way home it started to rain and they took shelter in a phone box in which someone had broken the light. It became the most erotic experience of his life so far. He does not know why it should have been so intense. Maybe it was the excitement of being simultaneously so public and so private. There was glass round them on three sides and yet they were invisible, at least from a distance. The rain came down like a defensive wall. Maybe it was the inescapable closeness, as if just by entering the phone box they had gone past each other's inhibitions. There were no gestures of distancing they could make in this confined space. Every movement became an involvement with the other.
They became impassioned before they knew it was happening. She had her hands inside his shirt, kneading him roughly, and his right hand was inside her pants, feeling the awesomeness of that bristly, secret hair, when she suddenly said, ‘Wait, there's someone coming.’ They pulled apart. She adjusted her skirt. He buttoned his raincoat over his open shirt. They stood casually with their backs to the street, as if they were innocently talking. ‘You're too dangerous for me,’ Margaret said mysteriously. The glass of the phone box was opaque with their breathing. He heard footsteps coming nearer. They stopped. There was a long moment while he wondered if it was a policeman. The door opened. He couldn't believe it. He turned round slowly and saw a man with a soft hat looking in.
‘This is an offence, you know,’ the man said, and let the door close and waited.
‘Oh my God,’ Margaret said. ‘That's my dad.’
He was a very big dad. They had no time to synchronise reactions. Margaret stepped out of the phone box immediately and Tam followed her, having buttoned up his coat.
The three of them stood in sheeting rain. Margaret put up her umbrella. Tam envied her possession of a prop. It gave her something to do. All Tam could do was stand there swaying slightly with nerves, like a potted plant, being battered by the rain. He felt disadvantaged by her father's hat. He felt as if he had wandered into a scene from The Maltese Falcon by mistake, one in which he had no lines.
‘You,’ Margaret's father pointed at her. ‘Home, lady. You,’ he pointed at Tam. ‘I've a good mind to take you over the park and give you a hiding.’
‘And what will Ah be doin’ while you're doin' it?' Whose voice was that? It wasn't him speaking. It was some instinct he hadn't known was there, expressing itself through him. ‘Ah wouldn't let ma father do that? Why should Ah let you?’
That sounded good. It sounded really good. His voice had somehow transformed his fragile timorousness into something strong and threatening, a chihuahua barking through a megaphone. It had worked. But it had worked too well.
‘Right. Come on. Let's see.’
Suddenly, they were walking towards Piersland Park. This was ridiculous but Tam couldn't think of anything else to do except walk beside the stranger. With his shirt unbuttoned to the waist inside his closed raincoat, he was freezing, but he didn't think it would be a good idea to button it up just now. That wouldn't be an action calculated to calm this big man down. Tam was wondering if he could turn embarrassing partial nudity to advantage by stripping off coat, jacket and shirt as one when they reached the park. That might look impressive. Come ahead. You're dealing with somebody here that's keen for action. That might give him a head start. ‘Half of fightin's psychology,’ his father had told him once. ‘Most losers lose of a fractured heart.’ But what about the other half? He remembered Michael clapping him on the shoulder once, withdrawing his hand in mock pain and saying, ‘Christ, Ah've cut maself. Tam, you've got shoulders like razor-blades.’ Tam Docherty stripped was not going to be the most intimidating sight. He was probably going to get hammered.
How did he get from the warmth of Margaret's body to this? The prospect of rolling about in the rain getting his head punched in? And Margaret was clicking along behind them. What was she going to do? Referee? Life was ridiculous.
‘This is ridiculous,' her father said.
He had stopped. Tam stopped. Margaret stopped.
‘Just leave my daughter alone. Okay? Come on, Margaret.’
The two of them walked away. Tam stood alone in the rain. He was both relieved and cheated. He knew this was just postponement of the inevitable. For he would have to find out some time what it would have been like in that darkened park - and it might have been better to find out from Mr Inglis than some of the Teddy-boys at the dancing.
‘Remember. Leave her alone,’ Mr Inglis shouted back.
But he hadn't. There were still those anarchic schooldays just before the summer holidays, when senior pupils lounged in the prefects' room and played shove-ha'penny and chess and briefly acted as if they owned the school. He talked to Margaret a lot and eventually she agreed to meet him outside Boots on Friday night. She agreed on the day he was leaving to look for a job. He didn't go back to school.
Meanwhile, came the plook - a record-breaking mound of white right on the tip of his nose.
‘That's not a plook you've got there, Tam,' Michael said. ‘Ah think it's a Siamese twin.’
Everything he did to hurry it on only made it last longer. It seemed to have the gestation period of an elephant, which was appropriate to its dimensions. Early Friday evening, he moped in front of Marion's mirror, feeling like a Quasimodo whose hump has transmigrated to his nose. He applied some of Marion's face powder but that only seemed to make it more conspicuous, seeming to him as vivid as the gentian violet that had shamed some of his classmates in primary school. Wiping the powder off, he saw his nose glow blindingly again, a light-bulb with the shade removed.
He stood Margaret up. He stood her up. It was the only time in his life he had done that. He thought if she saw him like that she might not want to see him again. He keeps hoping she will turn up at the dancing. But she never does.
He stares at his plookless face in the mirror and thinks that he looks not bad today. Margaret, where are you now?
‘Tom!’
His mother is calling him down for his dinner. If he had been born into a wealthy family, she would be calling him down for lunch. Or maybe a servant would be striking a gong. (His mother's voice sounds a bit like a gong - To-o-o-o-m.)
Either way, it would still be a pain in the bloody arse -the knight's quest for himself constantly interrupted by trivial irrelevancies.
AT LEAST HUNGER IS A CONSTANT, he would think. No matter what pretensions you had about yourself, your stomach was always waiting to bring them down to the ordinary. It was like the man who stood behind the triumphant Roman general on his chariot, while he took the plaudits of the crowd, and said, ‘Remember thou art but mortal.’ Is that what he said? Something like that. Anyway, what your stomach said was, ‘You better eat.’ In the tracklessness of thought, that was some kind of basic compass. In the confusion of selfhood, it was some kind of crude badge of identity. Even in the ecstasies of the mystics, there must have been a lot of bellies rumbling. Maybe that was what they mistook for the music of the spheres. You better eat.
Jesus, look at that fridge. It was like the laboratory of Sir Alexander Fleming. Get your home-made penicillin here. He would soon be frightened to open the door because, when he did, behold - a small abandoned universe of determined life. Cheese where lichen grows. Fruit that nurtures a dark, internal being. All around, small clumps of fungi continue their furious and meaningless existence and, when the god who carelessly created them absent-mindedly shuts the door, are plunged again into cold darkness.
He could forget about something to eat. Suicide by Roquefort. Stick to the liquid nutrition. He'd better clean it out in the morning. Before they all came out to get him like the invasion of the body-snatchers. The bastards.
He filled out another whisky, watered it and went back through to the living-room. Lit only by the light from the gas fire and the reading lamp that made a small bell of brightness on the table by the window, the darkened room seemed mysterious beyond the purpose to which he was putting it. He crossed it as if it was a walk-through painting of someone else's place.
Shit, he thought as he sat back down at the table,