The Booby Trap and Other Bits and Boobs (4 page)

Boobs. In the words of the Bloodhound Gang, hooray for boobies.

I have two. They are OK. Not amazing, but not terrible. I have hoisted them in bras, fed three babies with them, wished they were bigger and felt them for lumps, because lumps are the serious side of boobs. My grandma died of breast cancer when I was eleven. I still miss her now.

When I was asked to write about my relationship with my breasts I was a bit perplexed. I love them and yet, it's complicated. Like most girls I have not always reacted in a positive way to my boobs. When I was about ten or eleven the first girls in my class began ‘developing', as we called it, and began needing to buy their first bras. I found most of the process mortifying. Cuddling my parents was harder as the new existence of a chest came between us figuratively and literally. I felt I was betraying them by not being a little girl anymore. I then started wearing training bras which my dad – probably pretty mortified himself – called ‘bib tops'. This was pretty cringey.

As I entered my teens I began to embrace my new curves a little more. They weren't going away so I knew I'd better get a handle on them. Aged about thirteen I remember asking my mum if I could go and get a real bra. We finally went to get one and I was a 34D. I felt rather smug about that as she hadn't thought I needed a bra yet. Bib tops were still OK by her. Suddenly – ha! I had a proper bra size and they sounded like they weren't too small, either. This was what I wanted, right? My friends and I then proceeded to spend most of our late teens wearing Wonderbras. It seemed to be that we all wanted a killer cleavage. God, Wonderbras were uncomfy. Fortunately my twenties introduced me to getting properly measured, balconettes, comfort and a happier, less aggressive rack. I haven't looked back except for the times after having my babies when I have endured the joy of nursing bras. Until that point, you don't think there's going to be a time in your life when you will wear whatever it takes to get your boobs out whenever and wherever you are just to feed that baby.

I think all sizes have pros and cons. I have experienced mine big and small. With my pregnancies I've got to try out having really massive boobs. Quite fun and I always miss them a little when they go. That being said, what I have now is fine. A handful but not out of hand.

So what's round the corner? Hopefully we still have some fun times ahead. I will still be hoisting them in bras, possibly feeding another baby with them one day and checking them for lumps. When all is said and done it's the serious side of boobs it comes down to. I hope they stay healthy. I really do miss my grandma.

When I was growing up I only had one boob. It was fairly disturbing as I was the only one who knew, and I used to stuff the other side of my bra with tissue. It wasn't until one day when it just got too lopsided that I ran down to the kitchen where my mum was making carbonara and shouted out in despair, ‘I'VE ONLY GOT ONE BOOB.' Mum sat me down and told me it was totally normal. Weirdly, within a couple of months I grew a second boob and all was OK. You can rest assured now that I have two fully functioning boobs.

If boobs could talk they'd demand you to stop being so darn silly. They'd ask you why it is you squeeze them into bras that are quite obviously the wrong size for you and make them feel like they are about to spill over the top and into oblivion. I'm pretty sure they'd also wonder why you or your partner don't give them more attention either; and when they say attention, they mean checking for the signs and symptoms of breast cancer on a regular basis so that you could catch the disease nice and early. They'd tell you to stop being such a ninny because nine out of ten lumps are in fact nothing sinister, but knowing what it is for sure, NOW, is the best defence against the disease that kills so many of your boobs mates every year. Your boobs need you, and until they have a voice (which, quite frankly would be a bit weird, wouldn't it?) I will be telling you and the rest of Britain to check them and give them the love they deserve. Something I stupidly didn't do and now live with breast cancer at twenty-seven because it was detected very late. So, love thy boobies, people!

If there were an NSPCC equivalent for boobs then mine would probably be in care. I haven't been very nice to my boobs. In fact, they are suffering from a severe case of neglect.

I've got size 32DD boobies and I do everything in my power to conceal them. I am an expert in minimiser bras (the best ones are from M&S by the way) and finding clothes that hide any hint of a bulge (loose shirts are always a winner). My sports bra is so tight that I struggle to breathe (extremely unhelpful during a legs, bums and tums) and I would feel more comfortable wearing a batman costume than a dress that revealed my cleavage. I don't even like that word. It sounds like an STD. ‘I've got a nasty case of cleavage.'

Essentially, what I'd really love are little, pert, cute, size B puppies. You know. Those boobs that don't really need a bra. Those boobs that sit happily up like springer spaniels waiting for treats. Those boobs that laugh in the face of a strapless, silky dress. Ah, how I would love to buy those pretty, lace balcony bras rather than heading straight for the Mammary Gland lingerie.

You see what I mean about being mean? I don't think I've ever said a nice word to my poor glands. They just sit there, doing their job and doing it very well and all I do is complain. Enough.

I've grown up in the Kate Moss era where gamine is God. As a teenager I used to stare at the models in magazines and long for their fragile, boyish frames. It was a time before street style (a wonderful, celebration of different bodies) and TOWIE – big boobs just weren't ‘in'.

But I have recently felt a shift in myself. In a world where people pay thousands for painful surgery to enlarge their breasts, I should be embracing my boobies. I should wiggle them and jiggle them and set them free. I should wine them and dine them and dress them up.

The more I realise how ungrateful I've been, the more I realise how ridiculous it is to fight against the body shape you naturally have. Oh the time I've wasted thinking that the grass is greener makes me cringe. After thirty-two years of boob embarrassment, it's now time to give them some love. I need to invest in a few good, pretty bras and maybe even experiment with a bit of cleavage (there's a cream for that I'm sure). I need to remind myself that I Am A Woman and it's OK to have curves. In fact, it's more than OK – it's lovely. And I need to start saying positive things to my breasts. And I must remember not to do this out loud.

Yes, 2013 is the year for Boobie Love, and I'm sure my puppies will appreciate this.

Ben Harris and the Orbs of Power

Good Friday, 1995

Ben swallowed hard, trying not to let her see the fear in his eyes. He was close.

So close.

It had taken him many months, but he was finally face to face with the culmination of his long, dangerous quest. Now, all that stood between him and triumph were two black semi-circles of cotton and polyester, and a fiendish pair of metal hooks. As he studied this final obstacle, he felt his nerve threatening to betray him, and fought against it.

He had come so far. He would not fail now.

The quest was simple in concept, but no less daunting for its simplicity.

Sean Redman, Ben's best friend and companion on what would undoubtedly be an adventure full of peril and hardship, had summed it up with his usual class and elegance during the last days of the summer holiday, after they had finished watching
Raiders of the Lost Ark
for the hundredth time. He had taken a sheet of A3 paper, written THE ORBS OF POWER at the top in a mediocre approximation of the iconic Indiana Jones lettering, and addressed his friend.

‘Tits. Real ones. Female too, no trying to be clever. In the flesh, before the end of the school year.'

Ben had considered this. ‘Do we need to touch them, or just see them?'

‘The two things sort of go hand in hand, mate,' replied Sean, grinning lasciviously. ‘But for the sake of clarity, yeah, you need to touch them. Otherwise walking in on your sister in the shower would qualify. Although in the case of
your
sister, that would be pretty much the best possible result for me.'

‘Piss off,' said Ben, mildly. He wasn't really annoyed; Sean had been describing the array of things he would like to do to Chloe in remarkably graphic detail since the first time he had joined Ben's family for dinner after school. It was now just part of their routine.

‘Has to be consensual too,' continued Sean. ‘No grab and run. Otherwise I'd already be sorted.'

Ben nodded. Sean was an impulsive, risk-taking quester, and had technically already made momentary contact with one of the Orbs of Power, thanks to a remarkably ill-advised single finger prod to the chest of Laura Kelly, who sat behind him in Maths. His foolhardiness had drawn first a gasp of shock, then a furious, bellowed lecture on the subject of personal boundaries, punctuated with a series of vicious blows to his arms and face, delivered with unerring precision by the sharp edge of Laura's Take That ruler.

‘One more thing,' said Sean. ‘The main thing, actually.'

‘What?' asked Ben.

‘This is a quest. We take it seriously, or we don't even bother starting. So that means you don't tell anybody, and especially not any girls. They won't understand. All right?'

‘Agreed,' said Ben, although he was no longer really listening. His mind, as it often did, had wandered back to when the idea for the adventure had first occurred to him, a moment that was now seared forever into his memory.

He was lying on a sun lounger on a Kefalonian beach ten days earlier, his dad snoring steadily on one side of him, his mum with her nose buried in a bright pink paperback on the other. His sister had gone into town with the friends she had made in their apartment complex, and Ben was considering heading into the sea to cool down. The sun was beating down from the empty blue sky, and he could feel his skin beginning to burn, a tingling sensation that wasn't wholly unpleasant. He sat up, wincing as his back separated slowly from the white plastic of the lounger, and was about to slide his feet into his flip-flops when he saw her.

Saw them.

Her name was Ria, and she was a waitress in the restaurant they had eaten in the previous night, a narrow glass room wedged between the edge of the beach and main drag that was pleasantly amiable for such an obvious tourist trap. It sold Greek salad, prawns that were five times as big as the ones his mum brought home from Tesco on Saturday morning, and fillets of fish so exotic that he was only aware of them from photos in his encyclopaedia: swordfish, mahi-mahi, barracuda, stingray. All of which were available with chips, so as not to completely terrify the majority of the restaurant's clientele.

She had appeared beside their table, a vision of tanned skin, gleaming white teeth and long black hair, and introduced herself. Ben noticed a tiny frown appear on his mother's forehead and a look of outright dislike rise onto Chloe's face, but then Ria leant forward to pass out menus, and he would not have noticed if his mother and sister had got up on the table and started dancing the can-can. The top three buttons of Ria's white shirt were open, revealing a deep, gently curving cleavage that instantly turned his mouth as dry as the Sahara, and a sliver of pale yellow material that whispered of hidden treasure.

She took their order and glided away through the busy restaurant, leaving chaos in her wake. Ben stared blankly at the table, unable to remember what he'd selected from the menu less than thirty seconds earlier, as his dad smoothed down his hair and straightened the collar of his shirt, drawing a wide-eyed look of fury from his wife and an exaggerated roll of the eyes from his daughter. The atmosphere at the table was charged, almost electric, as they waited for their starters. When the food arrived in the unsteady grip of a middle-aged man with a bald head and a face that was running with sweat, half of the family tried their very best to hide their disappointment.

Now she was before him again, silhouetted against the blinding blue sky and gleaming white sand of the beach. She was wearing bikini bottoms that were the same pale yellow he had glimpsed so fleetingly the previous evening, huge round sunglasses, and a pair of white flip-flops.

And that was all.

Ben's breath froze in his lungs as his gaze came to rest on the upper half of her tanned, narrow body. He knew it was wrong to stare, not just at girls but at anyone, had been told so by both his mum and dad on many occasions, but he was simply powerless to resist. Ria was like something from another planet, a world of irreverent beauty and hopeless glamour so completely different to the one he inhabited; she seemed impossible. Her breasts rode high on her chest, full curves of flawless skin that defied gravity and logic. Then his vision was merely full of the beautiful contours of her shoulders and back as she strolled away down the beach.

Beside him, his dad let out a spluttering snore, then rolled over to one side and farted loudly, breaking the spell. His mother tutted with disapproval, before turning her attention back to her novel, unaware that beside her, her son's doors of perception had been thrown open to reveal a bigger, wider, and far more exciting world.

Ben had told Sean about Ria as soon as he got home, his eyes wide and shining as he attempted to convey the power of what he had seen, the essential
glory
of it. His best friend, who liked to consider himself an expert in all things female despite abundant evidence to the contrary, had listened carefully, then asked whether or not he had slipped her one. Ben, who understood the essential concept of ‘slipping one' to a girl, but was far from certain on the details, had said no, leading Sean to shake his head solemnly and call him a tosser.

‘I would have,' he continued. ‘No doubt about it. I slipped one to this barmaid in Benidorm last year. Nineteen she was. Gave her it right in the sand dunes.'

‘At night?' Ben asked.

‘Course,' laughed Sean. ‘Can't be slipping it to girls in front of everyone. You get locked up for that, even in Spain.'

‘Don't you have to be home by nine though?'

‘Not on holiday, mate. Different rules abroad.'

‘And didn't you come back complaining that your mum and dad made you have dinner with them every night?'

‘Ah, well,' said Sean, and tipped a wink in Ben's direction. ‘That's what I had to say. Couldn't have word getting back to them that I was sneaking out every night after they were asleep.'

‘So what are we doing this quest for then? If you slipped it to half of Spain last summer?'

‘Kept their clothes on, didn't they?' said Sean, as though it should have been the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Sand gets everywhere, mate. You'll find out one day.'

‘Right,' said Ben, wondering, not for the first time, exactly how full of shit his best friend really was.

‘Are you all right?' asked Grace Matthews, frowning at him. ‘You've gone a bit pale.'

Panic held Ben tightly in its grip; his heart felt like it was going to explode, his blood roaring through his head with a sound like crashing waves.

‘I'm fine,' he managed. ‘Bit too much to drink, that's all.'

Grace cocked her head to one side and frowned. ‘How much have you had?'

Ben did frantic maths in his head. ‘Not sure,' he said, aiming for nonchalant but missing badly. ‘Six or seven cans?'

Grace narrowed her eyes, then burst out laughing. Ben felt as though he had been punched in the soul.

‘What's so funny?' he asked.

‘
Six or seven
,' she mimicked. ‘
Just the six. Or maybe seven
.'

‘Could have been four,' he allowed, trying to defuse the situation, trying to bring her terrible, ball-shrivelling laughter to an end, but this merely set her off again.

Ben looked at her, at the deep pink that was now filling her cheeks, her wide mouth and her straight white teeth, her eyes squeezed shut, and wondered if there was any scientific basis to the notion of a heart breaking.

‘Please stop laughing at me,' he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

Grace did so, and opened her eyes. Ben saw no malice in them, saw nothing but gentleness and kindness, and felt his stomach lurch.

‘Sorry,' she said. ‘That was mean. But honestly Ben, six or seven cans? There's maybe about eight stone of you, if you're soaking wet. Six or seven cans and I'd be phoning you an ambulance.' She grinned at him, and Ben managed a small smile in return. ‘You don't have to make stuff up, trying to impress me,' she continued. ‘Bonnie was right. I do like you.'

Ben swallowed hard. ‘You do?'

Grace smiled. ‘I'm sat on this bed with you with no top on waiting for you to pluck up the courage to touch me. What do you reckon?'

‘You can see a nipple on this bit.'

Ben crouched down and scuttled across the garden to where Sean was kneeling in the midst of an overgrown hedge, holding out a scrap of paper triumphantly. Ben grabbed it, and saw that his friend was right; at the edge of the torn rectangle of formerly glossy paper, there rose the unmistakable shape of a nipple, the skin dark pink and uneven.

‘Wicked,' said Ben. ‘Any more?'

‘Most of the mag's in here,' replied Sean, turning back into the hedge and reaching through its branches. They raked at his skin, leaving the faint red lines that Sean called chicken scratches on his arms and hands, but he didn't appear to notice; his mind was completely focused on digging for treasure.

The quest for the Orbs of Power had been underway for more than a month, although frustratingly little real progress had been made. Sean had immediately attempted to secure glory for himself by making a move on what he referred to as his ‘sure thing', a girl from the other half of the year named Amy who had carried a passionate, somewhat inexplicable, torch for him throughout most of Year Ten.

Unfortunately for Sean, she had eventually grown tired of waiting for him to acknowledge her existence and was now seeing a boy from the other half of the year who Ben played football with and who, Amy had told Sean with obvious pride and no small amount of relish, was apparently ‘hung like one of them horses'. Sean had taken this revelation with his usual level of dignity, and had eventually been forced to apologise for some of his less polite comments after Amy had pointed out that her new boyfriend's older brother had just got out of prison, and had what his family referred to as ‘a bit of a temper'.

‘Check this out,' said Sean, and passed him a second muddy page from the depths of the hedge. Ben looked at it and frowned; the image was such a close-up that he didn't have the slightest idea what he was looking at. There was pink skin, and red folds, and something that might have been blonde hair at the very edge of the page.

‘Brilliant,' he said, without enthusiasm.

Sean loved nothing more than rooting through disused gardens and car parks, searching out discarded pages of the top-shelf magazines that often caught Ben's eye in the newsagent. They were a surprisingly common find, and Sean saw them as a treasure trail that should be diligently followed, benevolently left by older and wiser men for the education of the teenagers that found them. Ben, on the other hand, couldn't help wondering why they had been discarded in the first place. Presumably either the previous owner had been trying to get rid of them, or was finished with them; both options that filled him with the sudden desire to take a shower.

He had been reduced to scavenging for discarded porn by what he would forever think of as The
Playboy
Incident. Kev Simmons, the goalkeeper for Ben's Saturday morning football team, worked a paper round for the newsagent's on the high street, and was the closest thing they had to a Morgan Freeman in
The Shawshank Redemption
; someone who can get things for you. Mr Grey, who owned the newsagent's, was known to occasionally look the other way when it came to age-restricted items, provided he was asked about them when the shop was empty. As a result, Kev had been able to acquire a couple of packets of B&H, a four-pack of McEwan's lager, and eventually, after several requests (in Mr Grey's hierarchy looking at naked women was clearly potentially more damaging than drinking alcohol or inhaling poisonous smoke), the crown jewel: a slightly water-damaged copy of
Playboy
.

Everything about it was exotic; the square shape, the adverts for unfamiliar brands and products, the prices listed in dollars and cents. And, of course, page after page of naked girls, the vast majority of them tanned, blonde beneficiaries of the finest enhancements that the American plastic surgery industry had to offer. Their breasts stood out high and round like footballs, their skin glowed with airbrushed perfection, their legs seemed to go on forever, and their friendly, cheerful smiles were full of straight white teeth.