Sex and Other Changes Read Free

convincingly warrior-like Achilles. Nick was extremely shy and self-conscious about the whole thing.Somehow his unease made him disturbingly attractive as Helen. At the time they thought it all a great joke. Later, much later, looking back on it, they wondered how they could have been so naïve.
    They only thought it a great joke until they arrived at the party to find that no one else was in fancy dress, not even Prentice.
    â€˜You are a bastard, Prentice,’ said Alison.
    â€˜That’s true,’ said Prentice.
    Nick and Alison got so drunk in their embarrassment that when they got to bed they fell asleep straightaway, and in the morning they were so hungover that they made straight for the toilets. Alison held Nick by the shoulders while he retched into the bowl. He found that extraordinary. He didn’t think many women would have done that.
    Would Nick and Alison ever have made love to each other, would they ever have married each other, if the driver of a white van hadn’t fallen asleep at the wheel just two days after Daniel Divot had arrived home on shore leave?
    It’s impossible to know. The driver
did
fall asleep, Nick’s parents
were
killed instantly, he
was
all alone in the world.
    Oh he had uncles and aunts, and a granny with dementia near Knebworth, and cousins, but they were never close.
    One of his uncles made all the funeral arrangements. Nick drifted through the nightmare, rudderless, steered by Alison. On the morning of the funeral she dressed him. In the church she held his arm and led him to and from his seat. At the funeral tea she held him when she thought he was going to faint. That night she fucked him for the first time.
    They had woken up that morning as friends, chums, a bit more than platonic but a lot less than sexual. During that one day Alison became his father, his mother and his lover.
    Where did they make love? Friends in Throdnall would find this difficult to believe, but it was on the back lawn of hisparents’ house, just beside the tool shed, under the stars, on a groundsheet (Nick was subject to chills of the kidneys as a young man). Mock ye not, though. Grief is a great aphrodisiac, and Nick was a fine and fervent lover that night, for all his inexperience. He turned his sorrow into love, and poured it into Alison.
    The following week, Nick passed his driving test first time, to everyone’s astonishment, and the week after that, heady with excitement and independence, he set off on what he called
La Grande Route de Sympathie,
or
Der Grossmitzgefuhlstrasse
. In other words, he drove round rural England in an elderly Ford Anglia which he was only just capable of controlling, and spent two nights at each of five different outposts of Divots. He returned with a multitude of vague offers of future support, but had met no great warmth. ‘Divots tend to be good people, but they take some getting to know,’ his Aunt Jessica warned him. Long before the end of his little trip, the excitement was a thing of the past, and independence seemed a lonely game. He proposed to Alison on the day of his return, and she accepted him. They were both eighteen.
    The wedding was a quiet little affair. The loss of both Nick’s parents forced it to be so.
    He risked a break with his family by not inviting any of them. As he wrote to his Uncle Stanley, the unofficial leader of the tribe, ‘If we invite anyone we have to invite everyone. We can’t afford to invite everyone, so we’re not inviting anyone. We hope you’ll all understand.’
    He relied on Uncle Stanley to pass the message round. He half hoped that somebody might say, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll pay’, but nobody did.
    So Bernie and Marge were there, and a smattering of Thurmarsh friends, and Prentice, and Jen, and the registrar of course, and the photographer, and that was about it.
    The men wore suits. Prentice, the best man, already showing intimations of obesity, told Nick,