kissing on a bench by a pharmacy. He had his hand clamped to a breast, his tongue a driving piston between her teeth. ‘Find a room,’ my mother mumbled as we headed for the restaurant in which Clint trusted enough by now to order bangers and mash.
In many ways, that girl affirmed to me the benefits of remaining distant. I forced myself to believe that, like cortisone on my mosquito bites, the pain of that experience would be worth the long-term paybacks. I considered it a useful lesson.
Through my headache, in the back of a taxi on the way to Mariana’s house, I have to admit to myself that I’ve enjoyed flirting with her – protean signals, double entendres, those suggestive smiles. I like the way she plays me, the way she casually extracts me from myself, how the thought of meeting her waters my palms. But, cards on the table, the reason I originally turned down the offer to accompany her to New York was out of a fear that, in doing so, she might be cut out of my life too soon. Flirting’s very purpose, after all, presupposes another destiny.
She’s better than a one-night-stand. But am I?
‘Awright, mate?’ the driver asks. He’s about fifty and couldn’t be more Cockney if he were dressed as a Pearly King. A miniature West Ham kit pogoes from his rear-view mirror. ‘Want me to pull over or summink?’
I take my head from my hands, tell him it’s a migraine. He nods, unconvinced, but turns off the radio anyway, avoiding my eyes in the mirror all the way to Southgate.
Mariana teases open the front door to her ground floor flat, then trudges off, leaving me to close it after myself.
‘You ready?’ I ask, following her through a lounge-cum-dining area into a tightly-furnished but uncluttered kitchen. Her tiny garden doesn’t get much light at this time of morning but every flower’s upright outside her window, awaiting what little sun they can acquire.
She yawns a reply, failing to cover her mouth, and offers me a coffee.
I accept, mumble something about how cosy her flat is.
Such lacklustre small talk is to be expected. We’ve both had a night to sleep off yesterday’s kiss. She probably did the right thing by going home, so soon after the promise; she’s not after the smash-and-grab. She seeks the long game. In her eyes, have I passed the test by agreeing to come with her, thus proving a capability for commitment?
‘You haven’t brought much stuff,’ she says, nodding at my shoulder bag.
‘I like to travel light.’ I tap my jacket pocket.
‘Ooh, let’s have a look at your passport.’
Reluctantly, I hand it over to a nasal guffaw.
It’s not hard to see her point: the lank hair and thick-rimmed spectacles at odds with the complete lack of erudition in the half-pout, the gormless quizzing of the eyes. It’s impossible to believe this petulant try-hard put himself through seven years of chemistry exams, and harder still that any country on Earth permits me through customs.
‘So your parents don’t mind me coming with you?’ I ask, taking back the passport.
‘They won’t object. Provided you’re on your best behaviour. So, what changed your mind, in the end?’
‘Oh, you know. I had a few days spare…’
When she disappears into her bedroom, to collect some nearly-forgotten accoutrement for her suitcase, I wander the lounge. CDs by Suzanne Vega and Joni Mitchell. A DVD collection comprised mainly of Spanish-language films. Books penned by proponents of Magic Realism.
‘Who’s this?’ I ask, when she returns, pointing at a photo of a dark-haired man in his early thirties who peers into the camera in a tired, slightly Don-like way, as though auditioning for a role in a cheap TV rip-off of Goodfellas.
‘That’s Jorge.’ She unzips her case and stuffs in a pair of jeans without folding them. ‘The photo was taken a few years ago, about six months before he died.’
‘I’m sorry. Who was he?’
‘An uncle.’ She answers quickly, keen to move on.
Human lives are recurrently influenced by the losses and rejections of other people: the house that was no longer suitable for the previous owner; the vacated position before you joined the company; the lover’s lover who changed their mind. It would be an invidious man indeed who begrudged someone their past. However, an immediate and unjustifiable aversion to this ‘uncle’ develops within my gut.
She opens the door and strides into the sunlight.
‘Did you think, maybe, he was my boyfriend?’
‘Um… I wondered if…’
‘Get a move on,’ she chides. ‘We’ll miss the plane.’
My mother rings as we enter Heathrow’s departure lounge, grey, bright and with the acoustics of a supermarket. I only answer because things got uncomfortable the last time I refused to acknowledge her calls in Mariana’s presence and I disappear back towards the duty free, out of Mariana’s earshot, upon hearing the serious tone of her voice.
‘Are you sitting down?’ she asks.
‘I think we’ve already had this conversation, Mum.’
She doesn’t think this is funny.
‘Your father was poisoned,’ she says.
‘You fucking what?’ The entire airport falls silent.
‘Language, Lucas.’
In light of recent events, I vow never to pick up my phone again. ‘But… Who would…? I mean… Surely there’s been…’
Heathrow quickly regains its energy. A toddler knocks a rack of airport paperbacks across the terminal book shop. Mariana looks up from an issue of Marie Claire and grins at me without concern.
‘Where are you?’ my mother asks. ‘Can I hear flight announcements? You’re not vanishing off on holiday are you?’
‘Are you sure he was poisoned? Doesn’t that strike you as somewhat ridiculous?’
‘Of course it does. I’m just telling you what the police are saying. Lucas, I absolutely forbid you to leave the country.’
‘Mum, even if I were going somewhere, what would it matter?’
‘What would it matter? Think about how it looks: you never made any secret of the fact that you disliked your father; you’re a scientist with access to all sorts of chemicals; you’re flying off to… where are you going?’
‘Nowhere. I told you.’
‘Lucas.’ A hard edge finds purchase in her voice. ‘Grow up and stop playing games. Your father’s been murdered.’