Are You Experienced? Read online

  ‘Oh yeah. I forgot. Still – he could have waited. I mean, you get a summer holiday, don’t you?’

  ‘He’s been planning it for years. Since before I even knew him.’

  ‘You don’t mind, then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I don’t mind. I’m not exactly over the moon about being on my own all year. But it’s what he’s got to do.’

  ‘Got to?’

  ‘Yes – got to.’

  ‘Why’s he got to?’

  ‘Just because he has. That’s what he feels.’

  ‘What – so he can find himself?’

  ‘You’re so cynical about all this. What’s your problem?’

  ‘I haven’t got a problem. I just don’t think… you know… I don’t think he’s treating you very well.’

  She laughed and shook her head.

  ‘You’re funny.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Well – not only are you jealous of him going away, you’re also jealous of his girlfriend. And you’re supposed to be his mate. I mean, if that’s what you think of your friends…’

  That wasn’t what I was expecting her to say.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘About what?’ She was smirking.

  ‘What do you mean, “jealous of his girlfriend”?’

  She spun in her chair, pretending to look around the pub for someone. ‘Shit – I think I must mean me,’ she said. Then she gave me one of those looks. One of those looks that you have to look away from.

  ‘I don’t think you realize what kind of a relationship I have with James,’ she said. ‘We’re not kids any more. This isn’t teenagers snogging behind the bike sheds, you know.’

  ‘You’re still teenagers.’

  ‘Yes – but we don’t snog behind the bike sheds. We make love.’

  She said that just to freak me out. There really was no call for that kind of language.

  ‘I’m so impressed.’

  ‘Dave – do you understand what I’m talking about? It’s a proper relationship. We’re in love.’

  ‘All right, all right, all right, all right. I’ve got the message. OK. Change of subject – please.’

  There was a long silence. I was still avoiding her eyes.

  ‘You know what?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The funny thing is…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We talked about this before he left.’

  ‘What – about me?’

  ‘No. About this.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘About infidelity.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And we decided…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well – you know. Me and him have been together, what – about five months. Now he’s gone away for eight months, and we just thought – that you can’t force these things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘You know – whatever happens, when he comes back, things aren’t going to be the same. We won’t be able to just start again where we left off.’

  ‘So…?’

  ‘So, we just thought – that it’s better to play things by ear. We both reckoned that with him so far away, for so long, the chances of him – like – behaving himself are really very low, and the more pressure we both feel under to stay – celibate, or something – the harder it will make things. Basically – we both reckon that the more pressure there is, the more likely we are to be unfaithful.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Just that… we both decided to be a bit open about things. That if anything happened, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. That we should both do what we want.’

  ‘And what do you want?’

  I was trying to stop myself from smiling.

  ‘Well – I dunno. It’s just that me and James – we used to – you know – have a great time. We had an excellent time together. It was always great. Well – maybe not at first – I mean, in the beginning he didn’t know what the hell he was doing – but once we got going – you know it was always… we always had a lot of fun. And up until he left, we were together almost all the time – for weeks. I was virtually living with him. He was always there – and I mean, to be honest…’ She let out a chuckle. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. ‘Look – can I be frank here? To be honest – you get used to it.’

  She let that thought sit on the table in front of us, until it was ripe.

  ‘It’s only three months, now – and I’m getting – you know… almost – like – desperate.’

  There was another one. Another plump, juicy, bursting peach. I was very, very excited.

  ‘And…?’ I said.

  ‘And what?’

  She didn’t seem to know what I meant.

  ‘I mean .. . why are you telling me this?’

  I gave her a flirtatious look.

  ‘Oh right. I see. Yes – I remember. I was just thinking – that’s what’s so funny.’

  ‘What? What’s funny.’

  ‘You. You’re funny.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘It’s just funny. You know – the whole thing just seems really ironic.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just makes me laugh. There you are, making these hilariously clumsy passes at me, and if you weren’t… who you are I’d probably go along with it, just to get it out of my system.’

  ‘What? Who am I? What am I?’

  ‘You’re James’s mate.’

  ‘So? So what? You happened to meet me through James. So what?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘He’s gone. He’s not back for ages.’

  ‘Jesus! You might have no scruples, but it makes a difference to me. Besides, it’s all wrong, anyway.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well – we’re friends, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it’s wrong. You know – if you were some guy, and this was the first time I’d met you, we could just – you know – in out thanks very much bye bye. But we’re friends. It couldn’t work like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It just couldn’t.’

  This was bad news. I pulled my grieving-bloodhound face. Liz let out a half-laugh-half-sigh and gave me a consoling squeeze on the knee. Some consolation that was.

  ‘Look – have you forgotten what we said on the phone already?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All our mates are either out of the country or at university. We’re stranded. Look – I’m really glad you’ve come back from Switzerland. It’s great to have someone to hang around with other than the pricks from art college. The two of us can have a laugh together. I wouldn’t want to throw that away just for one quick screw.’

  ‘Right. I see.’

  She patted my thigh.

  I would have gladly thrown away just about anything for a quick screw – and who said it would have to be quick, anyway?

  Her definition of the word ‘desperate’ obviously wasn’t the same as mine.

  Does it have to be India?

  In the weeks after our drink in Camden, I saw Liz increasingly often. I began to realize that, in a strange way, she had been right about not shagging.

  Because of that conversation, we both knew exactly what the other one thought, and all the sex stuff could be left on one side. I still fancied her, and she knew I still fancied her, but we both knew that nothing was going to happen (or at least acted that way) and as a result, we could become like normal mates.

  It was the first time I’d ever had a proper female friend. She really was a good laugh, and it was genuinely possible to get on well with her, despite the fact that I wanted her body but couldn’t do anything about it. I actually got on with her better than I could remember getting on with any of my regular friends. We could have a laugh and everything, then, sometimes, if we were in the mood, we had quite serious conversations. I mean, what we ended up saying was occasionally properly… well, intimate. I ended up telling her things t
hat I’d never really told anyone before. I can’t actually remember what they were now, but at the time I remember thinking that it all felt very deep.

  *

  Although we were just friends, and I didn’t make another pass at her, over time it became obvious that we were getting closer and closer. Whenever we sat down, we always found ourselves right next to each other. When we went for walks, we often held hands. And in the cinema, it was quite common for us to squeeze various bits of each other’s legs.

  Now I’m no expert, but it seemed obvious to me that something sexual was going on. I wasn’t making advances to her or anything, but between us, things were just happening – almost of their own accord. And the more we sat around fondling each other, talking about our deepest, darkest secrets and exposing the depths of our hearts to each other, the more there was this massive thing that neither of us was mentioning.

  And I knew – you just know when this happens – you do – I just knew that if I had said that we were acting like a pair of honeymooners, she would have acted all shocked, got angry, and the whole thing would have disappeared in a puff of smoke – because if the physical stuff had vanished, the whole friendship would have collapsed almost immediately. We couldn’t have gone back to not touching without feeling like complete fakes.

  Occasionally, she’d say things like, ‘You’ve got a very close sense of personal space, haven’t you?’, which is bollocks – it’s just so wide of the mark. I’ve got a bigger exclusion zone than Chernobyl, and I hate touching people, I really do – but I’d have to just lie, and tell her that she was right.

  She must have known that the whole friendship was a farce, and that something heavy was on the way, but she made damn sure that neither of us could admit it.

  I had always assumed that things would come to a head in one sweaty guilt-ridden frenzy, then we’d never be able to talk to each other again. But one day Liz, completely out of the blue, floored me with a suggestion that opened up more sexual possibilities than I had dared dream about.

  It was coming to the end of April, and Liz was skiving off college for the third time that week. We had just spent the afternoon lounging around on Hampstead Heath, and both of us were lying on our backs on the ground. I was flat on the grass, and Liz had her head on my belly.

  ‘What are you going to do, then?’ she said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘With the rest of your year.’

  ‘Aaah – that’s the five-million-dollar question, isn’t it?’

  ‘Six million.’

  ‘It’s not that important.’

  ‘You’ve got over four months left.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘You going to work?’

  ‘Not if I can avoid it.’

  ‘Do you need to work?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I don’t. I’m Mr Moneybags now.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yup. Doesn’t it show?’

  ‘No – you’re still as tight as ever.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘How come you’re so rich, then?’

  ‘Basically – the minimum wage in Switzerland is over a grand a month. And since I didn’t have a social life, I saved most of it up.’

  ‘Over a grand a month?’

  ‘Well – they nick back most of your salary in accommodation and food costs – even though they put you up in the cellar and feed you on leftovers from the kitchen. But still – I came back with more than a thousand.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Plus what I earned in the Sock Shop.’

  ‘You rich bastard! And have you taken me out for one meal? Have you bought me so much as a lollipop?’

  ‘Look – I’m saving it.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For the rest of my year out.’

  ‘So you can travel?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But you just told me you didn’t know what you were going to do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘But you know you’re going to travel.’

  ‘Yeah. I suppose so.’

  ‘What do you mean, “You suppose so”? You’re acting like I’m persuading you to go away against your will.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you do want to travel?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so.’

  ‘Well – I mean I want to. I definitely want to. I’m not scared of it. But I don’t… I don’t want to go on my own, and I haven’t really got my arse in gear yet, but everyone else has already left. So I don’t really know what to do.’

  ‘I see. Right. Blood out of a stone or what?’

  There was a silence, while Liz stared out over London, thinking.

  ‘I’ve got a long summer holiday, you know,’ she said. ‘I break up in early June. That would give us three months.’

  ‘Are you being serious?’

  ‘Deadly serious. I don’t want to be left out of all this, just because I’m doing an art foundation. And I’m not going to trot after James and join up with him in America either.’ She looked at me and broke into a smile. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to India, you know.’

  ‘India?’

  ‘I’ve got some savings. Do you want to go to India with me? This summer?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I’m on for it if you are.’

  ‘Does it have to be India? Couldn’t we do Australia?’

  ‘I’m not wasting my money on that. It’s India or nothing.’

  I thought for less than one second, a vision popping into my head of a spartan hotel room with a marble floor, a ceiling fan, and Liz and me fucking like bunny rabbits on a huge double bed.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘Shake on it.’

  We shook on it.

  Just touching her hand like that turned me on. Liz and I were going abroad together for the whole summer. Sharing hotel rooms. There was no way, given the circumstances, that I could possibly fail to shag her.

  She gripped my hand, and gave me one of her stares. ‘As mates,’ she said. ‘It’s only going to work if that’s absolutely clear.’

  ‘Fine. As mates,’ I said, leaning forward to give her a peck on the cheek.

  The hot, wet gusset of James’s boxer shorts

  Liz’s dad agreed to pay for her ticket, on condition that he met me first. I was duly invited to her parents’ house for dinner, along with my mum and dad. This turned out to be one of the most stagnant social occasions I had ever attended. If an alien had landed in the room, he would have thought that human beings communicate by clanking cutlery together. Still, I seemed to fulfil whatever criteria he had in mind, and he gave her the money.

  Liz and I started spending whole days together, poring over maps, flipping through guidebooks, and gradually planning a route. We would fly to Delhi, head north to the Himalayas, do a little loop into Rajasthan, then head south to Bombay, Goa, and right down to Kerala at the very bottom. After that we’d go back up the other side from Madras to Calcutta, across to Varanasi, north to Kathmandu, then back to Delhi to fly home. The middle of the country is apparently really boring – just loads of people growing food and getting hot, so doing a loop around the edge was the best route to avoid missing anything.

  A lot of these planning sessions went on late into the night, and I occasionally slept at her place. This was a cramped student house which she shared with three other girls from her course, and there was no spare bedroom, so I had to sleep on a few cushions on her floor. There was something deeply erotic about this. Lying there chatting, after we’d switched the lights out, felt almost like pillow talk. A serenely post-coital atmosphere hung in the air, only marginally spoilt by the fact that I usually had a screaming hard-on.

  Once, we’d already been pillow-talking for some time, when she told me that she had a stiff neck.

  ‘Would you like a massage?’ I said.

  ‘Are you an
y good?’

  ‘All right,’ I said, meaning, ‘Never done one before in my life, but I’ll give it a go.’

  She turned round to lie on her front, and I climbed up to her bed, pushed aside her duvet, and started squeezing the back of her neck.

  At first she lay there giving me all the reasons why she had a stiff neck that day, and telling me how James was an excellent masseur. She went on and on about him, so I switched off and stopped listening. As I gradually figured out how to do it, I noticed that her speech slowed down, and the gaps between her sentences got longer and longer, until the gaps were winning.

  Then she started making these noises. I don’t think I can actually call them moans. That would be overstating things. They didn’t quite qualify as moans, and they weren’t exactly sighs – they were kind of hums-plus-a-bit.

  Soon I wasn’t just doing her neck; I was doing her shoulders and the top of her back. Then I started catching my fingers in the neck of her T-shirt – trying to give the impression that it was getting in the way and making a real massage impossible.

  It was an odd scene, really. There I was, dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts, sitting astride her, massaging her back, while she hummed-plus-a-bit, and every few minutes told me what good mates we were, and how much she loved James.

  I began to inch her T-shirt upwards until it was gathered around her armpits. Under cover of doing an upper-arm, forearm and hand massage, I straightened her arms out above her head. Then, in a gentle swoop, the T-shirt came over her head, down her arms, and on to the floor.

  Whoosh!

  I smoothed her hair back in place, and looked at her back.

  Her long, sweeping, elegant, gorgeous back.

  Now, without the T-shirt in the way, I could sweep, slide and rub in long, easy, unimpeded movements.

  She stopped talking, and the hums-plus-a-bit turned into moans.

  At the side of her back, I could feel the bulge of her tits. They were right there, uncovered, pressed into the sheet. And I was right there with them.

  After a while, I moved down and started on her legs. On the way past, I noticed that all she was wearing was a pair of men’s boxer shorts.

  Now she was definitely moaning. Up and down I went, over her whole body, my hands subtly slipping into the pant area on the way past. One of these little explorations flipped over the elastic on her boxer shorts, revealing, of all things, a name-tag. In the half-light bleeding through the curtains from a street lamp, I could just make out the words. ‘JAMES IRVING’, it said.