Vince and Joy Read Free Page A

virtually impossible to deal with.
    Vince’s underbite, in other words, was not just an aesthetic blight and a total embarrassment; it was also a significant physical disability. Which was why after yearsof treatment and check-ups, the NHS had finally paid for him to have corrective surgery last year. Too late to save his schooldays from being a complete washout, or to do anything about that fact that he was still a virgin at the age of nearly nineteen, but just in time, he supposed, to give him a chance in hell of getting a girl to French kiss him before his twenty-first birthday.
    No girl had wanted to kiss him with the underbite. No girl had even wanted to
talk
to him with an underbite, unless they really had to. And by the time he’d had surgery, he’d left school, hence severing the only contact he ever had with girls.
    The surgery itself had been a nightmare: months of agony, of mouth braces, pureed food and painkillers. He’d made a recluse of himself, unable to face the world looking like Jaws and feeling like a cripple.
    Oh, my goodness,’ his mum had squeaked when the final braces were removed two months ago. Oh, my God, look at you.
Look at you.
Oh, heavens – you look so…
handsome?
    Vince had stared at his new reflection in the mirror and tried to make sense of what he was looking at. He saw hazel eyes in shadowy sockets and he saw the soft wide boxer’s nose he’d inherited from his dead father. And just below the nose he saw a whole load of new stuff: a strong, solid jaw, a full shapely mouth with lips that met and a good-shaped chin. He’d pulled his lips apart and stared in awe at his teeth as the upstairs set finally made the acquaintance of their downstairs neighbours. Then he’d turned his head slightly to view his new profile. His lips had an almost regal curl to them and hisnose now formed the peak of his facial contours, instead of his lower jaw. He no longer looked like a bulldog. He looked like… like…
    ‘You look just like your dad,’ his mum had said, finally peeling her hand away from her mouth. ‘Just like him. It’s… uncanny. It’s like, like…’ Then she’d started crying.
    Vince’s dad, Max, had died on his motorbike when Kirsty was eight and a half months pregnant with Vince. Vince had seen his dad only in photos, a big, strong, long-haired man in jeans and leather who seemed so far removed from him in every way that he’d never even considered the possibility that he might look like him.
    He’d tried to bring Max’s face to his mind in the consulting room that day, tried to mentally superimpose it over his own. But he couldn’t. All he could see was a tall, skinny bloke in a black polo neck with a face that didn’t quite look familiar, an image he would never be able to reconcile with that of his macho, moustachioed dead father.
    Vince had vowed that he wouldn’t go to Hunstanton again after he left school. Last summer was the last time, he’d promised himself. He was booked in for surgery this time last year; had envisaged that come the following summer he’d be far too busy having sex to come back here with his mum and Chris. But it hadn’t quite worked out like that. His social life, if anything, had diminished since the surgery as he’d lost touch with his school friends. And here he was, five days off his nineteenth birthday and stuck on a bunk bed in a damp old caravan with his mum, her husband and a chemical toilet. Still, on the bright side, he’d just bought himself a Sony Discmanand five new CDs, the sun was shining and there was a beautiful girl next door. A really, really beautiful girl.
    All he had to do now was miraculously turn into an interesting, sexy, vibrant and irresistible man whom said beautiful girl might have even the slightest interest in talking to and this experience might turn out OK after all.

Two
     
    ‘Shit,’ said Joy, dashing back into the caravan and fanning her face with her magazine, ‘shit, shit, shit, shit,