The Booby Trap and Other Bits and Boobs (5 page)

After several rounds of pleading, the final one sweetened by a promise to pass on to Kev one of the pictures of his sister in a bikini that had been taken in Kefalonia, an agreement had finally been made to lend the magazine to Ben for one week. The exchange had been made after football practice one Wednesday evening, the magazine making its way from Kev's bag to Ben's at such speed that any casual observer would likely not have realised that the transfer had taken place. Ben had rushed home, showered the football mud off himself, then locked the bathroom door and settled down to examine his prize. He had just unfolded the glorious, jaw-dropping centrefold and placed it on the bathroom floor so that he could better take in its full majesty, when his dad had shoved open the bathroom door, sending the treacherous lock tumbling to the floor. He had taken a step into the room, caught sight of his son sat on the toilet with his jeans around his ankles and a two-foot long photo of a naked blonde woman called Neriah looking up at the ceiling, and frozen. For an interminably long moment, neither of them had moved. Then finally Ben's dad's paralysis had broken; he had shouted ‘Jesus Christ' before disappearing so quickly it was as though he had been yanked out of the bathroom by a bungee cord.

The subsequent conversation, after Ben had gathered himself together and made his way downstairs on legs that felt like jelly, had been excruciating, not least because his dad had chosen to open it with, ‘Look, son, men like looking at tits. It doesn't matter how old they are. I still like looking at them and I'm three times your age.' His follow-up line, in which he informed his son that every woman in the world had them, including his mother and his sister, had sounded to Ben like some terrible threat, rather than the casual demystification that was intended, and the exchange had rapidly devolved into a seemingly infinite purgatory of burning red faces and mortified stuttering.

The
Playboy
Incident had been the devastating end of a long-running series of attempts to familiarise himself more thoroughly with the subject of the quest that he and Sean had embarked upon: the Orbs of Power themselves.

He had stared in open-mouthed awe at naked women in softcore thrillers on cable movie channels late at night, sitting inches away from his small television in the dark, his ears plugged with headphones: tanned, bottle-blonde Americans with perfectly spherical breasts who bounced enthusiastically on top of men with side-parted hair, throwing their hair from side to side, screeching like banshees.

He had accompanied Sean to his friend's cousin's house one lunchtime, where the three of them had silently watched the porn video that Sean's cousin kept inside a box labelled
Match of the Day,
which was perhaps twenty years old, and at least a fifteenth- or sixteenth-generation copy. It contained the first penis Ben had ever seen apart from his own, and there were unquestionably real people actually having real sex in front of the camera, but it was a monotonous blur, and he found himself increasingly focusing on the sets and the costumes; the lead actress was dressed, when she was wearing clothes, as Cleopatra, a character in one of the plays they were studying in English.

He had also investigated the supposed orgy of imagery that was becoming available on something new called the internet. A couple of kids from school had it, and one of them, Matthew Hetherington, had held forth on the subject at great length during form a week or two earlier.

‘Mate, you can see whatever you want. It's incredible.'

‘How come?' Ben had asked.

‘You just search for stuff. There's this thing, it's called AltaVista. You type in, like, porn or whatever. Or big tits. Then you press SEARCH and it finds pictures of them for you.'

Ben frowned. ‘Where from?'

‘What?'

‘Where does it find them from?'

‘How am I supposed to know that? It just does. You need to tell your mum to get it, mate, seriously.'

Ben had duly asked his mother about the possibility of their getting the internet, but had been unable to provide an answer when she asked him why he wanted it. He was sure that ‘So I can look at porn without having to creep around in disused gardens' would not be what his mother wanted to hear. So instead, he had made an effort to befriend Matthew Hetherington, in the hope of getting access to the portal of sexual delight that apparently sat innocuously on his dad's desk in the upstairs office. But after several interminable lunch breaks spent listening to the intricacies of rugby union, a sport that left Ben scratching his head in confusion but seemed to be the central axis of Matthew's life around which everything else revolved, he had given up on the idea. Nothing was worth another lecture on the correct strategy to deploy when defending a line-out.

Not even the Orbs of Power.

‘This is bollocks, mate,' said Ben, throwing aside the scrap of soiled porn. ‘We're getting nowhere.'

‘What are you on about?' asked Sean, from within the hedge.

‘This,' said Ben. ‘The quest. All of it. Nothing's happening, mate. Just because we decided to be on a quest and you wrote it down in Indiana Jones lettering doesn't mean anything's changed.'

‘Stop whining, for Christ's sake,' said Sean. ‘You didn't have a girl threatening to have some prison nutcase cut your balls off unless you apologised to them. Could be worse.'

‘There you go though,' said Ben. ‘Tom Richards is the same year as us and he looks like he's been smashed in the face with a hammer. But he's having it away with Amy Dillon now, and she used to fancy
you
. Kev Simmons told me Olivia Bell let him put his hand up her skirt last week after Drama Club. Kev. Simmons. Yet neither of us can manage to touch a girl's tits. I mean, seriously, what the hell is wrong with us? Is that so much to ask from the universe?'

‘Never mind the universe. Have you asked any girls?'

‘Asked them to let me touch their tits?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Of course not,' said Ben. ‘I saw what happened to you with Laura Kelly.'

‘That's different though,' said Sean. ‘I never asked her, did I? That's why she got all uptight about it.'

Right,
thought Ben.
I'm sure that's why.

‘So what are you suggesting?' he asked.

‘Jesus mate, I don't know,' said Sean, ceasing his digging and turning to face his friend. ‘Do I have to think of everything? What about that girl in the year above?'

‘What girl in the year above?'

‘You know. Grace something.'

Ben froze. ‘Grace Matthews?'

‘That's her. You haven't done anything about that, have you? So you can't be that arsed.'

‘About. What?'

Sean frowned. ‘Did I not tell you she likes you?'

‘Were you supposed to tell me she likes me?'

‘Yeah. Her mate Bonnie whatserface told me to tell you.'

‘So why didn't you?'

‘Christ, I don't know. I've been a bit busy, mate, with this quest we're both supposed to be on.'

‘You're a complete twat. Do you know that?'

Sean's frown deepened. ‘What's the big deal, mate? Did you fancy her or something? I've never heard you mention her.'

Ben considered this. He had never really thought about Grace Matthews in those terms, or any of the Year Eleven girls for that matter. They were invariably seen in the company of boys from the Sixth Form College, boys with cars and motorbikes and unconvincing facial stubble who could successfully get served in pubs.

‘No,' he said. ‘But that's not the point. You should have told me, mate. We're supposed to be in this together.'

‘Jesus, don't cry about it. Bonnie only told me last week. I'm sure Grace is still interested.'

‘You're sure?'

‘Well, no. I mean, to be honest, she's probably thinks you bottled sending her a message back. But there could still be a chance. Like, a really small one. So that's something, eh?'

The next morning Ben walked to school with his heart pounding against his ribs, his palms clammy, and his legs feeling like they were made of jelly. His plan was simple; get through maths and English, track down Bonnie Dean during first break, send a message via her to Grace Matthews, meet up with Grace at lunchtime, and be well on the way to completing his quest by the end of school.

The first part of the plan went perfectly. Ben safely negotiated an hour of sines and cosines, along with one of Mr Barrington's characteristic tangents into how best to survive a nuclear apocalypse, including a basic rations list and the best places to buy a home Geiger counter. English too appeared to be passing without incident, as Ben answered a couple of early questions regarding the setting and atmosphere of Charles Dickens'
Hard Times
and then settled down for what should have been forty minutes of blissful, relaxing obscurity.

Then, with barely five minutes to go until the bell would have rung for morning break, Mrs James caught him doodling breasts of all shapes and sizes in the margins of his exercise book. This in itself was not disastrous, worthy of no more than a sharp telling-off after the bell, and the loss of a minute or two of his break time. Unfortunately for Ben, his mind was already rehearsing what he was going to say to Bonnie Dean when he tracked her down, and he responded to his English teacher with two words that would haunt his nightmares for months to come.

‘Sorry, Mum.'

There was a moment of incredulous silence, then the rest of the class burst into laughter of a volume and ferocity that Ben had never before encountered. At that moment, the trail that led towards the Orbs of Power, the trail which had seemed on the verge of bursting thrillingly, brilliantly into life in the Year Eleven shape of Grace Matthews, disappeared along with his social life and, or so it seemed to Ben, any possibility of his life ever again being anything other than cold and miserable.

‘So how come you never asked me out?'

Ben considered this, trying to keep this attention on Grace's pale, lovely face and not on the black bra that was hovering at the lower edge of his vision, taunting him. ‘I was going to,' he said, eventually. ‘But Sean didn't give me your message for about a week and he didn't think you would still be interested, and then the thing in Mrs James' class happened, and after that I was sure you wouldn't be.'

‘Your mate Sean's a moron. You know that, right?'

Ben frowned. ‘He's all right.'

‘No,' said Grace. ‘He's not. He's a moron.'

‘I know,' said Ben, loyalty twisting in his gut. ‘I mean, I get why you would think so. But when you get to know him … '

‘I would never want to,' said Grace. ‘And you'd be better off without him. I think you know it, too.'

‘Maybe,' allowed Ben. ‘But then, I've known him since I was six.'

‘I've known the kid next door to me who eats his own snot since I was three. Doesn't mean I have to be friends with him.'

Ben grinned. ‘Fair enough.'

‘None of my business, like. Do whatever you want. But I reckon you'll see I'm right, eventually.'

Ben struck out for safer ground. ‘Who's your best mate? Bonnie?'

Grace appeared to consider this. ‘I suppose so.'

‘You aren't sure?'

‘Not really. I mean, I am sure that she's my best friend now. But I'm not going to spend the rest of my life in this crappy little town, so I like to think that I haven't met whoever my real best friend is going to be yet.'

‘What if you don't meet anyone you like more than Bonnie?'

Grace laughed. ‘That would be very disappointing. But maybe I won't. Maybe I'll be a friendless loser for the rest of my life. Or maybe I'll meet the coolest people in the world and go on adventures with them. Who knows? That's what makes it all so exciting.'

‘What?'

‘Life, silly.'

Ben blushed. ‘Right,' he muttered. ‘Of course. Sorry.'

There was silence in the bedroom, a long moment of it that wasn't remotely uncomfortable; to Ben it felt warm and fuzzy, like he was surrounded by invisible cotton wool. He was trying to focus on his quest, on the goal that, as he stole a glance at the raised pattern on the edges of the black bra, he realised was literally within his reach, but Grace Matthews kept distracting him, kept disarming him with her easy confidence, her way of making things seem clear and simple, her straightforward honesty and her obvious disinterest in games or bullshit.

‘Ben,' she said, after an unknown amount of time had passed.

‘What?'

‘Look at me, Ben.'

He raised his gaze from where he had been studying the pattern of stripes and squares on the duvet cover. Grace was sat with her legs crossed and her elbows resting on her knees, her body leant slightly towards him, an unreadable expression on her face.

‘Why are you so nervous?' she asked.

Ben suddenly realised two things. Firstly, that he was about to break the solemn promise he had made to Sean. Secondly, that there was a good chance he was about to say one of the stupidest things that a teenage boy had ever said to a partially undressed teenage girl. He drew a deep breath, and took the plunge.

‘I'm on a quest.'

The winter months were cold, and hard.

Children have long memories, teenagers especially, and Ben's hope that referring to Mrs James as ‘Mum' would soon be forgotten proved hopelessly naïve. The outright insults and mocking died down, as new embarrassments presented themselves, but the incident remained lurking just below the surface, ready to be brought back up whenever he did anything even remotely worthy of derision. Even Sean had taken to keeping his distance, not wanting to be tainted with his best friend's sudden, catastrophic fall from grace, and appeared to have lost all interest in their quest. He was now spending most evenings at Matthew Hetherington's house playing something called
DOOM
and showing worrying signs of a burgeoning interest in rugby.