Huts70

Maureen Hargreaves followed me up the same road that we’d taken so many different times together- to go to school, to got to the shops, and worse luck of all, to go to work- and we’d never thought anything about it. But I was glad of the wind and the rain. It kept our heads down, and cheeks from burning, and most of all, meant that we didn’t have to talk. I couldn’t think of any thing to say. I started conversations in my head, but they were just stupid. Stupid.

‘It’s cold,’ I finally blurted out, turning round to look at her, but she walked straight on, and caught me a glancing blow with her head, onto my cheek.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Was it sore?’ She brushed my cheek with her gloved hand, and then laughed her little hiccup-laugh, as I stood looking at her, staring, perhaps too long. ‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ I said, smiling back at her.

Maureen’s hand accidentally brushed against mine, then it happened again, and somehow, miraculously, we were holding hands all the way to the bus stop. We skipped and giggled and laughed as if we were five-year olds again, but our eyes met when we got to the bus shelter, and we were instantly more sombre. I kissed her quickly on the lips, smudging and tasting her red lipstick. Her hands framed my face and pulled me in closer.

‘Ahem,’ coughed our neighbour Mrs Bell.

Mrs Bell wore a black hat, to protect her grey nest of coiffured hair from the rain; black overcoat to protect her rotund body and other shorter black coat, in case that was not suffice; a knee-length black skirt and sensible black shoes, in fact, more black clothes that could be found in a funeral parlour’s clothing sale. It was impossible to miss Mrs Bell, or her clothes, which could have stood up themselves, and counted as another person, in the confines of a bus shelter, but somehow we had. But Mrs Bell hadn’t missed us.

Mrs Bell monitored us; peeking out from the tent of her clothes. Maureen and me drifted apart like strangers, waiting for the bus, all our easygoing manner gone, as if it had never happened. When I looked up and caught Mrs Bell’s eyes I felt like asking her how much I had in my pockets, as I fiddled in them for loose change for the bus. And it grew colder and wetter and the wind howled and it felt longer than a back shift and that the bus would never come. We heard the shift of gears and the diesel engine, and then the roof of the Auchenshuggle bus appeared, like a cartoon that was too big to be real for our small roads, on the bend of the brae. We stood behind Mrs Bell as she regally lifted her short corgi-legs up and stepped up and onto the bus. She glanced at the conductor, with his hand taut on the cord, daring him to ring his bell, before she was fully seated.

Maureen jumped onto the bus behind Mrs Bell. But I grabbed at her hand. ‘I’m not going,’ I said.

‘Why,’ she asked, looking at me.

‘I’m just no’ going,’ I said.

‘What you doin?’ said the conductor, unimpressed, ‘on or aff?’

‘Aff,’ said Maureen mimicking the conductor and jumping aff; beside me. ‘What will we do now?’ said Maureen looking at me and smiling.

I didn’t so much kiss her, as nose her, but we were soon slurping from the same spoon. Outside the bus shelter the flickering stain of street lighting, squeaked and strained and it glowed on and off, as the wind battered it into submission. But I couldn’t have cared less if it was shrapnel; my only concern was digging in, and the taste of soft skin between chin and chest. I drew in a fresh breath, for what seemed like the first time, my hands roaming freely, up and under her bra and finally finding the rough aureole and the smooth buds of her breasts.

‘Don’t,’ she panted.

But I’d already pushed her breasts up, out of their cups, and looked down on them with all the sense of wonder at the birth of newborn moons. They were alien, and yet familiar, and tasted of her, and even as they blossomed on my tongue I could not get enough of them.

Enfeebled. My wet clothes chaffed on my dry skin. I drew in another breath.

‘Not here,’ she said.

But I was already there, cloth eared and snake hipped and swaying; missing and hitting and shimming and pushing her upright against the cold bus shelter panels; pushing her upright; pushing her, and kissing her lips and face, like a puppy, that doesn’t know what’s up and what’s down. And telling I loved her. And telling her I loved her.

We walked back down the same road we’d come up. But it was different. The wind and rain tried to separate us, and we were ‘soaked to the skin’, as my mother would have said, but I could only feel the warmth of her hand, as we walked hand in hand, like an old married couple. We stood and kissed again, under the partial shelter of the old turkey oak tree that was dead, but bits of it were still somehow alive; sprouting, gasping out leaves. I fitted into the contours of her body as if I’d been doing it all my life. But I pulled my hips back, not wanting her to feel that I had another hard on, and was some kind of sexual pervert that wanted sex all the time. It was me that separated us, prised us apart.

‘C’mon we’ll go home, get changed and go out to the Horse and Barge for a few drinks,’ I said, part of me already skipping ahead, working out, when I could be inside her. ‘I love you,’ I said, cupping her face and feeling the liberation of my words. ‘I’ve always loved you’.

‘I know,’ she said.

I flashed past mum on the stairs and was in my room and changed quicker than Jesse Owens. I sat on my bed looking out the window and waiting.

‘You want toast and cheese?’ mum shouted up the stairs.

‘No,’ I shouted back, looking out the window, at the cold dark night.

‘Keep your shirt on,’ said mum coming up the stairs, to tell me off, not so much for what I said, but the way I said it; for being rude.

But I didn’t mean it that way. I didn’t know what I meant.