No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (8 page)

The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they’re chocolates and it matters which they select.

Kurt has a steel lighter. The girls extend their pursed faces towards his flame. Kurt lightly touches their fingers, steadying their hands.

‘You look like Elvis,’ one of the girls tells Kurt. The tall one. Frank’s. Frank feels as if someone has punched him in the stomach. Klop go his kishkes.

‘Elvis who?’ he says. Second joke.

That was what he was going to be had he not been a student of psychology at the University of Basle – a high court judge.

The girls know a quieter bit of park. Kurt and his put one arm around each other’s shoulders and then lace themselves together by putting their second arm behind their backs and holding hands. Frank wonders where Kurt has learnt to do this. On the Rhine, presumably. Frank’s leads him by the hand as though she is his mother. She has very large hands, dry, flat as spatulas, her fingers almost all the same length. It passes through Frank’s mind – more as a disturbance than a thought, a sudden shock to the cerebral cortex – that while it would be with only the greatest difficulty that he could take possession of her Gregory Peck, it would be the simplest thing in the world for her to take possession of his.

He has read somewhere that when a woman scratches your palm she is signalling that she is hot for you. A Mexican or a Peruvian thing. But he can’t believe the meaning isn’t universal. He releases one of his fingers from her grip and runs his nail across the inside of her sapless hand.

‘Ow!’ she says.

‘In Basle,’ he explains, ‘we say that pain is just another form of pleasure.’

‘Well that’s not what we say in Harrogate,’ she tells him.

Considering how little she seems to like him he is surprised that they end up on the grass in the quieter bit of park, separated from Kurt and his only by the trunk of an ancient oak tree. In such a spot, under such a tree, Kurt and Frank have been stretching themselves out for a forever of boy-years, remarking on how sad tree trunks always are, how they resemble the feet of elephants, wondering whether it’s true that elephants have long memories, wondering what the future has in store for them. Now they know.

Kurt!

Frank!

Hold the picture still.

Lying down, Frank’s is far more agreeably quiescent than she was standing up. He wonders if this is always the way with girls. An alchemical thing. Vapours rising to the top of a heated horizontal body. Or merely physics. Sex spilling out of a woman when she’s laid flat just as coffee runs out of an overturned coffee cup. If he could think of more things to do with her, he has the feeling that she would allow him to do them. But once he has rubbed her over a few times, like a window cleaner working at a stubbornly greasy pane, he is out of ideas. That she might let him
under
her clothes never so much as crosses his mind.

Of course he knows better than to make a grab for her neck. Do that to someone when they’re flat out on the grass and it has another meaning. Even in Yorkshire.

The tree prevents him from seeing how Kurt is getting along with his. It obscures their middles. From their extremities he is able to draw no inference other than that they appear to be getting along.

It’s kissing that comes as the real surprise to Frank. He has pecked at girls at parties before now, even banged teeth with them given half a chance, but nothing has prepared him for the sensation of swooning invasion that comes with making a black O of your mouth and allowing a thick viscid serpent of a tongue to maraud around in it at will. He closes his eyes and submits to the idea that man is nothing but a lightless honeycomb of leaking caverns; up into his palate the serpent goes, slick between his gums, blind behind his fillings, slow as torture or a sneer tracing the spongy pouches of his cheeks, then, in a sudden mocking writhe, quick past his uvula, brushing it aside like a bead curtain, and down down
into his pharynx, where it might tickle his heart or stop his breath forever.

‘Mine has to go,’ Kurt tells him during an air break. The girls have gone to find a lavatory and to generally debrief. The boys use the bushes.

‘How was it?’ Frank asks.

Kurt rolls his eyes. ‘Didn’t you see? She touched it.’

‘She
touched
it?’

‘Didn’t yours?’

Frank is ashamed to say he forgot to ask her to. ‘We were too busy kissing,’ he says. ‘She’s got a great tongue.’

‘Yeah, and a big enough mouth to keep it in. She looks like a fucking camel.’

‘Yours isn’t so fair.’

‘Don’t start that. I like camels.’ Kurt is agitated. Pacing up and down. You can’t touch a boy of fourteen and not expect him to be agitated. ‘So what are we going to do?’ he says.

‘I don’t know. Get the train back?’

Wrong answer. ‘Mine,’ Kurt says, ‘reckons that yours doesn’t have to go.’

Frank thinks about it. He wouldn’t mind more kissing. And he knows he really ought to ask her to touch it while he’s got the chance. But he doesn’t fancy the journey home on his own. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ll come back with you.’

‘That isn’t what I mean.’

Frank stares.

‘Mine says she does it.’

‘I thought you said she’s going.’

‘No, she says
yours
does it.’

Frank’s eyes open. ‘Toss off?’

‘Better.’

‘She performs?’

‘Better.’

Frank shrugs. Can’t think of anything better. Except kissing, and he’s done that.

Kurt makes a sucking noise in Frank’s ear. Slurp, slurp, swallow, gulp.

‘Ligner!’

‘I’m not. It’s the emmes. Mine says definite.’

‘Then I’ll stay.’

‘What about me?’

‘What
about
you?’

‘Mine says yours’ll do two. Actually prefers two, she says.’

Stillness falls over Harrogate.

Boys. Boys on backs. Boys on backs in rose gardens with trousers round ankles. Looking up at the sky. What will you do? What will I do?

She is on her knees, dipping from one to the other, like a woodpecker.

Can’t be clean, Frank thinks. Where had her tongue been immediately prior to its being down his throat? Can’t be hygienic. Can’t come.

Kurt neither. Not with Frank there.

Frank proposes a short walk.

‘Go on, then.’

‘Not me, you.’

‘No, you,’ the girl says.

‘And make it a long walk,’ Kurt tells him.

When he comes back they are kissing. ‘My turn,’ he says.

‘Too late,’ she tells him. ‘You wouldn’t come.’

‘He
wouldn’t come either.’

‘He has now.’ She pokes her tongue out at him. That tongue. The tongue that once upon a time brushed his uvula aside. Out of her mouth – out of his mouth, come to that, and out of Kurt’s – it’s as flat as an egg-slice, like her hands. But not dry. Frank notices that her cardigan too is wet.

‘This time I’ll come right away,’ he promises.

She shakes her head.

‘Give me thirty seconds.’

No.

‘Twenty.’

Still she shakes her head.

‘I almost came before.’

‘I know,’ she says, ‘and I like the taste of Kurt better.’

Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,/And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be.
Donne’s Flea. Frank’s favourite lyric poem. No flowers or mountains. Nature simply acting as a go-between for the sexes. So did Kurt and Frank commingle blood in Harrogate?

Not his fault, boychick, Kurt says on the train back. Free country. If someone likes the taste of his sperm better …

Frank looks out at the Pennines. He’s never cared for them. Reservoirs and chimneys. And no sky. Rainbows in the smoke. God’s apology. No, thank you; apology declined.

How long before Frank recovers his self-esteem, sperm-wise?

‘I have heard,’ he tells his doctor, ‘that there is such a thing as a sperm test. I would like one.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Fifteen in a week.’

‘And you would like a sperm test to ascertain what?’

‘Taste,’ Frank says.

A year later he is one of a party in a friend’s parlour, parents away, whisky decanters emptying fast, seven of them sitting in a circle of ormolu chairs with their dicks out waiting for Marcia, a teamhander from Accrington, new in town, to gobble them up before they settle in to a night of poker.

Although she has already agreed to this, Marcia wants to lay down a few ground rules.

No touching.

OK, Marcia.

No coming out of my mouth until you’re finished. This is a new blouse.

OK, Marcia.

Everyone only comes once.

OK, Marcia.

But she still isn’t entirely happy. Teamhanders are like this. Punctilious. Protocol is everything with them.

I want a prize, she says.

Oh no. They all groan. If she’s a brass they don’t want to know. Absolutely not. Respectable boys don’t go with prostitutes.

Fine by her, she’ll just get back into her skirt and go then. What’s in it for her? All she was going to suggest was that they blindfold her, change seats, and let her try to identify them by taste. Put the sperm to the boy. A tusheroon for every one she gets right.

It’s Morris’s house. He’s prepared to double that to five shillings – a caser. He fetches one of his mother’s favourite cut glass fruit bowls. That’s the pot. Everyone puts in. OK? Bar flukes, Morris believes their money’s safe. Sperm’s sperm. All sperm tastes the same. Everyone agrees. Everyone except Kurt, who looks down.

And Frank, who walks out.

Later, he hears that Marcia screwed up. Only one she got right. Kurt’s. ‘I can taste something Red Indian,’ she said. And then, ripping off the blindfold – ‘You!’ After which she reneged on all her own stipulations and went upstairs with him.

They are all shtupping on a regular basis now. A house only has to be empty of parents for half an hour and there are ten of them round. Up to the bedroom fast, and then down again, a swimming Durex in each fist, just like the polythene bags you are given at fairgrounds to carry away the goldfish
you’ve won. Frank too. No more window-cleaning a girl over her cardigan. He can unbutton her with his teeth now. He can part her like a peach with his hands tied back his back. He can bring her off with his nose, with his chin, with an eye-lash. And as for the taste of his sperm – it is good to report that he has suffered no lasting aftermath of trauma in that regard: he comes into mouths all over Manchester without giving a single cause for complaint. Except –

Except when he is in the company of Kurt.

If Kurt’s fucking in the same room he is, he can’t come. If Kurt’s fucking in the same house but in a different room he can come but the girl always spits him out. Kurt sours his sperm, that’s what it comes to. Kurt curdles him.

They remain friends, catch the school bus together, go rooting around the second-hand book stalls on Shude Hill together, buy shirts in Halon together, go to the Hallé together, swot in the Central Library together, get told off in the Central Library for making too much noise together, but they can’t pull keife together, can’t share one, can’t start from an end each and meet in the middle. Invidiousness has entered their friendship.
It’s a free country, not Kurt’s fault if someone prefers his sperm to Frank’s
… but Frank knows that in his soul Kurt can’t leave it at a free market; in his soul, and in relation to Frank, Kurt has come to think like a genetic supremacist: he believes that chromosome for chromosome he is the better man. Frank makes the better jokes, but he shoots the better spermatozoa. And it’s not the joke that gets the girl, it’s the jism.

Of course Kurt never
says
this to Frank. He loves Frank. Wouldn’t hurt him for the world. But there’s an unmistakable
noblesse oblige
about him now. When Frank is offered a place at Oxford Kurt is pleased for him in the way that one is pleased for a man with no arms who wins an egg and spoon race – it’s not something he can begrudge him. Kurt himself
goes to Birmingham. Only Birmingham. But then
he
doesn’t have anything to prove, does he?

Frank doesn’t like the way Kurt sits on his settee and looks about him whenever he comes to stay with him in Oxford; he has a way of making Frank feel that he is living in a doll’s house. Cute. Dinky. Nice for him. Well done, Frank. Your secret’s safe with me. Out in the college courtyard he pats Frank’s bicycle seat. Springs, eh? Aren’t you doing well! Kurt himself drives a sports car around Birmingham. Brrrrm brrrrm. But then that’s to be expected. Tasty sperm, tasty car. He marries, too, after graduation. Meets her, impregnates her, marries her, boom. Brings her swollen-bellied to meet Frank, his best friend, presently fucking his life away in a language school in Summertown.

Liz – Frank.

Liz!

Frank!

Steady.

Not a qualm about sitting her in a corner of the disco where Frank is to be found Je t’aiming it in the psychedelic crossfire. God, that Frank! Kurt Je t’aimes it himself, just once, with a double-jointed Italian. Go on, Liz laughs. Go for it. Kurt doesn’t look like Elvis any more. He looks like the Temptations. The lights pepper him purple and orange. Thank your lucky stars I’m into responsible husbanding these days, Frank. And yourself, do you mean to go on fucking much longer? Well, why not. Ssh! It’s safe with me. Your secret.

And then the baby. Look what we’ve got, Frank. Go on, hold. Isn’t she beautiful? But then that’s to be expected. Tasty sperm, tasty baby.

And tasty wife? Yes. No. Frank can’t make up his mind. Yes. Maybe. Narrow green eyes. Generous mouth. Goodish legs. Flat behind. Breasts nothing special either, but then she
is feeding, and a tit with a baby on the end of it is
hors de combat
even for someone as omnivorous as he is.

Yes. No. Yes, tasty. It’s the laugh. It’s what happens to the green eyes when she laughs. It’s how wide she opens her mouth. It’s the amount of chest she gives it. It’s her concentration on the thing you’ve said to make her laugh. It’s her gift for exclusive attentiveness.

Frank!

How will her laugh be now?

She has another baby and loses a third. Frank writes a letter of condolence. Faulty sperm, Kurt? But tears it up. His own sperm is raging. Red hot emissions. In quantities that would put to shame a sperm whale. His bed is like the Atlantic. He is coming five times a day with a partner. Four times a day without. On days that begin without and end with that’s nine, plus one more for the element of surprise.