Life and Laughing: My Story (15 page)

Finally we spotted two similarly aged young girls and devised a carefully thought-out plan of seduction. ‘Let’s follow them,’ Sam suggested. And follow them we did, for about twenty minutes, round and round the village. When they stopped, we stopped. When they continued to walk, so did we. We wanted to be cads but were acting more like private investigators. The problem was that we didn’t really have a plan beyond ‘Let’s follow them.’ The two girls then turned and started walking towards us. It seemed like the ‘Let’s follow them’ strategy had worked after all. Sam and I frantically styled our hair as the girls approached. They were surprisingly attractive.

‘Bingo,’ I whispered to Sam.

The girls halted in front of us and with thick Liverpudlian accents screeched the unforgettable, ‘Why the fuck do you think you’re following us, you little turds?’

Sam and I had no answer and apologized. ‘We’re awfully sorry,’ we muttered and went home. That was as close as we came to pulling.

Within months, however, I was to experience my first kiss. Doesn’t that sound romantic? ‘My first kiss.’ Well, it wasn’t. Sam invited me to a Summer Ball frequented by upper-class-toff teens. It was held at the Hammersmith Palais in London. If you’ve ever flicked through the pages of
Tatler
magazine and seen the party photos towards the back, you’ll know the sort of people who were there. ‘Horsey’ doesn’t come close to describing them. Something happens to your mouth when you speak too posh; it becomes slightly misshapen as if in a constant state of preparation to say something along the lines of, ‘Er hillar, jolly good.’

All the Hooray-Henry boys were dressed in black tie, probably in suits passed down through generations of gentry. All the girls were in figure-hugging little black dresses and had names like Arabella shortened to ‘Bells’ or Pippa shortened to ‘Pips’. The object of the ball was to use your odd-shaped posh mouth to ‘snog’ as many other odd-shaped posh mouths as you could. My mum hired me a suit from Moss Bros and a clip-on bow tie, and I went with Sam and four other cologned young men.

We were dropped off by our parents. ‘Have a good time. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ they hollered, as we disappeared inside clutching our phenomenally expensive tickets. I was nervous and self-conscious. Was tonight the night I would meet the girl of my dreams?

I will never forget the sight that met me when I adjusted my eyes to the Hammersmith Palais lighting. Literally hundreds of under-age upper-class kids with their faces stuck together, ‘getting off’ with each other. Wow. Maybe it had something to do with them rebelling against their suppressed stiff-upper-lipped lifestyle. Maybe they were just making the most of it until they were carted back to their single-sexed boarding schools. Whatever the explanation my immediate thought was, ‘Surely I’m going to pull tonight.’

I turned to express my optimism to Sam only to find him with his tongue already down someone’s throat. My other friends also ploughed straight in, mouths open and latching on to whoever was nearest. There are very few things in life as embarrassing as standing next to a kissing couple, so I wandered on to the dance floor and danced, for some time, on my own. Just as I was mid-twist to Chubby Checker’s ‘The Twist’, I saw Sam and another friend, Alex. ‘Hey,’ I shouted over the music, ‘how’s it going?’

‘Forty-six,’ said Alex.

‘Fifty-two,’ said Sam.

‘What? What are you talking about? Fifty-two what?’ I genuinely enquired.

‘Girls!’ they said in unison, now both twisting too.

‘You’ve snogged forty-six and fifty-two girls tonight?’ I asked, amazed.

‘Yeah,’ said Sam.

‘Forty-seven!’ said Alex coming up for air from his latest conquest on the dance floor.

‘How many have you snogged, Michael?’ asked Sam.

‘None,’ I admitted. ‘How do you do it? What do you say? Do you say anything? Shall I just start licking someone’s face? Help me.’

Sam explained that all he was doing was approaching girls and asking whether they wanted to go and sit down. This was code for ‘snog’. They would then take a seat together and he would rack up another digit on his tally.

‘Go for it, Michael. Find a pretty girl and ask her if she wants to sit down with you on one of the sofas,’ Sam encouraged.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘That’s all, just ask if she wants to sit with me on one of the settees?’

‘Sofas!’ Sam corrected. ‘You’re such a pleb.’ And with that, he disappeared.

I now felt I had more purpose. I saw a space open up on one of the sofas and scanned the dance floor. And there she was, without a doubt the best-looking girl at the ball. ‘That’s her,’ I thought. ‘I’d rather kiss her than a hundred of the others.’ I twisted over to where she was dancing as Chubby Checker continued to sing. ‘How long is this song?’ I thought. ‘It must be the long version.’ She had dark hair and beautiful green eyes and fitted perfectly into her obligatory little black dress. It was as if she was the only girl on the dance floor, the only girl in the world. My heart was pounding. I moved in closer, a bit too close. I moved back a bit. I caught her eye.

‘I would like to go and sit down.’ I fluffed my line. Rather than ask her to sit down, I had simply informed her of my own movements. She looked at me, puzzled. I quickly tried again: ‘Would you like to come and sit down on the sof-tee with me?’

This was better. At least it was a proposition of some kind. However, I had forgotten whether sofa or settee was the correct thing to say and ended up creating my own chair, the sof-tee. I corrected myself again: ‘The sofa. Would you like to sit down with me on the sofa?’

There it was, the big question. It was out there. I’m not exaggerating when I say it took her some time to come up with an answer. She literally mulled it over, looking me up and down as I continued twisting to a record I was now convinced was stuck.

‘All right, then,’ she finally said.

I’d pulled!

Just.

Together we found a vacant slot between two other sets of snoggers. She was gorgeous, smelled wonderful and her perfect lips were attached to a perfect mouth, not like the back pages of
Tatler
at all. We sat down, she took out her chewing gum and within moments we were kissing. In the middle of the Hammersmith Palais surrounded by girls of loose morals, I had finally found one loose enough to kiss me. The sensation of kissing for the first time was extraordinary. Our tongues met with all the passion of a Magimix. Hers was swirling round and round, so mine did the same, chasing it. There was so much swirling that we started to froth a bit and my saliva was in danger of becoming stiff peaks. Then it was over. I thanked her, way too much; she returned the chewing gum to her mouth and stood up to leave.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked, worried I would lose her for ever.

‘Izzy,’ she said.

‘Easy?’ I questioned. Just my luck, the only girl I can pull is actually called ‘Easy’.

‘No,’ she said, ‘Izzy, short for Elizabeth.’

And then she was gone.

Sam’s final total was ninety-one and Alex’s eighty-seven. Mine was one. But I didn’t care, because I was convinced she was ‘the one’. I was in love with her. I told my four friends that I had kissed the most beautiful girl at the ball. They seemed happy for me. ‘Her name was Izzy,’ I told them through my perma-grin.

It transpired that they all knew Izzy. They’d all snogged her that night. I was just a number on her tally. It was also the common consensus that she wasn’t a very good kisser. ‘Kissed like a blender,’ somebody said. I had to agree. I was deflated, but not for long. I was off the mark. Surely things could only get better now. I had a newfound confidence. I had blender-kissed some chick called Izzy, and now I was a player. I had experience.

The next time I saw Lucy Protheroe sitting on the wall outside my school, I played it super-cool. No problems walking the fifty yards now.

‘Hi, Michael, how have you been?’ she asked, between hair flicks.

‘Good,’ I said. As if I couldn’t care less.

‘Are you going to the disco?’ she asked.

The major event on the school calendar was the Arnold House Disco. All the local girls’ schools were invited, and the gymnasium was transformed into a discothèque. I’d been dreaming about this night for ages. But I played it cool.

‘Maybe,’ I said with more nonchalance than I knew I was capable of.

She seemed intrigued by my cocky persona.

‘What have you been up to?’ she asked.

‘Snogging,’ I coolly announced.

‘What? In school?’ she probed.

‘No, me and my friends went to a ball the other night, and let’s just say … I got a little bit of action,’ I said, trying to make her jealous.

‘Oh, the one at the Hammersmith Palais. I can’t believe you went to that. That’s for like, the poshest people on earth. Apparently everyone snogs everyone, it’s gross. I know a girl called Izzy went and snogged, like, every boy there. But I’m glad you met someone, what’s her name? Where does she go to school?’

My face went bright red as I looked for an excuse to leave. A National Express coach drove past us.

‘I’d better go, that’s my bus,’ and I ran after the coach.

‘Where are you going, Michael? … That’s a coach … to Birmingham …’ she cried as I sprinted after it.

All week the school was buzzing at the prospect of this year’s school disco. I was thirteen years old and in my last year at Arnold House. I went shopping with my mum for my outfit and ended up opting for a fluorescent red shirt. I can’t remember where we bought it; all I remember is that it glowed in the dark, and I truly believed that my increased visibility would give me the edge over my male rivals. One of my mother’s friend’s daughters, Jessica Taylor, was also going, so my mother organized her to be my ‘date’. Before you get excited and think I may have ‘pulled’ before I even got to the disco, let me just explain that Jessica was 6 foot 3 inches and had a thick moustache.

Steve had a new ‘company car’ that David Rosenberg had given him to replace the written-off BMW 6-Series. It was a black Ford Orion 1.6i with ‘new car’ smell. It was a balmy summer’s night, a perfect opportunity to use the sunroof which came as standard. Steve and I picked up my ‘date’, Jessica, and he chauffeured us to the disco. I sat in the back with my red shirt glowing, and Jessica sat in the front with her head sticking out of the sunroof, her moustache blowing in the warm wind.

It was so weird arriving at school at night. I looked at Lucy’s empty wall in the crepuscular (surely the most impressive word I’ve used so far. It basically means dim) light. I was so over her. As soon as I shake off Jessica, I’ll have the pick of all the girls in the Borough of Camden. Jessica and I put our coats away and nervously walked into my school gymnasium, the sound of Wham!’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ getting louder with every step. The gym was unrecognizable; there was a glitter ball, flashing coloured lights, and smoke pumped out of a smoke machine. Nobody was dancing. All the boys were camped out in one corner and all the girls in the opposite corner. I looked up to Jessica’s face; the lights were reflecting off my fluorescent shirt making her moustache look like it was on fire. Almost in unison we said we wanted to find our friends. So we each took our places on our respective sides of the gym.

There must have been about fifty boys and fifty girls. I hooked up with Sam and my friends. ‘What the fuck are you wearing, McIntyre?’ Sam said (in fact, everyone said that). ‘Who do you fancy?’ asked Sam gesturing towards the girls camped in their corner. There they all were. Fifty thirteen-year-old girls of all different colours and creeds and shapes and sizes; it was like an advert for Benetton.

I saw Lucy Protheroe. I could cross her off the list, so there were forty-nine potentials. They all looked pretty in their own way, all dressed up in their new dresses. Even Jessica looked quite attractive until she got her hair tangled up in the basketball net. I had my eye on one girl who was wearing a Madonna-inspired ensemble complete with white lace gloves. When the DJ put on ‘Ghostbusters’ accompanied by some strobe lighting, she had a mild epileptic fit and had to be picked up by her parents. Down to forty-eight; they’re dropping like flies. Someone’s got to make a move and ask one of them to dance.

Apparently Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ was what many of the boys were waiting for. By the second verse, the middle of the gym was filled with boys and girls awkwardly dancing with each other. Jessica was dancing with Watson (the smallest kid in the class, who hid behind the blackboard) – that was quite a sight.

But, as usual, I was on my own. My confidence from the Izzy kiss was over, and here I was again, a bundle of nerves. Asking a girl to dance requires a tremendous amount of courage. The fear of rejection is too much to bear. I didn’t know if I could take it. There are two different forms of school disco dance. There’s the straightforward dancing opposite each other for the length of one eighties upbeat song, or there’s a slow dance. A slow dance is, of course, dictated by the tempo of the track playing. A normal dance is relatively trivial, but a slow dance involves bodily contact. Which at that age is quite intense. A slow dance is the Holy Grail of the Arnold House school disco. A girl may accept an invitation to dance to, say, Billy Ocean’s ‘Caribbean Queen’ but refuse a slow dance to Terence Trent D’Arby’s ‘Sign Your Name’.

Soon the boys’ side of the gym and the girls’ side were no longer distinguishable. Everyone was dancing with each other and enjoying themselves. I could barely dance. Because we were in the gym, I got confused and started squat-thrusting and doing star jumps, I think at one point I said the Lord’s Prayer. There was one girl I liked, but thought she was out of my league – and anyway my old electric-guitar-playing friend Gary Johnson was dancing with her. He was the coolest boy in school – what chance did I have?

Before you give up hope in me, I can tell you that I did pluck up the courage to ask a girl to dance. As the DJ played the Bangles, I walked like an Egyptian until I was standing directly in front of Alison with her dark frizzy hair and welcoming smile. ‘Do you want to dance?’ I asked confidently.