Читать книгу The Men Commandments - Christian O’Connell - Страница 19

Underage drinking, losing your cherry, getting and spending your first pay cheque. You think these mark you as a man. They don’t. Having your heart broken for the first time does.

I remember when I was first properly dumped. 1986. Man, it hurt. Mainly the pain from trying to break the vinyl single of ‘our song’. You cannot simply snap vinyl. You have to bend it several ways. It takes ages. Which lessens the thing, really.

My mind was tormented. When would I ever be able to see and touch a pair of breasts again? So many happy memories of me staring at the very things Steven Williams had shown me in that magazine that time. Makepeace had a pair of these too. Now I was girlfriend-less but more importantly boobless. Time to play really depressing music over and over again until my mum told me to get outside in the sun and open my curtains.

I needed to heal my aching heart. My parents needed me to stop moping. It was decided I should join a club or society. My mum had heard from a friend with a very serious and polite son that he was enjoying the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. So I was made to go along. Stop laughing. We are the people who are first on the scene of major disasters at fêtes with some weak lemon barley squash. I once saved a man’s life – he had severed an arm at a banger racing meet – with weak lemon barley squash.

Every Friday evening in a damp and smelly church hall, I and some other teenage boys would meet up and practise first aid. The best bit was French-kissing Annie. That’s Anatomic Annie, the rubber doll we were supposed to be honing our resuscitation skills on. The next girl I kissed benefited from the time I spent perfecting my snogging. I pinched her nose and blew into her mouth.

There were also girls in St John’s Ambulance Brigade and we would get to see them at the various public events we attended. I was something of a rebel among my fellow Johners by wearing Stay Press jeans as part of my uniform. This was not standard issue, I need you to know. This Fonze-like coolness was countered by being forced to wear a beret. I looked like Frank Spencer. However, at one memorable school fête, during a lull in field casualties being brought in from the coconut shy, I somehow managed to start getting off with a girl. In the back of the ambulance.

With her grey uniform, black tights and all that triangle bandage play, it was too much for me. I casually removed my beret, took off my white handbag that contained my first aid kit (bandage, safety pin, lemon barley squash and some Chewits – the Chewits were for me, gotta chew something while saving lives) and the ambulance was soon rocking. We were discovered and I was asked to leave the brigade. I was made up. It was the first time I’d had my hand up a girl’s skirt. The Stay Presses had worked a treat.

Over the next few decades, various rites of passage would happen to us. Moving in with someone. Them moving virtually all your stuff into the nearest bin to allow more space for all their stuff. Owning your first home. Having your first mental breakdown trying to buy that first home. Attempting your first flat-pack. Surprising yourself with the number of swear words you know while building that flat-pack.

Whatever the rites of passage, men are tested – and when that testing comes you can bet we will rise to the occasion. And do something odd. The boy in the Stay Presses is now the man who still carries a small quantity of weak lemon barley squash just in case.