Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith [17]
(My whole body goes cold.)
Now there’s one trial I can’t wait to see come to court. I hope we all get to come to it, Norman is saying.
We will, Dominic says. They’ll need men for there to be any coming at a trial like that.
Just what I was telling Brian, Norman says. Be ready to step in, now, when the moment’s right.
You know, I say, it said in the paper this morning that teenagers who are gay are six times more likely to kill themselves than teenagers who aren’t.
Good. Ha ha! Norman says.
Dominic’s eyes cloud. Human species, self-patrolling, he says.
They start talking as if I’m not there again, like they did when they were talking about work.
See, that’s what I don’t get, Dominic says shaking his head, serious. Because, there’s no way they could do it, I mean, without one. So it’s like, pointless.
Freud defined it, Norman says (Norman did psychology at Stirling), as a state of lack. A state of lacking something really, you know, fundamental.
Dominic nods, grave-faced.
Exactly, he says. Obviously.
Adolescent backwardness. Marked underdevelopment, Norman says.
Yeah, but a really heavy case of underdevelopment, Dominic says. I mean, never mind anything else. Never mind how weird it is. Like, what gets me is, there’s nothing to do the job. Nothing to do the jiggery-pokery with. And that’s why Queen Victoria didn’t make rugmunch illegal.
How’s that? Norman says.
It was on Channel Four. Apparently she said there was no such thing, like, it didn’t exist. And she was right. I mean, when men do it, poofs, in sexual terms, I mean, it’s fucking disgusting and it leads to queer paedophilia and everything, but at least it’s real sex they have, eh? But women. It’s, like, how can they? I just don’t get it. It’s a joke, Dominic says.
Yeah, but it’s good, Norman says, if you’re watching and they’re both fuckable.
Yeah, but the real ones are really mostly pretty unfuckable, you have to admit, Dominic says.
(Oh my God my sister who is related to me is a greg, a lack, unfuckable, not properly developed, and not even worth making illegal.)
(There are so many words I don’t know for what my little sister is.)
Dominic and Norman are somehow roaring with laughter again. They have their arms round each other.
I have to go now, I say.
No you don’t, they say in unison and fill my glass with Cobra.
Yes, I do, I say.
I shake them off at the multi-storey. I dodge behind a car so they don’t know where I’ve gone. I wait there until the legs I can see moving about have disappeared. I hear them go up the stairs and I watch them fumble at the exit ticket machine until finally whichever one of them is driving finds the ticket, works out how to put it into the machine the right way and their car goes under the lifted barrier.
I throw up under a tree at the side of the road on my way home. I look up. The tree I’ve just been sick under is in full white blossom.
(Adolescent backwardness.)
(I am fourteen. Myself and Denise MacCall are in a geography classroom. It is interval. We have somehow managed to stay in; maybe Denise said she was feeling sick or maybe I did; that was how you got to stay in over interval. We often said we felt sick if it was raining or cold.
There is a pile of homework jotters on the table. Denise is going through them, reading out people’s names. We say out loud at each name whether we pass or fail the person, like the game Anthea and I play at home at the countdown of the chart on Top of the Pops. Hurray for someone we like. Boo for someone we don’t.
Denise finds Robin Goodman’s jotter.
For some reason Denise MacCall really dislikes Robin Goodman from Beauly, with her short curly dark hair thick on top of her head, her darkish skin, her long hands that the music teacher is always going on about when she plays her clarinet, her serious, studious, far-too-clever face. I dislike her too, though I hardly know her. She is in two or three of my classes, that’s all I know about her, apart from that she plays the clarinet. But it makes me feel happy