Читать книгу Sexy Beast: The Intimate Adventures of an Ugly Man - Stan Cattermole - Страница 9

I was afraid. It was a cloudless night, ice hanging in the air. My breath was bright like broken glass and my skin was colder than Christmas. I shivered. The fear I felt had nothing to do with the fact that I was expanding into middle age like a dirty great stain, destined to spend the rest of my life with only my cat for company. No. Rather it concerned the fact that I was trudging towards a pub in Dartford where a gang of my childhood peers was lying in wait, doubtless preparing to relive our schooldays by taunting me with a cruel concoction of harsh words, drawing pins, and spittle, until I’d have no option but to leave the room, walk slowly to the nearest lavatory, lock myself in a cubicle and sob, silently.

But it had to be done. I was in recovery.

All my life I’d been terrified of what people thought of me. I went back to Dartford on the night of my thirtieth birthday because, finally, that had changed; because, finally, I didn’t care any more; and because, finally, I refused to be terrified. Now I was merely afraid, and the verbal slings and arrows which previously I’d allowed to reduce me to a whimpering, bleating, petrified feedbag, would from that point forth bounce off my broad back like ducks off a diving board.

Plus, I’d been invited to a school reunion via Friends Reunited, which I’d joined on a whim a mere matter of months before. It seemed like fate.

Keith, my lifelong friend and schoolmate, had refused to accompany me. We’d been in mostly different classes at school and many of the people I knew, he didn’t. Nor did he particularly want to. The idea of going alone was dreadful to me, but I had to get out of the house or there was a very real danger I was going to lose my mind.

So there I was. Out of the house and consumed with good old healthy fear.

Resisting the ever-present temptation to turn round and go home, I soldiered on, on the path to recovery, all dressed up and taking the bull by the horns.

The last thing I want, incidentally, is to come across as bigoted in any way, or discriminatory, or supercilious—but it’s important that I’m honest about this perhaps slightly controversial fact: people from Dartford are subnormal. If you’ve ever spent any time in Dartford, you will know this to be true. I don’t know what went wrong in the gene pool, but I suspect that, at some stage in Dartford’s history, some malevolent swine shat in it. I swear, the people of Dartford possess less human kindness, less discernment, less decency, and fewer IQ points than the inhabitants of any other inner-city conurbation anywhere else on planet Earth…with the one single exception of Orpington. Maybe. It’s a close-run thing.

I hadn’t been back to Dartford since my mother’s funeral some years previously, and I felt sick, like I was about to jump out of an aeroplane or dive from the top of a giant building in the name of sporting glory.

I caught sight of myself in the window of a stationary car and sighed. Apart from my face, which was an abomination, and my body, which was bursting at the seams, I looked good. Which is to say—with all thanks due to Leonard Cohen—I was dressed well.

While I was studying for ‘A’ levels I would never achieve, mooning after Marie Meeks in her well-filled duffel coat, with her shiny black hair and dazzling mouth, Leonard Cohen came to me with the following words: ‘An ugly man needs good clothes.’ These words struck me in the gut and left a mark that would endure. Until then I’d dressed like a slob, like your average, miserable teenager who gave no thought to matters sartorial. I knew I looked bad as a whole and so assumed—stupidly—that the clothes I wore would make no difference whatsoever. But I trusted Leonard Cohen, and the time and care I began to invest in my attire paid dividends. I felt better about myself and, at least to a certain extent, it showed.

So when I walked into the not especially charming and not especially friendly bar of the Hufflers Arms public house at precisely 8 p.m.—an hour after some of my former classmates had promised to arrive—I may have looked fat and afraid and ugly, I may have been sweating preternaturally, like a pig in a steam room but, at the very least, I was dressed like a prince. And that counted for something.

I made for the bar and ordered myself a pint of Guinness. When it finally arrived, I glugged at it like an overexcited man kissing a beautiful woman for the first time.

The pub was busy. As I sipped at the second half of my drink and glanced around, I recognised no one. I knew that, sooner or later, I’d have to wander through to the other rooms. The thought pained me considerably. Who would be the first person to recognise me, I wondered, and what would they shout out? Which of the hideous, heart-wrenching barbs that passed for nicknames would I first be forced to relive?

‘Stan?’

I turned, and there it was. The smiling face of the first woman to whom I never dared offer my unreciprocable love.

Angela Charlton. Ange.

To my credit, I didn’t stutter. Well, maybe a little. A slight cha-cha-cha on her surname, but nothing to tango to.

When she leaned forward to hug me, something inside me leapt. It was the Christmas-themed sandwich I’d scoffed in Charing Cross station an hour ago. I managed to keep a lid on it as she pecked me on the cheek and cried, ‘Wow!’ Her hand still on my arm, she said, ‘You look good, man. How are you?’

Bless her. Bless you, Angela cha-cha-cha-Charlton, for that small but much appreciated kindness. She was never so kind at school, but I loved her anyway.

I looked at her, felt for a moment that I might be holding back tears, then pulled myself together. ‘I’m fine,’ I told her. ‘I’m OK. You know?’ I added. ‘I’m all right.’

I wanted to say, ‘I survived. I survived the five years of torture that was my comprehensive education.’ But instead I just smiled inanely, suddenly happy to be there.

‘How are you?’ I managed. ‘You look…’ I stopped. How did she look, this woman whose face had filled dozens of socks with my plump, ungainly seed? Actually she looked old and tired and sad. ‘You look fantastic!’ I cried. It was true. She still had an achingly sexy face, with limpid blue eyes, a perky, some might say haughty nose and a lusty, pornographic mouth. Plus she was still stunningly put together, her breathtaking body still lofty, proud and pneumatic. She looked remarkable. I gazed into her eyes and the love I used to feel coursed back through my being.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I look like my grandmother is how I look. I’m all right though. It’s good to see you.’

‘Can I get you a drink?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Please. That’d be great.’

While I was being served, Angela Charlton’s phone made a noise. She picked it up and put it to her ear. ‘Oh, hi,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I’m here…No, not yet, I just arrived, but you’ll never guess who’s here…No, no, don’t be silly. No…’ Then she said my name. No nicknames. Just my name. Again it was appreciated. ‘Yeah! Yeah, I’m standing right next to him actually…’ I sensed that the person on the other side of the conversation had not been so kind.

Indeed, the person on the other side of the conversation, whoever it was, had shrieked it after the mention of my name.

‘Bag of Elbows?!’

I had a lot of nicknames at school, but ‘Bag of Elbows’—along with its variations—was without doubt the most popular. Variations included ‘Elbows’, ‘Elliot Elbow’ and—sadly only once—‘Edgar Allan Elbow’. Also, when I was fourteen, overnight—thanks to a Sunday-night screening of The Elephant Man on BBC2—I became ‘Merrick’.

The elbow theme kicked off in the first week of secondary school. I was eleven years old, and Gary Butler said to his friend Simon Figgins that I, sitting at an adjacent desk, had ‘a face like a bag of elbows’. Despite the fact that it made my first year absolutely unbearable, I can still see that it was quite a perceptive and well-crafted observation. There’s truth in it. I do have a face like a bag of elbows.

So, naturally, when Gary Butler said those words on that fateful day, they stuck. Bag of Elbows. That’s what I became, and to a certain extent, certainly in the minds of people who know me from school, that’s what I still am. A voluminous bag, fashioned from thick human skin and filled to bursting with the bones of a thousand elbows.

‘You’ll never guess who that was,’ said Ange, sipping at her drink. ‘It was Karen Walsh.’

‘Ah.’ Yes, I remembered Karen Walsh. ‘Oh, joy,’ I said.

Ange laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘everyone’s grown up a bit since school. Even Karen.’

‘Just a bit?’ I tried to affect a sophisticated expression, but I think I may just have managed mean. ‘So you two are still friends then?’

She said yes; they had drifted apart after school, then met at an earlier reunion.

Ange then spent five or ten minutes filling me in on her life since school—the bad exam results and time served at McDonald’s, the subsequent promotions and wasted years; the Pole she loved and lived with, long before Poles were de rigueur; the baby she lost when the Pole got drunk and jealous and punched her in the kidneys; the six-month trip around the world with her younger sister; her new life as a teacher in Hackney, retrained, revitalised and, despite the frustration and laughably long hours, daily rewarded.

‘We should go and find the others,’ she said. My stomach turned. I was enjoying talking to her, listening to her, looking into her eyes and remembering. I really didn’t want to find the others at all. ‘Let me just get another drink,’ she said, knocking back the rest of her rum. ‘Do you want another Guinness?’

‘ELBOWS!!!’

And so it began.

Suddenly a fist of faces reared up at me from the past. There was Neil ‘Bucky’ Buckley, who had a reputation for violence at school he appeared not to have outgrown. He was in tip-top physical condition, with some unpleasant tattoos, including a small blue teardrop high on his left eyelid. When he came towards me laughing, I flinched, but he was friendly. ‘Look at the size of you,’ he laughed, and shook my hand vigorously. He seemed pleased to see me. He asked me what I do now. I told him I write stuff for junk mail. Looking slightly impressed, he said, ‘That figures.’ He said, ‘You was well into all that shit.’ I resisted the urge to correct his grammar.

The best story I heard about Bucky all night was that he might be about to lose his job as a security guard for smoking a joint at work. The detail that made the story golden was that he was filmed smoking the joint on the same security cameras he was being paid to monitor. Bucky had a copy of Nuts in his coat pocket and a rash of tiny white scars on the knuckles of his left hand. He was a travesty and, like me, he was the polar opposite of Deborah Hutton.

Deborah Hutton was almost as unpopular as I was at school, but for entirely different reasons. She managed to irritate almost everybody with whom she came into contact simply by being perfect. Well spoken, beautifully turned out, very bright and sweetly pretty, she always gave the impression that she was in entirely the wrong school. Other girls hated her because they sensed in her a superiority which they suspected was well founded; boys hated her because she wouldn’t let them taste her unnaturally bright lips or put their grubby, nicotine-stained fingers up her skirt. I always liked her myself, but from a distance of light years. We were amusingly dissimilar, and I was very surprised to see her at the Hufflers Arms. She seemed surprised to see herself there. It was her first reunion too, and the only reason she was there at all was because her father was dying and she was desperate to escape the cloying stench of rotting flesh and ylang ylang, even for just a couple of hours.

Age had not withered Deborah Hutton. She was still bright and beautiful and beaming. Also, transformed by impending grief, she was caustic and careless and dangerous. When she smiled at me, I ached. I wished I were eight stone lighter and had Jake Gyllenhaal’s face. Sadly, I do not. Happily, neither does Darren McLaren.

Fifteen years have not been kind to Mac. Indeed, time has transformed a boy with quite a pleasant face and a sprightly form into a man with a pot belly and a comb-over. On the upside, he no longer seems to be under the impression that spitting phlegm at people’s backs is the height of sophisticated repartee. On the downside, nothing seems to have taken the place of this odious habit. Mac is a sophistication vacuum, and a charm void to boot. He’s also a Business Manager at a branch of the NatWest bank in Dartford. Hearing this made me smile. It made me really happy to think that, although I may, in my time, have stooped devilishly low—so low, in fact, that neither stealing and defacing a bible nor ripping the genitalia from a dead man’s memories were beneath me—I have never, never worked in a bank.

If we’d had US-style year-books at our school, Georgina Bentley would have been voted ‘Girl most likely to end up in the sex industry’. Georgina apparently thought nothing of orally pleasuring any boy brave enough to ask her. Such was the reputation she never denied. Now she’s a secretary for an insurance company in Maidstone.

Georgina—George—is a big, bouncy girl with a square face, eyes that are slightly too far apart, and a passion for Arthurian legend. She met her current boyfriend playing World of Warcraft. George isn’t exactly the sharpest chisel in the toolbox, but she is fun and funny and extremely likeable.

Then there was Karen Walsh, sporting a sensible brown bob and a not unpleasant smile on her eager, open face. Walshy was an absolute shit to me at school. Now she’s a social worker in Lewisham. She hadn’t said a lot to me since arriving at the pub, but she definitely seemed to have changed. It was early though. The jury was still out.

The strangest thing was standing there actively harbouring a grudge for at least two of those people. After all these years. As if nothing had changed. As if we were still teenagers.

Things, however, had definitely changed. I’d changed. Apart from ballooning in size, the main difference was that I was no longer crippled by shyness and shame. I used to let the likes of Bucky and Mac make me feel inferior. Now I looked at them and I felt pretty damned good about myself. They both looked so spent, and defeated, and neither of them had anything of any consequence to say. I felt good.

Realising they no longer had the power to make me feel bad, I felt less pressure. I relaxed. And the grudge fell away, like a cloak of dead skin, and a new me emerged, unashamed, unafraid, and confident. Suddenly I was glad to be there. Back where I belonged, among people. However, there was still plenty of time for things to go horribly wrong.

But for now I was mingling magnificently and speaking to everyone. Alfie Mussett had turned up too, as had Liam McDowell and Julie Moore. I caught up with them all, and reminisced like Gulliver, excited and freshly returned from his travels. Sadly, none of us—except Deborah Hutton and Angela Charlton—had done anything particularly exciting with our lives. At least Deb and Ange had each travelled a bit, more than the odd fortnight in a hotel here and there. Bucky, I discovered, had never once set foot outside the UK. And neither did he seem particularly perturbed by this fact.

‘But there’s so much going on,’ I pointed out. ‘There are, like, two hundred countries in the world, and nearly seven billion people. Don’t you want to maybe, experience a bit of it?’

He scowled at me, and half laughed, but not in a mean way. ‘You don’t get it, do you? The thing is, I really couldn’t give a fuck about all that. I’m happy where I am, with what I’ve got. I couldn’t give a monkey’s about the rest of the world, if I’m honest.’ His face had softened. He was genuinely trying to explain himself. I felt quite touched and privileged in a distinctly patronising way.

I held my hands up in resignation. ‘That’s fine. I’m happy you’re happy. I just can’t help thinking, you know…’

‘Yeah, you always thought too much,’ he interrupted. ‘That was your problem, mate.’

‘What does that even mean? And what the fuck else was I supposed to do?’ I realised I’d kind of snapped this. And I swore. And I don’t often swear. Not out loud. ‘There was nothing else for me to do. I was hardly the most popular kid in school.’ I’d snapped that too. I smiled at him, deliberately. I could feel myself getting emotional. That really wasn’t supposed to happen. The grudge had gone. I tried to remember that. It was all in the past. Calm. Calm. ‘What do you want to drink, Bucky? Let me buy you a drink.’

A couple more drinks down the line and I found myself talking with Ange, Deb, and George. I was drunk, they were drunk, we all were drunk, and the conversation turned to physical appearance. Not mine, but it was only a matter of time.

George was lavishing praise upon Deb Hutton. And rightly so. Then she extended her praise to Ange, congratulating them both on managing to keep their figures.

I interrupted. ‘Oh, God, George. Don’t you know it’s seriously bad form to start talking about weight in the presence of someone who’s morbidly obese?’

They laughed.

‘You’re not morbidly obese,’ chirped George and Deb predictably.

‘You are definitely obese though,’ said Ange.

George gasped. ‘Don’t be mean!’ she cried.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘As it happens, she’s right.’ Ange gave me a playful punch on the arm. I scrunched up my face at her adoringly, but I’m not really sure how it went across.

The conversation remained cosmetic. George was talking about her sunbed addiction. ‘It’s just about the only time I ever leave the house,’ she said, ‘apart from work. I even do it in the summer.’ Deb was the opposite. With her white, flammable body, she was obsessed by skin cancer and terrified of the sun.

‘I went to a tanning salon once,’ I said, ‘but I think I was allergic.’ They laughed. ‘It’s far from funny,’ I insisted. ‘I came out in a rash. But it’s good that it gets a laugh. It’s good that my suffering brings a little happiness into the world.’

‘Oh, poor you,’ said Ange.

I laughed. I love Ange. ‘No, but it’s a nightmare,’ I persisted. ‘It’s like there’s nothing I can do to even pretend that I’m healthy…’

‘You could lose weight,’ said Ange, flatly. Followed by the disapproval of George and Deb. George actually blushed on my behalf.

I smiled. ‘No, she’s absolutely right,’ I said. ‘Losing weight would be a good place to start.’

‘No, but I think it’s really good.’ This was George continuing to shy away from the truth. ‘You know, everyone is so vain these days, and I include myself in that, although you might not think so to look at me. I’m a complete slave to vanity and I hate it. I think it’s really good that you’re not…you know, that you haven’t give in to the pressures…’

‘What makes you think I haven’t given in to the pressures of vanity, George?’

She stopped talking, unsure of whether or not I was joking. She searched my expression. Her drunken eyes bobbed across my many-elbowed face, like wooden hoops down cobbled streets. ‘No, I just mean…’ She was lost.

I put her out of her misery. ‘I know what you mean,’ I chuckled. ‘And I know there’s a compliment in there somewhere desperately trying to fight its way through to the surface and I really appreciate it, honest I do. But you’re going to have to give me a blow job to make up for it.’

I was drunk. Part of me strived to feel embarrassed and apologetic for what I’d just said but it was getting laughs and it was only a joke, for God’s sake—kind of—and the new me was a little bit more loose-lipped than the old me. And I liked him for that.

Ange was patting George on the back, really quite firmly. George was choking, having laughed some of her wine up through the roof of her mouth into her nose. At one stage, she was bent double, a piece of grit in the very eye of a coughing fit. ‘Seriously though,’ I continued, ‘it was very difficult for me at school, being the only boy in the third, fourth, and fifth year that you never went down on.’

Eventually George recovered enough to say, between loud sniffs and mutterings of ‘Oh dear’, ‘Well, you never asked, did you? Everybody else asked.’

‘You’re in there, Stan,’ Ange declared bawdily. ‘She’s just a girl who can’t say no.’

To which George replied, ‘Hold your horses, Ange love, that was fifteen years ago.’

‘A leopard never changes its spots,’ Deb piped up.

‘So what, you’re the same prissy bitch you were when you were at school, are you?’ George retorted.

‘Now this is more like it.’ Ange laughed. ‘This is what I come to these things for!’

‘If you thought I was a prissy bitch then, then yeah, you probably still will now, but that might say more about you than it does about me,’ came Deb’s decidedly prissy reply.

‘Yeah, no change there,’ George snapped back, and they both laughed drunkenly, all talk of my oral pleasure washed away on this exultant wave of slightly bitter nostalgia.

Then Bucky appeared with a tray which was positively overwhelmed by drinks. ‘Here you go, peeps,’ he said. ‘Peeps!’ I repeated, grabbing hold of what I guessed was my fifth, but it could have been my eighth Guinness. ‘Cheers!’ I shouted. Suddenly everyone was standing around in a rough circle, maniacally clinking one another’s glasses.

‘Look in the eyes!’ cried Karen, as she clinked each in turn. ‘The eyes!’ cried Ange. Cries of ‘Eyes!’ reverberated round the pub, and people clinked and reclinked while drunkenly staring avidly into the windows of one another’s souls.

‘Here’s to the past!’ I cried, to still more clinks, and there it went—‘the past!’—bouncing clumsily but merrily round a ring of rubbery wet mouths.

When last orders were called, I found myself drinking vodka, which I knew to be a very stupid idea right then as I was pouring it into my fat neck. The conversation had turned to Christmas, the conversational curse of the season.

Bucky, Ange, Kaz, and George reminisced about some Christmas party where Graham Uren (whose surname made his life a misery) got so drunk that he believed he was possessed by the devil. Complete breakdown. Oh, the hilarity.

Well, I wasn’t at that party, because I wasn’t invited, but I do remember that Christmas. The Christmas of 1992. I remember the last day of term particularly well, because it was the day I was suspended from a goalpost on the school football field, wrists tied over the crossbar with a length of rope, me stretched on to my tiptoes, and my trousers pulled down around my ankles. It was the day thirty or so fellow pupils came to look and laugh and point and I had to wait for twenty-five minutes, in mute terror and fierce, boiling humiliation, before anyone had the decency to let me down.

‘It was funny though,’ Mac pointed out.

He’d been one of the five or six of my schoolmates responsible for tying me up.

‘No.’ I looked at him, really trying to stop my eyes from tearing up. ‘No, it really wasn’t funny,’ I repeated. ‘It totally fucked me up for a long time and it really wasn’t funny.’

Mac eventually became aware that there was a situation. He glanced back and forth at other faces, his grin fading.

‘Darren, have you ever been publicly humiliated, or bullied?’

He squirmed and nodded his head. ‘All right, mate, I’m sorry. It was a long time ago, you know what I mean…’

I was about to continue to argue with him, when Karen stepped forward and grabbed my arm, gestured for me to follow her and walked me away from the group towards the door and out on to the street, where she took hold of my wrists, looked up at my face and into my eyes and said, ‘Stan, I just wanted to say, I’m really, really sorry for the part I know I played in the torture that you had to put up with day in and day out for years in that…horrible fucking school. I’m honestly, genuinely so sorry.’

And that’s all it took. I burst into tears. My hands flew up to my face and I began to bawl. Karen tried to put her arms around me. I resisted at first, blocking her with my arms. Then I forced myself to stop weeping, and gradually lowered my guard. Karen’s face was wet too. She smiled at me, put her arms around my neck and squeezed.

Off I went again.

I don’t believe I’d cried this hard since I was at school. Maybe not since recovering from the goalpost incident. I held on to her like I could have squeezed the life out of her if I wasn’t careful and I cried like a giant baby with a face that not even its mother could love. And if you think I’m ugly in the cold light of day, you should see me with a skinful of Guinness and vodka on a cold winter’s night with my mad face sobbing and snot dangling from my nose.

‘It’s all right,’ said Karen. ‘It’s OK. Everything’s OK now. Come on. Come on, let’s get your face dried up.’

Gradually my sobs subsided. Karen gave me tissues. ‘I’m really glad you came tonight. For selfish reasons, I mean. It’s really made me confront some things that I’d been pushing to the back of my mind, you know?’

I blew my nose. ‘This is not Oprah,’ I said, and Karen laughed. She looked at me, all smiles. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘You turned out really fucking well.’ And that was that. I was off again.

Back in the pub a little while later, there were more drinks from somewhere, loud music and erratic loose-limbed dancing. Then time was called. It was over. We were being moved on.

‘But I was just getting going,’ I told the barman.

‘Just get going,’ the barman replied, wittily.

‘We’re going clubbing, mate, come on!’

‘Mac!’ I yelled.

‘We’re going to Air & Breathe!’

‘Breathe!’ I yelled. ‘Breathe!’

Then I remember choking, trying to breathe, trying desperately to catch my breath, fighting the feeling that I was drowning. Then I remember movement, falling and tumbling. Then I remember waking up, parched and gasping, my throat like a rusty cheese-grater. Then waking again with my legs and arms held hostage by a giant, sweet-smelling duvet. Light filtering through half-closed curtains. I had absolutely no idea where I was. I was alone. I was naked. I felt horrendous and frightened and lost. I closed my eyes and crawled away from the pain of consciousness, back into the sanctuary of sleep.

I was woken again at 10.15 a.m. By Ange. She knocked and popped her head round the bedroom door. ‘Wakey wakey,’ she chimed. I groaned, believing this to be the appropriate response at moments such as this. I pulled the duvet instinctively over my face, which was somehow covered in bits. ‘Where am I?’ I whimpered.

‘You’re at Ange’s house in Hackney,’ Ange replied. I was in Ange’s spare room. I breathed it in. ‘You had a bit too much to drink last night and got sick on George, so we brought you home in a cab. Karen’s here too and we’re all about to eat breakfast together and have a good old laugh about last night.’

Minutes later I shuffled through the living room and into the kitchen. My clothes were still drying so I was squeezed into Ange’s dressing gown, which I was trying not to feel too closely or smell too keenly for fear of inappropriate arousal, and which just about covered my shameful amplitude but was in truth a tad too pink and flowery for my taste; much pinker, in fact, and a great deal more flowery than I was feeling. ‘Goooood morning!’ cried Karen, bright as a bag of buttons on Cardigan Day. ‘Don’t you look good enough to eat!’ She laughed, amused by herself.

Apparently, we never made it to the club. Outside the pub I had an attack of best frienditis and began hugging everyone and telling them that I had learned a lot and that I considered them all very dear friends, while someone tried to organise taxis. I ended up with Georgina, shambling, falling into her, my body slurring. Ange witnessed this and shouted, helpfully, ‘What about that blow job, George?’ At which point George laughed and licked her lips at me.

Apparently, my blacking out and my vomiting occurred simultaneously, so I was already on my way down to the ground when George’s legs got between my puke and the pub car park.

I cringed into my coffee. I felt ill all over again. My head began to spin and bruises I’d just been reminded of began to breathe and throb in my arms and legs.

Ange and Karen were still very amused by the whole episode. ‘There was loads of it,’ said Karen.

‘It ran down her tights and into her boots,’ added Ange.

‘Gallons of it,’ insisted Karen.

‘God,’ I moaned. ‘I was aiming for Mac.’

‘I find that difficult to believe,’ said Karen. ‘You’d just told him you loved him.’

Apparently—if any of this nonsense is to be believed—I’d also professed my love to both Ange and Karen while drifting in and out of consciousness in the cab home. Also, by all accounts, I even made a coarse proposition or two. But I was assured my advances were ‘hilarious’ rather than ‘ugly’. So that was something.

I felt bad. But I felt wonderful too. Suddenly it seemed that I was part of the gang, that I’d been accepted. And all it took was for me to get drunk and be sick on someone.

‘Poor George,’ I said. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘She was definitely going to blow you too,’ added Ange. Then suddenly my penis was the topic of conversation and both Ange and Karen were laughing and passing conspiratorial looks back and forth.

‘What?’ I said, worried.

They looked at me, mock-suggestively, and I felt the blood rising in my face.

‘You don’t remember anything about how you got from the cab, covered in your own vomit, into my bed, naked and clean, do you?’

My mouth fell open.

‘You’re hung like a horse, my lad,’ said Ange.

I was embarrassed, but in a good way. They explained that they’d dragged me upstairs, undressed me and sponged me down. ‘I swear you were awake,’ said Karen. ‘Go on, you can admit it now.’

I wasn’t awake. At least, not fully. I remembered climbing stairs and heat on my legs but I think I thought I was dreaming. A brilliant dream, befitting of a birthday.

I started laughing.

‘Part of him was certainly awake,’ said Ange. ‘Know what I mean?’ she added, in the voice of Marsha from Spaced.

I laughed for a while longer, slightly maniacally. Then I was wiping my eyes. ‘Do you know, that was the best birthday I’ve had for years.’

‘What?’

‘Probably ever, if I’m honest.’

‘Did you know it was his birthday?’

‘It was your fucking birthday?!’

Blimey. They suddenly seemed really annoyed. ‘How could you not say anything?’ they wanted to know.

I shrugged. ‘I dunno. It didn’t seem important.’

On the contrary, they explained, it was actually very important indeed. Then, in order to show me just exactly how important it was, they made immediate arrangements to take me out to lunch.

Lunch, in time, turned into drinks, drinks turned into cocktails and cocktails turned into a wonderful long day becoming firm friends with two women who in very different ways had made my schooldays a living hell.

We finished it all off with a meal in a Korean restaurant, one of those where they cook your meat in front of you, on grills built into the table. ‘I’m going to change my life,’ I said, as we tucked in. ‘I’m going to sort myself out. Lose weight and start, you know, putting myself out there. Yesterday was the first time I’ve been out to a pub, or out of the house in any social situation, in about six months.’

Ange and Karen were both shocked by this, and full of encouragement for my plans.

‘I’m thinking of starting a blog too,’ I said.

‘What’s a blog?’ said Karen.

‘Do it,’ said Ange, after berating Karen for her ignorance. ‘If you think it’ll help. I’ll be happy to cook you a healthy meal once in a while too,’ she added. ‘And I must say, I’m loving your PMA.’

‘I love your PMA,’ I corrected. ‘What’s my PMA?’

‘Positive Mental Attitude,’ she said. ‘I’m loving it.’

Ange stuck out her tongue and clamped it between her front teeth. It was something she did when she thought she’d said something funny.

‘Put your tongue away,’ I said, adoringly.

It was a wonderful day. They wouldn’t even let me pay. And when finally I returned home, I was a changed man, more than ready and one hundred per cent willing to face the challenges of a new year and, if it wasn’t a tad too pretentious, a new life.

I felt like dynamite. In fact, for the first time in thirty years, I no longer felt afraid.

Or at least, not cripplingly so.