Vince and Joy Read Free

it. ‘Getting us some tea. Should be back in a minute. Oh, talk of the devil, here she is.’
    Kirsty’s green Mini pulled up alongside the caravan and came to a halt with a crunch of gravel under rubber.
    ‘Give us a hand, you two,’ she said, heading for the boot.
    Chris instantly dropped the canister and went to his wife’s assistance. Vince nodded at Joy and rubbed at his scars.
    ‘God, is that your mum?’ said Joy.
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘She’s gorgeous.’
    Vince turned, expecting to see Beatrice Dalle or someone standing there, but, no, it was just his mother.
    ‘How old is she? She doesn’t look old enough to have a son your age.’
    ‘Thirty-seven, I think. Thirty-eight. Something like that.’
    ‘Bloody hell. She’s younger than my mum was when she
had
me.’
    They both stared at Vince’s mum for a while, and Vince tried to think of something to say. This was officially the longest dialogue he’d ever exchanged with a girl who wasn’t either in his class or going out with one ofhis mates, and the conversation felt like a flighty shuttle-cock he was trying to keep in the air with the force of his will alone. He wanted to ask her something interesting. Something about music maybe, or her intriguing slanted eyes. Or what a beautiful girl like her was doing on a shitty caravan site like this. A dozen potential conversational openers formed in his head and were discounted in a nano-second – too personal, too naff, too boring, too much.
    The silence drew out like a held breath.
    Vince looked from Joy to his mum’s car and back again while he tried to think of the next thing to say. You staying long?’ he managed eventually, with a rush of blood to his head.
    ‘Another fortnight,’ she said, ‘worse luck.’
    ‘What happened to Geoff and Diane?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The people who own your caravan.’
    ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Mum and Dad are renting it off someone or other.’ She pulled her hands out from under her and turned them upwards in a gesture of ignorance. She obviously didn’t care about Geoff or Diane, or whose caravan she was staying in. He was officially the most boring man in the world.
    ‘Right,’ he said as silence descended again. Joy rustled the pages of her magazine and Vince felt a deep blush developing in his chest area.
    ‘So,’ he said, his hand rising subconsciously to his scars again, ‘I’ll see you around then?’
    ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I guess you will.’
    Her eyes were already dropping to her magazine. He’dlost her. But then, mused Vince, as he took a cache of carrier bags from his mother and mounted the stairs to the caravan, he’d never really had her. Of course he hadn’t. He was Vincent Mellon. Or Melonhead, as he’d been known at school. He’d been stupid to think that some operation, some bit of surgery, was going to change that. He couldn’t talk to girls when he was ugly, and he couldn’t talk to girls now he was supposedly ‘good-looking’ either.
    When he came out two minutes later, the deck chair was empty and the girl called Joy was nowhere to be seen.
    Vincent Mellon had been born with an underbite. It hadn’t really shown up until he was a few years old, but from that point on he’d resembled a very small, hairless bulldog. As he got older it transpired that Vince didn’t just have an underbite – he didn’t have a small but charming imperfection that added character to his face – but that his bottom jaw protruded so far ahead of his upper jaw that he couldn’t actually chew properly. Anything that required being fed into the oral orifice and bitten through – a doner kebab, for example, or a custard cream – was out of bounds. Things needed to be cut up and transferred into the very back of his mouth, bit by bit, with a fork or spoon. Not only that, but because of the misalignment of his upper and lower teeth two of his molars had started to erode as well, and eventually anything chewier than a tender piece of chicken had become