One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night by Christopher Brookmyre Page A

despite daily consuming enough rolls, pieces, crisps and Mars bars to burst an elastic tape‐
worm. Theoretically this ravenousness was fuelling his pubescent growth‐
spurt. Except that he didn’t seem to get any taller, broader or even just fatter.
    Matt wandered along the covered walkway that skirted the building, connecting the main entrance he’d just passed and the doors to the larger third‐
and fourth‐
year bearpit. He picked his steps carefully, finding the surface underfoot to be unaccustomedly dry and tractable. In his schooldays – no doubt no different now, when the current incumbents amassed – the passage was a hazardously slippy route, slickly coated in a slimy amalgam of mildew and accumulated groggers. The male and female bodies each underwent their complex and dismaying changes throughout those stressful few years, with the distaff’s boob‐
, pube‐
and bleeding‐
related ones coming in for the greater academic research and discussion. This had unfortunately led to a frustrating neglect in exploring also why puberty caused the teen male’s saliva glands to increase production by a factor of four, at the same time as restricting the previously effective ability to swallow the stuff back. Some time around thirteen, spitting transformed from an anti‐
social habit to a survival reflex necessary to avoid drowning in your own phlegm.
    Perhaps a greater sensitivity to masculine needs or merely sharper awareness of a historic marketing opportunity would one day see the development of the male oral‐
tampon, and the introduction of a comparable rite‐
of‐
passage in commencing their regular use. Soft, absorbent, ergonomically shaped and discreet, apart from a modest length of hairy string hanging out the side of your gub. Drawbacks would include not being able to talk, but as most teen males were several years off saying anything worth listening to, this was hardly a great loss, and indeed would cut down on their embarrassment‐
recall quotient for later life.
    Matt smiled at the image, automatically shunting it to his brain’s routines‐
in‐
progress workshop, which was, happily, still open for business.
    He walked past four sets of glass double‐
doors, the statutory minimum one of which was boarded up with plywood, a janitorial operation more often than not paralleled by lengthy suturing work at the Royal Alexandra Infirmary. Inside he could see the distinctive terraced benching arrangement where S3 and S4 spent their lunchbreaks and intervals. This was where he had achingly discovered why his preceding years of unsated guzzling hadn’t put an ounce or an inch on him. All proteins, fats and fluids had evidently been diverted into advance sperm production, as by the middle of third year he was wanking enough to fill a small swimming pool on a weekly basis.
    He remembered the boys at St Michael’s – particularly the ‘bright’ ones – being frequently berated over their failure to match their female classmates’ academic standards. Such admonishinent was generally at the hands of female teachers who could not understand (and a select few males who had presumably forgotten) how much greater a workload was unavoidably being processed by the teenage male mind. Given the exhaustive mental effort required to relentlessly visualise the breasts, buttocks and pubes of the at‐
least fifteen girls present in any given class, Matt considered it laudable that he and his peers had had enough brain cells spare to notch up
any
O-grades between them.
    Such reflections had formed the basis for one of his early open‐
mike routines, expanding the night a woman in the audience shouted out that he was being sexist. ‘No, I’m being honest,’ he countered, adding that his mental undressings had been entirely PC and subject to no prejudice. ‘I mean, hear me out, get the full picture – I fantasised about the hounds as well.’
    Rain and hunger had given way to rain and hard‐
ons. The random