LITMIR.BIZ

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do on Saturday?’

      When she finally replied, it was as if she was measuring every word, carefully and cruelly weighing up her riposte. ‘Did I ask you to speak to me? Are you retarded or something?’

      ‘No, don’t be offended like. I was just thinking you will have sore feet on Saturday if you wear them heels!’

      ‘And what is so special about Saturday?’ she asked.

      ‘It’s the 12th! The 12th of July. Won’t you be out with Orange Lil and all the girls marching to the Field and then coming back pregnant?’

      I noticed that she repressed a laugh and was relieved that she hadn’t taken offence.

      ‘Either you are being sarcastic or else you are simply a moron. Now which is it?’

      ‘Well, I can confirm that I am not a moron. I’m just asking if you will be OK for the big day.’

      ‘I won’t be going anywhere with that lot next Saturday. I don’t like crowds, let alone big processions. Are you going?’

      ‘I wouldn’t think I would be welcome. I might be the invited guest on top of one of their eleventh-night bonfires, but I wouldn’t qualify to be marching the next morning.’

      She snatched up her leather handbag with fringes dangling from it and tried to make a quick exit.

      ‘I’m only slagging ya,’ I said, standing up with her. ‘I’ve no time for any of that shit, green or orange. I’m not one of them. And by the way, my name’s Robbie, but my friends call me Ruin, and I’m dead on.’

      She stopped in her tracks and fixed her eyes upon me. They were still loaded with contempt. ‘You’re a cheeky wee shite. Does your mother know you’re out?’

      ‘I bet you’re a secret ABBA fan. You can’t admit that in here or you will be tried and convicted for being a secret spide. Truth be told, my ma’s dead but don’t feel bad about it.’

      ‘Snap!’ She smiled back at me. ‘Snap! Mine’s dead too.’

      ‘Excellent. So we really have got something in common as well as Bowie and liking, ahem, ABBA. So, as I said, I’m Robbie. What’s your name?’

      She gave me a long scrutinising look and said, ‘Well at least you’re not afraid of the punk thought-police. If you wanna like ABBA, go ahead, but I don’t think I’ve any of their albums up in my place and—’

      I butted in to accept what I assumed was an invitation. ‘Don’t worry. As long you don’t play fucking Pink Floyd or Yes, or for that matter Bob Dylan.’

      She nodded in approval towards my home-made T-shirt. ‘Well, I can see you’ve got some taste. I’m Sabine. Let’s go!’

      Outside The Pound, we skirted past my home area then around the closed-off security zone in the city centre. The streets and roads were deserted, except for one army mobile patrol breaking through the traffic lights. The soldiers cooped up in the back of their jeep wolf-whistled at her while flapping their hands towards me, indicating that they thought I was queer, probably because of all the zips and studs. In the distance, I could make out the burning orange lights illuminating the back of the bakery, where only a few weeks earlier I had joined my friends playing midnight football, acting out all the World Cup games we had just watched on TV. We pretended that we were Kempes, Ardiles, Luque and Passarella. Now, just a few short weeks after the World Cup final, here I am, arm in arm with Sabine as we make our way to the black taxi stand at the City Hall. It hit me that all those last blasts of a football-obsessed childhood were fading, corroding faster than I had ever anticipated in this short burst of summer towards something entirely new and out of time altogether.

      Even before Sabine, I had concocted a strategy to spend as much time at The Pound as possible. I had told my father I was sleeping over in Padre Pio’s house, where I had spent much of June watching the World Cup matches on his colour TV and heading out afterwards to our free floodlit ‘pitch’ at the back of Inglis’s bakery to play five-a-side into the early hours of the morning. PP was always in foul humour when we were going back to his house to bed. He was a shite player and was always picked last. I’d wait for him to fall asleep before creeping back downstairs to the front parlour, where his mother would be waiting for me on the floral sofa – legs open and propped up on the table, just like that first night a few days after we buried my own mother. Her feet in slippers, the half-empty bottle of vodka, a three-quarters smoked cigarette burning in the ashtray and then her slobbering, her urgings, her orders. On my knees eventually and my head in-between her thighs, spearing her moist pubis with the tip of my tongue while she moaned and groaned in a voice rubbed with smoke and Smirnoff: ‘It’s just a bit of sex, Robert. It’s just a wee bit of sex.’

      Truth be told, that’s why I was confident on that first night with Sabine. I wasn’t afraid of this standoffish snob with the crimped hair, the white dress and the fishnets that I longed to rip off with my teeth when we finally got to be alone. Padre Pio’s mum had once whispered into my ear when she finally allowed me to bolt inside her that she was giving me ‘an education’.

      In the taxi up to the Holy Lands, we snogged for the first time and I tasted a sharp clean laboratorial sensation in her mouth.

      ‘I thought you only drank Coke,’ I murmured as I tried to slip my hand up her dress.

      ‘At them there prices, no way,’ she said. ‘They don’t have civilian searchers on the door to check what’s in your bag. I could get a bomb into The Pound if I wanted to. A half bottle of Smirnoff is easy to smuggle inside,’ she continued, while placing her hand on my swelling crotch. ‘I wonder why you,’ she said.

      ‘Why me what?’ I answered.

      ‘I never bother with anyone in The Pound. You’re my first. I’m just wondering why you.’

      ‘Cos I’m special?’ I ventured helpfully, as I slide my hand further up her dress.

      ‘Maybe,’ she whispered and, gliding the tip of her tongue inside my ear, added, ‘It’s more likely that I’m just feeling particularly horny tonight and I like your T-shirt.’

      We must have fucked all night inside 66 Jerusalem Street because when I woke up early the next day my cock was raw and my head was pounding thanks to a half bottle of vodka. Sabine had provided us with a soundtrack for our sex; not Bowie, as I had expected, not even ABBA. Instead we rolled about, she lay astride me, and I took her from behind to the sound of 1950s rock ’n’ roll blaring from a C-60 tape she had put on. I recalled too the way she liked to writhe around when she was on top, like the lithe, sinister dancer at the start of Tales of the Unexpected. The look on her face told you that she was elsewhere, and wherever that was, she was in charge.

      Sabine stirred beside me. ‘You’ve obviously done this before, young man, and there was me hoping you’d be a virgin,’ she said with a smirk.

      ‘Sorry about that, love. Damned inconvenient of me all the same,’ I replied.

      ‘Where did you learn to screw like that?’ she asked.

      ‘I could ask you the same question. You are one fine mount.’

      ‘Oh, I think I was the one doing the mounting, Mr Ruin! But hey, I forgot to ask you something important: what age are you?’

      ‘Fourteen, mam,’ I joked and got an elbow in the ribs from her. ‘Nah, I’m nineteen. I’m just having a year off before I go to uni,’ I lied. ‘What about you?’

      She had wrapped her legs over mine and started to caress my face with her fingers.

      ‘I am at the art college. It’s only the foundation year but I’m thinking of starting first year proper over in London. Maybe St Martin’s if I can get in. Where have you applied for?’

      ‘Maybe I’ll head to London too. Perhaps the LSE. My dad thinks I should go there and study economics.’

      ‘Didn’t Mick Jagger go to the LSE?’

      ‘I’m

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