Your head so heavy and sleepy now
Why do you have to be such an asshole?
and then she sees the phone in your hand, and freezes, and her green red eyes go wide, What the fuck are you doing?
Nothing, you don’t even look at her
and suddenly like a wildcat she’s lunging over you and screaming at the top of her voice and scrabbling and scraping trying to reach it even though it’s too late ha ha and you push her back and away shouting at her at the top of your voice shut up bitch shut the fuck up ho
‘Hey, someone sent me a video-message!’ Mario exclaims, springing out of his seat. ‘Ha ha, up yours, Hoey, someone’s sent me a video-message! I told you this phone wasn’t a waste of money!’
‘Who’s it from, Mario?’
‘ID withheld,’ Mario reads. ‘Whoever it is, though, he’s got the good stuff. Check this out.’ Four heads gather eagerly around the phone, knocking together like clunky moons.
‘Oh-ho-ho! This is a bit more like it!’
‘What is it? I can’t see.’
‘Yeah, move over, Victor… holy shit, hey Skip, take a look at this.’
The picture is fuzzy and dark, but there at the centre, in a vortex of shadow, a pale, pixellated face may be seen attached to an anonymous penis.
‘Ho, this bitch is really chugging it back.’
‘That’s my kind of woman,’ Geoff says approvingly.
‘Isn’t that your mom, Mario?’
‘Fuck you, Hoey.’
‘Fuck you, you can’t see anything properly on your stupid phone.’
‘Well, don’t look then, and the rest of us will enjoy this porn.’
‘She’s hot… like it’s hard to tell, but I’d say she’s hot.’
‘Shut up, he’s about to – here it comes… oh yes! Take it, bitch!’
The money shot, cheers mixed with disappointment: ‘Why didn’t he do it on her face?’ ‘Some of it went on her face.’ ‘Yeah, but I’d totally do all of it on her face.’ ‘Oh sure, when you’re a hundred years old and you finally crack open your penny jar and you go down to some skank on a street corner, is that it?’
‘Play it again, Mario.’ The crowd around the phone now swollen to take in everyone in the room, shouting encouragement as the grainy face, no bigger than a fingernail, tentatively sets to work again.
‘Hey –’ someone – Lucas Rexroth – extends a finger ‘– what’s that there in the background?’
‘Where?’
‘There, right there in the corner, see? That ring thing?’
‘I don’t know, a sign or something?’
‘It looks sort of like…’
But here comes the messy denouement again, and the boys cheer like they’re at a Senior Cup match and Seabrook has just scored a try.
It was eleven years ago tonight that Guido LaManche, Hawaiian-shirted pariah of Seabrook’s graduating class, came into Ed’s Doughnut House and advanced his proposal.
‘They call it the “Bungee Jump”,’ he said. ‘They’ve been doing it in Australia for years.’
‘Why?’ Farley asked.
‘What do you mean, why?’
‘Why would you want to throw yourself off a cliff with elastic tied around you?’
The Doughnut House had opened just a few weeks before; the lights made Guido’s olive skin shine, as he turned to Tom and his entourage at the next table – Steve Reece, Paul Morgan, and a trio of soft-haired St Brigid’s girls who looked like they’d just been taken out of their packaging – with a scoffing, palms-up gesture. ‘Because it’s exciting, that’s why. So that when you’re a grey-haired old fart drooling into your soup, you’ll have at least one thing to remind you that you were alive. Seriously, you’ve never felt a rush like this. It’s like sex to the power of a thousand – that’s a good thing, by the way,’ he glosses for Farley’s table, winning a laugh from the jocks.
‘It sounds dangerous,’ one of the cashmere-clad girls said dubiously.
‘You’re damn right it’s dangerous. What’s more dangerous than jumping off a thousand-foot drop? But at the same time, it’s one hundred per cent totally safe, because of the elastic rope and the harness, see? I’ve personally tested it out fifty times, and it’s absolutely foolproof. Although perhaps it’s not for the ladies.’ He directed another sly, theatrical glance at where Farley sits with Howard and Bill O’Malley. ‘Or all of the gents.’
Guido LaManche, though he’d failed every exam he ever sat, was a bona fide genius when it came to the psychology of the adolescent male: even when you knew he was playing you, it was nearly impossible to resist. ‘Well, where is it, so?’ Farley said, bringing his Coke down on the table with a thunk. ‘Why don’t you show it to us, instead of just sitting here talking about it?’
At this Guido became demure, folding his hands like a chaplain. ‘If anyone thinks he is ready for the ultimate challenge, I will bring him to it personally right now. All I ask for in return is a small contribution towards expenses – say, twenty pounds a head?’
‘Twenty pounds?’ someone spat incredulously. But Farley was already on his feet.
Howard grabbed his arm: ‘What are you doing?’
‘I want to see this thing,’ Farley replied.
‘Are you mad?’
‘It’s not like there’s anything else going on. We’re just going to sit here all night and, let’s face it, not talk to any girls. Anyway, you guys don’t have to come.’ Turning away, he fished around in his pockets till he found a twenty-pound note. ‘I’m in,’ he said, slapping it into Guido’s palm
‘All right!’ Guido said. ‘At least there is one brave man here tonight.’
Tom, Steve Reece and the others looked at each other in consternation.
‘Don’t go now?’ a blonde voice pleaded. ‘It’s like the North Pole out there.’
But the shame of being out-faced by a nerd was too great; already coats were being put on, scarves wound around necks, and the next thing Howard knew he was wedged into the back of Tom’s Audi with two of the blonde girls, cruising down the dual carriageway after Guido’s moped.
In spite of his reservations, he couldn’t suppress a wave of excitement. Earlier in the week, Tom had scored four tries in the Paraclete Cup match against St Stephen’s; Howard’s own father, who rarely showed interest in any aspect of the world not preceded by a pound sign, had come home raving about this ‘boy wonder’ everyone was talking about, and his prospects of ending Seabrook’s five-year dry spell in the Cup Final next month. Even sitting half-asleep in a dingy classroom, Tom exuded prowess, vitality, the sense that something was about to happen; he moved in broad, bold strokes, sweeping through the complications and dithering that for most people constituted life. Howard thought of him as a kind of anti-Howard, a bolt of lightning to Howard’s ever-dissipating fog. And now Howard was in his car!
He would have been happy simply to stay here for the rest of the night; it was warm, and his thigh was welded hip to knee to the blonde girl next to him – her name, he thought, was Tarquin, and she was, or had been, Tom’s girlfriend. But after ten minutes the red eye of the moped turned off the dual carriageway, and down a series of darkened, narrowing roads; then it passed through a gateway and now puttered to a halt in an unlit car park surrounded by storm-blown trees. Dismounting, Guido, rendered silver by the headlights of the cars, removed his helmet and with a little comb began arranging his hair into its customary nest of swirls.
‘Everybody ready?’ he inquired chirpily, when the second car had pulled up and everyone had disembarked. Farley was acting nonchalant, smoking one of Steve Reece’s cigarettes. Howard tried to picture him hurling himself off a cliff. Maybe he could still be talked out of it if it was done right. Years of careful self-attendance had taught Howard that there was a back door to most situations, through which the prudent man could slip discreetly.