the Sidney Preece Leisure Centre

It starts to piss down, but there are no signs of any buses, so I start to walk. By the time I get home from Sophie’s I feel like I’ve been pushed into a swamp. My jeans cling to me like some denim reptile, unwilling to regurgitate my legs until they are totally dissolved. When I finally manage to wrestle the trousers off, my skin is red with cold and covered in indigo dribbles and streaks. I slop to the bathroom in my pants and T-shirt and wring them out in the bath. Then I walk naked back to my room, collapse into bed and pray that I won’t catch flu.

Next morning, I don’t emerge until well gone eleven. The bedroom smells of weak farts and rotting trainers. I cough and get up. Then, cloaked in my duvet, I stumble across the room to open the window. It is overcast, but not raining - the sky one billowing sheet of milky cloud. I pull on a fresh pair of boxer shorts, then tie the laces of my sodden trainers together and sling them over the latch of the open window, dangling them above the garden.

I think about Sophie.

I’m not really hungry, but I have a couple of slices of toast and a black coffee, then head off to the Sidney Preece Sports and Leisure Centre.

I have no idea who Sidney Preece is or was, but I like the centre. That aroma of chlorine, squash balls and Ralgex. The huge bottle of Lemon Lucozade on the side of the vending machine. The squash rackets, swim hats and Zoggs goggles in reception. The faded motivational posters and plastic plants. I find it all very soothing.

The staff at the Sidney Preece Centre wear calm yellow and idle lilac. They seem to do little all day other than to mop the changing room floors, pin yet more bits of paper to the notice board and sit by the pool side toying with the red ribbons tied to their whistles. Talk about an easy life.

That Monday morning, there are two ladies on reception. One is about twenty, all thighs and ponytail. She looks like a professional tennis player. The other is fortyish and looks like she is addicted to doughnuts. There are a few of them like her at the Sidney Preece.

Probably she did once represent the county at netball or javelin or something. Maybe there was a time when she did 100 sit ups each morning with a large tin of pineapple chunks behind her head. But there obviously came a day when she thought ‘sod it’ and just ate the pineapple. And now she is focused firmly on the ‘leisure’ side of the business.

Her exertions are confined to squeezing her bellies past the young fillies in reception, sweating over staff rosters, pencilling in (and vigorously erasing) squash court bookings, and bouncing her way sweatily through a session of ‘Aqua aerobics for the over fifties’ a couple of times a week to reinforce the myth of her lost athleticism. I guess I should be careful what I say. I’m only bitter because I’m headed that way already. Twenty-three, and the tennis player wouldn’t give me a second glance.

Before approaching the counter where the brochures and entry forms are piled, I linger for a while and read the lists of names and times on the Westing Swimming Club notice board. The board is plastered with newspaper clippings: Kelly’s Nationals Hopes, Kelly Going for Gold, Kelly’s All Set for Birmingham Bonanza, Kelly Misses Out on Butterfly Bronze, So Close for Braze Kelly, Kelly Kisses Olympic Hopes Goodbye.

Maybe Kelly’s legs turned to jelly. Or maybe Kelly had Delhi belly after one bhindi bhaji too many at the balti the night before what was tipped to be her big Birmingham breakthrough. Or maybe it was a bad barrel of beer that broke her. The latter is least likely, as she only looks about fourteen in most of her photos - curling, yellow and torn in the corners. She is an odd looking thing, deformed in a way, her head shrunken by her rubber hat, shoulders made massive by 128 lengths before breakfast day after day after day.

I pick up a leaflet of pool opening times and an entry form for the Hellathon. The tennis player smiles, but she is just being polite. Then I stroll home, stopping off at the Spar on the corner to buy myself a couple of bottles of Lemon Lucozade and the March edition of Triathlon and Adventure Racer magazine.

The house is empty when I get back. Paul and Adrian, the two other guys who live with me, are both out at work. They aren’t really housemates, just people who happen to rent from the same landlord. Although I get on quite well with Paul, it isn’t the same as sharing with a bunch of mates. But at sixty quid a week including bills I can’t complain, even if the kitchen is a shrine to dangerous domestic appliances of the seventies, and I do occasionally see a cockroach scuttle among the dropped Frosties and Basmati rice, spilled from boil-in-the-bag Korma for one (meaning one sad bastard). Still, that’s what I am now - college drop out turned cage rat, a double sad bastard with honours.

I open the fridge and grimace at the stench from a bowl of tuna and sweetcorn, which Adrian has left uncovered for three days. I decide to squeeze my Lucozade into the larder between bags of sliced white bread. There are about a dozen bags in all, each containing between two and twenty slices of various age and mouldiness. They also belong to Adrian. I’m not sure whether the bread is intended to be organic art, a home penicillin factory or an adventure playground for roaches. Still, there’s no way the little beggars could get the cap off a bottle, so I guess the Lucozade will be safe for a while.

I jog up the stairs, clutching my entry form for the Hellathon. Spurred on by my visit to the sports centre, I’m in the mood for some athletic action, ready to show Brett and all those other disbelieving bastards what I’m really made of. All I need to do is find my spare trainers and footie shorts and I can hit the streets.

My spare trainers (alternatives to the ones which still dangle over the front garden, stinking like a couple of dead rats) are relatively easy to find. They are in a bag in the bottom of my cupboard. The spares are a little on the stiff side. I last wore them three or four months earlier for a game of footie on a waterlogged pitch (and neglected to clean them afterwards). However, after a bit of bending, the caked-on mud cracks and most of it falls off in satisfying chunks.

My shorts are less easy to locate. I know they are in one of the bin liners I stuffed full of clothes when I was politely asked to vacate my hall of residence at the University of Westingshire. It’s not that I can’t find the bags. I know exactly where they are - shoved in deep drawers beneath the old double bed. Nor is it that I can’t be bothered to sift through them - it would only take a couple of minutes. It’s just that my departure from the institution formerly known as the Polytechnic of Westing was not entirely without incident. And I’m not sure I’m quite ready to face a bag load of gory reminders.

the field trip

There was no one big reason why I quit my Ecology course. If I had to explain it to people, I’d say dismissively that it was lots of little things. But that isn’t really true either. There was only one part of the course that I particularly enjoyed, and that was the field trip to the Westingshire coast.

It was beautiful by the coast, all sea, windswept cliffs and picture postcard villages with deep green bays of bobbing fishing boats. There was something very organic about the villages, as if they had always been there; church spires sprouting up out of the cliffs, and the tall guest houses blossoming, powdery blue and pink alongside the wide, pale beaches. Even the boats seemed to belong to the sea, their barnacled hulls like the empty shells of giant crabs.

I was so taken by the coastal scenery, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to what I was supposed to be learning. As we clambered over rocky outcrops to reach caves, wave cut platforms, stacks and stumps, I gazed out at the endlessly shifting ocean looking for oil tankers on the horizon, and imagined painting huge Turnerlike seascapes. When the other students laid out wooden squares among the wild dry dunes to count different species of flowers, I lay on my back knotting marram grass and watched the clouds float by.

In the woods and fields along the coast path, where the others dug trenches and collected samples of soil and rock at different depths, I wandered over to the cliff’s edge with a pair of borrowed binoculars to survey the islands with their plump seals and colonies of cormorants, wings outstretched like little Christs to dry their feathers in the sun. And I marvelled at how peaceful and rugged and pure the place was.

The magic of the coast failed to enthuse the lecturers. They appeared even less interested in ecology than I was, going through the motions in their wellingtons and anoraks, as if they were stood in a draughty lecture theatre rather than in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. And, despite the awesome scenery, the trip might have turned mind-numbingly boring had in not been for Graham, a post-graduate from Devon who was incredibly enthusiastic about rocks and fossils.

Graham was a bearded young farmer type - all checked shirt, muddy denim and wellingtons. And, at first, I’d joined in with the other students when they took the piss out of Graham’s accent. However, as the week went on, I became more and more caught up in Graham’s enthusiasm. After a couple of days, I decided he was about the only person I’d met at University who I actually respected.

On the Thursday before the field trip finished, Graham announced he was going to give an informal talk on fossils of the Westingshire Coast in the lecture room of the education-centre-cum-hostel we were shacked up in. Besides me, the only person who turned up for the talk was Tariq, a North African student, who always got 90 per cent plus for his practicals, and stayed behind late to do his own research into Acacia trees. Graham suggested that we should convene to the local pub, the Lifeboat, which was about three miles walk away (but was a welcome alternative to the field centre bar).

When we arrived at the Lifeboat, we discovered there was a special offer on real ale which was 6.3 per cent and a pound a pint. I can’t remember the name of the ale. However, I vaguely recall it had something to do with Stoats or Badgers (possibly because it tasted like the putrefied piss of said creatures). I thought it might be a bit embarrassing for Tariq, as I’d always presumed he was a Muslim. But I guess he can’t have been, because he packed away the Badger’s piss with the rest of us.

At closing time, the landlord and another local (who looked like they might have been in some seventies rock outfit before their hairlines receded) produced a couple of guitars and invited me, Tariq and Bob to join them and a couple of middle aged divorcees in a lock in. Two bottles of whisky, and most of the Eagles and Stones back catalogues later, we eventually staggered back to the hostel through the dew dampened fields of dawn (the sunrise that is, rather than the eponymous farmer’s daughter, who featured in a dirty song the landlord taught us).

Graham, amazingly just kept going that morning, without so much as a change of shirt. Tariq looked rather tired, but (having never missed a lecture in his life) dutifully attended that day’s futile field trip. I, however, collapsed into bed feigning illness, which wasn’t hard to do as I’d vomited twice on the way home and felt as if I’d been pounded on the head by a large trilobite from Graham’s fossil collection.

When I got back to college, I tried to explain the excitement of rock formation to my mates, who all did art history and French literature and the like. But they just took the piss. I didn’t really mind this reaction. It was roughly what I would have expected. But it made me realise how everyone (well, almost everyone) in the University, was just going through the motions. There was no enthusiasm there. No one who really believed in what they did. It was all just about securing a passport to the upper echelons of a divided job market - getting a bigger mortgage, a bigger pension. And for what?

After I got back from the field trip, I went to see my tutor, Dr Paxton, to explain how I felt. I told him that the ecology course was not what I’d expected it to be. Dr Paxton smiled understandingly and suggested that maybe I should try another course. I told him I wasn’t really interested in anything else. Then he told me it didn’t really matter what degree I got just so long as I got one. Most graduates, Dr Paxton said, don’t ever use the subject they study. So I shouldn’t worry. I should grin and bear it, do my time, then ‘go and become and accountant or management consultant, like the rest of them’.

I guess he was as bitter as I was. However, he’d accepted the shortcomings of academic life, and traded in his scepticism for a comfortable salary. I couldn’t do that. I was desperate to find something worthwhile to focus on, like Graham’s rocks and fossils, a vocation that made me want to get up in the mornings. But I couldn’t think what that something was, so I just meandered on.

Passmoor Manor

A couple of evenings after I’d had that little chat with my tutor, I was in the Student Union bar, when my mate Nobby started going on about this volunteer work he did with people with mental health problems. As usual, we all took the piss, especially big Steve, who started on about some ‘axe murderer’ who’d escaped from a ‘looney bin’ near where his folks lived, and how they’d had to barricade all the doors and windows.

Nobby was outraged. He invited big Steve to accompany him to a social club he organised at this local psychiatric hospital. He said it would help Steve gain a ‘more informed view of people with long term mental health problems.’

Steve declined. In fact, what he said was: “there’s no way you’d get me within a million miles of them fucking nutters.”

I’d had a couple and Nobby looked so deflated, before I knew it, I’d said, “I’ll go, if you like.”

I couldn’t really back down after that. And the following Wednesday evening I found myself in a minibus crunching down the gravel drive to Passmoor Manor, this old gothic hospital, which, I have to admit, did look a bit Hammer Horror.

On my first visit I felt pretty uneasy as a nurse led us down the long grey corridors to the recreation room where a couple of dozen patients were waiting for their free tea and biscuits. The recreation room was not in a good way. It smelled like a rotting tree stump, and the floor sagged in the middle as if at any moment it might split open, plunging us all into the cellars below. But the patients seemed harmless enough.

One thing I noticed straight off, was that some of them seemed to dress very peculiarly. Flared trousers flapped three inches above the ankles of lanky manic depressives. Buttons were strained to breaking point by psychopath’s beer bellies. And giant cardigans swamped tiny schizophrenics.

At first I thought this was due to the inmates’ illnesses - that they were literally mad dressers. It was only after a couple more visits, that one patient explained they were given their clothes from a communal pool, and simply put on what the ward orderlies threw at them each morning.

To be fair, some of the patients would have looked weird whatever they were wearing. There was Valerie, a woman who painted her whole forehead with bright blue eye shadow. And Griff, whose face was covered in tattoos. He had scars on his neck where, every so often, he’d try to cut his own throat. But they were the exceptions.

Most people at Passmoor were worryingly normal. The only thing they had in common was the loss of their surnames. Each patient was introduced simply as John or Ann or Julie or Graham, never John Davis or Julie Perkins. Maybe, being long term patients, they didn’t need a surname any more.

I guess, second names - like addresses and credit card numbers - are just a way to sort you into the right pigeon hole. When you’ve flown the coop, they became kind of irrelevant. Still, as the weeks came and went, I actually got quite friendly with one or two of the patients and genuinely looked forward to chatting to them.

There was this one guy called John. He was in his early forties and well over six feet tall. He had a large bald patch surrounded by a fringe of dark greasy hair, and he always wore a tatty blue jumper (two sizes too small) over a crumpled white office shirt. John had an enormous beer gut, probably due to his sedate (sedated) lifestyle, and the buttons on his shirt were always open revealing a glimpse of dark stomach hair. He had a very dry sense of humour. Every so often during the evening, he’d look around the recreation room, shake his head, and mutter drily, “you’d have to be mad to live here.”

After a couple of weeks, I asked John how he happened to end up at Passmoor. John said that his family had a history of Schizophrenia, and during the 1960s his mum and dad had both ended up in a mental hospital, where a researcher had decided to give the entire family Electro Convulsive Therapy, to see if this stopped the kids becoming schizos too. So, from the age of eight, John regularly had a few thousand volts shoved through his frontal lobes. And guess what?

“It was,” as John explained, “a ducking stool approach to mental care. Either way you were destined to end up mad.”

“You’re not mad,” I said. “At least, no more mad than anyone out there.” I gestured towards the moulding windows. John shrugged.

“Mind you,” I said, “even if you weren’t mad, this place would send you that way. I mean, I don’t know, I’m just some student who pops in for a cup of tea once a week, but most people here don’t really need to be here do they? They’re not some great threat to society.”

“No,” said John. “But society is a great threat to them.”

I nodded. “I know what you mean.”

In an attempt at profundity, I quoted the lyrics of that song, Sweet Dreams, by the Eurythmics; “Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you. Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.”

Suddenly, something seemed to click in John and his eyes went black. “To abuse or be abused. To give or take. To lead or follow. To beg or borrow. To plough a lonely furrow. Today or tomorrow...”

Everyone stopped talking as the words poured out of John with ever greater ferocity, a violent diarrhoea of rhyming couplets. Then he stormed out of the room, pausing only to head butt the rotten door. It rattled on its hinges for several moments. And I listened in shock to the dull thud of John’s head banging against the walls as he ranted his way down the corridor.

Helen, one of the nurses, locked the door from the inside and pressed her personal alarm. Then she walked calmly over to me and said, “you must be careful not to over excite John.”

The next week it was suggested we should try and organise some themed evenings to try and brighten up the atmosphere at the club. The first one was a games evening. This was not a tremendous success as every game had been defaced in some way. Cards were missing from packs, the heads had been snapped off the table footballers, and half the letters in the Scrabble set had been eaten.

Undeterred, we organised a fireworks trip, which was a huge success. No one went missing. And we even stopped off at the pub on the way home. It was strange to watch the residents of Passmoor in the pub, gradually emerge from their institutionalised state and become human again. They reminded me of ageing ex-league footballers, instinctively raising their game when given a chance to play against Premier opposition in the FA Cup.

Fired up by the success of the fireworks evening, I offered to help organise a Xmas party for the residents. Nobby said I could spend up to fifty pounds on food and bits and pieces and then claim it back from the treasurer’s office in the Student Union. So, having bought a selection of snacks and nibbles from Asda, I duly took my receipt in.

I nearly didn’t make it. I was on my way to a mycology exam, and there was some posh git in front of me who spent ages arguing the toss over hundreds of pounds of hotel expenses for some rugby club tour. He was really talking down to the old guy in the treasurer’s office. I felt my heckles rising. Not surprisingly when my turn eventually came, the old guy was in a bit of a bad mood.

“What’s this for,” he snapped. “More broken hotel toilet seats?”

“Oh no, nothing like that,” I smiled. “It’s a Christmas party, well just a few snacks and stuff really, for the visitors group that goes to Passmoor Manor, you know the psychiatric place.”

“So it’s for the students then?”

“Well for the people in the hospital too, but...”

“Nah,” said the man. “I can’t reimburse this.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “why not?”

The man sighed. “If it’s not for the sole use of students we can’t pay. I shouldn’t have to keep on telling you people that.”

“Come on,” I said, “it’s only a few quid for a couple of snacks.”

The man just shook his head.

“All right then,” I said. “If it’s only the students who eat the food, can I have the money.”

“You just said it wasn’t,” said the guy.

“Well, now I’m saying it is.” I was getting a bit belligerent. But then the old guy lost it completely.

“You don’t come in here and lie to me,” he said. And prodded me with his finger. Now that was a mistake.

“I’m not fucking lying,” I said. “I just thought if you could give that stuck up arsehole a few hundred quid so that him and his rugger bugger mates can go and trash hotels, you might be able to help me out with twenty quid for a couple of packs of crisps for people who spend most of their lives locked up in a fucking ward.”

The old guy just looked at me. His face turned crimson.

“Right,” he said. “You are going to hear about this. You people will not come in here and speak to me like...”

“Oh, fuck off, you stupid cunt,” I said. “I’ll pay it my-fucking-self.”

I ripped up the receipt and strode off to my exam.

I was about a third of the way through the paper when I started thinking about John, and the guy in the treasurer’s office and that stuck-up rugby bloke. I looked at all the people around me hunched over, scribbling away. And I sat back and began to tear up my answers, then stood up and tossed the bits into the air. The people around me flinched from the confetti as if it were fallout from some nuclear explosion, but they never stopped writing. Not one of them.

With a final cry of, ‘See you later suckers’, I walked out, feeling like my whole head was one huge burst boil. And that was the end of my academic career. Well, almost…

I found out afterwards the invigilator was in tears over my little performance. She spent the rest of the exam on her knees collecting the torn pieces of paper and sellotaping them together like some bizarre jigsaw. Freakier still, they actually marked my paper. I came third from last. Thirty six per cent, almost a pass.

Mel, Steph and Sam

It was crazy. I’d been living in Whitfield Hall for months surrounded by girls, corridor after corridor of them, young, unattached and decidedly up for it. I’d been clean and sane and sociable. Yet, I’d never got more than the odd snog and a bit of a drunken grope, while everyone else was at it like rabbits on Viagra.

I thought maybe it was because I was a mature student (in the loosest sense) being twenty-two rather than eighteen or nineteen. But even so, I would still have expected somebody to show some interest at some stage. I mean I’m no Brad Pitt. But nor am I the hunchback of Notre Dame (and even he had that thing going with Esmerelda).

The strange thing is, after the exam incident, I turned into this lazy, scruffy headcase. And suddenly aloof goddesses like Melanie McIntrye and Stephanie Parker were flinging themselves from their pedestals with their knickers around their knees.

Melanie came knocking at my room in Whitfield Hall one lunchtime when I was still in bed. I stumbled to the door in a pair of pale blue boxers that I’d been wearing for three days. I was nursing a hangover induced by five cans of Special Brew, a very cheap prawn korma and some premium strength skunk, which I’d sat up smoking until two in the morning. I unlatched the door to my room and was just about to tell whoever it was to ‘stop fucking banging on my fucking door and fuck off’, when I realised it was Melanie.

As I peered around the door all stubbly and bleary eyed, I thought I must be hallucinating. I scrunched my eyes shut, then opened them again. But she was still there - Melanie ‘sex doll’ McIntyre, the fantasy of every man within a ten mile radius of campus.

Melanie was fairly short, about five three I’d guess, but very blonde and very bubbly with a bum so pert it brought tears to your eyes and the kind of breasts that you normally only see on computer generated heroines. Mel’s mams (as they were affectionately known) were almost completely spherical, and the red blooded males of the college had spent many hours debating whether or not they were real. But no one (as far as I knew) had had an opportunity to find out.

Melanie had a boyfriend in the army to whom she was very loyal. We all thought he was a right lucky bastard, despite the fact that he never got a chance to see Melanie (which we did every day) and had a decent chance of being blown to smithereens (whereas we merely toyed with a bit of alcohol poisoning).

Still, I thought, if Mel’s fella did get gunned down in some foreign desert, at least he’d have some pretty amazing last memories (and he could rest assured that Mel would be well looked after in her widowhood). Melanie McIntyre, imagine that! And there she was stood outside my door in a very, very tight pink T-shirt emblazoned with the word Pussy Power in glittery Magic Roundabout style writing.

Having established that I was not imagining things, I continued to gawp at her, while my scrambled brain tried vainly to work out why she was there. Sure, I’d sat with her at lunch a couple of times, and chatted to her while watching Eastenders in the Whitfield Hall TV room. But she was not what you’d call a best mate and she was the last person I’d expect to come and wake me up.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yea, sorry, I was dozing.”

“Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t meant to disturb you.”

“Oh Christ no,” I said. “I was getting up anyway...”

She paused, then asked nervously, “Do you mind if I come in for a moment?”

I coughed and started to choke. I’m sure my face turned the colour of a beetroot.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked. She stepped closer and peered intently at me.

Still unable to talk, I held up my hand, embarrassed that my room was such a tip and stank from the previous night’s excesses of curry, lager and skunk. Then I started coughing again and the door swung open revealing me in all my semi-naked glory. I stepped back into my room and, to my surprise, she followed me in.

“Oh Newton, you’re not well.” she said, in a very cute kind of way. And for some reason the vision of her in a skimpy nurse’s outfit flitted through my mind. I felt myself start to stiffen. I hurriedly turned away from her, and sidled over to the sink in the corner. I poured cold water into a mug (still a quarter full of two day old black coffee) and sipped it.

“Do you mind if I get back into bed,” I croaked, pretending I really was ill (although actually it was just a ruse to hide my hard on, which was about to burst through my boxers). As I slid into bed, I thought I caught her sneaking a quick look at my dick, but I guessed that was wishful thinking.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll go.”

“No please don’t,” I said, a little too eagerly. “Take a seat.” I gestured to the battered chair beside my civil service surplus desk, but instead Mel perched on the edge of bed. I winced with pleasure as the warmth of her bottom seeped through the thin duvet.

“I’m...we’re worried about you,” she said. “You’re not happy are you?”

I pulled the duvet further up over my naked chest and silently shook my head, biting my bottom lip.

“I know how you feel,” said Mel. “When I first came here, I was really looking forward to my degree. I thought it would be different here. But it’s just crap.” I nodded vigorously. Then she began to get a bit more personal. “Everyone keeps saying it’s OK for me, because all the men like me. But they don’t really like me. They just like looking at me. It’s true, I do try to look nice...”

“You do, you do,” I said with a Woody Allen style shrug. She smiled complacently.

“But it’s not like I’m some kind of supermodel,” she continued. She arched her back to accentuate her shortness, inadvertently making her nipples push sharply against that cute pink T-shirt. I had to work overtime to keep my eyes on her face. “I admit, I get up at six every day to get ready. But it’s not because I want everyone to look at me. I just like to feel nice.”

“Of course,” I said, feigning maturity.

“I know some people think I only get good marks because I shove these in some professor’s face.” She wiggled her breasts like a lap dancer, and I smiled guiltily. “But they don’t know what it’s like. I work really hard.” She pouted indignantly looking even more ravishing than ever. “I spent weeks on my dissertation. But I don’t think they even bothered to read what I’d written. The male lecturers just talk about sex all the time. And the women are even worse. They’re either lezzies or they dog me up and down like I was something they’d trodden in. It’s really unfair. Why shouldn’t I try to look nice!”

“You should, you should.” I nodded. “If that’s what you want to do.”

“It is,” she said.

“Well, there you go then,” I said. “It’s just totally fucking unfair. You should be able to be who you want, without other people fucking judging you for it all the time.” I paused. “Anyway, for what it’s worth, I think you look fucking gorgeous.”

“You’re very nice,” said Melanie touching my arm.

I shrugged and blushed.

“I heard about the exam,” she said.

“A moment of madness,” I said.

She shook her head.

“They’re not going to kick you out are they?”

I shrugged again.

“I don’t know. No one’s said anything about it...yet.”

“”Well, I hope you don’t go,” she said.

Little pin pricks of tears appeared in her eyes, like sap slowly oozing from a punctured plant stem.

I let the duvet fall and held out thin white arms to her, and she sunk into them like a child. And all I wanted to do was be cuddled and caressed like some motherless mongrel puppy, to feel her warmth against mine. But I think she sensed that was all I wanted, and I think that was what made her want to go further.

I held her without moving for what seemed like an hour, feeling her heart thump against mine, then she started to tremble, quite violently and suddenly started to kiss me, plunging her tongue into my mouth, like some kid licking out a tub of chocolate mousse.

She run her hands over my chest, teasing my nipples. Then she pushed her hand under the duvet and greedily pulled my cock out of my boxers, before going down on me, sucking me really hard and groaning with pleasure as I stroked her hair and reached inside her T-shirt to feel her breasts. And they were real. Fuck, they were real.

She stood up, her face flushed red and her eyes wide and black, and with no hint of shame pulled down her jeans and knickers, smiling as she revealed her slim thighs and neatly shaved pubic mound. Then she kneeled on the bed, thighs apart, grabbed my dick and guided it to the mouth of her pussy. I’d never known one so hot before, and I almost felt scalded as she sank down onto me, then slid violently up and down on my stiff pole, touching herself at the same time and kissing me so hard she made my lips bleed.

It was surreal. She came in about two minutes, and then kept on coming for about two minutes. And when she’d finished she emitted a couple of strangled sobs like she was about to burst into tears, but then started to laugh, glowing with happiness. Then she clambered off me, wanked me off until I came all over her t-shirt and was gone. But before she left, she actually thanked me - thanked me for fuck’s sake!

The crazy thing was, the whole time it had been happening I felt nothing. I was just totally numb. I had to go and ask her later, if I’d been dreaming. Luckily she took it as a compliment, and visited me again the next evening with a three-pack of featherlites. But again I was in a state of shock, and it almost felt like I was having an out of body experience (which is not what you want to happen when you’re doing it with Melanie McIntyre).

Melanie must have said something to someone because word soon got round about her little fling with me (much to the disbelief of all the trendier, sportier and better looking lads who had tried and failed to get anywhere near her). And it wasn’t only the blokes who gave me funny looks. Many of the girls suddenly seemed to view me in a new light. They would eye me up and down and blush as I passed them, as if by shagging Melanie (or rather, being shagged by her) I had become the number one seeded Don Juan of Whitfield Hall.

I told myself that I was imagining it, that the girls were really just thinking ‘what the hell did she see in him?’ But shortly afterwards I bumped into Stephanie Hughes in the corridor. I mean, I literally collided with her. It was one of those episodes where we were both looking the other way as we rounded a corner. We ended up doing an impromptu waltz in each others arms, teetered for a few seconds on an invisible tightrope but just about managed to stay on our feet.

Instead of letting go straight away, Steph kind of held onto me, squeezing my flesh like a farm hand sizing up the value of a bullock. And then she gave me this really odd little grin. We eyed each other up for a second, and I found myself saying:

“Do you fancy going for a drink.”

She looked sheepish.

“I’ve got a tutorial.”

“Who cares,” I grinned. “Tell them you had a headache. Come on, live a little.”

“I can’t,” she said. “Anyway, I go all silly if I drink in the middle of the day.”

“Sounds good.”

I gave her tummy an amorous tickle.

“No, I can’t”

“Go on,” I winked, “I’ll make it worth you while,” and leered over her. Steph took a step back, clutching her note pad to her bosom.

“I’ve got an essay to hand in,” she said.

“They won’t mind. Slip it under your tutor’s door later on.”

“No, really,” she said.

I assumed a dejected pose.

“Just one little drink. Is it too much to ask?” I raised the back of one hand to my brow, and affected a Bronté-esque tone. “Oh Stephanie, my beloved. Why do you have to torture me this way?”

She laughed.

“Your offer is greatly appreciated sir, but I am sorry I have a prior engagement.”

I sighed.

“Oh Stephanie, my heart is rent asunder.”

“Farewell, farewell, for I must fly,” she said, and fluttered away like a bird.

“The memory of your loveliness will dominate my every waking moment.”

“Nutcase,” she said.

“Lightweight,” I hollered. “You know where to find me.”

About five minutes later, when I was about fifty yards from the White Hart, I felt a sudden prod in the ribs. I turned to see Stephanie sans note pad. She was grinning from ear to ear.

“Pray, my angel what magical cloud have you suddenly descended from?”

“The ‘I’ve just discovered my tutor is in Birmingham’ cloud, fine sir.”

I eyed her up and down.

“Be still my pounding heart. I have just left another whose beauty is endless, but not even she can compare to you my goddess.”

“Stop being so silly,” she said. She blushed and wagged her finger as if admonishing a small terrier, then hooked her arm in mine and steered me towards the pub.

If anything, I was more surprised about Stephanie than I had been about Melanie. For one thing, Stephanie was posh - verging on what students would call a Yah or a Sloane. She was quite tall, but also quite wide and vigorous, with a turned up collar and dark hair bundled wildly on top of her head.

Stephanie studied Estate Management and drove a smart red Golf, a couple of years old. I guess it was a present - for her eighteenth birthday maybe, or for when she’d passed her A levels. She had been to an all girls school, and tended to be overtly loud and silly in the company of men. But, all the same, she was pretty nice, and I genuinely liked her. She was always bright and breezy, and very quick witted. Several times she’d told me she was a fairy, and once she ran around the corridors giggling and wearing a pair of false wings. Some people said unkind things about her that day. But I actually found it quite amusing. Quaint but kinda’ cute.

Later that week (the week Stephanie had run around with the wings on) I’d sat with her at dinner. I said to her, if she really was a fairy, she should watch out for the elves that lived around the halls. And we spent half-an-hour gravely discussing the little folks’ theft from fridges and acts of alcohol-fuelled vandalism. However, even though we’d had a few laughs together, I was surprised about what happened after we returned from the White Hart.

We’d had a couple of pints each, when she took hold of my hand under the table. I gripped her fingers with all the sensitivity of a man holding a plastic handle on a crowded bus. She moved closer to me, and her body might as well have been made of stone for all it mattered to me. But she wasn’t to know. Then we wandered back to the halls, hand in hand, and ended up in her room.

Once we were inside, she closed and locked the door. Then she lay back on the bed and I tumbled on top of her. She was wearing a long denim skirt and a T-shirt. And as we started to kiss, I reached up inside her top to feel her breasts. They were much smaller than Melanie’s, but her nipples were huge and stiff, as if she’d had acorns implanted in them. I started to suck them through the soft white satin of her bra. This was not something I generally tried, but then again these were not normal nipples.

Stephanie seemed to find this quite a turn on and wedged her hand inside the top of my jeans and started to feel the swollen head of my dick, like she was testing the ripeness of a Victoria plum.

Taking her cue, I reached my hand up her skirt and was startled to discover that she was wearing no knickers. I pulled away slightly, and looked quizzically at her, trying to work out when she’d slipped them off. She’d been to the loo a couple of times in the pub, so perhaps it was then. Or maybe she’d not been wearing any in the first place.

Stephanie sensed my excitement. She smirked and unzipped my flies, then gave the shaft of my cock a hard squeeze. I responded by shoving two fingers up her pussy from behind. That really got her going. I reached down to spread her lips with my other hand and started to stroke her clit. It was huge.

They talk about girls having a love button. Well, Stephanie had a joystick. I didn’t know whether to finger it, suck it or plug it into a flight simulator. I’m not kidding I needed to use two fingers as I rubbed it with the juices from her cunt. It seemed to do the trick as she started to moan with pleasure and closed her thighs tight around my hands, rather than opening them wider as other girls generally did. She was full of surprises.

I was just about to suggest that I should nip back to my room for a condom, when Steph started to writhe and buck as if my fingers had been replaced by an electric cattle prod. Her cunt spasmed like the gullet of a puking cat, and she commenced a series of explosive orgasms that practically broke my arm as her legs tightened around my wrist.

Then she reached out for my cock and began to give it a vigorous wanking. Normally this would not be a tremendous thrill, as most girl’s masturbatory techniques are akin to gently stroking a rabbit or, at the other extreme, trying to rip the head off a struggling chicken. Stephanie, however, was a fellow professional (perhaps because she almost had a penis of her own), and I soon felt the come surging up from my balls.

I suppose it was quite a passionate encounter, in a dirty kind of way. But it stirred no emotion. It was as if I’d experienced a minor clinical procedure - a visit to a dentist or a chiropodist - rather than an impromptu sexual liaison. And as I came, all I felt was a strong urge to turn to Stephanie and say, “Hey I couldn’t have done it better myself.”

But I said nothing. I just lay there.

It was as I gazed up at Stephanie’s ceiling - the come dribbling from my belly button, dampening her duvet - that I first realised I’d had some kind of breakdown. There was just nothing happening inside me. No anger or frustration, no lust, no sadness, no doubt, no opinions, no humour, no fear. I just listened to Stephanie without listening and nodded with an empty smile, and stared coldly at the mix of fairies and male models that covered her wall.

How refreshing, she must have thought, as she babbled away like a four-year-old on the arm of her father. How kind and gentle and understanding, he is, how strong and mature and sexy. In truth, I was simply one of the waking dead - my nerves in a coma and my glands dried up like stale prunes - an organic vibrator with an optional man attached. But, like Melanie, Steph didn’t seem to particularly notice or mind.

I thought my sexual encounters with Stepahnie and Melanie were bizarre one-off events. I guessed they were both just bored and I happened to be around. I never imagined either of them had any real feelings for me. But a couple of days later Steph had a massive cat-fight with Melanie, which ended in tears. Word went round that I’d been cheating on them both.

This seemed doubly unfair to me as, firstly, everyone else seemed to shag who they liked without censure, and, secondly, I’d never expressed any kind of commitment to either of them. Still it didn’t seem to stop people looking at me as if he were some kind of alien, as I sat alone and ate my lunch in the Whitfield canteen.

Some of my mates, Nobby, Steve and Mosher, did come and sit with me and laughed and cracked jokes. I guess they were trying to show some support in a laddish kind of way. But I just ignored them, and eventually they went away, shaking their heads, leaving me to suffer the disbelieving scowls of those public schoolboys who’d also fancied their chances with Stephanie, but had had no luck.

I hardly talked to anyone much for a week. But then on Saturday morning I headed into town to buy an apple doughnut from Millie’s Kitchen, and happened to find himself walking alongside Sam Hughes, who I knew quite well. In fact, when I first started on my course, I’d had a bit of a thing for her.

Each morning, as I entered the canteen for breakfast, I’d try to spot her nibbling away at her toast like some dainty dark-eyed hamster. I even made a pass at her a couple of times. Well, kind of. At the end of the first term there’d been this party, a Mexican evening. I’d borrowed a Hawaiian shirt and a false moustache and danced with her on and off all night. We’d even shared one quite promising slow dance. But at the end of the evening she’d vanished.

I’d looked everywhere for her, staggering up and down the corridors like a drunken bloodhound hoping to catch a sniff of her sweet perfume, But all I could smell was Tequila flavoured vomit, chilli farts and burnt toast. So it had come to nothing. Still, she seemed pleased enough to see me that morning.

“Hi, stranger,” she said, as I caught up with her on the edge of town. “People were starting to think you’d left.”

“No, not quite,” I said, and forced a grin.

“Just keeping a low profile?” she said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean...”

“It’s OK,” I said. “I’m not bothered...How is Stephanie anyway?”

“I think she’s OK. Maybe you should ask her yourself. She really likes you, you know.”

I was genuinely surprised.

The thought had never occurred to me.

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” she said. “And Melanie.”

I felt bad.

“I really didn’t know,” I said. “I never thought they took me that seriously. I mean, I never meant to...Shit, I don’t know what I mean. To be honest, my head’s a bit fucked at the moment.”

“Yes, I had noticed,” said Sam.

“Want to know something funny?”

“Go on, then,” she said.

“Well...” My throat tightened and I struggled to get the words out. “You’re probably the only person I’ve really fancied since I got here.”

“Oh do me a favour,” she said. But her walking pace slowed a little.

“No honestly. I’m not just saying it. I mean, I’m not trying to... you know. I mean, I know you’re not like that...”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Remember that stupid Hawaiian evening?” I asked.

“Mexican,” she said.

“Whatever…anyway, remember we had that dance.”

“Yea.”

“I looked everywhere for you after.”

“So?”

“Well, I was gutted, I thought maybe we might...”

“Might what?”

“You know.”

“So, who did you end up with?” she asked.

“No one. I only wanted to be with you.”

“Yea, right.” She laughed bitterly.

“Look, I know I could just be saying this, and I know you probably don’t fancy me anyway. But I just wanted you to know, if I had the choice, it’s you I’d choose.”

“Well thanks Newton. Maybe I might have believed you if you’d told me all this before you slept with those two slappers.” Then she just walked away, crushing me with every step.

As I stood and watched her go, a million tons of sky closing down on me, I thought of the things I wished I could tell her. “I know you think I’m an arsehole, and I’m just trying it on with everyone I can. But it’s not like that. I did, really like you. My heart used to skip a beat everytime you entered the room. And when you smiled at me, I would dissolve, like I’d just been dropped into a blast furnace - woooshhhh. Do you know that, Sam. Do you? When I saw you with Patrick, I was so jealous of the bastard, I could have fucking killed him. And you think I went after Melanie or Stephanie. No they - for God only knows what reason - came after me. And I was lonely, because I didn’t have someone like you. And now you will never take me seriously. So fuck you then. Walk away. Just walk away.”

It was at that moment, as I stood there on the street, I knew I was finished. More so than when that old prick in the treasurer’s office said he couldn’t pay for the Passmoor party. Or when I’d walked out of the exam. Or when I’d lain there with Stephanie, gazing emptily at her cut-out pictures of angels.

Sure, I went through the motions for a couple more weeks, attending a couple of lectures, drinking with my mates - the way a man who is about to stick his head in a gas oven, still pauses to answer the phone. But in the end I knew I had to go.

To the College’s credit, they did try quite hard to make me stay. On the day I was due to leave, I spent about three hours talking to my tutor, Dr Paxton, about anything and everything (which was quite weird as it was only about the third time I’d ever met the guy). But in the end, we both agreed I should take some time out. His parting advice, as he escorted me to the door of the Ecology Department, was not to join any kind of religious sect.

I though this was a little bizarre, until I heard later that Dr Paxton’s daughter had drooped out of her course at Cambridge to join an extreme faux Christian cult, and was now one of the many wives of a self-proclaimed prophet, who was considerably older than her father and had served time for attempted murder.

Still, that isn’t my problem. And anyway, dropping out from Westing Uni is no big deal. After all, it’s only a jumped up polytechnic. Why should I give a shit? I worked for five years before I went there. And now I’m working again. So fucking what?

The only person who was really sorry to see me depart from the place was my mum. And she’s only pissed off because she had to work so hard to get her education, and can’t bear the thought of her son so readily rejecting what is precious to her - as if I did it on purpose just to get at her!

The only thing I regret about quitting my course, is that afterwards I lost touch with my family and friends. I didn’t mean to. It’s just that, at the time, I felt totally numb, as if I could have sliced my own hand off and not felt a thing.

That’s partly why I’m pleased I’ve met Sophie. I’m not sure she likes me the way I want her to like me. But it doesn’t really matter. One way or the other, she’s got to me, ignited my pilot light and led me from robot mode back into the land of the living. Shit, I’m even feeling something that approximates motivation.

I don’t even know why I’m bothering to dwell on all that uni shit. It’s done with. I’ve left. I’ve got a job. I’ll probably never see Sam or Stephanie or Melanie ever again. And even if I do, they’ll most likely walk the other way. Christ, I shouldn’t even be thinking about them, not when a few hours ago I felt so in love with Sophie.

No, from now on, I’m going to stop moping about the past, and get on with life. I’ll open those bin liners, find my shorts, get my trainers on and Just Do It. When I get back from my run, I’ll drink my lemon lucozade, then call mum. I’ll send off my entry form for the Hellathon. And I’ll show Brett and Steve and Nosher and Noddy and Stephanie and Melanie and Sam and Sophie and Dr Paxton, mum, dad, grandad and Jenny and Max and all those other doubting bastards out there that I’m not such a loser after all.

Yep, I honestly feel, at last, that my shit is truly reassembled!