THE CONVERSATION

It's the last night for the two lads in their tent.

What a week it had been!

The ride to the seaside had been so exhausting Oliver’s legs still ached and he was sure he had developed muscles where there hadn’t been any this time last week. He and Gavin had wanted it to be a time of discovery and adventure, but the only discovery they’d made was which was the best fish and chip shot and the only adventure had been paddling in the edge of the sea.

But there had been the brief encounter with his hospital nurse, the lovely Nurse Elly Saunders. She’d been a figure on the edge of his dreams ever since she’d been his nurse in hospital a couple of years earlier, and a slightly blurred memory of what she had let him see still hovered around the edges of his dreams and well into his waking day-dreams.

Then he’d experienced a kind of misery when he realised it was someone else who was holding her hand.

As if it would be me, he rationalised, as if a lovely woman like that would find more than a few moments for a lad like me… I’m too young to start with, being only sixteen when she’s got to be thirty...

The two boys lay in their thin sleeping bags (thin for the summer and because carting thicker ones on bicycles would have been impractical) and the very last suggestion of daylight warmed their world. It was fun being in the tent that had served them as home for the past week and Oliver stared at Gavin, a distant look showing just how little he was seeing of the here and now and just how much of his own dreamy fairyland dominated his mind.

“She was a wonderful nurse,” he said, talking to nobody in particular, but Gavin thought the comment was addressed to him, which it might have been.

“You what?” he asked, perplexed at the randomness of the sudden remark. “Who was so wonderful?”

“Nurse Saunders. The woman with the doctor,” Oliver said, dreamily.

“That woman from the first day, the one who knew you?” queried Gavin.

“The same. I saw her … I saw her bosom when I was laid up in hospital with a bad head,” sighed Oliver. “It was lovely.”

“You mean through her clothes?” Gavin sat up when it crossed his mind that the conversation might be about to get interesting, and banged his head on the roof of the small tent that was enclosing them like some kind of cotton cocoon.

“Clumsy!” smiled Oliver.

“Well?”

“Not through her clothes. Under her uniform, down the front. She was my nurse that time I was in hospital with a bad head after the football thing.”

“You saw her tits? Her real tits and not a lacy bra or anything like that?”

“Everything,” confirmed Oliver. “It was as if she meant me to look, the way she stood there taking my temperature with a clear gap down her lovely blue uniform and no bra, so I could see absolutely everything. And it’s been on my mind ever since. It was one of those sights a person might never forget, and all I could do was gurgle because I had a thermometer in my mouth.”

“You lucky sod! She looked fair pretty to me.”

“She was an angel with an angel’s smile,” confirmed Oliver enthusiastically. “And she did more towards clearing my head of the aches and throbbings I’d suffered from than any amount of doctors could, just by smiling that smile at me. She smiled at me a lot.”

“I’ll be it made your you-know-what twitch!”

“More than twitch, Gavin. More than twitch. After all, I’m only human.”

Gavin groaned audibly. “And here we are at the end of our week at the seaside and all we’ve got to remember it by is the memory you’ve got of a nurse’s bosom from years ago!”

“There were those two lasses on Wednesday...” reminded Oliver. “Though maybe we’d be better off forgetting them!”

“I’d say so! They were scrubbers! All right to look at and really nice legs and stuff and sweet little skirts so you could just about see all the way up without perving, but when they opened their mouths...”

“Their potty-mouths,” grinned Oliver, remembering.

“Their potty-mouths,” agreed Gavin, “when they opened them they were common as muck and with too many words beginning with f!”

“We had dreams of things being so much better and different… but now it’s going to be back to Brumpton and the exam results,” sighed Oliver.

“Just a bad week for pretty birds,” nodded Gavin, lying back down again. “Best put it down to experience.”

“And out virginity’s safely intact,” laughed Oliver.

“You speak for yourself!”

“What? You mean you’ve done it and not told me?”

“Why should you know everything? A lad’s got to have secrets,” said Gavin.

“I know, but that’s a mighty big one … if it’s true.”

“It might be.”

“It isn’t then! You’re a liar, Gavin Hardstock!”

“I wish it were true…” sighed Gavin, “but you’re right, I wasn’t really bragging … it was wishful thinking.”

That was what Oliver liked about Gavin. He didn’t tell tall stories or make out he was better than he was. Instead he went about his life like a true friend, and that was the best thing a mate could be. Honest. Straight forward. Trustworthy. And if he said something you knew he was being straight with you. Gavin was all right. He was a good mate.

“You’re a good mate,” he said, wearily.

“So are you,” murmured Gavin, “a really good mate. I’ll tell you what: we’ll need a bit of strength riding all the way back to Brumpton tomorrow, so how about a bit of shut-eye? We’ve had a few late nights this week, gossiping like old women! Even though I sound like my foster-ma when I put it like that!”

“I’m shattered anyway.”

“No dirty dreams about that nurse of yours though, Olly!”

“There’s no way I can control what I dream, mate. And Nurse Saunders makes a good dream even if it might be a bit raunchy. Taking my temperature, feeling my pulse, doing my blood pressure, stroking my head...”

“Shurrup! You’re making me feel … gooey! I hope she doesn’t go too far south with all that feeling!”

“Chance would be … crikey, you’ve got me going. Now shut yours eyes before it’s tomorrow and we’re both too tired for the ride home.”

“It’s okay, mate.”

Oliver closed his eyes and lay there. It was good being under canvas even though the ground was both hard and lumpy and the odd insect crawled past him, too close for comfort. But that didn’t matter. This was freedom, and he was experiencing it with a really good friend.

Though he’d be happier experiencing it with Nurse Elly Saunders.

And that wonderful bosom he could still just about remember.

© Peter Rogerson 05.01.17