27. TO BE IN LOVE

Wallace is growing older and more subject to the whims of his hormones

“And the trial was halted?” asked Maureen. She was full of curiosity and had called on Wallace for an update. His mother was out (a common occurrence these days, now that she was finding a personal life) with Richie Donne, a quietly spoken and rather shy man of about her own age.

“”The judge ordered a mistrial when it transpired that the police hadn’t even thought of looking for the man that Freddie Barnard said had jumped on them in the darkness of the cellar.”

“So they’re going to investigate further? I wouldn’t like to be in Penny’s father’s shoes right now, being accused of murdering his daughter in a public court room!” Maureen shook her head slowly and sighed. She was dressed in the prettiest dress Wallace had seen her wearing, a full skirt spreading like a flower garden around her where she sat.

“They won’t have to do much investigating,” Wallace told her, “Mr Ashton as good as admitted he was there. He said he’d followed Penny because he was getting suspicious of all the money she seemed to have, not big fortunes but more than she should have, and he was worried about her stealing from shops. Then it seemed what happened was he shouted out on the steps down to the cellar, Penny was wearing those flimsy underthings that Freddie had stolen for her, he was about to push his chisel, old but sharp as a razor, into a gap between two bricks on the cellar wall, and Penny’s dad leapt on him, he dropped his bicycle lamp which was the only light in the cellar in his surprise, Mr Ashton knocked him over and in the mix-up the chisel which he was still holding somehow found its way between two of Penny’s ribs, and killed her.”

“So nobody actually murdered her?” asked Maureen, “after all, an accident like you just described could never be called murder, could it? And if it was murder, who did the murdering? Was it the boy holding the chisel or the man who jumped on him?”

“It’s a conundrum,” sighed Wallace, “Innocent thinks it’ll end up as accidental somethng-or-other. Because, truth to tell, that’s most likely what it was.”

Maureen frowned. “Don’t forget that a girl lay dead, nobody thought of reporting it but both father and boy said nothing. What if she could have been saved if an ambulance came for her? And the boy holding the chisel must have known it was sharp, and the man jumping him must have been aware what that might do. What sort of girl was she? The Penny Ashton I thought you once were deeply in love with!”

“I thought she was nice,” admitted Wallace, “and in a way she was. But she did this thing with boys, showing them and stuff I don’t like to talk about. Never with me, if you must know, but with some of the others, mostly from the grammar school because that’s a great deal closer to the cellar in Swanspottle Woods than Mickelthwaite Secondary is.”

“I suppose she was no better than she should be, then,” sniffed Maureen, “probably at it from dawn to dusk if the truth were told. I know there are girls like that, and if they get trouble from it, it probably serves them right.”

“She was a virgin, though,” Wallace told her, though he wasn’t exactly sure what virginity entailed, but the court had made a special point of getting the pathologist to tell the jury. The education of boys about encounters with the female part of the population was still in its infancy and limited to a great deal about plant life and the parts of a flower, a little about Mr Tewkbury’s wife’s cat (the one having kittens in his home) and not much else.

“It’s funny to hear you say that,” smiled Maureen, “but the truth is, you sometimes have to ignore what girls may boast about, and boys too, I’m sure, no girl with brains wants to get pregnant before she’s married and so she won’t go that far. So virginity’s quite common.”

“Oh,” muttered Wallace, suddenly embarrassed. He’d know Maureen all of his life and they’d never had a discussion that even verged on the topic of sex and relationships. It was as if the subject was taboo, that talking about something might encourage it to become part of reality and more substantial than just words.

“I lost my virginity when I was racing my step-dad’s bike to work,” she said, grinning. “And there was no boy involved, just a fragile piece of me being stretched that little bit too far as I hurtled down the High Street!”

Wallace didn’t understand There was nothing about the structure of a rose blossom that might rupture if it was made to race a bicycle, of that he was very sure.

“Oh, right,” he said.

“But in the morality way of looking at things, at the moral way of what a girl has done with boys, I’m still a virgin. So you’re safe in my hands!”

Now he was lost, and looked as confused as an embarrassed boy can look. He needed to change the subject, and he needed it fast. He could feel a not altogether unfamiliar sensation in his jeans and he was terrified that she might notice. It was the idea that he might be safe in her hands that had done it.

That, and the way he looked at her for the very first time. In that instant, in that fractured moment of conversation, he saw her more as an attractive, desirable even, young woman and no longer the sweet and innocent but slightly older friend who had guided him from toddling to today.

His blush deepened, and he felt a pounding in his chest as she moved to sit closer to him, so close that he felt the warmth of her body and smelt the sweetness of her perfumed flesh.

“You know, Wallace,” she said, and there was the suggestion of a croak in her voice as she spoke, “there’s nothing dreadful or terrible about talking about real things, and what boys and girls do together are real things. And when I first learned the facts of life, as they call them, when I first discovered how babies are made, I promised to myself that I would never be the silly girl who did it with a boy unless, and this is the crunch, unless I would be perfectly happy marrying him.”

He didn’t know what to say, but the last thing he wanted to do was push her hand away from where it lay like a feather on his thigh, something she’d never got close to doing before. So he didn’t.

Instead, he said, completely out of the blue and without putting his brain into gear first, “I think I love you, Maureen...”

And she replied, “I know, Wallace, I know, and I love you...”

© Peter Rogerson 03.07.19