Lifesaving for Beginners (25 page)

March 1987

I’m seven months pregnant and I don’t even know.
Fifteen years old and seven months pregnant.
I haven’t got a clue.

Minnie works it out, in the changing rooms of O’Connor’s Jeans in the Ilac Centre.
I can’t get the Levi’s over my belly.

I say, ‘Coconut snowballs,’ by way of explanation.
I laugh when I say it.
Minnie doesn’t laugh.
She looks at my belly so I look at it too.
I say, ‘I’m a bit bloated after the Big Mac.’
Minnie puts down the jeans she’s holding.
She stretches her arm towards me.
Puts her hand on my belly.

She says, ‘It’s hard.’
She pokes it like she did with the frog we dissected in biology yesterday.
Then she drops her hand and moves away from me.

I say, ‘What?’
Minnie doesn’t scare easy.

She says, ‘It moved.’
She points at my belly and when I look down, I think I see something.
A ripple along the skin.

I say, ‘Oh shit,’ and I back up until I bump against the mirror of the changing room.

Minnie says, ‘You’re up the duff.’
That’s what Minnie says about her mother when she’s pregnant.
Up the duff.
Minnie’s mother is always up the duff.
Minnie hates how up the duff her mother always is.

The minute she says it, I know it’s true.

Minnie says, ‘You did it.
You had sex and you never told me.
We’re supposed to be best friends.
We’re supposed to tell each other everything.’
Her face is flushed with shock and I don’t know if it’s because of me being up the duff or me not telling her that I’d done it.

‘I only did it twice.’
It doesn’t seem real.
Even now.

‘Twice?’
She’s livid.
We always assumed Minnie would be the first one to go.

‘Jesus.’
I sit on the stool in the corner of the changing room.
All of a sudden.
As if my legs have forgotten what to do with themselves.
‘What am I going to do?’

Minnie shakes her head but hunkers in front of me.
I realise how serious this is when she touches my hand and squeezes it.
But then she shakes her head again.
‘How the hell can you be this up the duff and not know?’

I shake my head.
‘I don’t know.’

‘And who the hell was it?
You haven’t gone out with anyone since .
.
.’
She stops talking and looks at me.
I nod.

Minnie says, ‘Elliot Porter?’

I say, ‘Yes.’

Saying his name is enough to bring me right back to that sick, heady, dizzy, delirious feeling.
It is like a hollow, the feeling.
Right inside you.
A hunger pain that no amount of food can ease.

Elliot.
Elliot Porter.
Right from the start, Mrs Higginbotham calls him ‘an unsuitable boy’.
He doesn’t introduce himself at the front door.
Nor does he take his hands out of his pockets.
She has a thing about men’s hands and their pockets.
Elliot Porter walks up to my front door, knocks on it and, when Mrs Higginbotham opens it, he says, ‘Is Kat in?’
like he’s been at the front door millions of times, except he hasn’t.
He’s never been at the front door before.
He’s never said, ‘Will you go with me?’
so I’m not sure what the story is.
He kisses me.
Twice.
Behind the changing rooms at school, where we smoke at lunchtime.
A couple of days after our first conversation, which happened to be about the Smiths.
He liked that I liked them too.
He wasn’t even talking to me.
Not really.
He was talking to one of his gang.
His herd, Minnie calls them.
About a bootleg recording of a Smiths gig in the SFX the previous May.
I say, ‘I was at that gig.’

He looks at me, and I know for a fact that, up till now, he was not aware that I was there.

He says, ‘You?’

‘Me and Minnie.’
I don’t tell him that we went with Minnie’s dad, who was given tickets because he happened to be the insurance broker for the SFX at the time.
Instead I say, ‘We went backstage.
Morrissey signed my ticket.’

He says, ‘FUCK OFF!’
before he walks over to me and offers me his cigarette.
I take a drag, give it back to him.

I’m in.

I make him laugh.
I can’t remember how but I remember the sharpness of his Adam’s apple, jutting against the pale skin of his throat, as if it might cut through.
He says, ‘You’re funny.’
The next thing you know, we’re walking through St Anne’s Park and then he’s got his arm round my shoulder and somehow – I don’t know how – we end up kissing in the Rose Garden.
The next day, at school, there’s a new rumour doing the rounds and it’s about me and Elliot Porter.
We’re going out.

No one can believe it.
Especially me.

I doodle his name in the margins of my homework notebook.
Surround it with lovehearts and cupid’s arrows and wedding bells and bubbles of champagne spilling from the tops of long, narrow flutes.
I write my name too.
Underneath.
But only in the faintest pencil, which I rub out immediately.

Mrs Katherine Porter.
Ms Kat Kavanagh-Porter.

Of course, I don’t tell him any of that.
I’m in love.
But I’m careful.
You have to be careful with a boy like Elliot Porter.

I don’t tell Ed.
Ed is not good at keeping secrets.
‘Kat’s in love,’ he would have told my father.
‘But she made me promise not to tell anyone so don’t tell anyone, OK?’

Instead, when Ed asks what’s wrong with me, I shake my head and say, ‘Nothing,’ and he asks me to play Snakes and Ladders and I let him win and then Mrs Higginbotham makes us mugs of chicken soup and we watch
Gidget
on the telly – with the sound down low if Mum is working in the attic – and I stir the soup round and round with a spoon and think about Elliot Porter.

Elliot Porter is not an easy boy to be in love with.
He is moody.
Unpredictable.
He mitches off school.
He smokes cigarettes lifted from packets of blue Rothmans his father leaves lying around.
He fills SodaStream bottles with mixtures of brandy and gin and vodka and whiskey, filched from the drinks cabinet in his parents’ front room.
He washes it down with cans of Coke, in the fields behind his house.
He steals things from shops.
Things he doesn’t need and will never use.
He has long black hair and wild navy eyes that never settle on any one thing for long.

And then there’s the sex.
Elliot Porter is keen to have sex.
He’s done it before.
Loads of times, I’d say.
He assumes I have done it too.
I don’t tell him the truth.
I think he won’t be interested in me if he realises the extent of my experience, which is Bressy Dolan putting his hand up my T-shirt and – fleetingly – cupping one breast through my bra last summer.

The sex turns out to be brief and messy.
The first time, in his house, when his mother goes to the tennis club.
Her white tennis skirt strains against her waist.
She says, ‘You two behave yourselves, OK?’
She winks at us.
Blows Elliot a kiss.
His father is away again.
Malta, I think.
Or Tunisia, maybe.
A business trip.
There are no brothers or sisters to worry about.
We do it in the room they call the sunroom, which is a small room at the back of the house.
He lowers the blinds.
Turns off the telly.
Pulls me by the hand onto the couch.
We are still in our school uniforms when it’s finished.
I pull my skirt down, say I have to go to the bathroom.
Wipe at the cold white dribbles running down my legs with a piece of toilet paper.

The second time is a few days later in my house, during the fifteen minutes between Mrs Higginbotham leaving the house and my father arriving home from the lab.
Elliot sends Ed to his room.
Tells him he’s hidden a surprise in his room.
Sweets.
Tells him not to come down until he finds them.

‘That’s not nice,’ I say.
‘You haven’t hidden any sweets up there.
Have you?’

Elliot says, ‘Don’t worry.
We won’t be long.’
He smiles his beautiful smile.
He pulls my T-shirt up, undoes my bra.
He calls my breasts tits.
He says, ‘Your tits are gorgeous.’
He takes a nip out of each of them.
Then undoes the button on my jeans, pulls the zip down.
He is right.
It doesn’t take long.

I say, ‘We have to use johnnies the next time, OK?’
I don’t care about the next time.
I’m glad the sex bit is out of the way.
Now I can concentrate.
On being in love.
This is where the good stuff is.

But there is no next time.
The next day at school he looks away when I catch his eye in history.
The day after, in the canteen, I say, ‘Hi!’
as I walk past the table where he is sitting with his friends.
He ignores me and his friends snigger, as if I have something on my face.
Ketchup, maybe.
Or mayonnaise.
I go into the toilets.
Check myself in the mirror.
There is nothing.
Nothing on my face.

After school, I walk home with Minnie.
She says, ‘Nicola Moriarty told me that Porter’s after dumping you.
True or false?’

If Nicola Moriarty said it, then it must be true.
I nod my head.
‘I think so.’

Minnie punches the top of my arm with her fist in a rare public display of affection.
‘At least you didn’t do it with him, right?’

Humiliation burns like acid.
I think of Elliot Porter telling his friends.
Telling them everything.
Laughing at me.
I wish I were dead.

I say, ‘No, of course not.’
I want to tell her.
But I can’t.
She’ll feel sorry for me.
I know she will.
And if Minnie Driver feels sorry for you, things are bad.

Two weeks later, he’s going out with Melissa Hegarty, a sixth-year doing a roaring trade in fourth-years, and a reputation for being ‘fast’.

Minnie says, ‘How could you not know you’re up the duff ?’

I sit on the stool in the cubicle in O’Connor’s Jeans in the Ilac Centre.
I shake my head.
I have no idea.

In my bedroom, I play the Scorpion’s ‘Still Loving You’ from their
Love at First Sting
album, over and over and over again, the needle scratching deeper and deeper into the groove until you can nearly see the tip of it poking out the other side.
I wear baggy Frankie T-shirts that fall to my knees and hide the safety pin that now strains across the waistband of my Levi’s.

Sometimes, in the gap between Marillion’s
Misplaced Childhood
and Dire Straits’
Brothers in Arms
,
Minnie asks the question: ‘What are we going to do?’
She says ‘we’.
I am pathetic with gratitude.
I am not alone.

We don’t say much during those two months, Minnie and I.
We spend a lot of time together.
Even more than usual, I mean.
We listen to music, we smoke out of my bedroom window, we play Snakes and Ladders with Ed.