The Kissing Game. Jean Ure

too busy with her classes. Last year she took classes in car maintenance and reflexology. This year it’s vegan cookery and antiques. She keeps making all these gungy dishes like carrot and oatmeal pudding and stuffed cabbage leaves. When she’s not doing that she’s rushing off to car boot sales to look for genuine antique junk.

      I guess it’s no more than you can expect of someone that married a dentist. If she wasn’t weird before, she’s become weird since.

      She’s quite nice; so’s Dad. I don’t dislike them or anything. But I do think they are weird! Bones’s dad is a long-distance lorry driver and his mum works at B&Q. That’s what I call normal.

      It’s why Bones is normal and gets to kiss girls and I don’t. But I intend to! I have made up my mind. I mean this most sincerely! It is my project for this term.

      – to work on getting to know girls better

      – if possible, to acquire an actual girlfriend

      –if I can’t do that, then at least kiss one, preferably Lucy West, but if I can’t get her then I wouldn’t mind Emma Crick or Carrie Pringle.

      – if all else fails I will make do with Nasreen Flynn, though I would rather not kiss one that has already been kissed by Bones.

      By the time I reach Z, I might have kissed them all!

      A, B, C, D

      Here I come!

      Swifter than the wind

      From a polecat’s bum!

      A is for armpit,

      Which smells when you’re hot.

      Specially great hairy ones.

      They smell A LOT.

      You can check whether your armpit smells by holding up your arm and burying your nose in it. Your armpit, I mean. I have done this. I could not detect any odour.

      It is very important not to have odour if you want to kiss a girl. Girls are into cleanliness in a big way. At least, they are if my sister is anything to go by. She spends for ever in the bathroom. Dad gets really mad at her. Sometimes he yells.

      “Have you become a permanent fixture?” he goes. “There are other people in this house besides you, you know!”

      The other morning, at breakfast (after Dad had been yelling) I asked her what she did in there. I wasn’t being nosy; it was serious research. I am trying to learn all I can about girls and their habits.

      My sister gave me this really poisonous look, like I was some kind of noxious bug, and snarled, “Don’t you start!”

      I said that I wasn’t starting. “I just want to know what you do!”

      “Do you really need to ask?” said Dad, fanning the air. “I’m surprised they let you into school smothered in that muck.”

      “It happens to be perfume,” said Iz.

      “Where do you put it?” I said. I like to be clear about these things. “All over? Or just—”

      “Oh, go jump in a bucket!” said Iz. “You get on my tits!”

      She doesn’t have any tits, so I don’t know how I was supposed to have got on them. An ant couldn’t get on her tits, hardly.

      My sister is obviously just as weird as the rest of the family. Yesterday I asked Mum if she thought she was quite normal.

      “Your sister?” she said. She sounded surprised. Like, why would I ask such a thing?

      “I was just wondering,” I said, “if all girls were like her.”

      Mum sighed and said, “Unfortunately.”

      “Why unfortunately?” I said.

      “Well … it’s a phase they go through,” said Mum.

      “All of them?”

      “Most of them.”

      “Like about … how many?”

      “About 99.9%. Why?”

      I explained that I was making a study of them. For some reason Mum seemed to think this was amusing. She said, “And what have you discovered so far?”

      I said, “Well, I’ve discovered that they like to be clean.”

      “Really?” said Mum. “What made you come to that conclusion?”

      “Observation,” I said. “Taking a million hours in the bathroom.”

      Mum laughed. I think it is what is called a hollow laugh.

      “They don’t go into the bathroom to get clean!”

      “So what do they go in there for?” I said. “Just to splosh perfume over themselves?”

      “Oh, more than that,” said Mum. “Far more than that! It’s a total experience … it’s a happening. They look at themselves … all over, from every angle. They agonise over spots and whether their noses are too big or their mouths are too small. They use their dad’s razor to shave their legs – and don’t bother to clean up after themselves. They drench the place in talcum powder. Their mother’s talcum powder. They snip bits off their hair and block the plug hole. They cut their toenails in the hand basin. They varnish their toenails in the hand basin. They drop great blobs of it and ruin the enamel, thus making their mums and dads extremely angry. They—”

      Mum broke off. “What else can I tell you?”

      I said, “Um … well! They do wash a bit, I suppose?”

      “I don’t know about washing. They have hot baths and stay in there for hours on end, wasting water and putting up their parents’ water bills.”

      “It’d make them pretty clean, though,” I said, “wouldn’t it?”

      “It might make their bodies clean,” said Mum. “The state of their bedrooms, on the other hand, leaves a very great deal to be desired!”

      I don’t know why she brought bedrooms into it. She sounded kind of bitter. But at least I have learnt a few more things about girls.

      This afternoon when I got home an old friend of Mum’s from school had arrived. She is staying with us over night. When she was at school she was called Match, as she was extremely thin. She is still called Match even though she is now extremely fat. She and Mum seem to think this is very funny and giggle a lot.

      The fat Match person has not seen me since I was little. She said to Mum, “My! Hasn’t Sal shot up? He’ll be quite a lady killer when he’s filled out.”

      “You reckon?” said Mum.

      “Oh, yes,” trills the fat Match. “He’s going to be a real charmer!”

      My sister was there and she made this loud vomiting noise. As far as she is concerned, I am just something that has been brought into the house on the bottom of a shoe. Any feeling of triumph I may have had, however, was short-lived. The next thing to come out of this person’s lips completely destroyed me.

      “He looks such a nice young lad!”

      To which my sister went, “Hah!”

      This is extremely disturbing. I don’t want to look like a nice young lad! I want to look sultry and degenerate.

      I am still worried that I may be gay and not know it. Kelvin Clegg keeps referring to me as Sally Tomato. Even Bonesy sniggers.

      B stands for boob and also for breast.

      As