Lobsters Read online

  We laughed again. You don’t usually laugh two proper actual laughs within a few seconds of meeting someone. I looked at him closely. I had definitely never seen him before. Not at a party, not at school, not on Facebook. Not anywhere.

  He was tall, really tall in fact. He looked as though he hadn’t quite grown into his height. As if he was a bit apologetic about people having to look up to speak to him. He put his hands in his pockets and slouched to try and minimize the issue. He had brown, curly hair that fell in front of his brown eyes. I noticed his trainers were really battered and had been bound together with gaffer tape. There was something gentle about him. He looked kind. And fit. Really fit. In a scruffy, cool sort of way.

  He nodded towards the bathroom and said, ‘Well, I guess I should … you know.’

  I jumped out of the doorway. ‘Oh yeah, sorry. Of course.’

  He smiled at me shyly then looked down and ruffled his hair. I didn’t want that to be it, I wanted to keep talking to him.

  ‘Watch out … It’s quite … intense in there,’ I said, because it was the only thing I could think of to say.

  He stepped inside the bathroom and held the door open as he looked around. ‘Oh my god. Yeah. Seriously. It’s like a James Bond villain’s toilet.’

  He was right. The entire room was painted dark purple, with little flecks of gold dotted about, and there was a massive mural of a stag on one of the walls. Stella’s mum got this woman in to paint it specially. The shower in the corner had no curtain or wall around it. You just showered in the room.

  ‘It’s called a wet room,’ I said, and blushed because the word ‘wet’ is rude when you say it within five feet of a boy.

  ‘It’s a bit like standing inside a blueberry,’ he added.

  ‘Yeah. It’s purple, though, not blue, so it’s more like standing inside a Ribena bottle.’

  ‘I love Ribena.’ He said it like he’d just remembered that Ribena existed.

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Hot Ribena’s even better.’

  ‘Yes!’ His eyes widened like he was having a mini-epiphany. ‘Hot Ribena is amazing. I can’t believe I’ve met someone who knows about hot Ribena.’

  We grinned at each other, and I felt that warm, tingly feeling you get when you find something in common with someone you like.

  Suddenly there was a roar of laughter and commotion from the garden. The boy walked over to the bathroom window and, without thinking, I followed him inside, letting the door click shut behind me. I was alone in a wet room with a boy I’d just met. Ordinarily, this kind of situation would have required at least two weeks’ preparation with Stella, Tilly and Grace, planning out exactly what I should wear, what I should say, how I should act. We’d have probably even practised. Without a dress rehearsal I was feeling slightly panicked.

  We stood side by side at the window and peered down at the chaos in Stella’s garden. My arm was inches away from his. Two massive, troll-like boys were having a drinking competition, while everyone around them cheered and chanted.

  ‘Oh my god,’ I said, as we watched one of them pour a whole pint of beer into his mouth before putting the glass on his head, burping loudly and getting thumped on the back by all his mates. ‘That’s insane. I don’t think I could even down a pint of water.’

  ‘It is quite impressive,’ the boy agreed. ‘I’m not sure how that skill could ever come in handy in life, though – being able to drink a lot of liquid very quickly.’

  ‘Maybe if you were drowning in a really small pond?’ I suggested, and he laughed.

  It was so weird. Even though he was hot and funny – my dream combination – I didn’t seem to need a dress rehearsal.

  On the other side of the garden a boy and a girl were greeting each other with a kiss on the cheek. The girl pulled back after one kiss, but the boy leant in for a second. There was an awkward moment where the boy tried to style out his mistake without the girl noticing.

  ‘Oh, I hate that,’ I said, pointing. ‘When you do one kiss and the other person tries to do two and then you both try and make out it’s fine. It’s so awkward.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I always manage to get that wrong. I seriously think there should be a law that says once and for all how people should greet each other. We should just decide on one thing and stick to it. I’m sick of going in for a handshake and having the other person go for a hug, or doing two kisses when they’ve already pulled away after one. It makes life unnecessarily complicated.’

  I nodded. ‘You know they do three kisses in Italy?’

  He sighed and shook his head. ‘That’s just taking the piss.’

  ‘And who’s got the time?’ We both squinted down at the couple, who were now exchanging cheek kisses with each other’s friends. ‘I kind of miss the days when we didn’t have to pretend to be proper adults all the time. It seemed to change so quickly from us being kids and acting stupidly, to kissing each other on the cheek and having to know which clubs are cool.’

  This was the type of statement that Stella would never have permitted me to say in front of a boy. She would have died if she knew I’d said something like that. But he didn’t look embarrassed or weirded out in the slightest. He was smiling back at me.

  ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘I remember the exact moment it all changed. I went away on holiday in the summer of Year 9, and when I came back all my mates were kissing girls on the cheek. That was it – we were all suddenly grown-ups. I remember going to a party and getting the piss taken out of me because I tried to high-five one of my girl mates.’

  ‘I actually quite like a high five,’ I said. ‘It’s friendly and informal but there’s also not much risk of embarrassment. Unless your hand–eye coordination is really bad, and you slap the other person in the face or something.’

  ‘OK, well, that settles it,’ he said. ‘The new law will decree that everyone must greet each other with a high five. No hugs or handshakes or multiple cheek-kissing.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘Or,’ he said, ‘if it’s a really important occasion – like two prime ministers meeting, or something – a high ten is acceptable.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said.

  ‘Shall we high-ten on it? I think this qualifies as an important occasion.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  We slapped hands. In Stella’s bathroom. With the door shut. For just a couple of seconds, we stood there, grinning at each other.

  Then I heard footsteps outside in the corridor and someone knocked on the door.

  ‘Hello? Excuse me? Is anyone in there?’

  Grace’s voice. I love how Grace is polite even when she’s drunk.

  ‘Yeah, Grace, it’s me,’ I called back through the door.

  ‘Oh my god! I’ve been looking everywhere for you! Is everything OK?’ Then she affected a sort of primary school stage-whisper. ‘It’s not your fanny again, is it? It can’t be that bad. Do you want me to come in and check it out?’

  A wave of utter mortification shot through me. The boy slapped his hand over his mouth to suppress a laugh, before giving me a sideways ‘this-is-unbelievably-awkward-isn’t-it?’ sort of smirk.

  Before Grace could divulge any more highly personal, minge-based information, I quickly yelled back, ‘No! Grace, please … I’m fine. I’ll be out in a sec. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, fine, but you need to come downstairs now. Freddie’s here! He’s asking where you are.’

  Freddie. I’d totally forgotten about him. I’d been thinking about him all night, but he’d completely disappeared from my thoughts since I opened the bathroom door. At the mention of Freddie, the boy’s embarrassed grin dissolved and he just blinked and looked down at the floor. I tried to think of something to say, but nothing came.

  ‘Come on, come on! It’s time for you and Freddie to get jiggy with it!’ Grace finally lost all patience and rattled the door handle. It swung open and she gasped as if she’d found me with a hippopotamus.

  ‘Erm … hello,’
she said to the Toilet Boy.

  ‘Hello,’ replied the Toilet Boy.

  ‘Sorry, I … thought it was locked. I didn’t realize there was … anyone else in here.’ She said that to me rather than him. ‘It’s just that … someone’s downstairs waiting for you, that’s all.’ Her eyes were boggling like a crazed lunatic.

  ‘OK,’ I said, slowly. ‘Cool.’ I turned to the Toilet Boy. ‘Sorry, I’m supposed to … I said I’d …’ No proper sentences were forming, so I left it at, ‘I’d better go.’

  He nodded and put his hands back in his pockets. ‘Cool. See you.’

  As we marched down the corridor, leaving Toilet Boy in the toilet behind us, Grace reached down and held my hand. ‘Oh my god. I am so sorry,’ she hissed. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said. I’d just caught sight of Freddie at the bottom of the stairs.

  Sam

  Freddie. Of course there was a Freddie. There’s always a fucking Freddie.

  In films and books you’re allowed to meet pretty girls in bathrooms without any Freddies popping up to ruin it, but in real life, you always get Freddied. Or, at least, I do.

  She – the Ribena Girl – just muttered something about having to go, and then walked straight out the door. I didn’t even get the chance to introduce myself – Samuel or otherwise.

  I listened to her friend whisper excitedly at her as they disappeared down the hallway. I just stood there, staring at that stupid fucking stag painting on the wall, and wondering what had just happened.

  Nothing had happened, really. Not in a tangible, something-I-could-brag-about-to-Robin-and-Chris kind of way. All their stories with girls involved proper, physical activities – kisses, bra removals, handjobs, or threesomes that were technically not threesomes. They certainly didn’t involve high tens and discussions about hot Ribena.

  All that had happened was that I’d had a conversation with a girl in a bathroom. Why did that feel like a big thing when, in Robin’s eyes, it wouldn’t even have warranted a text message?

  Maybe because it was all so … easy. Talking to girls is usually a nightmare – trying to find the perfect balance between saying things they want to hear, and saying things that don’t make you come across as an utter knobhead. There was none of that with the Ribena Girl. It just … flowed.

  But it was more than that. She was, undoubtedly, really pretty. That was what made the whole easy, funny, flowing conversation thing so weird. She had blue – really blue – eyes and soft, straw-coloured blonde hair, strands of which she would occasionally, absent-mindedly unfurl from her ponytail and chew on. It sounds odd, but it was actually really sweet.

  Her smile seemed to cover her whole face, and she smiled a lot. I only got a brief glance, but I was pretty sure she had a really good bum, too.

  Basically, she was hot. And in my (admittedly limited) experience, hot girls do not do easy, funny, flowing conversation. They only do standing around sulkily, pouting, and waiting for someone like Toby McCourt to come and talk to them. Toby McCourt. He was a Freddie, too. He was probably a bigger Freddie than Freddie.

  My not-particularly-productive train of thought was finally interrupted by the door being thumped open by a bloke in a grey hoodie swaying drunkenly on the threshold.

  ‘Oh, sorry, man,’ he mumbled, looking slightly confused to find me standing in the middle of the bathroom and staring intently at the wall. ‘Are you finished in here? Because we’re not allowed to piss in the rose bushes any more, apparently.’

  I nodded, not entirely sure why he’d felt the need to impart the rose bushes information, and stepped out into the hallway. I slunk along it feeling glum. Somewhere downstairs Ribena Girl was with Freddie. Probably, in the words of that Grace girl, getting ‘jiggy’.

  It seemed like everybody in the whole world was getting ‘jiggy’ except me.

  Hannah

  Freddie looked exactly how he has always looked. Stella says he looks like he’s in a boy band, and I suppose he does a bit. Like he’s thought about what he’s going to wear for a long time and is really pleased with how it turned out. He’s quite small with blond-brown hair and blue eyes.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he smiled. ‘We went to the pub first and then we had to go to this random girl’s eighteenth because Amir’s trying to get with her.’

  ‘That’s OK. Nothing’s really happened.’ Actually, it felt like a lot had happened already.

  ‘Do you want to go into the garden with me?’ He smiled slightly as he said it. Like it was a euphemism. Up close, I could see the gel in his hair. He was wearing a waistcoat.

  ‘Yeah, all right. We can go on the trampoline.’

  I walked outside ahead of him, climbed on to the trampoline and started bouncing. He clambered on after me but almost immediately shouted, ‘Stop’ and lay down on his back.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked, and sat down and crossed my legs.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Just a bit …’ He suddenly sounded much drunker than he had before. ‘You look really fit, Hannah.’

  I didn’t know what to say. ‘You do too’ would have sounded strange, and ‘Thanks’ a bit cold. I stared up at the house and all the people in all the different rooms. The light was on in the bathroom and I wondered where Toilet Boy was now.

  And then, from out of nowhere, Freddie sat up and said, ‘I’m really pleased you want to do it with me, Hannah.’

  And with that, he lurched forward clumsily and kissed me. I was too busy trying to process what he’d just said to stop him. Stella must have told him. Why? Why did she have to control everything everybody did? She just has to get in there and be mates with everyone. It was OK for it to be my night, but only if she said so. What was the point of getting all dressed up to seduce Freddie when she had given me to him on a plate already?

  I pushed him back, gently. I’d kissed him loads of times before, but this time felt different. Wrong. His mouth was really wet, and he tasted like cider and Wotsits.

  He smiled, his eyes half shut, as he swayed backwards. ‘We could do it here, if you like?’ he murmured.

  As if. There was no way it was happening now. I looked around the garden at the clusters of people smoking weed, getting off with each other or looking ill. Yup, this was just how I’d pictured losing my virginity; being publicly deflowered on a piece of exercise equipment. I suppose the only advantage was that it didn’t have his name written across it in huge, sparkly letters.

  ‘Erm, yeah, we could do it here,’ I said. ‘That is an option. But there are about a hundred people in this garden and you aren’t coping very well with moving or staying conscious.’

  Freddie’s eyes were now fully shut. He didn’t even look like he was interested in being awake, let alone with me. This wasn’t really how I had imagined it. A half-asleep Freddie Clemence, deigning to do me a favour by murdering my youth on a trampoline.

  Sam

  I couldn’t find Robin or Chris anywhere. I wandered through to the kitchen. Ribena Girl wasn’t in there but her friend was, the one who’d summoned her down to meet Freddie. She and another girl were staring out of the French windows into the garden and giggling. I saw what they were staring and giggling at, and immediately felt a bit sick, like I’d just done a shot of sambuca on a full stomach.

  She – Ribena Girl – was sitting on the trampoline, kissing a bloke I can only assume was Freddie. Freddie had apparently come straight to the party from the set of Hollyoaks. He had one of those Mr Men T-shirts on (he’d gone for Mr Messy) and a blond quiff that laughed in the face of gravity.

  Most appallingly, though, he was wearing a waistcoat. A fucking waistcoat. Unless you’re a snooker player or a magician, wearing a waistcoat outside your own house is surely not an acceptable thing to do? If you’re the sort of person who can get up in the morning, put on a waistcoat and walk out of the front door, what other atrocities might you be capable of? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  I suppose it was strange to feel jealous over someon
e I’d just met, but I did. Or, I don’t know, maybe not jealous, exactly. It’s not like we had some major moment or anything, but we got on well and what are the odds of getting on well with someone you bump into outside a toilet? What are the odds of getting on well with anyone? Especially when most of your conversation revolves around Ribena.

  I couldn’t watch any more. I turned around and pushed my way out of the kitchen. I was about to head into the living room to try to find Robin and Chris when I heard what was unmistakably Robin’s high-pitched cackle coming from inside the cupboard under the staircase.

  I opened the door, and a cloud of weed smoke hit me full in the face. I peered through it to see Robin and Ben crouched inside, smoking a spliff the size of a Cornetto. This probably makes the spliff sound impressive. It wasn’t. It had major structural design flaws.

  Robin threw his arms up in greeting. ‘Yes, Sam! We’re hot-boxing Harry Potter’s bedroom,’ he laughed, clearly not realizing that any credibility he hoped to gain from talking about hot-boxing was immediately wiped out by his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Harry Potter franchise.

  ‘Come on in!’ said Ben, a Cheshire cat grin splitting his face in two. He was very, very stoned.

  I shuffled inside and shut the door behind me.

  Hannah

  Freddie was out for the count. I think I even heard him snore. I sat next to him thinking about Stella and what the fuck she was playing at, and wondered whether other people had this much trouble losing their virginity? I suppose Bella Swan did have the whole potentially-being-killed-accidentally-in-the-moment thing. But at least they were on that tropical island, not a bloody trampoline. And I bet Edward didn’t taste like Wotsits.

  That was it: Freddie and me were dead in the water for tonight. I decided to just leave him to sleep it off and stood up, but the movement woke him. He opened his eyes.