Unrequited

At the urinal I swayed and prayed it would happen. There was certainly a sense that it might. Sat out there, smiling out from behind her hair, was my best friend in the world. And I was going to try my best to fuck her.

I walk over to the bar doing up the buttons on my fly. Forthy, that fucking prick, is pontificating to his usual herd of wet-lugged haires by the dukebox. The pied-hash-piper to Alnwick's investation of pseudo goths and geniune emo kids. I notice that, in addition to a superflous chain dangling from his jeans, he's also invested in a 'Kasabian' t-shirt. Very cool Forth, very sharp. Shame you're fucking thirty.

"Two treble vodka and Red Bulls please" I tell the dour-faced barmaid cheerily. The strong drinks are as much to drug me as they are to drug her. We need alcohol, us young Brits, to force any moment to its climax. We don't date, we don't woo, we get pissed, then wait for the detritus to form. With a deep breath I carry the drinks, one in each hand, through the crowds of men and woman over to where Sally is sitting. She is beautiful. She is beautiful and I go to her like goes light through a telescope. Do you want ice in that love? Yes, yes you'd fucking well better.

"Whatcha get?" she asks, taking a draw on her ciggerette. God I love those nostrils. I love every movement they make.

"Double-vodka and Red Bull"

She gives me a conspiratorial nod and a lazy, close-eyed smile. My palms feel moist so I cling to the cool glass and swig with theatrical vigour.

"God Paul I can't believe it!" she says for the hundrendth time tonight. "I can't believe it's only one week before I go to university!"

"Nor can I!" I tell her.

And I can't.

"No more drinking in this shit hole - Get. In." she says.

I look around. Try to feel indignant. Everything thing she says she's glad to be leaving behind, I try to rationalise as being ok, actually; rather good. The truth was I couldn't wait to get away either. The only thing we pretended we weren't about to move on from was each other, and so, with conviction more willed then felt, she said:

"You'll have to come visit us mind Paul, I fuckin' mean it!"

I hope so.

We continue talking, laughing, reminising. But for some reason, perhapes because of the sense of time running out, this is all accompanied by touching, flirting, frequent, commited gazing. I feel as though I am living out a day-dream then wonder if, alternatively, I'm imagining all of it. If this tactile behaviour is merely a defiant expression of friendship in the face of impending seperation. Or just the fact that she's a fucking flirt, plain and simple. Then she touches my lips with her finger-tips. She's tells me she always thought that I was fit, then, quickly, not to let it go to my head which is in any case large enough. Then her face simmers a perfect maroon. No, this is real.

Oh my god.

THIS IS REAL.

Forthy is glancing over broodily; he's always fancied Sally. She's the one young woman around here that hasn't been daft enough to buy into his patter and end up on the woolly carpet in his Mother's loft - the idiosyncrantic conclusion to his mating ritual entrusted to me by a bitter ex-girlfriend who had went on to shag him a week after I broke it off with her. The reason I had was that Sally had worn this increadible black dress to a party one night and later, as I writhed away with this girl, I could only shoot my load when I thought about her instead. Whenever that happened I always knew it was time to let go.

We finish our drinks but decide we need another one. Another two trebles, please. Another two trebles and a shaky return to the table, where Forthy has slid in beside Sally and begun to talk, thank you very much. I'm overwhelmed with despair at the thought of this night, this event, losing momentum to that jaded, embaressing twat. I sit down and they both ignore me. He's already started.

"... I like them y'know, they're honest. Sincerity is what I look for in music. And bass. But then that's just the musician in me talking..."

I can tell she's bored. I can tell because she's starting swinging her foot as it dangles off the chair and blinking, a lot. This over-bearing, pompous cunt is stealing my momentum, my moment, replacing it with his own rehersed drivel. It won't do, it can't do. With an unsteady lunge, I grap both her hands in my own and pull her to her feet. We begin a clumsy dance across the room, with her half resisting.

"What are you doing?" she laughs. But I say nothing. I close my eyes and nod my head to the music - something by Soundgarden - in mock appreciation. I contort my face muscles in looks of pain, understanding, emotion, as if the power of the music has overcame me.

"It's the SINCERITY of it all Sal! The SINCERITY that I can't resist!"

She roars at this and I spin her by one hand and then we sort of collapse back down into a giggling heap. Forthy polishes off his pint with a measured gulp and gives us a sterile smile that in his head probably looked patronizing, then explained he had to get back to his 'friends'. Wanker.

"What was all that about?" she askes.

I don’t say anything.



At closing time we leave, sneaking a couple of bottles of Stella out with us. It's about a five minute walk to my house, but we take our time. I begin to worry that the momment is either here, or is passing. Please I think. For once let something come of our flirting. Of our half-truths. Please oh God don't let this be another night of unrequited lust. I revert to the tried and tested school-boy method and, as we pass St. Paul's, I put her in a gentle head-lock and begin twirling her around.

"Ge-rof!" she shrieks, panelling my arse uselessly with her clenched fists.

We stagger into the thick lawn just infront of the big clock tower and crumble to a heap on the ground. I position myself along side her, facing her, try to look into her eyes. Neither of us do or say anything, we just breath, steam merging between our mouths, damp grass pressed up inside our ears. The fog a blanket over us. I move my face a centimetre towards hers.

"If it's going to happen, there needs to be a sign" she whispers, and I'm reminded of her belief, her inpenetrable, life-long belief that fate governs our lifes, that fate in turn manifests it's self in physical occurences, in lost car keys and symbolic acts of weather, her stupid, whimsical, ignorant fucking belief that she lives by, has always lived by in all the years that I had know her, that rules above all in her dippy fucking head... I want to protest, tell her that I've had enough signs, tell her that she...

Then the clock above us struck. It hammered out twelve, steady dongs and for the duration of it, for twelve seconds, we kissed. We finally kissed.

For those twelve seconds, I felt purgued of what felt like a life-time of agony. A life-time of lying beside her in a bed as she slept. That was the worst. Lying there not able to put an arm over her, onto that smooth, brown belly, or fingers gentley through her soft brown hair but wanting to, wanting to so badly that I'd lay awake for hours, muscles tight and eyes red with rubbing, mind racing with desire and morality and self-loathing and lust. A life-time of feeling nothing for other girls, of holding them in contrast to her and finding them lacking, of using them and trying to care about them, but never once coming close. Her sexual confessions and relationship woes that I listened to, head down as if in a hail-storm, white knuckles dug down deep, being a friend, a best friend, then afterwards all the fustrated, guilty wanks and the reams and reams of drunk, sloppy poetry that I fanatised about showing her but never, ever had the courage to.

'I want a guy to seduce me with poetry'

She had said that one day as we lay on the school field, sharing an ear-phone of my walkman each, listening to 'Scar Tissue', our song. She must mean me, I thought, she must mean me. But my poems could never convince her of anything except the deseperate, self-indulgent way that I worshipped her. Nothing but frighten her and have her look upon our friendship as a sham, a con. She'd know that I loved the way her nostrils flared and the way her lips creased and pouted, the way she bit her brittle finger-nails to the soggy ends of her finger-tips and then spat them through pursed teeth across the floor, the way she yawned and arched her back when she was tired. Every smile, every frown, every recollective gaze and every nervous hair-twist. She'd know that I had loved her all along. From almost the first second. So instead I dwelled in muted hope. Praying that one day she might, like a bolt of lightening or a heart-attack, become stricken with the same feelings, feelings that she'd been denying all along.

The bells stopped, and so did we. Amazed and silent, we walked the rest of the way to my house, my arm around her waist. Once inside we fell onto my bed, embraced and kissed, only now more urgently, with none of the previous tenderness, only furious, exsasperated passion. I left the light on my bed-side table on, hot and dusty, like a spot-light over us. I pulled her top off and she began unclasping her bra. Those breasts. Those perfect breasts I had scrutinized so many times when they were clothed, trying to imagine what they'd be like, were suddenly now beneath me, bare and offered. I plunged my face into them and allowed all the fustration to drain away. I filled my eyes and my nose and my mouth and my hands with their warmth and softness and felt blissfully prepared to sleep. But the job had to be done. There was no going back now.

Nervous and unfocused, I thrusted away. In the end, the animal mechanics of sex felt no different, except that they were accompanied by a sense of bafflement and fear that made it as clumsy and awkward as losing my virginity. In my head I could detect no real pleasure, just a sense of occasion that I wasn't living up to, or that wasn't living up to me. I came weakly before she even came close, pulled out, then, delaying my anxieties, fell back into those smooth white breasts and slept.

I woke in the middle of the night and felt her warm body asleep against me, curled into my chest and onto my lap like a second cutting of a jig-saw. In that blearly, black moment, I wished there were some way of stopping the sunrise.

But there is no way, no way at all. Friendship doesn't survive sex. Sex only creates, or it destroys. It is an force for change by which people get closer or more distanced from each other. And so, as I dream of a happy ending, as we lie together as one, we are really drifting, steadily, unstoppably, apart.