Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 14.1

One night Sophie kicked me out of bed. I thought she was asleep. I probably should have gone somewhere else, like to the bathroom or something. Big mistake.

"What're you doing," she said suddenly, switching the light on.

"Nothing," I said, reaching under the doona and pulling the waistband of my pyjamas up with one hand. When you're put on the spot like that you can never think of a convincing lie. I should have said I was counting to a thousand with my toes, or rubbing my hands because they were cold. Something at least. "Nothing" is the oldest lie in the book. You might as well just admit you were jacking off.

"You were masturbating," she said.

I'd never heard this word before. "No I wasn't," I said.

"It's normal," she said. "Boys begin to masturbate at age twelve to thirteen." Now she was quoting her women's magazines at me. Jesus. That must have been where she got that word from. You never heard sophisticated words like that back at Crapper.

"I wasn't," I said.

"Yes you were. And it's inappropriate."

"Bet you do it."

I didn't know if girls did it, actually. I wondered what they did it with, I mean, what did they have to grab onto?

"I do not," she said, but her face had gone bright red.

"Ha!" I said.

Sophie was never on the back foot for long though. "Even if I did, I'd do it in private. What were you thinking about anyway?" She sounded slightly curious now.

I had to think about that. What had I been thinking about? Sometimes I thought about Ginger Jane, or Mrs. Death, or Bill's wife, whose blouse I had once looked down as she bent over to fix a chair. I never thought about Sophie. Probably because she looked like a boy, with her flat chest and narrow hips and everything. Poor Sophie.

"Girls," I answered, which was roughly true. I'd actually been thinking about a mish-mash of a whole bunch of different women, all their most exciting bits brought together into one body – a kind of superwoman that pinned me down like a bug and zapped me with her sex powers. I couldn't tell Sophie that though.

"Girls?" she said, suspiciously.

"Yeh."

"Well it's inappropriate." She sure loved that word. "We'll have to sleep in separate beds from now on. You might decide to assault me in the night."

"Why would I do that?"

If anything this seemed to make her angrier. She sat up and glared at me. "Because I'm a girl."

"Oh."

She crossed her arms and looked away miserably.

"It doesn't matter," I said. But you can't explain that something doesn't matter. The more you say something doesn't matter the more it seems to matter. It's exactly like when someone asks you what you're doing and you say nothing.

So I got out of bed, taking care to hide my boner, and went to the cupboard and got a blanket and a pillow. "Sorry," I said to her, but she'd rolled over and was facing the window, and didn't reply.

I went into the spare bedroom, but I couldn't sleep. I suddenly remembered Joe's book. So I went down to the office and got it out of the filing cabinet and came back up to the bedroom. I hadn't looked at it for ages. If I'm going to read something, like a story for example, something has to be happening in it – or at least something has to be going to happen – otherwise I get bored and stop reading. Hearing about James and Elinor falling in love and sharing umbrellas was all a bit of a snooze to be honest. Sophie probably would've liked it. Her magazines were all about people sharing umbrellas and things.

I figured when I picked up the book again it would be about James and Elinor getting married and Joe and Alice growing up and all that crap.

But actually, it wasn't.