‘In Australia, they go the other way.’
‘On the equator, they just stand there. Very self-conscious.’ Now ‘2 Become 1’ faded into the warm syrup of Whitney Houston’s ‘Greatest Love of All’. ‘Yikes,’ said Helen and rolled her shoulders. ‘I hope, for all our sakes, that the children aren’t our future.’
‘I don’t think Whitney Houston had this particular school in mind.’
‘No, probably not.’
‘The other thing I’ve never got about this song: learning to love yourself – why’s that the greatest love of all?’
‘It makes more sense if you hear it as loathe,’ she said. We listened.
‘Learning to loathe yourself—’
‘—is the greatest loathe of all. That’s why it’s easy to achieve. And the great thing is, it works with nearly all love songs.’
‘She loathes you—’
‘Exactly.’
‘Thanks, Helen. That makes more sense to me now.’
‘My gift to you.’ We turned back to the dance floor. ‘Trish looks happy,’ and we watched as Patricia Gibson, hand still clamped over her eyes, contrived to simultaneously dance and back away. ‘Colin Smart’s trousers have arranged themselves in an interesting way. Weird place to keep your geometry set. Boing!’ Helen twanged the air. ‘I had that once. Christmas Methodist Disco with someone whose name I’m not at liberty to repeat. It’s not nice. Like being jabbed in the hip with the corner of a shoebox.’
‘I think boys get more out of it than the girls.’
‘So go rub it against a tree or something. It’s very rude, by which I mean impolite. Leave it out of your arsenal, Charles.’ Elsewhere, hands were seeking out buttocks and either lying there, limp and frightened, or kneading at the flesh like pizza dough. ‘It really is a most disgusting spectacle. And not just because of my much-vaunted lesbianism.’ I shifted on the bar. We were not used to frank and open discussion. Best to ignore it, and after a moment –
‘So, do you want to dance?’ she said.
I frowned. ‘Nah. M’all right.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ she said. A little time passed. ‘If you want to go ask someone else—’
‘Really. I’m all right.’
‘No big crush, Charlie Lewis? Nothing to get off your chest in these dying moments?’
‘I don’t really do that … stuff. You?’
‘Me? Nah, I’m pretty much dead inside. Love’s a bourgeois construct anyway. All this –’ She nodded to the dance floor. ‘It’s not dry ice, it’s a haze of low-lying pheromones. Smell it. Love is …’ We sniffed the air. ‘Cointreau and disinfectant.’
Feedback, and Mr Hepburn’s voice boomed out, too close to the mike. ‘Last song, ladies and gentlemen, your very last song! Let’s see everyone dancing with someone – courage, people!’ ‘Careless Whisper’ came on, and Helen nodded towards a huddled group that now emitted a single girl. Emily Joyce walked towards us, starting to speak while too far away to be heard.
‘…’
‘What?’
‘…’
‘I can’t—’
‘Hello! I just said hi, that’s all.’
‘Hello, Emily.’
‘Helen.’
‘Well, hello Emily.’
‘What ya doing?’
‘We are being voyeurs,’ said Helen.
‘What?’
‘We’re watching,’ I said.
‘Did you see Mark put his hand up Lisa’s skirt?’
‘No, I’m afraid we missed that,’ said Helen. ‘We did see them kissing, though. That’s quite something. Did you ever see a reticulated python swallow a small bush pig, Emily? Apparently they dislocate their jaws, right back here—’
Emily squinted irritably at Helen. ‘What?’
‘I said, did you ever see a reticulated python swallow a small—’
‘Look, do you want to dance or what?’ snapped Emily impatiently, poking at my kneecap.
‘Don’t mind me,’ said Helen.
I think I might have puffed my cheeks and blown out air. ‘All right then,’ I said and hopped down.
‘Don’t slip in the vomit, lovebirds,’ said Helen as we walked onto the dance floor.
Slowies
I held out my arms and for a moment we found ourselves standing with gripped hands out to the side like pensioners at a tea dance. Emily corrected me, placing my hand on the small of her back, and as we began our first rotation I closed my eyes and tried to identify an emotion. The artificial starlight suggested I ought to feel romantic, the rasping saxophone, an awareness of her pelvis and the clasp of her bra should have been enough to spark desire, but embarrassment was the emotion I recognised and the only longing I felt was for the end of the song. Love and desire were too tangled up with ridicule and, sure enough, at the edge of the hall Lloyd was waggling his tongue lewdly while Fox turned his back, crossed his arms and caressed his own shoulder blades. I adjusted my right hand so that only the middle finger showed, which seemed pretty witty to me, and we revolved away as the saxophone played on. Say something, say anything …
Emily spoke first. ‘You smell of boys.’
‘Oh. Yeah, it’s old games kit. It’s all I had. Sorry.’
‘No, I like it,’ she said and snuffled into my neck and I felt a wetness there that might have been a kiss or the dab of a damp flannel. Grandmothers aside, I had kissed, or been kissed, twice before, though it might be more accurate to describe those events as facial collisions. The first occasion was in a darkened audio-visual exhibit on a history field trip to Roman remains. There’s no reason why anyone should instinctively know how to kiss – like snowboarding or tap-dancing, it can’t be learnt from watching – but Becky Boyne had taken her instruction from Disney fairy tales, pursing her lips into a tight, dry bud that she tapped around my face like a bird getting nuts from a feeder. Films had also taught us that a kiss was not a kiss unless it made a noise, and so each point of contact was accompanied by a little lip-smacking sound as artificial as the clip-clop that represents a horse. Eyes open, or closed? I kept them open in case of discovery or attack, and read the wall display behind her. The Romans, I noted, had pioneered under-floor heating and on it went, the tap-tap-tap becoming harder and more insistent, like someone trying to unblock a stapler.
Kissing Sharon Findlay, on the other hand, was an angry, open-mouthed frenzied shark attack, both of us jammed down the back of a sofa. Harper had a den, a concrete bunker in the basement of his house that held a certain notoriety and on Friday nights resembled the Playboy Mansion’s fallout shelter. Here Harper presided over exclusive, high-rolling ‘DVD parties’, doling out own-brand lager spiked with soluble aspirin – the olive in our martini – to be drunk through a straw and potent enough to send us behind the sofa, kissing amongst the dust balls and the dead flies. I had never been more aware that the tongue was a muscle, a powerful skinless muscle like the arm of a starfish, and when my tongue tried to fight back against Sharon’s they had wrestled like drunks trying to squeeze past each other in a corridor. Whenever I tried to raise my head it was ground back down onto the dusty underlay with the same kind of force and motion required to juice a grapefruit. I retain a certain memory that when Sharon Findlay belched, my cheeks puffed out, and when we finally pulled apart, she wiped her mouth along the entire length of her arm. The experience left me shaken and sore-jawed, with two small rips in the corner of my mouth, a third in the root of my tongue, and nauseous, too, from what must conservatively have been half a pint of someone else’s saliva. But I was also strangely excited, as if after some harrowing fairground ride, so that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it again immediately or never again in my life.