32

An hour after my first kiss, the residue of euphoria still remained, the way it does when you’re lucky to still be alive. I walked slowly home as the sun set and the sky dozed a melancholic purple. I was blessed with a new confidence. I imagined myself in an old film, doffing my cap to ladies and jumping into the air to bring both heels together with a charming clickety click. I pictured myself swinging effortlessly around lampposts for the full three hundred and sixty degrees. Maybe twice. I was grace and cool. Something about the evening had aroused in me an untested superpower. I felt the faintest tingle of it across my forehead and down each arm.

I turned into my street in time for the sunshine to outline the chimney stacks. Dad was sitting in his car, the door open, his legs swung to the side the way you’d lower yourself into a well. He was smoking a cigarette, the ghost of which made fragile designs. I hadn’t even known he smoked. He did that Dad nod, a neatly compacted ‘Hello, how are you?’ that signalled some level of familiarity. He looked heavily weathered, a stranger almost.

‘You’re just in time for dinner,’ he said, then bounced the butt of his cigarette against the drain.

Dinner was an unloved oven-ready pizza. Pineapple chunks flanked sore-looking meat, glazed in a shiny coat of grease and sitting on an old, chipped plate Dad won in a raffle. The television was switched off and we were perched on each side of a haggard, square, self-assembly trestle table we never normally used. It didn’t bode well. Happy families eat off of laps. I took extra time to chew through the lightly browned cheese and thick crumbling crust in the hope that it would render me exempt from any duty to break the silence. Dad examined the serrated edge of his knife before buttering another piece of bread.

‘So,’ he said to me. ‘Today? Good?’

‘I saw the careers adviser,’ I said.

I’d decided that now was not the time to mention that, after lying in a field with a girl and almost feeling the outline of her tender young breast, I’d been forced to stop off on the way home and look into the mirrored window of a hairdresser’s to be sure that my bottom lip wasn’t smeared in make-up. It was. With his eyes he goaded me, implored me to recount my day at school. And so, for him, I did.

‘So what is it that you would you like to do?’ she’d asked me.

My school careers adviser, a woman named Ms Kay, who, when asked the same question, hadn’t responded ‘Be a careers adviser’, seemed surprised that I didn’t have a ready answer.

She was dressed like an art deco super-villain, powerful clashes of blacks and whites topped neatly with a slick, angular bob that danced against the side of her head as she strode purposely about the corridors. She had pretended not to notice the gross caricature of her that someone pencilled on the wall next to the door of the staff room. There were few in existence who wanted to be elsewhere for so much of every working day as Ms Kay. Adult life for her had been a huge disappointment. It had failed to keep a single one of the promises it had made to her and liked to rub it in by forcing her to spend most of her waking hours with those of an age that facilitated the enjoyment of being alive.

In the sterile environs of her office she’d spread pamphlets on the table, detailing all manner of career paths I’d never entertained. She was busy talking me through them, making no pretence at having any passion for her vocation whatsoever. Not that it mattered to me, I’d stopped listening some time ago.

‘Are you even listening?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I was actually thinking about Lou. That beauty, the poise of whose cheekbones alone (they formed the perfect gradient, pulling tight the skin around her cherubic chin) made dizzying bursts of adrenalin burn through my heart.

‘What do you feel that you are good at?’

Pretending to listen.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

Ms Kay cleared the pictures of plumbers, electricians and builders from the table, slotting them back into the corresponding files on the bookshelf. It was a process she’d be performing in reverse just five minutes later. She walked to the window, removed a smear from the glass with the cuff of her jacket, and turned to me.

‘Do you know . . . ?’ She paused. She sounded like she had too many teeth in her mouth. ‘Do you know what your brother Malcolm said two years ago when I asked him what he’d like to do?’

I’d no idea.

‘Malcolm is unemployed,’ I said.

‘“I’d like to change the world”,’ she said. ‘And do you know what I told him?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘“Don’t be ridiculous”.’

She thrust a leaflet into my hand as I walked through the door. On the front was a photograph of a man carrying a box, looking bored. I could only presume that the box contained his will to live. He looked a little like Ms Kay.

My family, at the dinner table that was so small our knees knocked and locked together, received only an edited version of this story. I left the part about Mal out of it but I thought it to myself and I watched his face as he was reminded of it, his eyes dropping to the piece of cheap cubed pork that lay alone on his plate.