The Kissing Game. Jean Ure

did you first kiss a girl?”

      “Oh, I can remember that!” chuckled Dad. “That was Jenny Libovitch. We were six years old.”

      Blimey! I am definitely a late developer. I have a lot of catching up to do!

      D is for diarrhoea

      Also known as THE RUNS.

      It comes from fear

      Or from upset tums.

      It is gross and mucky.

      Decidedly yucky.

      And I wish my sister could get it! I wish she would break out into a hideous rash and all her toenails drop off and her hair fall out in great chunks. While we were eating tea, the phone rang and she rushed off to get it. Whenever the phone rings in this house it is almost always for her. She leads this mad social life full of hectic activity. I don’t know how she gets to have so many friends as she is a really quite obnoxious person.

      She came back into the kitchen chanting, “Sally’s got a girlfriend, Sally’s got a girlfriend!”

      I fixed her with this stony look. (This is something I have been practising.) I said, “What are you talking about?”

      She said, “Your girlyfriend! She’s on the phone.”

      I said, “I haven’t got a girlyfriend.”

      “Well, whoever it is,” said Izzy, “it’s a female person and it’s waiting for you.”

      My heart did this battering thing that hearts do when you are agitated. Or maybe it was my hormones starting up. The only girl I could think of was – Lucy!

      It wasn’t Lucy, however, it was Harmony Hynde. Ringing to tell me about cats and dogs. She said, “I suddenly remembered! We’ve got this book at home called Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, so I looked it up. Raining cats and dogs … it’s really interesting! Do you want to hear?”

      I did, sort of, so I said all right, and she said, “I’ll read it to you. Listen! In Northern mythology …”

      It might have been quite instructive if I’d been able to pay attention properly, but my hormones were raging like mad and all I could think was why couldn’t it have been Lucy? Well, and I also found myself wondering what cup size Harmony Hynde was and deciding that she probably wasn’t any cup size at all. I mean, that girl is totally flat. She is like a playing card.

      It’s very bad for the concentration when all you can think of is cup sizes. So the only bit I really got was the last bit, how the cat can be taken as a symbol of pouring rain and the dog as a symbol of strong gusts of wind.

      “My dog is certainly a symbol of that,” said Harmony.

      I held the phone away from my ear and stared at it. Did she mean what I thought she meant?

      “He farts,” said Harmony; and she made this loud trumpeting noise down the phone and laughed this shrill laugh. “My dad says he’s like a wind machine!”

      I was a bit gobsmacked, actually. It’s quite embarrassing when a girl uses a word like that. It’s not what you expect. I mean, I know my sister uses words like that. She uses them all the time. But my sister’s a very crude person. Mum’s always telling her to wash her mouth out. I wouldn’t expect that sort of language from someone that’s a library assistant. Specially not Harmony Hynde.

      “Where did you get my number from, anyway?” I said, sternly.

      Harmony laughed her raucous laugh – she has this really loud, pealing sort of laugh – and told me that I wasn’t exactly hard to find.

      “There’s only one d’Amato in the book!”

      I hadn’t thought of that. I would have done, if she hadn’t gone and confused me. It’s just my brain wasn’t functioning properly. I found this distinctly annoying. So I grunted in a Neanderthal way and told her that as a matter of fact I was in the middle of my tea, and I think the message must have got through as she was off the phone pronto (as my dad would say).

      When I went back to the kitchen Mum was all agog (or is it just gog? It is a very strange word) wanting to know who had rung me. Mum is full of insatiable curiosity. I said, “It was a library assistant explaining my metaphor.”

      There was a silence. Mum blinked, Dad shot me a glance over his glasses. He’s probably never heard of metaphors. I don’t imagine you’d need them, for being a dentist. Then my sister gave this mad cackle and said, “So that’s what you get up to in the library! I might have known it was something disgusting!”

      Are all girls like this? Rude and foul-mouthed? It is a sobering thought. It shows once again how little I know about them.

      Anyway. That was yesterday. Today is Saturday and I went swimming in the morning with Bones. All night long – well, for quite a large part of it – I lay awake having this fantasy of Lucy being there, in a bikini, and of me having to dive in and rescue her from drowning. Instead of which, guess what? Harmony Hynde comes prancing up (in a one-piece bathing suit that makes her look scrawnier than ever. No cup size at all).

      “Salvatore!” she goes. At least she doesn’t call me Sal. I suppose that is a point in her favour. But I do hope she is not going to start dogging my footsteps! I mean, what was she doing at the baths? She’s never been there before.

      “Do you come here often?” she trills.

      “Every Saturday,” says Bones, before I can stop him.

      What a thicko!

      “I’ve only just started,” gushes Harmony. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

      Fortunately she can’t swim very well so we were able to junk her. We left her messing about in the shallow end. Even then she grabbed us on the way out. She seemed to want to be friendly, but I swiftly discouraged it. I explained that me and Bones had things to do.

      As we walked away Bones said, “What’s the matter? Don’t you like her?”

      It’s not that I don’t like her. It’s that she doesn’t do anything for my hormones, and they have to be my priority if I am ever going to catch up with Dad.

      It’s nine o’clock now and my sister has gone to a party. Well, she says it’s a rave but I don’t really see how you can rave on Coca-Cola, which is all she’s allowed to drink. She went off looking like a Christmas tree, all hung about with bits and pieces. She’s always going to parties. I can’t understand how she gets all these invitations. People surely can’t like her? She is quite reasonable-looking, I suppose, but Mum’s Match friend didn’t say anything about her being a charmer. Well, you hardly could, the way she carries on. She has this extremely vicious temper. She threatened to gouge my eyes out the other day all because she caught me eyeing her bra on the washing line. I was only trying to find out what cup size she was! About A minus, I should think. A at the most. But I didn’t get a chance to look properly.

      It is a mystery to me how some people have a social life and others don’t. I don’t have any at all. I just sit in my room dreaming of Lucy. I think I shall resume work on my novel. I have decided what it is going to be about. It is about a cockroach – a low, unlovely form of life, shunned by all and sundry. This is how it is going to start:

       I am a cockroach.

      Mr Mounsey told us in English that it is very important