The Cruelty of Morning

by Hilary Bonner

  ‘I do,’ she replied. ‘More than you can ever imagine. And I want my first time to be with you.’

  So she was a virgin. It was probably just nerves.

  He touched her cheek with his hand.

  ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘Will you let me now?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No. It’s got to be right. I’m not doing it in a car. And I don’t want to get pregnant.’

  ‘You won’t,’ he told her. ‘I brought a packet of three with me.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose my virginity to somebody wearing a plastic bag over his thing.’

  Mark laughed in spite of himself. ‘OK, I’ll take it out,’ he told her.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she replied.

  His frustration was almost too much to bear. ‘I don’t remember you being bothered before.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I think I must have gone mad. That teacher did me a good turn. This time I want everything to be right.’

  ‘And how do you plan to arrange that?’

  ‘For a start I want to go on the pill and I want you to get them for me. I can hardly go to our family doctor, can I? You can fix it, I’ll bet. Get me some pills and I’m all yours.’

  She smiled what she hoped was her most winning smile.

  ‘Just like that. And meanwhile what do you suggest I do with this?’

  To hell with it. He unzipped his trousers.

  ‘Oh that’s OK,’ she told him casually. ‘I’ll deal with that. I’ve done that before.’

  She had too. She took him in her hands and began to play with him. It was bliss. She told him he could touch her on the breasts but nowhere else. He did better than that. He undid her ridiculous blouse, lowered his lips to her nipples, and sucked them like there was no tomorrow. He felt her stiffen and thought for one moment that she was going to give in and let him have her. It did not occur to him to try and force her. He wanted her panting for it, crying out for it, the way he knew she could. She worked on him like crazy and it didn’t take long. He came in great spurts all over his trousers, the car seat, and her hands. But his desire to be inside her was so overwhelming that once again it brought scant relief. Calmly she mopped him up with a handful of paper tissues taken from the box on the back seat.

  He took her home, then went out and got very drunk. He slept on the sofa. In the morning he stole a packet of pills from Irene’s stock of them, which she kept in the bathroom cabinet. He just hoped she wouldn’t notice. Actually he didn’t really care. He had arranged to see Jenny again that evening. He picked her up at seven and drove straight to the lay-by. She didn’t protest. He gave her the pack of pills.

  ‘I’ve got a rug, we can lie down outside if you don’t want to do it in the car,’ he told her. ‘Nobody will see us here.’

  She glanced at the pills.

  ‘Don’t be silly, I’ve got to start taking these after a period and they don’t make you safe right away,’ she said. ‘It’ll be at least a fortnight.’

  His lower body was one big ache. ‘I can’t believe this,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll bring you off again if you want,’ she volunteered, and started to unzip his flies.

  ‘No you won’t,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel worse than not doing anything.’

  He decided on a last try. With the forefinger of one hand he lightly traced the hardness of her nipples. He brought his lips close to her ear and began whispering to her.

  ‘I won’t hurt you. I’ll make you ready and I’ll slip into you so gently. I won’t hurt you.’

  Strange, he meant that too. He would never hurt Jenny Stone. He was sure of it.

  ‘I know you won’t hurt me, that’s not the point,’ she said rather prissily and with supreme self-confidence.

  How could she be prissy at a time like this? And how could she be so cool and confident and in charge? Virgins weren’t supposed to behave like that.

  He carried on trying.

  ‘You know how much I want to be inside you,’ he said. ‘You want it. I know you do. I want to fill you up. I want to drive you wild. You can be wild, can’t you, crazy?’

  She pushed him away again. Grumpily he started the motor and drove her home.

  She went straight to her room. She sat on the edge of the bed and reached under her skirt, putting both hands on herself. She rocked backwards and forwards. Her act of willpower was extraordinary. But never again would Mark Piddle think he could have her and just walk away. He had to learn to do as she said.

  She wanted Mark to lie in bed longing for her body, just as she had longed for his so many times. She shut her eyes and tried not to think about him. She had never had sex, and yet she could imagine so vividly what it would be like.

  Mark turned the car round and drove back to his flat.

  This time he was going to have to give it to Irene, and how he was going to give it to her.

  She had been asleep on the couch and was still only half awake when he made her kneel on the floor. He didn’t want to look at her face. He didn’t want to see her compliance. He didn’t want to see her wince when he hurt her inside. Poor little Irene. He was quite detached. She was just satisfying his need now until he could do what he really wanted with the girl who was driving him mad. He pushed himself straight into her. It didn’t take long. But the frustration still burnt in his belly. He made her suck him until he was hard again and then he took her into the bedroom, threw himself on top of her and hammered into her once more. This time she was on her back with her head over the edge of the bed and he maneuvered her like he had before so that her pelvis was pivoted upwards and he could get deeper into her than in any other position. It was his second erection. It was going to last a long time. And it was going to take some satisfying. He pushed into her with all his strength, with all his might.

  The next day was a Wednesday. Three days after she had discovered Marjorie Benson’s body, Jenny still could not sleep without having terrible nightmares. And her desire for Mark Piddle was driving her wild. She was determined to stick to her own terms, and to make sure that he would never just drift out of her life again. But all day Wednesday passed and Mark did not call. Had she teased him too much? Had he moved on to some other, easier girl? Every time the phone rang in the tiled hall of 16 Seaview Road, Jenny rushed to pick up the receiver. It was never Mark.

  Johnny was at the deckchair stand again. He had turned up as usual every day since Marjorie’s death, sticking to his routine. But oh, how he missed her, and how afraid he was. He thought he wanted to die. He could not eat, he felt dull and listless.

  Bill Turpin did nothing but prowl around all morning. Johnny had been acutely aware of the old man’s thoughtful staring. The boy tried desperately to behave normally. But he knew he was not winning the struggle.

  He felt that Marjorie had been everything to him, She alone had understood when he had told her all about himself, and he had shared everything with her, the secret thoughts he had never allowed anyone else near.

  That morning’s tourists seemed noisier and more mindless than ever. Johnny felt contempt for them. He knew it was hypocritical, wrong even, but he couldn’t help himself. All his life he had watched their convoys arriving, clogging the roads with their caravans and their campers, crawling along in fear of sharp corners and high hedges, winding lanes and steep hills. They threw litter over the moors, at the roadside, and on the beach. They crowded out the pubs on Saturday nights and demanded discos where once there had been only joyous peace. They provided a ceaseless market for the rubbishy souvenirs that appeared in all the shops just before Whitsun, and were relentlessly replaced as fast as they sold until long after August bank holiday.

  But take them to the small unspoilt beaches of North Devon where the cliffs are carved out of marble and the rocks have been given muscle by Michelangelo, where the sea is deep green above drowned forests and the sand is the finest in the world, and most of them would feel nothing. Johnny was certain of his own superiority.
He revelled in the mighty poetry of nature. It was in his head all the time.

  He had explained all this to Marjorie and she had not laughed at him, nor criticised when he told her how in a moment of madness the previous summer, he and a couple of friends had toured the district scrawling ‘Grockles Go Home’ on posters and lavatory walls. Marjorie recognised the true Johnny Cooke, and Johnny had loved that in her. He was no vandal. Underneath his veneer of bravado he was a quiet introverted boy, eighteen years old and already resigned to having nowhere in particular to go, happy to hand out Bill Turpin’s deckchairs and daydream in the sun. At least, until last Sunday he had been.

  Brooding adolescent Johnny, sensitive but youthfully arrogant, with his long wavy dark brown hair, black eyes and perfect body, was handsome and he knew it. There had already been a selection of girls in his young life, most of them older than him, but he had never had a regular girlfriend. Until Marjorie. He had never before been interested in making the effort to get to know somebody, to care, to learn to love. By and large he had lived in a world of his own, wandering off for long lonely walks, reading the books he had found he really loved and not bothering or remembering to read the books he needed to read in order to pass his exams at school.

  When he was thirteen, Johnny had been taken ill with meningitis, and, during the weeks of convalescence became even more of a loner. Boys of thirteen are not usually very interested in sitting quietly and talking, in putting the world to rights, and Johnny’s friends soon became bored with visiting him while he was sick. It was a thoughtful time for him. His instinctive confidence in the health and strength of his young body had been shaken rigid. He had been brought close to death at an age when death is a lifetime away and a lifetime seems like eternity.

  It was almost too much to bear: the sympathy, the understanding, the sense of near tragedy. When he started to regain his strength, he needed to get out of the house, to clear his head. So he fell into the habit of visiting his grandfather, a big quiet man, a retired farmer who never seemed to get excited about anything, good or bad. Before he met Marjorie, Johnny’s grandfather had been the only true confidant in his life – but then his grandfather had died.

  The old man had lived in a solid square house with a garden of vegetables and fruit and a garage in which he kept his bicycle and sacks of potatoes and boxes of sweet-smelling apples. He and Johnny would go for long, long walks through the fields by the sea. And Johnny would ask him what he thought of God and the prime minister, and why the world was always on the edge of war. On these walks he would pour out all the crazy mixed-up ideas and worries of a thirteen-year-old who had had too much time to think. And the old man would produce boiled sweets from deep pockets, butterscotch and fruit drops, some without paper and covered in fluff. He would rub them on his shirt to clean them and then take out his false teeth so that he could suck the sweets more easily.

  He would listen with the patience of his eighty years and a lifetime lived in the peace of the countryside.

  ‘In my day us was only worried about filling us bellies and keeping warm in winter,’ he told Johnny. ‘Then there was war, two of the buggers. And us worried about keeping alive. There wadden time for nought else. I tell ’ee this, boy, I don’t know if us be better off now or not. Buggered if I do.’

  His words never amounted to anything clever or profound, but the old man had a natural wisdom about him, and wisest of all, he knew how much Johnny needed somebody to listen. And so the boy spent almost all his days with his grandfather, and his evenings scribbling poems in exercise books.

  Most of it was not really true poetry, just outpourings of feelings, the things he said during the day put on paper in bad blank verse. All about knocking down the walls of ignorance, rushing through dark tunnels into vacuums of freedom, and trying to get back through the tunnel again because it was cosier on the other side.

  But as Johnny grew strong once more, he went back to school and re-found his friends. He began to forget the fear. He stopped writing poems, and he stopped seeing his grandfather.

  When the old man died he hadn’t visited him for months. Johnny was consumed with guilt and the thought that his grandfather had gone for ever was almost unbearable.

  At the funeral everyone was glad the weather was fine. The ham was sweet, the pickles held the tang of last summer, the tea was strong, and they talked about everything except dying.

  The coffin, and the flowers, and the body of Johnny’s grandfather, flabby and red and ugly with great age, had been burned. Johnny thought suddenly of flesh burning. Just for a moment he had a dreadful vision of flames licking through the rosewood and biting into the still body of his grandfather.

  He left his ham and pickles, went to the lavatory, and was secretly sick. When he came back his face was white, but his hands were steady. And he sat down and ate his meal.

  Twice now in his young life he had been confronted by death. Its shadow would never leave him. The third time was approaching – and that would finally destroy him.

  On the night of his grandfather’s funeral, he had slipped out of the house taking with him all the money that he had. He had spent the evening in pubs where his age was not known, drinking more beer than he had ever drunk before. In the third pub he visited he found himself chatting up a pretty red-haired girl wearing thick eyeliner and the shortest possible miniskirt. Through the beery haze she looked very desirable to Johnny. He bought her whisky-and-coke and ordered a large whisky for himself.

  The girl happily took up Johnny’s offer to walk her home, and raised no objections when he suggested a detour along the unlit riverside path by the park. They sat together on a bench and began to kiss. So far so good. She responded eagerly. Johnny fondled her breasts through the flimsy material of her blouse and she barely protested. He could feel that her nipples were hard. He didn’t know much – but he knew that was a good sign. He kissed her, gently at first, then a little more forcefully. He parted her lips with his tongue and began probing, exploring, inside her mouth. She was still responding, flicking her tongue against his, sucking his mouth. Very promising. He began to undo the buttons of her blouse. She pushed his hand away. Each time he tried to get a hand inside her blouse she pushed him away. Oh, how he wanted to feel those pert rounded breasts, to tweak those hard little nipples between his fingers.

  He had an erection in spite of all the booze. Hopefully he placed her hand on the bulge in his trousers. She felt it for a few seconds, moving her fingers just a little, then took her hand away. He couldn’t make her put it back.

  He began stroking her legs above the knees. He was aware that her skirt had slid up nearly to her crotch. She was teasing him with her mouth but not letting him do any of the things he so wanted to do with his hands.

  Finally, drunk and frustrated, he held his left arm across her body and shoved his right hand, hard and directly on target, up between her legs. The skirt did not offer much protection. He ripped at her underwear, tearing tights and knickers in his eagerness. It was not until the next morning that he realised how stupid he had been.

  The girl had screamed, struggled ferociously, and with the strength of fear managed somehow to heave him off her. She had jumped to her feet, slipped on the grass, fallen over, further damaged her already laddered tights, and covered her clothing in mud and grass stains. She ran off, sobbing and shouting that her father would kill her when he saw the state she was in.

  Johnny sat on the seat a bit longer. He was very drunk. His stomach, assaulted earlier by the emotion of the day, started to rebel against the beer and whisky to which it was unused. He was sick again, and finally staggered unsteadily home, still feeling dreadfully ill. His father, who had waited up, took one look at him and gave him the lecture of his life. It was mostly wasted because Johnny could remember almost nothing when he woke the next morning.

  His memory began to return all too vividly a little later when two policemen arrived on the Cooke doorstep. Johnny’s mother immediately telephoned his fat
her, who came home from the greengrocer’s shop he ran in the town. The girl, forced by her parents to explain her appearance, had blurted out that she had been attacked by Johnny Cooke.

  Johnny, suffering from the first real hangover of his young life, said over and over again that he didn’t do anything. The truth was that he couldn’t really remember what he had done, the police were not convinced, and so Johnny faced the court proceedings which were to continue to haunt him. The girl, it transpired, was only fifteen years old, and Johnny was charged with indecently assaulting a girl under the age of consent. The landlord of the pub where both youngsters had been drinking also found himself in trouble – but that didn’t help Johnny.

  What did help him, in true small-town style, was the friendship of his father with the local police chief inspector – his Rotary Club friend Ted Robson. Only that prevented charges of attempted rape.

  Johnny had appeared before the magistrates, pleaded guilty, and been put on probation for three years. His protests of innocence had not impressed his father, who never felt quite the same about his son again. His mother just pretended the incident had not happened. But the publicity in the local press had, she told her closest friends, ‘nearly killed her’.

  ‘Just you behave yourself, my boy,’ she would warn continually. ‘Another do like the last affair and it would kill your father.’

  Johnny knew what she really meant. The eleventh commandment ruled his family: don’t get found out.

  Suddenly Johnny was startled back to the present. Bill Turpin loomed at his side. He had crept up in that disconcerting way he had. Silent footsteps. Johnny felt the old man’s breath before he heard a sound.

  ‘Morning, boy. All right this morning be ’ee?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Feeling better, then?’

  Johnny’s flesh started to crawl. Did Bill Turpin know something? Oh God. If it was going to be anybody it would be Bill, the nosy old bugger.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I thought you seemed a bit off-colour the last day or two.’