girl, Jonathan and Jennifer. Your wife will also be a professional. You will both have cars. You will continue to run, continue to draw ahead of the shadowmen at your heels. The track ahead of you stretches towards the twenty-first century. At the turn of the century, you’ll be forty. You write an essay in English about your fortieth birthday, spent on a day trip to Mars.
Throughout your third and last year at Marling’s, you put on speed. Competitors fall exhausted by the side of the track. Even the masters find it a strain to keep up with you.
Sean Rye, Laraine’s boyfriend, asks you one evening why you have to keep running.
You don’t know, but you just
do
.
‘You could always stop,’ Sean says, ‘take a rest, slow down. You’re missing a lot.’
When you ask him to give examples of things you’re missing, Sean can’t come up with a decent list. But you still wonder if he doesn’t have a point.
In your dreams, you run, enveloped by a pack of shadows, losing your footing. You wake up as if you’d really been running, heart pumping, drenched by panic sweat. Often when this happens, you have an itchy erection, sometimes with shameful discharge.
You have known about sex since primary school, when you were given pamphlets explaining the biology. You wonder if Sean and Laraine have slept together, but doubt it. You think your parents have grown out of sex, and Laraine has become a miniature Mum, always perfect and poised, dressed up as if for a party. It’s impossible to imagine her putting her tongue in Sean’s mouth. Sean works in your father’s bank; after his A Levels, he didn’t go to university. Mum and Dad like Sean. James says Sean is a pillock and teases Laraine in a disrespectful manner you would never countenance.
Why should you pay attention to what a bank clerk says? Sean is one of your father’s slavey young men, with his diamond-shaped ties and wide lapels. How would he know what you’re missing?
The whispers of ‘Slow down’ persist. You think they come from the shadows. They are a trick, a trap. If you slow, you will stumble and fall under the others. Feet will trample over you, imprinting dap-sole patterns on your back, forcing your face into the dirt.
At night, in bed, you take hold of your penis and pump fast, faster, faster. Gully has told you how to toss off. You think of yourself running. Towards your future, your wife, your life. You get faster and faster. You leave the shadows behind.
You have no shame about running.
Each orgasm is a victory. For you, victories come fast and often.
Sean envies you your future. You’ll leave him behind. That’s why he wants you to slow down: envy. Laraine breaks up with him and goes out with Graham Foulk, an ancient soul of twenty-two who plays the guitar with his own pop group. Mum and Dad like Graham less than Sean. He has long hair and a fuzz of beard and they’ve heard he is a bad lot, but Laraine says he’s sweet really. She starts dressing less like a Sindy doll, more like a flower child. You’re sure Laraine has slept with Graham, and is on the pill. He is one of a loose knot of aimless young adults who work sporadically, some on farms in the ring of villages outlying Sedgwater, and are known, even in the mid-1970s, as hippies.
Graham makes you as uncomfortable as he does your parents. Since leaving school, he’s done nothing except practise with his group, who have never played anywhere for money, though they do appear at birthday parties and school discos. The summit of his ambition is to have his group, which goes through names the way you go through biros, play at the Glastonbury Festival. Sean, still at the bank, is scornful (perhaps understandably) of Graham and his bunch of wasters, which prompts Graham (quite amusingly) to name his group Graham and the Wasters for a few weeks.
If you slow down, you might become like Graham. As soon as the tiniest fluff sprouts on your chin, you scratch yourself bloody with your
Throughout your third and last year at Marling’s, you put on speed. Competitors fall exhausted by the side of the track. Even the masters find it a strain to keep up with you.
Sean Rye, Laraine’s boyfriend, asks you one evening why you have to keep running.
You don’t know, but you just
do
.
‘You could always stop,’ Sean says, ‘take a rest, slow down. You’re missing a lot.’
When you ask him to give examples of things you’re missing, Sean can’t come up with a decent list. But you still wonder if he doesn’t have a point.
In your dreams, you run, enveloped by a pack of shadows, losing your footing. You wake up as if you’d really been running, heart pumping, drenched by panic sweat. Often when this happens, you have an itchy erection, sometimes with shameful discharge.
You have known about sex since primary school, when you were given pamphlets explaining the biology. You wonder if Sean and Laraine have slept together, but doubt it. You think your parents have grown out of sex, and Laraine has become a miniature Mum, always perfect and poised, dressed up as if for a party. It’s impossible to imagine her putting her tongue in Sean’s mouth. Sean works in your father’s bank; after his A Levels, he didn’t go to university. Mum and Dad like Sean. James says Sean is a pillock and teases Laraine in a disrespectful manner you would never countenance.
Why should you pay attention to what a bank clerk says? Sean is one of your father’s slavey young men, with his diamond-shaped ties and wide lapels. How would he know what you’re missing?
The whispers of ‘Slow down’ persist. You think they come from the shadows. They are a trick, a trap. If you slow, you will stumble and fall under the others. Feet will trample over you, imprinting dap-sole patterns on your back, forcing your face into the dirt.
At night, in bed, you take hold of your penis and pump fast, faster, faster. Gully has told you how to toss off. You think of yourself running. Towards your future, your wife, your life. You get faster and faster. You leave the shadows behind.
You have no shame about running.
Each orgasm is a victory. For you, victories come fast and often.
Sean envies you your future. You’ll leave him behind. That’s why he wants you to slow down: envy. Laraine breaks up with him and goes out with Graham Foulk, an ancient soul of twenty-two who plays the guitar with his own pop group. Mum and Dad like Graham less than Sean. He has long hair and a fuzz of beard and they’ve heard he is a bad lot, but Laraine says he’s sweet really. She starts dressing less like a Sindy doll, more like a flower child. You’re sure Laraine has slept with Graham, and is on the pill. He is one of a loose knot of aimless young adults who work sporadically, some on farms in the ring of villages outlying Sedgwater, and are known, even in the mid-1970s, as hippies.
Graham makes you as uncomfortable as he does your parents. Since leaving school, he’s done nothing except practise with his group, who have never played anywhere for money, though they do appear at birthday parties and school discos. The summit of his ambition is to have his group, which goes through names the way you go through biros, play at the Glastonbury Festival. Sean, still at the bank, is scornful (perhaps understandably) of Graham and his bunch of wasters, which prompts Graham (quite amusingly) to name his group Graham and the Wasters for a few weeks.
If you slow down, you might become like Graham. As soon as the tiniest fluff sprouts on your chin, you scratch yourself bloody with your
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