by Paul Charles
‘Oh, I just love Crying Time – with a voice like that he can sit next to me any time he wants to!’
‘There’s the trap. I bet you if we went round and talked to every boy here, they’d all say “With looks like that she could sit beside me any time she wants to.”’
I paused, took a sip of my wine – a cheeky little number, I’d say a French nail varnish remover, late sixties perhaps even early seventies – and collected my thoughts.
‘You see, when someone looks as amazing as you do, well, it’s obvious men will be attracted to you, we simply can’t help it. However, our attention is not always wanted. It’s like a signal is being sent out but it’s not a very selective signal, everybody is able to tune in and receive it. So when the poor Welsh boy goes up to you and tries, in his cumbersome way, to make a verbal connection, he’s only reacting to his instincts.’
‘Flattering, Mr Buchanan,’ she replied, ‘very flattering. But I don’t seem to remember you coming on to me or Jean within five seconds of clapping eyes on us. Correct?’
‘But that was different,’ I replied, sheepishly.
‘Well, maybe you were more calculating about it, but there’s also a good chance your brain was closer to your ears than your trousers. You had manners, you were polite, and you didn’t treat either of us like a hunk of meat. Don’t you see? That’s why both of us took to you – not because you didn’t have a good reserve list of chat-up lines, but because you showed us the courtesy of good manners. Our Jean says that the boys who want to jump on your bones the minute they see you are also the boys that will get bored with you and drop you just as quickly. Do you think that Welsh git wanted to get to know me? Do you think he wanted to know what I think about politics, about love, about music, about my parents or about life? No, of course he didn’t, he just wanted me to use my pants to warm my ankles while he performed some primeval ritual to get his rocks off. I bet he wouldn’t even know what it meant for a girl to get her rocks off.’
She must have seen the look of bemusement on my face because she stopped talking, picked up her drink and, before moving it to her lips, she said, ‘Goodness, all of this on four half pints and I don’t even know you properly yet, David Buchanan!’
‘No honestly,’ I protested, because I was really interested in all of this, ‘I’m really interested in all of this,’ I said. ‘So let’s see; would it be safe to say that you agree that women are created as such beautiful creatures to attract the opposite species?’
‘Possibly David, but there’s much more to it than our looks,’ she replied, looking slightly disappointed.
‘Exactly, which is what brings me to the second part of my theory. So the looks are there for the first hit, the initial attraction, but before you react to that reaction, there must be some additional interplay where both boy and girl get to know each other better.’
‘Well I would hope so, otherwise we’d both be copulating on the pavement within seconds of meeting each other. Now that would never do, would it?’
‘Quite. I think I’m with you so far. Now for the next part – it seems to me, though, that in this exchange the woman comes off the worse.’
‘How so?’ she asked, as I noticed most of the crowd making their way through to the music room. Bad timing, this was just getting interesting and we would have to find our place in front of the stage any second now.
‘Okay; we, the men, get to interact with beautiful women and apart from anything else it’s a very pleasing sensation. But can you honestly tell me that women experience the same feeling?’
‘You mean do I look at a man and get turned on merely by his looks?’
‘Yes, I think that’s what I mean.’
‘Well yes! Probably not to the same degree men seem to get turned on by looking at women,’ she replied. She was now looking deep into my eyes and she was, I thought, revealing a bit of mischief in her own, ‘But yes, David,’ she continued very seductively, ‘that can definitely happen, David.’
She’d just delivered an earthquake-sized shiver the whole way down my spine.
And then it was Jethro Tull’s turn.
I can’t remember a time before that night at the Toby Jug when I didn’t get lost in the music or the performance at a gig. For once I wasn’t thinking ‘How come Rory Gallagher uses a simple VOX AC30 amplifier and sounds tonally perfect, and here’s Mick Abrahams using a Marshall 100 Watt stack, with four 4x12” speaker stacks and whatever other gadgets and foot pedals and what have you, and he’s continually fighting his sound? In fact, the only time he doesn’t fight his sound is when he’s lighting up another ciggy. That Wednesday night I was swaying with the music, shaking my head to the beat. However, when Ian Anderson took a flute solo standing on one leg, I didn’t clock how dirty his overcoat was, because I was totally intoxicated by the scents of Jean Simpson. She was standing directly in front of me and was very close, so close that when either of our sways went out of sync we bumped into each other. She didn’t seem to mind us bumping into each other. And, as I was behind, it was easier for me to orchestrate our bumping into each other. Pretty soon we’d bumped into each other and stuck and moved together as one, but only very subtly where nobody but ourselves was even aware of what we were doing.
And you know what? Yes, of course you’re right. But I couldn’t help it. Honestly, Jean seemed to be positively pushing into me. Gently, mind you, but firmly – in other words, she seemed to know exactly what was happening and she seemed to be physically encouraging it. She seemed to be charged. All of this could have been in my mind of course, I’ll give you that, and she could have been just totally lost in the music, as I had been on numerous occasions before. I’d never know for sure because there was no eye contact and neither was anything said. But then again, she must have been pretty lost in the music not to notice what was developing between us. I just hoped that she wasn’t going to go off to the toilet leading me standing… alone.
As Ian Anderson announced the last song of the set, coincidentally, ‘Ode to a Jean’, Jean moved away from me ever so slightly. I could still smell her perfume – mind you, that might have been an accumulative intoxication, but she had moved just far enough away so there was no longer any direct physical contact between us.
By the time the Tull’s performance was concluded twenty-two minutes and three encores later, I found walking was possible, despite being a little tentative at first. We didn’t have a lot of time to hang around and let me practice though, as we’d a last train to catch.
As I walked her home, we talked a lot about Jethro Tull’s performance but not a lot, not anything at all, in fact, about the performance on her brightly lit doorstep, I’m sure I saw her wink at me as she quietly closed the door.
Chapter Fourteen.
Girls never cease to amaze me, though. Two days previous I thought I was having… well, I don’t really know what I was having, but I was experiencing some kind of relationship. A relationship with two girls. Then I heard nothing for three weeks, not a peep, out of either of them for three whole weeks. I even rang Mary once and left a message, but no response. Explain that one for me, could you please?
A full nineteen days later – I wasn’t counting, honest! – the doorbell rang in the Rostrevor Road, SW19 flat. I reluctantly went to answer it, convinced it was either Jehovah’s Witnesses or a salesman (I’d have been pretty thrown if it’d been Hank Marvin selling guitars, wouldn’t I?). I nearly didn’t answer; my flatmate was out and if the caller hadn’t persisted in continually pressing that wretched bell, I would’ve ignored it and continued on with what I was doing, which was reading while listening to music, of course.
I looked out of the bay window of my ground floor flat in hopes that the person who was annoying the hell out of me had taken a few steps back from the door, the way some do, because then I could have sneaked a peek at them before answering. But no, the porch hid the determined ringer from my view. I suppose I kind of went to the door with a bit of an attitude, you know, �
�What kind of fresh hell is this?’
Thank goodness for the anger, or whatever else it was, that got me off of my backside and to the door on that dull Monday evening.
‘Hi,’ said Jean Simpson.
She was standing on my doorstep and smiling as if we’d just been to the Toby Jug the night before, and not the long nineteen days ago that I knew it to be.
‘And how are you?’
‘I’m good and you?’ I replied in shock. I opened the door wider. ‘Do you want to come in out of the cold?’
‘I’m not sure I should. You’ve been mean to me. You haven’t been in touch with me since we went to Tolworth to see that horrible dirty group.’
With that she kind of stormed past me, leaving nothing but a trail of perfume in her wake.
I followed her indoors as I said, ‘Well, I thought, you know, because of Jean and John, it might not have been appropriate for me to get in touch.’
‘You’re my friend, right?’
‘Of course!’ I replied. She’d already taken off her long black coat and black French beret, and I could now see what she was wearing beneath them: black stockings; black calf-length boots; a black miniskirt; and a black Beatle-style polo neck jumper. She looked more like Johnny Cash’s English daughter than the northern lass who’d only moved to London several months previous. She’d even taken to wearing some black eyeliner.
‘And both Jean Kerr and John Harrison know you’re my friend, right?’
‘They do? Yes, I suppose they do,’ I admitted, none too convincing. I doubted if they knew we were really friends and if they did, neither of them would have approved.
‘Well friends are supposed to keep in touch with each other, right?’
‘Right, so I’ll remember that for next time. Okay?’ I pleaded, and chanced a distraction course. ‘So both of them know you’ve come around to see your friend tonight?’
‘Jean knows – I’ve told her I wanted to listen to some of your records. But I made her promise not to tell John and to cover for me. Talking about John, what do you think about the outfit?’
‘Stunning, in a word,’ I said, chin still on the floor.
‘Good! I knew you’d approve. Am… if you meet John, ah, it’s probably best that you don’t mention this outfit; he’d never approve of the money I spent on it. Nor my other extravagance,’ she said, as she fished in her black canvas bag for something. She eventually pulled out a bottle of wine. ‘But I figure he spends more on cigarettes in a week than I do on wine. You uncork this and I’ll select the music,’ she ordered, as she made her way to the record player where Dylan was spinning needle-free at thirty-three and one-third revolutions per minute. You see, I’d raised the needle so as not to spoil my enjoyment of the album when I went to answer the doorbell.
I trusted Jean with my records. She very carefully, using only forefingers and thumbs, raised the record from the deck, expertly placed it back in its dust jacket and slid it gently into the sleeve. She then placed it back in the proper position, in the Dylan section. (I always flag the record-being-played’s location on the shelf by pulling the neighbouring record out an inch or so from the pack.) I watched as she then made her selection, Mr. Fantasy by Traffic, and lowered the needle onto the record carefully.
Some people play a bunch of records and leave the evening’s playlist scattered all over the floor until the following evening, or even the weekend, before tidying them up. Some even leave the records scattered around the floor and record deck, still out of their dust jackets. Not me; I find it better to put the current record away before selecting the next. Not only does it save on time, but it prolongs the life of the records. Jean Simpson, independent of me, had adopted the same procedure with her own records. She said she filed her albums alphabetically though, whereas mine were filed randomly by artist; it was always more impressive, I felt, when you could go into the middle of your record shelves and miraculously pull out the intended record on the first attempt. This would’ve been the first time I would have put that theory to the test, and I have to admit that Jean Simpson seemed far from impressed.
The sound of Traffic was filling my speakers to stretching by the time I returned to the bed-sitting room with the wine and two recently washed wine glasses. I gave her the bottle and held the glasses as she poured us both a generous serving.
‘You don’t like this skirt as much as you like the tartan pleated one, do you?’ she said, as she sat down on the bed – sorry, I meant sofa.
‘Well, I like them both…’ I started, ‘for different reasons.’
‘And you like this one because…?’ she inquired, sounding all innocent.
‘Well because… ah… am, because it’s black and it fits with the rest of your outfit.’
‘Sneaky! I’ll let you away with that, but only just. And you like the other one because…?’
‘Because it’s…’ I struggled.
‘Because it’s pleated and when I spin around and give you a wee twirl it flows out and you get to steal a quick eyeful,’ Jean Simpson said, no messing around.
It would appear that we were getting to be friends, if only because she knew exactly what I was thinking. I didn’t admit it though. I didn’t deny it either, for that matter.
‘Poor David, no such treats so far tonight.’
I wasn’t sure what she said next because she did it as her wine glass disappeared into her lips, but it sounded like she might have said, ‘We’ll see what we can do for you later though.’
Wishful thinking perhaps, because the next hour or so was taken up discussing music, groups, clubs, clothes, looks, and then we got to talking about Jean Kerr. I had to ask how she was doing, out of politeness.
‘I know you’ve got a major downer on her,’ Jean said, after another swig of wine, ‘but it’s sad, you know; it’s all gone horribly wrong for her over the last couple of years. When we were growing up in Derby she was the envy of everyone. She was the best in the class, she looked great, was the first to wear make-up, the first to snog a boy, the first to pick a career, the first to go steady and… the first to ride a boy. She was so competitive, but as long as she was the best and the first she was always dead good with everyone else, with all of us. She’d help you with anything, she’d lend you clothes, she’d tell you what to do and what not to do with a boy, she’d give you her homework.’
All this talking was obviously making Jean dry because she waved her empty glass under my nose, encouraging me to give her a refill as she continued with her story.
‘The only time she doesn’t react generously is when things are going pear-shaped on her – when she’s behind in her studies, when she’s the one without a boy, when she’s frustrated with her look, or when she’s not the leader of the pack, then she is a right royal pain in the ass. Now, for the first time in her life, she’s under pressure from all sides and she’s not reacting well to any of it. She’s not making the progress she thinks she should be at work, and she can see her planned career disappearing just because she says her superior has an anti on her. Her love life is a mess. She’s putting on weight. She loves to look glamorous but she can’t get it together at the minute, with her make-up or her hair, or her clothes, what with her current figure.’
‘It can’t help that there, right before her eyes, you’re blossoming into the belle of the ball. Not to mention the fact that you seem happy enough at work. And you and John are going to marry.’
Jean Simpson grimaced as I said this.
‘Yes, David, I’ve been thinking that as well. But what am I meant to do, wear sackcloth?’
‘No, the little tartan number will do perfectly, thank you very much.’
‘Yeah, which reminds me; I was watching you at the party, David Buchanan.’ The look on her face clearly showed that she was remembering something.
‘What? When?’ I said, noticing that we’d already drained the bottle of wine between us.
‘Remember the wrestling match at the party when there was me and Mary a
nd John on the floor and you were in your beanbag, catching an eyeful?’
‘Oh that. I think there was more than just me guilty on that occasion,’ I offered in my defence as I went off to try to find some more wine.
I knew my flatmate always had two bottles of wine stashed away for such emergencies. The problem was, he was as unlucky in love as I was and so the wine had probably passed its sell-by date by now. But a bit of hooking around in the bottom of the fridge and I’d found it. I opened it quickly and took a brief swig. It was okay. Yes okay… just, but luckily for me it would definitely benefit from being the second bottle of the evening, rather than the first.
I returned to the other room just in time to see Jean lie down on the floor.
‘It’s more comfortable down here,’ she said, ‘come sit down beside me, but not at my feet to cop a view, you perv.’
I poured us two fresh glasses of wine then did as I was bid, sitting cross-legged, around about her waist. Do you know what the first thing about her lying down that I noticed was? No it was nothing pervy – well, at least nothing too pervy.
It was her breasts. They didn’t fall! You know the way that when women lie down on their back their breasts tend to pretty much fall into their chests? Well Jean Simpson’s didn’t; they were firm, I thought, very firm. I mean, I’d been too preoccupied with her legs before now, barely paying any attention to her breasts. I mean, I’d kind of been working on the theory that girls with brilliant legs, who do everything in their power to draw your attention to their brilliant legs, did so because they had a weakness in the other department. But now I was very much intrigued by the sight of the other department. Or should I say, by the shape they appeared to be taking beneath her sweater.
