5. Jennifer's Attractive Legs

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

A SUMMER UNDER THE SUN Part 5

Mrs Rona Bingley, mother of the possibly concussed Darren, stared with near disbelief out of the kitchen window.

There was her husband of well nigh twenty-five years with his eye on a knot-hole staring, or ogling more like, at that pretty teenage girl next door. And he was wearing that unsuitable pair of shorts he’d bought on Saturday. They’d look okay on Darren, probably really suit him, but on Tom’s roly-poly belly they were ridiculous, and he couldn’t see it. She’d noticed him when he was doing a turn at their bedroom mirror, posing like a model before strolling cross-legged down some catwalk somewhere, and it sickened her. But what he’d seen must have been a mirage rather than anything to do with him.

Maybe she should pay more attention to him, give him something to take his mind off Jennifer’s legs. Maybe she should snuggle up to him in bed in the mornings and whisper sweet nothings in his ears, maybe grope him a little, but the whole thought of the lies in any sweet nothings she might think of appalled her, and as for groping…

“Tom!” she called, “What in the name of goodness are you doing, and us with our lad lying in a coma and on the point of death?”

That was a lie on both counts, and she knew it. So did Tom. But the lovely Jennifer next door didn’t, and she overheard the frustrated woman’s questions, and believed them. So the boy who spent so long gazing wistfully on her bronzed thighs was dying, was he? And she’d heard that snorting gurgle he’d made and saw him fall like a sack of cheap potatoes flat onto the pavement that very morning.

She leapt out of the deckchair and raced into her own home. Mrs Violet Sagebrush was in the kitchen, posing in front of the looking glass she had there for when the mood for self-examination came on her, which it did almost every day. This time it was her mouth that concerned her. Little crows feet were forming at the corners of what she saw as still being a lovely mouth (and why didn’t her boss Claude Spooks want to kiss it more often? He really ought to because, well, despite the beginnings of those little lines, didn’t she have the most kissable of mouths? Mind you, he usually stank of that tobacco he rolled into cigarettes, and that was far from pleasant and not kissable at all.)

“Mum,” shouted the delectable one, “I just heard that the kid next door is dying!”

“What kid next door, darling?” asked Violet, not really caring.

“I think he’s called Darren,” she replied.

“The spotty kid?”

“He might have the odd little eruption to show his masculinity,” conceded Jennifer who, for the first time in her life thought that there must be something really nice about Darren. If he was dying, wasn’t that the most romantic thing he could be doing when, and she recalled this vividly, he had been looking directly her way when that horrible sound had issued from his pursed lips and he had crumpled to the ground?

“Why, he’s definitely spotty, girl,” murmured Violet, brushing her hair in order to encourage further growth even though it quite easily touched her waist. “It’s a sign of a lack of juvenile hygiene,” she added, “look at you: not a spot on your pretty face anywhere, and that’s because you wash, dear. Simply that: you wash and you shower and you keep spots at bay.”

“But he’s dying, mummy!”

“That’s a shame, dear,” sighed Violet, “anyone would think he meant something to you! But all he does is stare at you from the other side of the fence and look up your skirt whenever he can, which is quite often seeing you hitch it up so that he can see everything you’ve got!”

“It’s what boys do, mummy!”

Violet smiled the sort of smile that could have meant anything but in actual fact meant nothing, and said “watch the fish fingers, darling, while I nip to the loo.”

Meanwhile, next door Mr Bingley pulled a face at his good wife. He’d been caught doing the most damnable thing he could do in her eyes, and he knew it. He was perving at a schoolgirl. And not any schoolgirl. No, only the delectable and delicious Jennifer Sagebrush, and in particular at her bronzed legs.

When he looked back through his knot-hole, the girl had gone.

Damn!

But his wife, and he’d loved her once, he must have because the fruit that had been created by one particular evening of almost unbelievable passion, was in hospital. Not dying, though, he knew that. Rona was prone to exaggerating, especially when she thought that exaggeration might get his undivided attention. But he was wise to her and her ways, this time because she was at home shouting at him and not weeping and wailing by Darren’s hospital bed, which is is where she’d be and what she’d be doing without a moment’s doubt if there was really anything wrong with the boy.

Meanwhile, in hospital, Darren was wondering why he was there and not at home. For starters, there was a fascinating series on the television about black holes, the existence of which he barely understood, an intellectual sort of programme that he’d been really looking forward to seeing since the episode last week. And anyway, the state of the hospital staff shocked him. He’d seen old comedy films in which young buxom nurses figured prominently, and the nurse that came to bother him from time to time was neither young nor buxom.

“Why am I here?” he asked her on one occasion, and she replied tartly that he might have concussion, and anyway, it was already nine o’clock and he should be asleep.

“At nine o’clock?” he asked, disbelievingly.

What was concussion, anyway? Something a lad caught when he missed breakfast? Because that’s what he’d done that morning. He’d been so occupied thinking about the girl next door and the way she teased him with the hem of her tiny skirt that he’d lost touch of time. And it had also crossed his mind that prophesies might come true and this time he’d wake up blind and helpless in a dark world of his own. In fact, he’d quite forgotten to get up for school until his mother had bellowed round his bedroom door and almost caught a glimpse of his eyesight as it scuttled past her to the land where blind eyes go.