One Of Our Jeans Is Missing

by Paul Charles

  Are you still with me? I hope so, but I need you to know that in no way did either of the relationships interfere with each other. You don’t believe that’s possible? Okay, fair comment. From my point of view, and I realise this is not a point of view which can be shared by everyone, I couldn’t possibly have cheated on, or with, Jean Simpson. She was getting married to someone else. She kept reminding everyone, including me, about this fact. And I was okay with that. Totally. As a friend, I advised her that she should watch John because she’d caught his roving eye when he was with Mary and who’s to say the eye wasn’t going to start roving again? (All of which reminds me that both his eyes seemed to have a (roving) life of their own.) I knew for a fact that Jean Simpson and John Harrison both had a different agenda on the no-sex issue, not that I ever discussed my theory with Jean; I didn’t feel it was fair to do so. In short, though, I didn’t feel any sense of loss that she was going to be riding off into the sunset with John Harrison, or anyone else for that matter. That’s it as far as Miss Simpson is concerned. Okay?

  Now, Mary Skeffington; well, how could I possibly be cheating on her when we hadn’t started on anything yet?

  So QED.

  We used to write those letters at the end of complicated algebra questions in maths class. It was Latin for something or other, but our translation was Quite Easily Done. Or, as Laurie Anderson put it, ‘Let X = X you know it could be you.’ The X’s in the equation could be the fact that both Jean Simpson and Mary Skeffington could be out of my life in a heartbeat if they ever wised up to me.

  I hear some rumblings in the one and thruppennies. Look, that’s it, that’s all I can tell you, and you’re going to have to believe me. Now get over it, okay? That was exactly how I saw it. You do what you do. We do what we do. If we ever knew while in the eye of the storm that we were going to be called to task later to justify our actions, how different would our actions have been in the first place? Not a lot, I fear. We do what we do!

  So, was Mary asking me whether or not my intentions were honourable?

  ‘I suppose I could be,’ she replied, after some hesitation.

  ‘I suppose they could be,’ I said with a smile.

  ‘How did you get to be such a gentleman?’

  Time to shatter the illusion. ‘Look,’ I said, putting my fork down on my plate, ‘I’d really hate for you to think that I’m a Goody Two-Shoes. That’s simply not the case. But, if my parents taught me anything it was never do to anyone what you wouldn’t like done to yourself. My mum brainwashed me with “In your dealings with girls, never do anything you wouldn’t be comfortable with someone doing to your sister.” That’s pretty much it, I think – I try to stick to that. It’s not always possible of course, but I’m always conscious of it.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ she said, smiling ear to ear as though she’d made a decision. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’

  We’d finished our dinner at near enough the same time.

  ‘That was just absolutely delicious,’ I said. The mind’s a funny old thing, isn’t it? I mean, as I was saying those words I flashed back to Jean Simpson saying them during our red carpet wrestle. I flicked my head quickly from side to side in an effort to shake the thought out.

  ‘I’ve got some ice cream,’ Mary said, as she took both our plates to the sink, ‘if you’d like a dessert.’

  ‘No thanks, that was just perfect.’

  ‘Some tea or coffee?’

  ‘No, I’m happy with the wine.’

  ‘Good, me too,’ she replied. ‘Let’s go over to the sofa.’

  So we did.

  For the first time during the evening she tuned into the fact that her radio wasn’t on the usual station. She seemed intrigued and she turned it up a little. They were playing ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ by Van Morrison, which sounded really amazing: uplifting, fresh, honest, original and even, dare I say it, commercial. Do you remember when we used to sing?

  ‘It’s Radio Caroline – I tuned your radio to it,’ I said, when the song had finished. ‘I hope you didn’t mind.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ she said. She had taken up what I imagined to be her favourite pose on the sofa, both feet tucked up underneath her and her wine glass cupped in both hands. Her skirt fell about the curves of her legs. Mary Skeffington had a slightly fuller body than Miss Simpson and she seemed happier, confident even, with her sexuality. Whereas Jean always hid her breasts, Mary didn’t exactly flaunt them but their full shape was clear above and through the blouse.

  She looked cosy, comfortable and happy as she said, ‘I can’t believe that I nearly didn’t meet you.’

  ‘Here’s to Tiger!’ I said, raising my glass.

  ‘To Tiger,’ she echoed, and then paused before speaking again. ‘You don’t look very comfortable, David,’ she said. The clink of the wine glass on wood as she set it on the floor chimed perfectly with the sound of The Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, which was majestically filling the puny speaker of her radio. I was sitting at the opposite end of the sofa so there were about two feet separating us. I was sitting upright, legs crossed, body facing forward, head turned to my left to speak to her. To an outsider, and on paper at least, it looked like there was more than the gap on the sofa separating us.

  ‘Why don’t you take your shoes off? Do.’

  Does a bear do a do-do in the woods?

  Then you realise as you start to undo your shoelaces that perhaps you socks aren’t clean, perhaps they’ll smell, even. That’s the normal first reaction. But luckily I’d had a bath and a complete change of clothes before I’d left the flat. I don’t know why I’d gone to such trouble; maybe I wanted to impress her. My mother had always encouraged me to take a bath and get a change of clothes, but I don’t think her reasoning applied to this particular situation (‘Just in case you get knocked down by a double-decker bus!’).

  I continued unlacing my shoes and confidently removed them before aping her shape in the opposite corner of the sofa.

  We enjoyed the music and the wine for a couple more songs, whereupon she straightened her legs out on the sofa, to about a foot away from me, so I started to massage her feet with my free hand. Nothing professional you understand, just a bit of pressure where I like pressure applied to my own feet.

  ‘Excellent,’ she said, ‘you’ve got the touch. Can you do my neck? Oh please, I’ll be your best friend.’

  How could I refuse? If I can bluff a foot massage, I could just as easily bluff a neck massage. I kneeled on the sofa while she sat in front of me, and I began working my fingers around her neck, applying varying degrees of pressure, pushing, kneading along her shoulders and up her long, elegant neck. There was something quite regal about the way she sat in front of me. She’d bunched her hair up out of my way with her left hand and she was breathing slowly, as though she had floated away somewhere. My fingers went automatically to her ear lobes. A split second later she jolted upright.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘no more of that please.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, no, it’s okay. It’s just that… it’s just that that is such a turn-on for me – you know, my ears. Touching my ears, kissing my ears, anything like that, well it just… am… well to be perfectly honest, it just turns me on.’

  Good to know, I thought, but didn’t say.

  ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ she asked, if only, I imagined, to draw a line under the last topic of conversation.

  ‘From an old Indian, a member of the Kowitirie Tribe.’

  ‘Sorry?’ she said.

  ‘Just kidding,’ I confessed, hoping I hadn’t ruined the mood. I went back to caressing her neck and she seemed to allow herself to drift off again. I kept away from her ears this time though.

  Eventually she turned towards me.

  ‘That was wonderful, David,’ she whispered, ‘I feel totally refreshed.’

  Then she kind of just fell into my arms and lay there. It felt like she was committing herself to my care and it seemed
that she was prepared to do so unconditionally. I put my hand under her chin and turned her face up towards mine. And we kissed. I’d really enjoyed the previous kiss with Mary, but this one was so much better. It seemed in that kiss that we were finalising a bond between us. Without breaking apart, we stretched out side by side on the sofa and lay kissing for what seemed like ages. It was not a kiss of sexual intent. It was in its own way the main course. It was totally, as in totally, enjoyable.

  Then the kiss finished just as naturally as it had started and neither of us was disappointed, or longing for any more. I felt, I really felt, that something special had happened between Mary Skeffington and me.

  It was after midnight.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve my reputation to think of, Mr Buchanan,’ she said, as she rearranged herself, ‘it’s time you were on your way home.’

  We had one more, much shorter kiss on her doorstep as I left.

  ‘I can’t begin to tell you how happy I feel,’ were the last words I heard from her as I headed out into the cold.

  Chapter Nineteen.

  Jean Simpson and John seemed to be having problems around this time. I don’t really know what the main issue was, and Jean would never really fully explain their difficulties. She’d say, ‘Oh, he does make me mad sometimes, he really does. His head’s in the clouds most of the time, clouds that are most likely a product of his own terrible habit of smoking. The rest of the time, he’s in Cloud Cuckoo Land.’

  And that was as specific as she would get. She said she didn’t want to spend our time together discussing John Harrison so we didn’t. We’d one such conversation a few nights after I’d seen Mary. Mary rang me, too, on the same day – in fact, they rang within minutes of each other. But I’ll tell you about Mary’s call later.

  I wasn’t meant to see Jean Simpson that night. It was a Friday. I mean, it wasn’t that we had a ‘usual night’ or anything like that. It’s just that she saw John on Tuesday and Thursday, and she and Jean went out for a bit of fun every Friday and Saturday. If they were going to a party on Saturday, they’d sometimes take John. So I got to see her on Wednesdays, sometimes Mondays. So Friday? This was a new one on me.

  ‘Can I come round tonight?’ she’d said. I could hear a wee bit of desperation in her voice.

  ‘Of course,’ I’d said and meant it, feeling another encounter coming on.

  ‘I’d like us just to stay in and play records if you don’t mind – I’ll pick up some fish and chips on the way. Will your flatmate be in or will we have the place to ourselves?’ she’d asked, appearing to place extra emphasis on the last part of the question.

  ‘I think he’s off to see Nucleus tonight.’ It was a safe bet. My flatmate was a fanatic of Ian Carr’s jazz band and spent every waking minute and every penny he earned following them around the country.

  ‘Good, then see you at eight,’ she’d said, sounding a wee bit happier.

  Six and a half hours later she was on my doorstep, large as life and twice as pretty, but without the fish and chips.

  ‘God, you’re so uncomplicated, David,’ was her opening remark.

  I’d worried that we were going to have a down-in-the-dumps kind of evening. Not so. Whatever it was that was getting her down, she left it on the other side of the doorstep.

  She was dressed all in black again, although without the tartan miniskirt this time. Which was great, you know – I’ve always thought it boring to see a magician perform the same trick twice. Her current mini was short enough for me to ascertain the minute she sat down on my sofa that she was wearing black stockings and white underwear. No sooner had she sat down than she sprang up again and shouted, ‘Oh, can I choose the record?’

  ‘Please, feel free,’ I said.

  That may have sounded like a throwaway, but, as I’ve mentioned before, there were few people whom I trusted with my records and record deck. Jean Simpson was as caring and considerate of the records, their sleeves and the needle on the record deck, as I was. She always filed the records away properly when she’d finished playing them and, at the end of the session, she would always secure the arm in its position and turn off the power to the amp to avoid the dreaded speaker hum. Just like I did. So, yes, I was more than happy to allow her at my records.

  This time, she picked an unusual one, unusual for her that was – The Spencer Davis Group’s very fine album Autumn ’66. I didn’t think she’d like it because she was more into the poppy Stevie Winwood stuff and Autumn ’66 was mainstream R’n’B.

  It might have been that it suited her mood.

  ‘Agh, that voice!’ she said, as the music burst into the room. The volume was up to weekend volume – it was a social kind of thing; we played our records louder at the weekend than we did midweek.

  Then she did the strangest of things.

  She started fiddling around with the zip on her skirt before saying, ‘If you think you’re going to crease and crumple up my skirt again you’ve got another thing coming, David Buchanan.’

  And with that she dropped her black miniskirt to the floor and stepped over it. She bent over, modestly this time, by hunkering, picked up the skirt and folded it carefully over the back of a hard chair by the stereo. More comfortably attired, she went over and sat down on my sofa bed.

  ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’ I asked, literally unable to find anything else to say. I was sure she could hear the desperation in my voice. Perhaps desperation was too strong a word and anticipation too keen a word, but somewhere right in the middle of the two would probably be spot on. I mean, here she was in my room, on my bed (okay sofa), stripped down to her knickers and stockings. She’d kept her polo neck jumper on. Yes, I’d a few brief flashes of her legs before, but mostly they were stolen glances. Now that I didn’t have to steal a look at her perfect legs, I found myself self-consciously looking everywhere else but her legs.

  ‘David,’ she said shooting me a lopsided smile, ‘why don’t you pick your chin up off the floor and come and sit beside me on your bed?’

  Did you notice that, that little Freudian slip? She called my soda a head! I’m sorry, of course I mean she called my sofa a bed – can you see how out of sync my brain was?

  So we lay side by side on the sofa, listening to the music; well, actually I was taking as much enjoyment from looking at her beautiful legs as I was from the music. In fact, I was so close I could have touched the skin of her thigh just above the stocking top. It looked so soft I reckoned on it being exquisite to the touch, although I felt it was prudent not to try.

  ‘David,’ she said, ‘I feel totally safe lying here beside you, dressed like this.’

  ‘Don’t you mean undressed like that?’ I replied, and added as an afterthought, ‘I’m not quite so sure that’s a compliment.’

  ‘Oh, but it is! You don’t know exactly how big a compliment it is; I can only do this because I feel totally comfortable with you. On the one hand it feels so absolutely wicked, yet on the other I feel that I can totally trust you and that nothing will happen that I don’t want to happen.’

  Miss Simpson put her arm under my neck and used her other hand to stroke my hair. We lay like that for a time. Then she rolled over on top of me, her head returned to her favourite position in the nook of my neck. We lay like that for a time and then she rolled the opposite way so that I was lying on her. Precisely flat on top of her, as her legs were closed. She didn’t move. I didn’t move. It was as if she was testing me.

  That seemed likely to be the case, for her next words were, ‘If I let you take your trousers off, will you behave?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, perhaps a fraction too quick.

  ‘I mean, I don’t want you to behave yourself altogether. In fact, I need you to misbehave a little. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘Okay,’ she said after a few seconds’ consideration. You could tell that she was nervous about this move, but she was obviously also having fun making it. As I’ve said before, it was
her dance and she was leading it – if I’d ever, even once, tried to lead the dance, we’d probably never have progressed beyond the first encounter, enjoyable though it was.

  She released me from her arms and turned to face the wall, thereby, I believe, inviting me to remove my trousers. I’d seen the movie so I knew that men are meant to look ridiculous in their underpants, shirt-tails and socks. Luckily enough I had on a short-sleeve, green granddad shirt and dark blue boxer shorts. I quickly removed my socks.

  I lay back down on the sofa and she rolled over onto her opposite side so that she was facing me again.

  Unlike myself, who was taking every available opportunity to look at her legs, she didn’t once look at any part of my body, preferring instead to bury her head in my neck. Then she rolled me over on top of her and very slowly opened her legs. Stevie Winwood had started to sing ‘I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water’ and as I fell in between her legs, I felt her rise against me. Now the softness of her skin pressed onto my bare legs. The sensation was mind-blowing, no other word to describe it. The skin on her thighs was as soft as velvet, it really was. I could have lain there forever.

  As she pushed into me, now, less the hindrance of trousers, I could feel her dampness. To be honest I was surprised at how wet she was. It kind of disproved my theory that girls can only get excited through physical contact down there.

  Not that this contact wasn’t pretty wild – we knew each other a little and I could feel her buckle against me, searching for that one final scratch to push her over the edge. I was losing control and I feared I was going to leave her behind. So I pushed further against her and ground my hips in a circular motion as she had done on the previous occasion. Her grip tightened on my neck. She was taking larger and larger, louder and louder gasps of air.