Second coming, yellow glove girl
Exhibit: 78% of UK prime ministers went to public school…
…
He has, of course, fallen in love from a very, very great height. Not just the first love for a girl, but so much more. The relationship has simultaneously given him friends and a sense of belonging to a group. Be-longing – an intense longing that had been in vain for so, so long. This is not just a boy falling in love with a girl. This is not just a relationship with her, but a host of other parallel relationships and needs being met. In less than 4 weeks his internal life has been radically altered. He hasn’t just fallen in love, he has become dangerously imprinted on her. She is his yellow-glove girl.2
This unhealthy psychological state, the consequence of his schooling, means he’s defenceless against manipulation. He is in thrall to his captor, held hostage by his needs. In the short term, however, his besottedness and lack of male machismo means the girls treat him like a gay heterosexual best friend who is in love with someone else. Safe. Utterly safe. This becomes his default persona for many years. He earns their trust by placing them all on pedestals, through discretion and by listening as they share their thoughts with him, feeding his own insatiable appetite for human connection and his need to be needed.
…
1: buy condoms
On the one hand, he is in love with the girl of his (wet) dreams and a lust engorged testicle will, at some point, rupture. Consummating their love will be the high point of his life. He’s just 18 and – well, sex…
On the other hand, he has to buy condoms. Chemists have condoms. But: customer – counter – condoms. OK. Script. “I’ll take these [enter innocuous (cheap) product name], and [a packet of 3; a packet of condoms [(but she, always a she, might ask “how many?”)]; 3 Durex; (what type sir?)]… Plus a copious helping of embarrassment please.”
Followed by: “Shall I put them a brown paper bag sir, or one of our entertaining “I’m planning to have sex soon” logo bags?” Local chemists report being haunted by a young man who never makes eye contact and never buys anything.
Until, finally, he does.
On the other, other, hand, they are planning to have sex and he is terrified.
…
They talk. They cuddle. They love. They feel different, dot dot dot… “Tyres on gravel” has to be one of the most detumescing sounds on the planet. Fuck, fuck, fuck and fuck again, not to mention ex-virginal frenzy as clothes are thrown on edge of panic sets in time to go out as laid back as cool dudes listening to music that has somehow turned their faces the colour of labia…
Later, he is dropped off at school, a school that seems even smaller, even further away, even less important.
It is April. He had had this feeling, the feeling you get when looking up the shear face of the A level temporal cliff. Now the feeling has changed. Whereas previously it went LOOM, from his new, sexually active adult perspective, it can only manage loom.
And everyone else can just fuck off.
Opportunity. Opportunity becomes his central psychological tenet. When and where can they make love again – and again and again? It turns out that “again and again” is doomed to wither on the vine of circumstance. Plagued by parental and educational establishment botrytis, it evolves into “sometimes”. Even a sometimes is a wonderful thing. Another human loves him. And it’s a she who isn’t his mother. He has someone to talk to, to really talk. He is allowed to have feelings, and, as an even greater reward, he is allowed to show feelings. And, sometimes, they are naked…
Whether it is because the school environment no longer encapsulates his entire outlook, because his peers are becoming more mature or simply because he cares significantly less of a fuck, he is slowly being treated as less of a pariah. Or perhaps it’s because “A” levels are starting to soak up more and more cohort emotional energy, leaving less left to use as a cudgel.
- He had acquired a phobia around phone calls. Something to do with the lack of body language potentially making it so much easier for the person on the line to lie and for him to misread situations and make a fool of himself. And that was just with his parents and grandparents. He hated the phobic feeling, the sense that his behaviour was being controlled by something lurking inside his head. In an attempt to cure himself, he wrote scripts that he just delivered as a voice over. Receiver up. “Hello, is that X? [script] Goodbye.” Receiver down. Eventually, after much script reading and writing, he could venture the odd improvisation. It remained, however, something he would try to avoid for years.
- Imprinting is any kind of learning that occurs at a particular age or a particular life stage that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behaviour. Young birds shown yellow rubber washing up gloves at a key moment, for example, would imprint on them, and would follow and try to mate with them as adults. That’s not to say that he later found Marigold gloves irresistible (on the other hand, hygiene is important), but as so many of his needs were so rapidly met at one time in, and via, one individual, he imprinted. His very own yellow glove girl who would henceforth hold him in thrall. The implications of his imprinting were – considerable, locking him irrevocably into a particular behavioural pattern. The dire consequences, by definition, occurred later – and then later still…