Holly Deblin twizzled my moussed hair. The skin round her neck’s the softest thing I’ve ever stroked. And she let me. That’s the amazing bit. She let me. Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic-Tacs. My cousin Hugo reckons he’s kissed thirty girls (and not only kissed) and he’s probably up to fifty by now, but you can only have one first one.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I nicked some mistletoe. Look.’
‘It’s all squashy and—’
During my second ever kiss Holly Deblin’s tongue visited my mouth, like a shy vole. You’d think that’d be disgustingsville too but it’s wet and secret and mine wanted to visit hers back so I let it. That kiss ended ’cause I’d forgotten to breathe. ‘This song,’ I was actually panting, ‘that’s on right now. Sort of hippyish, but it’s beautiful.’
Words like ‘beautiful’ you can’t use with boys you can with girls.
‘“#9dream”. John Lennon. Walls and Bridges LP, 1974.’
‘If that’s s’posed to impress me, it really does.’
‘My brother works at Revolver Records. His LP collection stretches to Mars and back. So how d’you know about this little hidey-hole?’
‘This back room? Used to come to youth club here, to play table tennis. I thought it’d be locked tonight. But I was wrong, obviously.’
‘Obviously.’ Holly Deblin’s hands slid under my jumper. Years of hearing Julia and Kate Alfrick talk about wandering hands warned me off doing the same. Then Holly Deblin sort of shivered. I thought she might be cold, but she sort of giggled.
‘What?’ I was scared I’d done something wrong. ‘What?’
‘Neal Brose’s face, in metalwork, this morning.’
‘Oh. That. This morning’s one big blur. The whole day is.’
‘Gary Drake got him off the drill, right, and pointed at what you were doing. Brose didn’t get it at first. That thing you were annihilating in the vice was actually his calculator. Then, then, he got it. He’s a smarmy bastard but he’s not stupid. He saw what’d happen next, and next, and next. He knew he was stuffed. Right at that moment, he knew.’
I toyed with Holly Deblin’s clacky beads.
She said, ‘I was pretty surprised, too.’
I didn’t hurry her.
‘I mean, I liked you, Taylor, but I thought you were…’ She didn’t want to say anything that might hurt my feelings.
‘A human punchbag?’
Holly Deblin propped her chin on my chest. ‘Yeah.’ Her chin dug in a bit. ‘What happened, Taylor? To you, I mean.’
‘Stuff.’ Her calling me ‘Taylor’ feels closer than ‘Jason’. I’m still too shy to call her anything. ‘The year. Look, I don’t want to talk about Neal Brose. Another time?’ I slipped off this woven band she wore round her wrist and slipped it over mine.
‘Thief. Get your own top-of-the-range fashion accessories.’
‘I am doing. This one’s the first in my collection.’
Holly Deblin gripped my slightly big ears in her fingers and thumbs and steered my mouth to hers. Our third kiss lasted the whole of ‘Planet Earth’ by Duran Duran. Holly Deblin guided my hand to where it could feel her fourteen-year-old heart beating against its palm.
‘Hello, Jason.’ The lounge, lit by the Christmas tree lights and the gas fire, reminded me of Santa’s grotto. The TV was off. Dad was just sitting there, so far as I could see, in the Fruit Gum dark. But the tone of his voice told me he knew all about Neal Brose and the wafered Casio. ‘Enjoy the disco?’
‘Not bad.’ (He didn’t care about the disco.) ‘How was Oxford?’
‘Oxford was Oxford. Jason, we need to have a little chat.’
I hung up my black parka on the coat-stand knowing I was a condemned man. ‘A little chat’ means I sit down and Dad lays into me, but Holly Deblin must’ve rewired my head. ‘Dad, can I start?’
‘All right.’ Dad looked calm, but volcanoes are calm just before they blow half a mountain away. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ve got two things to tell you. Big things, really.’
‘I can guess what one is. You had an exciting day at school, by all accounts.’
‘That’s one of them, yes.’
‘Mr Kempsey telephoned earlier. About that expelled boy.’
‘Neal Brose. Yeah. I…I’ll pay for a new calculator.’
‘No need.’ Dad was too drained to throw an eppy. ‘I’ll post his father a cheque in the morning. He telephoned too. Neal Brose’s father, I mean. He apologized to me, actually.’ (That surprised me.) ‘Asked me to forget the calculator. I’ll send the cheque anyway. If he