JOSIAH PYKE AND THE GIRL

Josiah Pyke feels the first stirrings of interest in a girl as he looks at Penny Longlane at school.

Penny Longlane, aged seventeen and almost certainly, she was told, the beauty of the county, was puzzled.

It was all to do with the Pyke boy. He didn’t seem to want to know her, unlike just about every other boy she’d ever met, and he didn’t seem to have any attachment to any other girl either. She had even wondered whether he was into other boys, like Craig Fulsome who she thought was close enough to David Stickly for them to be joined at the hip, but he showed no signs of it. In fact, he showed no signs of being into anyone, not even himself.

Yet he was, she thought with her teenage brain, a looker. Since he’d started that particular school he’d grown from a weedy rather bruised looking little lad into just about a man with a few straggly whiskers which he removed from time to time. And he was always smartly dressed and clean. He never smelled like some of the lads did, those who triumphed on the games field and might have put more effort into the showers and scrubbing their armpits afterwards. But more important to Penny was the fact that in his own quiet way he was bright. He’d made in to the sixth form and was studying English as she was, and even when it got to be difficult he contributed to class discussions in a way that made Mr Evans nod his head and praise him.

To her eyes he was everything a boy should be, and she was a girl who was beginning to look at boys in a much more interesting way than she had last year, when she’d been a kid.

She wanted to be close enough to Josiah (and whoever thought of giving him that name needed shooting) to smell the nectar of his breath. But even though she tried, and she was aware she was really only a novice at trying such things, he was distant, not treating her as if she wasn’t there but not treating her as if she was either.

It was when Penny Longlane turned her attention to Kevin Bloxam because he was a decent clever lad as well that she became aware of Josiah’s eyes because, suddenly and out of the blue, they were on her. They followed her when she moved around the room, they almost melted as they darted to her face for a magic moment. Josiah Pyke was no longer into nobody: she was sure that somehow and marvellously he was into her. And she loved the idea. But it was only a crafty glance sort of into. It didn’t have what she most wanted: proximity, because whenever she contrived to be near him he seemed to freeze, and the glimpses and glances went away.

“Tell me about yourself, Joe,” she asked one day. She called him Joe, most people did, he did himself whenever he called himself anything. They were in the school dining room and he had sandwiches thick with ham and cheese and she had a salad in a clear plastic bowl.

“I’m … sorry,” he almost stammered, but for a fractured moment their eyes met and she thought what nice, kind eyes, what lovely eyes, I wonder what the rest of him looks like and she blushed because of the thought and the way it wasn’t like her at all, but it returned with a vengeance moments later when he replied,

“I’m nobody in particular,” he said. Just like that, condemning himself with those few words to the inconsequential.

“But you are!” she said, unable to stop herself. “Or at least, I think you are...”

And that did it. They were talking.

“What are you going to do when… you know, when you’ve left school?” she asked.

“University,” he said, suddenly assured, “I want to … don’t laugh, I want to go into the church.”

Her eyes opened wide when she looked at him, and she shook her head meaning what a waste.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because … just because...” was his non reply, and a bell rang.

The lunch break was over, the sandwiches were eaten, the salad bowl was packed away empty, and they returned to their lessons. And she noticed, when they sat in their seats in the classroom, that when he looked at her he seemed to have a problem with his trousers, and it made her blush again when she thought she knew why.

“This girl spoke to me in the dining room,” he told Mildred, shyly, over tea.

“She did? What girl might that be?” asked Mildred.

“Her name’s Penny,” he replied uncomfortably.

“A lad needs a girlfriend,” grinned Malcolm, who had moved in and who spent quite a lot of time either gazing at Mildred or dozing off in his chair even though it was broad daylight.

“I wasn’t much older than you are now when I got married to Terry,” sighed Mildred, “and he was my first love. You’ve no idea how important a first love is to a girl. A first anything with a fella!”

“Or to a bloke,” contributed Malcolm.

“I think your first real love will travel in your memory down all the years of the rest of your life,” sighed Mildred. “What’s this girl like?”

“She does English with me in my class,” muttered Josiah, suddenly shy because there was something about the girl that was getting at him. Something about the way she looked, the way she spoke, her voice … her lovely voice. And that hair. That absolutely wonderful fragrant hair … at least he thought it must be fragrant and he’d do almost anything, but probably nothing, to bury his nose in it and inhale that fragrance.

“Does she have a name?” asked Mildred, and he blushed.

“Of course she does. She’s Penny,” he said, shyly. Talking about her even when she was nowhere near him made him suddenly shy.

“And does she like you?” asked Malcolm, “I mean, does she want to go out with you? Maybe for a walk somewhere, in the country or to the shops? Walking can be fun. It’s when you can talk, and nobody else can hear. It’s when you can exchange little secrets. It’s when you can share thoughts.”

“Like we did, you naughty man!” smiled Mildred, sucking the tension from Josiah’s mind, and he sighed his sudden relief.

“Did you?” he asked Malcolm, “with mum?”.

“Everybody does,” was Malcolm’s reply.

“Tell me about Penny,” suggested Mildred.

“She’s beautiful, with hair so long she almost sits on it when she sits down,” Josiah said, thoughtfully, “and her eyes… they’re really warm are those eyes. And she’s clever. I know that because stupid people can’t understand some of the stuff we do at school, and she’s really good at everything.”

“She sounds good,” said Malcolm.

“She’s perfect,” sighed Josiah, “so perfect it makes me want to cry,” he added, and then, suddenly, without warning, he stood up and rushed from the room and up the stairs to his room, taking them, for once, two at the time.

“He’s smitten,” remarked Malcolm.

“I worry for him, with his history, though,” murmured Mildred thoughtfully. “He had it tough when he was a kid, you know. That father of his, the vicar in Henstooth, was a real b*****d and ought to have been locked up. It’s odd what religion can do, Malcolm, it can twist itself into ugly knots and it did that with Julian Pyke, until all he wanted to do was bully people into belief in what he believed in as though it was the only important thing in the world.. And he spent years bullying Josiah until the boy was all bruises and had no self confidence left.”

“Unforgivable, What about his mother?” asked Malcolm.

“Ah, her, poor woman: the vicar bullied her to an early grave,” replied Mildred, “and that’s another sin he doesn’t realise he committed. But it might strike him one day when he finds himself alone and incontinent, and friendless.”

“But he’ll still have his god,” murmured Malcolm.

“Yes, and that’s most likely all he’ll have as he dribbles himself into darkness,” replied Mildred thoughtfully.

© Peter Rogerson 12.03.18