Part 12 (1/2)

'Right! Well I'd love to, but I don't want to leave Mum alone . . .'

'Of course not, but you could come after Christmas, the day after Boxing Day or something. And my parents pretty much keep themselves to themselves, so it would just be me and you most of the time' - she thinks I need persuading - 'we can just hang out and walk and read and talk and stuff . . .'

'Okay,' I say.

'Fantastic! It's a deal then. I'm cold now. Let's go home.'

It's gone midnight when we get back to her halls of residence, but there are still a few people padding to and fro 131.

along the parquet corridors, the swots and the insomniacs and the stoners. They all say 'h.e.l.lo Alice' and then glance at me sceptically, but I don't really mind. I'm too busy thinking about how we say goodbye, the mechanics of it. At her door, she says, 'I'd better go straight to bed, I've got a nine-fifteen lecture.'

'Right. On . . . ?'

'”Stanislavski and Brecht, the Great Divide, question mark”.'

'Right, because they're not actually that different in many ways, though people tend to think that their philosophies are mutually exclu . . .'

'Actually, Brian, I really ought to go to bed.'

'Okay. Well, thanks for agreeing to come out with me.'

'Brian -1 didn't agree to. I wanted to,' and she leans forward very quickly and kisses me just near my ear. It's pretty quick, like a cobra strike, and my reflexes aren't really up to it, so I just have time to make that smacking noise with my mouth too loud in her ear, and then the door's closed and she's gone.

And once again, I'm walking up the gravel driveway, on my way home. So it was okay in the end. I think it was okay. I've been invited to a cottage, and I think she finds me 'interesting' now, even if 'interesting' wasn't really what I was going for. I'm a little uncomfortable about the reasons why, but still . . .

'Oi, Jackson!'

I look around.

'Sorry, I mean Brian. Brian, up here . . .' It's Rebecca, leaning out of the first-floor window, ready for bed in a long black T-s.h.i.+rt.

'So, how'd it go, lover-boy?'

'Oh, you know. Alright.'

'So is love in the air?'

'Not ”love”. ”Like”.'

'”Like” is in the air. I thought so. I sensed it. Like is in the air. Well done, Brian. And you hang in there, pal.'

132.

On the way home I go to the all-night garage and treat myself to a Picnic and a can of Lilt with the money I saved by bursting into tears. When I get home to Richmond House it's nearly two o'clock. There are three handwritten notes pinned to my door . . .

7.30 Brian - your Mum rang.

10.45 Spencer rang. Says he's 'bored out of his skull'. He's at the petrol station all night. Call him.

Brian, can you please not use my Apri without asking?

133.

17.

QUESTION: What precisely does Dorothy Gale have to do to return to Kansas? ANSWER: Click her heels three times, whilst thinking 'There's No Place Like Home'.

Mum's still out at Woolworths when I let myself in, so I make a mug of tea, flop on the sofa, pick up a pen and methodically mark up my Christmas television viewing in the b.u.mper edition of the Radio Times. I feel completely exhausted, which unfortunately owes more to Josh and Marcus' home-brew than any academic fervour. The last few weeks of term have pa.s.sed by in a blur of spa.r.s.ely populated parties in strangers' houses, or drinking games in the kitchen with Josh and Marcus' pals; big, burly sporty boys, and hearty, perma-tanned girls from the lacrosse team, all with their s.h.i.+rt collars turned up, all doing French, all from the home counties, and all with the same flicked-back blonde hair. I've made up a pretty good joke about this kind of girl, i.e. that they're all from Surrey-with-a-fringe-on-top, but unfortunately have no one to tell it to.

Anyway, whatever else they teach them at those private schools, they certainly know how to drink. I feel poisoned and grey and malnourished, and glad to get home, lie on the sofa, watch telly. There's nothing good on this afternoon, just some Western, so my eyes wander up to the school photo of me on top of the telly, taken just before Dad died. Is there anything more grizzly and joyless than an old school photo? They say 134.

the camera adds five pounds, but here it seems to have been added exclusively to my acne. I look positively mediaeval, like a plague victim, all gums and boils, and I wonder what Mum gets out of it, having me grimacing out at her while she's trying to watch the telly.

The photo depresses me so much that I have to turn the telly off, and go out to the kitchen to boil the kettle and make more tea. While it boils, I look out at the backyard, a shadowy patch the size of a double-bed that Mum had paved over when Dad died, to save bother. I make the tea, and take my bag upstairs to my bedroom. Mum's turned the radiator off, to save on heating, and it's icy cold, so I get into bed fully clothed and stare at the ceiling. The bed feels smaller for some reason, like a child's bed, in fact the whole room does. G.o.d knows why, it's not as if I've got any bigger, but already, after only three months it's started to feel like someone else's room. All that's left here is the kid's stuff - the piles of comics, the fossils on the window-sill, the Brodie's notes, the model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling covered in a fur of dust, the old school-s.h.i.+rts hanging in the wardrobe. I start to feel a bit sad for some reason, so I think about Alice for a while, and then I fall asleep.

I haven't spoken to her properly for ages. The Challenge team meetings broke up two weeks ago, and since then she seems to have been swallowed into her own little clique, a tight, noisy gang of cool and beautiful boys and girls that I've seen in the student bar, or driving round town, seven or eight of them stuffed giggling into her smoke-filled bright yellow 2CV, pa.s.sing a bottle of red wine between them and listening to Jimi Hendrix, then all going back to someone's Georgian flat to share interesting drugs and have s.e.x with each other. In fact the nearest I've got to Alice was in the student bar a couple of nights ago. I approached and said 'hiya', and they'd all said 'hiya' back, bright and smiley, but unfortunately there weren't 135.

enough chairs at the table for me to actually sit down with them. Also, Alice was having to crick her neck uncomfortably to turn and talk to me, and there's only so long you can stand at the edge of a group like that before you start to feel as if you should be clearing the empties off the table. Of course I have nothing but contempt for cool, self-satisfied, privileged cliques like that, but unfortunately not quite enough contempt to not want to be part of it.

But we did manage to talk long enough for Alice to confirm the cottage trip was definitely on. I don't have to bring anything except lots of books and a jumper. In fact she laughed at me when I asked if I had to bring a towel. 'We've lots of towels,' she said, and I thought, yes, of course you have. 'Can't wait,' she said. 'Can't wait either,' I said, but I really meant it, because I know that at college I'm never really going to be able to take up much of her time, there are too many distractions, too many lanky boys with bone structure and money and their own flats. But when we're finally away, just me and her, then that'll be my chance, my big opportunity to prove to her the absolute inevitability of us being together.

It's Christmas morning, and the first thing I do when I get up is eat a big bowl of Frosties and turn the telly on. It's about ten o'clock, and The Wizard of Oz has already started, so I put it on in the background while Mum and I open each other's presents. Dad's there too, in a way, like Jacob Marley's ghost, dressed like he was in an old Polaroid I have of him, looking weary and sardonic in a burgundy dressing gown, black hair slicked back, wearing new slippers and smoking the packet of f.a.gs that I bought and wrapped up for him as a present.

This year Mum's bought me some new vests and the Collected Works of e.e.c.u.mmings that I specifically asked for, and which she had to order specially. I check the price on the fly-leaf and feel a twinge of guilt at how expensive it was, a day's wages at least, but I thank her and kiss her on the cheek, 136.

and give her my presents in return - a little wicker basket of smellies from the Body Shop, and a second-hand Everyman edition of Bleak House.

'What's this then?'

'It's my favourite d.i.c.kens. It's brilliant.'

'”Bleak House”? Sounds like this house.'

And that just about sets the tone for the day, really. d.i.c.kensian.

We're joined for Christmas dinner by Uncle Des. Uncle Des's wife left him for a bloke from her work a couple of years ago now, so Mum invites him round for Christmas dinner every year because he doesn't have much family of his own. Even though he's not my real uncle, just the bloke from three-doors-down, he thinks he's somehow got the right to ruffle my hair and talk to me as if I was twelve years old.

'How ya' doing then, brainbox?' he says, in his children's entertainer voice.

'Fine thank you, Uncle Des.'

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, don't they teach you how to use a comb at university!' he says, ruffling away. 'Look at the state of you!' - ruffle, ruffle, ruffle - and it occurs to me that this is all pretty rich coming from a forty-five-year-old man with a tight blond perm and a moustache that looks as if it's been cut out from a carpet sample, but I keep quiet because Mum doesn't like me back-chatting to Uncle Des. So I squirm bashfully and count myself lucky that at least this year he isn't pulling fifty-pence pieces out from behind my ear.

Mum pops her head round the door and says, 'Sprouts are on!' A waft of warm chlorophyllic air confirms her warning, and I feel a little wave of nausea, because I can still taste the Frosties caught between my back teeth. Then she heads back to the kitchen and Uncle Des and I sit and watch The Wizard of Oz with the sound turned down low.

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, not this rubbish again!' says Uncle Des. 'Every Christmas, the b.l.o.o.d.y-Wizardofb.l.o.o.d.y-Oz.'

137.

'You'd think they'd find something else to put on, wouldn't you?!' I say. Then Uncle Des asks about college.