Malcolm and Juliet Read online

  ‘Nah, don’t want to talk about it.’

  They were both sitting on the couch. Juliet swung her feet round so they rested on Malcolm’s lap and surveyed the room, as if on the lookout for something else that was edible.

  ‘I came round here to be cheered up. How’s the research going? Got any more material?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s all starting to take shape now. I still need more interviews though. I want to vary it a bit. I thought I might ask Mum. It’s sort of fascinating don’t you think, the thought of your own conception? And maybe our principal, Mr Ramsay. It could be a good idea to include somebody of standing in the community, to lend credibility.

  ‘I still have to check out copyright laws too, because I want to get some short pornography montages and splice them into the action, to give it more impact. The judges said that last year you know. They said my entry lacked visual appeal.’

  Juliet was laughing and came dangerously close to jiggling her feet on his genitals in her amusement.

  ‘God, you’re priceless. You know that don’t you? Absolutely priceless.’

  It was the moment, the window of opportunity as Charlotte had put it, or at the very least a loose louvre.

  ‘Um, actually Juliet, it’s good you think that, because, well, I was sort of going to ask you a bit of a favour.’

  ‘Sure, no problem. What do you want?’

  ‘Well, I was just wondering whether you might consider…’ They were such simple words, yet somehow Malcolm’s mouth was incapable of shaping them. Juliet saved him the effort, her eyes widening with understanding.

  ‘You want me to…Oh, of course. Matey, no problem. I was wondering when you’d ask me.’

  She checked her watch and Malcolm felt his pulse push past 150.

  ‘Look, I don’t have a heap of time right now, but…no, I should be okay. Where then? Your bedroom I suppose. Let’s go.’

  She bounded up the stairs and Malcolm followed at a frightened distance. So this was how it would be. Him and Juliet. It was going to happen. He rounded the doorway, wondering if she would be naked already, and whether it would be a good idea to start undressing himself. Instead he found her fully clothed and standing facing the camera.

  ‘Okay then, I’m ready. Roll camera. My first time eh? Gee, I have to warn you, it’s really rather tacky.’

  Malcolm’s partial relief was quickly swamped by a more substantial anger. How could the world be such a tease? He felt a childish wave of tears and ducked his head down behind the camera before he had to explain.

  ‘Hang on. I’ll just check out the focus. Yeah, Okay.’

  He tried not to listen. He tried to block out the words, stop them penetrating the wounds of his disappointment. It was no good though. He was still a researcher and sex was still fascinating.

  ‘Okay. You know Todd right? Well, no you don’t, but you know who he is. I’ve told you about him before. We do kickboxing together, only he doesn’t turn up so much these days. Anyway, last year, me and him were going out.’

  ‘You never told me that.’

  ‘Thought you weren’t meant to interrupt.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Right. Well we were, but I didn’t tell anyone, because it was just our thing, sort of. Anyway we had been together five months I guess and at first it went pretty well. But then he really started to want to have sex with me, and looking back maybe I should have just said yes and been done with it, but I wasn’t sure I liked him that much, and it was sort of fascinating seeing the lengths he was prepared to go to. Hiring motel rooms, planning weekends away for his parents, long walks in the country, getting a key to that tacky caravan those guys have hired down at the camp ground—you’re not really all that dignified are you, boys?

  ‘Anyway, the harder he tried the more fun it was resisting. I got to the point where I was sure that I’d be a bit of a let-down anyway, after all of the buildup. Also, I have to be honest, it was pretty cool having so much control.

  ‘But then, one day, the strangest thing happened. We were training together in the gym, doing some sparring, and everybody else had left. For some reason, all that exertion perhaps, the sweat in the air, I don’t know, something anyway, I started to feel drawn to him. Here I was, ducking and blocking, when all I wanted to do was jump him, you know what I mean?’

  Behind the camera Malcolm nodded. He had a fair idea.

  ‘I tried to fight it, by concentrating on fighting him, but the more hard-out I went the worse it became. I still remember the startled look on his face when I floored him with a footsweep and then jumped right on top of him.

  ‘“You got those condoms here?” I asked, and his eyes were wider with fear than excitement as he shook his head.

  ‘“Go get them,” I told him. “You’ve got five minutes.”

  ‘He was out of there so quickly I was sure he was never coming back, and there was so much energy pumping through me, I pummelled the bag the whole time he was away.

  ‘Todd tried to look calm and in control when he walked back in, but his face was red with panic and he was still puffing away from the run, and anyway, I’m bigger than he is. I pushed him back into the changing rooms and lay him down on one of the little benches, like I knew exactly what I was doing. It was ridiculous. The space was so small and I ended up falling off at the worst possible moment. I had a bruise on my arse for weeks.’

  ‘I remember that.’

  ‘It was good though, in a funny sort of way. I don’t know why exactly. I felt so powerful, so close to so many different possibilities. I remember afterwards looking down at him, all limp and confused, and almost feeling a tiny bit guilty.

  ‘A week later he rang to tell me he’d found another girlfriend and like I say, he doesn’t come to kickboxing all that much any more.

  ‘Oh, but listen to me rambling. This isn’t what you want at all is it? You’ll be more interested in the technical details, like the way—’

  ‘No, no! That’s fine,’ Malcolm shouted. He’d had all the detail he could bear. ‘Battery’s almost out.’

  ‘Oh, okay then. Well, guess I should get to the gym then. Almost got me going there you know, with all that sex talk. You were lucky.’

  She grinned and gave him another peck on the cheek, then she was gone.

  Malcolm played the interview back, hoping the pain might help him focus. It didn’t work. No matter how he looked at it sex with Juliet seemed almost as frightening as sex with Charlotte. The Science Fair was looming and he was running out of options.

  Washed Up

  Kevin’s cleaning job gave him the option of working after school or coming back in the evening. He preferred the late shift. School at night was interesting, and there was no one there to hurry him.

  He only ever lit the room he was working in, pretending the silent darkness of the corridors stretched forever. Vacuuming the classrooms was less a chore for Kevin, and more a piece of performance. He covered the surface of the much abused carpet in a rhythm of spirals and swirls, humming along to the vibration of the machine, at one with his task.

  In the corridors he danced with his broom, in the girls’ toilets he set off the flushes at carefully spaced intervals, so that the sounds of emptying and filling sang to him.

  In the gym foyer he flicked the lights on and off, in a message of code only he could interpret, and in the Biology lab he cleared the board one letter at a time, until the words ‘I love you Brian’ emerged amidst the jumble of notes on osmosis.

  While other cleaners were often finished by eight-thirty, Kevin was still going at eleven, and he didn’t mind at all. There was only the admin block left to complete. Its entrance was shielded from the outside security light by a large tree, making it the darkest area of the school. Kevin rushed towards the door, stooped over, the pipe from the vacuum cleaner wrapped around his neck like a piece of military hardware.

  ‘Almost in,’ he whispered into an imaginary headpiece.

  ‘You’ve sixty seconds,’ the headp
iece crackled back.

  Kevin fumbled with the keys, finally found the required master and then sliding quietly inside, waiting a moment more before giving the game away and feeling for the light switch. Terror came first.

  Kevin liked to think he was the sort who didn’t frighten easily. If shit would happen it would happen, he figured. There were better things to worry about. Only now, as far as he could tell, shit was happening, and it was happening rather close.

  The noise that bounced along the trophy-cabineted corridor was like none he had ever heard before. It was a groan of sorts, but so unearthly and unexpected that at first Kevin couldn’t be sure it wasn’t inside his own head. To add to the horror, a blinding flash of light exploded out of the staffroom office, second door on the left. Then there was darkness once more, and silence.

  Fleeing was an obvious option, but curiosity is a strong emotion. Kevin put down the tools of his trade as quietly as he could and, dropping to his knees, crawled slowly forward. There was another groan, and then a third, the most blood curdling of them all, followed by a second flash of light.

  Kevin’s resolve was weakening but still he crawled on, until he knew he was at the very edge of the doorway. He tried to tell himself he was prepared for any vision. An alien abduction maybe, or the climactic sacrifice of a satanic ritual. He was ready. But imagination is not always big enough for the world it inhabits, and the scene which greeted Kevin in the brief moment of the third flash twisted his stomach and throttled his mind in a way he could never have anticipated.

  He recognised both people immediately, despite the strangeness of their underlit pose. Mr Ramsay, the fifty-something-year-old principal, trousers and boxers around his stumpy ankles, perched vigorously atop Ms Charters, the much feared school secretary, who was in turn precariously arched over the school’s new, self-sorting, digital photocopier. The light emanated from the machine itself, pressed into action each time Ms Charters tried to correct her balance, thus illuminating the entire grisly scene.

  Kevin had seen such a thing once before, on a DVD Brian had made him watch. At the time he had been uninterested, now he was more disturbed. In fact he was quite certain this was the single most repulsive and unnatural act he had ever witnessed.

  Mothering

  ‘It isn’t natural you know,’ Camille called from the laundry. ‘A boy your age moping around, looking so miserable.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Malcolm replied, wandering through so he could talk to her. ‘I think it’s quite normal actually. That’s the problem really. I think I’m becoming like everybody else.’

  Malcolm’s mother was an enthusiastic cleaner. In fact she attacked most tasks with unrestrained energy, including the guidance of her only son.

  ‘I know that look.’ She pulled a pair of Frank’s y-fronts from the basin and inspected them against the light. ‘You had it when you were born and it’s been there on and off ever since.’

  ‘I don’t remember. You should have got it on video.’

  ‘I was busy.’

  ‘Dad could have held the camera.’

  ‘A steady hand isn’t one of his better qualities I’m afraid. So, what exactly’s on your mind?’

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Oh dear, that is quite normal.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s getting so I can hardly think of anything else,’ Malcolm confessed. ‘I’ve had every book on the subject out of the library, including one in German which I got for the pictures. The librarian has begun to look at me quite strangely. And the worst thing is, the more I read, the more complicated it gets.’

  ‘Don’t worry so much. Complicated becomes straightforward soon enough, and then straightforward slips into routine without you even noticing. Complicated is probably the best bit. Have you decided yet, who it is you’d like to have sex with?’

  ‘Deciding who I wouldn’t want to have sex with would be more of a problem,’ Malcolm admitted. ‘I’m not even sure you’re safe.’

  ‘You must be able to do better than follow in your father’s footsteps,’ she replied, apparently more interested in the colour of the water draining from a pair of socks. ‘How’s it been so far anyway?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The sex.’

  ‘I haven’t had any yet.’

  ‘So why am I doing all this washing?’

  ‘Practice.’

  ‘It doesn’t make perfect you know.’

  ‘No, but it passes the time. Actually, how was it for you, Mum, the first time you had sex? It wasn’t with Dad was it?’

  ‘Good Lord no!’ His mother laughed in a way Malcolm was sure his father wouldn’t have wanted to hear. ‘It was at a party.’

  ‘Do you mind if I film this? The camera’s just in the kitchen.’

  ‘If you help me hang this lot out later.’

  ‘Deal.’

  Malcolm got the camera and steadied it on his shoulder. There wasn’t much room in the laundry and he had to shoot from the side. His mother continued to scrub as she spoke, her hands on automatic while her eyes gazed into the past through the small window over the sink.

  ‘We used to go to parties all the time at this one great old place out in the country. There was this chap across the road, a friend of the family, who would ask me along and I would go, as much out of a sense of duty as anything.

  ‘It was a simple arrangement, the sort that can only come from being with someone you could never fancy. His hands were too big and he looked confused when he smiled. Not that it mattered too much who you went with. You maybe danced with them a couple of times but in reality we were all free to hunt alone.

  ‘Back then, being in such a small town, there was a whole ritual to the thing, and I liked that; waiting round to be invited to dance, and the other invitations which inevitably followed.

  ‘Wanna go out the back? was easy enough. All that was being proposed was a drink behind the house, where half the party always ended up. Or you could be asked down the barn where, it was well enough understood, kissing and groping would be on the cards. Finally there was wanna come to the river? where right of entry was being requested, as it were.

  ‘I suppose I always lived a little in hope and a little in fear of that sentence, from someone who liked the smell of you, or the way you moved. I’d been asked before, twice in fact, but both times I’d said no, because they deserved it.

  ‘But this particular chap was quite sweet I remember, nervous when it came down to asking, which I liked. He was very tall and he had to bend right down to be heard over the music. “Wanna come to the r…, r-barn?” he asked, losing his nerve and pulling out half way.

  ‘“I’d prefer the river tonight to be honest,” I replied. The look on his face, I can tell you. I’d been drinking a little by then, and we both drank a little more before we left the house. We found ourselves a hollow beneath a tree on the bank of the river, although in fact it wasn’t much more than a muddy creek.

  ‘It was a still night and I could make out the occasional whisper or groan from voices I half recognised. I let out a few of my own, just to let the chap know his efforts were appreciated. Gosh, it all seems so long ago now.’

  She managed to wipe the smile from her face but it lingered in her eyes. Malcolm faded out.

  ‘Thanks Mum. I think that will come out really well.’

  ‘Not half as well as it did in real life, I can tell you. You know, we really ought to think about getting you started. Have you thought about Juliet? She’d be a good place to begin. She’d be kind to you. Why don’t you ring her?’

  ‘Well, I had thought about it,’ Malcolm confided. ‘But what if she says no? I don’t want to risk ruining our friendship.’

  ‘You thinking SEX every time you see her will ruin it more. Go on, give her a ring. Your father and I can go out. You can use our bed if you like. Yours is very small.’

  ‘She’s used to that.’

  ‘Ring her now, while I’m down here doing the washing, so I’m not tempted to listen in.’r />
  And so Malcolm found the courage to make a second approach. It could work. Juliet could be his teacher, Charlotte his examination. It seemed reasonable enough, so long as he didn’t think too hard. And his mother was quite right, it would be far easier over the phone.

  His mother was also a great liar, and while poor nervous Malcolm dialled up his request she slipped into the kitchen and listened to every word.

  ‘Oh, hi, is Juliet there please? Oh, it is you. No, I don’t know who I thought it might be, you sound different, that’s all, or maybe I’m just listening differently, you see I’m feeling a bit nervous…Yes, yes I know I should…Look, the thing is, I was wondering if you might do me a bit of a favour…Yes, well you might not say that when you hear what it is…Um, no, of course not. I was more just wondering if you might have sex with me—please…Well, I have to start somewhere don’t I, and you’re my best friend, and you don’t scare me as much as other girls…No, no I wouldn’t want a relationship or anything, I just need to practise, that’s all. Mum says you can come over here…Well, it was sort of her idea to be honest…I don’t know, tonight maybe? Oh, well could we do it before? How long does it take about? Yeah, you’re right. Best to be on the safe side…Yeah, yeah seven-thirty then…No, I hadn’t thought so, but I suppose I should, it’d be more scientific. I’ll wipe the tape if I’m not any good…Oh yeah, Juliet, what should I wear?…No, you’re right, I don’t suppose it does… Okay, well thanks then. Ah, bye.’

  As soon as Malcolm hung up he had to sit down, before his legs gave way. She’d actually said yes. It was going to happen. He was almost feeling good about the whole thing again.

  Transactions

  Juliet didn’t feel good about calling back. Malcolm was, exactly like he’d said, a good friend. And even if he hadn’t been, she had a feeling that what she was about to propose involved crossing one of those boundaries which you can never cross back.

  Then again, this was not a time of normal rules. Malcolm’s proposal had hardly been normal. So maybe he was the one who’d crossed the boundary, and taken them both into a world where new rules applied. Or maybe it was just fate, finding a way of apologising for all the treading on toes it had been doing lately. Yes, that was exactly it, she told herself as she picked up the phone. Fate had been taking dancing lessons.