22. A Second Kiss

The Scumbag boys have plans to make and Barney must come to terms with liking Emma

22. A Second Kiss

The very best thing that could have happened to Jed and Gozza Scumbag was that when they arrived in hospital shaken and with throbbing heads they were shunted into the same ward and in adjacent beds.

It wasn’t that either of them was badly injured in the collision between their mortal flesh and the Bishop’s limousine, but they had both received knocks on the head and it was decided that for their own good they should spend at least one night under close observation in hospital.

It was a small ward, just the four beds, and the other two were occupied by elderly gentlemen who seemed to prefer sleeping to being awake. That would be understandable in the case of one of them, for he had chosen the arrival of the Scumbag boys to pass from life, silently and unnoticed, into death. The other just liked to sleep, and at his age (eighty three) he deserved the right to do it.

The deceased patient was Gregory Thornbird, one of that true breed of Englishmen who find pleasure in complaining about just about everything in a refined voice that suggested private education as a child, something he hadn’t enjoyed, though he had endured many a religious lesson at the very deeply religious hands of Mr Ingram Pickle who invariably had food stains on his black swirling gown and who had an eye for evil, which he punished with at least half a dozen bamboo canes he kept in a cupboard so that the culprit could select his own instrument of torture.

This continued until Mr Ingram Pickle was discovered doing it in a particularly savage way at the precise moment when he was punishing a boy for no better reason than he felt like it, and the headmaster chose that same precise moment to be showing an important man from the department of education how his school was run, and peremptorily sacked Ingram Pickle on the spot for cruelty. Consequently, with more time at home the ex-teacher had a greater opportunity of preaching sin and evil to his son Barney, who left home as innocent as any blade of grass on any muddy length of roadside kerb when he left both home and school, and became a very religious student himself, and from that position progressed to become a very religious vicar in Brumpton.

The sleeping patient was Nathaniel Cockswain, once a librarian and since retirement an inhabitant of the nearby park whenever the weather made it in some way comfortable.

But less of the fellow patients in the Scumbag ward, both the deceased and the living. The two young tigers had plans to make.

“Say bruv,” whispered Jed, keeping a wary eye on the deceased Gregory Thornbird in case he woke up and overheard matters that should never be overheard, “seems we’re in ‘ospital.”

“You reckon?” asked Gozza, whose own head hurt considerably more than did that if his brother.

“I does. There’s nurses popping about and one of ‘em has great big knockers! But you know what ‘osptal means, don’t you?”

“What, bruv?” asked Gozza, wearily because he suspected that Jed had come up with a scheme that couldn’t possibly go wrong, but would.

“’Ospitals mean drugs. Loads o’ bottles o’ drugs. All kinds, and they’re somewhere about just waiting to be nicked by you an’ me.”

“I’ve got an ‘eadache…”

“So what I’m going to do is talk all sweet and fancy to that nurse with the big knockers, promise ‘er a lift to Heaven an’ back, an’ get ‘er to tell me where the good stuff is!”

Gozza groaned, and closed his eyes because the world was spinning around unnaturally, and the aforementioned well-endowed nurse arrived to check on Gregory Thornbird, find him totally unresponsive and his flesh getting chilly already, and rang a hideously loud bell to get a doctor along to confirm her suspected diagnosis, of death.

Meanwhile, several miles away in the Cowslip Retreat, Barney, son of the bullying teacher, now deceased in hospital, had a kiss to recover from.

“But Emma,” he stammered, “we’re not man and wife, we were never joined together under Heaven by a clergyman, never told to kiss when the service was concluded, you know, I wasn’t told you may kiss the bride by a lawful man of the cloth other than myself, so kissing like that is evil and sinful and we will both spend eternity in Hell because of it!”

Emma looked at him and shook her head sadly. “You are a silly man,” she said, “haven’t you worked out that there’s absolutely nothing evil about a woman kissing a man or a man kissing a woman?”

“But there is!” he insisted, “My father insisted! He told me with a cane in his hand that it ever I kissed a woman I’d end up in Hell for all eternity. And he should know because he’d been s schoolmaster who taught the truth! He’d stood in front of a class of boys and made them swear that they would never do anything like kissing a girl!”

“So, Barney,” said Emma slowly, “he’s the one who lied to you about stuff like that, is he? If I kiss you, Barney, it’s because I think I… I believe ... I love you.”

“You can’t” he shrieked, “a woman can’t love a man until after she’s married to him, and a man can’t love a woman until he’s married to her! Though I must say I do like you.”

“That’s good to hear,” she smiled at him, and she gently but firmly pulled him towards her until her breasts under the pink nightgown that she was still wearing were pressed against his chest, and very slowly, very deliberately, she kissed him again. But this time it was no fleeting little brushing of her lips against his, put firm, decisive, and to push the message home to him she allowed her tongue to move between his lips, searching his mouth with a passion he’ never suspected could exist anywhere under the Heaven he believed so fervently in.

Then, so as not to overdo it, she pulled away from him.

“So what do you think, Barney my love,” she asked.

What did he think? He thought with every synapse in his brain that he was going to Hell for a dreadful fiery eternity and at the same time he wondered how come something so magical as kissing a lovely lady like Emma could ever be evil and be rewarded with such dreadful punishment as burning for ever and ever...

© Peter Rogerson 13.04.24