RED RAW

By Clare London

Surely it’s the stuff of fiction alone?

Can you really spend years growing up with someone, in and out of their house, sharing school benches, sledging, swimming and stealing sweets from the corner shop, and yet still want something more than friendship? When someone tells me it happens in real life, I laugh. How can you divorce the magic from the mundane? How can you know someone through short pants, spots and secondary education, and then when they’re a man and you’re still beside them, find some other desire for them?

Enough questions. I never said I knew the answers.

Our mothers fell pregnant at the same time, moaned and giggled and were awed about the whole thing together. Our families lived in the same street and we were born only a month apart, burst into the world, upturning our families in just the same way. Two underweight, squalling red-faced baby boys. Our parents shared all the details, all the shock, all the amazement.

Nicky and I were together from then on.

We were at the same school, had the same kind of bike, negotiated the same pocket money by pretending the other one got more. Nicky’s dad had turned his garden over to vegetables and fruit, and we hung out there in our spare time. The smell in season was fantastic and he let us eat lots of it. The vegetable beds were separated from the house by a greenhouse and a high hedge, and we’d hide behind the hedge, unseen by anyone in the house, sharing apples and raw runner beans. It was ‘our place’. We read gaming comics and harassed spindly spiders and played ball up against the wall.

The raspberries were always the highlight. We raced to be the first to pick. Nicky would ‘accidentally’ knock some from the canes, destined for wastage, but I’d catch them as they fell and then we’d eat them. Or he’d struggle with me, laughing, mock-punching me in the belly until he could snatch some from me. We didn’t eat them so much as cram them in our mouths, the tart sweetness bursting on my tongue, the dribbling juice staining Nicky’s mouth. Wet, sticky, sweet. Red.

Later in years, we were cool, bored teenagers. Our comics became magazines, and were hidden in the back of the greenhouse where the spiders now kept guard for us. We didn’t like getting soil all over our new boots, and the ball games gave way to hand-held screens. We still stole apples and beans, though, and lay behind the hedge together on weekend afternoons. In the summer, we took off our shirts, puffing out our expanding chests, peering for blossoming hairs between the nipples.

Nicky got badly sunburned. We wanted to transform our too-pale skin into the golden tan of male models, but like, immediately. He was nearly in tears. I can’t remember where his mother was, but he needed me to keep smoothing cream over his chest, to ease the pain and the shivering, to help him get to sleep. His skin was hot and so red, it reflected on my palms. The heat soaked into me as I massaged him. He bit his lip; glanced up at me. The red seemed to reflect in his eyes, too.

I don’t think I knew, then. A small, awkward flame flickered inside me, quickly extinguished by shock and embarrassment.

We still had Our Place in the years after school. We’d both chosen a local college, staying at home until we found a shared flat. Life was no money, battles for the bathroom, the need for privacy warring with the need for company. We liked the courses we’d chosen but they didn’t lead to employment. The parents were alternately frustrated and proud of us. All sorts of conflicting feelings bubbled in us.

I’d meet Nicky in his garden for a secret smoke, sitting on sacking behind the hedge. Both sets of parents had guessed our allowance went mainly on beer and cigarettes, but we hid the evidence at home. It was different in Our Place. We moaned about teachers, about the price of a pint. About the hysteria and predatory nature of girls. How they didn’t understand; how they clung. No girl had clung to me any longer than a couple of hours at a party, but Nicky had more luck. If that’s what you called it. He blew out the smoke from his cig and the wind caught it, whipping it into my eyes. I was caught unawares, started coughing.

“Shit, Terry.” Nicky laughed, but when my eyes started watering he looked worried. He grasped my chin and pulled my face around to face him.

“I’m fine.” His hand was firm. I wished I’d felt it more often that I had. Not in fights, in games, in high-fives. But in other ways.

I knew, then.

“You’re red.” He frowned, maybe not as perplexed as he made out. “Why the hell are you blushing?”

He was as familiar to me as myself. Probably more so: I’d stared at him more often than my mirror. I knew his shape and size, the flicker in his eyes and the set of his jaw. And yet…I knew nothing. Conflicting feelings, indeed. It was like someone new inside me, clambering up through my comfort zones, twisting my emotions, challenging my self-confidence. Changing me. Wanting.

I kissed him. A silly, clumsy kiss, smoke into his mouth, licking his lips so they shone red. Just like the raspberries. But much, much sweeter.

He didn’t punch me; didn’t pull away. He was silent for a long time. After that, he offered me another cigarette. I took it. His hand was shaking slightly.

“You’re red, too.” I sounded hoarse, like when my voice first broke. When we’d laughed at each other’s squeaky sound.

Nicky laughed softly, now. But for obviously different reasons. A far more mature sound. Happy, too.

I leaned back against the hedge, smiling. It was Our Place.

It always would be.