'Oh, once or twice - you know, just playground bundles, scuffles in pubs. Thankfully I have a black belt in hiding under tables.' She smiles, takes my clothes off me, eyes averted, and starts shaking them out, folding them neatly.

'So he didn't hurt you then?' I say.

'When?'

'Spencer, in the fight.'

'When?'

'I saw him push you against the wall . . .'

'Oh, that was nothing, just a little b.u.mp on the head. Why, can you see a bruise?' She turns around, parting the hair on the crown of her head, with one hand, and I stand close behind her, and pull the hair to one side and don't really look, just inhale. She smells of red wine and clean cotton, warm skin and Timotei, and I have this overwhelming urge to kiss the top of her head, the small raised area where the bruise is. I could get away with it too. I could lean forward now and kiss it and then say 'there you go, kissed it better!' something along those lines, but I do have some pride, so instead I just place my fingers gently where the redness is.

'Do you feel anything?' she asks. Alice, you have no idea . . .

'There's just a tiny bruise,' I say. 'Nothing much.'

'Good,' she says, and starts hanging my clothes on the 271.

radiator. I'm still standing in my vest and pants, and a quick glance down at my boxers reveals that it looks as if I'm smuggling executive toys, so I quickly pull on the tracksuit bottoms and the old jumper that still smells of her. 'I've got some whisky. Want some?'

'Absolutely,' I say, then sit on her bed and watch as she rinses out two teacups in the handbasin. In the light of the anglepoise I notice that the flesh at the top of her thighs is very white and dimpled slightly, like risen bread dough, and as she turns sideways-on against the light I see, or think I see, a little wisp of pale brown hair escaping at the top of her underwear against the small, soft bulge of her belly.

'So what are you going to do about it?'

I snap to. 'About what?'

'Your friend, Spencer.' There she goes again - Spencer, Spencer, Spencer . . .

'I don't know - talk in the morning, I suppose.'

'So what are you walking around in the rain for?'

'I just wanted to give him a couple of hours to go to sleep. I'll head back soon . . .' I say, and pretend to shiver.

She hands me a teacup with an inch of whisky in it. 'Well, you can't go back out tonight. You'll have to sleep here . . .'

This is my cue to feign resistance. 'Oh, really, that's all right, I should head back . . .' I'm actually quite warm now, but try to make my teeth chatter artificially, which is actually a lot harder than you'd think, so I don't push it, but just quietly say, Till drink this and go.'

'Brian, you can't go back out there, just look at your shoes.. . I' My ruined suede brogues are steaming on top of the radiator like hot pasties, and I can hear the rain being blown hard against the window. 'I refuse to let you leave. You'll have to sleep with me tonight.' The bed is single. This is a very narrow bed. Very narrow. More like a ledge.

'Oh, all right then,' I say, '. . . if you insist.'

272.

31.

QUESTION: Discovered accidentally by the Dutch physicist Pieter van Musschenbroek in 1746, and also by the German inventor Ewald Georg von Kleist in 1745, a Leyden jar is a sealed gla.s.s container used for storing what?

ANSWER: Static electricity.

There are things that a nineteen-year-old man such as myself might reasonably be expected to have done by now. For instance, I think you should be able to a.s.sume that, at nineteen, I'd have travelled by plane, for instance, or ridden on a motorbike, or driven a car, or scored a goal, or successfully smoked a cigarette. By the age of nineteen Mozart had written symphonies, operas and played for the crowned heads of Europe. Keats had written Endymion. Even Kate Bush had recorded her first two studio alb.u.ms, and I've yet to eat tinned sweetcorn.

But I have to say I don't really mind all that, because tonight I'm about to crack the big one. Tonight, for the first time in my life I am about to spend a whole night in bed with someone.

All right, I should qualify that a little. Last summer I shared a one-man tent with Spencer and Tone on Canvey Island, and that was pretty cosy. I slept in the same bed as Mum for the first couple of nights after Dad died. And the night before his funeral I shared my single bed at home with my Irish cousin, Tina, but of course this last one doesn't count because, leaving aside the sombre circ.u.mstances and the incest taboo, cousin 273.

Tina was, and remains, a deeply violent person. To clarify then, I've never, ever, in my life shared a bed as an adult for the whole night with a member of the opposite s.e.x to whom I'm not closely related and/or afraid of. Until now.

We stay up for an hour or so, drinking whisky, sitting on the bed next to each other and talking and listening to Tapestry and the new Everything But The Girl alb.u.m. Because I know that I'm here for the duration, I relax a little and we start to have fun again, proper fun, reliving the party, the fight, the look on Patrick's face while he tried to remember Spencer's name. She sits right up next to me with her legs crossed in front of her, her T-shirt tugged down over her belly for propriety's sake, but when she's not looking I can still see the mottled pink and white smoothness on the inside of her thighs, the beginning of a dark hollow at the top of each leg.

'By the way,' she says, 'I've got something to tell you.'

'What?' I say. I'm in love with Spencer or something, I expect.

The got some good news tonight,' she says, making a meal of it.

'Go on . . .'

The ... am ... Hedda GablerV 'Congratulations! That's brilliant news!' To be honest, I'd been secretly hoping that she wouldn't get the role, partly because it means she'll be rehearsing all the time, and partly because, like a lot of actors, she can frankly be pretty monumentally boring on the subject. But never let it be said that I don't have a huge talent for insincerity. 'That's amazing! The eponymous Hedda! You'll be great! I'm so pleased!' I say, and hug her and kiss her on the cheek, because after all, I might as well get something out of it. 'Hey, you are still going to do University Challenge, aren't you?'

'Absolutely. I've checked. The dates don't clash, even if we do get through to the second round . . .'

'Which we will.'

274.

'Which we will.'

And then we both talk for an hour or so about the many and varied challenges involved in tackling Hedda Gabler, which isn't easy, because to be honest I've never read it, so I drift off and just look at her for a little while, and then she's saying . . .

'. . . and the really great thing is that Eilert Lovborg is being played by Neil Maclntyre . . .'

'Who's Neil . . . ?'

'You know - he was that amazing Richard III last term?'

'Oh, himl' I say, meaning 'Oh, the t.w.a.t with the tambourine!' Neil Maclntyre's the actorly b.a.s.t.a.r.d who spent most of the last term hobbling ostentatiously round the student bar on a pair of crutches to 'get into character'. Many's the time I've been tempted to kick his crutches away, but Alice is obviously pretty fired up about the experience that awaits her because she's getting incredibly animated and pa.s.sionate, waving her hands in the air, biting her lip, and pressing her hand against her forehead. In fact she's pretty much running through her whole performance scene by scene, so I try to stay awake by blinking heavily when she's not looking, and sneaking occasional surrept.i.tious glances at the faded print of Snoopy on her T-shirt, rising and falling, or the pale skin on the inside of her thighs, taking little mental photographs.

Finally, after Hedda's thrown her beloved Lovborg's ma.n.u.script into the flames, and committed suicide off-stage, Alice says, 'G.o.d, I'm bursting for a pee,' and pads off down the corridor to the communal toilet. As soon as she's gone I surrept.i.tiously have an illicit roll of her Cool Blue underarm deodorant, and adjust the angle of the bedside radio-alarm clock in the hope that she won't see that it's gone three in the morning and start getting sleepy. But when she comes back to the room the first thing she does is yawn and say, 'Time for bed,' then goes to the handbasin and starts to brush her teeth.

275.

'You'll have to borrow my toothbrush, I'm afraid,' she says, through a mouthful of foam. 'Hope you don't mind.'

'I don't if you don't!'

'Here you go then,' and she pa.s.ses it to me, and I rinse it under the tap, but not too much, and then we stand side by side at the sink, and I brush my teeth while she takes her makeup off with blue cleanser. There's a little bit of comic business when I accidentally spit on her hand as she reaches across the washbasin for a cottonwool pad, and we catch each other's eye in the mirror, and she laughs brightly as she swiftly rinses my minty flob off her wrist. And it occurs to me that there's something a little bit cosily domestic about the moment, as if we're getting ready for bed having just hosted a delightful and hugely successful dinner party for our closest friends, but I don't say this out loud, because I'm not, after all, a complete and utter cretin.

I take the green jumper and tracksuit bottoms off in a way that doesn't seem too s.e.xually provocative, and contemplate leaving the hiking socks on, for comfort's sake, but it's not a good look, pants and socks, so I take them off and put them by the bed, just in case.

'Do you want to be up against the wall, or . . . ?' she says.

'Don't mind . . .'

Till be up against the wall then, shall I?'

'Okay!'

'Got a gla.s.s of water?'

'Yep,' and she gets under the hand-made patchwork eiderdown, and I follow.

To begin with we don't actually touch each other, not on purpose, and there's some shuffling round as we realise just exactly how small the bed is. Finally we adjust ourselves into what seems like a workable position, which involves lying curled up in parallel, like quotation marks, but with me not actually daring to touch her, as if she were a live rail. Which, in a way, she is.

276.

'Comfy?' she says.

'Uh-huh.'

'Nifty-nift, Brian.'

What? '"Nifty-nift?"'

'Just something Daddy used to say, you know, instead of nighty-night?'

'Nifty-nift to you too, Alice.'

'Turn the light out, will you?'

'Don't you mean turn the "lift" out?' I say, which if you ask me is a pretty witty thing to come up with at 3.42 in the morning, but she doesn't say anything or make a noise even, so I turn off the light. For a moment I wonder if this will act as some sort of catalyst to make us lose our inhibitions and unleash our potent mutual secret longings, but it doesn't, it just makes the room dark. We lie exactly as before, in quotation marks, not touching, and it soon becomes clear that the actual muscular tension required to stay rigid and not touch her is going to be impossible to sustain, like holding a chair out at arm's length all night. So I relax slightly, and the top of my thigh comes into contact with the warm curve of her left b.u.t.tock, and she doesn't seem to flinch or elbow me in the gut, so I a.s.sume it's all right.

But now I realise that I don't know what to do with my arms. The right arm, under my torso, is starting to tingle, so I wrench it out from under me, jabbing Alice in the kidneys.

'Ow!'

'Sorry!'

"S alright.'

But now they're just sort of dangling pointlessly in front of me, at weird angles, like a discarded marionette, and I'm trying to remember what I usually do with my arms when I'm not in bed with someone, i.e. my whole life. I try folding these strange new extra limbs across my chest, which doesn't seem quite right either, and now Alice has shifted slightly nearer the wall, taking the eiderdown with her, so that my backside is 277.

DAVID N1CHOLLS.

hanging over the edge of the bed, and a draught is blowing up the leg of my boxer shorts. So I can either yank the covers back, which will look a bit rude, or risk moving closer, which I do, so that I'm now lying curled-up tight against her back, which is wonderful, and I think is technically called spooning. I can feel the rise and fall of her breathing, and try and synchronise my own with hers in the hope that this will make me fall asleep, though this seems unlikely, because my heart is clearly beating way, way too fast, like a greyhound's.

And now her hair is in my mouth. I try to flick it away by spasming an a.s.sortment of facial muscles, but this doesn't seem to work, so instead I crane my head backwards as far as I can, but her hair's still there, creeping up my nostrils now. My arms are still folded across my chest and pressed against Alice's back, so I have to lean backward and extricate my arms and brush the hair away, but now my left arm is outside the eiderdown, and cold, and I don't know where to put it, and my right arm is starting to tingle, either from cramp or an impending heart attack, and the under-arm deodorant is smelling overwhelmingly Cool and Blue, and my boxers are out in the draught again, and my feet are cold, and I'm wondering if I should maybe reach over and get the hiking socks and . . .

'Quite a fidget, aren't you?' mumbles Alice.

'Sorry. Can't work out what to do with my arms!'

'Here . . .' and then she does the most amazing thing. She reaches over and takes my arm and pulls it tight around her ribs, under her T-shirt, so that my hand is resting against the warm skin of her belly, and I think I feel the curve of her breast brush against my forearm.

'Better?'

'Much better.'

'Sleepy?' she asks, which is an absurd question really, considering that her right breast is rubbing against my wrist.

'Not . . . really,' I say.

278.

The neither. Talk to me.'

'What about?'

'Anything.'

'Okay.' I decide to grasp the nettle. 'What did you think of Spencer?'

'I liked him.'

'You thought he was all right?'

'Yeah! Bit bloke-y, bit full-of-it . . .' she says, putting on her Radio 4 c.o.c.kney accent '. . . bit ov a jack-the-lad, but I thought he was great. And he obviously loves you.'

'Well, I don't know about that . . .' I say.

'No, he does. You should have heard him, singing your praises.'

'I thought he was chatting you up . . .'

'G.o.d, no! Quite the opposite . . .' she says. What does that mean?

'How come?' I ask.

She hesitates, and half turns her head and says, 'Well . . . he seemed to have this idea in his head that you had ... a bit of a crush on me.'

'Spencer said that? To you, tonight?'

'Uh-huh.'

So there it is. It's out there. I don't know what to say or where to look, so I roll onto my back and sigh, 'Well, thanks Spencer, thank you very much . . .'

The don't think he meant any harm by it.'