Metroland by Julian Barnes Page A

was actually Janet, but Toni had given her a pulp sobriquet partly, I think, because of his tendency to Americanise sex; but officially because, he claimed, he was afraid that if I didn’t finally hurl one past her (as he, not I, would have put it), she might rust up.
    After leaving school, I’d spent a couple of months knocking around with Rusty. She was the local solicitor’s daughter and fulfilled our SST qualifications. (Though in her case, it was more like TSS. She had big tits and was unhappy. Toni deduced with impregnable logic that she was unhappy because, as soon as her tits became larger than her mother’s, her parents gave her a hard time; so she had Suffered; and if you had Suffered, you couldn’t not have Soul.) Janet and I used to lie around in the sun, which I almost enjoyed (though I suspected I would always be oppidan at heart: my cool soul needed to be indoors, like a stick of rhubarb growing best in an upturned chimney-pot). We went for walks and laughed at golfers; we tried learning to smoke; we thought about the capital-F Future. I explained that I was part of the Anger Generation; she asked me if this meant I wasn’t going to take a job; I said I wasn’t sure – you could never tell which way Anger was going to jump; she said she understood.
    Janet/Rusty was the first girl with whom I exchanged kisses of respectable duration; the first, that is, with whom I realised that you were only allowed to breathe through your nose. Initially, it was like being at the dentist’s: you spent all the time hoping that your one operative air-passage wouldn’t clog up before you got out of the chair. Gradually, though, I got my confidence. After that, it felt more like snorkelling.
    I snorkelled a lot with Janet. She was almost the love of part of my life.
    ‘She was almost the love of part of my life.’
    ‘You said.’
    ‘Does it still sound OK?’
    ‘Yeah, it’s OK – wry, if thin-blooded; but I suppose that’s about right. So why didn’t you ever shoot one past Rusty?’
    ‘Why are your metaphors always taken from sport? Scoring, shooting, hurling, hitting a home run. Why do you make it sound so competitive?’
    ‘Because it is, it is. And if you don’t look out, you’ll get relegated. Rusty, I mean, Rusty …’ He did a lost-for-lust face and waved his hands around like a black-and-white minstrel.
    ‘Did you fancy her then?’
    ‘Fancy her? If it hadn’t been for you, I’d …’
    ‘… ’ve scored five goals, three boundaries, two knock-outs, eight home runs and broken the marathon record while you were about it.’
    ‘Pole vault.’
    ‘Javelin.’
    ‘Shot putt.’ He pretended to juggle two monster breasts in his weighed-down palms.
    ‘Hop, step and thump.’
    ‘Why not, Chris?’
    ‘Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you have to.’
    ‘If you can, and you want to, then you ought to.’
    ‘If you do just because you ought to, then you don’t really want to.’
    ‘If you can, and you want to, and you don’t, then you’re queer.’
    ‘It was the man in Rusty I loved.’
    Rusty/Janet and I spent quite some time not undressing each other. Partly it was lack of opportunity, although – as I would argue grandly to myself – the ingenious and the desperate always find some sodden undergrowth, some disc-slipping back seat, or nervous shop doorway flicker-lit by passing cars. But then, I suppose we weren’t desperate, and our ingenuitywas limited to making our parents believe that we didn’t really mind whether we were left alone or not; that way, we were left alone more.
    Sometimes, though, we’d go in for a playful, partial, half-amused investigation of each other. We’d expose a small area of the other’s body – a crescent of breast, a band of belly, a shoulder, a thigh. On the few occasions we undressed totally, there was a sense of let-down afterwards. But it wasn’t, I came to realise later, the sense of frustration at not making love; it was a vaguer feeling,