bet I can swing higher than you.’ This is her way of flirting. She wants to boff me.
We swing until we get dizzy, then we lie out beneath the climbing frame on the wood chip. It smells like rain.
‘Remember when Arwen said you were a ten-out-of-ten kisser?’ she says coquettishly.
‘Hmm,’ I say.
‘You’re not ten out of ten.’
Again she tries to bed me.
‘I’d give you a six and a half,’ she says.
I lean over and put my palm on her belly.
‘Get off !’ she says, grabbing my wrist. Jordana sometimes lacks intelligence.
‘Oliver?’ she says.
‘Yes.’
She looks a bit like a beautiful woman. She has hip bones that stick out and make me want to do handstands on them. She smells of milk and oestrogen.
‘Sunsets or sunrises?’
Jordana always asks things like this: Knife, fork or spoon? Full-fat or skimmed? Money or good looks?
Fork, full-fat, money.
‘They’re both pretty shit but, if I had to choose, I’d go for sunsets – they are less supercilious.’ Sometimes I think that I might give Jordana a dictionary as a Christmas present.
We share a chocolate Pop-Tart at my house. Jordana asks if she can have a look around my room while I go to the toilet. I sometimes take up to and beyond five minutes on the loo. I will change.
14.5.97
Word of the day: echolalia – meaningless repetition of another’s words.
Dear Log,
The problem, I think, with diaries is that they make you remember things you’d rather forget. I prefer to use the space for recording the times when I’ve got the Countdown conundrum before the contestants:
reference – 14.01.96
speedboat – 4.04.96
Facts:
• Jordana carries cartons of milk in her backpack. She likes the taste of milk and says she wants to have strong bones when she’s older. She has never broken a bone.
• When I was four years old, I used to climb on to the windowsill – during my parents’ dinner parties – pull my pants down and perform a genital display. In my subsequent research I have learnt that this sort of behaviour is perfectly normal for a five-year-old boy. And so, when my parents recall this story, I remind them that, if anything, I was ahead of my peers.
• In sex education, they show us photos of all the STDs. I think they want us to feel disgusted by sex.
• My favourite was the man with the anal warts, which looked like a bad outbreak of bubble wrap. There was a man with thrush; it gave his bell end a kind of polka-dot pattern, like a hat that no one would wear.
• When I have sex with someone, I will be thinking about the unnecessary number of words there are for inter-course: shagging, fucking, screwing, bonking, porking, nobbing, consummating, boneing, boffing, copulating, dicking, bedding… I could go on.
• Chips says that sex is like a wet wank.
Thursday afternoon.
Sometimes it is important to skip school for an afternoon. We are missing Welsh and maths. Our classmates will notice that we have disappeared and they will respect us. Our Welsh teacher thinks he is young. He tells us that the Welsh for skiving in town is ‘mitchio yn y dre’.
We lie on our backs in the wood chip beneath the kids’ climbing frame. She shows me the photos of the time we snogged in the stone circle. She says she is going to email them anonymously to Janet.
‘Are you using me?’ I ask.
Jordana thumbs through the pictures and laughs. In the photo it looks as though I am eating her face.
‘You have a massive head,’ she says. Normally, I would say that this is just her trying to get into my pants.
‘I said, “Are you using me?”’ Sometimes Jordana doesn’t hear very well.
She puts the photos down, turns on to her front and leans up on her elbows.
‘You wish I was using you,’ she says, smiling.
‘Just because we have a tryst doesn’t mean you can take me for granted,’ I say.
Jordana stands and clambers up the red ladder that arcs over the climbing frame. Once at the top, she carefully lowers herself between the two uppermost rungs so that she hangs upside down by her legs. She looks like a spider at the centre of a web. Her long brown hair falls down towards where I am lying, almost touching my nose. It smells of bubblegum.
‘Banana Heaven. Is that really what they call me?’
Jordana’s mammary glands look bigger from this angle.
‘You kissed Rhian Weld,’ she says, starting to sway back and forth. I think that Rhian must have told