rolhirst.co.uk

“What’ll it be, bud?”

“Whisky. Doubles. Line ‘em up. And keep ‘em coming till I tell you otherwise.”

“Sure thing, pal… It’s a woman, right?”

“Ha! No. No, it’s not a woman. It’s not a woman… it’s all of them, man. Every single… Look, you really want to hear this? You really want to…?”

“Hey, it’s a slow night. I sometimes find a story helps pass it quicker. Only if you want to though.”

“Yeah. Yeah, why not? You just keep ‘em coming like this first one. This first one’s to Penny, see? We were eight years old. She was the cat and I was the dog. That’s what we… playtime, in the schoolyard. She’d meow, I’d woof. It was just a silly game, but… The other lads, they took the piss. ‘Evan’s got himself a girlfriend!’ ‘Go on, Evan, snog her!’ ‘Penny and Evan, sitting in a tree…’ One day she kissed me. I was too young to know what it meant, but I didn’t think I liked it. I mean, I did, but… The other lads… I told her I didn’t want to be her friend anymore. She cried. They always cry, but at that age, everybody cries if they don’t get their own way, right? We were supposed to walk home together – she lived just down the road from me, our mums were friends. But I was sick of the other lads laughing, doing that thing where they hug themselves and move their hands up and down their backs and make kissy noises and… So I left her to walk home by herself.”

“Something… happened?”

“Yeah. Yeah, something happened. The next day she was hanging out with Andy Cooper instead of me. She came up to me in the playground and told me straight. Andy Cooper was a cat too. Just like her. Except he was a Persian! If I’d been older and smarter, I might have told her Persians don’t even have tails, but I was too young, and I was… I was just a dumb dog. And Penny hated dogs. Dogs were rubbish. Dogs were… Dogs, I guess, they didn’t have the courage of their convictions.”

“Thank you. Now, this one… This one’s to Cassie. Cassie Broadbent. We were fifteen. She played piano and violin and we used to hang out in the music block on a lunchtime. She was in the year below me, but that was how it went at that age, you know? All my mates who had birds – that’s what we used to call them, you remember? ‘Is she your bird?’ Somewhere along the way, someone decided ‘bird’ was offensive to women, which I never really… I mean, if I were a woman, I don’t think I’d mind being a bird. Birds are pretty, right? Graceful. Sweet and mel… mellifluous…”

“Apart from crows.”

“Yeah, I suppose. Apart from crows.”

“And magpies. Magpies are nasty little buggers…”

“OK, yeah. I’ll give you—“

“And pigeons. I hate pigeons.”

“Look - do you want to talk about birds? I mean, if you’d rather…”

“Sorry. Sorry, go on. Tell me about Cassie Broadbent.”

“OK. Yeah. Cassie… pour. Pour and I’ll… To Cassie Broadbent! I remember one time she was dancing. She was playing this music on the stereo in one of the music rooms, it was some kind of samba or… one of those Spanish dances where you swish your skirt tails like… you know, swish… and I was looking at her legs. Couldn’t help myself. Every time she swished her skirt, I saw a little bit more of her legs, and I was fifteen, you know – I hadn’t learned not to stare yet. And Cassie – I remember exactly what she said because I played it back in my head so many times over the next few nights, I might as well have taped it off the radio… She said, ‘I really need to shave my legs – even though they’re getting all downy… because it’s getting on towards winter. I’m letting ‘em grow to keep me warm. I’ll shave them in the Spring.’ I think it was the most erotic thing I’d ever heard in my life. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to ask her out so much, but I couldn’t even breathe. I mean, it was just the two of us, in that tiny little room, with the hum of the ventilation that you could always hear in the music block – it was supposed to be soundproofed, but that only made the ventilation sound louder – it was just the two of us, and she was talking about shaving her legs, and she wasn’t embarrassed or anything… and I wanted to ask her but I couldn’t.”

“You never did?”

“I got my mate to do it instead. Julian. Or at least he was supposed to… you know, sound her out. Try and do it all subtly like, without actually revealing that I… so if she didn’t, if she wasn’t - it wouldn’t be like she knew I… We could still be friends, she wouldn’t be all uncomfortable around me, like girls get when they know you’re in love with them but all they really want is to be your mate. But Julian… Julian messed it up. Cassie got the wrong idea. She thought it was actually him who was interested, she thought… And he was a bit of a lad, Julian. Bit of a catch. A lot of the girls – a lot of Cassie’s mates, they fancied him rotten. And I guess, while he was talking to her, while he was supposed to be sounding her out for me, I guess Julian realised he had a shot there himself. And he was my mate, yeah, but not so much that he’d let that… Come on, we were fifteen.”

“Bastard.”

Read the complete story here.