Page 8 of Little Wing
We smoked some pot and I felt so floaty with it and so springy from the punch. I’ve never felt so – here! – so alive! So my own person, so in love with being me at this time in the world’s history! I felt so high! And ‘Everlasting Love’ by Love Affair just made me feel this overwhelming sense of YES!!! Me in my dress being the most Me I’ve ever been – and being kissed all the more for it. Could anything ever match this night, could feelings ever have this strength again? Once you’ve felt something once, is it diluted by repetition?
And then Peter took my hand and led me away. I know Joan’s house as well as my own. I told him, I know where we can go – and we ran up the stairs and then tiptoed up the next flight too. I took him up to the attic, to Joan’s brother’s room – because he’s away at university. We could hear people in Joan’s room and even in her parents’ room – but I knew Dicky’s room would be empty. It was also dark. Warm. Lovely and warm. And so were Peter’s lips which were all over me; my face, my mouth, my neck. Oh my, I was soaring and sinking all at once but I was safe in his arms and I was kissing him back. His hands. His hands were moving and finding and squeezing and I thought oh my goodness I’m going to pass out with the pleasure. I mean, I’ve kissed boys before and they’ve had a feel over my clothes. But Peter – well, he discovered the flaw in my homemade dress, which is that the armholes are a bit gapey so he found a way in. And I’m so glad he did. Felt like my breasts were made especially for his hands. He was pressing against me and moving back and forth and I could feel It. It. His desperate hardness. His hardness. His desire. For me.
He took my hand and led me over to Dicky’s bed and we just lay on it, gazing at each other touched by moonlight, or maybe it was streetlight not moonlight. But anyway, he looked so deliciously handsome!
We were kissing so passionately and it was like he was dying of hunger, of longing. I gave his hands freedom because it felt good and nothing felt wrong. He ran them up my thighs and then between my legs and his voice was so soothing, saying, relax baby relax. When your parents call you a baby it’s like an insult – but when the man you love calls you baby it’s like honey. So I relaxed. It felt – I never knew! His hands, his fingertips – I never knew it could feel so – I never knew that about my body.
And he unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his jeans and he took my hand down there and I never imagined it would feel so – warm.
And Peter said shall we?
He said I think we should.
He said that feelings like this are so rare and that not many people experience a connection like ours. He said that we have to live in the moment. I believe that too.
And I said I know, but –
And he said don’t worry – I’ll pull it out in time.
And I said I know, but –
And downstairs the Beatles were singing ‘Hey Jude’.
And Peter said relax, baby, relax.
I’m so in love.
Nell
Sometimes Saturdays felt like Tuesdays and Wednesdays could feel like Sundays and Nell didn’t mind that. She liked shift work, she didn’t mind that her weekends were a movable feast. Invariably, whether she was working or not, she’d pop in to the Chaffinch anyway, to double-check she really wasn’t needed. Saturdays, after all, were filled by a different crowd. Dads came in, bewildered by what their kids were allowed to eat, while their offspring said Mummy definitely lets me have the triple chocolate brownie with ice cream and double sprinkle. And Danny, bless him, always colluding. He’d figured out early on how dads tended to tip very well, especially if he called them mate and clapped his hand on their shoulders. Also at weekends, teenagers lingered in small throngs, commandeering the tables at the back, dawdling over cappuccinos and eking out one toastie between the lot of them. That she was treated like a minor celebrity on her impromptu visits was a crucial antidote to how monotonous and quiet she found her time off could be. Just occasionally, though, when she wasn’t needed and her flat was too still, too empty, she yearned to be far away from everything and everyone. But she didn’t really know how to get there, nor where on earth that could be anyway.
On this particular Saturday, after she’d popped in to the café and paid for a latte to go, Nell mooched up Trinity Street. She stopped by the archway as she always did to admire the Tudor splendor of Tymperleys and recalled how her mother would always tell her how it was built from an old ship’s timbers before going off on elaborate tangents about life on the high seas, telling the stories in a rustic pirate’s voice which she’d then forget to switch off. The window display of a candy-coloured lopsided old building caught her eye, antiques and bric-a-brac enticing her to enter. It was cold. As if she needed an excuse to go inside. She loved this shop. She examined a Toby jug, wondering on whose shelf it had spent its lifetime with its benign stare. Nell wondered if anyone was missing him.
‘Do you a good price.’
‘Oh – sorry – I was just looking.’ Nell had long known that she was every shopkeeper’s nightmare.
‘Remind you of someone?’
She regarded the china face again. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I mean – someone who might have similar? Granny? Mad uncle? Bloke called Toby?’
‘No,’ Nell said, ‘not in our family.’ She put a vague smile on her face and turned her attention to a shoebox crammed with a jangle of old keys.
‘Bet some of those could unlock a story of two,’ the shopkeeper said. Nell nodded in an anodyne way, focusing on a basket brimming with balls of wool, so comfortingly soft despite lurid colours. She felt conflicted. It was the same every time; she felt she ought to buy something, not for herself but for the shopkeeper.
She never did. Her flat, though small, had space enough – but she let her enduring aversion to clutter govern her purse strings.
And then, on a small table which itself was for sale, Nell chanced upon the cups. They were laid out as if waiting to be filled. Some had cracks, some were tea stained, and some had price stickers that were jaw dropping. But Nell had spotted the one identical to her mother’s: the commemorative Coronation cup with its bright blue crenellated edging and gold detail.
‘No saucer – so you can have it for eight quid.’
‘My mum has one,’ Nell told him. ‘With a saucer!’
‘And the plate?’
‘A plate?’
