Am I Right or Am I Right? by Barry Jonsberg Read Free Book Online Page A

the kitchen table and picked at the food.
    I ran through the events of the previous day, with considerable emphasis on the conversation with Jason. To be honest, I indulged in a certain amount of editing. I mean, would you admit to that embarrassing soccer stuff? So I cleaned up the story and recast it to some extent, so that I was a touch more charming and witty, ever so slightly more in control.
    Okay. I told a pack of lies.
    Vanessa listened. At least, I think she listened. She could have fallen asleep, but I don’t think so. She was nibbling on a cracker, slowly. It took ages to disappear. It was like watching the erosion of a sandstone cliff. Vanessa doesn’t eat much, but then again she doesn’t have to. That one cracker would balance out the calories she expends in an average day and still leave room for fat storage.
    I finally finished my little tale, giving prominence to Jason’s physical attractiveness, and waited for Vanessa’s response. I didn’t know what to expect. Vanessa had never shown any interest in boys and I didn’t know if this was to conserve energy or because she genuinely didn’t like them. The most reaction I had ever seen was when she curled a lip fractionally at the football-kicking drongos in the schoolyard. But where she stood on the issue of boy-girl romantic entanglements was a closed book. So I was curious.
    “He’ll want sex,” she said finally.
    “What?”
    “Sex. He’ll want it.”
    “Oh, my God,” I yelled. “You can’t be serious. Sex! Who’d have thought it? Boy meets girl, and the next thing you know sexual attraction is involved. What am I going to do? Get the Mace out! Call the vice squad now! Sex!”
    Mrs. Aldrick poked her head around the door. It was probably the first time she had heard the word
sex
yelled in her kitchen and she wasn’t responding well. But she disappeared quickly.
    Vanessa continued to stare at me. She treated sarcasm the same way she treated a snarling dog. If you ignored it, it generally lost interest and wandered away to urinate on a telephone pole.
    “They’re only interested in one thing,” she said, unembarrassed by her lack of originality.
    “Jason isn’t,” I replied. “He’s interested in soccer as well.”
    Vanessa sniffed.
    “Oh, come on, Nessa,” I said. “You’re behaving like a grandmother.” I was tempted to tell her about the condom-buying geriatric but didn’t think it would go down well. “I mean, what about your whole sixties thing? I thought you were into that era. Well, they invented free love. You couldn’t sit next to someone on a bus in the sixties and not have sex with them. No one got any work done because they were at it continually. Rabbits were feeling sexually inadequate in comparison. Come on!”
    “Just be careful. That’s all I’m saying.”
    To be honest, Vanessa had taken the gloss off my news. I’d wanted a little enthusiasm and now I felt like I had gone to confession and needed to recite two hundred Hail Marys. Even a “That’s nice” would have done. I felt cheated and resentful.
    I made my excuses and left. I hadn’t intended staying long anyway, on the grounds that it was unlikely I’d hear my phone ringing from a distance of half a mile. I plodded home in the blazing sun, but it felt like I had a small black cloud attached. Nothing gets under Vanessa’s skin. She always keeps calm. It’s one of the things that annoys me the most about her.
    The Fridge had gone and hadn’t left a note to say anyone had called. I checked the answering machine. Nothing. I tried the caller ID function on the phone as well and drew a blank.
    It was 2:33 p.m. precisely. No problem. I’d do some reading. There was no point just hanging around waiting for the phone to ring, like a complete loser. I wasn’t one of those sad people who mope, dependent upon others for their state of well-being. No, I was a busy person with demands on my time. Things to see, people to do.
    But what if Jason had lost my