Katy Regan - One Thing Led to Another

We met in November 1997, second floor of the John Rylands Library, Manchester University, both of us wading through our very first English essay in Critical Theory (critically dreary more like). At eighteen years old I was a dangerous mixture of ecstatic and terrified to be officially ‘independent’. Two years my senior, Jim seemed like he’d been knocking around on his own all his life. He was sitting opposite me with his head buried in The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes as was I (and probably every other first year English Lit student in there). But it was the intense frown that really made me laugh, it told of utter and total bafflement. My feelings exactly!

‘Is that making about as much sense to you as it is to me?’ I said, hoping this guy with legs so long his feet were nearly touching mine under the table was in need of distraction too.

Jim looked up.

‘I.e. none whatsoever?’

‘That’s the one!’

He smiled, broadly.

‘Put it this way,’ he said. ‘If this death of the author lark means it’s all down to the reader’s interpretation then I’m screwed because I haven’t got the first clue what this French nutter’s on about.’

‘Me neither,’ I whispered back. ‘I thought I’d be studying books, literature – you know, novels innit…’ Jim laughed. ‘But it’s all structuralism this and post-structuralism that, seminology…’

‘Semiology,’ he corrected.

‘Yeah, that’s what I meant,’ I said, feeling suddenly embarrassed.

That was it, we were off. Couldn’t shut us up for two whole hours. We sacked off work and went for a pint in the end because neither of us could fathom what ‘Barthes Simpson’ as we christened him that day was on about and we were having too much of a good time chatting. When I stepped out of the student union into the crisp November air, I felt like we’d cracked the secret to something that afternoon, Jim and I. Life, probably, or maybe that was just the beer. But for all the personality fireworks I didn’t fancy Jim that day, still don’t, maybe that’s why sex with him has never been a big deal. It’s not that Jim’s un-fanciable, far from it, he’s just not my type. He’s cigarette-thin with Scottish skin and dark hair that flicks out at the sides and on top due to cow licks and various double crowns. He’s got nice full lips – if a little gormless on occasions; a sturdy, prominent nose – attractive on a man I’ve always thought; and green, sparkly eyes that crinkle up so much when he laughs they almost disappear. But I’ve never felt the urge to tear his clothes off.

And so if you had told me on that day we met (or any other day during the next eight years and six months which is how long it took us to kiss, never mind have sex: hardly a whirlwind romance) that one day James Ashcroft and I would be occasional shag partners, I’d never have believed it. But we are and it’s strange, most of all because I don’t really get why it did take us so long. Until one warm weekend last May to be exact.

It was supposed to be two days’ hard graft cleaning up my parents’ caravan, which along with fifty or so other caravans on the tiny site in Whitby hung precariously off a cliff like a stranded sheep. I’d agreed to give it a makeover in return for a hundred quid from my dad and Jim was the only person I knew who had a power drill, but from the first moment we got there, it felt more like a holiday than hard work.

I’ve never known lager taste so good as that first, exhausted pint drunk with Jim at the end of day one. We sat on a bench outside a pub in the town – the Flask and Dolphin – a prime spot with harbour views, and seagulls fat as milk jugs squawking round our feet. I remember the vinegary smart of fish and chips in the air, the lull of bobbing boats, the warmth of the sun on my chest and the feeling that I’d not been so happy for a long time. I told him all about my childhood holidays spent here in Whitby. He told me about endless summers holed up in Stoke-on-Trent, playing Connect Four in his front porch, bored out of his mind.

One pint turned into two, into three, into four, until suddenly it was almost dark and we were surrounded by towers of empty glasses and a sense of anticipation as sharp as salt air.

Jim sighed. ‘This rocks.’ he said, lifting his face to the sinking sun. ‘I’ve had the best day I’ve had in ages.’ Then he turned, his head resting on the wall and he added, ‘With you’. And it didn’t feel awkward. I didn’t get that feeling I was going to regret this in the morning. I just put my glass down, threw my legs sideways over his knee and snogged him like we’d been going out for twenty odd years and this was one of those rare romantic nights made for rekindling the flame.

We’d kissed now, what the hell – sex back at the caravan seemed like the most obvious next step. Afterwards, we sat and talked on the beach until a red dawn flooded the water. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ said Jim. ‘I’m probably closer to you than I am to anyone.’ And the thing was, right at that moment, I felt exactly the same.

When I opened my eyes late the next morning to find the sun in slices on the floral duvet and the North Sea wind whistling in through the windows, I felt strangely and yet wonderfully at home and at ease.

‘So, Jarvis, that was going to happen all along, was it not?’ I remember Jim muttering as he stood in his palm tree underpants pouring coffee into two chipped mugs. And I agreed. ‘Predictable as death,’ were the words I mumbled from underneath the duvet.

After all, if you rate one another highly enough to be close friends in the first place, then chances are, if you’re opposite sexes, it’s only a matter of time. That’s not to say there aren’t consequences. A quick scan of the carnage when I finally emerged that morning revealed my bra was hung on the back of a chair, my knickers gusset-side-up on the caravan hob. There were CDs scattered all over the floor, ransacked in a frenzy of drunken delight, not one in its case. We’d danced to Take That, to George Michael, to Billy Joel for crying out loud! I’d made five thousand times the fool of myself as I had with Gavin Stroud and yet I wasn’t one bit embarrassed.

I don’t know what I expected after that night. I suppose I would have been happy to give a relationship a try, but then I was also petrified of ruining what we had. In the end, Jim made that decision for me, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little deflated.

I called him on the Monday, the night after we got back. ‘I had a brilliant time this weekend,’ I said. Good opening I thought, perhaps this is where he says he couldn’t agree more and asks me out?

Or not.

‘Me too,’ he giggled. ‘It was right laugh. I have particularly fond memories of you doing a routine to ‘Relight My Fire’ wearing only your pants.’

Brilliant, I thought. Absolutely typical. Could it be, perhaps, that I failed to give off the right signals?

But maybe that was no bad thing. Maybe there’s a reason we felt no embarrassment whatsoever after our antics. So unembarrassed were we, in fact, that, a year later, we seem to have fallen into a habit of just ‘doing it’ whenever the need for a little no-strings nookie grabs us.

‘Think of it as a way of extending the fun we’re having,’ Jim always says, usually naked which doesn’t exactly help, ‘like going to an after-hours bar.’

And this suits me too, because I don’t think I know what I want. I can’t fathom the workings of his brain either if truth be told. All I know is that Jim Ashcroft and I have crossed the line. We are no longer purely platonic, nor lovers either. We’re just two misguided fools frolicking about in a vast sprawling, savannah-sized space commonly known as ‘The Grey Area’.