Huts56

The way that Gillian Ambrose put her head down, into the wind and rain and trudged behind me suggested that I should have a bell around my neck and should be shouting:‘Unclean. Unclean.’ But somehow I felt responsible for her. I tried to show Gillian the best way to get across the burn using the stepping-stones. I was like a guardian angel, with a hard on. But she insisted on going across on her own slipshod fashion and, curiously, managed it without getting one of her feet wet, unlike me.

In fact, as I glanced up at her smug, little pock marked pixie face, looking down at me from the embankment, I felt tricked. She managed it, like a Brummie mountain goat, or the equivalent, of which there was none, for as far as I was concerned, it was all flat caps, flat vowels and flat chests.

I didn’t need to tell Gillian to sshh as we approached my house because, for a girl, she’d said very little. Then she spoiled it by mega phoning out: ‘Where am I sleeping?’

I was sure the curtain moved, but it might just have been the wind blowing through the council houses’ steel window frames.

‘No,’ I said incredulously, ‘I’ll need to sneak you in.’

‘Why?’ she said.

My mouth dropped open like a trap door. She didn’t seem to appreciate that the only people that ever stayed were family, under 10, or over 50, or in a wooden box, with or without breathing holes. Dad wouldn’t even let a goldfish move in.

I didn’t have time to explain all that to her. ‘Just wait here,’ I said, perhaps more forcibly than I should.

My words hurt her. But, perhaps, not hard enough. I heard the scratching of match on box, turned around, and she’d lit a fag.

‘Jesus,’ I said, rushing back, ‘put that out’.

‘No,’ Gillian said simply, and too audibly, cupping the fag in her hand and then smiling defiantly, waving it about like a kid with a sparkler enjoying themselves.

I knew it was going to be a long night. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘my parents are really funny…’

‘So are mine,’ she said coldly, all childish play suddenly gone from her, so that it was like a different person standing there.

I didn’t know what to say, so I carried on with what I’d already said, ‘…they might let you stay with me if you were a man or a nun.’ I looked at her, and had to reconsider how I put it: ‘…a Catholic nun. Or if we were married. But maybe not even then'.

‘But I’m not asking to stay in the same room as you,’ Gillian said, in a perplexed way, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I can sleep on the couch, or on the floor. I don’t really mind’.

I’d been that focussed on getting Gillian into my room and maybe even into my bed, that I hadn’t thought of that.

‘It won’t work,’ I said, trying, desperately, to think of some reason why.

‘Look,’ said Gillian, ‘I’m not that bad am I? I’m not willing to hide and sneak about.’

‘I’m not asking you to do that,’ I said reassuringly, patting her on the hand, ‘just wait here a minute and I’ll sort something out’.

I didn’t wait for her reply. Mum always left the back door open for me coming in from the pub. It saved me losing a key. I heard my mum climbing the stairs and the studied bang of my parent’s bedroom door. Usually, I’d have put the radio on and the cooker and made toast, or, if I was feeling adventurous, toast and cheese, but I stood beside the back door and listened, attuning myself to the creaks and groans of our house. I knew mum would also be listening. So I stomped about a bit and turned the radio on and off and back on again, whizzing through the channels, as if I was looking for something, or nothing. I left the radio on and sneaked back outside.

There was something vulnerable about Gillian Ambrose still standing in the same spot, clutching, all her worldly possessions in her bag, that I felt sorry for her.

‘I’ve sorted it,’ I said, ‘mum and dad are away to bed. So you’ll need to be really quiet.’

‘So’s-not-to-wake-them,’ I quickly added.

‘You haven’t told them. Have you?’ Gillian said. ‘That’s the worst bit of acting since Roger Moore was in that thing’. She looked perplexed with Roger Moore, but she was smiling at me.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘You’ll need to be really quiet’.

‘I can do that,’ said Gillian in an upbeat manner that suggested she could do anything she set her mind to.

But I wasn’t so sure. Dad, especially after a few drinks, could sleep through Hiroshima and ask what happened after Nagasaki, but mum could hear a moth’s wings fluttering in the attic.

I wasn’t really sure if mum heard us coming up the stairs or not. I’m sure she did. But she couldn’t have failed to hear Gillian banging about our toilet. Jesus. Even dad would have heard that. I didn’t know what she was doing. At one point she had that many taps running I was sure she was having a bath. I’d have banged on the door, if I could have.

‘What kept you so long?’ I whispered, listening to my parent’s bedroom door, to hear if it opened.

But Gillian just giggled, and not very quietly. I thought about putting my hand over her mouth. Then I thought of other things. And it was me that was quieted.

I’d never thought of my bedroom as small, but it was filled with the muffled bigness of both of us. Any marks of untidiness had been swept away by my mum, right down to the emptied ashtray beside the hospital corners on my bed. Somehow it seemed alien and familiar.

Gillian squinted at a newspaper clipping on the wall. It showed the Glendevon Cup winners. I’d slipped my shoes off and slid them under the bed to claim it as my own.

‘Which one is you?’ asked Gillian, smiling sympathetically.

My mouth felt as if it was filled with sand. ‘The one with the blue biro around the head’. I sat on the edge of my neatly made bed, and took my wet shirt and socks off, as she peered once more at my football clippings.

‘But I can only see a bit of hair circled,’ she whispered, too loudly, but I’d almost given up caring.

‘Yes. That’s me, at the back,’ I replied.

The bed squeaked as Gillian sat beside me on the bed, pushing up, closer and closer and cuddling in, the heat of her thigh against mine, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and we were the only ones in it. She took my wrist and hand in hers and glided over them, back and forth, in a mesmerising pattern of soft massage. But her attentiveness couldn’t stop my hands shaking. I moved away from her.

I moved her hair to the side and exposed her cute little ear, pushing my lips in close. She sucked in her breath, as if expecting a moist tongue, but it was only whispered words: ‘I’m tired,’ I said, faking a yawn Roger Moore would have been proud of.

‘Ok,’ she said, moving away from me. The space on the bed between us became a canyon.

‘Where do you want me to sleep?’ Gillian whispered.

‘Here,’ I said, patting the bed. ‘You can sleep beneath the blankets and I’ll sleep on top.’

I still had my denims on, but I pushed myself in against the wall and pulled the blankets back for Gillian to get in her side of the bed.

Gillian looked at me, lying with my hands behind my head, as if I was daft, but she just nodded.

‘Where will I put my clothes?’ she asked shyly.

‘Anywhere.’ I whispered.

But there was only my cupboard and that would mean opening doors and banging about.

‘Just stick them on that chair’ I said.

It was an old wooden kitchen chair. Usually, it would have been piled with my junk, but mum had obviously cleared everything off it. Gillian seemed grateful, folding her coat, over the back of it, making a puddle of material on the floor.

‘Turn your back,’ said Gillian, putting her fingers to her lips, as if she was drunk, adding ‘sssshhhh’, to her repertoire and undoing the soft-hued buttons one by one; not looking at them, looking at me as she took off her blouse.

In response, my cock pulsed and leapt in my pants, through my denims, like a fresh water salmon in a clear water loch. I’d never seen a red bra, apart from in magazines, of course, but all my hand shuffling practice no longer mattered. The myriad images of what I’d do when I got the chance overpowered my feeble mind and made my body shake and rattle like an alky with delirium tremens. I turned around to face the wall and give Gillian some privacy.

I didn’t need to turn. My senses were in hyper mode. I seemed to hear every swish of every hair. And I could smell the bloom on top and beneath her perfume, right to the centre of that which made her a woman. Every article of clothing she dropped in the chair, happened in slow motion and was carefully weighed by my mind.

The heat of her body grew closer and closer. I should have turned then. Her soft skin on my back was like a burn. She wrapped her arms around me, feeling the contours on my bared skin, as I’d hoped to, with her. But my rigidity defeated her. She retreated, back, to her side of the bed.

‘Good night,’ she whispered, trying to kiss my neck, but hitting my hair.

‘Night,’ I said, in a muffled reply, searching for the courage to say more, to do more.

Gillian turned away from me then, which was both a release and an agony. She settled herself in a position to find sleep.

I knew I would find none. My cock ticking away time better than any clock.

‘Oh,’ she said, bumping against me, like the female equivalent of Roger Moore, ‘my bra straps digging in to me, do you thing you could get it?’

I turned slowly and found sanctuary in her eyes. She waited. When I didn’t kiss her, she turned slowly, pushing her bum in against my legs.

Gillian’s skin was smooth to the touch as ivory, but I fiddled and fudged with her metal bra strap, like a man with boxer gloves on, trying to undo the Gordian knot.

Gillian reached behind her and undone her bra with one hand. ‘Thanks,’ she said, as if I’d done something, turning leisurely around and lying on her back. She watched me, watching the yellow speckles in her eyes, and then her mouth, as if she was going to say something else, and gradually sinking down; drinking in the sight of her breasts, sitting like two pearly white Tipp-Ex drops.

‘Night’ I said, ducking down, pecking her on the lips, like an elderly matron, and turning to face the wall all in one fluid movement.

Gillian pulled the sheets from under me and wrapped herself in my bedclothes and her bedclothes. I’d a lot of time to think, as I shivered and my cock continued its countdown until dawn. I knew if I’d another chance I’d shag her rotten.

I half turned, just before it was time for us to get up. I sensed that she was looking at me. One of her breasts was poking out, uncovered, but she seemed unconcerned.

Gillian breathed in and out, long deep breaths, which spoke of contentment, as if one of us had slept well. She stretched out kicking the blankets away with her long legs, exposing enough of her little panties to make me think I could see through them.

‘What?’ she finally said, facing me, a lip’s breath away.

‘You breath too loud when you’re sleeping.’ I said.

Gillian was up and out of the bed, with her big legs flashing before me like a pole-vaulter, herding her stuff together and putting her clothes on as she walked out of the bedroom. She banged the door behind her. I’d no idea what I’d tell my mum.