Therapy

departed. We were exhausted, but jubilant, and reluctant to break up the collective euphoria by going home. Even Maureen was happy. Her parents and her brothers and sisters had come back to see the show a second time, and she had heard her father shouting “Bravo!” from the back of the hall when we took our curtain call. I had discouraged my own parents from coming, but my Mum had attended the first night and pronounced it “very nice though a bit loud” (she meant the music, especially the “Ride of the Valkyries” which accompanied the Flight into Egypt) and my brother, who had accompanied her, looked at me the next morning almost with respect. Bede Harrington, his head quite turned by success, was full of grandiose plans to write a Passion Play for the following Easter. It was to be in blank verse, I seem to remember, with speaking parts for the various instruments of the Crucifixion — the Cross, the Nails, the Crown of Thorns, etc. In magnanimous mood, he offered me the part of Scourge without the formality of an audition. I said I would think about it.
    The conversation turned to our various plans for Christmas, and I chose this moment to announce that my boss had given me four complimentary tickets for his production of The Babes in the Wood at the Prince of Wales on Boxing Day. These were really intended for me to take my family, but some imp put it into my head to impress the company with a casually generous gesture, and to put Maureen to the test at the same time. I asked Peter and Anne if they would like to go with Maureen and me. They accepted readily, but Maureen, as I had anticipated, said that her parents wouldn’t let her. “What, not even at Christmas?” I said. She looked at me, pleading with her eyes not to be publicly humiliated. “You know what they’re like,” she said. “Pity,” I said, aware that Josie was listening intently. “Anyone else interested?” “Ooh, I’ll go, I love pantos,” Josie said promptly. She added, “You don’t mind, do you, Maureen?” “No, I don’t mind,” Maureen whispered. Her expression was stricken. I might as well have taken the dagger I wore on my belt as Herod, and plunged it into her heart.
    There was an awkward pause for a moment, which I covered by recalling a near-disaster with a sagging backcloth in the crib scene of our play, and we were soon engaged in a noisy and hilarious recapitulation of the entire performance. Maureen didn’t contribute, and when I looked round for her, she had disappeared. She had left without saying goodnight to anyone. I walked home alone, moodily kicking an empty tobacco tin ahead of me. I did not feel very pleased with myself, but I managed somehow to blame Maureen for “spoiling Christmas”. I didn’t join her at Midnight Mass as I had intended. Christmas Day at home passed in the usual claustrophobic stupor. I went through with the Boxing Day excursion to the pantomime, pretending to my parents that I only had a single ticket, and meeting Josie, Peter and Anne at Charing Cross station. Josie was dressed like a tart and had drenched herself in cheap scent. She daringly asked for gin and orange at the interval, nearly bankrupting me in the process, and laughed raucously at all the blue jokes in the show, much to the embarrassment of Peter and Anne. Afterwards I saw Josie home to her family’s council flat, and embraced her in a dark space under the communal stairs to which she led me without preliminaries. She thrust her tongue halfway down my throat and clamped one of my hands firmly onto one of her breasts, which was encased in a wired, sharply pointed brassière. I had little doubt that she would have allowed me to go further, but had no inclination to do so. Her perfume did not entirely mask the smell of stale perspiration from her armpits, and I was already tired of her vacuous chatter and strident laugh.
    The next day I received a letter from Maureen, posted on Christmas Eve, saying she thought it would be best if we didn’t see each other for a while, apart from the last performance of the play. It was written in her round, girlish hand on the usual mauve notepaper smelling of lavender, but the is were all dotted normally, not with the little bubbly circles. I didn’t reply to the letter, but I sent one to Bede Harrington saying I couldn’t make the last performance of the play, and recommending that he ask Peter Marello to double as Herod. I never went to the youth club again, and I