In Bed with Jocasta by Richard Glover Read Free Book Online Page B

control his own urinary tract.’
    Finally the jeans dry. I pick up The Space Cadet from after-school care and stumble home, to see my family, standing there at the front door, a picture of warmth.
    ‘Hello, girl,’ says Batboy, with a big, toothy smile.
    ‘Hello, girl,’ says Jocasta, with a kiss.
    The girl is home.

3
    Jocasta decides that our discussion of my
drinking problem needs one more element.
It needs Simon to be involved. Now, Simon is
a good bloke … but he’s also a doctor.

The Girl Magnet
    T he way my parents brought me up has left me with many advantages in life, chief of which is a watertight excuse should I ever snap and become a crazed psychopath. The reasons are too numerous to mention, at least until the judge calls for the submissions on sentencing. But we could start with my childhood wallpaper.
    While most parents decorate their eight-year-old’s room by buying four litres of baby-blue paint and a night lamp, mine decided the room should also have a ‘feature wall’. This involved James Bond wallpaper, complete with a recurring pattern made up of a sports car, a glinting revolver, some quite realistic bullet-holes and a group of semi-naked women — presumably evil Soviet spies.
    In terms of my own psychosexual development, it’s hard to assess the exact impact of the James Bond design, although it did lead to constant dreams in which I was brutally murdered by wallpaper. And, years later, I still find myself strangely anxious in groups, particularly those comprised of half-naked women with Russian accents.
    Of course, as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, feature walls around the country were painted over, and young minds began the slow struggle to regain their equilibrium. Which is when they brought in novelty underpants.
    Novelty underpants were a sort of ‘70s version of the feature wall: while the rest of you would be dressed in fawn, your underpants would be covered with orange geometrics or, worse, actual cartoon characters.
    Again, we can only speculate as to the deep effects on my developing mind, knowing that deep beneath my school uniform, Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone were playing inside my pants. And — just maybe — protecting me from the next attack of the half-naked Russians.
    It was a strange idea, really, the personality jockette, and most men just settled for the Jockette of the Month, which offered twelve new designs each year — a marketing idea which collapsed after it emerged that most men thought you were meant to wear the single pair all month.
    The exotically patterned jockette survived, however, and quickly built a reputation among teenage boys as a real Girl Magnet — with considerable effort being expended, before each date, choosing which one to wear.
    No women, you understand, actually got to see the pattern — at least, not the patterns worn by the sexual no-hopers in my peer group. We must have believed the girls could just tell — that somehow they’d know that beneath our jeans there lurked a pair of red ones. And that, given the subconscious rays being radiated by these, our lucky undies, the girls would be rendered helpless.
    ‘Hey, Liz, look at Richard over there — there’s just something about him that makes me think, I don’t know … red.’
    ‘Yeah, Hanna, I know what you mean — suddenly I know it’s right for me to have his baby.’
    Later in life, we’d discover that a ‘pair of luckies’ was essential to all sorts of events, and not just adolescent dating, including:
    (a) the pay-rise ‘lucky undie’;
    (b) the public speech ‘lucky undie’; and
    (c) the university exam ‘lucky undie’.
    Yet unanswered questions crowd in: if a bloke’s lucky colour is red — and it always seems to be — why doesn’t he just buy two dozen reds, so he can always be encased in a pair of luckies? The answer being (hushed voice):
‘Because they would lose their power, that’s why.’
The lucky undie is a delicate instrument — and must