THE BLUE EYES.

Oliver is at a particularly low ebb when someone comes along to lighten his heart with her blue eyes....

It was the summer of 1986 and Oliver needed a break from the wretched life he found himself virtually imprisoned in. It had all crashed onto him from a great height since his pointless and rather silly attempt at finding some clue about the immorality of his boss, and being caught red-handed.

For some reason his name was poison when it came to interviews for a job and he assumed the reason lay in the vitriol of Mr Cyril Hunt who hadn’t believed a word of his explanation about a mother who claimed then denied sexual exploitation by the man. He thought it unfair that he should be considered persona non grata and maybe it was, but there weren’t many who saw it that way because Mr Hunt was a big name in Brumpton, widely respected both as a businessman and a human being. So if he intimated something, then….

Who would have believed Oliver’s account, anyway? He asked himself that question and decided that because it was the absolute truth he would, right up to the point when a little voice inside his head said no, actually he wouldn’t. Who could possibly believe that an intelligent teenage girl had got herself trapped between the pages of a pornographic novel to the point that it had twisted her entire life? Even led to murder?

It had sounded at the time like something he might make up and although Mr Hunt, had been very friendly in the past with Lydia’s parents, that past was such a long time ago he’d just about forgotten that they’d had little parties in each other’s homes and that when he’d been round their house there was a bored teenage girl upstairs, and he knew nothing about the way she had plunged into the grimy world of an obscene novel and taken part of the real world with her.

His part.

It was too fantastic to be true so why was the lad telling him it as if it was perfectly okay for reality and fantasy to merge into a strange new world in which nothing could be believed? Was there going to be a rider to the story, a claim that some impropriety had happened with him as well? Was that what the lad was building up to, and chickening out of because fantasies and the real world can’t easily coexist?

Best to be aware.

So the boy’s name was blackened, and rightly so, and the whisper went around like whispers do and the boy was still unemployed even though he was on the cusp of being twenty.

The last couple of years had been a struggle for him and his mother was no help because he didn’t see her once in that time. He decided not to. Life was complicated enough without adding her into the mix, and he had quite enough on his plate just staying alive and sane.

And the summer of 1986 was upon him.

“You should go on a holiday like you did,” suggested Edina, the kindly woman who had fostered him but now just let him stay in his room because there was nowhere else for him to go and anyway she liked him, as did Ian, her husband.

“You mean, with Gavin?” asked Oliver, “I don’t think I can. He’s got a girl friend and they spend every minute they can together.”

“You could do with one of those,” grunted Ian, “they make a lad feel good...”

“Not with Gavin, silly,” grinned Edina, “but like you did, but on your own or with a different friend.”

He didn’t like to say he had few friends, and then, when he thought about it, had no friends. It sounded pathetic because it was pathetic.

“I might, I suppose,” he mumbled.

“Go on a bus,” enthused Edina. “They’re not so expensive, and you could take that tent you borrowed when you went with Gavin. It would do you good, getting away from it all, getting refreshed and ready for battle!”

“I don’t really want any battles...” he said quietly.

“It’s a manner of speech,” Edina suggested, “and it doesn’t mean swords and guns and bloodshed on battle-fields!”

“I wish I had a car,” he mourned.

“You’d need to pass your test first, and doing that all takes time and money,” the ever-practical Edina smiled.

So the seed was sown and the first green shoots of dreams started to poke through the soil of life, and Oliver paid for a ticket to the same seaside town that he’d been to with Gavin a few years earlier.

And it was easy, really, booking bus tickets to the not-so distant coastal town, packing a tent with the same flimsy sleeping bag and setting off as if life should always be so bereft of problems. He didn’t have much money, but that didn’t matter because he had most of what he needed anyway.

The cycle ride had taken the best part of a day but the bus took only a couple of hours to complete the same journey. But when he climbed off the coach his heart sank.

The campsite was gone.

Where Gavin and he had erected their tent was now posh with brand new caravans and the smell of fish and chips cooking constantly in the air, together with the tinkle of coins in slot machines from a small arcade and the raucous music from a handful of unentertaining rides.

It was just a few years since he and Gavin had pitched their tent, but just about everything was different. The place was no longer the kind of resort where a lad could find a week’s patch of grass. It was all wrong.

Oliver sighed the deepest of sighs and leaned casually against the bus shelter.

And it was then that he noticed her.

Paint a picture of an angel and you might have some kind of likeness as she paused walking past him, the hem of her white skirt contrasting with her sun-bronzed thighs and her eyes, those blue intelligent, all-seeing eyes pausing as they swept over him.

And that smile.

There never was such a smile, not in his world, not ever. It consumed something inside his head and made all the myopic staring at nothing into what it really was… not very much at all.

He’d noticed girls before �" of course he had, and there had been the wonderful nurse in hospital. But he’d not done anything about any of them because nothing had gone right enough to make him even want to share his nothing-life with anyone beautiful enough to earn his right to stare. He was as low as a young man can get, and he didn’t know it.

Until that moment.

He couldn’t help staring. The white skirt, loose and cotton, caught by the summer breeze and clean like he knew her thoughts must be, her wonderfully bronzed skin … and those eyes.

He’d seen eyes as blue as that before, he knew he had, but these were so special he stupidly and wonderfully wanted to depart this life and swim in them…

And she looked at him.

With those blue eyes, straight at him.

“Oliver!” she said, and: “Oh, how wonderful! Oliver, it’s you!”

© Peter Rogerson 16.01.17