Forever Is Over

by Wade, Calvin

  That was twice in one night, Amy had pointed out her sexual availability to me. This time though, she was handing me the key to the chastity belt. I knew I would not be using it.

  Just as I was making my way to Amy’s front door, I heard Amy mumble something behind me. I thought I heard her right, but not understanding, I turned around.

  “What was that?”

  I knew the comment was obviously not intended for me, which made it all the more interesting.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Amy said, turning back to the crimson shade she had been in before, during the heat of passion.

  “Go on! Tell me!” I pushed pleasantly.

  “I just said to myself ‘Phantom Fucker’!”

  I thought that was what she had said but was confused by its meaning.

  “Eh?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Richie. It’s a private joke between Jemma and me.”

  “You should go and visit her and share it face to face, Amy. It’s not right her being in there and no-one visiting.”

  “I will, Richie, I definitely will,” Amy said as she led me out the door,

  “ I’m sure she’d have a chuckle at my expense.”

  I had no idea what Amy was on about but was still too drunk to care.

  I set off home thinking things over and cringing to myself from time to time, screwing my face up to reflect my torture. How complicated was I making things?

  First, I fell in love with Kelly, who ran away to Holland then Singapore after pushing her mother down the stairs and killing her. Then, I developed an interest in her sister Jemma, who has now been jailed for the manslaughter Kelly committed. Finally, as the icing on the cake, I find myself naked in the lounge of Jemma’s best friend, Amy, despite the fact that I had never been physically attracted to her in my entire life! Add into the mix, a cancerous and subsequently removed scrotum and it all adds up to one fine mess!

  All I could conclude from the whole sorry state of affairs was that I wanted Kelly back. I remember breaking out into another Billy Bragg song that night on the journey home. A song called “The Only One” as that was what I wanted Kelly to be and by the time I reached home, I felt in utter turmoil. I had let Kelly slip through my fingers and I knew if I didn’t get her back, I would regret it for the rest of my life.

  Amy

  “Come on big boy! Come to Amy!”

  I closed my eyes, lay back on the carpet, the soft hairs tickling my naked back and told myself the more I relaxed the less this would hurt. There were too many things running around in my mind though to allow me to chill. The day before had been day five of my period and I would have just died of shame if Richie had been witness to the last of the blood. Blood was fear one, fear two was pregnancy. Should I stop before we start and suggest he put a condom on? Would Richie sort that out himself ? If he didn’t, could I get pregnant at this time of month? Claire Rayner was always saying no time in the month was safe, but the girls at school reckoned if you had just been “on” then it would fine. I trusted Claire Rayner more, but since I had leaped on Richie, we had just kissed and tore at each others clothes in silence, would it ruin the moment now if I spoke?

  All this was going around in my head, when Richie suddenly started breathing like a Doctor had a stethoscope to his chest. On his second deep exhale, he came out with,

  “I’m going to have to stop.”

  The first thing I thought was that he must have “come”. Maybe, during all the passionate kissing and fondling, he had got himself over excited, overheating and then completely refusing to do any further work like a car engine in a traffic jam.

  ‘This is going to be embarrassing’, I remember thinking, ‘especially for Richie!’

  I opened my eyes and thought I had best keep my own frustrations under wraps.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “It feels wrong.” Richie replied.

  What did he mean? Did he mean his big ‘attention seeker’ felt wrong? It had certainly looked alright before! I had never really seen a male ‘attention seeker’ in its proudest form before. I had felt a few in the darkness, but I had only seen my brother’s at bath time when we were really little and I certainly had no recollection of it looking like Richie’s just had!

  Is that what he meant by ‘it felt wrong’ or did he mean, as I suspected he did, that it ‘felt wrong’, as he was still obsessing about Kelly and therefore rolling around my Mum and Dad’s lounge naked did not seem like the best laid plan.

  ‘Come on Richie!’ I thought. ‘This is my best ever chance of losing my virginity, don’t bloody ruin it! You just don’t understand how much I need to lose my virginity to you!’

  “It’s only a lay!” I said as if I was ever so laid back about the whole thing! I wasn’t! This was a momentous occasion for me, or at least it could have been, if Richie had not backed out! Why was this happening? Boys always said that it was alright for girls, we could just have sex whenever we wanted it, we just had to make ourselves available. How much more available could I be? I was laying naked on the floor with my legs as wide apart as a labouring mother in stirrups! I started to feel humiliated and within seconds I felt so small that Thumbelina would have loomed large over me.

  Richie’s next two sentences confirmed my virginity was to remain intact.

  “Amy, it’s not just a lay to me. It feels like I am cheating on Kelly.”

  At this point, I could have thrown a wobbly, accused Richie of unnecessarily stringing me along, but I was still clinging to the hope that once he got over Kelly, Richie might still want to be with me, so I just remained all sweetness and light. I had had too much to drink in Ormskirk though, which resulted in the ‘think before speaking’ switch in my brain turning itself off.

  My first ‘faux pas’ was to pretty much say to Richie that although he had not wanted to nail me there and then, if he ever wanted to, he could just come around and do it. I’m sure I did not put it quite as tactlessly as that, but I remember standing there cringing thinking,

  ‘Amy, you are just making yourself look like a desperate slut! You should be playing hard to get, not “Open All Hours!”’

  My second ‘faux pas’ was saying my drunken mutterings too loud. As Richie was all dressed and ready to go home, I was looking at him and thinking ‘This Man Is Gorgeous!’, I must be the only girl in the world who could manage to get both myself and Richie naked and still not have sex. Then, I thought,

  ‘Hang on a minute! Maybe not! Jemma did that too! Back at the Birch’s party! I think she managed to get further than me, but Richie still fled before everything got going! What was it Jemma called him again?

  Dracula Dick? No, that wasn’t right.

  Fucking Frankenstein? No.

  GOT IT!

  “Phantom Fucker!”

  Problem was, when I said the right answer I meant to just mumble it to myself but I’ve always struggled to gauge my decibels one I have had a drink and through drunken excitement that I still had an active brain, I must have mumbled it far too loud.

  Richie, who at this point was heading for the door, swivelled around with an offended look on his face and asked me what I had just said. I think he thought I was insulting him, as he probably only heard the word ‘fucker’, but I was just delighted to have remembered Jemma’s nickname for the man who had crept into her room that night at the Birch’s. Jemma had never been 100% sure it was Richie, but after this I would have bet my mortgage on it, if I had not lived at my parents at the time!

  I made some lame excuse to Richie about it being a private joke between Jemma and I, which he did not appear to believe for a second, but we made some awkward, forced conversation before he finally left.

  As soon as Richie headed home, I closed the door and slumped onto the floor like an exhausted marathon runner, one step beyond the finishing line. I knew every time I saw Richie from that day forth, he would not just think, ‘Lovely girl Amy’, he would think, ‘Lovely girl Amy, I’ve seen her boobs and fluffy bits’, which w
as just the most embarrassing thought!

  As I lay on the floor, tearfully slapping the hall tiles with my fists, my Dad must have come down the stairs to see what all the commotion was about. Being face down horizontal, I wasn’t aware of his presence, so I am not sure how long he witnessed my theatrical outburst for, but by the time he spoke, he had sat himself down, halfway down the stairs.

  “Has that boy done something to upset you, Amy?”

  It was more a case of what he had not done rather than had done, but there was no way I was going to tell Dad that. Still horizontal, looking like a drunken swimmer in an empty pool, I looked up at Dad. I knew how stupid I must look, so pulled myself up and dusted myself off. Being found fornicating in the lounge with Richie would probably only have been slightly more embarrassing.

  “It’s not Richie, Dad, it’s me.”

  “What’s you?”

  “I’ve done something to upset myself. I keep chasing a dream and somehow I keep managing to turn it into a nightmare.”

  “How do you mean, love?”

  “I fall for lads that are out of my reach, Dad. The one’s that everyone wants. Why would someone like Richie want to ‘go out’ with someone like me? He’s out of my league? I need to start looking for someone at my own level.”

  “And what do you consider to be your level, Amy?”

  “Average”.

  Dad smiled. That knowing smile that parents do, which says ‘you’re so young!’

  “Amy, in life, don’t ever just ‘make do’. Now I’m not saying don’t compromise, because you will have to do that in life, but keep chasing dreams, because one day they will come true.”

  “That’s not how it feels right now, Dad.”

  Having managed to compose myself temporarily, I was now staving off tears again.

  “Amy, you will have heard the saying ‘you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince’.”

  “Of course I have!”

  “Well, that’s probably how you feel right now, that’s there’s a horribly long journey for you before you meet Mr. Right, but that is not necessarily true. I found my princess, your mother, very early in my adult life. She was my first real girlfriend. We started ‘courting’ when we were only seventeen. We met at “The Cavern Club” in Liverpool, one night at a Rory Storm & The Hurricanes gig. Their drummer, Ringo Starr, ended up in “The Beatles.”

  I had heard this story a million times before.

  “I know, Dad. You had to borrow a shilling off Mum to get home and Mum always says it’s the best shilling she ever spent and you say that was the dearest loan in the history of banking as you borrowed a shilling and it cost you a fortune!”

  “That’s right love, but the point is, I did not kiss a lot of frogs and you may not have to either. Your prince may be just around the corner or it may be you don’t find him for a while yet, but I’ll tell you something, Amy, you certainly don’t need to drop your standards, because which ever young man ends up marrying you, will be the luckiest man alive You are beautiful, Amy, inside and out, and there aren’t that many people in life, who are that blessed. There is no-one less average than you.”

  I headed upstairs to bed, kissing my Dad on the way up and giving him an almighty hug. I didn’t believe a word he said, it was just ‘Dad speak’, but the reason that I pretty much remember every word he said, was because he turned out to be right!

  The following afternoon, the phone rang. Mum and Dad had taken Daisy to Formby beach for a run around the sand dunes. My Mum had already had a quiet word with me that morning about leaving knickers around the house, as Daisy had apparently found a pair somewhere and Dad had had to pull them from the back of her throat as she had been choking! Martin was out too, at some geek convention, so I answered.

  “Hello”.

  “Is that Amy?” the voice of my future husband asked. I recognised it vaguely but could not place it.

  “Yes.”

  I was going to ask who it was but I figured if I continued to let him speak, I’d be able to figure it out.

  “I just wanted to ring to tell you that my brother is an absolute fool.”

  Nope, still no idea. Maybe if I established who the brother was.

  “Who’s an absolute fool?”

  “Richie! He told me what happened last night and I told him he was a complete and utter idiot!”

  I blushed so hard that I thought my cheeks would explode with the heat. I hoped Richie had not told Jim explicitly what had happened last night. Maybe he had. Maybe Jim was phoning to cash in his brother’s “Shag Me Whenever You Want” voucher.

  “He told you what happened? What exactly did he tell you, Jim?”

  “That’s between me and my brother!”

  “Not if it’s about me, it’s not! I just want to hear whether my version of events and your brother’s are the same, that’s all.”

  “Well, after I left you I went down to “The Golden Lion” and then to “The Ropers” as they sometimes have lock ins and I was in the mood for a few beers. When I got down to “The Ropers” though, there were about six pensioners there and that was about it, so I headed home. I saw a few mates at the Acropolis though, so stopped and had a bit of a chat. Richie made it back before me, but only just as he was sitting having a cup of coffee, when I came in.

  I asked him straight away if anything had happened between the pair of you. I know the two of you were having a row when I was in Disraeli’s, but it was a real husband and wife type row, a row between people with feelings for each other, so that was why I had made a discreet exit. I had sensed some sort of chemistry.”

  “You’re obviously a good brother.”

  “Not always, I’m not! Richie could tell you a few stories!”

  “So did he tell you a few stories about me?”

  “Not really. He just said you had a bit of a snog and then he regretted it, because he’s still got the hots for Kelly. I told him he was mad, you’re much cuter!”

  Jim was massaging my ego, but I knew he was building up to asking me out, he wasn’t telephoning to check my lips were OK. I began to quickly think of excuses. There was no way I was going on a date with Jim Billingham. There were countless reasons. He was ugly and I was a bit of a looks snob. He dressed weird, like a 1920’s throwback. Jim looked and dressed like ‘Fat Sam’ from Bugsy Malone! He was a school year younger than me, which felt like ten years and finally, and probably most importantly, I was madly in love with his brother. All told this was a lethal rejection cocktail.

  “Thanks Jim!”

  “Amy, I’m not being complimentary here just for the sake of it, I’m dealing in fact. You are an incredibly fine woman and you need someone who would love you and respect you for the wonderful specimen that you are!”

  I knew it! I knew he was angling for a date!

  “Jim, are you suggesting to me that you could be that man?”

  “I certainly think that I have all the qualities you need, Amy. I may not be blessed with my brother’s good looks, but I make up for it in personality. If you come on a date with me, Amy Perkins, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.”

  I smiled. Jim was certainly not lacking in confidence!

  “I may not be disappointed, Jim, but I’m afraid you might be. I’m not going on a date with you.”

  “Give me one good reason why, Amy.”

  I could have given him a hundred, but they would have seemed very cruel.

  “I just don’t want to!”

  “That’s not a good reason, Amy! Just one date. Why not? If you hate it, just don’t have a second date!”

  “You’re too young for me!”

  “One year, Amy. When you’re ninety, I’ll be eighty nine!”

  Cruelly, I remember thinking that with a body like his, he’d have a heart attack long before he got to eighty nine!

  “I’m happy single.”

  “So? I had an Auntie Elsie who apparently said in the early 1970’s that she was not going to swop to a
colour television because she was happy with her black and white one! Once she got a colour one, she realised what she’d been missing!”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I’m just saying I could put some colour into your life!”

  “No matter what I say, Jim, you are not going to accept it as a good reason!”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “So, basically what you are saying is, that you are going to force me to go on a date that I really don’t want to go on, by persisting when any normal bloke would just take the rejection on the chin and slope off feeling sorry for himself.”

  “Amy, let’s get a few things straight. Firstly, I am not a ‘normal’ bloke. I am unique. I am not part of the herd, nor would I ever want to be. I do things that I want to do. Linking in with that, I wouldn’t dream of forcing you into doing something that you don’t want to do, all I am trying to point out, is that your decision making process is flawed. If you want to come on a date with me - “great!”, if you don’t, then don’t, but don’t turn me down because of a twelve month age gap or pretend you would rather be single than have a boyfriend or because my external features aren’t as pleasing on the eye as my brother’s, that just makes you look shallow.”

  “Ok.”

  “OK you’ll come on a date with me?”

  ”No, I was just agreeing not to be shallow.”

  “So, will you come on a date with me? Just a drink in Ormskirk, tonight. It doesn’t have to be Ormskirk, it could be Southport or Liverpool or Preston or Wigan, or wherever you like.”

  “Hawaii?”

  “As long as you’re paying!”

  “Jim, another reason I don’t want to go on a date with you, is because you have a reputation for trying to screw anything that moves!”

  There was an element of irony in that statement. The previous night, I had not exactly been trying to avoid sex myself. At least I was selective though.

  “Amy, I am not going to insult you by denying that I have a past, but that’s all it is, a past. It would be far, far easier for me to ignore your obvious charms, go back into Ormskirk tomorrow night and manipulate some Edge Hill College student who is just looking to feed her libido now that she has moved away from Mummy and Daddy’s. I’m not looking for easy though, Amy. I want to go on a date with you, as I think you are the only girl I have ever met who I truly believe I could fall in love with.”