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