The Kiss Read online

  ‘Sorry love,’ says the till lady, handing it back. ‘It’s not going through the machine. Have you got anything else?’

  With only two pounds in cash on me, the undies are returned. We head for the food department instead.

  ‘That was embarrassing,’ I say as we leave with our purchase. ‘I’m really sorry. I’ve probably set something up wrong with the bank. I’ll talk to them about it tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Tab. ‘I love Percy Pigs.’

  ‘Stick with me and I’ll treat you to pig-shaped chews forever, babe,’ I sigh. ‘I know how to impress a lady.’

  The Percy Pigs are gone before we’ve made it halfway down the High Street. The Gaslight glimmers at us, a hundred metres further on. It’s cloaked in pink lights today, and is already shining in the grey September afternoon.

  ‘We’re going in there,’ I say, high on Percy Pigs and sudden resolve. ‘We’re going to sort this out with the bar guy right now.’

  Tabby looks pale. She stares at the Gaslight. ‘I don’t think I can face him,’ she says in a small voice. ‘And I’ve got an essay due on The Odyssey. I think I’m going to – you know. Head home.’

  I pat her on the arm. ‘I’ll deal with it by myself. Give me Sam’s number so I can hand it over.’

  Tabby messages me the number. Her eyes look a bit watery at Sam’s smiling photo on her phone.

  ‘Shoulders may not work there at five-thirty on a Thursday afternoon!’ she shouts after me as I stride towards the theatre.

  ‘We’ve got to start somewhere!’ I shout back. ‘I’ll call you later!’

  And I walk up the theatre steps into something completely unexpected.

  The Gaslight is quiet and the familiar smell of stale beer hangs in the air. Someone is hoovering, somewhere. The pinboard by the double doors is covered in flyers about shows, art exhibitions and animal sanctuaries, as well as singing lessons and job vacancies at the theatre. A big poster for the Christmas pantomime – Cinderella – beams down at me, looking about as funny as a dead clown. The brown zigzag carpet, invisible beneath a thousand partygoers at the Start of Term party, is the same one I remember from when I was six. It crunches under my feet as I go past the box office with its cheery displays of old Gaslight productions.

  A woman comes out of a door beside the bar, carrying boxes of crisps stacked up to her nose. A pair of heavily mascaraed eyes regard me, sandwiched between bleach-blond fringe and brown cardboard. I think I remember her from the party night.

  ‘Bar opens at six, love.’

  I clear my throat. ‘I’m looking for a guy.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ Smoky laughter makes the cardboard tower of crisps shake as she sets it down on the end of the bar. She wipes her hands down the legs of her tight-fitting jeans. ‘You want to get specific?’

  This is suddenly feeling like one of those things you talk about but never actually do, like, Hey, let’s leap in the river to see how deep it is! or, I’m going to dye my hair green and get an undercut! I cast my mind back to Sunday night. I don’t know the bar guy’s name. What does he even look like? I hardly saw him, except on the dark theatre steps with Studs and then with half his face attached to my friend. ‘He’s, er, tall? Dark hair? Works here?’

  The woman tilts her head towards the bar door. ‘JEM! Get out here!’ She rests her arms on the bar and assesses me. ‘Friends, are you?’

  ‘I’ve never met him,’ I say.

  ‘Internet date, is it?’

  ‘I’m here on behalf of a friend.’

  She gives me a look. I get the sense that she has lots of girls coming here ‘on behalf of a friend’. All my resolve about making it up to Tabby teeters like the pile of crisp boxes on the bar. I’d like to go home now because I know this is going to be very embarrassing.

  Jem comes out of the door with both hands full of beer glasses still shimmering hot from the dishwasher. He is tall, even by my five-foot-three standards. His shoulders are exactly as wide as I remember, and encased in a close-fitting grey T-shirt that brings out the ashy flecks in his blue eyes. A red and white teatowel is wrapped inexplicably around his head.

  I stare. He stares back. Even with the teatowel, he is divine. No wonder Tab went primal. He sets the glasses down on the bar and pulls the teatowel off, revealing black hair spiked up and a little sideways.

  ‘What’s with the teatowel?’

  My appropriate-first-question filter is apparently in the ‘off’ position.

  He regards the teatowel in his hands. ‘It’s a teatowel,’ he says.

  The blond woman has vanished so it’s just me, him and the distant hoover. He slings the teatowel over his shoulder. I try not to think about the actual shoulder under the T-shirt under the teatowel, which means my imagination paints it in total clarity. He leans his extremely fit arms along the bar and grins at me.

  ‘What do you want to talk about?’ he asks.

  ‘My friend. You, er . . .’

  I fumble around for the words, and know I’m looking increasingly stupid. This is hideous. I would swap Tab’s stair incident for this any day.

  ‘Slept with her?’ he suggests helpfully.

  I am stunned into action. ‘No!’ I say in outrage. ‘Kissed her, I was going to say. And now there’s this nightmare going on in her life that you have to help me with, because you caused the problem in the first place.’

  It’s his move now. I look at him in an expectant way. Then I realize that he might think I’m looking at him in the other sort of expectant way – which I’m totally not – and I stare at the bar instead.

  ‘What’s your friend’s name?’

  I make myself look up again. He’s even better looking second time round. ‘Tab,’ I say. ‘Tabitha. Tabby.’

  ‘What, I got with all three?’

  He’s laughing at me, I realize.

  ‘Tabby,’ I say, holding on tightly to my dignity. ‘On Sunday, at the college party. Across the bar?’

  His flecky blue-grey eyes clear. ‘Spiky brown hair? Big . . .’ He makes the gesture that translates in boy language as ‘boobs’.

  ‘Yes!’ I point at him in emphasis, then put my finger down because it looks a bit pervy, agreeing with the boob thing he’s just mimed. ‘Spiky brown hair. Angry boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the angry boyfriend.’ Jem scratches his head, close to his hairline. ‘He should get over himself. It was a party. Everyone does dumb things at parties. Anyway, she was cute and asking for it.’

  I colour angrily on Tab’s behalf. ‘She’s not a slut!’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. We didn’t get that far.’

  His fingertips are pinkish-white. I notice the same pink-white colour all around his hairline. The teatowel thing suddenly becomes clear.

  ‘Have you been doing a facepack?’ I say in astonishment.

  ‘Facepaint,’ he corrects, colouring slightly.

  ‘Facepaint?’ I have him like a spider under a glass, scuttling helplessly beneath my scorn. ‘What are you, Krusty the Clown?’

  He’s gazing into my eyes. I’m not sure he’s listening. ‘Why are you staring at me?’ I demand when he fails to respond to my clown remark.

  ‘Your eyes are different colours. One’s like chocolate. The other’s more like poo.’

  I lose my thread. Understandably, I feel.

  ‘I— it’s my contact lens, I just wear one because the other eye doesn’t need anything so it makes my eyes different— I’m sorry, did you say poo?’

  Stretching up from the bar, he links his hands and cricks them above his head. His chest does this expanding thing that always happens when guys do that. At that moment he seems as big as a tree, if you can get ripped trees.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asks, lowering his arms again.

 
Visions of burning vinyl rise once more in my mind’s eye. ‘That’s actually irrelevant, but since you ask, Krusty, it’s Delilah.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘I could say the same of you,’ I shoot back, stung. I am still battling with the poo thing.

  ‘I mean it. I always mean what I say.’

  ‘So you’re saying my eyes actually look like poo?’

  ‘Only one of them,’ he says agreeably. ‘I could go with mud, at a stretch.’

  I take a deep breath. Where and how has this conversation gone so wrong? ‘I came in to tell you that my friend needs your help to get her boyfriend back. That’s it, basically. That’s what I came in here to say.’

  ‘I’m not convinced this is any of your business,’ he says, ‘but you’re here and not her because . . .?’

  ‘Because it’s my fault,’ I reply after a pause. ‘And I promised I’d fix it.’

  He looks genuinely curious. ‘Why is it your fault?’

  Time out, people. Stuff here needs to be explained.

  You only have to scrape the surface of Delabby/Tabilah in order for things to become clear. We are as one. As luck or puberty or whatever would have it, I’ve always been one step ahead of Tab on boobs, periods, cigarettes, alcohol and boys. We have grown together in this way, like this amazing photo I once saw of a bicycle inside a tree. Tabby is the bicycle – in a genuine steel-and-rubber way, not a slaggy one – and I am the tree that has grown through the bicycle and around the bicycle, raising the bicycle from the ground as part of the tree. The bicycle wheels spin in the wind, but the tree calls the shots. All of which makes me responsible for stuff like this, whether Teatowel likes it or not.

  I don’t say any of this out loud. It would sound insane.

  ‘You don’t need to know that,’ I say briskly. ‘I just want to give you Tab’s boyfriend’s number and ask, very nicely, if you could call him and explain what happened and how it wasn’t Tabby’s fault.’

  He disappears into the kitchen, which isn’t supposed to happen when you’re in the middle of a conversation. I hear the clank of a metal locker being opened. ‘How do you square that?’ he says, re-emerging in a dark grey jacket. ‘She jumped on me, not the other way round.’

  This is like wading through treacle in a big Victorian frock with my feet tied together. On a very cold day so the treacle has set like toffee. I am close to breaking point.

  ‘She’d never have done it if you hadn’t given it all that with the free crisps thing!’ I say through my teeth. ‘Can I please message you his number?’

  He flips up a hinged part of the bar and comes out to join me, adjusting his collar. ‘Let’s walk and talk,’ he suggests, and heads for the double doors.

  The afternoon is gloomier than ever. I hurry after him, the double doors swinging shut behind me. ‘What’s to talk about? Will you do it or not?’

  ‘You expect me to call up the angry boyfriend when I don’t have the full facts?’ he asks, jogging gently across the car park. ‘I think not.’

  ‘You want more facts? Fine.’ I break into a run, trying to keep up with his long legs. ‘I told her to do it.’

  ‘Did you know she had a boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘So why did you tell her to kiss me?’

  This isn’t painting me in a good light.

  ‘I messed up, OK?’ I say in frustration. ‘And for the record, I didn’t tell her to kiss you specifically.’

  He swings round so I practically collide with his chest. He smells warm.

  ‘Are you busy?’ he asks, looking down at me.

  ‘Yes!’ I practically shout. ‘I’m busy trying to unscrew my screw-up! Will you help me or not?’

  ‘I’m thinking about it. Keep walking or we’ll be late.’

  We make an odd pair, him striding easily along and me scurrying beside him like a pet mouse on a string.

  ‘Late for what?’ I pant as we pause at a set of traffic lights.

  He shoots me a sideways look. ‘My Krusty the Clown convention.’

  I am too breathless, too curious, too annoyed to ask anything more about where we are going. We rush along, up narrow streets and through little alleyways, heading into the yellow lights of the Watts Estate – a cluster of uneven concrete high-rises that crown the town like rotten teeth. The views across the Downs are breathtaking up here, even in the gloom of six pm.

  Jem switches left and right, with me still grimly on his tail. I lose my bearings and find a whole bunch of misgivings to replace them. Why am I following a total stranger into this ever-darkening place? Have horror movies taught me nothing? I stroke my house keys in my pocket, and tuck the sharp end of the latch key between my fingers. If he tries anything, I’ll be ready.

  He is the answer to Tabby’s problem, I remind myself. I can’t let him out of my sight until he agrees to help. If he thinks he’ll lose me in this badly-lit maze of twists and turns, he can forget it.

  ‘I have other stuff to do tonight!’ I complain as he makes what feels like the fiftieth left turn, past a collapsing fence and a couple of mildewed greenhouses.

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘You’re not the one who has to explain Keynesian theory in class tomorrow afternoon!’

  I don’t actually have to do that for another fortnight – fortunately, as I’m having trouble even spelling Keynes,

  let alone getting my head around his ideas on macro­economics – but I have to fight back with something.

  ‘What’s Keynesian theory?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  I never plan on making him laugh, but I seem to do it with tragic ease.

  We’ve reached a tower block at the top of the estate. He goes through a set of doors and down a bleach-smelling corridor towards a lift. I follow, practically snorting with determination. No way am I letting go now. I am double-sided Sellotape. I am No More Nails.

  The lift is steel and way too small. He fills most of it. I plaster myself into the smallish corner that remains, and hope we aren’t going to break down halfway. Being stuck in a tiny space with the hottest guy I’ve ever met would be a nightmare.

  ‘You remind me of an angry squirrel,’ he says as we crank upwards. ‘You’re actually chittering.’

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ I snarl.

  ‘Not all of them,’ he says, looking at me consideringly. ‘Just the cute ones.’

  Cute?

  Oh my God. Right here and now, perhaps even before the lift has reached its destination, I have an opportunity to dust off my newly minted no-strings-attached approach, as perfected with Laurent in the summer sand dunes, and kiss this teatowel-wearing god.

  Yay! woofs the Lust Labrador.

  Don’t even, hisses the Cat of Mistrust.

  I have always found that the big questions in life boil down to the Lust Labrador and the Cat of Mistrust. It’s a useful distinction. The Lust Labrador acts without thinking while the Cat of Mistrust does it the other way round. The Cat of Mistrust is a big thing with me and getting bigger all the time. I think Laurent was a weird one-off.

  Beyond the lift, a corridor takes us to another door, a battered red one this time, and into an open-plan space stretching the width of the block and filled with the sweet smell of hash. The walls are painted a riot of different colours and long windows face the setting sun, which hangs low in a sky striped with oranges and reds and greys. Music is playing quietly somewhere; there are mirrors, and curtained-off areas, and a studio set-up with lights and a white backdrop and a camera on a tripod.

  The place is full of people of different colours. Greens, golds, reds, blues and pinks, all swirled up together, some abstract and some not. There’s a girl with eyes like peacock feathers; a guy with a red snake around one thin arm; silver-skinned boys with r
ivets studding their chests. A red-haired girl in a black dress is poised over a boy’s bare back, painting a delicate set of angel wings on to his shoulder blades.

  Jem goes to high-five a full-on jungle vine heading for the camera and the white backdrop.

  ‘If you smudge Sukhdev, I’ll murder you, Jem,’ says the red-haired girl, barely looking up. ‘He took me three hours.’

  Jem lowers his hand, leaving the jungle vine hanging. ‘Anywhere free?’

  ‘There’s a space by the window. Light’s terrible so no one else wants it. ’Scuse me for not chatting but if I don’t keep my eyes down, these babies are going to turn into chicken wings. Kev! How’s the lighting?’

  A big guy with a bullet hole painted through his cheek lowers his light-meter. ‘When are we getting blinds in here? Sunset keeps changing the readings.’

  ‘Take Sukh’s pictures as quick as you can then.’

  ‘Guys, this is Delilah,’ says Jem.

  I lift my hand to say hello, forgetting that I am still holding my house keys. They fall with a clatter to the

  paint-stained floor. The red-haired girl’s hand jumps, sending a feather shooting off at a strange angle across the ribcage of her canvas.

  ‘All that’s missing is the tambourine,’ she growls, dabbing at the splodge she has made.

  I flush and scoop my keys up. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Ignore Ella,’ Jem tells me, steering me on to a stool beside a tall mirror reflecting the swiftly changing

  sky. ‘She’s brilliant and she lives here, so it pays to tolerate her moods.’

  My curiosity wins over my embarrassment as I gaze around at all the activity. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘A body art collective. We paint each other most Thursdays.’ He points at his hairline. ‘The remains of this afternoon’s skull. I practise whenever I get the chance.’

  That explains the teatowel, I realize.

  He rubs his ear. ‘How did our first conversation go again?’

  ‘“What’s with the teatowel?” “It’s a teatowel.”’ A smirk is snaking across my face. I can feel it, wiggling in there.