Flick (6 page)

BASKING IN THE AFTER-GNOR

So time flies and I find myself, a fortnight after GNOR (the Glorious Night Of Rainbow, hallowed be her name), walking home from the school bus stop through Osford center, with an old mate of mine, Angie, who now works at our village's one and only pub. Again, she's someone I went to playschool with, and we ate dinner together every night for about three years when we were in single digits because our mothers worked in the same supermarket and used to take alternate shifts so they could babysit us. I haven't spoken with Angie since before GNOR, as it shall now formally be known, so I'm happily boring her with every detail of the things she has missed, right down to the composition of Rainbow's irises (very dark blue with a slash of gold through each). I like Angie because she's one of the guys without being too butch and she'll listen to you without trying to get off with you. Plus she always lets me drink for free, even if Rob, the grumpy manager, is watching. She picks at her nose stud while I struggle to describe the exact curvature of Rainbow's bum.

“So.” Angie flicks dried nose skin to the curb. “D'you click with her then?”

“Yeah, I think so. I actually asked her and she said most of the time, clicking takes a while, y'know, you have to get into the other person's rhythm, but she said we fitted instantly, like jigsaw pieces, which I thought was wicked.”

“Completely, I know when I first started seeing Jamie we took a while to click but now when we're together it's awesome—”

“Yeah—” I attempt to butt in. Jamie isn't actually Angie's boyfriend by the way. They have a weird and complicated relationship based on sleeping with each other and being best friends—the downside of being a “matey” kind of girl. I've had words with Jamie about it, but he says Angie knows the score and if she hasn't got it from the things he's said to her about wanting to sleep about a bit before “settling” for someone, then she'll probably have got it from watching him sleep about a bit with practically all of our mates. I don't agree with his approach but I have a certain amount of admiration for his big, hairy balls.

“—and there's no awkwardness anymore. When we wanna say something we just say it—”

“—yeah, like—”

“It's so simple now.”

Grrr, let me talk about Rainbow, let me talk about Rainbow, let me talk about Rainbow. I'm holding my jaw tight with impatience. She knows I'm not listening so I don't know why she bothers. I bite at my nails. I have to get my sentence out or
I'll die
, thinks my brain.

“Jamie said to me the other week . . . Flick? Are you
shaking
? Oh for fuck's sake, talk about Rainbow then.”

Ahhhh good. “Okay, so I said to her did she want a drink and she said . . .” Wicked. I get it all out. By the time we get to our estate I'm still not finished so we sit on the pavement and I talk her ear off for another hour before there's no more to tell and then I go home, eat dinner and have a wank. Bliss.

FRIENDS

My “time equals school over disinformation” equation proves true, and another pointless couple of weeks go by with little to report. We stay in, go out, shake it all about, drink and shout. Ash shags people and cries, I take a few lines, Daisy gets dumped, we camp in the woods, Mike gets bottled in the face late at night near Daisy's place, Ella and Josh fight and make up and fuck loudly next door and I call Ash a whore, always unheard, and we get wankered and Jamie fucks a skank, and I wank and wank and I fail one more test and pass two and flirt my way out of the former and get stoned round the corner. There's flashing lights and later nights and one full moon and nothing new over and over again with no discernible end and all the time, in the back of my mind, I'm seeing colors, lips, tits, hair that flicks, a rainbow of Rainbow.

It's been a fortnight since our first rendezvous and Rainbow is proving as illusive as her namesake. I've got her number and MSN off a mutual mate but my casual and, I'd like to think, smooth texts go unanswered, and since I'm reluctant to appear anything but my usual cool and unflappable self I can't beg her for another meet-up, but I let it slip that I'm very interested to certain notorious gossips (such as Fat Sal) and I wait for news.

Privately I allow myself to remember her by saying her name. Just once each time, quietly, so as not to jinx it, and longingly, because I need, now I know what it means, to feel alive again.

All my friends seem to be ghost versions of themselves. We sit out and smoke up on the field at the back of our school one lunchtime. Gav joins us with a cheery grin, as he sometimes does when there's money to be made on the school field, and starts rolling joints for Josh and telling him about this PCP murder he saw on
Without a Trace
. I can hear him from where we're sat, about ten feet away on a small grassy bank with a good view of the school, saying something about stabbing and laughing like an excited toddler. I suck in the pot and hold it thoughtfully. Dildo starts telling me a story about his sister and I grunt at pauses and think about Rainbow.

“We went to Poz's on . . . on Sunday . . . no, Saturday, 'cause it was the day of that boxing match. So we went to Poz's for a line and that stupid dyke was there, being sick in his toilet, right?”

Grunt.

“So I tell her to go home because our mam doesn't know but our dad said not to let her go to Poz's until she's fourteen and that's not 'til August but she's such a fucking whiny little bitch with a face like, ‘urrr,' like a cat's arse, you know, you know Bex, don't you?”

Grunt.

“So she's falling off her shoes and her tits are falling out her top and that's not pretty.” He lights the joint he's been rolling, I throw my dead one away, and we share his cozily. “Y'know, like, I don't wanna see that, do I? So she starts getting ready to do another line and I say get some water down you, 'cause she's fucking puked up everything she's had in her stomach and I know for a fact all she's been drinking all night is cherry Lambrini 'cause it's so cheap it's the only thing they'll buy, right?”

Grunt.

“So she's fucking telling me to get fucked and I say do whatever you want then you fucking slag and she downs some vodka and she does another line, joins in on the joints, which I'm not happy about 'cause she starts talking to Katy, who I'm trying to get with, and then she goes and fucking gets off with
Danny
”—Danny's Dildo's best friend—“and I can see them out the corner of my fucking eye, and she's got her skirt up round her waist and his arse is going at it like that Jane Fonda ‘buns of steel' video.”

I laugh. Dildo looks offended. It clearly wasn't the right time to laugh (and I'm clearly not listening). Maybe someone died in the story.

“Anyway,” he continues. “I think, Fuck this, and I go to Poz's bedroom with Katy. And I've been going for Katy for months, you know that, and finally,
finally
I'm in there, and she sucks my dick and then I turn her around and I've got her arse, so fucking hot, and I push my dick in her from behind, not in her arse, like, y'know, like, her cunt, right?”

“Mmm.”

“And I'm fucking away at her and her big tits are jiggling, man, and it's wicked and, FUCK, man, the door opens and Poz puts his head round the corner and goes, ‘Dildo, you've gotta get your sister, she's well out of it and I can't have her here like that,' and you know, I fucking understand his point 'cause it's his house, right, but if he's got a thirteen-year-old there, and she's clearly fucked, then it's, well, that's trouble, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So I zip up, apologize to Katy, I go out the room, and there's fucking Bex . . .”

Rainbow.

“Mascara and that shit all down her face.”

Her beautiful face.

“Coke-ringed fucking nose.”

Her beautiful little nose.

“Tits falling out . . .”

Her beautiful chest cuddled to mine.

“. . . skirt ridden up above her pussy . . .”

Her beautiful pussy in my face.

“. . . Danny looking a fucking smug twat . . .”

Me and Rainbow, Rainbow and me.

“. . . stroking her . . .”

Pushing myself into her.

“. . . KISSING HER NECK . . .”

Diving in her, losing myself, opening up, letting go.

“FUCKING BASTARD TWAT.”

Swimming in Rainbow, helpless, resigned, content, forever.

We sit in silence for a while, each mulling over his thoughts. Dildo's words filter through my dreams of Rainbow and reach my conscious mind. “Dildo? What was the point of that story?”

Dildo shrugs. “I dunno. Just every weekend seems to be the same, doesn't it?”

I'm looking at him. Poor Dildo, his mop of hair unevenly cut about his ears, stubble sprouting randomly on his face, nicotine under his fingernails, all on a giant's frame. Yeah, Dildo is a gentle giant. His other sister is famous in our area. She was a druggie and died from an overdose when she was seventeen and Dildo was nine. It was in all the papers, and as usual Fez and Troy were questioned, even though they were only fourteen at the time. We still don't know that they weren't involved, so Dildo's never been on good terms with either of them. It was sad but as Troy said to me once while muntered, at least she went out with a bang. The only other way to go here is slowly, when you're old and thin and alone and shafted from working in steel and coughing up blood that you can't seem to get a lawsuit through the courts for. And she made it onto
Look North
. Dying's the only thing that gets you noticed around here. Which is depressing and probably not a helpful thought for her family or the little brother she left behind, all wide blue eyes and black hair and now scratched up from various burn marks and from mucking about on the street on his bike with no one watching him. His parents gave up after she died. Pretty much forgot they had three other kids: Dildo, Bex, plus one other little brother (younger I mean, he's not a midget or anything).

Dildo's looking out across the field to the sky above the art block. Up in the deep summer blue a massive bird soars higher and higher on a thermal, dips forward and tumbles down, then arcs round again, soars back upwards with its wings spread wide, through a wisp of cloud, then beyond and away, until we can only see a tiny dot over the sea. I think about what he's said, how everything seems to be the same, always, and I nod slowly. And then, because I don't know what I could say or do that would make anything change for Dildo, or for any of us, I suck another lungful of the sweetly acrid smoke, then let it drift out through my lips, floating away and disappearing into the air.

ILLUSORY HOPE AND MY COLD, TINY DICK

I, however, have a Get out of Purgatory Free card. The following day Mam comes into the spare room, where I'm on the computer wasting away time I don't know what to do with, and thrusts the phone into my hands, whispering loudly, “It's a young lady!”

The phone splutters with laughter. “Thanks, Mam,” I mumble, taking it off her, wondering what Ash/Ella/Daisy, none of them young ladies, wants this time. A clear, articulate, polite voice, still with a mild northern accent, rings out of the phone.

“Hello, is this Flick?”

“Yeah, hello, is this Rainbow?” I almost drop the handset. “How do?”

“Huh? Oh, I'm good yeah! I'm sorry I've been so busy—I've got my exams coming up and it's a bit mental with me being new and transferring and there was a whole load of crap to do . . . but I'm free now if you're free!”

Yay! Rainbow! I think, but I calm myself. The aim is to come off cool, sexy and nonchalant, and also to secure a date and then love her forever and move into a Victorian flat on the seafront at Ness or emigrate to Berlin with our two charming but illegitimate children and I'll be a graffiti artist and she'll be my muse. No problem. I'd better stay calm and collected for the moment though or she'll think I'm a psycho.

“Oh . . . cool.” I swing my legs onto the spare bed and lean back in the computer chair, in an attempt to channel James Dean. “Wicked, yeah, that's—obviously I didn't worry, I knew you had work, so, you know, it was cool, so I'm cool. I haven't really thought about you—it. I mean, like, dating. Obviously I thought about you . . . Anyway, I'm pretty busy too actually. In fact—I'm slammed.”

“Oh . . . so you don't want to meet up?”

“Oh no! I mean, yeah, that would be great, I meant—slammed as in . . . well you know . . . um . . .” Fuck. My brain has gone blank. I was so successfully being noncommittal that my brain has lost its commitment to the English language. Think of something, Flick,
think
. I'VE FORGOTTEN ENGLISH . . .
Say something!
says the little voice in my head. What else could “slammed” mean? “Beaten?” I mutter. Out loud. Oh God, Jesus and fuck.

“Beaten? Have you been hurt?”

“No! I didn't mean beaten. I meant . . . beaten as, as, as in tired, as in I'm beat from doing stuff, but, but now I'm free, and not really doing anything . . .”

“. . . So you're not busy?”

“I'm not busy right now, I have, I have, nothing . . . absolutely nothing to do right now. I've been on the Internet for the past hour looking up what I'd do on a law degree and now I'm on eBay looking up ‘smallest,' so . . .”

“. . . What?”

“Um . . .” The hole I've dug has no way out. It's dark in here and I want my mum. “It's really funny actually, um, you, um . . . well you look up ‘smallest' and just see what you get, and there's a teeny tiny phone. Anyway . . . I'll tell you later. So where d'you wanna go slash what d'you wanna do?”

“I don't mind, where d'you want to go? Slash do?”

“I don't mind either, we can do whatever you like.”

“Oh no, I'm crap at choosing, I can make massive decisions about my life, but I can't decide how to spend afternoons or what to eat or anything like that. You choose!”

“I'd like to do something that you'd like to do, Rainbow.”

“Well yeah but . . . I don't know what to do here. Go to the cinema?”

“If you'd like to, Bow, that would be lovely. May I call you Bow?”

She laughs. “You may. But I don't want to go just because I'd like to! I want to do something
you
want to do too!”

Oh, isn't she so polite, I think happily as the voice pipes up sardonically,
This could go on forever
.

“Ha ha, well I don't know what we do around here. There isn't much to do. We sit in the center of Osford and drink alcoholic Panda Pops mainly. What d'you like doing though?”

“Boys.” I feel her grinning provocatively down the phone. “But for today I'd like to do something that you usually do.”

“Err, okay!” I stop to wonder what she looks like naked, then realize she's expecting me to speak. “Er, sorry, like what?”

“How would I know!?” She squeals laughing. “What d'you do in your free time?”

“In my free time? Erm . . .” A pause ensues.

“. . . Flick?”

“ . . . I mostly just look up ‘smallest' on eBay.”

“Right.”

We go to the beach. I've lived here all my life and can see the sea from my bedroom window. In summer we have barbecues and jump off the pier at high tide. Our hair is stiff and brittle from years of fucking about in the water and most of us have an obscene amount of bright flowery Hawaiian shorts in our wardrobes, and a wetsuit in the garage that we never use. These are the symptoms of a seaside dweller. It's normal for me but it fascinates Rainbow. We meet on the beachfront and I grin inanely as we walk towards the water on the wet sands, me holding her hot little hand. We roll up our trousers and paddle in the wash, shyly kicking the water up at each other. We count the boats.

Rainbow tells me about Hull, where she's from. It's a city south of here by an hour and a half, and almost as grubby as Sandford, but she used to live in a really nice Victorian terrace in a posh, leafy suburb practically in the country, which doesn't surprise me. Her mums moved out here because they wanted to live near the sea, so now they live in a sizeable sandstone house in what, I note to myself, is the nice part of Ness, right near the beach. That's not to say she's rich. Houses are cheap as chips round here and people from the south sometimes move here to get more land or extra bedrooms, but it's true that some areas of Clyde County have less litter and bigger gardens than others. Ness is considered a wee bit classier that Osford and Langrick because it has tearooms and a reasonable view from the cliff.

She tells me about her little brother, Tim, who is shy and gay and had a rough time with bullies in Hull, and about her mums, one who works in a graphic design firm and the other who writes books on historical figures. The designer grew up in Hull and is of Irish ancestry, and the author is Scottish, with parents from Glasgow and Trinidad. I tell her, feeling a bit lame, that my family come from Clyde County and have for a while, although beyond my grandparents we've never discussed it so I don't really know. She calls me inbred and I call her a cock and push her over onto the sand, and we tickle each other, which is just an excuse to touch. She finds shells she likes and I put them in my pockets for her, planning to bore a hole in one so she can use it as a necklace. I kiss her neck. We look at the birds together and try to identify them.

We do the things you do honestly when you're between fifteen and seventeen, and dishonestly when you're older, in the illusory hope that you are still between fifteen and seventeen. This includes talking about life and the future (I don't yet mention the kids and Berlin), our hopes and dreams (I want to get away from Clyde and retire my poor mam from her job on the till at the co-op; Rainbow wants to live in a beach hut in Montauk, New York, and paint and sculpt like Margaret Kilgallen and Jo Jackson), our favorite Green Day CD (
International Superhits!
) and also how we both have a secret jones for Gregory Peck after watching
The Big Country
. Then, of course, the most obvious but also most important question, and I've been asking everyone this since I was five with no clue as to how I would answer it: “What d'you want to be when you're older?”

Rainbow looks to the sea dreamily, already imagining her future, and then a toothy smile slowly spreads across her cheeks and she turns to me. “I want to be an artist.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, a painter, like I said, out in Montauk.”

“Is there a big art community there?”

“Not particularly, but I'd exhibit all over the world.”

We sit in silence while I think about the sheer enormity of her imagination and dreams and belief that she can make them happen, and wonder whether it's a state of mind she was born with or whether she's just had a lot more encouragement in life. She doesn't seem to be much better off than me. I've seen her house (a spying trip with Ash from Ella's back garden) and it's not that big, but her family all seem to be working for pleasure rather than money. Perhaps that's a choice for everyone and I've just never thought about it, maybe because I've never seen it happen before. I'd ask whether she has the money to not work for a living but I've been taught never to talk about money. It's odd but I've always noticed that rich kids will be like, “Oh man, I'm so broke, this is how much I have in my bank account,” etc. and the less well-off know that it's rude to even mention that kind of stuff. Fucking insensitive bastards. My mind rolls back around to Rainbow and I imagine her in a paint-splashed smock somewhere in the USA, tucking her hair back behind her ears and surveying her work.

“Can you make a living off of that?”

“Yeah, of course, it's hard but people do it every day, in every—well, at least in every free country in the world.” She stops for a moment, then shrugs without sadness, in a practical, even optimistic manner. “And everything's hard. If you're gonna try for something, might as well be something you really want.”

I've been watching her out of the corner of my eye the whole time we're talking. The way her lips move, the strawberry pink of her cheeks, each freckle, and I suddenly know that whatever happens to us in the future, I will remember this girl for the rest of my life, that she will change the way I see the world, and that people like that are hard to find. Practically impossible to find when you've known everyone in your life for its entire fifteen-year duration. And then I tell her that I have this strange feeling, like I'm an old man looking back over my life, and I'm watching this young girl as she looks out to sea.

Rainbow smiles back at me. She nods thoughtfully. “Like
On Chesil Beach
.”

“Like what?”

She grins, her lip catching on her tooth. “A book. You should read it.” Her hair whips around her cheeks, both red with the cold, and her eyes look alight and bluer than I've ever seen a pair of eyes look, and vulnerable, and honest. She leans into me and whispers to me shyly, but knowingly, “I think it means you like me.” She looks to the water, then turns back to me grinning sweetly, but almost challengingly, like she's just set a dare, and as we lock gazes her slender arms move slowly, charmingly, to her waist.

She unbuttons her jeans and drops down to sit on the sand and sheds them like skin. She stands up and her sweater and shirt come off over her head as one, leaving a sheer, pearl-colored tank top and pink French knickers. The top quickly follows the rest of her clothes onto the ground and she hooks one finger in her underwear and tugs them down her leg and onto the pile. I'm left still taking in the above information as Rainbow walks into the waves, turning to smile proudly at me and sinking further backwards until the water swirls around her tummy, sandy at the bottom, clear where the spray splashes at her breasts.

“What?” she shouts in her innocent, playful, childlike voice. “Too chicken?” She laughs at me.

Cheeky. I can't help grinning wildly and laughing back. “Fuck you!”

I can't believe I'm about to show her my skinny, spotty form in sunlight. Not to mention it's fucking cold and my knob's going to be fucking tiny. So not smooth. But fuck it. I drop my coat and rip off my T-shirt and sweater. I flick out my belt and rest my hand on the top of my jeans hesitantly.

“Bwarrrk, boc boc boc, CHICKEN!!!” She flaps her arms like wings.

I grin, still frozen to the spot.

“C'mon, Flick. Me and the water are waiting for you.”

I jiggle my leg and bite my lip. I glance down. Yep. Tiny.

“Are you worried your dick'll be small?”

I let out a massive nervous laugh.

“It's okay,” she says reassuringly. “I'll help you warm it up.”

I look up and she winks at me. I steel myself, whatever that means, and with a last grin at her, I drop my kegs.

“Wooooohooooo!!” Rainbow lifts her arms up to the air and screams and I run into the waves and dive onto her, dragging her down into the water.

She screams girlishly and I follow suit: “BASTARD it's so cold!”

I touch her lips with my fingers, holding her close with my right arm, then kiss her full and deep on the mouth, tasting the salt water and feeling Rainbow's tongue, my hands moving down further, stroking her back and bum and lifting her up to wrap her firm little legs round my waist. I feel my dick harden. Her hand reaches down and wraps around it. My hand reaches down and touches her between her legs. We pull our lips apart and stay very close to each other, each looking in the other's eyes, breathing heavily as our hands explore each other. What she's doing with her fingers feels so good. I hold on to her tight and close my eyes. Rainbow lets out a little moan. Then her hand pulls me a little harder, closer, until she's sitting just above me, and then inside her. Oh. My. God. It's overwhelming. She's tight and it sort of wasn't what I was expecting. The pressure all over my dick feels incredible, and going in and out makes the feeling come in waves, building so quickly I have to stop her and wait a moment to keep from going past the point of no return. I kiss her again, and she whispers to me and kisses my ear and my face. I kiss her nipples, keep going steadily, burying my head in her shoulder, thrusting, biting her neck gently and then finally, letting go, totally going under.