Read by Jaz Deol
“That’s bollocks, Greenfield,” said Dean Murphy, hurling a half-deflated tennis ball against the wall of the gym. “There’s no way you’ve nobbed Gemma Hadley. For starters, cos she’s well fit, and for seconders, because you’re a total gay.”
Martin Greenfield pushed his hands into the pockets of his parka.
“Well, I have, so fuck off.”
“What’re her tits like then?”
“None of your business.”
Dean ignored this limp rejoinder, and instead flung himself into a nearby bush, in search of the tennis ball that had ricocheted off a protruding window ledge. When he emerged, cloaked in thorns and strands of foliage, he hurled the ball vaguely in the direction of Martin’s head and said, “What was it like then?”
“Awesome,” said Martin.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Martin hadn’t, of course, nobbed Gemma Hadley. He wanted to nob Gemma Hadley. He wanted to nob Gemma more than he wanted a Playstation. He also wanted to do lots of other things with Gemma. Gay things, like holding hands, or going for walks. He wanted Gemma to write him love letters, and wait for him at the gates of the school. He wanted her to cry when he got cross and shouted at her, so that he could cuddle her and say he was sorry, and make everything all right. Everything he could think of doing in the world, he wanted to do with Gemma Hadley.
“D’you get a BJ then?” said Dean, who suddenly had his grimy face inches from Martin’s. Martin hesitated briefly.
“Yeah,” he said.
“What is one then?”
“What’s what?”
“A BJ.”
“Why, don’t you even know?” said Martin, knowing it was a lame gambit, and knowing that Dean would know that too. Dean took a step back and looked at him assessingly. There was a smirk on his face.
“Oi, Kemp!” he shouted, and, as if bidden by a higher power, Philip Kemp trotted out from behind a hedgerow. Philip Kemp was fat, and smelled a bit, but was rarely bullied on account of his seemingly inexhaustible supply of pornography. Nobody knew where he got it from, although his claim that he took most of the photographs himself, with his dad’s camera, was treated with open suspicion.
“What’s up Murphy?” he said, scratching at his belly, as was his habit.
“Greenfield doesn’t know what a BJ is.”
“What?”
“Greenfield. He doesn’t know what a BJ is.”
“Ha!” said Philip Kemp, screwing up his fat, red face in a mixture of extreme contempt and considerable pity. With a different adversary, Martin might have been tempted to call the bluff, but although it was true that Kemp distributed large proportions of his illicit stash as a protection levy, there was no doubt that he was himself a serious student of his own wares. Instead, Martin just shrugged, and said:
“Just because I nobbed Gemma Hadley.”
Surprisingly, this met with silence. Dean kicked a pebble at him and wandered over to the wall, where he started etching something on it with a fifty pee. Philip Kemp just stood there scratching his belly. Perhaps, Martin thought, it was not that they believed him, but that the very mention of this idea, unobtainable and almost unimaginable as it was, had the power to subdue. As if an idea had been released into the world that was so powerful, so awe-inspiring, so transcendental, that there was nothing else to do but maintain a respectful and humble silence.
For a sudden, horrifying moment, Martin was struck with the notion that Dean might be writing something on the wall along the lines of ‘Martin hearts Gemma’, or ‘Martin & Gemma 4 eva’, but a surreptitious investigation revealed that he was merely scrawling the word ‘spunk’, along with an appropriate illustration. Martin sighed inwardly, and strolled off along the side of the sports hall, dragging his fingers along the flaking brickwork.
It had been two days since his moment with Gemma, but he could still remember every detail with a mesmerising clarity. It had been at lunch time, when most of the other boys were playing MegaWar, a game in which one’s aptitude for strategy and hand-to-hand combat came second to one’s ability to devise ludicrous and unwieldy weaponry which, once conjured from the ether, could be employed indiscriminately. Martin had himself been playing, but had been forced to bow out early, once his nuclear crossbow had proved an unworthy adversary for Thomas Grade’s Wank-Powered Diarrhoea-o-tron. (“You’re dead!” Martin had cried triumphantly. “Well, at least I haven’t got diarrhoea,” came back Thomas, holstering his weapon. It was immediately clear to both parties who had bested whom.)
And it had been as he strolled down by the Portakabins, where the geeks stroked rabbits and weeded the school gardens for free in the evenings, that he heard her. The sound, at first, was unfamiliar to him. He’d heard people cry before, of course, but not like this. Usually it was the little kids in the lower years, who had become wearied of being pelted with conkers, or stupid girls who missed their mums and had to go and see the headmaster and be allowed to call home. Or once, on a memorable occasion, a middle-aged, menopausal supply teacher who, clearly tiring of decreasingly-subtle references to her luxuriant facial hair throughout a particularly fraught triple French, was found sobbing into a hanky in the stationery cupboard.
All those times, the sound of crying had been big and gurgling and ugly and wet and red-faced, and pretty much disgusting from start to finish. This sound was different. It was like a sigh, with a soft hiccup in the middle. Not even a hiccup - more of a tremble, or a waver. For a while it went on, then it died, then it rose again. And again the tremor, the waver, the hiccup. The softest of gulps. Martin listened, and it seemed as if he could hear the sound of eyes blinking back tears. He turned the corner, around the last Portakabin, and she was there, with her back to him, long blonde hair spilling down the back of her blazer, and her head in her hands, and her shoulders shaking, and that sound, that incredible, beautiful sound, just audible above the whisper of the trees and the background chaos of MegaWar.
Martin took a breath, and said something that he never thought in his wildest dreams he would say to a girl.
“Are you okay?”
Gemma Hadley turned, and Martin felt his breath catch in his throat. She looked impossibly wonderful. Even with her eyes red, as they were, and the make-up, that you weren’t supposed to wear but she still did, running down her cheeks, and a delicate little bubble of snot or spit or something perched on her trembling lower lip, she looked impossibly wonderful. Martin, for reasons he couldn’t quite define, took a step backward. He supposed he was waiting for her to shout at him to fuck off, but she didn’t. She seemed almost glad he was there. He didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. This went on for some time. Then, with her voice barely more than a whisper:
“Do you want to come and sit down?”
“Yes, please,” said Martin.
He moved towards her, and sat down, and it didn’t even feel awkward, and he didn’t even wonder how close he should sit. He could smell her hair, which smelled of some sort of shampoo. He turned his face, and met her eyes.
“Why are you crying?” he said, and realised, as he said it, that he was holding her hand, and that she hadn’t even tried to pull it away.
“It’s nothing,” she said, still looking at him.
“You can tell me if you want.”
“Do you promise you won’t tell anybody?”
“Yes,” said Martin, automatically holding up his hands to show that he hadn’t crossed his fingers or anything. That made her smile. She pointed across at the hutches that ran along the perimeter of the school fence, the ones that the after-school geeks looked after.
“It’s the rabbits,” she said.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“They sell them, don’t they,” said Gemma Hadley, wiping the back of her hand across her nose. “At the school fayre and the jumble sales and everything. The little ones. As pets.”
“Yeah,” said Martin, and then, without thinking, “Derek Wick’s mum bought him one. He chucked it out of his bedroom window.” Then, feeling her hand spasm in his – “It was all right though.”
“And I know they go to good families and everything. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that they’re already a family. Just for a short while.”
Martin looked over at the hutches. Gemma’s hand was warm in his, and she wriggled her fingers and rested her head on his shoulder.
“It’s stupid, I know.”
Martin kept quiet. He didn’t know if it was stupid or not. He knew that every other boy in the school, had they been surveyed at this moment, would have returned a hundred percent verdict of ‘very stupid’. But he also knew that Gemma Hadley had her head on his shoulder, and her hand in his, and that she was sad. And it was these things, especially that last thing, that really mattered.
“I don’t think they get sad about stuff like that, rabbits,” he said, not knowing if this was the right thing to say, not knowing anything about rabbits.
“You don’t think?”
“No. They look like they’re having fun, don’t they?”
“I suppose.”
There was a long silence. Martin worried that his hand might be getting sweaty, but miraculously, it didn’t seem to be. They sat together and looked at the hutches. You couldn’t even see the rabbits inside, so they just looked at the hutches. He felt happy. He could smell her dry tears and her wet make-up, and he felt happy.
“Will you stay here till the end of lunchtime?” said Gemma Hadley.
“Of course,” said Martin.
He met Dean Murphy outside maths. Dean Murphy looked like he knew something. He also had a streak of mud spread diagonally across his chest like a sash.
“Ur,” said Martin. “You’ve got all dogshit on you.”
“Fuck off,” said Dean. “It’s just mud.”
“Who won Megawar?”
“Paul Cross,” said Dean, shrugging. “Super Infinity Laser Deathbomb. As usual.”
They shuffled along the queue.
“Anyway,” said Dean, “I heard that Kemp saw you coming out from behind the Portakabins,” he paused for effect, “with Gemma Hadley.”
Martin felt his heart lurch a little. He kept his head down and the speed of his shuffle constant. A hundred things to say occurred to him, but, as was so often the way, there was not enough time to sort through them all.
“Yeah, so?”
“Well?” Dean stopped and turned to face him.
“Well what?”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
Dean looked at him with a mixture of incredulity and awe.
“Did you nob her?”
Martin looked at his feet. He had one second. And now less than that. And now less than that. He thought of promises, and the softness of her hand, and the smell of the running mascara, and that hour they had spent with just the rabbits and each other, and he looked up again, and met Dean Murphy squarely in the eye.
“Yeah,” he said, “Yeah, course I fucking did.”
The Honourable Thing by James Smyth was read by Jaz Deol at the Liars’ League Cock & Bull event on Tuesday 8 February 2011 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Sq., London
James Smyth spends his professional career fiddling with video compression algorithms and audio protocols, only occasionally stopping to dream of a life more Bohemian. He mainly writes short stories, not having the stamina for much else, and in his spare time enjoys frowning sadly at misplaced apostrophes.
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