Telling Tales

‘There’s no such place.’

‘Harvale, then.’

‘That’s even less existent than the other one you mentioned.’

Ah, it’s like no time has passed at all. They can go like this for hours, every word hinging on Wade’s ability to be intentionally ridiculous for long periods of time, and Cameron’s almost death-like insistence on the literalness of things.

Though he has grown a slight hint of sardonicism, right at the back of his words. It’s very faint but I can hear it, and there’s something about the gaze he lays on Wade that seems…cold, almost.

It makes all the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, at the very least.

‘But anyway. Back to the sex-ghosts,’ Wade says abruptly, as though maybe he spotted the glittering cool beneath Cameron’s steady stare too.

Sadly, this only puts me in the spotlight again. I feel like a Vegas stripper, only without the feathers. Or spangly nipple-covers. Or skin.

‘I really have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about.’

‘Your stories were always like that, Allie,’ Kitty says, because she’s a goddamned traitor. ‘But it’s OK, ’cause mine were too.’

OK, maybe not a traitor, exactly. Maybe more like a really evil partner in crime who drags you down with her, into disaster. In all my many dreams of how this reunion would end up going – minor explosions, someone killing someone else, nervous breakdowns – none of this ever featured in even the tiniest, remotest sense. I didn’t even imagine myself ending up in bed with Wade, really, because whenever I let myself want something it almost never happens.

Did I do the opposite of wanting this chat about sex stories?

‘Yeah, also guilty,’ Wade says, and I rack my brain trying to think of where they crammed all this boiling lust into tales about being a pig who could fly (Kitty) and a cyborg from the future (Wade).

Maybe the pigs and the cyborgs had a lot of sex I just don’t know about.

‘It’s OK, Cam, you don’t have to put your hand up for this one,’ Wade adds, and my brain automatically makes an odd little dinging noise. As though it’s decided to tally up all the little digs Wade’s going to get in about Cameron, for no apparent reason. ‘Everyone knows that you’re not a part of our dirty perverts club.’

Seriously. Were they like this before? Because that last part seems even meaner than the first bit, as though Wade would like nothing better than to slice Cameron right out of our group forever, for some end I can’t quite see.

I can’t see it so much that I’m compelled to say something in too big and too funny a voice, as though I can just smooth everything over by being ridiculous.

‘Hey, how do you know he’s not a dirty pervert? You seem really perverted to me, Cam, I swear.’

By being really ridiculous. Because in truth, there isn’t a person on Earth who seems less sexual than Cameron. I’m sure Mother Teresa was more adventurous with her lovers than Cameron is with his. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it…I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen him with someone I could loosely term a ‘lover’.

He probably has constant, epic sex with the robot girl he’s built.

Annnnddd…now I feel mean. Especially when he then says: ‘Thank you, Allie. Your faith in my perverted-ness is very…welcomed.’

He actually does seem heartened too. When I look at him he’s getting really close to smiling in this strange, almost-definitely-drunk way, and after a couple of long, weird moments have ticked by I find my mind rolling back and back to that word he used.

Welcomed. And the pause he had before it, as though he had a couple of other contenders before he settled on something so mundane. Though for the life of me, I can’t think what other word he could have slotted in there. What replaces welcomed, easily? Pleased? Sweet?

And then my brain throws up arousing like an insane hiccup, and I move along quickly.

‘OK, so, maybe I liked to occasionally write about sex-ghosts,’ I say, but it comes out less funny and more wounded than I intend. And Wade spots it, which is weird because he never used to. He never used to know when I’d taken a mortal hit and was down for the count.

‘Hey, what’s the big deal?’ he says, and there’s this creamy, smooth note of conciliation in his voice that sounds weird. Weird, but not exactly unwelcome. ‘We’re all grown up now. We can be perverts if we want to be.’

‘I didn’t care about being a pervert before, quite frankly,’ Kitty says.

Of course, my mind flicks to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers in the bed next to mine, in our tiny dorm room. Though I’ll admit, my mind sometimes goes to her bonking the living daylights out of Martin Carruthers when I’m busy plunging the toilet or waiting for a kettle to boil, so it’s no real commentary on the things we’re talking about now.

‘So where are the stories, Kit? The dirty stories, about something other than magic balloons that get lost?’ Wade asks, and Kitty heys!

Then tries to hurl a cushion at him and fails, miserably.

‘I wrote loads more than kids stories, you doof. I wrote fabulous tales of rip-roaring sexual adventures the likes of which the world has never seen.’

I can well believe her. One of her postcards just had the word ‘five-way’ on it in big letters. Is five-way even a word? I’m not sure and largely felt too afraid to ask.

‘Yeah?’ Wade says.

And then he does something that makes my stomach kind of flip-flop. As though maybe I’d just thought this whole conversation was going down a path to nowhere, and any second we’d start talking about the same cool, literary stories Professor Warren always used to encourage, with everything sexual about them stuffed firmly into the subtext. The subtext that’s now, apparently, cracking under some weird pressure I didn’t even know was there.

It’s not there, is it? I mean, none of us fancied each other, or anything like that. Unless you count me fancying Wade, which is pretty linear and only in a single direction. I mean, it’s not as though you can write a postcard to someone with ‘one-way’ on it in big, fancy glitter letters.

‘Like this story?’ Wade says, which isn’t the thing that makes me flip-flop inside.

No. It’s him leaning over the side of the chair he’s sitting in to the satchel bag resting at its side, to whip out his usual scrunched-up bunch of semi-clipped together pages. Pages that could well have text all over them, and none of it sub.

Kitty squeezes my legs and squeals: ‘Ooooh, he’s a magician!’

Because she’s bonkers. Only Cameron and I are sane, adrift in the sea of weirdness this whole night seems to be sinking into.

‘You’re not seriously going to read a dirty story, are you,’ I hear myself saying, but it’s from very far away and the tiny section of me that’s cool is staring at this very far away person with a sneer on her face.

‘Well, it’s not as though Warren’s here to tell us off for using the word fuck,’ Wade says, and though it’s mean and Cameron interrupts with Hey, man, he just left us a house, he’s got a point. The Professor didn’t even like to hear the L-word in fiction.

And the L-word’s loose. So you know. The craps and the damns didn’t stand a chance.

‘Why do you think he did?’ Kitty asks, and we all sort of freeze in position, then. Not because it’s a little jarring in the middle of a discussion about smut that was starting to get…let’s say…heated – though it is. Jarring, I mean. The weird tension I can feel pushing against the nape of my neck and under my arms doesn’t dissipate, but it does start tapping its foot, waiting for us to go back to whatever Wade’s got us moving toward.

But no, it’s the question itself that makes us freeze. As though we all know we’ve been kind of avoiding it, and maybe we wanted to avoid it a little longer. I can hear Wade shuffling the pages of his probable hellfire and brimstone story around, as though he just wants to get back to this, this is the point of us being here.

Sharing what we never shared before.

Though when I think about this idea, my stomach stops flip-flopping and drops out of me entirely.

‘Because he had no one else,’ Cameron says, finally, and though Wade starts blathering on about Scooby-Doo and Kitty wants to know why he wanted us to stay here for a month first, then, if it was just about him being a lonely old bastard, I think Cameron’s right.

I think we were his family, once. And maybe he just wanted his family to come back together, in some sort of wildly eccentric and completely inadvisable fashion. One that makes Wade say: ‘There’s a curse on the house, and a month is what it takes to possess us all and make us kill each other.’

This time, Kitty manages to hurl a cushion at him. She even kicks one little leg out at him, and misses by a country mile.

‘You dick! I’m already not going to sleep tonight, thinking about people watching us.’