SIXTEEN YEARS ANGLE
I was on a summer holiday with my parents and little sister, on the Petit Camargue delta — inhabited mostly by horses and flamingos. In a moment of hysteria my mother had booked us into what can only be described as a dole-queue resort, a vast community of mobile homes with a swimming pool, a stage for evening entertainment, and a nightclub open until four in the morning. My nights were based heavily around the nightclub, the doors of which would open around ten p.m. when all the sun-struck parents would waddle off to bed, while their young would begin swigging cheap Mexican lager and vodka-lemonades.
On the last night I was sitting at the bar minding my business when this skinny ginger number came up and sat next to me. She looked a lot younger than me. She ordered a snakebite — a pint glass of half lager, half cider with a shot of black-currant cordial. I ordered the same. Her name was Ceri and she was from Wales, a poor village somewhere or other. She was sixteen and she only got fifty-pence pocket money a week. We smoked and smoked and smoked.
Before I knew it we were on a wooden bench near the swimming pool, under the shade of a palm tree. I was stone drunk. All I remember is her saying, "Oh, just bloody kiss me, you twat," in this almost incomprehensible Welsh slur and grabbing me by the head. I slid my hand up her mini-skirt and pulled her knickers apart and awkwardly tried to do what I thought I had become quite good at. She put her small hand down my shorts and jerked at it. We must have been doing this for a good twenty drunken minutes until her impatience got the better of her again: "Come on then, are we going to shag or what?"
We made a break for a nearby field. It had been freshly plowed, so the surface was all dried dirt and stones. She pulled off her shirt and her bra to reveal her little breasts, then flicked away her boring white knickers. I ripped my shorts off and barely had time to think before she jumped on top of me. She grabbed it and tried to stuff it in, but she was so small, it could barely fit. After a while she succeeded, but I was so drunk and everything tasted stale from all the cigarettes and the rocks were sticking into my back I just couldn't keep the old boy going. I felt like I'd let the entire world down.
The next morning when I met up with Ceri she told me she'd lied about her age and some other things. She was actually fifteen, and had a boyfriend who stole her pocket money for fags. So that made me a pervert and a partner to adultery. She sent me letters and kept calling me up over the rest of the summer, but her spelling and grammar were so bloody awful I could barely understand her. But I still think about her now.
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