Malcolm and Juliet Read Online Free PDF Page A

camera, reached for the remote, and in the familiar privacy of his small bedroom, he made his announcement.
    ‘Hi, it’s me again. Malcolm. Your researcher. I have made a decision. I am going to have a go at this sex thing myself. It seems right that I should. In fact anything less might well be considered unscientific, in the circumstances. I have always been afraid to try, in case I might be a total failure. But the more I hear, the less likely this seems. I mean to say, if someone like Brian can achieve it, apparently without too much difficulty, then really how tricky can it be? And if someone like Kevin can stand naked before the world, his exposed buttocks awash with refracted light from the disturbed dribble of a malfunctioning fountain, and emerge not in shame but instead as some sort of drunken hero, then what is there to be embarrassed about?
    ‘So there you are. Next time you hear from me I will no longer be the ivory tower academic, removed from the real-world complications of his subject matter. No, I will be amongst it, with stories of my own to tell. Teenage sex, don’t go anywhere! Malcolm is on the way over.’
    Malcolm sat down on the end of his bed. Hearing the words out loud that way made it all seem so much more real and, if he was honest, a little bit of apprehension was nestling up beside his excitement. Malcolm was a details man and he knew enough to realise there were still hurdles to sidestep. For instance, a willing partner was a requirement and, as with any experiment, he would need to choose his subject carefully.
    He already had an idea. At the party there had been a girl who was hard not to look at. Charlotte was her name, and that night Malcolm had imagined the two of them alone together, and the image had lingered longer than his consciousness. He had a plan. He would ask to interview her, for the documentary. It would be a good way of raising the topic of sex. And after that, well he supposed he would just ask her outright.
    He had seen enough of the way his peers operated to understand this wasn’t the normal approach, but Malcolm had never had much time for the sloppy complications of normality. No, he was a Scientist, and Science was all about method. This was by far the most sensible, scientific way of doing things.

Movies
    Charlotte knew it wasn’t sensible, but then the best things never were. She knew exactly what she had to do. It had come to her in a moment of clarity, of inspiration even. She spun around in her bedroom, watching the faces of the posters on the wall merge into an heroic blur. Orson, Atom, Quentin, Lars, Alfred, Robert; surely they would understand. Surely they’d all had moments just like this, when the future had reached out and offered its hand. Charlotte spun faster, and the blur became a single grey line of encouragement.
    She had never been in love before. Any number of hopefuls had stood before her and pleaded their cause but years of obsessive movie-watching had gifted her a certain jaded cynicism, and a certain hopeless romanticism too. In the movies this was no contradiction. She knew exactly why they wanted her, those sweaty boys with their cigarette breath. They wanted her because her hair was a certain colour, and her mouth formed a certain shape when she smiled, and it did a certain thing to a certain chemical balance in a certain part of their brains. But that could never do. In the movie of her life, which each day she refined inside her head, Charlotte was altogether a different kind of heroine.
    The man for her would see something more, he would understand something more. He wouldn’t need to be beautiful; Quentin’s eyes after all were far too small and Orson had always been too heavy. Her man would just have to know a few things about plot-line and composition, and the fragile tension between them. He would be the sort of man who could spend a day to frame a single perfect shot, and then work quickly in a rush of adrenalin in the few