The Cannon (1988)

"Well?"

I looked up. A smug smile played on his lips.

"Eleven and a half."

He coughed.

"Oh, OK. Eleven and five eighths long. Girth, six and a half."

He laughed: "That's all right then: it hasn't shrunk."

I rolled my eyes. He knew bloody well it hadn't shrunk when he asked me to measure it.

We'd been seeing each other for a couple of weeks, but I was still as spiky as the conker cases littering the ground outside college. Every time he touched me, I felt my body tense and harden. My introduction to "The Cannon" was the latest desperate attempt by Johnno to get me into his bed, but the harder he tried, the more my will repelled him.

It had started so well too. I had been walking to the life drawing studio, painfully and self-consciously aware of myself as usual, when I looked up and saw Johnno staring at me: stunning in his US Navy sailor trousers and striped t-shirt. My knees buckled and it felt like all the air had been punched out of my lungs.

Our first date revealed that we liked all the same things: Jimi Hendrix, flared trousers, Kendo Nagasaki... It seemed so perfect; but then the presents started.

Andy was looking out of the painting studio window sniggering and so I went over to see for myself.

"I think those must be for you?" he said, eyebrows raised in disbelief.

Johnno was walking across the carpark; a box set of LPs tucked under his arm, bright yellow 1950s dress in his hand and a huge bunch of pampas grass balanced on his shoulder.

I felt sick. These love tokens, chosen to absolute perfection, were beginning to make me hate him. I only had to mention a passing fancy for something and he would buy it for me. I felt suffocated by his intense longing to please me. This had to stop.

"I'm sorry Johnno. I just can't do this any more."

We were standing outside the dry cleaners on the High Street. Johnno slid down the plate glass window and slumped in a deflated heap on the pavement. He looked up at me with red rimmed eyes and I wanted to scream at him to stop being so fucking pathetic. Instead, I turned on my heel and walked away.

Weeks of misery followed. Johnno would turn up pissed for tutorials and drone on about how much he loved me. He even collared my mum in the library and implored her to persuade me to go back out with him. He followed me everywhere, begging me for sex. Eventually, he approached me in the pub next to college and pleaded with me to give him a blow job.

"All right," I responded, making my voice sound as hard as possible, "but only if you buy me a drink."

I performed this service for him behind the photography studio, but he started sobbing and went limp in my mouth.

Later, I accepted the vodka and orange from his hand, but then walked out of the pub, deliberately leaving it untouched on the table in front of him. A last defiant gesture of my callous and unfeeling perversity.