Dot (Araminta Hall)

all of that, but soon he found they were funny and before long an hour had passed and then Trev and Ketch had joined in the conversation because where he went others soon followed. Debbie flounced off around twelve, but Clive knew it was nothing he couldn’t solve in the morning, knew that she knew that her stock would plummet without him. His head was groggy from the vodka they’d smuggled in and, as he stood leaning against the wall of their school gym, he thought that if you took away the make-up and the hair and the pushed-up breasts and skin-tight dresses, maybe Debbie wasn’t really as fit as a page-three honey. Or maybe it was that page-three honeys weren’t that hot after all. And he found himself wishing harder than he had done since he was a child that he’d do well. Not that he thought any of those things for very long: his brain was too used to seeking out pleasure and easy routes and so starved of real ideas that it sucked any up like a sponge, not letting anything settle. Instead it fixed itself on Mavis, chatting brightly to Kai across the room, and knew what needed to happen.
    Clive only had to ask Mavis once if she needed a lift home for her to accept. But then, annoyingly, she remembered her strange ginger friend as they were leaving and so Clive said he’d drop her off first. Dot was really drunk, staggering and swaying and Clive told her not to puke in his car or he’d go fucking mental and she seemed to agree. By then though there was no going back anyway. The desire to possess Mavis had lodged itself in every part of him because if you want lots of things you can’t have and if you live in a world of immediacy, it sometimes works to have something you don’t particularly want but can have.
    Snoop Dogg spat out his bile as soon as Clive turned on the ignition, shouting about the things he’d do to his bitch in his private plane. The video started to play in Clive’s head as it did for almost every song he ever listened to: images of women in bikinis, their impossible bodies oiled and ready, lollipops stuck in their open mouths, whilst fully clothed men mouthed the words to their songs, as in control as they had ever been. Clive didn’t know that what he was feeling was sexual tension; maybe he hadn’t even heard of Marvin Gaye and all the forerunners to the music he thought he owned. He didn’t imagine making love to Mavis; he imagined fucking her senseless like the porn stars and rappers in his head. He didn’t imagine any other scenario other than that she would love it, opening herself up to him like a flower.
    He had a hard-on by the time they reached Dot’s house and he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited impatiently for Mavis to see her friend to the front door. He rolled a steadying joint to avoid the premature ejaculation he was in danger of experiencing. When Mavis got back in she smiled and he offered her a toke, which she sucked deep into her lungs. The sweet Sensi, as he liked to call it as if he spent his days on a Jamaican beach rather than a windswept Welsh village, was having its desired effect, as if someone was spreading a warm blanket through his veins, and so he smiled back.
    ‘Where to now then?’
    She shrugged. ‘I live on Bateman’s Road.’
    ‘I know,’ he lied. ‘D’you wanna go home then?’
    She giggled and blushed. ‘I don’t mind. Do you?’
    Clive put his hand on to Mavis’s leg and brushed it up under her T-shirt/dress thing. ‘Nah, man. You look well hot.’
    ‘We can’t go to my house.’
    ‘Nor mine. How ’bout Sayers Common.’ It had been one of those unusually warm Septembers and being naked outside wasn’t unappealing.
    ‘OK.’
    Clive restarted the car, praising the weed now swirling round his blood, giving him time to get somewhere and show Mavis a thing or two. They left Druith behind in minutes, the lights from his headlights bouncing off the road so that he kept on having to remind himself that he wasn’t playing Need for Speed, which always happened when he drove at night. Clive turned off about halfway through the common. He couldn’t see any other cars but there were bound to be other people fucking nearby. He found the thought warmly erotic, being a young man as he was who lived in a world without sexual boundaries. He had learnt years ago that men, women, animals, dwarves and shit you’d never even dreamt of was no more than a mouse click away.
    He shut off the car and the silence enveloped