1. The Spy who Almost Loved Her

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

A SUMMER UNDER THE SUN Part 1

Jennifer couldn’t see why the lad next door wasn’t allowed to peep over or even through the garden fence when she was sun-bathing. It didn’t seem fair, somehow, that her increasingly golden and tanned flesh couldn’t be enjoyed by the spotty kid even if she didn’t really know him and he’d never so much as done anything but turn green when he saw her.

But then, Jennifer was what a lot of people would call an angel. Not the biblical sort (they’re almost exclusively male) but the earthly kind, with perfectly formed bosoms and a happy smile revealing the kind of perfect teeth that are ever so slightly imperfect.

“Now then, Darren,” warned the spotty teenage boy’s mother, “don’t you go looking through that old knot-hole at the tart disporting herself on the other side or you’ll find yourself going blind, and you don’t want that to plague you when you’re grown up and out at work needing your eyes for all the close work involved!”

Darren planned to be an astrophysicist when he had enough “A” levels of a sufficiently robust nature (that was on abeyance for the time being because the best he’d managed so far was a C minus), and he did know that work with telescopes at night did involve the eyes and that they really ought to be working.

He’d ensured that last piece of knowledge a week or so earlier when he’d aimed his rather ancient and feeble toy telescope at the moon and, on its way up, had inadvertently caught the lady in the house opposite, through her bedroom window (which she’d left uncurtained due to the heat,) just as she was removing her brassiere and wearily massaging one rather large and fascinating breast. It was possibly a good thing that his instrument didn’t have proper grown-up magnificatiuon.

The good news was, though, he hadn’t started to go even the least bit blind despite the fact that he’d hovered on the object for longer than common sense suggested he should. What he had begun to learn, though, was that not all fascinating things led to the need for a white stick if they were indulged in. This time he got away with nothing but an interesting twitch in his never-to-be mentioned private quarters and an itch he’d been warned against scratching.

But that wasn’t his only foray into potential blindness.

For instance, he had a dog-eared paperback picture book that consisted entirely of monochrome and badly reproduced photographs of what were called “Nudes Of The Century” and on which any female component that might really effect his eyesight had been rather cobviously smudged out. The tatty volume had been lost by his own father when he’d been twelve and enjoying the discoveries it contained in the sort of clandestine way twelve year old lads do enjoy some things, and subsequently rediscovered by himself all these years later, trapped in the lining of an old suitcase where it might have lingered for all eternity had he not come upon it by accident.

The trouble is, the retouched photographs may have saved his eyesight but they did little for his carnal knowledge.

“If only I had a sister,” he often wept. But that was one impossible dream too far, which was just as well.

But back to Jennifer Sagebrush.

When contemplating Jennifer it must be remembered that there never was a purer soul under this or any sun. She loved animals, any animal though it must be remembered that she never put her romantic inclinations towards dangerous big cats in jungles far away to the test.

She was most certainly her teacher’s pet, which was evidenced by the spectacularly impressive grades she got for every piece of work she submitted, her body had clearly been modelled and honed by the saints themselves (she believed in all sorts of saints) and here she was basking in the sun with her bikini top undone so that there wouldn’t be any tell-tale lines where the straps had been, and as her virtue would have it, she aimed the angle of her n*****s at a particular knot hole in the fence separating their garden from their neighbours.

She’d heard the warning issued by the spotty boy’s mother about the desirable nature of good eyesight, and quietly giggled to herself. And she knew which was the offensive knot-hole because occasionally, not too often but often enough, she could see what looked very much like an eye peering through it.

It was, as may have been intimated by the careful reader, a glorious summer’s day with barely a cloud daring to drift anywhere near the skies above Jennifer Sagebrush’s bronzing body.

She giggled when she heard, clear as anything,

“Now then Darren, are you peeping at the tart next door again? Remember what the doctor said about your poor eyes!”

Darren did remember. The doctor had suggested they went to see an optician if the boy’s mother thought there might be something awry, but he thought he had nothing to worry about.

In order to facilitate the boy having a better view Jennifer stood up, moved her towel a foot or two closer to the fence, and lay down again. And she made quite sure there was nothing, not even a bra strap, to obscure his view, and, yes, she could quite clearly see that the eye was there.

She winked at it. Quite brazenly. But it didn’t wink back.

“I think you’ve been out in the sun long enough now,” squawked Mrs Bingley from an upstairs room, the window of which showed quite clearly that the hussy next door had exposed her lady bits, at least those in the chest region, for all to see, particular Darren who was hovering near a knot-hole that she’d asked Mr Bingley to block up, something that he’d failed to do and would learn all about when he got back home from work later that day.

“It’s okay, mum,” replied Darren, “I’m fixing this bit of fence. I won’t be long!”

He wouldn’t. By fixing he meant slightly enlarging a knot hole and investigating the possibility of creating an artificial knot-hole near it so that he could peer with both eyes simultaneously and consequently get an enhanced view of something that wasn’t quite clearly obvious in his tatty booklet.

“Darren, do you want fish and chips for lunch?”

That was a killer stroke from Mrs Bingley, one worthy of a genius, or if not that, of a moderately intelligent woman. And Darren knew it. It would be he who had to go to the chip shop and thus leave the fence and its knot-hole and accompanying view into Paradise. The moment would be severed. It’s glories lost to time. The uncovered bosom would soon retire to its own indoors, and its own lunch.

“No thanks, mum,” he replied, regretting every syllable, “I’ll just have bit of salad, if that’s all right.”

He knew their fridge was abundant with lettuces and spring onions, and anyway, wasn’t it too hot a day for fish and chips?

The other side of the fence Jennifer Sagebrush giggled quietly, and reattached her bikini top.

“Mum,” she called to a shadow in their own kitchen, “do you mind if I pop to the chippie? I’m a bit peckish, and a nice bit of fish would go down really well…”