ONE
BILLY (BY DAWN)
My mother was a bit of a goer in her youth – ‘goer’ being my preferred euphemism. If you asked Mum she’d probably say she was a ‘liberated woman’ or something, while Wayne – my brother – tends to use more basic language, favouring terms like ‘slapper’ or ‘slag’.
If Mum overheard him talking about her like that, she’d always whack him around the head, but Wayne didn’t expect anything less. Her smile, as she hit him, gave the game away: her son’s insults were just part of the fun. I don’t think anyone’s ever found a way to upset Mum, not really.
Anyway, the result of Mum’s so-called ‘liberation’ was that neither of us ever knew our dads. Mine, the family myth has it, left before Mum had even ‘come’ – something she considers to this day as proof that it was a case of ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’.
The story of my conception, then, goes as follows:
Mum and Bert – her minicab driver boyfriend – were busy doing it on the sofa, when our StBernard decided it was the perfect moment to join in, jumping up and starting to hump Bert’s leg.
Bert, I suppose quite reasonably, was outraged, but not enough to actually pause the sex act. Instead, and without interrupting his thrusting, he requested that Mum control her ‘bloody dog’. But Mum, in addition to being pinned down by the combined weight of both Bert (who apparently wasn’t skinny) and her beloved Benjy (who was massive), was too busy laughing to intervene. Mum laughed, she always says, until she wept that day, and I believe her on that one. Even now, tears of mirth well up whenever she tells the story.
Bert, who, I gather, felt humiliated both from having been humped by a dog and by Mum’s failure to take his humiliation seriously, stormed out, leaving Mum and the dog together, both sexually frustrated, lying on the sofa.
But luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you look at these things, Bert had managed tofinish offbeforestorming off, so, nine months later, I was born.
Did Wayne and I miss out by not having dads? It’s kind of hard to say, really, because how do you miss something you’ve never had? How would you even know what you might be missing?
Plus, it’s hardly like there were no father figures around – there were lots and lots of boyfriends. In fact, I’m not sure Mum, who was tall, blond and pretty – funny too – ever went more than a week between one man and the next.
She dated bartenders and BT engineers; policemen and criminals… Some of these boyfriends were fun, and some were mad, but mostly they were just kind of repetitive – an endless stream of not-quite-good-enough men.
All the same, David taught me to play poker and roll a cigarette one-handed, and Pete to ride a motorbike, long before I was old enough for that to be legal. Jeremy – who was a gardener by trade – planted spuds in our tiny front yard, potatoes we harvested long after Mum had broken up with him. And Andy, whingy Andy, not only taught me the meaning of ‘passive aggressive’ but also demonstrated the flammability of cheap furniture by setting light to our new sofa with a cigarette. The remains are still in the front garden today.
Mum even went out with a bank robber for a bit, an actual proper bank robber called Pablo, and even he had his good points. Because, of course, Pablo always had plenty of cash in his wallet and he didn’t mind splashing it around, either.
So, though Wayne might not agree, I’d have to say that I, at least, never felt short-changed. Some of my schoolfriends came from stable two-parent relationships, and it never struck me as something to be jealous of. If anything, it seemed to me that, compared with our varied adventures, they’d missed out. There always just seemed to be so many things they’d never tried, so many things they’d never eventhoughtof trying.
Of course, sometimes a guy would stick around long enough for us to get attached and, when he packed his bags, we’d feel sad. But we were so fusional with Mum that we’d either be furious on her behalf, or we’d be as relieved as she was that it was over. In our house, sadness never had much space to hang around for long.
Years ago, I read a silly column inSmash Hitsthat said something about absent father figures making for girly sons. And I suppose that’s proof of a kind that we didn’t miss out too badly. Because though our Wayne might have some issues – and he really, really does – being girly definitely isn’t one of them.
As for me? Well, I suppose you’d say I’m a bit of a chip off the old block. I gave my first blow job to Patrick Stevens behind the bike shed at fifteen, something that, because I didn’t know the cheesy topping was optional, I didn’t do again for a decade. I had my first full-on bang on the morning of my sixteenth birthday in an abandoned house out in Westgate. That was with drop-dead gorgeous (and clean as a whistle) Andy Copeland, so no regrets there. Thanks to my brilliant upbringing, I never felt guilty about any of it.
In my opinion, people make way too much fuss about sex. I mean, I really don’t get why it should be more or less complicated than swimming or cycling or any other physical activity. If it’s fun, and you like it, then do it, that’s my motto. And if it’s not fun, or you don’t, then don’t.
That said, the one aspect of our upbringing that was lacking was any detailed education about pregnancy, Mum’s theory seeming to have been that the best protection was ignorance.
‘Dawn!’ she’d snap. ‘Cross your legs! There are boys present!’
‘Why, Mum?’ I’d whine – I didn’t much like crossing my legs.
‘When you’re old enough to know why, you’ll be old enough to decide,’ she’d say, a Rothmans Menthol wobbling as she spoke.
Trouble was, by the time I was old enough to know why, I was at an age where I was incapable of deciding anything other than ‘Yes.’
It’s not that information was hard to come by, either. It’s just that the gossip we relied on, in the days before the internet, was no more reliable that the fake news kids get nowadays. Thus, we all ‘knew’ you couldn’t get pregnant if your period was due, and that you couldn’t get pregnant if you peed right after, either. The doggy position was clearly safer than missionary because the tadpole thingies had to swim upstream, plus Julia Biggin’s sister said you only got pregnant if, deep down, you really wanted to. As I really, reallydidn’twant to get pregnant, I figured I didn’t have much to worry about. Plus, if the worst came to the worst we all knew we could just take a pill the way Tracey Judd had, and the problem would be solved in a flush.
But I was lucky and for a while, for quite a while really (especially considering how much sex I was having), it didn’t happen. And that luck sort of emboldened me. It convinced me that I was in control of it all.
* * *
So, Billy was my first proper boyfriend.
I met him at the Harbour Lights, a biker pub in Whitstable, where my best friend’s brother liked to hang out. At seventeen I shouldn’t have been in a pub at all, let alone a wild, druggy biker pub like the Harbour Lights. But Derek’s Kawasaki had a flat battery, forcing him to take his mum’s old Hillman Imp. He’d offered a spare seat to his little sister, Shelley, and Shelley, being both my schoolfriend and too much of a scaredy-cat to go alone, invited me.
