Dot (Araminta Hall)

them, making him immediately turn the music back on. The moon was full and Mavis looked pale; he wondered if the skunk was too strong for her and hoped she wasn’t going to puke before she’d sucked him off. Clive stroked some hair off her face in an embarrassingly clichéd move, but which he felt safe with as he presumed he was the first person ever to have done this to Mavis. His skin prickled and he felt an urgency. He wished he could skip all this shit.
    ‘Do you come here with Debbie?’ she asked and Clive had to force himself not to shout at her because, man, what the fuck was the point of that question? He wasn’t going to stop but he didn’t need his girlfriend in his head.
    ‘Nah. Her mum’s cool, she lets me stay over whenever.’
    ‘Oh, right.’
    He felt her tense beneath his touch. Don’t give me this shit, bitch, he imagined shouting, although of course he never would. For a second he even felt sorry for her, realised she was a nice girl who didn’t deserve to be treated like a ho. But then again, come on, he was Clive Buzzard, she was lucky to be about to be fucked by him. ‘You know what this is, right?’
    Mavis looked at him and her eyeliner had smudged so he had to look away. ‘Are you saying you’re not going to leave Debbie and start going out with me?’ Then she laughed. ‘Of course I know that. It just feels weird.’
    Clive responded to this in the only way he knew how; by pulling her towards him and kissing her hard on her mouth, sticking his tongue down her throat, feeling her breasts and eventually pushing her head towards his lap. By the time they were properly fucking Dr Dre was blasting out of the stereo and he felt righteous and perfect and on top of the fucking world, man.
    Mavis didn’t grind into him the way Debbie did, nor did she moan or whisper in his ear that he was too big for her. But she seemed to have enjoyed it, she was certainly flushed and smiling when he dropped her off at her front door forty minutes later.
    ‘Thanks, yeah,’ he said as she got out of the car.
    She turned round, looking puzzled, and he realised she’d misunderstood; he turned the music down so he could be clear. ‘I mean for all the maths shit. You’re a good teacher.’
    She smiled at this. ‘Oh right, that’s fine.’
    ‘So, see ya at school then.’
    ‘Yeah. Thanks for the lift.’
    Clive didn’t think about Mavis much after that. There was no need; he’d got what he wanted from her in all respects and life floated on as it was intended. Of course Debbie was fine with him the next day. In fact they were fucking in her bed less than twelve hours later. When he finished Clive rolled over to light a fag and wondered whether he’d had a shower between women. He didn’t think he had and the thought filled him with a great warmth, a real sense of achievement. Sometimes he regretted being Debbie’s friend on Facebook, a story like that was made to be shared.
    Still, however, a residue of guilt must have been swirling somewhere in his body because Debbie had been dogging him out about having a joint birthday party for ages and he’d been knocking her back, but when she brought it up again that afternoon he agreed much too readily. Besides their birthdays were months away and so he put it to the back of his mind.
    Time, however, is not stable, a lesson which Clive was learning with increasing regularity. Dates that seemed far away loomed up pretty quickly, ambushing you like a mugger. Like exams, when you worked out that you didn’t have enough hours to study every topic that you needed in order to pass. Although Clive did work much harder than he had expected; something played on in the back of his mind, which he never realised was a tiny memory of that night with Mavis, urging him to knuckle down and make sure he didn’t regret wasting his opportunity. And maybe he didn’t recognise the phrase for what it was because it so permeated the airwaves, usually when some dumb kid was wasting theirs on a reality TV show. Sucker, Clive would shout at the screen, using the same word for the desperate singers as the dead soldiers. But then again, what did it matter, none of it was real when you flicked that off switch.
    Debbie wanted them to have their party in the Christmas holidays, which soon became a New Year’s Eve party. When he started protesting, she cried and in the end he threw his hands into the air and told her to go ahead and organise it, although obviously she was to