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interrupted that she had made her point, so enough already. When Ramsey said nothing to shut her up, he induced the little falling sensation of anticipating resistance and meeting none, like unexpectedly stepping off a curb.
“Having buck teeth in junior high,” she rounded up unsteadily, “must be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb shock. It’s like, what’s going on? Why doesn’t anyone smile at me at checkout anymore? But it won’t be a shock for me. It’ll be, oh that. That again. Teeth.”
“Rubbish. You’ll still be ravishing at seventy-five.”
“Dream on, buddy,” she said with a smile. “But you —you have that telltale face of a boy all the girls were a-swoon over in high school. Grammar school,” she corrected.
“Hate to disappoint you, sunshine, but I didn’t go to no grammar school. Secondary modern. I failed the eleven-plus. I don’t think you lot have it, it’s—”
“I know.” The British had since converted to the “comprehensive” system in most of the UK, but in Ramsey’s day tremulous eleven-yearolds were put through a grueling separation of wheat from chaff, whose results determined whether they went to the grammar schools of the university-bound, or the lowly secondary schools intended to encourage entry into the trades. “That must have been painful.”
“I weren’t fussed, were I? I aimed to be a snooker player. Jesus God, I bunked off school more than I went.”
“Still, I can see it. You were the kind of kid that the eyesores like me would all have hopeless crushes on from the back row, while you went out with the only girl in class who’d had breasts since she was ten.” The image came readily. Maybe it was the Peter Pan effect of playing games all day, but Ramsey still looked adolescent. Even his hair, turning less gray than white, gilded in candlelight to surfer-blond.
“I may have had my options,” he conceded. “But only in hindsight. In them days, girls scared my bollocks off. I’m thirteen, right? A bird named Estelle, what’s a year or two older, takes me to her room and pulls her shirt off. I stare at her Beatles posters—anywhere but at her chest, like— mumble something about snooker practice, and scarper to the push-bike. I hadn’t a monkeys’ what I were meant to do.”
“You left her there, standing in her room, with her shirt off? I bet she loved that.”
“Seem to recollect she never spoke to me again.”
“But you figured it out eventually. What to do.”
“Matter of fact, I ain’t sure I have done.”
“I could steer you toward a few birds-and-bees how-tos, but I should warn you they’re mostly targeted at ages five to eight.”
“To be honest, the most erotic memories of my life ain’t of shagging at all,” he reflected. “I did have a girlfriend in senior school, you was right about that. And she did have breasts, but they was small. Small and perfect. We was inseparable, and I wager the rest of the school assumed we was bonking our brains out. We wasn’t. Denise was tiny, and dark-haired, like you. Quiet. She spent every night she could get away at Rackers, the local snooker club in Clapham, watching me cane fellas twice my age for a fiver a frame. I’d give her the dosh to hold, and my coat, and she knew the signal for ‘the competition’s getting bolshie, so do a runner sharpish.’ She liked to chalk my cue.”
“Sounds metaphorical.”
“Well, there’s something to be said for getting your cue chalked, full stop, and not in any filthy sense. When I cleared up my last frame, I’d walk her home. She’d carry my case. I’d hold her hand. We always walked through Clapham Common and stopped midway at the same bench. We snogged there, for hours. It sounds innocent; I reckon it was. Them kisses, they was so endless, and each one so different . . . I weren’t really busting to do anything else. I didn’t feel cheated. Though best nobody warned me that at sixteen I were experiencing the