Free No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel by Howard Jacobson

elephants have long memories, wondering what the future has in store for them. Now they know.
    Kurt!
    Frank!
    Hold the picture still.
    Lying down, Frank’s is far more agreeably quiescent than she was standing up. He wonders if this is always the way with girls. An alchemical thing. Vapours rising to the top of a heated horizontal body. Or merely physics. Sex spilling out of a woman when she’s laid flat just as coffee runs out of an overturned coffee cup. If he could think of more things to do with her, he has the feeling that she would allow him to do them. But once he has rubbed her over a few times, like a window cleaner working at a stubbornly greasy pane, he is out of ideas. That she might let him
under
her clothes never so much as crosses his mind.
    Of course he knows better than to make a grab for her neck. Do that to someone when they’re flat out on the grass and it has another meaning. Even in Yorkshire.
    The tree prevents him from seeing how Kurt is getting along with his. It obscures their middles. From their extremities he is able to draw no inference other than that they appear to be getting along.
    It’s kissing that comes as the real surprise to Frank. He has pecked at girls at parties before now, even banged teeth with them given half a chance, but nothing has prepared him for the sensation of swooning invasion that comes with making a black O of your mouth and allowing a thick viscid serpent of a tongue to maraud around in it at will. He closes his eyes and submits to the idea that man is nothing but a lightless honeycomb of leaking caverns; up into his palate the serpent goes, slick between his gums, blind behind his fillings, slow as torture or a sneer tracing the spongy pouches of his cheeks, then, in a sudden mocking writhe, quick past his uvula, brushing it aside like a bead curtain, and down downinto his pharynx, where it might tickle his heart or stop his breath forever.
    ‘Mine has to go,’ Kurt tells him during an air break. The girls have gone to find a lavatory and to generally debrief. The boys use the bushes.
    ‘How was it?’ Frank asks.
    Kurt rolls his eyes. ‘Didn’t you see? She touched it.’
    ‘She
touched
it?’
    ‘Didn’t yours?’
    Frank is ashamed to say he forgot to ask her to. ‘We were too busy kissing,’ he says. ‘She’s got a great tongue.’
    ‘Yeah, and a big enough mouth to keep it in. She looks like a fucking camel.’
    ‘Yours isn’t so fair.’
    ‘Don’t start that. I like camels.’ Kurt is agitated. Pacing up and down. You can’t touch a boy of fourteen and not expect him to be agitated. ‘So what are we going to do?’ he says.
    ‘I don’t know. Get the train back?’
    Wrong answer. ‘Mine,’ Kurt says, ‘reckons that yours doesn’t have to go.’
    Frank thinks about it. He wouldn’t mind more kissing. And he knows he really ought to ask her to touch it while he’s got the chance. But he doesn’t fancy the journey home on his own. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ll come back with you.’
    ‘That isn’t what I mean.’
    Frank stares.
    ‘Mine says she does it.’
    ‘I thought you said she’s going.’
    ‘No, she says
yours
does it.’
    Frank’s eyes open. ‘Toss off?’
    ‘Better.’
    ‘She performs?’
    ‘Better.’
    Frank shrugs. Can’t think of anything better. Except kissing, and he’s done that.
    Kurt makes a sucking noise in Frank’s ear. Slurp, slurp, swallow, gulp.
    ‘Ligner!’
    ‘I’m not. It’s the emmes. Mine says definite.’
    ‘Then I’ll stay.’
    ‘What about me?’
    ‘What
about
you?’
    ‘Mine says yours’ll do two. Actually prefers two, she says.’
    Stillness falls over Harrogate.
    Boys. Boys on backs. Boys on backs in rose gardens with trousers round ankles. Looking up at the sky. What will you do? What will I do?
    She is on her knees, dipping from one to the other, like a woodpecker.
    Can’t be clean, Frank thinks. Where had her tongue been immediately prior to its being down his throat? Can’t be