Chapter Eight If There Is Something
Roxy Music floated lazily through the air, the music as lackadaisical as the thick, golden afternoon sunlight that caught the slow-moving dust motes in Rahul’s bedroom.
The two boys lay horizontally across the bed.
Two parallel lines, so near yet not quite touching.
Rahul gazed unseeingly at the uneven surface of his ceiling as Bryan Ferry crooned out of the little blue record player on his nightstand.
It was a muggy, stifling summer’s day, and Rahul felt uncomfortably sticky in his clothes.
He found himself unable to relax the way his friend seemed to, too worried that he might begin to smell and put the other boy off.
Julian’s fingers traced the music’s notes through the heavy air and Rahul’s eyes were drawn to them, entranced by their unpredictable patterns.
Julian reminded him of a toasted almond.
He was all one rich golden colour -- skin tanned from his outdoor sports, hair bleached lighter from the sun.
His long, skinny, brown legs stretched out from the football kit he still wore, with a pale band of lizard-belly-white skin visible just at the top of his thighs where his shorts had ridden up.
The heat under Rahul’s collar seemed to be intensifying.
He tugged on it and mentally cursed this wretchedly hot day.
“They’re brilliant, aren’t they?” Julian breathed. The whole day felt hushed. Even the birds outside the window were muted under the heavy blanket of summer’s heat.
“Yeah,” Rahul agreed succinctly. He liked Roxy Music just fine. He preferred his dad’s old jazz records, but he wasn’t about to tell Julian that. He didn’t want the boy to think him uncool -- even if he very much was.
Julian’s hand slowly descended and came to rest idly on his stomach. Rahul was grateful. It had been making him dizzy.
“You know what I heard from Leroy?”
Rahul turned his head to look at him. Julian was gazing down thoughtfully, his pose making his eyelashes spread out over his cheeks. Rahul couldn’t understand how his hair could be so light but eyelashes so dark. They often gave Julian a girlish appearance.
“Leroy said he got off with Helen Pruneridge in the shed behind the football pitch.”
“He didn’t,” Rahul scoffed. Leroy was a well known liar. Also, he was spotty. There wasn’t a chance in hell Helen Pruneridge would give him the time of day.
“He did too,” Julian insisted. “He had details and everything.” The way he said “everything” somehow added a “k” to the end of it. “He isn’t smart enough to come up with details like that if it didn’t happen.”
Rahul snorted, but he let Julian go on. Clearly the smaller boy was in a mood to share.
“He said they kissed. With tongues and everything.”
“How was it?”
“He said it was weird at first, but then it was kinda nice. Said it was wet.”
The boys fell into a contemplative silence, each trying to imagine what a wet kiss with tongues might feel like.
“You reckon we ought to practice before we do a first real kiss with a girl?”
Rahul’s heart sped up behind his ribs but he tried valiantly to ignore it. “Who says I haven’t kissed anybody yet?”
Julian gave him an incredulous look. “Yesterday, you told me you had a dream where your mum’s tits turned into barracudas and tried to eat you. You don’t think you’d have told me if you’d had a first kiss?”
“I kissed my cousin Amrita when we were seven.”
“That doesn’t count!” Julian waved a dismissive hand. “In nursery school, I kissed Dan McBryer on the roundabout. You think I go around saying that was my first kiss? Get stuffed. I mean a proper kiss. Like with a real girl.”
“All right, so I haven’t. Whatever. You haven’t either.”
“I know, you knob! That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying, shouldn’t we practice or something? So that we, like… aren’t bad at it or anything? When it really does count?”
“Wh-who should we practice with?” Rahul stuttered, pretending to study his fingernails with a nonchalance he didn’t feel.
“I dunno.” The duvet shifted as Julian shrugged.
“Probably somebody we can trust or… or whatever. Like, I dunno, with us being best mates and all… if we practised kissing it wouldn’t count or anything.
It’d just be practice. So then we won’t be rubbish when we really care about who we’re kissing.
And we can, like, impress them. Or something. ”
Rahul was suddenly very aware of the place where Julian’s bare leg was brushing his. He imagined he’d be able to feel the tickle of the golden hairs there if he weren’t wearing trousers either. He bit his lip hard, trying to use the pain to steer his thoughts back on course.
“Erm, yeah, that, uh…” Rahul’s words seemed to be getting stuck in his throat on the way up.
He couldn’t quite think. The heat was turning his brain to mush and his heart couldn’t seem to stop its infernal throbbing.
“That’s probably a -- a good idea. Just so we’re not rubbish. And it doesn’t count.”
“Right. Exactly.”
Julian suddenly bounced up and sat cross-legged on the bed.
Rahul dared to glance at him and saw that his face was eager and excited, even if there were two rosy spots high on his cheeks.
Rahul slowly sat up to match him. His movements felt clumsy and sluggish compared to Julian’s.
If Julian was a sparrow, flitting elegantly about, then Rahul was a badger, crashing into the hedges.
Once their positions mirrored each other, knees touching knees, neither one of them seemed quite sure what to do.
Bryan Ferry’s melancholy voice was the only sound for several long, excruciating seconds.
“Um, right,” Julian said, his voice barely above a whisper. Rahul could hardly hear him through the rush of blood in his ears. “Why don’t we both lean forwards, then we can meet in the middle?”
“Like this?” Rahul said. He stretched his neck out a little, like a turtle.
Julian didn’t move. He was just staring at him. His eyes were enormous when he was this close, Rahul thought. It’s like he was all eyes. They were making Rahul feel rather self-conscious, in fact. Like one of those changing rooms that was all mirrors. They left him nowhere to hide.
“What? Have I got something on my face?”
“No, it’s just… I never noticed. Your eyes are kind of gold. I thought they were just brown, but close up it’s like they’re kinda yellow. Like that stone that’s got bugs in it. Amber. That’s it. Genius.”
The heat continued to creep up Rahul’s neck and he felt that if he didn’t get some kind of relief from it soon he might just faint.
“Um, thanks?”
“Right, sorry.” Julian cleared his throat and schooled his expression into one of earnest concentration.
He lowered his eyes to Rahul’s lips and Rahul felt certain he was about to be sick.
Julian leaned forwards, slowly, so painfully slowly.
This close, his face blurred in Rahul’s vision.
Their noses bumped softly into each other.
Julian’s breath was on his cheek. It was nice.
It was surprisingly cool in the stifling heat.
A sudden desire hit Rahul then, like a punch right to the gut -- no, not a desire.
A need. A need so all-consuming to kiss Julian that he felt that if he didn’t do so in the next second he was going to spontaneously combust, sending little pieces of Rahul exploding all over the room.
There was the faintest, barely there brushing of lips against his. He sucked in a desperate breath, having been holding it for who knows how long. And just as the pressure on his lips began to increase --
“Rahul!”
And three sharp raps on his bedroom door.
Rahul and Julian sprang apart as if jolted by an electric cattle prod. Julian’s eyes were wide and wild. Rahul was so disorientated that it took him a solid beat to even remember why they’d jumped away in the first place.
“Y-yeah, Mum?” His voice sounded reedy and unsteady. He prayed she wouldn’t notice.
“I have snacks. Are you boys hungry?”
“Famished, Mrs. Chaand,” Julian called out, leaping up and going to the door.
Rahul was infinitely grateful, as he pulled his knees up to his chest to try and hide the mortifying tenting in his trousers.
He realised with sudden alarm that maybe the reason Julian had volunteered to get up was because he’d noticed his little… situation.
Oh God. He’d seen. He must have done. They were just meant to be practising and he’d gone and gotten a stiffy and now he’d never live it down.
Julian would stop being his friend for sure.
Call him a woofter and tell everybody at school all about his predilections.
He was done for. Finished. And worse than any of it, he was going to lose the best friend he’d ever had.
All because he’d gone and fancied him like some kind of an idiot.
Julian shut the door after Rahul’s mum and bounded back to the bed with a tray of freshly baked pakoras, one already stuffed in his mouth.
“Your mum’s genius, she is,” he said around a mouthful of potatoes.
“Food as good as this? I’m lucky if my mum rustles up a sandwich when we get home.
Most of the time I’m making the packed lunches for me and Mel and my mum’s sat in front of the telly smoking slims and telling us to piss off.
” He swallowed his food and washed it down with a glass of milk.
When his mouth was empty, he grinned at Rahul so brightly and genuinely that it made his heart stop.
Whether or not Julian had noticed Rahul’s predicament, Rahul had never been more grateful in all his life.
He was so relieved he could have cried. Julian’s determination to pretend that nothing had happened was the greatest gift he’d ever given him.
He made a silent vow to himself then and there that he would treasure this boy for as long as he was alive. Possibly longer even than that.
He grinned back. He took a pakora and he bit into it.
* * *
1987