I looked back into the kitchen. Gavin had vanished and as I walked towards the foot of the stairs a maniacal inhuman gut wrenching laugh filled the room. I was twelve tiny steps away from docking with the cosmonauts. As I went up, Fiddler came down, passing me on the fourth step.
‘Alright Fiddler’?
‘What’s it to you?’
‘Nothing, sorry to bother you’
‘Well Good luck anyway, nice cords, knob’
I continued to climb the fifth and sixth step. It hit me on the seventh. Why was Fiddler wishing me ‘luck’? I had been aware of a steady stream of my ‘mates’ slipping upstairs at fifteen minute intervals, returning looking flushed and with a grin as big as the proverbial Cheshire. Was I about to become just one of the many or was I one of the chosen few? Was I just a complete and utter knob for thinking Gillian could possibly want anything to do with an eleven stone stick insect? I began to come over all queasy. My stomach was churning. To think I had fooled myself into believing that Slow motion Gillian and I were to become an item. An item like Chris and Karen, fellow sixth formers joined at the pelvis who no longer had their own single identity and were now forever acknowledged individually and collectively as ‘Chris and Karen’. As I climbed the stairs my mind went back to Rob’s love poem; ‘…my love unbound, it cost me a pound’.
Is that what he meant? Not the rose, but love’s first union. Had he paid for Gillian’s services? Had all the flushed and pimply gits, who were now swapping sordid stories in Fiddler’s living room, paid for their pleasure? As I entered the bedroom, my eyes immediately became transfixed to the single bed, unmade and crumpled. I didn’t want to look, I wanted to act as if the situation were as normal to me as getting up in the morning, but whatever I did to try and avert my eyes from that bed of inequity, my head was twisted and my eyes magnetised to that filthy mess.
‘Where have you been? I told Fiddler to tell you I was here ages ago’
‘Well, he didn’t, did he and I would have thought you were quite busy enough without having to worry about where I was’
‘Well, for a little while yes, but I couldn’t keep going indefinitely’
‘You’re unbelievable, have you no shame? They’re all talking about you downstairs. It’s disgusting. I thought tonight was going to be special. And if you think I’m paying for it? You really are an entrepreneur of exceptional fortitude. You’ll need to open a safety deposit box if you carry on at this rate”
‘What are you talking about’?
‘Don’t give me that Little Miss innocent routine. What do I get for fifty pence? I don’t have a pound. All that slow motion stuff and bunnies running about your mother's hall, was that all made up as well?’ I was really flowing now.
‘Bunnies?’
‘Tartan picnic blankets and overripe strawberries. What a mug I’ve been. Let me tell you something. I don’t pay for it and if I did I wouldn’t pay anywhere near as much as those pimply gits. A pound? It’s pathetic.’
‘I don’t know what you’re rambling on about. I was really excited about tonight. After you dropped that rose off I thought you were really sweet and kind. Tonight you sound like all the other wankers who can’t hold their drink. I thought you were different”
Now forgive me, but wasn’t I the one who should be aggrieved? Who was it that had turned Fiddler’s bedroom into an all night drive through? She thought nothing of her actions. I was supposed to accept it as an everyday occurrence. I wasn’t even the first. Number bloody six! Infantile grins greeted my deflated stick insect of a body as I descended the Kama Sutra highway.
‘Stick it to her William’
‘Oh piss off’
As I slammed the door and headed home my head was filled with images of sweaty youths pumping for all their worth, zits popping with each thrust, faces in pained exultation, pubescent greasy backs arching, screams from their barely broken voices;
‘…love unbound, it cost me a pound!’
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