» William Tells
Will Harris gets some; in Dominos Pizza
In hindsight, I think there are three reasons I find myself being snogged by a chav in the Coventry branch of Dominos Pizza. First, I’m still in those grey, post break up doldrums and am willing to consider anything that might shock me back to glorious technicolor. Second, I watched West Side Story last night and my brain is now full of romanticised notions about men from the wrong side of the tracks. And third, I’ve had five pints of festival-strength pear cider. Plus, in my defence, he does have the element of surprise.
When my Kappa-clad bad boy – half Danny Dyer, half a set of teeth – first approached the spot where H and I are waiting for our Mighty Meaty, I automatically assumed I was about to find myself at the gay end of a gay-bashing. We are in the wild West Midlands, after all, where people of my bent are not so much glad to be gay as they are to make it through each successive day without being burnt alive in an enormous wicker armature.
“What I hadn’t expected
was for a total stranger to start kissing me with a ferocity rarely seen outside of Mills & Boon”
So all the time he was shaking our hands, asking our names and saying how smart I looked in my winterwear, inwardly I was bracing myself for the inevitable curl of the lip and the bullet spray of words that followed me like a fanfare during my childhood on these streets. What I hadn’t expected was for a total stranger to launch himself at me and start kissing me with a ferocity rarely seen outside of Mills & Boon novels. At least now I understand where the rest of his teeth went.
When finally we disengage, I am too shocked to do anything. H is too shocked to do anything. The entire staff of Dominos Pizza is too shocked to do anything. I’m serious. They literally stop making pizzas. You could hear a pepperoni drop.
“Are you a hugger mugger?” I ask, eventually.
Then the door to the takeaway bangs open and a young woman stumbles in, mascara streaming down her face like warpaint. That’s when I realise, in this West Side Story my Riff already has a Maria; a dumpy, many-earringed Maria, blotto on vodka and glue.
“Not this again!” she wails, launching herself at my unlikely leading man and clawing cat-like at his collar. In seeking a diversion from my heartbreak, it seems I’ve inadvertently stumbled right into someone else’s. Across the room, I see H clinging on to her potato wedges for dear life.
As we bundle out through the door and into the precinct, pizza boxes hot against our chests, I realise we’re laughing. I’m laughing. And just like that, beside that grey row of shops in that greyest of cities, for the first time in weeks I feel my colour begin to rise.
