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“Two teacakes it is. And a pot of English breakfast tea. No sugar.”
“You know him, then?” Denise studied me as I hurriedly piled teacups onto a tray.
“Yeah.” I tried to sound bored. “He’s a kid at our school. One of the other lot.”
No further explanation required. For the last couple of years of education, pupils at our school formed a natural split into two social groups. Rich and poor. Up the road, lay a fee-paying establishment that only took kids until the age of sixteen. From sixteen to eighteen, about half fucked off to boarding school in Birmingham. The other half, the ones whose parents couldn’t bear to wave goodbye to their precious Jemimas and Crispins, slummed it at St George’s with unsuitable council estate kids like me, supplemented by private tutors and rugby training. As an anthropological experiment, it was an unmitigated disaster—the smaller, naïve posh kids were bullied relentlessly. The bigger ones, such as Alex Valentine, huddled together like colonies of fucking penguins, praying that roaming, hungry predators like Brenner, Phil, and me wouldn’t single them out.
Young Alex Valentine, however, seemed a little different. Bolder. Not once had he failed to meet my eye. Not during detention, not when I’d riled him in the car, and not now, when we both knew being seen out shopping with your mother was social suicide.
Café trade was brisk, but as I went about my business, I kept an eye on table six. I’d seen well-to-do kids in here before with their parents—they always shared an easy camaraderie, more like close friends than offspring. Afternoon tea wasn’t something I’d ever done with my mum—too expensive for starters, and we wouldn’t have anything to talk about anyhow. Alex wolfed his own teacake then half his mum’s—with their blond heads bowed together they appeared to be flipping through her diary, planning maybe. She jotted something down and they laughed, her hand lightly resting on his forearm. Shopping bags from an upmarket boutique were lodged securely between her feet, her elegant leather handbag perched on top. Gripped by a wistful longing, so visceral it almost hurt, I made an effort to turn away, and busied myself in the kitchen until they left.
“I picked up that new Blur album in Woolworth’s on my way in,” Denise informed me at the end of our shift. Ifpicked upwas a euphemism for shoplifting, I didn’t wish to know, or care. Denise didn’t have much that I did wish to know about, to be honest. All I wanted was to get drunk with her then use her body as a handy orifice. Nope, still not a nice person. It wouldn’t be Kurt’s delicate prettiness filling my head this time though. Alex Valentine and his beautiful body would take centre stage.
“Modern Life Is Rubbish.” She waved the CD at me, still with a tag attached.
Ain’t that the truth.
ADD IT UP
(VIOLENT FEMMES)
Winston Churchill is quoted as saying“the only statistics you can trust are ones you make up yourself.”If I did ever go to university, I’d train to be a smart-arsed journalist, or an economist or something, and debunk quotes like his with accurate statistics of my own. Given the chances of that happening were statistically zero, I had to content myself with learning as much as I could from Mrs Goodman, the world’s least charismatic maths teacher. The probability of fifty percent of the class still being awake after the first quarter hour of her teaching approached 0.01 percent.
Three minutes into the lesson, however, and my body became as alert—neurones firing madly and gay heart drumming, as it could possibly be—Alex bloody Valentine pushed open the classroom door. With a charming smile and a hand raised in gracious apology to Mrs Goodman for his tardiness, he headed for the only available empty desk. Which happened to be on the back row next to me. I bet he’d never sat on the back row in his life until now. As he settled, my senses were assaulted by a delicious whiff of fresh, lemony aftershave. Maths was the last lesson of the day; the rest of us hormonal boys honked like the lining of Brenner’s trainers. How the fuck did he manage to smell so good?
Mrs Goodman embarked on a laborious tour through the minutiae of the chi square test. “Are you stalking me?” I demanded in a loud whisper, wriggling in my chair. My dick had suddenly taken on a life of its own. He peeled off his sweater, his warmth probably a result of the searing heat radiating from my groin.
“No.” His tone was full of scorn. “I’ve swapped out of pure maths into maths with stats, because it will be more useful at medical school.”
How the hell being able to calculate the probability of pulling out a green counter followed by a red counter from a cloth bag containing green, white, red, and blue counters helped a doctor diagnose cancer or perform heart surgery remained a mystery to me, but my newfound crush gave the impression he knew what he was talking about. My expression failed to hide my scepticism.
“So that I can correctly analyse research papers,” he explained, in an earnest whisper. He leaned in closer. “And discern how much value to place on medical trials in peer-reviewed journals.”
I shivered as his breath ghosted against my cheek. My school trousers tightened by the second. Jesus, that smell! I shuffled my chair forwards, tucking my errant organ under the desk.
“That’s my med school interview answer, anyway,” he carried on. “But basically, I swapped because its apparently easier, and I’m rubbish at maths.”
His conspiratorial grin punched me right in the balls—two rows of even, white teeth, with a hint of pink tongue poking through. Sweating buckets, I affected a cool slouch and raised a Roger Moore eyebrow.
“You’d better shut the fuck up and pay more attention to Mrs Goodman then, because you’ve written down the wrong answer.”
He stared at his scribbled calculations, fair eyebrows knitted together in a cute confused frown. Oh my God, him chewing his lower lip to pieces was not sexy at all. “What? How?”
I pointed with my biro. “You’ve made up the square wrong. The sample size is very small. Chi square doesn’t work with small samples, so you have to apply Fisher’s exact test.”
Attempting not to behave like a smug bastard, I outlined Alex Valentine’s mathematical errors and failings. I desperately wanted to impress him. He’d discover I was his intellectual superior; I’d become his maths buddy; maybe he’d turn to me with a list of his maths problems from this moment forwards. There would be so many of them that he’d invite me home; we would pore over calculations together, sitting at his parents’ huge antique dining room table in their huge, fabulous house, overlooking their ginormous garden and surrounded by snapshots of Alex’s loving family beaming down at us. Photos of the Valentine clan enjoying sunny beach holidays, Alex posing in a colourful pair of skimpy trunks, or Alex running topless across golden sands with a rugby ball tucked under one bare arm. LikeBaywatch, but set in Bognor, not California.Bogwatch. He’d realise he couldn’t cope with day-to-day existence without me, and soon we’d be joined at the hip, go everywhere together, and bit by bit I’d turn him gay with my magic gay wand, because apparently if you wanted something so fiercely, then that was a queer thing that happened. And he’d kiss me and touch my dick and beg me to go to bed with him.
“Why have you written a three in that box? I don’t understand how you did that, Matt.” He swept his tongue across his upper lip, his features a mask of concentration.
With Herculean effort, I focused on the diagram in front of us. Perhaps I was getting a titchy bit ahead of myself. Maybe, next maths lesson, he’d arrive on time and sit with the swots on the front row.
Nonetheless, determined to look on the bright side, I decided that maths would be as good a place to start with Operation Turn Alex Valentine Gay as any, and, from the head-scratching going on, he was crying out for a maths buddy.
“Jesus, Alex. Are you fucking defective? It’s because I’ve added up each of the numbers in that column over there, then subtracted them from the total down here!”
My teaching methods needed refining. Alex huffed and frowned some more.
“Don’t call me defective! We can’t all be maths geniuses! And stop sniffing me, you weirdo!”
