Free Doing It by Melvin Burgess Page A

funny, after all.
    ‘I went home,’ Dino told Stu, and started laughing and laughing. ‘Outta my head!’ he howled. Stu grinned back, and Dino knew he was going to get away with it. Once he’d recovered laughing at how out of his head he’d been, he went to look for Jackie and apologised. She forgave him at once.
    ‘OK?’ he said and she said,
    ‘OK.’
    Dino leaned in and whispered, ‘Sorry.’
    ‘Yeah, so am I.’
    ‘No more snogging other people, eh?’
    ‘No more snogging other people.’
    Dino thought, I’m still in. ‘I’m still in? Later?’ he said.
    ‘Mmmmm … OK. If you’re good.’
    But it had been a close thing. He found Fasil and – this was really cool – had a chat with him about nothing much, just to show no hard feelings. But warned him off as well.
    ‘I reckon I’m in with Jackie after,’ he said.
    ‘Mmm,’ said Fasil.
    Dino leaned up right close to his face and breathed, ‘Virgin hole,’ right in his face. Fasil moved his head back and stared at Dino with a horrified expression. Dino winked and leered.
    The party went from quiet to friendly, to busy, to loud, to frantic. Dino had a few smokes and a couple more Ice Head beers and gradually a holy, rosy glow started to hover around him. It was a good party. He was a saint, really. All these people having such a good time, just because of him. His Holiness Pope Dino the First, he felt like, as he went from group to group, bestowing his benedictions upon them. The hardcore were like a bunch of apes by comparison, they were all jiggering about and shouting. They had indulged in something a bit stronger than a few spliffs. Dino himself declined. He didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with his session with Jackie later on. That, after all, was the main event of the evening. He didn’t want his vital parts shrivelled up like a frightened slug. He wanted big, stiff parts for that night’s action.
    People were rushing up and down the stairs shrieking. People were yelling in the kitchen and having fights over the limited quantities of alcohol. Couples had moved into the bedrooms, or, if the bedrooms were full, into the garden and under blankets in the downstairs room. A row of them were snogging up the stairs.
    ‘What’s this, the queue for the bedrooms?’ bellowed Jonathon up at them. Standing in a group three metres and about fifty people away, Deborah looked at him and laughed far too loud. Jonathon pretended he hadn’t noticed. A crowd in the sitting room discovered that if they all danced up and down hard enough they could make the piano next to the door advance on them. It looked threatening and stupid at the same time, and someone christened it Dino’s Dad, because it looked like it was coming to chuck them all out.
    A girl called Sam made love in Dino’s parents’ bed with a boy called Robby, who was sick on the sheets next to her as soon as he’d finished. They covered it up with the duvet and went home. Next door in the boxroom a kid called Simon Tiptree pretended to pass out on top of a pile of coats. When he was left alone, he began systematically to go through all the pockets and bags, looking for money and valuables. At about the same time downstairs in the kitchen, a thin girl in a tiny pink dress was opening the fridge door. She stared rapturously inside. Treasure! Cheese, pork pie, cold cooked sausages! Paradise. Cream cake! What comes next on the ladder up after cold sausage paradise? Cream cake paradise, of course. Without even pausing to moan in pleasure, she reached in and seized an oozing triangle of pleasure, and bit in.
    At that moment Jonathon entered the kitchen, trying to duck out of sight of Deborah. It was getting severe. So what if he’d snogged her? Sod it, why couldn’t he have a snog just because she was a tubber? Now she was following him. It was awful. And so public! Whenever he lifted his head, there she was, looking at him, walking towards him, eyeing him sideways, craning her