Boys and Girls Read Free Page B

with him, I’m afraid to say – was that here was no sort of a launching pad for a new and soaring lucrative career, but rather its acme. He came up with a new slogan for a very fashionable spirit of the time, white rum it might well have been (please listen to this): ‘It’s Intoxicating!’ They thought he was joking, so he just barely got away with it. Ho ho Alan, they went: highly amusing. But now seriously, mate – what have you got …? Poor Alan, poor sugar: he had nothing, did he? Nothing at all. In order to have come up with this slogan, he had stayed up for nights on end,endlessly downing just pints of the damn white rum, if white rum it was (maybe for inspiration, more likely because it was free), and had been, he told me, juggling concepts concerning its clarity, utter purity – its heavenly grace, I’m afraid is what he said to me. This, I think, led him to choirs and angels and then the thin and rarefied air, way up amid a clouded sunlight in Paradise. ‘It’s Intoxicating!’ became his eureka moment: it assailed him at 4.15 in the morning of a Tuesday – he passed out on the floor, the crashing of bottles awakening Amanda.
    They gave him another chance, though – working on the premise, I think, that no one could really be quite so sincerely idiotic. They put him on to something less contentious, and far lower-profile – some sort of dog biscuit, I seem to recall. ‘Dogs like to eat it’ was the gist of his proposal, so irresistible a pitch made to the background of hugely expensive and animated storyboards, not to say a barbershop quintet; it was received into a sea of unwavering eyes. Then, of course, the anger took over: they tried him on an uplift bra whose manufacturers were seeking to break the stranglehold of the unquestioned market leader. ‘Makes Your Tits Stick Out’ was Alan’s nearly spat-out response, and well – that was the end of things, really. Rather oddly (and I’ve often thought this), just maybe five or so years later, they might actually have used it: it could have been huge.
    Sex. That sort of rather quietly expired, you know. According to these terribly forthright magazine articles that are forced into all our faces these days – Sunday supplements and so on (things that used to be for all the family) – this is hardly unusual, a number of years on. I can’t say I even remarked upon it at the time. I just didn’t seem to care for it any more, as simple as that … though it had never been a priority withme – all the touching, the licking, and then any purring. I did not care any more to be a supine receptacle – and not just the intake either, but the outlet for an appetite. Alan said I was spurning him because he was no longer an employed and productive member of society – he said I was unmanning him; I told him to stop at once being quite so utterly ridiculous, and that he had achieved all that under his own volition, needing no sort of help from me – which may, I suppose, have been unkind, but look: we cannot, can we, squander the allotted time remaining to us just in scanning and analysing all our past remarks, assessing each one of them for sensitivity, or else an unnatural bluntness. I doubt anyway he even remembers. It is just as well though, really, that Amanda came along very early in what we might quite happily term the proceedings; Alan had been predictably amazed (mouth open, gaping like a fish) – he imagined, I think, that it was quite unplanned, as so many men, I’m told, will do. She’s sweet, Amanda – so very beautiful, and nearly a young lady, as I simply can’t ignore. She has a way of looking, though, you know – at me, I mean: I couldn’t even begin to tell you, whenever she does it, what it is she might be thinking. I ask her outright, from time to time: Amanda,