THE SMELL OF LAST NIGHT'S FINGERS

I was in love.

Geraldine McLellan had long been the object of my adolescent sexual fantasies. She was pretty rather than beautiful, but she wore clinging tops and short skirts that accentuated her breasts and her lovely, long, shapely legs. When she walked her peach-shaped bottom moved with the rhythm of an exotic dancer and, if I thought hard enough, I could imagine the sounds of sleazy, sensual, late night jazz following in her perfume scented wake. With almost depressing regularity I would push my pen off my desk whenever she walked by so I could stoop down to pick it up, hoping for a tantalising glimpse of her stocking tops.

One night I dreamed about her stealing naked into my bedroom, her firm breasts bouncing to the rhythm of her long, shapely legs. Moving seductively towards me, she took hold of my bed covers and in one violent, passionate movement threw them to the ground, revealing my hardness and vulnerability. She tossed her head back, her long, dark hair gleaming under the cool light radiating from the lampshade suspended from the ceiling and screamed, "Get out of bed, you idle bugger! You’ll be late for school again!"

And then I woke up in wet and sticky sheets to the sound of my mother calling me from downstairs. As I threw off the bed covers and reached for my tape measure, I breathed the forlorn sigh of a thousand wretched teenagers who, like me, were all held prisoner by the unrequited love of their history teachers.

Pete Webster was waiting for me in the kitchen. Mum was asking him how he was and he was stepping nervously from one foot to the other. My mother was a small, petite woman with blonde hair and a ready smile. I grabbed a piece of buttered toast from a plate off the table, picked up my bag and said, “Right, then.”

Pete smiled at my mother and then quickly followed me out of the door.

As we walked to school Pete said, “She’s a bit of alright, she is.”

“Who?”

“You’re mum.”

“Aw, come off it, Pete – she’s my mum.”

“That doesn’t stop her from being a bit of alright.”

“Look, will you shut up and talk about something else.”

“I was only saying.”

The previous evening Pete and I were rooting through one of the drawers of the sideboard in the front room of our house. I knew it was one of the secret places where my stepfather hid cash that he didn’t want mum to know about. He must have moved the money to another hiding place because there was not even a brass farthing in there, but what I did find was a million times more exciting than a bundle of bank notes. Underneath a pile of papers and scrunched up chocolate bar wrappers was a well-thumbed, 64-page, dog-eared magazine full of naked women. Not only that – it was in 3-D!

Once I had the magazine in my hands Pete started to dig a little deeper into the drawer until he found a pair of the cardboard glasses with the red and green filters.

He immediately snatched the magazine from me and yelped, “Me first!”

We took turns passing the glasses to each other and staring at the fantastic feast of female fancies before us.

“They’re all bald,” said Pete, eventually.

“No, they’re not,” I replied in all innocence.

“Yeah they are – look,” said Pete, “they have no hair down there.”

Back then pubic hair was not allowed to be shown and it was the job of government appointed airbrush men to supervise the removal of any trace of bodily hair on the female form before publication. These tireless guardians of the moral high ground, however, were totally unaware that their acts of censorship were raising the temperatures of men around the nation who were now being turned on by the sight of grown women with shaved fannies.

Pete and I stared – transfixed – at those pictures for what seemed like hours; at one point I was so mesmerised by what I was seeing in front of me that I began to dribble down my shirt. We only stopped looking when we heard my mother outside the door. We hurriedly threw the magazine and glasses back into the drawer and pushed it shut just as my mother opened the door and peered inside.

“What are you two buggers up too?” she said. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement, but I answered it anyway.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Well make sure you carry on doing that,” she said, before leaving the room.

The next morning Deborah Delaney waved at me from the other side of the assembly hall. Deborah was fifteen going on twenty-five and had already managed to obtain carnal knowledge of almost ninety percent of the fourth and fifth year boys at Highfield. But Deborah didn’t go out with just anyone. She only went out with boys who didn’t ask her out. She had her principles. If you asked her out she’d refuse you; you had to wait your turn. Eventually when she felt you were old enough she would get around to you.

Pete, who was a couple of months older than me, had already been seduced by Deborah and the morning after his unbridled passion with her he came rushing into the playground and shoved his fingers under my nose, saying, "Smell them. I haven't washed them yet!"

I breathed in the faintly salty smell and asked, "How many fingers did she let you get up her?"

"Two."

 

"Did she let you shag her?"

"Yeah."

  

And then we held a long, meaningful discussion on how many fingers Deborah had let Pete insert into a part of her body that I had never seen on any girl.

Deborah lived on the next street up me and when I was younger Mum used to tease me about her, saying she was my girlfriend because we were always playing together. Deborah would sometimes boss me about when no-one was looking, but I liked her anyway, even if she was a girl.

Deborah was sat in between her two ugly friends, Violet Evans and Christine Smithand when I waved at her she whispered something to them. The girls looked over at me and started to giggle and I was sure she’d just told them about the time she tricked me into getting my penis out for her when we were playing in the back garden.

I was six at the time.

"Let’s play mummies and daddies," Deborah said.

"Don’t want to," I told her.

         

"I don’t care if you don’t want to, we’re playing it anyway." She picked up one of her dolls and pretended it was a baby. "You’re the daddy and I’m the mummy."

         

I sighed and said, "Alright then."

         

"I’m putting the baby to bed now, daddy."

         

"Where’s my tea?"

         

"Make it yourself, you stupid bugger!"

         

I started to giggle behind my hand but Deborah shouted at me.

         

"Stop it!" I cried, putting my hands over my ears.

         

"We’re supposed to shout at each other," she said. "That’s what mummies and daddies do."

         

"Mine don’t."

         

"That's because you haven’t got a daddy."

         

"Have."

         

"Haven’t."

         

"So?"

         

"You just have Uncles. They don’t count."

         

"They do."

         

"Don’t."

         

"Do."

         

Deborah looked at me and smiled. "Right, now we’ve had our argument we’ve got to go to bed and have sex."

         

"What’s sex?"

         

"It’s when the daddy takes his willy out and shows it to the mummy."

         

"I’m not showing you my willy."

         

"Go on," Deborah said, "I’ll show you mine if you show me yours."

         

I thought about this for a few moments. "Alright," I said, finally.

         

"You first."

         

I unbuttoned the fly of my shorts and took my little boy’s penis out. Deborah looked at it and smiled.

         

"Now you," I said.

         

"Nah nah," Deborah said, sticking her tongue out. "Girls don’t have willies stupid."

                  

I just stood there looking gormless with my fly undone and my willy hanging out when the back door flew open and Mum charged out. "What the bloody hell’s all this racket about?" she barked.

         

Deborah’s lip began to quiver. "S . . . Stephen took his willy out and he wanted me to touch it."

         

"You dirty little bugger," snapped Mum, slapping me across the back of my head with the flat of her hand. "You know what they do to little boys like you?”

“No, mum.”

“They lock them up and throw away the key, that’s what they do."

         

As Mum took hold of my ear and dragged me into the house I could see, through watery vision, Deborah smiling her sweet smile at me.

Deborah was smiling her sweet smile at me again, but this time my day improved beyond measure when she approached me and said softly and sexily, "Do you want to come babysitting with me tomorrow night?"

My answer was a swift, simple, emphatic, “Yes.”

         

The next evening I stole some of my step-father’s aftershave and splashed it all over, dressed myself in my very best, trendiest clothes and hurried forth, smelling like the cosmetic counter of the local Timothy White’s, to meet with my destiny.

         

The couple we were babysitting for were already out when I arrived and they weren’t going to be returning until the early hours of the morning. Deborah was wearing a revealing, tightly fitting top with a short denim skirt when she answered the door and I was hot and nervous even before I stepped over the threshold.

It was all very civilised at first. She got me a drink and we sat on the large couch watching telly. I had my arm around her and she had her head nuzzled up under my chin. When we started kissing I felt Deborah's hand move swiftly down to my crotch. I could feel my whole body trembling as she began to caress the bits of me that only I had ever touched.

"Do you want to put your fingers inside me?" she whispered in my ear.

It was a question that required no answer.

Did I want to?

Bloody right I did!

As I stroked the inside of her thigh, she moaned softly, spreading her legs at the same time, allowing my excited fingers to slide easily into the smooth cotton warmth of her panties.

A tingling sensation ran through my body as my fingers entered her, and the next thing I knew she had my trousers undone and my penis in her hand.

"Now, where have I seen this little fellow before," she said.

She did the whole thing in a swift and expert movement that suggested she had performed this manoeuvre many times before. This didn’t bother me in the slightest. Like her, I was only there for one thing and everything else was of no significance. For all I cared the world could have exploded into a billion tiny fragments. It didn’t matter, just as long as I got to shag Deborah Delaney before it happened.

   

She moved her body around and looked me straight in the eyes.  Then she smiled and said, "I think you’ll like this."

I’ll bet she said that to all the virgins.

I wanted to say, I love you Deborah, but all that came out was a strangulated, “Nnnneeeeeeeerrrrrraaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!”

Although my whole being was exploding with sexual fulfilment, deep down inside I knew that, like Pete and all the other boys before him, I was just a one-night stand, another sorry name crossed off an endless list. But, that night, as I lost my virginity to Deborah Delaney, all the carnal thoughts I’d ever had about Mrs McLellan evaporated. The next morning at school I was asked a multitude of intimate, personal questions about what happened the night before. I told everything in graphic detail, and although Pete had experienced it before, he stayed and listened anyway.

And, of course, I let him smell my fingers.

MY QUIET PLACE

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s; it was a time when you just got on and did stuff. There was bureaucracy everywhere, but that didn’t seem to bother people in those days. People queued patiently for things they wanted. When you went to see a new film at the cinema you sometimes had to queue around the block, only to find, that when you got to the end of the queue, the cinema was full – but that was no problem because you’d go back the next night and queue again. People chatted to each other in queues – people would even sometimes swap each others' life stories.

I was told, many years ago, that as I got older I would become more tolerant, but I have actually found that as the years have rolled by I am annoyed by more and more things. In fact, almost everything these days annoys me.

It’s the simplest things that annoy me the most; something I would have quite happily done when I was younger, like standing in a queue, now frustrates the hell out of me. I also hate waiting for things. When I was in my twenties time seemed to be irrelevant – I didn’t mind waiting for things because it wasted time where I would otherwise be engaged in the act of working for a living.

It’s hard to put my finger on the time when everyone became intolerant of each other, when queues became a chore, where people stood in silence, not daring to talk to the person next to them in case they turned out to be some gun-toting maniac intent on murdering everyone in one-mile radius. It’s even harder to put my finger on when I myself became intolerant of those small niggly things in life that irritate me to the point of annoyance.

People who talk through films at the cinema have always annoyed me, but I never used to say anything, preferring to suffer in silence and whinge about them all the way home. Not any more, though. Those days are well and truly past me. These days I speak up, running the risk of being punched in the face by some moron with a Neanderthal brow and bad teeth for having the temerity to even speak to him. I was in a cinema in Winchester once; I went there with my wife to see the Terrence Malick film The Thin Red Line. It was a long war film about the WW2 battle for Guadalcanal and my wife was several months pregnant at the time, so, in hindsight, it was possibly not the best type of film to take her to see, but I was so excited about seeing a new Terrence Malick film after such a long absence (twenty years) that it never entered my head that she wouldn’t enjoy it.

Sat next to me in the cinema was a couple in their mid-fifties, who were chatting away to each other without a care in the world. When the ads came on they continued chatting to each. When the forthcoming attractions came on they continued chatting to each other, which did irritate me slightly. I thought I’d give them the benefit of the doubt as they were bound to be quiet when the film itself started. But they didn’t stop. As the film started they carried on chatting as if they were in their lounge at home.

I lasted for about three minutes before my annoyance turned to intolerance. I turned to the couple and snarled, “Look, either shut up or get out and wait for this film to come out on video!”

The husband looked at me with a certain degree alarm and then he shut up. He and his wife didn’t say another word throughout the entire length of the film, but as we were leaving the cinema my wife said, “I daren’t ask while we were in the cinema but what war was the film was set in?”

Here is a short list of some of the things that irritate or annoy me.

• People who talk through films in the cinema.
• Stupid people who think that knowledge is not important.
• The conservatives.
• People who stammer.
• Television companies that make piss-poor brainless entertainment – including reality programmes, pointless game shows, soap operas, Downton Abbey, etc – which cater for the lowest common denominator, whilst assuming that everyone who watches television is a moron.
• Politicians who get away with fraud and live in second houses paid for by the tax-payer.
• Vernon Kay.
• Parents who talk about their children ALL the time.
• Footballers who are just overpaid nancy-boys.
• People who are unaware of, or have no interest in, their own country’s history.
• Bingo.
• People who think that the events in the Old Testament actually happened.
• People who chart their entire days on facebook, making comments like “Just curled up on the sofa with a cocoa” or “Just off to bed”. I’m not interested in your dull and pointless lives.
• Modern R&B.
• The Post Office Syndrome – where you switch queues in a local Post Office only to find that the queue you just left starts to move faster than the one you’ve just joined.
• Nouvelle cuisine.
• People who believe in ghosts and who think mediums can talk to the dead and fortune tellers can see into your future.
• 3-D films.
• Run-of-the-mill, mediocre, middle-of-the-road music (Cliff Richard, Celine Dion, Chris De Burgh, Phil Collins, etc).
• Wives who assume their husbands rank or status.
• People who walk around with their mouths open (it’s a sure sign of stupidity).
• Bad neighbours.
• Books like Fifty Shades of Gray that have no literary merit whatsoever.
• People who talk a lot but don’t actually say anything.
• People who read books like Fifty Shades of Gray, under the impression that they are reading something substantial because it contains more than 200 pages and has no pictures in it.
• Parents who give their kids stupidly embarrassing names.
• Comedies like My Family that follow the American pattern of comedy sit-coms and which are, like their US counterparts, not in the least bit funny.
• Working class people who vote conservative in the misguided belief that a leopard can change its spots.
• New Labour (see The conservatives).
• Religious nutters from any denomination who feel the need to ram their views down your throat and try and convert you to their faith when they can plainly see that you are perfectly happy believing in nothing at all.
• Apple products.
• Pretentious Oscar-winning films like A Beautiful Mind that only serve a singular purpose, which is to waste two hours of my life.
• Bad food in expensive restaurants.
• Star Wars Episodes 1, 2 & 3.
• ColdPlay.

Whenever I get annoyed by something on the list above or any new thing that didn’t irritate me before but does now, my wife will encourage me to go to my “Quiet Place” and to get over what is causing me so much pain and anguish.

So, where is this Quiet Place of mine? Well . . .

I have this magic aircraft, you see, and I can take anyone who didn’t deserve to die off it and replace them with talentless or annoying or boring living people. For example – I could take Roy Orbison, Alex Harvey, Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley off my plane and replace them with Chris De Burgh, Cliff Richard, Celine Dion and Vernon Kay.

Once the replacements are safely on board and the drinks have been served (by people who have annoyed me, obviously), the plane will take off and after about five minutes it will crash into a mountain, killing everyone on board.

When I explain to people about my Quiet Place I usually get two different responses, depending on the type of person. The first type will think that my Quiet Place is brilliant and they will wish they had thought of it. The second type comprises almost entirely of people who take themselves/life far too seriously.

I try to ignore this second type of person because they just get on my nerves.

In fact, I’m going to add them to my list.