Left of the Bang

As soon as Chris articulated these thoughts he felt ashamed of them. Then it occurred to him that Tamsin was no longer a girl but a Woman; and, having fitted a word to her new state, Chris found his old admiration returning with fresh force. A Woman. Of course that was what she was. He felt a buzz of contempt for his younger self, obsessing over a teenage girl, unequal, till now, to the fuller, sweeter reality of Woman.

Oddly enough, the fact of her boyfriend concerned him less than the difference in her appearance had done. Chris was so accustomed to the idea of not having Tamsin that her unavailability felt somehow expected. Besides, the boyfriend’s presence left him in a position that he immediately appreciated as both noble and poignant. The third Schubert Impromptu came on his headphones, then Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’. By the end of ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by the Verve, Chris was resolved: the only decent thing to do was nothing. He wouldn’t ask Edwin for Tamsin’s number. He would make no attempt to find her on Facebook. He would make the sacrifice, he thought, smiling a bittersweet smile at his own benevolence. He would leave their happiness untainted.

When his phone bleeped with a text message inviting him for supper next weekend, it took him several minutes to work out who ‘Callum’ was.

* * *

Callum genuinely did want to see Chris again. The guy was smart, and he had plenty to say about the army. Mostly, though, the invitation was a gesture of goodwill towards Tamsin – to show he was sorry for being so suspicious, to prove that he had set aside his insecurity about Chris.

Jealousy is never rational; it zooms in, it enlarges, it distorts. In Callum’s case, it focused solely on men that Tamsin had slept with. Occasionally this annoyed Tamsin. She found herself wanting to reason with him, to point out that the men she hadn’t slept with – the what-ifs – were surely far more of a threat to him that the ones she had tried and rejected.

This, however, would have been cruel, and she knew it. When it came to Callum and sex, any sort of challenge was liable to be read as an attack.

There had been just one, ostensibly definitive discussion between the two of them on the subject of Callum’s penis. A bold move on Callum’s part, this conversation had taken place nearly three years ago, before they had ever even slept together.

It was their fourth date and they were walking along Grand Union Canal after a chilly picnic lunch on Primrose Hill. Inside a plum-coloured houseboat with apricot detailing, someone was frying onions.

Callum kicked a beech mast. It skittered along the path then dropped, almost noiselessly, into the canal. ‘There’s something you should know about me.’

‘MI6?’ Tamsin had joked, laughing at his sudden seriousness. She tried to imitate his accent. ‘The neem’s Deimpster, Cahllum Deimpster.’

‘It’s about sex.’ Callum was straight-faced.

For a terrible moment, Tamsin wanted to giggle. She blew her nose instead. When she looked at Callum again, the urge had passed. ‘Go on,’ she said, doing her best to sound soberly mature.

‘Well – it’s difficult for me. I mean really difficult. Please’ – he stopped her question with a look – ‘hear me out, okay?’

He assured her that there would be sex, just not much of the traditional penetrative kind. His fingers and tongue, he said with a wry smile, were used to compensating for his incompetent penis. ‘And it isn’t totally defunct. It works maybe forty per cent of the time. Okay, maybe more like thirty. If only I’d kept the receipt for the damn thing.’

Tamsin understood that he was making a joke, but she couldn’t laugh at the bitterness in his voice. Instead, she squeezed his hand and said, gently, ‘Doesn’t it depend a bit on who you’re with? I mean, if you feel comfortable…’ Already she was thinking that she would be the one to make the difference.

‘Yes, actually.’ Callum let out a dry chuckle. ‘The more I care about a girl, the less likely it is to work. In fact, you can take it as a definite compliment if my penis hates you.’

Tamsin looked around; there was no one in sight apart from a lone dog-walker, over a hundred yards ahead of them and safely out of earshot. ‘So … can you … masturbate?’ she asked, bringing out the last word with difficulty. Although she had slept with several people, this was the first time she had talked directly about sex with a man.

Callum nodded. ‘That’s never been an issue.’

A duck laughed in the distance.

‘And can I – can I do that to you?’

‘Perhaps. You can try.’ He frowned. ‘Look, it’s the same deal. Sometimes it works. Mostly it doesn’t.’

Then he had explained that his problem didn’t entail infertility. He wanted her to have all the facts so that she could make an informed decision. ‘I’m not asking for any guarantee of commitment or anything like that.’ Callum coughed to clear the formality from his voice. ‘I just didn’t want you to find out and be shocked. And you see, the thing is, my last—’ He stopped. He’d promised himself that he wasn’t going to go into specifics. ‘Some women have been cool with it, but others haven’t. It’s boring for both of us if you have to make excuses later on to spare my feelings. If you’re just not up for it, say now and I’ll understand.’ He sounded almost angry and he couldn’t meet her eyes.

Tamsin was moved by his vulnerability. ‘Oh, Callum, don’t be ridiculous. Of course, of course I don’t mind. Of course it’s not a problem.’

(And anyway: what else could she say?)

They had stopped under a bridge, its damp bricks padded with the bright olive velvet of moss. Callum cupped Tamsin’s face in his hands. It was a long kiss, fuelled by their relief at reaching the end of a difficult discussion.

* * *

Callum was one of those men who cook competitively, with loud remarks about ‘plating up’ and the joys of offal. He bought his olive oil in huge square cans and shopped in Borough Market at least once a fortnight. This evening he was doing one of his staple dinner party menus: scallops on a minted pea puree followed by slow-cooked rabbit ragout, with panacotta (dead simple, actually) for dessert. When the buzzer buzzed, he was up to his elbows in rabbit, picking through the mess of meat to check for the smaller bones.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Tamsin quickly, even though Callum was already wiping his hands clean.

Tamsin had managed to keep her face neutral when Callum told her he’d invited Chris round for supper. Really, she was terrified – terrified that Chris might recount, as an amusing anecdote, the real story of how they met, and expose her version of their history for a fiction. She needed to tell him not to tell – but she had no idea how to communicate this with Callum in the room. Now she hurried over to answer the door, half-hoping to whisper a warning to Chris before he entered the flat.

‘Hi, hello,’ said Chris, stepping towards her. He paused, moved his head from left to right like a tennis player waiting to return a serve, coughed twice, then thrust out his hand.

‘Hi,’ said Tamsin, as they shook. She felt afresh the strangeness of seeing this figure from the almost-forgotten past. Without the makeup and the nurse’s outfit, he looked much more like the boy she remembered, although he was older now, with a man’s broader frame and a strong neck thickened by exercise. There was something unnatural about his physique, as if his muscles had been inflated very suddenly: Clark Kent transformed into Superman. His T-shirt had clearly been bought for a scrawnier version of himself.

Impossible, she realised, to say anything to Chris now. ‘It’s, er, nice to see you,’ she told him. ‘Again.’

Chris nodded fervently. ‘I know, it’s so weird, it’s one of the strangest things that’s ever—’

‘Come on through, come on through,’ she said loudly, desperate to prevent his sentence from heading any further in that particular direction.

‘Chris, hi, good to see you again, mate.’ Callum waved to them from the little open kitchen, jovial but distracted. ‘Tam, I can’t find the bloody mint leaves. They’re not in the fridge, they should be in the fridge.’

Tamsin stepped over to the fridge and produced the packet of mint, eyebrows arched.

‘God, I hate it when you do that,’ said Callum, coming up behind her and putting his arms round her waist.

Tamsin twisted round in his arms so that she was facing him. ‘It’s because your peripheral vision’s no good.’ Her tone was pertly flirtatious. ‘Men didn’t need it, you see, when they were chasing woolly mammoths.’

Usually, Callum had scant patience with Tamsin’s penchant for evolutionary psychology. But right now they were performing, as couples do in company, a pat double act. Callum tucked his hands up under his armpits and capered like an ape until Tamsin pretended to cuff him round the head.

‘Right,’ he said, turning to Chris. ‘Enough of all that. Let me get you a drink.’

This little routine wasn’t wasted on Chris. He had accepted Callum’s invitation out of a sense of kismet: because he barely remembered giving Callum his number, the text message seemed, somehow, to be a call to destiny, a prompt it would be foolish to ignore. His initial resolution to leave Tamsin and Callum in peace had dissolved in a froth of conjecture (was she unhappy with Callum? was Callum unhappy with her? how had she felt, meeting him again after all those years?). Now he was here and he could see the situation for what it was – domestic bliss – his role was very clear. There were no decisions to make, no moral dilemmas to brood over. He would talk to Callum, eat his supper, adore Tamsin from afar, then go back to barracks life.

What he hadn’t bargained on was liking Callum quite as much as he did. Chris would meet his few non-army friends at the weekends for sixteen hours of expensive hedonism before crawling back to Bulford. In contrast, Callum and his compact little flat were, as Chris pronounced loudly over pudding, ‘the peak of civilisation’. It was all wonderful: Callum’s cooking, the canvas photo prints of Moroccan souks and Scottish islands (all Callum’s own work), the complete set of Loeb classics on the homemade bookshelves, the electric drum kit in the corner of the room on which Callum let him mess about and finally, after much protesting, demonstrated a short but breathtaking burst of eight against nine.

‘Our Callum’s something of a Renaissance man,’ Tamsin remarked, drollery a poor mask for her pride.

Best of all, Callum appeared to be fascinated by Chris. He asked question after question about the army, and actually took out a small notebook when they got started on the history of the machine gun.

‘Can you believe it? Gatling, the guy who was basically responsible for the machine gun mark two – after the Maxim, that is – genuinely thought he was saving lives. One soldier kills a hundred times more people, so you need a hundred times less soldiers. I mean, go figure.’

Tamsin watched them as they talked, feeling relieved that they had not, so far, approached the question of her history with Chris. Yet she was also feeling curiously excluded. She had been dreading conversation about Afghanistan or Iraq, two subjects on which she felt herself to be embarrassingly under-informed. But neither Chris nor Callum seemed interested in what she thought.

‘You think of bullets, you think of bangs, right?’ Chris was saying. ‘’S’nothing like that at all. More of a whipcrack sound, a sort of stinging, high-pitched whine, peeow, peeeow.’

He had his head dipped low as if he were actually in a trench, sheltering from rifle fire. Callum was leaning back in his chair, legs crossed at the ankle and hands behind his head, nodding slowly with an expression of shrewd attention on his face.

Finally, Callum left to go to the toilet and Tamsin took her chance.

‘Listen,’ she said, keeping her voice low. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound too crazy, but I haven’t actually told Callum that whole thing about how we met. It just seemed … I told him you used to date a friend of mine, years ago, and that I met you once or twice through her. Shit, this does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’

But to her surprise, Chris was immediately compliant, even grateful, for this alternative version of events. He didn’t appear to think it was odd that she hadn’t told Callum the real story of how they knew one another.

‘God no, of course, that’s much better,’ he said. ‘We met through your friend, perfect. Thanks. Seriously, thanks.’ He sounded relieved.

(Chris was embarrassed: by what he now perceived as unforgivable cowardice that day on the tube. It didn’t look too hot for Second Lieutenant Kimura to be running away from a suitcase. Tamsin’s lie allowed him to save face. Was she just as ashamed, he wondered? Or was it something else she was hiding from Callum? Even as he rejected this interpretation as absurd, he found himself feeling faintly, pleasantly hopeful.)

They finished the meal with port and Stilton. It had been a boozy evening. Halfway through his second glass of port, Chris became almost tearful.

‘People, they ask me, they ask me all the time why I joined the army. I wish I could show them this, all this.’ He flung his arms open to indicate the room. ‘This is my answer. People like you two, all this decency, and culture – this is exactly what I’m fighting for. We’re fighting the bastards who’ll throw acid in the eyes of schoolgirls so that this, this paradise – because, for all its faults, the UK really is paradise – this paradise that allows people like you guys to just be, to do your thing…’ He raised his glass in a reverent toast. ‘I wish you all the best. I really do.’

Callum reached over to plunge the coffee, hiding a smile at the younger man’s emotion.

Later, at the door, Chris kissed Tamsin on both cheeks, then pulled Callum into a backslapping hug. ‘Great evening. Pukka scran.’

Callum laughed. ‘Pleasure. Like I say, you’re welcome any time.’

A door banged somewhere in the flat, making them all start. A moment later, a girl in a pure white towelling dressing gown and fluffy blue slippers appeared in the kitchen and shuffled over to the sink. Long dark hair obscured her face.

‘Leah, I’m so sorry – I didn’t realise you were here, you should have come out – you could have joined us—’ Callum was embarrassed.

Leah produced an apple from the pocket of her dressing gown. ‘S’okay, I was sleeping.’ She squeezed a generous blob of Fairy Liquid into her palm and began to wash the apple under the tap.

Chris looked at Tamsin, who crossed her eyes and grinned at him. He stifled an urge to laugh. Leah squirted another dose of Fairy Liquid onto her apple. When she put the bottle back down on the kitchen counter, two tiny oily bubbles puffed out, twinkled, burst. They were all watching her.

Callum stepped awkwardly towards her. ‘Erm, Chris, this is Leah, my flatmate, Leah, this is Chris, a friend.’

Leah took a clean tea towel from a drawer and dried her apple on it. At last she turned to face them.

‘Hello, Chris. Hi, Tamsin.’

She was very beautiful. Her glossy hair hung from a neat centre parting, two straight sheets of onyx that reflected the kitchen lights. Apart from one flat, irregularly shaped mole on her right cheek, her biscuit-coloured skin was blemish-free.

‘Uh, hi,’ said Chris. ‘Actually, I’m just going, but, er, nice to meet you.’

Leah smiled unconvincingly and bit into her apple.

Five

Like all small, enclosed communities, Denham Hall – where Callum had now been working for nearly a year – had its own mores and cultural codes. At the core of the school’s identity was a nostalgia – fiercely subscribed to by most of the pupils – for the rigours of the bad old days. Many children in the top two years remembered the previous headmaster and his deputy speaking Latin together over lunch and in the corridors. Corporal punishment had ceased only when it was made illegal in 1999, a fact often repeated among the pupils with a mixture of horror and pride.

Until quite recently, Denham Hall had been boys-only; even now, boys outnumbered girls in a ratio of 2:1. This discrepancy had two effects. The first was a general feeling, cheerfully shared by both sexes, that boys were standard issue, whereas girls were an anomalous deviation from the norm. The second effect was that each year, the school’s position on puberty was determined by the relatively small number of girls in the top forms. If most of these girls had developed discernible breasts, then adulthood was in vogue. But this year, only two out of the twenty-five pupils in the incipient eighth form – boys and girls – had started puberty with any real conviction. There was Des Kapoor, who had an unreliable glitch in his voice and faint inverted commas above the corners of his upper lip; and there was Sophie Witrand, cup size 32A and growing, fast. Neither Des nor Sophie had any social heft. The cool kids in their year-group were Milly Urquhart, Ludo Hall, and little Rhiannon Jenkins – all still small and slim and smooth-skinned, their snub noses only just beginning to morph into more distinctive shapes.

These three set the tone: for now, the currency at Denham Hall was immaturity. The children seemed innately to understand that their un-sprouted bodies were approaching expiry date, and that this made them all the more valuable. Theirs was a clean, clear beauty, crystalline in comparison to the maculate adult world with its coarse dark body hair and pendulous flesh. Menstruation was regarded with particular disgust. Yet paradoxically, the accoutrements of puberty were de rigueur: bras were worn, legs were shaved, deodorant ostentatiously applied. The ideal was to display all the sophistication of adolescence, while maintaining the physical purity of childhood. Anyone who actually needed the deodorant would have been ‘minging’.

Sophie Witrand, the only person in the whole year who could have done with a bra, was one of the few girls who didn’t have one. She had shaved her legs just once, with a razor stolen from her father. The act itself had been executed in the airing cupboard (there was no lock on the Witrands’ bathroom door), without shaving foam or even water. Sophie’s leg hair was blonde and almost invisible, but once this soft nap had been harvested by the razor’s four-blade grille it formed a little heap the colour of silt, dry yet silky when she rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. Her mother, a keen gardener, used the bottom shelf of the airing cupboard to germinate the seeds of delicate plants. Sophie pushed a finger into the gateau-black soil of verbena bonariensis and planted her pinchful of evidence. A tray of white Italian sunflowers had just germinated, the tips of the little shoots still hooded by the old humbug-striped seed casings. For a silly second Sophie wondered what her leg hair would look like if it grew. A snatch of Edward Lear came into her head: ‘I answered him as I thought good / As many red herrings as grow in the wood.’

Her idea was to replace the razor and tell no one, but two hours later she was down in the kitchen wearing her longest nightie, tremulous yet ready to confess. Sophie was obsessively truthful. When she was younger her parents had imposed a rule to prevent her from tiring herself out by reading late into the night: book closed and lights out at 8 p.m. If Sophie exceeded this deadline by just five minutes, she would lie awake worrying until the guilt grew too great to bear, at which point she would have to get up and go downstairs to admit her transgression to her mother.

Now she sat on her mother’s lap and hid her face as she explained what she had done. Mrs Witrand rubbed her daughter’s back, alternating strokes with little pats as if she were burping a baby. She let the theft of the razor pass without comment. Then she took Sophie up to the bathroom and gave her some of her Body Shop moisturiser. She explained how shaving made the hairs grow back thicker, and how – look, see those little white flakes? – Sophie’s skin had already been ravaged by the razor. ‘If you like, I’ll take you to get them waxed, you only have to ask. But I think your legs are just fine. I’d give anything to have lovely soft hair like that again. You do know you can hardly see it, darling?’

Sophie thought of her mother’s legs with their squiggly veins. The backs of her big calves had dimples like sand that had been rained on. Once Sophie had poked one of these strange dents and been surprised to find it firm and unresisting. Mrs Witrand was large but not flabby; her flesh was tightly packed under her skin, as if bursting to get out. Everything about her was slightly oversized, from her size nine feet to the fat brown plait that hung down her back to her waist. Underneath her thick, straight-cut fringe, her pale blue eyes were permanently narrowed by the upward pressure of her glacé cheeks.

Both mother and daughter knew that Sophie would never ask to have her legs waxed. Although no hint of reproach had entered Mrs Witrand’s voice, a judgement had, implicitly, been passed: Sophie’s error was forgiven but not to be repeated. It had been the same when she had mentioned the possibility of a bra. Mrs Witrand was briskly implacable: ‘You don’t need one yet, sweet pea, you’re only twelve. There’ll be plenty of time for all that later.’

* * *

‘Mr Love’s wearing a bra, pass it on!’

Rhiannon Jenkins, nearly thirteen but no bigger than a nine-year-old, short dark hair, a face-full of cappuccino freckles. She was the smallest girl in the class and something of a mascot. Teachers found her faux-naïve manner infuriating; her peers found it hilarious.

Predictably, it was Sophie Witrand who had been left to sit next to Mr Dempster in the double passenger seat at the front of the bus. She squirmed round and squeezed her neck past the headrest, desperate to join in with her classmates’ banter. Callum decided not to comment on her twisted seatbelt.

Next year’s scholarship form at Denham Hall, 8S, were stuck in Friday afternoon traffic on the M25. It was the final day of a week-long summer programme designed to introduce scholarship candidates to real-world applications of subjects they were studying. Parents invariably thought it was a fantastic opportunity. Their children tended to disagree. This week had been the hottest of the year so far and they had spent most of it in a minibus. They were overheated and sticky and sunburnt and fed up.

Today’s itinerary had been Geography (Chichester Harbour) and Latin (Fishbourne Roman Palace). Mr Love the Geography master was melting in the driving seat, sweaty kiss-curls of thin brown hair clinging to his forehead. The front of his pale blue double-cuff shirt was now translucent with sweat. Through the damp cotton, Mr Love’s chest hair did look like a black lace bra.

Callum was wearing Hawaiian board shorts and a tight V-neck T-shirt with the logo ‘NBX Burnout’ – just as open to ridicule, in its way, as Mr Love’s outfit. But 8S had granted Mr Dempster immunity. There was a certain toughness about him that made them wary of taking the piss. He was also going to be their form teacher next year. It was preferable to have him as an ally.

The snickering was getting louder. Callum turned to face the class with one eyebrow raised and his head slightly cocked. Could he have seen it, Mr Love would not have thanked him for this look. But it worked. There was one more titter, and then 8S were silent.

‘Mr Love won’t play our CD, though.’

The speaker sounded aggrieved. Ludo Hall was head of choir; he had tightly waved marmalade hair and a pure treble voice reputed to have made several of the male members of staff weep. Because of this, and in spite of a staffroom mantra ‘not to let Ludo Hall think he’s special’, he was treated, ever so slightly, like a celebrity. Women of all ages responded to his fine, pale features, and Ludo had already begun to respond to this response. In class he was subtly disruptive, with a keen sense of injustice and a talent for figuring himself as the wronged party when caught.

Callum eyed him evenly then smiled before the boy could see him weighing his decision. ‘Ah, Charles?’ he said, turning back to Mr Love.