Girls and Boys

Dennis Kelly

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786823151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Britisches Drama

An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids – theirs is an ordinary family. But then their world starts to unravel and things take a disturbing turn. A tragic, violent look at parenthood and trauma.

Chat One

– I met my husband in the queue to board an easyJet flight and I have to say I took an instant dislike to the man.

This was in Italy. I’d been traveling – not with any real sense of purpose or ‘see the world’ but more because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing with my life and I just could not face getting another job I hated back home. So I handed in my notice, took my last month’s pay along with the deposit I got back from my flat, a brand spanking new credit card and I stuck a pin in a map of the world, determined to go wherever it landed, be it Paris, Calcutta, New York or Dubai.

I got Southampton.

An entire planet to choose from and I got Southampton. But I thought ‘fate – follow fate. This could be the start of the rest of my life’ which is how I found myself in Southampton.

For three days.

After which time I thought ‘fuck you fate’ and got on a train to Paris.

Paris is a dump.

I’m sorry, it is, and it’s time we all started talking about this.

France is beautiful, I have been all over France and it is something, but Paris? Call that a world city? It’s Leeds with wider streets. After Paris I went to twenty-two European cities including Mechelen in Belgium and Ingolstadt in Bavaria and let me tell you not one of those places was as dumpy as Paris.

I chose Europe to do my travelling because I was too old for a gap year and I reckoned in India or Thailand you’d see that, and I’d be lumped in with the other flee-ers of life: the dropouts, the divorcees, the drug addicts, the cult survivors and sex offenders and – worst of all – those who had no clue what they were doing with their lives.

I really, really, really was not on the lookout for someone. You see the travelling phase of my life had followed hot on the heels of what I now refer to as my drinky, druggy, slaggy phase: and I mean slaggy, by the way, not slutty, it was not some kind of Sex and the City shag fest that you could gossip with gay pals about, it was dirty, messy and slaggy.

I’d been with the same bloke for four years – six months of passion followed by six months of warm bickering followed by three years of a slow decline into sub-zero tedium, and when we finally took it out the back and shot it in the head there was blood, mess, tears and recriminations for… well, months, actually.

It was not nice.

But at that point I realized I was twenty-five and I’d had exactly three sexual partners in my entire life; the first for one night, the second for six months and the last for four years. So I put all this information onto a spreadsheet and was shocked to discover that on current trends I’d be with the next guy for 326.8 years. I decided to go a different way.

I had fun.

Drink, drugs, a fair amount of cocaine and different partners – it was fun and a laugh and also destructive and slightly depressing and oddly callous and upsetting as well as energizing – confusing. It was confusing.

The end of it came when I was having extremely drunk, doggy style sex with my flat mate on this grimy, suicide-beige carpet in our flat in – of all places – Wood Green. We had developed this unhealthy ‘let’s not have a relationship but fuck when drunk enough’ thing and at this moment I was so drunk that I’d just thrown up – and we were still doing it. I mean I’d just puked, the sick was right there, I’d just folluped it up on the carpet. And the force of the thrusting is kind of nudging me towards it, towards this, well, towards this puddle of puke and I remember thinking ‘if he doesn’t come soon, he’s going to fuck me right into that puddle of puke.’

That exact thought.

That exact sentence materialized inside my brain.

Let me repeat it for you.

‘If he doesn’t come soon…

he’s going to fuck me right into that puddle of puke.’

Let me tell you something – when a sentence like that appears in your life, you know it’s time to start looking at your choices.

That was the end of my drinky, druggy, slaggy phase. I quit my job, took my cash and went to Europe.

Beat.

So I’m queuing. And this is an easyJet flight. And it’s been delayed and they’re not saying anything, so everyone in this queue is just standing there quietly hating anything within our hate radius.

And this is in Italy.

And let me be clear – I love Italians. Italians are great, Italy is great: fucked up, yes, but great, it is a great place, but Italians do not like queuing. Italians have an extremely lax attitude to the whole concept of the queue in general, and that is not a thing, by the way, that’s just the way it is, I mean you go ask an Italian and they’ll agree.

And this wasn’t just Italy, this was Naples – and I fucking love Naples, Naples is incredible, but if Italians don’t respect the queue, then Neapolitans outright despise the queue. Neapolitans have a complicated relationship to rules; in Naples doing what you’re told is sort of a sign of weakness and they tend to see little things like laws as more suggestions than imperatives.

So needless to say this queue is tense. Everyone is on edge waiting for the cut-ins, everyone is looking daggers at everyone else like ‘is that guy moving up, is he fucking sneaking up…?’ or ‘I swear to Christ, if that old bitch tries to cut in I will drop her and stomp on her neck.’

But by some miracle the integrity of the queue is staying intact. We are queuing, it has not become the last helicopter out of Saigon that we all know at any moment it could turn into.

But this guy in front of me…

I mean he is just standing there, not a care in the world, reading – reading a fucking book, head lost in it, casually shunting his bag forward with his foot every so often, taking his own sweet, allowing a gap to open up – I mean a gap? Here? In this queue?

And I’m just fuming. I mean you moron, you idiot, you thick brained, lard-synapsed cock-head, do you not get what’s going on here? Do you not know what it is taking for these people to keep this queue together? They are fighting every instinct in their bodies and are somehow winning and here you are just letting gaps open up? Gaps?

And then…

These two

models, I mean they had to have been models, they were gorgeous, these girls, god knows what they were doing here – must’ve had a flight suddenly cancelled because they were looking around and thinking ‘where are we? I don’t like it, where’s the VIP lounge?’

And you know when you see proper expensive clothes, but proper expensive – and the hair and the grooming… it was like being visited from another dimension. I swear people were taking photos.

And they go straight up to this guy

Idiot face. They go right up to idiot face and the brunette goes

Hi there, how are you?

(And he looks up and he’s like ‘huh?!? What?’ I mean he doesn’t say that, he doesn’t say anything, he’s just staring with his mouth open like Scooby fucking Dooby because no one of this genus has ever spoken to him before, and he’s actually looks slightly scared, like he’...