She stripped off her dress and lay alone in the cottage. All day she’d been soaked in words and gestures, pre-oven-prepared like Neill’s roulade, and her bottom now chafing the couch where they’d all sat, she imagined them - whether she wanted to or not - sitting there now. Watching her, calling her cute, saying how much Neill likes and adores her. Claire cooing like a woodpigeon, Monica smiling like a L’Oreal poster and Ed cracking stupid moist jokes, ‘Miss Virgin no more!’ and Justin just standing somewhere whilst Neill grabbed and groped and fondled and devoured her, one big mouth, cock, hand, thigh and voice all at once, sizzled like a scallop on his pan or a steak under his hammer.
‘Fuck her! Put a baby right in there, Rich, and make her look just like me!’ says Monica, as they all look adoringly down on her, fag fed into in her mouth. ‘Open wide! Aww, she makes us feel like teenagers again!’
Shit, did that count as three? She twisted her neck round to the cream clock. Only 11, an hour till Neill said he’d be home, whilst her free hand flicked the channel to E4. Ah - the makeover programme - she wondered how Coleman’s application was doing. ‘I’ll probably pork her when I see the results.’ Whoops, slip of the hand! Not fair, she thought. There’s no way that counts as a third. How could Neill prescribe only three and how can she be even following these rules?
She had another four out of indignation. Now she really was like the Thames on the painting. Good job he doesn’t check her knickers.
Two makeovers later, 1am and no Neill.
Now she is floating through Oulton Hall clutching a report card in the same shade of Neill’s bright red boxers. Next thing she knows, she’s being picked up by the armpits and her arm is being wrenched from her knickers.
‘Let’s get that out of there, shall we. Come on—’ A heave onto a fireman’s shoulder. ‘Let’s get you to bed…’
Hauled up by that familiar groan of Neill smelling of smoke and town, she blinks confused in the dark of the living room, to see a familiar heart-shaped face and blonde bangs, slumped groaning in the single chair.
‘Claire?’
‘Yes, don’t worry, she’s fine.’
‘What time is it?’ she whispers as they rise up the dark cool stairs.
‘Must be three by now.’
She is plonked into Neill’s sheets, whispering, ‘what’s happened? What’s—’
‘Crazy night. Tell you in the morning. Need to go get Claire sorted. Couldn’t have her in here.’
The door promptly closes and shortly she can hear murmurings of female retching and deep male placations, half wondering whether he’ll come in shortly with popcorn for his requested triorgasmic performance at three o’clock itself? Weary floorboard creaks up to the attic confirmed the show must be cancelled, for it must be past 4am now, and the drowsiness dawn brings, winds her down into deep, delayed sleep.
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*
She came out of the bedroom tying Neill’s robe, just as he was jogging to the top of the stairs in navy t-shirt and jeans, sweeping her into a gentle hug.
‘Good morning! Sleep well?’
‘Yeah, yeah! Is… everything ok?’
‘Yes. Go take a shower. I’m just taking Claire off back to her hotel and I’ll drop by Waitrose on the way back. Are you going to have a Sunday roast with me today?’
‘Yes! I’d love to. I never have them…’
‘Sacrilege! Sundays are always for a roast. Have you texted or spoken to your mum?’
‘No. I need to charge my phone. And find it first…’
Washing her hair in Garnier Ultimate Blends, in merry mutiny of her mother (‘a shampoo I’d never buy when for the price you can get four bottles of Albert’s Bal-slam!’) her mouth watered at how sacrilegiously full her stomach will shortly be of Neill’s Sunday roast, which she guessed wouldn’t involve a convenience tin or packet in sight.
Towel-wrapped, creaking into Neill’s bedroom, she wondered if he owned a hairdryer, having hair longer than most men. Or rather, she wondered if the pursuit was a good enough excuse to put her fingers to the brass handle of the first drawer of his dresser, pull it open and let her fingers fall inquisitively to cool swathes of pants in blues and maroons, a hundred laundered crotches waiting for their turn to twitch alive.
Then she peeped inside his wardrobe where she sighed in soft awe at the line of twenty Neills that had saved and entertained her since October. She pulled each hanger delicately to examine and sniff every shirt and jacket suit, recognising every time in school she’d seen him in each of the blue, the purple, the ivory; turning over his silk ties in her hand, to see Dolce & Gabbana, Dior, Fendi, Mulberry. She recognised the shirt she’d cried against in the bike shed, its thin purple lines that she’d smeared tears down like notes on a music sheet and felt guilty and excited about all at once, because she couldn’t believe her tears were on him, on Mr Neill of all people.
Trousers all ironed and folded and hung probably by his doting cleaner. She ran her fingers along the waist hem on one brown pair and then, feeling mischievously ridiculous for a moment, rooted her lips right into it, her head in the wardrobe like she was looking for Narnia right in his fly, before she pulled herself out again quickly. Back to what she was looking for… blindly pulling open another drawer to an assortment of objects, she prised open a small jewellery box with an innocent hum as though it could possibly hold a hairdryer.
Round gold cufflinks - gift from a wife? - and then, at the bottom of a sock sea of Pringle and Calvin Klein, her fingers fell on a tiny plastic sleeve stuffed with passport-sized pictures of three different Neills, short-haired, slim-necked, bearded, oh my… and one, right at the back of the pile, a chiselled Neill squashed into a booth with a lady of long red frizz, pale oval face, narrow nose like a droplet… Rose it must be, the pre-Raphaelite wife, she gazed at for a whole minute, till her fingers warmed and loosened another photo stuck behind it: the two of them with mouths and noses smooshed against each other.
She hurriedly stuffed and slammed it all away, her scalp growing hot as though she’d found in the end, something that dried her hair after all.
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Sitting in the silence of Neill’s kitchen, all for the ding of her spoon in her deep white bowl of Cheerios, in time with the tick-tock of the rustic clock, her feet brushing against the stone floor as her eyes ran along the Rose-tinted pipes on the walls. He insists he didn’t love either of his wives. She wondered what made him stay with her for five years and smoosh her face in photo booths. And then there was all the negativity she heard about Ed and his woman Andrea. What makes adults cling to someone they don’t like? As though it was against their will, like being a pupil at school again? She was going back there tomorrow, but if she had a choice, she would drive a million miles the other way. Why didn’t adults do that? Of course, ‘free spirit’ Neill eventually did ‘fuck off and live his own life,’ and this supposedly despicable thing was what she admired about him, that he shunned his spouses - seemingly the root of all the problems the characters moaned about in Corrie and Emmerdale that her mum would idly watch with a look on her face that seemed to confirm their mundane truth.
The front door creaked open and she stood up quickly, as though Neill rustling his way through with Waitrose bags was some kind of royalty.
‘Hey!’ Out of breath, as though he’d ran down the dual carriageway home, he eyed her curiously. ‘Are you ok?’
‘Yeah, yes! Would you like tea?’
‘No thank you. I need something a little stronger,’ as he pulled out his cafetière, flicked the kettle and turned back to her. ‘You look lovely,’ he nodded at her chequered dress.
‘Oh, this is the same as what I wore on my birthday.’
‘I know. You’ve run out of dresses?’ he smiled.
‘Yee-ah.’
‘Ahh,’ he beamed, ‘you really should have a boyfriend to buy you more.’
She damned her face for flushing so unnecessarily.
‘So dare I ask what happened last night?’ she asked as he turned away to pour his coffee.
‘Claire overdid it,’ he sighed, ‘which isn’t a surprise. But she really overdid it, and made Ed look like Mother Theresa. Then she smoked a joint which made her sick after so much wine, and ended up on a tirade against Ed for all his jibes over the years. She even lashed out at Monica.’
‘Oh, my god…’
‘Yes. Not good at all. I brought her back here because of how embarrassing it would have been for them getting her in and out of a taxi to Oulton Hall, and because we were genuinely worried she’d need A&E. Stuffed her in my car, funnelled water down her neck - it’s all wet in there but by some mercy she didn’t vomit.’ He turned and sipped gingerly from a steaming mug. ‘So how many did you have?’
‘Huh? I don’t drink.’
He raised his eyebrows, pupils fixed on her.
‘Three,’ she eventually blinked.
‘Three?’
‘Is… the time you came home. After I laid flicking through many… TV programmes.’
‘You’re awfully bad at lying,’ he sighed, turning out the shopping bags onto the worktop and running his hand over a plump chicken carcass. ‘But right now I need to shove my hand up this chicken’s crack to find the giblets. Or would you like to do it as penance?’
‘No way,’ she shrunk to the counter corner, crossing her feet. ‘It’s only 11.30, isn’t it a bit early for lunch?’
‘Oh, this will take a few hours,’ as he cranked up the oven fan and pulled out a large bowl. ‘Here. You can get peeling the spuds.’
He tumbled out a bag of potatoes onto the table and tossed a peeler as she sat down to begin, her eyes wandering awkwardly to his giblet-removal and stuffing operation. He turned, mid-prodding sage wrist-deep, and nodded:
‘You’re getting peel on the floor.’
‘Oh - whoops,’ she laughed, collecting the bits together with her toe.
‘And you’re leaving skin on the potatoes,’ he pointed a glistening herby finger. ‘Peel them completely, please. Doesn’t Mrs Clayton teach you anything?’
‘Stop it, Mr Bossy. So, what got Claire so mad last night?’
‘I think she was triggered by this whole weekend. Drunk mind speaks a sober heart, or as they say in Latin: in vino, veritas.’
‘More triggered than you were on Friday night?’
‘Not by booze alone, but a ghastly game and a sager young bird than the one I have here. That said, all three triggered her too.’
He glanced to her. ‘That’s why it was best she didn’t see you this morning. She’d miss her train if she started bawling all over again about letting men take advantage of her in her teenage years…’
‘Oh. Well I know nothing of those kind of men.’
‘Quite. She said that at 16 she slept with men she wishes she didn’t,’ he sighed as he massaged oil all over the skin. ‘So I suspect seeing a 19-year-old virgin getting her face snogged off by the dozen-man-libido Head louse, threw her some new - although not altogether accurate - perspective.’
‘Head louse! Sorry, shouldn’t laugh. Well, I’m glad you got her sorted in the end.’
‘I don’t reckon we’ll be seeing them again up North in a hurry, unless Ed comes for golf. Claire’s head and liver - and by the sounds of it her vagina, will be hanging in shame for a bit, and once Monica has her kid she’ll have her hands full. And that’s just keeping the reigns on Justin.’
‘Oh, that’s something that confused me. When Monica and Justin were talking about their sex life, I thought you’d find that funny. But you just got cross.’
‘That was Ed’s comment about the sexless life of parents,’ as he unravelled a roll of foil.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because to be reminded that bearing progeny - necessary to continue’s one’s legacy - is synonymous with the wane of the main reason to be alive, it feels like doom itself falling on my ears, deader than this chicken.’
He slid it into the oven and banged shut the door.
‘How would you know what it’s like to have a child until you do?’
‘I haven’t met anyone I’ve wanted to take that risk with.’ He nodded down. ‘Don’t chop the potatoes twice. Just once down the middle. Then put them into this boiling water.’
He slapped a pan on the stove and took up the kettle, just as his phone tail-spinned in vibration on the table.
He snatched it up. ‘Joan. Seems she’s texted a few times. Sorry, I’d better take this—’
‘Sure, sure…’
‘In five minutes, drain those spuds with a colander,’ he pointed, ‘pull out the hot tray from the oven and load them on, straight into the hot fat, that’s the secret to a perfect roast potato!’ - she nodded back wide-eyed - as he finally jabbed his phone with a ‘hi, Joan darling—’ and with a scrape back of the door bolt, his work-voice trailed into the garden.
She couldn’t find the colander, used a sieve instead, dropped two potatoes on the floor, hurriedly teatowelled the floor, pulled out the tray from the oven, dropped another potato loading them on, wiped the floor again, and slammed the oven door back just as he returned.
‘Didn’t you use the oven gloves?’ he frowned. ‘We don’t want to be going to A&E with you either…’
‘Oh, it was fine, I’m used to using tea towels in my house. Holey ones, actually,’ she grinned.
He set the timer. ‘We’ll turn the spuds every 30 minutes and give the chicken a basting at least twice.’
‘Basting? I remember the word from Santa, but…’
He stood and looked at her. ‘It’s what I would have done to you over Monica’s bed if you hadn’t done as I asked.’
‘Oh.’ She digested that frowning. ‘So… is everything ok with Joan?’
He groaned as he flipped open his fags. ‘She’s back from Norwich, and her priority is to tell me there’s a video of the candy jar sex toy from the Valentine fair online.’
‘Oh, shit!’
‘Obviously because it’s been half term I hadn’t chased Dean or Jenny for their footage. I daren’t even look at what views and comments it’s had.’
‘How did Joan even find out?’
‘Mrs Tracey saw it. Joan’s worried Phil will see it if we don’t get it pulled quick.’ He sighed. ‘All I want to do is relax with a Sunday roast and your tongue for dessert.’
He stepped toward her, unlit fag hanging from his lips, and brought up his hands to lightly clasp her face.
‘Leave it till tomorrow?’ Her eyes blinked rapidly like the arms of a swimmer who’d otherwise drown in the piercing blue irises right upon her. ‘Turn your phone off like mine’s been?’ she faintly smiled.
‘Good idea.’ His whole face beamed as though she had said something most revolutionary or redeeming, and now pulling her hand aloft, with a sudden gentlemanly flourish, swept her out onto the terrace.
‘Come! The sun’s made an appearance!’ as they strolled together down past the shed, toward a splash of spring sunlight hitting the spiny bushes, as a chorus of birds chirruped from the willows ahead and a soft breeze blew over them, and it seemed like spring had literally just stuck out its head for the first time at that very moment.
‘I see you scrutinising my defunct plants like the baskets on the pub terrace,’ he leaned against the wall, clicking his lighter.
‘What’s that one?’
‘That’s a redcurrant bush. Whitecurrant next to it. All planted by the last person who lived here obviously. Will be delicious once they fruit in June and July.’
He motioned them further down the garden. ‘These are rose bushes,’ he pointed with a trail of smoke. ‘And raspberries. Autumn fruiting. They were in full pelt round about when I first started at Thornwood.’
‘Our garden has nothing growing in it but weeds.’
‘Shame. I like to grow tomatoes like we did when I was a kid. Peas, spinach, carrots, whatever doesn’t need much help, as I’m always so busy. I’m looking forward to getting started,’ he gazed up at the sky. ‘Spring seems to takes longer up North.’
‘Mary Lennox didn’t complain. Yorkshire brought her and the crippled boy back to life again.’
‘Oh, The Secret Garden.’
‘Secret Harden,’ she added.
‘Hmh. Very apt.’ He gestured her to sit down with him at a weather-worn metal table and offered his fag. She smiled politely as she took it to her lips.
‘You’ve done something to my cock.’
She coughed. ‘What?!’
‘When you did that morse code on it or whatever,’ frowning as he took the fag back. ‘It’s not been the same since.’
‘Morse code?’
‘It’s just… hmm. He’s not himself.’
‘Are you really talking about your… willy, as though it were a sick pet?’
‘Yes, and you’re the problem,’ he rapped.
‘Oh? I barely touched it.’
‘Exactly. You were tapping it like it was a fucking magician’s wand. And now it’s under a sort of spell like a dog’s nose twitching in its sleep. You’ve literally turned me into Mr Twitch.’
After a peal of laughter she looked hesitatingly to the neighbouring wall. ‘Do we need to keep it down?’
‘Reckon we’d need a ship’s battle ropes. Do you know what a morning glory is?’
‘Erm—’
‘What you saw on the couch yesterday,’ he puffed sharply. ‘You cured it of brewer’s droop to the proportions it normally goes to, like clockwork most mornings I’m not sloshed. But this morning, Natalia, thank heavens I’d confined the madman to the attic quarters. It crossed my mind at 5am I could go give you a hug, claim the threepence you owe Virginia and I, so to speak, then fall asleep with you both. But I think if I did, the bed wouldn’t be the only virgin I’m asleep inside of. My cock was the size of that cactus,’ he nodded to the kitchen window, ‘and the cherries of both you and Virginia would be speared on its spines before I could even wake to stop him.’
A breeze picked up from the trees and blew her hair around her mixed expression of disbelief and hilarity. ‘I’m… speechless,’ she sighed.
‘Well, you did say I keep certain women in my life in order to shut them up. But with you I come to expect a bit more of a challenge.’
She shivered and laughed at once.
‘Cold?’ He stubbed the fag end against the wall. ‘Shall we head in for hot tea to get you going again? We could try the Rooibos we picked up from Borough.’
‘Sure.’
He shut up the kitchen door as she filled the kettle at the sink, averting her eyes from the cactus as she asked:
‘So are you glad you invited your friends up, and not just for a challenge to shut them up? Was it a trigger-happy ending?’
‘Ah!’ as he rummaged for the teabags, ‘so I was thinking about that comment. On how contemptibly I treat the women in my life—’
‘I didn’t say that,’ she laughed.
‘Interestingly last night, before Claire went off the rails of course, I felt like I enjoyed the girls. I felt as though listening to them talk is rather like watching… a fountain flow,’ he mused, as the kettle bubbled and Natalia lifted to pour it. ‘But one where I don’t wish to get too close, or drink the water, for you don’t know what’s in it,’ as he watched the water turn brown upon the teabags. ‘There might be sewage, or—’
‘Funny metaphor.’
‘No, it’s a simile. I said like a fountain. Or, perhaps, it’s like watching kids open up a toy box, picking and throwing things around whilst one watches, smiling and grunting…’
‘And has to clean up afterwards?’
‘Yes,’ as he teatowelled a splash of water round the kettle. ‘There comes a consequence, accompanied by parental revulsion, where one wishes to withdraw and restore order again - or in the case, of the fountain - watch dry up again.’
‘And I take it that’s Joan too,’ as she took out the milk.
‘Ah, now with Joan, it’s the same kind of thing, but because there’s a romantic connection, the analogy is more like… sand,’ he mused, watching her open the jar of brown sugar. ‘An irritation that gets into my shoes, and into my eyes, and into my pants, and to get rid of it, I have to… take off my pants, and shake it out of me. Back into her.’
‘Hmm.’ She finished stirring the teas, and carried them into the lounge where they sat down opposite each other.
‘So, Monica is a fountain of contaminated water, Claire’s a kid throwing her toys out of the pram, and Joan is… the Sandman, blinding and throwing you to your ego death, where…’
‘Go on,’ as they raised their mug rims in tandem.
‘Well, you insert your climactic vulgarity here.’
‘Interesting way to put it.’
‘Huh… oh!’
‘Needs more detail though, so you’re not quite there.’
‘And what would your literary masterpiece be?’
‘Something like… God, this tastes like shit!’
‘Does she really?’ she laughed.
‘Not something I would know about,’ he grimaced, placing the mug back on the table.
‘Do you want to try mine, it’s sweeter. My tea, I mean—’
‘I saw you put three sugars in. Filth, girl. Pass it here—’ Upon trying hers, his face brightened. ‘Turns out I like rooibos,’ as he passed it back. ‘Take mine and put your three spoons of filth into it.’
She jumped up to fetch the sugar jar.
‘Only thing is it’s making my throat feel funny,’ he lamented as she returned. ‘And that’s something Joan does know about.’
‘So how do you choose when to…’ as she sat down, ‘shag her, or do something else? Put… it, somewhere else?’
‘It?’
‘Your… you know.’
‘Come on Natalia. Do I have to phone up Mr Khan to check he’s teaching you the body parts? Don’t they tell you those in primary school?’
‘Your dick,’ she glared cynically.
‘Goodness. Khan’s getting some street cred. Do you want to climb into my lap and tap it again like some sort of ancient Chinese ritual whilst we chant the different slang for it all together?’
She blinked toward his crotch.
‘You would, wouldn’t you?’
‘Stop it,’ she smirked. ‘Back to coh…tok… topic!’
He chortled. ‘Now give me the whole question again please, in a full sentence as Mrs Coleman would ask it.’
‘God,’ she huffed, then began: ‘So… how do you decide what to do to her, with your… clockwork orange, tap-it-and-unwrap-it… morning knicker-bocker-bollocking-glory, king cactus cock?’
‘Top of the class!’ he guffawed. ‘It’s a very good question. And the answer depends on what brand of bullshit the daft cow’s been spewing an hour before—’
Her face screwed. ‘Now that’s contemptible.’
‘You’re right, you’re right. What tiresome pedagogical tripe the irascible harpy had been earlier imposing on me, whom she seems to think is gagging for a dose of Harrogate Grammar like a vial of elixir she’ll drip onto the working class swamp of Thornwood… when instead, she kneels down for a different kind of vile drip, making her own face into the swamp she thought she was superior to.’
She stared.
‘So basically, if I want to shame her, onto the face it goes. She doesn’t even deserve it up her cunt.’
‘You… baste her face?’
‘Precisely. I can run the whole lot all over her,’ he went into a reflective stare as if musing on a line of Keats poetry, ‘and watch her become the living swamp creature. I could do with about three more Headmasters really,’ he sighed, ‘all like me, equally beleaguered and pissed off… pissing, as well as ejaculating, over her in a bukkake. A word you learnt from your Headmaster and have already used in conversation, so very well, hm? B-u-k-k-a-k-e, by the way.’
‘Oh… thanks.’
‘So does that alter or worsen what you know of me?’
‘Worsens it.’
‘Really?’ He looked concerned.
‘I’m joking. It’s just… very coarse isn’t it.’
‘Don’t try be like Joan for fuck’s sake. Coarseness for horses, middle-class-apeing fillies like her, is the perfect antidote, yang for her yin,’ as he swirled his tea mug as though it was brandy. ‘You’d rather be here hearing the Head’s harangue than holed up at home turning the pages of Jane Eyre with your wanky weasel fingers, n’est ce pas?’
‘And yet you remind me of Rochester,’ she pondered. ‘‘To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts; all flatness, triviality.’’
‘Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel so bad talking contemptibly about women. After two marriages and all these years trying to hammer myself into long-term monogamy, always feeling guilty in the back of my head for running riot, for running away, and still doing that now, with Joan… perhaps, I’m just a bachelor at heart. Destined to be as alone as Claire will be, and Ed, probably,’ he chuckled. ‘Maybe there’s a teenager in me, that would prefer to just… talk over tea to one.’
‘Why do you want her as a pretend girlfriend then?’
‘Why do you agree to be one?’
‘That’s a bit unfair, isn’t it,’ she mused. ‘What girl with a drunk mum from Gipton would refuse her Headmaster offering to sweep her away to glamorous places and shower her with… grooming products?’
‘Oh, so… you’d do this with anyone?’
She frowned. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that—’
‘If Mr Neary had fired the fucktards, and had you round to share his meat and veg, would you have repaid him with the same cutesy attention to hear what he does with his own meat and two veg?’
‘No, no way! Not with anyone else!’ she stared earnestly.
‘And to whom else could I tell the truth,’ he blinked back, ‘that I don’t like women? I couldn’t tell Joan that, could I? No, there’s certain acceptable currencies of conversation and manner with her, and with all women, that if I don’t duly conform to, I will fail to get into their pants, and defy the only reason I’m interested in them in the first place.’
‘You’re… hilarious,’ she bit her lip softly.
‘Am I?’ He looked bemused. ‘See, that’s what I like about you. Someone intelligent finds my sexitragicomedy life funny, so I can’t be too bad. Or maybe you’re too young to be offended. Write down what I said, give it five years and you’ll read it gurning. Male chauvinist pig!’
‘Hmph,’ she stared into her tea. ‘But you play the age card inconsistently. One minute I’m your sincere and pure, Raphaelic imprint of nose hairs, and the next, I’m as green and insignificant as something that gets trapped in them.’
‘That’s… snot true.’
She narrowed her eyes.
‘The answer to your astute denunciation of my hypocrisy is simply my conscience, Natalia. It’s sod’s law for me that I spend my life looking for my dream woman and I find her in Miss Oliver Twist at a council estate school, forbidden to me by the long arm of the law, yet about as deserved by me as would be an outstanding Ofsted rating after I paid to get her boy enemies beaten up, and bribed her with bags of sweets and a new phone to let me grope her bottom in my cottage kitchen.’
Her heart flared on the compliment, but those last smug words struck her stomach hollow, as her eyes fell to the fire grate with a rib-throb of indignation.
‘Um, I think you’re being a bit hard on yourself,’ still frowning down, ‘and on me. I’m not the Oliver, bloody Twist joke anymore and I don’t take material grope bribes…’
He gritted his teeth. ‘Insulting myself ended up insulting you. I’m sorry.’
There was a silence.
‘Maybe what you are doing with me isn’t right, I know that, but…’ she shrugged, ‘what I do know is that if I’d seen you in the office only that one time - just that one time you asked me why I truant - and I’d never seen you again, I’d… remember you, forever. You have guts. You have gall, like no-one else.’
She took in the sight of his flailing fish of a mouth, not dissimilar to how he looked after she kissed him in Truth or Dare - just as the oven beep went off.
‘Ah!’ He blinked up and smiled. ‘Poultry excuse to adjourn,’ as they arose.
‘Is this where you come all over the chicken?’
‘Well you’re going to be steaming the beans, and I’m going to be rising the Yorkshire puds. I guess you’ll find out whether I’m a leg or a breast man!’
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*
Soon the chicken was carved, gravy poured, and cutlery clinked as they settled at the table with genial mms and aahs; Neill’s adjoining commentary on meat succulence, his Sunday meals growing up, their candid tea talk now curtailed by smiling, innocuous pleasantries, stored silently with a knowing remembrance in their eyes between her sips of orange juice and his quaffs of red wine.
‘So you’re both a leg and a breast man,’ she eyed his plate, which had been piled up with half the chicken carcass, now demolished.
‘Of course. So, back to the grindstone tomorrow! Are you looking forward to school?’
‘Nope.’
‘Last week I saw your application for Our Lady College. Do you want to go to university?’
‘Dunno if my mum would afford it.’
‘If she’s poor enough then you wouldn’t have to pay anything, and a student loan covers the rest.’
‘Dunno. I can’t even think as far as exams let alone uni.’
‘Goodness. This roast was better prepared than you are. Although I can’t talk,’ he sighed, raising his glass. ‘Here I am as your Headmaster keeping you from a weekend you should have spent revising to bring up that measly predicted B you have for Maths. Your pretend girlfriend role might expire once you go home tonight but I think I might have to extend your wanking ban to make up for all these jollities—’
‘No fucking way!’
He chortled. ‘You think I don’t have the power?’
‘Once I’m home I have 100% power,’ she swigged her juice cockily.
‘Just like your phone? Did you find it?’
‘Oh yeah. It should be full, it’s been turned off whilst charging.’
She disappeared into the lounge as Neill cleared the plates.
‘…Oh my god! Ten missed calls from my mum. Seven texts…’
‘Jesus. What did she say?’
He came over as she shielded her screen.
‘It’s fine, it’s just… God, so embarrassing. She’s moaning about the cat and… fuck’s sake, I already told her I’m away till Sunday…’
‘I’d better take you home.’
‘But I wanted to watch another film with you!’
He sighed. ‘Call her, and tell her you’ll be back by five. Let’s hope she doesn’t take a new fancy to calling the police. But let her know I have the perfect kitchen table to bend and wallop your bottom over to save her the need from doing it.’
‘Shut up,’ she said, going red. ‘I’ll just text. What have you got for dessert?’
‘You, Natalia. You are my Sundae.’
‘And for me?’
‘I picked up a pair of choix buns. After you scrape your plate properly and stick it in the dishwasher. Cups go upside down, you council estate novice. I need to go change out of these jeans. I’ll be far too stiff laying for a film in them.’
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Ten minutes later, she stood flicking through films, choix bun at her mouth. Neill, in lounge bottoms and long sleeved shirt, arose from the now roaring fireplace.
‘You’ve got cream round your mouth. Right there—’
She ducked from his hand, laughing. ‘You can go eat the other one!’
‘My throat still feels scratchy so I’m swerving the sugar. You can have it.’
He yanked the remote from her. ‘Not that cheesy stuff, you rascal. Pick a lewd 18, at least—’
He brought up a section of seedy 80s thrillers, handed the remote to her, then laid his body upon the main couch with a loud exhale, cocking his ankles over each other and monopolising most of the area.
‘So where do I sit?’
‘Right here, up beside me—’ he shuffled an inch inwards and patted the edge. ‘Put your bottom right here. Lady Chatterley’s Lover… an ok choice,’ as he brought up his arm for her to snuggle under with excited familiarity. ‘Bit of D.H. Lawrence for your literature mind. Film’s a bit wet at times and I don’t even mean like that. Right, ready?’
The dramatic violins of a grainy 1982 film began with curly font credits over a huge manor house at dusk.
He tossed the remote and his hand went straight to her bottom.
‘Oh! Talk about bad manors,’ she laughed.
‘This weekend has established it’s my new territory, correct?’
‘Ohh, of course…’
‘Maybe because my friends have gone home, technically I shouldn’t touch your bottom anymore,’ just as his hand yanked up her chequered dress, and now smoothed a palm upon on the fabric of her purple tights.
‘Yeah, that’s true isn’t it,’ she laughed softly.
‘But unfortunately this cottage is so small, there’s nowhere else for it to go. Besides, with the speed of these eighties films, and my tiredness creeping on, if I keep both my hands somewhere on you then you’ll be a sort of wankometer to wake me up for the good bits.’
‘Is that a grope bribe?’
‘No, just a win-win.’
‘And how do you know you’ll like the same as what I like?’
‘I’ll like whatever you like. And if not, then watching you like it will be a pretty good gamble.’
‘You mean, feeling me like it…’ she murmured into his sweet-scented cotton arm delicately intoxicating her at one end, whilst his squeeze of the muscles in her buttocks fizzled her like a sparkler at the other.
‘Feeling how hot you’re getting, right now. This film is working a charm and Mr Chatterly hasn’t even been crippled yet.’
‘Well that’s because you’re saying such things, right here…’
‘So we don’t need a film then?’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Shall I turn it off?’
‘No, keep it turned on.’
‘Seems it always is. Not like him, sadly—’
They watched as Lady Chatterly puts her war-injured husband to bed and looks disappointed to only receive a peck on the cheek.
‘He’ll need more than a country garden to bring him back to life again,’ he remarked. ‘But I bet she’d be bribed with a good grope to get back to the lights of London.’
‘She could always help herself,’ she giggled, restless to be sandwiched in Neill’s warm strokes: his one hand parked on her bottom, and his other hand now capping the knuckles of the hand she rested at her groin, and the south-shifting bones of her hand she knew was felt through his, and which he would mimic back every few seconds. And she began to wonder if soon he would invite her to pleasure herself right there as they watched the film, or whether she should offer it, or whether they should both wait till their food had gone down.
Flying her other hand down her tights to an itch on her bum a few minutes later, it met with his grasping hand through the net of the fabric.
She laughed. ‘Are you going to keep my hands prisoner again?’
‘Look, the lady is about to see the gamekeeper naked,’ his lips brushed at her ear, ‘so best I keep your hands warm for you. In fact, they could go rest somewhere else and I could take over their job entirely.’
‘Ahh, haa. …Oh my god - you can see his thingie…’
‘You’ve forgotten what it’s called again?’
They watched as the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors washed himself outside his hut, his penis swinging around as he soaps up his thighs, whilst Lady Chatterly watches through a hedge with her lips parting in wonder.
‘That was your exact expression yesterday, sitting right there,’ he chuckled.
‘What, is she sixteen? She must have had plenty of cock before?’
‘As plenty as our bellies right now,’ as he squeezed her into a strangle, nuzzling and burying kisses on her neck as her eyes closed in delirium. ‘God,’ he moaned, ‘even I’m getting turned on, watching a woman get turned on, by a grubby Yorkshire gamekeeper with a flaccid penis.’
‘Ohh, is your… poor, sick pet feeling ok?’ She strained up to glance over his body swathed with blanket. ‘After all the morse code?’
‘He’ll be fine if we fast forward to the rude bits.’
‘No, no,’ she laughed. ‘I don’t want to be going home to my rude cock of a mum any quicker. Besides, I like to… you know…’
‘What?’
‘Feel it, get bigger… can I…?’
‘Oh, you’re asking this time?’
‘Ye-eah. But, will he want to… wreak revenge, like you said yesterday?’
‘Not as you’ve been such a good, spud-peeling GF and asked politely.’
Her hand rummaged along his thigh.
‘Come on Natalia. You knew where it was last time.’
‘It’s hardly difficult,’ she giggled as her palm ran tentatively along a forming lump, gathering her fingertips onto it directly this time, relishing the close-lipped breathy moan he made in response, which in this first time alone together, touching it with no company’s small talk except their own, was both sweet and unnerving.
‘Oh, look, she heard you! She’s helping herself.’
Lady Chatterley was covering her face with a sheer scarf and touching down between her legs. Natalia’s breath halted, fearing the same embarrassment she felt watching Secretary, but either the brevity or diffused dreaminess of the scene, or an up-levelled confidence since the Swaledale wank, had her scoffing:
‘Well I’ve never done it behind fabric.’
‘Neither have I,’ he remarked, ‘ever had a girl running her fingers on my clothed cock as cautiously as though it were a cat’s tail.’
‘Oh. Sorry—’
‘Why are you stopping?’
‘Oh.’ She put her hand back.
She felt his breath behind her ear intermittently incline to her cheek, noticing her smile would gently broaden every time his tumescence throbbed under her fingers.
‘I think you think this is your cat, hmm?’
‘I’d swap mine for it.’
‘Swapping pussy for cock is what they’ll be doing in a moment. Oh, look, they’ve tumbled down on the hearth! They’re getting it on…’
‘Why’s the music like a murder scene?!’
‘Downside of these old films is they make sex look like melodramatic, bad theatre. It’s like Brecht but erect.’
‘It would help if he actually took his trousers off!’ she laughed.
‘I know how he feels.’
‘I know how he feels too. It bounces up and down like his labrador…’
‘Oh, mine’s strictly trained to keep down from something he really wants to jump.’
She fizzled in silent titillation, as he squeezed her tighter in his arms, and murmured into her ear:
‘Do you want to feel doggie against you?’
‘But… what if he…’
‘If you let him rub up against you and sniff you to get to know you, then he won’t bite.’
‘Ok. Yeahh, yes…’
He took her shoulders into him at a forty-five degree angle, she breathing a flush of delight, that with those declared perimeters, she would be permitted to feel that clothed bulge against her thigh, just below her buttock, and everything it suggested but not more, and with a sudden mental thank-you to Claire for the sober look on Neill’s face earlier when relating her plight of men preying on her at sixteen, they continued watching as Lady Chatterly copulated with the rugged gamekeeper upon a tree branch, and Neill’s comment was all but:
‘Their kisses are pathetic. Nothing like ours,’ as he planted kisses down her jawline, right to her lips, murmuring about Sundays and sundae worship, melting into a sideways snog, her dress all hitched up and the blanket falling down, her hips in tights side-staked by his trouser wedge, as she wondered if she gyrated too much, whether he would invite his erection between her legs, and to what consequence, she sweated in uncertainty as a haystack scene now began of Oliver butt-naked between Chatterly’s legs.
‘The fire’s going out,’ she glanced, ‘shall I…?’
‘Sod that, or as Oliver might say… fuck t’fire! You’re not moo-ving from me knob—!’ he mouthed her neck as she tossed it back in laughter, his hands criss-cross squeezing her breasts over her dress, nibbling her ear as she writhed in both delight and a sort of alarm that here she was pinned by Neill’s steel-strong arms into his hard chest on the couch, almost dry-humping her to a naked sex scene on the screen, as her eyes closed and flickered open to the hardwood table, which made her felt soft, relenting, between hardness of tables, cocks and Oliver’s gnarly brow, and she feigned a cough, thinking what would her mum say, what would Dinkey or Sam say or even Joan. Ah! She was the safe word.
‘Do you watch films like this with Joan?’
‘Once.’ His lips detached from her with a small rasp in his throat, but his arms kept wrapped tight, his ankle over hers.
‘And was it erotic? And did you shag her by the end?’
‘It was a romcom. Could have been Tom & Jerry or a fucking sheet over the TV for all I cared. Shagged her by the first half hour, propped her up with a fag in her mouth and went home.’
A stifled note of laughter from her clamped chest.
‘It was a school night. I did my business like a Staffordshire Bull Terrier and left her cunt looking like one.’
‘Oh… Neill you’re awful. I never know whether to laugh or grimace. Usually both.’
‘Shut up, little girl, watch the film and learn something,’ as his cock throbbed now like something she imagined needed to be burst like pus from a pimple.
‘Don’t you need a bathroom break?’
‘Getting longer each time’ - she felt his hand rummage down himself - ‘I’ll have a Guinness World Record by Easter. Besides, he’ll get it all out when he goes to the gym. I’ll probably go jump gym-Joan tonight but right now is my Sunday worship.’
‘Like that—?’ She nodded to the screen, where the couple were now naked in a cottage bedroom, dressing each other in flowers.
‘What a ponce. I’d never do that with anyone.’
‘Not with me… your ideal woman?’
‘Well I’m already a ponce with a blue balls record for laying next to the school virgin, so I’d probably bear the indignity of half an hour lining petals along her crack as long as I get to fuck them all off afterwards and take her flower with it.’
She laughed with the incredulity that was becoming habitual.
‘Ah the famous bit!’ he boomed in her ear. ‘Dancing naked in the rain.’
‘Bloody hell, she’s confident,’ she murmured. ‘I couldn’t do that.’
‘Not with me, your unforgetta-gall?’
‘Ah, haa. Well that’s something Dean and Jenny would film and stick online.’
‘Don’t remind me of that. Joan sent me a YouTube link just before I turned my phone off, and the thumbnail shows me grinning like a sex offender over Miss Doris’s shoulder.’
‘I’ve got to see that before it’s deleted!’
‘Just turn round.’
She squealed in laughter, as the film moved to its conclusion, with Lady Chatterly pregnant with her gamekeeper and going off to start a new life.
‘Ah, that’s sweet,’ she gazed. ‘So different from Secretary but another happy ending where they get to be together.’
Neill echoed her wistful sigh as the credits rolled and they disentangled.
He stepped over to poke the fire, then looked down over her as she stretched and yawned.
‘So how wet did the film make you?’
She dissolved into giggles. ‘Do you want to check, inspector?’
‘Stand up.’
‘No way…’ She laughed and pulled up the blanket over her.
‘Tell me then,’ he crouched down on his knees next to her, his face at her sly grin. She pushed her hand down the blanket.
‘Quite.’
‘Quite?’
She reached for his hand, covered his knuckles and rubbed her fingers on the underside of his.
‘Well, quite.’ He shoved aside her feet and sat down on the other side of the sofa. ‘Come here. On top of me—’
She climbed up, into his lap, head back against him so their necks were interweaved, her stomach under the bar of his arm, his cock pressing up against her left thigh, his other hand squeezing the right.
‘Play with yourself now,’ he nuzzled into her ear, her eyes lit up by the fire rekindled and roaring. ‘The three you owe me.’
‘What time is it? Isn’t it time to go?’
‘We’ve got all the time,’ he purred in that low, storytime husk she melted into along with the kisses down her temple. ‘You gave me one the first time, two the second, and now you the time is three o’cock. Right on him, he’ll love that. Put three spoons of filth into it like the tea.’
‘Oh God… that’s even better than your sexting poetry.’
‘Will you, for him?’
‘Yes… if I can? I hope I can, but I need the toilet….’
‘So do I. You can be as blue-bladdered as I am blue-balled. Now plant your hand down there and give me three of the best before I do.’
‘No no no,’ she laughed softly, ‘only I do it…’ as her fingers dived down her hem into a butter-soft vulva, marinated to perfection, so impressed that she almost wants to pull his hand to show him. Motivated by ‘him,’ his cock-dog, pulsing against her leg like a cheering audience, she circulates her rhythm with his lips in her neck, not feeling watched, but so much more closely felt; every little shake of her body is felt by him now, there is no hiding the spasmodic motion, but there his own spasm against her, so they are equally spasming… and two or three husky, soft manly groans into her ear are like coins into the slot machine for the one-armed bandit to keep cranking, despite that she is thinking, god, she’s in the cottage of her Headmaster, wanking herself in his lap upon his lurid invitation, but she owes him, she owes him three… her lips pant open, twisting sideways as the climax pulses through her body, moaning onto his jaw, almost cricking her neck as her body pounds with pleasure underneath her dress as chequered as he is. It feels like five Neill Cheshire Cats purring through her:
‘So very good… did I blink and miss the second?’
Her face glowing, her eyes alive, with some incredulity that this practice was becoming bizarrely normal to them, she murmurs, or rather radiates the words:
‘Does your hand want a ride… to catch it with me?’
‘Pull these tights off—’
Pinched in his thumb and forefinger are the hems of both tight and knickers, but she retains the hem of the latter. With an air bicycling of legs, her tights sail into the air, and his hand cups of the top of hers as she piggybacks him like a large tumour in her stretched knickers, a knuckled-back beast they co-control like an obscene crystal ball, that asks whether this illicit fondness for each other will, like Lady Chatterly and Oliver, bear them too a happy ending, or be brought to an end by societal authority of Mr Chatterly, shot down dead like Rasputin himself.
She sighing in after-throes of two in rapid succession, he interweaving his fingers into hers - ‘you’ve given my doggie such a good treat’ - as her eyes widen at visible juices upon his fore and middle finger, which she pulls down with modesty whilst he is occupied with three last kisses on her temple. ‘But I’m afraid he gets the toilet first,’ he heaves up off the couch and up the stairs, as she, with a dash of coyness contemplates that she has contributed to the digital lubrication of his masturbation upstairs, of which she hears nothing but the flush of water down the kitchen pipes, till he reappeared as genially as he would at the front of Assembly.
‘Right! Are we all done?’
‘I’m sleeping here,’ she smiled, post-coital-triumphant, curling up her knees.
‘I’m afraid your mum will come for the Head on a stick. Come on, up—’
He reached for her hands.
‘Sorry, you washed your hands and I’ve just…’
‘I didn’t.’
Her eyebrow raised.
‘Come on, get your things. And I’ll cover one of your lessons tomorrow. How about that?’
She gasped. ‘Really? Really, really? Will you?’
He laughed. ‘Yes, I’ll try…’
‘Maths? Please Maths, for God’s sake, I’m in danger of dying from boredom…’
‘When is that?’
‘First lesson after lunch.’
‘I don’t know. I’d have to put something in Noble’s bolognese…’
‘Yes! Do it! I’ll spike it myself! You said yourself I need to get an A.’
‘A for arsenic? Well, let’s hope I’m well for tomorrow!’
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*
‘Other hand, other hand—’
She took his right hand and pecked kisses all over it. ‘Thank you for everything. Thank you, thank you. Best weekend ever.’
‘That’s quite alright, beautiful. Take care walking up the street, please.’
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Just as she opened her door, her mum was standing at the door of the kitchen, arms crossed.
‘Yer back, are ya.’
‘Yes.’ Natalia shut the door tentatively. ‘Why all the calls and messages? You knew I was away till today…’
‘You left me looking after that bloody cat, the cat you wanted.’
‘Wasn’t Darren around?’
‘He were in and out. He got a building job this weekend, wonders’ll never cease…’
‘Oh. That’s good he got some work.’
Mary’s eyes followed Natalia moving to the foot of the stairs. ‘And I’ve not had much peace! Both him and you leave me in the lurch with that thing, crying and scratching like a newborn baby!’
‘I’m… sorry,’ Natalia stopped and stared. ‘I didn’t know it was that difficult…’
‘God you sound just like him! Yer dad, that’s exactly what he said!’
‘What? When?’
‘When he bloody left.’
‘Yeah, well I don’t know what happened when I was five.’
‘No I meant when he buggered off when you were bloody born—’
‘Born?!’
‘When he were gone for six weeks and I didn’t know if he were ever coming back—’
‘You never told me that.’
‘Well now I can see it in ya! He must have thought you’d be just like me, but I can see you’re just like him!’
‘I… I’m sorry,’ Natalia’s voice cracked. ‘I mean, I wasn’t gone for six weeks, and, and, I didn’t know that a cat was as bad as… as bad as…’
Her mum’s eyes narrowed now as if she was sniffing the air. ‘This Sarah, does she wear aftershave does she? Smoke fags?’
Natalia glared through tears. ‘Maybe we do have boyfriends. It’s none of your business.’
‘Oh, bugger ya! Take that fucking cat out of me sight! I don’t want to see either of you down here tonight.’
The cat weaved panic-stricken between Mary’s legs and streaked up the stairs.
Natalia locked her door and threw herself onto her bed. It felt like a magical weekend had been flushed straight down the toilet like a blue-balled wank. After a five-minute torrent of tears, she sat up sniffling and scowling at her peeling wallpaper, the condensation trapped in the double glazing, the psychedelic 70s carpet almost threadbare at the spot where her feet rested. The wardrobe door was held closed by a cardboard box weighted by her blocky Alba CD player. What a world away this was from Neill’s cottage or Oulton Hall. Would she get to taste that world again?
She frowned at whether her mum was speaking the truth of her dad leaving when she was a baby. Just casually chucking that bombshell up like a cat with a hairball! She imagined Justin leaving Monica right after she gave birth. Was the nausea she felt for Monica’s sweetness just jealousy, plain jealousy, for a fine, caring and articulate woman with a well-to-do father - any father at all - by her side?
She finally took notice of the cat brushing back and forth and purring at her shin.
‘Hey, Ras. Rasputin. Neill gave you the name. Neill is a nice man. A really, really nice man with… a lovely doggie,’ she laughed. Full-bellied and thankful she had no need to forage in the kitchen, she’d been spoiled this weekend and now it was back to reality. But Neill promising to cover Maths tomorrow was a silver lining in the bleakness, oh and she was now free o’clock, as he’d said in the car to her on the way home, what luxury that she could now dissect and indulge in every sexy moment of the last two days!
Meanwhile he’d be taking out his frustrations on Joan. She felt like she should be jealous like women were supposed to be, but couldn’t help feeling like rejoicing like Lady Chatterly when she skips back from the gamekeeper’s hut after her clandestine frolics. Neill joked he’d be a ponce and wear flowers for only her. His sundae; his Sunday worship, he said. He props up Joan after a film, but props her into his lap for kisses she could still feel all scratchy down her neck. She slid her finger on her phone screen to check the time. Funny, she could be in time for Mass down at church. Just like she sang carols at Christmas, from that place in herself that rejoiced for Neill’s box of books and phone, she wanted to sing that she’d spent a Sunday of unrest clutching his cock.
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The taste of cream bun and gravy and Neill’s smoke still on her tongue, there was only one hymn it recognised to move empathetically enough to. Here I Am, Lord! Is it I, Lord? Is it her, that could be with Neill somehow? Did he furnish her with all his flattery from a real desire to be with her?
‘‘Ello again, Natalia! How are ya?’
Bill, with his puffy face and big blue jumper, was weaving through the pews at the end.
‘Hi, Bill. I’m ok thanks.’
‘You’re welcome to come join us for a squash in the presbytery? Well - literally a bit of a squash in there, but I did mean orange squash!’ he hooted.
‘Goodness.’ Goodness? She was even reacting in Neill-speak.
‘How’s Mary? I haven’t seen her?’
‘No, she does other things these days.’
He caught the spaciness in her frown. ‘If you ever want anything, love, I’m here. My number’s on the board there’ - he nodded - ‘if you ever need to chat.’
‘Oh. That’s nice. Thanks.’
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*
Her phone vibrated at 11.40pm.
‘Is it 15 o’clock yet where you are?’
He whom she still reeled from calling her beautiful earlier. A whole day of Miss Oliver Twist wasn’t enough?
Smiling eyes concocting a reply to the ceiling, almost oblivious to the smell of cat shit rising from the corner as Rasputin scraped in the litter tray, she finally smirked and typed:
‘Actually I’m reading a magazine’
- ‘Look Harder?’
‘Just Seventeen’
- ‘Ah… ha. Your behind’
‘Bad grammar’
- ‘Bad speller, you spelt grabber wrong.’
‘So good at English but will u do the math?’
- ‘Here’s the MATH, you wank yank. 2 glasses wine.. 1hr small talk.. ..3 or 4?? climaxes .. woman over 2x your years.. bedroom 3x larger than mine.. is lesser or greater than 90 mins cramped on a couch for a wet film with you?’
‘Sum is wrong / indefinable. With a man as great as you a woman should have no less than 100’
- ‘Now I’m going red’
‘What, embarrassed?’
- ‘No, coughing. Think I’m getting sick’
‘Getting?’
- ‘Not as much as you. Sweat dreams…x’
‘Xxx’
Eight hours of confused dreams about babies, chickens and bottoms later:
‘Sorry darling… no math… no day at all. Woke up throat awful. Bedbound. Off work today at least. X’
Dragging on her school uniform with renewed malaise, she leapt up with an idea. Scooping a top and leggings into her bag, she ran as fast as the startled cat down the stairs. No Cheerios left in the kitchen. No matter, when she knew where she could get some!
Down at her bus stop she texted:
‘Are you home alone?’
Ten minutes later:
‘Yes..?’
She smiled and checked her purse. She had money for a taxi if she needed it.
‘What do you want from the shop?’
-‘?’
‘I’ll be there within an hour so text me if you want anything!!’
His number sprang up.
‘Natalia, what are you playing at,’ came a hoarse crackle.
‘Nurse Natalia to you. Did you want anything from the shop?’
‘You should be going to school.’
‘I know. Don’t tell the Head.’
‘You don’t want to come anywhere near me, I’m coughing and phlegming like nobody’s business…’
‘I don’t care.’
He sighed. ‘You’re not the worshipful girlfriend now—’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
He wheezed with laughter which morphed into a dry fit of coughing.
‘That’s what you get for doubting me. Now what do you want?’
‘Ok, ok, I have food in. Just bring me some lemons please. Did you want me to do the taxi?’
‘Yes please, for 15 minutes.’
‘You can come briefly then. I’ll be packing you off to school later.’
‘Maths is shit, so I won’t miss it, remember?’
‘Key under the white stone, skiver.’
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