Growing Up Twice (11 page)

‘Get her seventy denier and you can’t go wrong. Let’s get out of here, I’ve had enough of this shop for one day.’ I catch Denise’s eye as I’m leaving and see her eyebrows shoot so far up her forehead that they almost meet her improbably high gelled-back hair-line.

The first thing he does is to freak me out by taking hold of my hand. I am not sure how to react so I calculate the odds of anyone I know seeing us together, realise that they are pretty low, imagine for a second the utter mortification of running into Owen with a Titian-haired teenager in tow and pull him off Oxford street and on to a side road taking deep, panic-abating breaths as I go.

‘Have you got somewhere in mind then? I thought you might fancy walking down to Soho and going to the Coach and Horses?’ He releases my hand and drops his arm around my shoulder. I get the impression I might be letting him down a bit too gently. But it’s a bit chilly in this halter-neck and it’s nice to have the warmth of another person nearby, especially another tall person. A tall male person with nice hands.

‘No, not there, there’s this really nice place down here,’ I say on the off chance that there might be. ‘It’s called the … ummm … the …’ We turn the corner into a street I have never been down in my life. ‘Ye Olde Parson’s Nose.’

‘Oh right,’ he says as he takes in the mock Tudor frontage. ‘You’ve got a thing about scuzzy old pubs, haven’t you? Irony, nice one.’ The irony is that he’s not actually wrong. During my life of sporadic financial security I have worked behind many a bar, and most of them scuzzy just like this one. Scuzzy pubs are nicer and also no one I know goes into them, and that is definitely a plus when one is on a letting-down-gently mission. As we approach the bar I have a brief moment of panic in case he’s asked for ID. He looks older than eighteen to me. I wonder if I look older than twenty-nine?

‘I’ll have a Stella, please, mate.’ He seems at ease with bar staff at least. He turns to me. ‘What are you having?’

‘Large gin and tonic please, ice and lime if you’ve got it, lemon if you haven’t.’ The barman nods and I see Mike surreptitiously checking the note and some change he’s got in his hand. Well, good, he should know it’s expensive going out with an older woman. Especially an older woman who has got butterflies and isn’t exactly sure what it is she is meant to be doing, who keeps thinking about the last time he kissed her and who needs a large G and T even to be here.

‘Shall we sit down?’ he says. I follow him to a little niche in the corner and he steps aside, gesturing that I should sit down first. Instead of sitting opposite, he slides in next to me. This is bad for two reasons. Firstly, it seems as if he has far more sophisticated first-date experience than I gave him credit for, and secondly, after I’ve finished this drink I’ll probably need the loo in about three minutes and I’ll have to ask him to move. You can’t see the bar from where we are sitting and I can’t see any other customers. I think I saw this set in a German porn film once.

He looks down at his hands so that his fringe flops forward over his eyes, and then smiles at me sideways. ‘I didn’t think you would meet me tonight. I mean, you didn’t reply to my message or anything,’ he says and turns a little to face me. This would all be much easier if he wasn’t so my type. I really didn’t think that ginger hair
was
my type, but the summer seems to have lightened his with little gold flecks and I am finding the slightly almond shape of his brown eyes disconcerting, more so even than the way that he is biting his soft lower lip that kissed me so nicely only the other day.

‘Well, I thought it was best,’ I say. This is it. I have to do it. I have been around the block enough times to know exactly what misery and mayhem will come my way right now if I say and do the wrong thing. I open my mouth to speak but he gets there before me.

‘It’s just, well, the first time I met you, you were so cool and everything and you were really nice to us and you looked really beautiful even though you were mashed from the night before and I was really pissed off because you got off with that bloke who was obviously a twat.’ I couldn’t fault him so far. ‘That bloke’ was my most recent rebound fling after Owen (break-up number six), a friend of Josh’s called Danny, very pretty but a complete jerk and the cause of an embarrassed silence between Josh and me for a couple of weeks.

‘And then when I saw you again in the park, even though it was a year later, I thought, you know, this means something like fate or something and you’re so sexy, I’ve never met a woman as sexy as you and you looked great, even though you were a bit hungover. And after that kiss I couldn’t stop thinking about you, I thought about it all the time and I chucked Sarah last week because she kept going on about you and now her mum’s not speaking to my mum. It took me ages to get up the guts to phone you, after you never replied to my message, and then I thought you were pissed off with me when we spoke, but when you turned up looking like
that
, like really beautiful, I thought well maybe she does want to know me? I know you’re a bit older than me, twenty-two or something, and you think I’m a geek probably, but I think that kiss was
so
good that you must have felt it too and so well I want to ask you if you will go out with me?’

As he makes his speech he flushes pink from the hollow in the base of his throat up to his temples and if I could see into a mirror right now I’d see two red spots on my cheeks too. I can’t remember the last time anyone said something like that to me and I don’t think there was ever a time when I heard that kind of speech and believed that it was sincere. The romance of it all is going to my head and I need to get my feet on the ground. He said he thought I was twenty-two.

‘Mike. Mike, I really like you, you are very attractive to me and we haven’t spent much time together but I have really enjoyed the time we have. But we can’t see each other. I’m not twenty-two. I’m twenty-nine. I’m too old for you.’

There. I’ve said it. I have done the responsible thing, I have learnt from all those impulsive encounters that left me messed up for weeks, months, years, depending on the encounter in question. I cannot go out with someone this much younger than me. He’s very attractive, impossibly sincere and forbidden-fruits sexy, but despite all that I just can’t do this.

‘You aren’t twenty-nine. You’re not.’ He looks at me and shakes his head.

‘I am and in a few months I’ll be thirty. So now you know that you feel different, don’t you?’ I am really hoping he doesn’t.

He sits back and looks at the ceiling. ‘No, I mean all that stuff I just said, it doesn’t depend on your age. I still mean it. And it’s not that you’re too old for me, is it. It’s that I’m too young for you, right?’ He’s got an angry, slightly hurt tone to his voice and his long fingers clench the edge of the seat so that his knuckles show white.

‘I can’t stop thinking about you,’ he says, as if that is reason enough for me to throw every reservation out of the window.

The really scary thing is that I think it might be. At least some of them. When was the last time anyone felt that way about me? The large gin on an empty stomach – along with the sensation of his knees pressing against mine and the pull of being near someone who wants me – has made me feel light-headed. I should get up and leave now. I’ve done what I meant to do, I have behaved in a responsible way and walked away from a situation doomed to failure. I can’t go out with him, of course I can’t, but I suddenly realise I am about to say something I know I am likely to regret at some point in the near future.

‘Look, you and I aren’t going to have any kind of relationship. It’s not going to happen. But I do fancy you like mad and so I have decided to have sex with you tonight, for one night only. OK?’ I say quickly.

The flush on his face deepens another shade and he crosses his legs in a none-too-subtle way.

‘Fucking hell,’ he says. ‘OK then.’

We have been sitting in the back of this black cab for about the last fifteen minutes and we’ve made it about halfway down Oxford Street.

We haven’t said a word. I look out of my window and he looks out of his. Across the wide expanse of the black leather seat our arms are outstretched and our fingers stop just short of touching each other. I look at him and smile. He looks at me and smiles.

‘Sorry, I don’t mean to clam up or anything,’ he says. I smile at him even more and reach out to pat his hand; it feels freezing cold. Freezing cold probably
isn’t
the temperature most desirable prior to carefree, fantasy-fulfilling sexual abandon, but as my nan always said, cold hand, warm heart, or something.

This is not the first time I’ve jumped into the back of a black cab with the intent to liaise. But this is the first time that my love interest and I haven’t been making free in one corner, embarrassing or entertaining the driver depending on what type of driver he is.

Michael shifts a bit in his seat to face me. I smile at him so much that I am afraid I have probably started to look a bit scary and mad. My face hurts. I should have slipped another gin in to relax me more while I was waiting for him to come back from the loo. He seemed to spend quite a long time in there, composing himself I expect, but anyway by the time he came back, still looking pink and a bit flustered, I could easily have had two more doubles, neat over ice, one after the other just like I used to when I was too poor to afford mixers.

I was only young back in my part-time waitressing days and although no one can actually prove any correlation between the number of undiluted doubles I sank and the number of total toss-pots I pulled, they seem to tally up pretty much percentage wise. Michael isn’t like any of those mishaps. Michael is the kind of boy I would have died to have a date with back then. Come to think of it, he isn’t the first eighteen-year-old that I have kissed, it’s just that at the time I was eighteen too.

‘What about, you know … condoms?’ he asks. I can’t help the childish giggle that escapes my mouth before I catch the eye of the driver in the rear-view mirror and look guiltily away. He’s the type that won’t be entertained.

‘Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve got some. If the sell-by date hasn’t run out, that is!’ I laugh with cartoon-calibre hundred-watt voltage but Michael nods solemnly. I wish he’d stop being so mature and not take it all quite so seriously. I wonder if, in a few years from now, when he’s sitting in the back of another cab with another woman he doesn’t intend to see again, he’ll think about tonight. The night that he first had sex.

It’s not that it has suddenly occurred to me that he might be a virgin – it’s crossed my mind around the same number of times as he has over the last few days – but it
has
suddenly dawned on me that it might be a problem. For me, if not for him. I never intended for things to get to the cab stage. I hadn’t planned to act out my last sleepy thoughts before I drifted off every night and besides, in those fantasies I have a flat stomach. I reach over and slide the glass across to close off the passenger compartment from the driver’s ears.

‘Michael, don’t be embarrassed or anything,’ I say as I am about to ask the most embarrassing question I have ever asked next to, ‘is that erect?’ ‘But, well, are you a virgin?’ I say it quickly, avoiding his eyes and trying to act as if someone else must have asked him such a personal question. I really hope that glass is soundproof.

‘A virgin?’ He splutters. ‘No! Well, not
completely
. I mean Sarah and I got pretty damn close, I can tell you. We didn’t actually do it, but it’s not like I haven’t had plenty of dry runs. OK, yes I am.’

He looks at me closely and completely straight-faced, trying to gauge my reaction. I look back at him, trying to gauge my reaction. I think how much the girls would laugh if they ever heard this story, but they are never going to hear this story. Even now in the midst of the most surreal taxi ride of my life – and I have had a few – I know which secrets to keep and this is one of them. So I just smile at him, transfixed, with a manic grin that feels as if it has bisected my ear lobes.

‘I made her come,’ he informs me anxiously.

I turn and look out of the window and take a deep breath. Tears sting my eyes and my face is hot enough to fry an egg on. As soon as this is over I have to go out and make some new friends to tell this to. Just about composed, I turn back to him.

‘Perhaps now isn’t the right time for you,’ I say softly. The gentle tilt of the not-enough gin has subsided and the virgin thing has somehow taken the edge off the whole idea.

I’m not the virgin-busting type. I have never knowingly had intimate dealings with a virgin before. I’m not sure I’m up to it, it’s a big deal. There would be things I would feel obliged to do, I know; I spent much of my early teens reading about it in fat books featuring busty virgin mayor’s daughters/novice nuns and naughty swarthy pirates/highwaymen. There should be candles, four-poster beds or a full moon and a windswept empty beach.

First overcome protest. Remove clothes (forcibly if preferred). Place hands. Whisper encouragement. Make them float, float on a burning sea of desire. Just not sure I have what it takes.

My virginity was lost on a single bed in a squat in St Albans. I hadn’t quite picked Mr Right, more a Mr All Right, but it was just about as romantic as cider-and-chip-fuelled passion could be and it was perfectly nice. I had just wanted to get it over and done with. Selin, Rosie and I had all told each other we’d done it when we were sixteen. I told them I did it with an Italian twenty-year-old in the local graveyard, but in reality I was eighteen when I finally went through with it. We only found out a couple of years ago that we had all lied to each other because the others said they’d already done it. Good old peer pressure, where would we be without it? Non-smoking, teetotal thirty-year-old virgins probably.

Actually this sort of thing
has
happened to me
once
before, about five years ago. I went to this rooftop party in Old Street with an old friend I had known since sixth-form college who I was secretly in love with. It was entirely futile as he was not secretly in love with me, and I suspect that he thought I was a bit too flighty for him anyway. The fact that I followed him to parties, got drunk because he wasn’t in love with me, and then pulled an assorted variety of his friends probably didn’t help much, but you know how it is. Logic flies out of the window when you are in a futile crush situation.