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He hit me after that, but not too hard. Only a swift, open-handed smack across my jaw. I’d had worse. And then he gave me both barrels, his words hurting a hell of a lot more than my smarting chin. Red streaks of fury flushed each sallow cheek, his puffy eyes glinted with satisfaction that I’d handed him an excuse to behave like a total shit. Ideas above my station? Matt Leeson poncing around at fucking university? My home not fucking good enough? And blah fucking blah. Matt Leeson would be getting a bloody job and putting in a bloody manual shift like every other Leeson bloke before him. If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. If I wanted to carry on having a roof over my head, Matt Leeson could fucking contribute to its upkeep like everyone else. As my dad reminded me, my granddad had died with his head held high, and little more than a tenner in his pocket. He planned on doing the same.
I didn’t ask again. We never mentioned it again. No matter how many glossy brochures Cartwright pushed under my nose, no matter how many times he offered to fill in bursary forms and grant forms, no matter how many lunchtime meetings I spent with all the other clever kids listening to some bloke droning on about how the application system worked. One person in the room knew I was an imposter, and that person was me.
Back to Brenner. He was shit-scared. Scared that Phil would abandon him and that once I’d begun my hoity-toity university life, I would grow out of him too. I wasn’t ready to admit that he needn’t worry, that I’d most likely be lined up on the factory floor next to him. Not yet. Once school knew about me, once nice, helpful people such as Mr Cartwright and Phil’s dad knew, I’d become about as interesting as a cardboard box. I liked being clever, and I enjoyed being praised. I enjoyed knowing other people envied my sharp brain. I liked imagining I’d fit in one day alongside the likes of Alex bloody Valentine. So I lied and lied and lied. Even to my oldest mate, Brenner.
I wasn’t a nice person. “I’ll come home from university in the holidays and at weekends,” I bullshitted, the untruth rolling off my tongue easily. Secret homosexuals like me were good at lying – we’d had enough practice. “And you can come and visit. We’d have a great laugh. All those fit, posh birds. They love a bit of rough.”
He’d offered me a perfect opportunity to admit the truth. To beg him to hold on until the summer when I finished my exams. We could leave school together and find work somewhere else. God knows what, but not spending the rest of our lives in that fucking monolith of a dead-end factory. Anything but that.
MIS-SHAPES
(PULP)
Thanks to the regulation candy-striped pastel shirt I wore to wait tables in Debenhams café, I spent Saturday afternoons looking as if I’d picked a fight with a deckchair and lost. When they remembered, my mates hung around the café to take the piss. Although, the last time Brenner and Phil had pitched up they’d been accosted by security and had their pockets emptied. As if anyone bothered chancing their arm nicking stuff from Debenhams, when Woolworths sat literally next door?
“Are you coming back to mine after work?” Denise asked, her face a neutral mask as we wiped down a couple of adjacent tables. Despite her matching deckchair shirt, my waitressing colleague still managed to give off the full emo vibe. Needless to say, her perpetually smouldering expression didn’t garner many tips, not that she seemed to give a shit. Thin as a rake, every undernourished, pasty inch of Denise screamed teenage angst, from her skinny black jeans to her lank curtains of hair and panda-like eye makeup.
“Yeah,” I confirmed, because I had fuck all else to do.
We’d been having sex for coming up to a year. I hesitated to call it a relationship; it would stretch a point to even label us friends. And we were light years away from friends with benefits, as I wasn’t convinced either of us actually, well, benefitted.
Denise and I had started the Saturday café job the same week. She was in my maths class, a member of one of the common, scaggy tribes, like me. Although until we’d worked together, we’d never so much as looked at each other, let alone spoken. My subtribe and Denise’s subtribe did not mix. If Denise had been cast inThe Breakfast Club, she’d have been that crazy emo girl who sprinkled her dandruff over the desk. But short of anyone else with whom to slag off the customers, we’d bonded over picking up stinking nappies chucked under tables, and finding mislaid wallets, which we handed in after extracting the cash. None of my mates knew her, and overall, she didn’t get on my nerves too badly.
Denise and I had one thing in common and that was our taste in music. Feeling at a loose end one afternoon, I’d gone back to her place after our shift.Automatic for The Peopleplayed in the CD player. More mainstream than some of REM’s earlier stuff, it had been my duty to pretend to hate it. After we’d both criticised Michael Stipe’s genius sufficiently to justify listening to the album twice, we’d got hammered on rum and coke and then she’d propositioned me for sex, in the same, off-hand, bored tone she’d asked if I had a cigarette lighter. Tipsy and horny, I’d agreed, and we’d kind of gone from there.
Every Saturday since, in the shrine to Kurt Cobain known as Denise’s bedroom, the same routine played out: music, ciggies, rum and coke, and then genital action. From all four walls, Kurt stared down at us, silently judging me as I made a hash of things. Which should have been off-putting, but in reality made the whole thing a hell of a lot easier. We’d kiss (very briefly), shove our jeans down, and I’d insert my penis into her vagina, all the while staring up into Kurt’s pretty, blue eyes instead of down at the girl underneath me. I’d fantasise about him doing something similar in my arse. Or the other way around; to be honest, I had no idea of the finer mechanics of man-on-man sex. I just knew I wanted to experience it.
Having a teenage dick on a hair trigger meant I always managed to finish the job with Denise, even if our sex left me with a strange sense of dissatisfaction. Like eating a bowl of Co-op own brand cornflakes while craving the superiority of Kelloggs. Denise probably lay there wishing she had picked a bloke with a more refined technique to shag . And who touched her boobs occasionally and cuddled her afterwards.
Some days, I contemplated confiding my secret homosexuality to her. Part of me thought she’d an inkling anyway. Which meant the singular benefit of our weird, mechanical sexual encounters was that she could be relied upon to point out fit guys dropping by the café well before I ever spotted them.
“Table six,” she observed mildly, as I arranged a tray in the kitchen. “Blond, big, looks like he plays a lot of sport. Sitting with his mum.”
Seemed like she’d worked out my type, too.
Growing up, I’d watched my fair share of American films and sitcoms. So I was well versed in the language of cheery waiters, with their, ‘Hey you guys!! I’m Chuck! How are you all doing today?’ Very pleasant I’m sure, but not how us reserved Brits did it. That said, even at my most surly, I didn’t tend to greet a table of punters with, “Hello. Oh, pissing fuck.”
I guess there was a first time for everything.
Alex bloody Valentine in soft, grey trackie bottoms and a plain blue T-shirt. Gorgeous beyond words. He’d obviously come straight from a sports match or training session. I reckoned he played rugby, from the outline of his chunky thighs and toned biceps. Ihopedhe played rugby, as my head had suddenly exploded with images of him scrabbling in the mud, naked, wrestling with other blond giants, grinding those solid thighs into…. Okay, so maybe I needed to brush up on the rules.
“Shit, sorry. Sorry. I’m so sorry. Um…can I get you anything?”
Blond curls, still damp from the shower, framed his wholesome, perfect face. His full mouth twisted into a smirk as his gaze flicked over my deckchair ensemble. My one remaining brain cell not focussed on the vision of loveliness stretched out in a plastic chair in front of me vaguely registered a glamorous, smiling woman next to him.
“Mum, this is Matt from school,” Alex said, by way of a lazy introduction. “He was at that extra maths tutorial with me on Thursday when I had to stay late. Remember? I gave him a lift home afterwards, as it was raining? Matt—this is my mother, Lizzie.”
Such a well-brought up boy. I’d never heard detention sugar-coated as a maths tutorial before. Lizzie gazed at Alex as if he’d dropped to his knees then spreadeagled himself across the road so I could avoid stepping in puddles, not merely taken a five-minute detour from his usual car journey. She turned her megawatt smile on me. “Hello, Matt! It’s nice to meet one of Alex’s friends.”
I raised my eyebrow at Alex as his mum perused the plastic menu, and became the recipient of a threatening look. His cosiness with his mother clearly didn’t extend to confessing to a detention.Friends, that was what we were now. Friends who hung around together for extra maths tutorials, who shared rainy car journeys.In my fucking dreams. His mum beamed up at me; with that set of gnashers, she evidently declined sugary wine gums too.
“What do you recommend, Matt?”
I recommend your son comes back to my place and I grind on his lap until he begs me to jizz all over his face.
“The teacakes are always popular.”
Alex watched me, with a curious expression.
