Submarine - By Joe Dunthorne Page 0,19

‘chat’. Mum knows I have a girlfriend but, as yet, I have refused to disclose the name Jordana Bevan. When I go to meet Jordana, I usually tell my parents that I’m going out for pudding. They think this might be a nickname for heroin. Mum made the international face for: is there anything you want to tell me?

17.5.97

Word of the day: compunction – a strong uneasiness caused by a sense of guilt.

Hi Diary!

Hi Jordana!

News:

• I’ve discovered that masturbating in the darkness of my empty wardrobe is excellent, particularly because of that newborn feeling as you stumble back into the well-lit room. A kind of Narnia.

• For some time now, my parents have been slowly coming round to the idea that they can speak to me about anything. I’ve been very careful to remain in the mode of a well-adjusted young man. I wrote a log, not a diary. I acquired a girlfriend, of all things.

But my good work was undone this afternoon. Mum was sat at the dining-room table with a glass of Rose’s Lime Cordial glowing like kryptonite. She said that she’d spoken to my therapist. That she’d bumped into him on our street when his car alarm had been going off.

I was next door, in the kitchen, fixing myself a dessert island.

Oli T’s Famous Dessert Island Recipe

Ingredients:

One wooden hut (chocolate muffin)

One sandy beach (custard)

Utensils: Microwave, bowl, spoon.

Mum said: ‘I am worried about you.’

I said: ‘That’s good to know.’

She said: ‘I spoke to Dr Goddard, across the road, about your consultation.’

I said: ‘Yes.’

She said: ‘It was very kind of him to give you that lumbar support.’

This was clever – she let me know that I’d been uncovered but, by not making a big thing out of it, she made me believe, for a few hundred milliseconds, that we have an open and honest relationship.

I said: ‘Look, Mum, I’ve got to tell you something big.’

I thought that, probably, the best thing I could do was tell her some sort of enormous secret. I knew that – deep down – she was hoping there would be some sort of highly classified information, a disturbing formative event, which would explain all my weirdness. And then, if she felt that I was being fully honest, she would unveil all the family skeletons.

Like all of history’s great orators, I stood up and walked in slow circles around the dining-room table as I spoke. Here is a transcript of my speech:

Remember, Mum, when Keiron last came over. I was eleven and he was seven. He had one upper tooth that poked outward, giving him a permanent Elvis lip. You were having coffee with his mum in the front room and we were in the music room.

We were playing the perennial classic: hot or cold. Except I didn’t really know what it was I wanted him to find. I got him to open up Dad’s viola case. I got him to lift up the lid on the piano. I got him to search through the cupboard full of board games and shove his hand into the cloth sack for the Scrabble letters. I made him open the jar full of dice, tiddlywinks and golf tees. Then I laid out in the middle of the rug, in a star shape. Whenever he came close to me, I said ‘warmer’, until, eventually, he knelt by my side and put his hands on my chest. ‘Temperate,’ I said. Then he searched my hair. ‘Hyperborean,’ I said. Then he touched my chest. ‘Thawing.’ Then he touched my stomach. ‘Clement.’ Then he went down my right leg. ‘Algid.’ And my left leg. ‘Gelid.’ Until there was nowhere left for him to go. He cupped both his hands over the lump in my jeans. ‘Magma,’ I said.

And then when he put his hand on my zip, I said, ‘Thermal.’ And when he unzipped me, I said, ‘Igneous.’ And then he looked at me for a moment and he seemed a little unsure. Then he put his clammy hand inside my trousers and flopped out my wazzock. ‘It’s hot,’ he said.

Please don’t be angry, Mum; I came on to the Turkish rug.

Keiron asked me: ‘What is it?’ And I said: ‘It’s glue. Like Copydex.’ And he said: ‘I like Copydex.’ He rubbed it on his hands. ‘It peels off like skin,’ he said.

Afterwards, I didn’t want to do anything but stare at the ceiling rose. He sat on my chest and fed me back my own cum off his fingertips, laughing and