Sweet Sorrow Read online

  A new craze had started now, the boys climbing on backs and crashing full speed into each other, jousting. Even above the music you could hear the slap of spines against the parquet. A real fight had broken out. I glimpsed keys bunched in someone’s hand and in the spirit of public order Mr Hepburn played the Spice Girls, a kind of musical water-cannon for the boys, who scattered to the edges, the girls taking their place, skipping and wagging their fingers at each other. Miss Butcher, too, replaced Mr Hepburn on the decks. I saw him raise his hand to me and dart across the dance floor, looking left and right as if crossing a busy road.

  ‘What d’you think, Charlie?’

  ‘You missed your vocation, sir.’

  ‘Clubbing’s loss was geography’s gain,’ he said, folding himself into the bars beside me. ‘You can call me Adam now. We’re both civilians, or will be in, what, thirty minutes? In thirty minutes you can call me anything you like!’

  I liked Mr Hepburn and admired his perseverance in the face of vocal indifference. No offence, sir, but what’s the point of this? Of all the teachers who’d aspired to it, he’d best pulled off the trick of seeming decent without being ingratiating, dropping tantalising hints of ‘big weekends’ and staffroom intrigue, displaying just enough small signs of rebellion – loose tie, stubble, shaggy hair – to imply that we were comrades. Occasionally he’d even swear, the bad language like sweets thrown into a crowd.

  Still, there was no world in which I’d call him Adam.

  ‘So – are you excited about college?’

  I recognised the beginning of a pep talk. ‘Don’t think I’ll be going, sir.’

  ‘You don’t know that. You’ve applied, haven’t you?’

  I nodded. ‘Art, Computer Science, Graphic Design.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘But I didn’t get the grades.’

  ‘Well, you don’t know that yet.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure, sir. I didn’t turn up half the time.’

  He tapped me on the knee with his fist once, then thought better of it. ‘Well, even if you haven’t, there are things you can do. Retake, do something less conventional. Boy like you, boy with talents …’ I still treasured the praise he’d lavished on my volcano project: the last word, the ultimate in volcano cross-sections, as if I’d uncovered some fundamental truth that had evaded volcanologists for centuries. But this was a small hook from which to hang the word ‘talent’.

  ‘Nah, I’m going to get a full-time job, sir. I’ve given myself ’til September, then—’

  ‘I still remember those volcanoes. The cross-hatching was superb.’

  ‘Long time since those volcanoes.’ I shrugged and, unexpectedly, mortifyingly, realised that some switch had been flicked and that I might cry. I wondered, should I scamper further up the monkey bars?

  ‘But maybe you can do something with it.’

  ‘With volcanoes?’

  ‘The drawing, the graphic design. If you wanted to talk to me about it, once the results are through …’

  Or perhaps not climb the monkey bars, perhaps just push him off. It wasn’t far to fall.

  ‘Really, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘All right, Chaz, all right, but let me tell you a secret –’ He swung in and I could smell lager on his breath. ‘Here it is. It doesn’t matter. Stuff that happens now, it doesn’t matter. I mean it does matter, but not as much as you’d think, and you’re young, so young. You could go to college, or go back when you’re ready, but you have so. Much. Time. Oh, man …’ He pressed his cheek winsomely against the wooden frame. ‘If I woke up and I was sixteen again, oh, man—’

  And blessedly, just as I prepared to leap, Miss Butcher found the strobe light and jammed it down for a long, long burst and now there was a scream and a sudden surge of movement in the crowd, a panicked circle forming as, in the flickering light and to the sound of ‘MMMBop’, Debbie Warwick coughed and spewed magnesium-white vomit, splattering shoes and bare legs in a series of rapid snapshots like some hellish stop-motion film, her hand widening the arc like a finger pressed to the end of a hose, until she was left hunched and alone in the centre of a circle of kids who were laughing and screaming at the same time. Only then did Miss Butcher switch off the strobe and tiptoe into the circle to rub Debbie’s back with the very tips of the fingers of an outstretched arm.

  ‘Studio 54,’ said Mr Hepburn, clambering down from the bars. ‘Too much strobe, you see?’ The music was paused as kids scrubbed at their legs with abrasive paper towels and Parky, building maintenance, went to fetch the sawdust and disinfectant that were kept close at hand for parties. ‘Twenty minutes to go, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Mr Hepburn, restored to the decks. ‘Twenty minutes, which means it’s time to slow things down a little …’

  Slow songs provided a school-sanctioned opportunity to lie on top of each other while still standing up. The first chords of ‘2 Become 1’ had cleared the floor, but now a series of panicked negotiations was underway at its edges as, courtesy of the lab technicians, a small amount of dry ice belched out, a cloaking device, settling at waist height. Sally Taylor and Tim Morris were the first to kick through the fog, then Sharon Findlay and Patrick Rogers, the school’s sexual pioneers, hands permanently plunged deep in the other’s waistband as if pulling tickets for a raffle, then Lisa ‘the Body’ Boden and Mark Solomon, Stephen ‘Shanksy’ Shanks and ‘Queen’ Alison Quinn, hopping blithely over the sawdust.

  But these were old married couples in our eyes. The crowd demanded novelty. From the far corner, there were whoops and cheers as Little Colin Smart took Patricia Gibson’s hand, a corridor opening up as she was half pushed, half tugged into the light, her spare hand covering as much of her face as possible like the accused arriving for trial. All around the hall, boys and girls began their kamikaze runs, the suitors sometimes accepted, sometimes repelled and sent spinning off, smiling hard against the slow handclaps.

  ‘I hate this bit, don’t you?’

  I’d been joined on the bars by Helen Beavis, an art-block girl and champion hockey player, tall and strong and sometimes known as The Bricky, though never to her face. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Lisa’s trying to fit her entire head into Mark Solomon’s mouth.’

  ‘And I bet he’s still got his chewing gum in there—’

  ‘Just knocking it back and forth. Little game of badminton going on. Pok-pok-pok.’

  We’d made a few self-conscious attempts at friendship, Helen and I, though nothing had ever taken. In the art block, she was one of the cool kids who painted big abstract canvases with titles like Division, who always had something drying in the pottery kiln. If art was about emotion and self-expression, then I was merely a ‘good drawer’; detailed, heavily cross-hatched sketches of zombies and space pirates and skulls, always with one living eye still in the socket, imagery ripped off from computer games and comics, sci-fi and horror, the kind of intricately violent images that catch the attention of an educational psychologist. ‘I’ll say one thing for you, Lewis,’ Helen had drawled, holding some intergalactic mercenary at arm’s length, ‘you can really draw a male torso. Capes, too. Imagine what you could do if you drew something real.’

  I’d not replied. Helen Beavis was too smart for me, in an un-showy private way that didn’t require the validation of book tokens. She was funny, too, with all the best jokes muttered in a low voice for her own satisfaction. Her sentences contained more words than necessary, every other word given a twist of irony so that I never knew if she meant one thing or its opposite. Words were hard enough when they had one meaning, and if our friendship foundered on anything, it was my inability to keep up.

  ‘You know what this gym needs? Ashtrays. Fitted flush at the end of the parallel bars. Hey, are we allowed to smoke yet?’

  ‘Not for … twenty minutes.’

  Like the best of our athletes, Helen Beavis was a dedicated smoker, lighting up more or less at the gates, her Marlboro Menthol waggling up and down like Popeye’s pipe as she laughed, and I’d onc
e watched her place a finger over one nostril and snot a good twelve feet over a privet hedge. She had, I think, the worst haircut I’d ever seen, spiked at the top, long and lank at the back with two pointed sideburns, like something scribbled on a photograph in biro. In the mysterious algebra of the fifth-year common room, bad hair plus artiness plus hockey plus unshaved legs equalled lesbian, a potent word for boys at that time, able to make a girl of great interest or of no interest at all. There were two – and only two – types of lesbian and Helen was not the kind found in the pages of Martin Harper’s magazines, and so the boys paid little attention to her, which I’m sure suited her fine. But I liked her and wanted to impress her, even if my attempts usually left her slowly shaking her head.

  Finally the mirror-ball was deployed, revolving on its chain. ‘Ah. That’s magical,’ said Helen, nodding at the slowly spinning dancers. ‘Always clockwise, have you noticed?’

  ‘In Australia, they go the other way.’

  ‘On the equator, they just stand there. Very self-conscious.’ Now ‘2 Become 1’ faded into the warm syrup of Whitney Houston’s ‘Greatest Love of All’. ‘Yikes,’ said Helen and rolled her shoulders. ‘I hope, for all our sakes, that the children aren’t our future.’

  ‘I don’t think Whitney Houston had this particular school in mind.’

  ‘No, probably not.’

  ‘The other thing I’ve never got about this song: learning to love yourself – why’s that the greatest love of all?’

  ‘It makes more sense if you hear it as loathe,’ she said. We listened.

  ‘Learning to loathe yourself—’

  ‘—is the greatest loathe of all. That’s why it’s easy to achieve. And the great thing is, it works with nearly all love songs.’

  ‘She loathes you—’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Thanks, Helen. That makes more sense to me now.’

  ‘My gift to you.’ We turned back to the dance floor. ‘Trish looks happy,’ and we watched as Patricia Gibson, hand still clamped over her eyes, contrived to simultaneously dance and back away. ‘Colin Smart’s trousers have arranged themselves in an interesting way. Weird place to keep your geometry set. Boing!’ Helen twanged the air. ‘I had that once. Christmas Methodist Disco with someone whose name I’m not at liberty to repeat. It’s not nice. Like being jabbed in the hip with the corner of a shoebox.’

  ‘I think boys get more out of it than the girls.’

  ‘So go rub it against a tree or something. It’s very rude, by which I mean impolite. Leave it out of your arsenal, Charles.’ Elsewhere, hands were seeking out buttocks and either lying there, limp and frightened, or kneading at the flesh like pizza dough. ‘It really is a most disgusting spectacle. And not just because of my much-vaunted lesbianism.’ I shifted on the bar. We were not used to frank and open discussion. Best to ignore it, and after a moment –

  ‘So, do you want to dance?’ she said.

  I frowned. ‘Nah. M’all right.’

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ she said. A little time passed. ‘If you want to go ask someone else—’

  ‘Really. I’m all right.’

  ‘No big crush, Charlie Lewis? Nothing to get off your chest in these dying moments?’

  ‘I don’t really do that … stuff. You?’

  ‘Me? Nah, I’m pretty much dead inside. Love’s a bourgeois construct anyway. All this –’ She nodded to the dance floor. ‘It’s not dry ice, it’s a haze of low-lying pheromones. Smell it. Love is …’ We sniffed the air. ‘Cointreau and disinfectant.’

  Feedback, and Mr Hepburn’s voice boomed out, too close to the mike. ‘Last song, ladies and gentlemen, your very last song! Let’s see everyone dancing with someone – courage, people!’ ‘Careless Whisper’ came on, and Helen nodded towards a huddled group that now emitted a single girl. Emily Joyce walked towards us, starting to speak while too far away to be heard.

  ‘…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘…’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Hello! I just said hi, that’s all.’

  ‘Hello, Emily.’

  ‘Helen.’

  ‘Well, hello Emily.’

  ‘What ya doing?’

  ‘We are being voyeurs,’ said Helen.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re watching,’ I said.

  ‘Did you see Mark put his hand up Lisa’s skirt?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid we missed that,’ said Helen. ‘We did see them kissing, though. That’s quite something. Did you ever see a reticulated python swallow a small bush pig, Emily? Apparently they dislocate their jaws, right back here—’

  Emily squinted irritably at Helen. ‘What?’

  ‘I said, did you ever see a reticulated python swallow a small—’

  ‘Look, do you want to dance or what?’ snapped Emily impatiently, poking at my kneecap.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ said Helen.

  I think I might have puffed my cheeks and blown out air. ‘All right then,’ I said and hopped down.

  ‘Don’t slip in the vomit, lovebirds,’ said Helen as we walked onto the dance floor.

  Slowies

  I held out my arms and for a moment we found ourselves standing with gripped hands out to the side like pensioners at a tea dance. Emily corrected me, placing my hand on the small of her back, and as we began our first rotation I closed my eyes and tried to identify an emotion. The artificial starlight suggested I ought to feel romantic, the rasping saxophone, an awareness of her pelvis and the clasp of her bra should have been enough to spark desire, but embarrassment was the emotion I recognised and the only longing I felt was for the end of the song. Love and desire were too tangled up with ridicule and, sure enough, at the edge of the hall Lloyd was waggling his tongue lewdly while Fox turned his back, crossed his arms and caressed his own shoulder blades. I adjusted my right hand so that only the middle finger showed, which seemed pretty witty to me, and we revolved away as the saxophone played on. Say something, say anything …

  Emily spoke first. ‘You smell of boys.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah, it’s old games kit. It’s all I had. Sorry.’

  ‘No, I like it,’ she said and snuffled into my neck and I felt a wetness there that might have been a kiss or the dab of a damp flannel. Grandmothers aside, I had kissed, or been kissed, twice before, though it might be more accurate to describe those events as facial collisions. The first occasion was in a darkened audio-visual exhibit on a history field trip to Roman remains. There’s no reason why anyone should instinctively know how to kiss – like snowboarding or tap-dancing, it can’t be learnt from watching – but Becky Boyne had taken her instruction from Disney fairy tales, pursing her lips into a tight, dry bud that she tapped around my face like a bird getting nuts from a feeder. Films had also taught us that a kiss was not a kiss unless it made a noise, and so each point of contact was accompanied by a little lip-smacking sound as artificial as the clip-clop that represents a horse. Eyes open, or closed? I kept them open in case of discovery or attack, and read the wall display behind her. The Romans, I noted, had pioneered under-floor heating and on it went, the tap-tap-tap becoming harder and more insistent, like someone trying to unblock a stapler.

  Kissing Sharon Findlay, on the other hand, was an angry, open-mouthed frenzied shark attack, both of us jammed down the back of a sofa. Harper had a den, a concrete bunker in the basement of his house that held a certain notoriety and on Friday nights resembled the Playboy Mansion’s fallout shelter. Here Harper presided over exclusive, high-rolling ‘DVD parties’, doling out own-brand lager spiked with soluble aspirin – the olive in our martini – to be drunk through a straw and potent enough to send us behind the sofa, kissing amongst the dust balls and the dead flies. I had never been more aware that the tongue was a muscle, a powerful skinless muscle like the arm of a starfish, and when my tongue tried to fight back against Sharon’s they had wrestled like drunks trying to squeeze past each other in a corridor. Whenever I tried to raise my head it was gr
ound back down onto the dusty underlay with the same kind of force and motion required to juice a grapefruit. I retain a certain memory that when Sharon Findlay belched, my cheeks puffed out, and when we finally pulled apart, she wiped her mouth along the entire length of her arm. The experience left me shaken and sore-jawed, with two small rips in the corner of my mouth, a third in the root of my tongue, and nauseous, too, from what must conservatively have been half a pint of someone else’s saliva. But I was also strangely excited, as if after some harrowing fairground ride, so that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it again immediately or never again in my life.

  This dilemma was taken out of my hands when she paired up with Patrick Rogers later that same night. We passed them now on the dance floor, devouring each other beneath the institutional glitter-ball. I felt another damp patch on my neck, then a murmured sentence that I failed to hear over the music.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said …’ But she was mumbling into my neck again, and I could only make out one word, ‘bath’.

  ‘I can’t hear you …’

  Again, something-something-bath, and I wondered, had she said that I needed a bath? If only they’d turn the volume down. ‘Sorry, one more time?’

  Emily mumbled.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘last time.’

  Emily took her face from my neck and glared at me with real anger. ‘F’fuck’s sake, I said I think about you in the bath!’

  ‘Oh. Do you? Thank you very much!’ I said, but this seemed insufficient, so – ‘You too!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘No, you don’t! Just … oh, just forget it. Oh, Jesus!’ She groaned and settled her head once again, but there was rage in our slow-dance now and we were both relieved when the song came to an end. Self-conscious in the sudden silence, the couples stepped away, faces glinting and grinning. ‘Where you going afterwards?’ said Emily.

  ‘Not sure. Meant to be going round Harper’s.’

  ‘To the den? Oh. Okay.’ She slumped her shoulders, pouted with her bottom lip and blew up at her fringe. ‘I’ve never been to the den,’ she said, and I might have invited her but Harper’s door policy was ruthless and inflexible. The moment passed, then she gave my chest a single hard push – ‘See ya.’ I had been dismissed.