Paper Round

By Billy Bodman

Growing up in the industrialised valleys of South Wales in the late 1950's, the adolescent Warren awakens to all the confusing emotional signals that boyhood brings.
He is slowly discovering maturing girls but finds, like all his contemporaries that he is clueless about the next stage of development. Temptation lies all around.
Fortune smiles on him in the alluring shape of Mrs Brown, the owner of the paper shop and then, on his paper round, the temptress, Mrs Strickland, who eagerly seduce him into the mysteries of sex. But knowledge brings problems and responsibility as he finds he knows more than he should, with secrets begetting more secrets. As he begins serious courting, he has to decide whether to exploit his new-found experience or pretend he is a s gauche as everyone else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Billy Bodman
• Release date: Aug 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005316747

Billy Bodman

Presently (pleasantly) retired and well divorced. 1 novel published to date, 'PAPER ROUND'), the content of which would lead you to believe that the Shades of Grey stuff was penned by Enid Blyton. Interested in having it republished as Ebook along with its sequel 'PAPER BOY'. If successful, there are 3 others to consider.2 novels brought out simultaneously- 'FARADAY'S EYES' and 'INTERREGNUM', both featuring on Amazon et el websites. Exciting, exotic, X-rated.Now have seven (7) novels on Smashwords submitted almost simultaneously, all of varying genres. 2 of them are sequels and a further sequel is being readied.March 2022. Published the paperback version of my latest Billy Bodman novel, 'RUNNER', which can be found on Amazon plus Barnes and Noble et al. June 2020, just published the sequel to 'RUNNER' entitled 'HIRAETH' which is Welsh for 'A longing for home'. Almost a 1000 pages all told, and the family have still not reached the gold-fields of California. A third act is on the cards.So, you'll never be bored with a BOD.

Book preview

Paper Round

Billy Bodman

Copyright © Billy Bodman

Published at Smashwords 2021.

It had just begun to drizzle, that fine, cobweb-light precipitation, that never fails to surprise with its capacity to soak by stealth when Warren reached the halfway point of his evening paper round.

He had, with only the most cursory of glances in either direction of the main road, continued his full-pelt run until, with a groaning exhalation of relief, he stood beneath the mellow glow of the towering street-lamp.

He gave a slight shudder, then, unable to control himself, glanced uneasily over his shoulder in the direction from which he had so smartly appeared, before hitching his canvas bag more evenly onto his shoulder and marching on to his next port of call.

He blinked in surprise as his forehead registered the filmy tickle of gauzy rain.

Good job he had taken the precaution of wearing his Burberry, he concluded, but unfortunately not his cap, which was at home, rolled and stuffed in the side-pocket of his school blazer. Still, that would not have been much of a protection against the elements, he mused with a rueful smile as, like him, it was now into its third year and was almost hidden by the waved sweep of his hair. It was a token item of the school uniform and its longevity was more a mark of status than usefulness.

Still, he shouldn’t get too wet if he got a move on.

He didn’t like this kind of rain. It seemed to give too much shape to the darkness, and he was always on edge as he walked up and down these shrub-lined drives to deliver the paper.

Nothing like as forbidding as the lane of course, which was without light of any description, but it only needed the sudden appearance of a yowling cat from under his feet to set his heart racing.

He shuddered again, and moved on.

His was an elliptically-shaped round, in the shape of an eye, a flattened Eurasian eye he had decided, thinking of the geisha girls in ‘The Wind Cannot Read‘, a contradictory description, elliptical and round, which had tickled his fancy when he had taken the precaution of re-tracing his movements in his own mind’s eye, in order to stamp the route in his memory, and took the form of two distinctly opposite parts.

From the starting point of the paper-shop, he would set off in a vaguely north to south direction, along the lower eye-lid, parallel to the bottom railway, and return the opposite way, along the upper eye-lid, parallel to the top railway.

The bottom line, just beyond the point where he ended the first half of his journey, slalomed off westwards across the warp and weft of other valleys, but which in the summer, carried him and hundreds of other day-trippers to the seaside delights of Porthcawl, notably on the occasion of the British Legion’s annual outing which invariably seemed to empty the whole area of inhabitants.

Going in the opposite direction, away from the paper-shop, the track veered off across the grain of the eastern valleys ending up, so he had been told, somewhere in England, so that he imagined it as some sort of elongated ‘S’ shape. Something like the hook on the belt to his trousers, now that he had forsaken childish bracers.

The top line trawled directly down the western valley, along which some of the bigger pits were situated, depositing every weekday at teatime its bellyful of black-faced colliers, his father amongst them, but otherwise trundled on down to Newport or, again in summer, turned along the coast to the other day-tripping attraction of Barry Island.

He had never been on either the top or the bottom railroads for any other reason than seaside excursions.

He had always liked the Porthcawl train best, although it took the longest time to reach the seaside, because it offered a larger variety of vistas, exemplified by the curving stone-arched viaduct that hovered high above the turgid, duff-black river below; duff-black that is until the miners’ fortnight on the last week of July and the first week of August, when it ran eerily clear.

The exhilaration of lowering the window and hanging out sufficiently far to encompass, in one look, the whole stretch of swaying coaches all displaying equally adventurous young faces, and squint through the cinder-blowing smoke toward the magnificently matt-black monster up front, was one of life’s great joys.

Last summer though, a change had manifested itself in him and his buttys, persuading them, for some un-spoken reason, to adopt a more blasé attitude to the outing. Affecting to be bored with the whole outing, Warren was nevertheless still unable to control inside the same bubbling thrill that he had always engulfed him.

There were girls closely watching from under hooded eyelids, and any urge to indulge in childish exuberance was suddenly anathema to him and his contemporaries. They could not always contain themselves, the surging energy would not let them sit still for long, but they did try to behave whenever it occurred to them. It was something to do with the confusion of growing up, although no one seemed to analyse it properly.

So his close proximity to those bright-polished lines, ensured that those thoughts and impressions were never far from his consciousness, ready to intermingle with the other myriad of plans, ideas, and possibilities that vied within his mind for dominance.

Starting his round, Warren was faced with a half-mile long, unbroken terrace of stone-faced, slate-roofed houses, which fronted directly onto the pavement. All he was obliged to do, as a result, was pop the evening newspaper through each letterbox, like flicking a Smartie off his thumb and into his mouth.

Flick and chew.

This simple action was especially gratifying, because he did not have the problem of snarling mastiffs and ankle-nipping corgis to worry his head over at each and every dwelling.

As a result, it continually amused him to induce the shrill yapping of demented mongrels along all the echoing hallways, with the noisily contrived clatter of the letterbox as he passed.

The second part of his journey, the return trip, was an entirely dissimilar arrangement, in that it encompassed the more affluent members of the community, with their lawned fronts and hedged and fenced barriers that insulated them from the main road.

At early evening, in the dark days of winter though, their rhododendron bushes and sprawling silver birches lent disguises to those creatures of the night that kept his pulse racing and heart beating quickly. Very little light reached out into the darkness from the heavily draped windows.

As palpitatingly nervy as that was however, it bore no comparison to the section of his round that caused him to end up slumping gut-tight and breathless under the main road lamplight.

The lane.

Where the first half ended and the second half began, the linking passageway that somehow managed to incorporate in its sunken depths every childhood fear that he had ever been able to conjure up, lay in wait for him.

No sooner had he slipped the last of the deliveries through the flapping aperture of the end of terrace house, than all his life-long fears coagulated grotesquely into one swamp-filled morass.

From the end of the road, where the final cast-iron lamppost threw its dirty puddle of amber light, he was faced with the twilight world of his worst nightmares.

Before him was a wearyingly steep climb of some two hundred yards, at the beginning of which were the two railway bridges that carried the parallel sets of railroad tracks.

There was nothing to show the way.

When he had started the job in crocus-spring, a mere six months back, daylight only began to fade by the time he reached the safe haven of home, and lasted longer and longer as summer progressed. Then, the steep gradient, was an open invitation to him to use its lung-bursting slopes as a means of adding extra training to the school regime, and had been the main contributory factor in him surprisingly winning the second-form cross-country.

He had launched himself up that blossom-arched hill with a solitary sense of dogged intensity, pitting himself each time against the previous day’s performance, and the discipline had stood him in good stead against his classmates.

Now however, as the dark nights closed in ever tighter he ran out of a sense of pure dread.

Unlit, the lane posed a barrier in Warren’s mind of nightmarish proportions.

In this shape-shifting gloaming, the two bridges, a stone-arched structure that carried the lower level line, and a sturdy, functional iron one that performed the task for the higher level, harboured densely black shadows of a malevolent, brooding intensity and dared him to enter.

Beyond those, where the gradient steepened markedly, a cant of some forty-five degrees, the lane itself served up a fresh gauntlet for him to encompass, with its banked sides of hovering trees and thickly-tangled bushes and shrubbery.

A perpetual wind seemingly brought alive by the twitching twigs and branches, threw unimaginable ghouls at his hurtling, breakneck body.

The fact that he was well familiar with the lane and its environs, from the days of his wild-adventured childhood, where he would often linger to pick the swathes of nodding bluebells and primroses from its verdant-green banks, as well as scrump the late-summer, peggy-threesy hazelnuts from the bowed down branches, offered no comfort.

Now, it was suddenly alien territory, the friendly joyfulness of warmer months leaching away as the dark things woke from their slumber.

As he became more aware of the changing perspectives of his journey; as autumn slipped softly away and as the sun became ever more lower over the rolling hills, he began to seriously consider the possibility of turning about face after the final terraced-house delivery, and retracing his steps so that he would be delivering the second half of his round from the opposite direction.

In one stroke he would be taking the dreaded lane out of the equation. Reversing his routine meant that he had the benefit of lamplit streets, with only a footbridge over the top railway line to negotiate, although that itself was spooky enough at night with its loose rattling boards and sharp, metallic shadows.

Only an unnatural hatred of ‘doubling back’ and of making the round twice as long, stayed his itchy feet, forcibly compounded by an unreasonably grim resolve to conquer his dreads to his best ability.

He hated his stupid stubbornness almost as much as the daunting prospect before him.

So every evening he screwed up his courage and flew the hill with a blind terror, although he had long since stopped roaring his defiance when the moss-soaked walls of the bridges threw the echoes back at him with a hair-raising and bowel-churning amplification.

From then on, he ran with a grim, tight-lipped, breathe-only-through-the-nose, urgency.

Consequently, not only did he have the distinction of being form cross-country winner, but could also count himself the fittest member of the under-15’s rugby side, ensuring him an uncontested place as their all action, hard tackling, scrum half.

It had helped him to gain a jealously guarded kudos amongst his contemporaries, a position he had no intention of relinquishing. It also gave him a very clear insight into the old saying, ‘no pain no gain’. He found it instructive to take note of pointed sayings of that calibre, especially ones that he could relate to his own experience.

Warren had always been afraid of the dark, ever since he could remember and a vivid imagination helped to fuel the black fires, with their nameless, spectral demons lurking in every night-time corner.

The distance between his bedroom light-switch and the bed near the opposite wall, was a yawning chasm of claw- fingered monsters, a gap he negotiated with an explosive, head-long rush into the sanctuary of his bed and a blind burrowing beneath the protection of his blankets.

It was this uncontrollable imagination of his that brought into being all those tainted heroes of his comics, straight off the page and into vivid reality. This self-afflicted scourging, was most clearly exemplified in the terror wrought by the ‘Wizard’s ‘V-for-Vengeance’.

That bane of the Gestapo, with their grey suits, grey gloves, and grey fitted-masks, engulfed him in an almost paralytic terror, as though they were creatures of the dead brought to life to stalk the earth, and not even a sandy beach teeming with gigantic crabs scuttling after ‘Morgan the Mighty’ produced such waking nightmares in him.

He took them off the written page, gave them form, and then unaccountably allowed them to haunt him.

The fact that he had recently completed John Wyndhams’ ‘Day Of The Triffids’ only served to give more credence to his fears.

And now, finally, as though some dastardly plot was afoot to leave him no corner of his world that did not induce terror, his all-encompassing passion for the pictures had seen fit to push this dread to ever-expanding boundaries.

These days, not even his favourite duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were able to conjure up the ever-lurking belly-laugh without tempering it with a nervous propensity to choke in mid-chuckle.

In their last few pictures, the two jokesters had come up against, ‘The Mummy’, ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ and ‘The Invisible Man’, and while some of the set pieces were up to their usual comedic standard, the fat one anyway, there was too much of the scariness to make the entire film satisfactory.

Even those other second-feature favourites of his, Mugsy and Satch and the rest of the Bowery Boys, had managed to turn his normal joyful laughter into a giggle that lent more to hysteria than appreciation.

Wasn’t there enough to do in the Bronx without stumbling onto a haunted house, for goodness sake? Why couldn’t they stick to gangster and shysters? He could get a different kind of thrill out of that. It was the unknown, the supernatural that un-nerved him.

Now, he made his way into the devil’s pit with a slow and measured step, fighting the knowledge that he was about to be scared out of his wits, simply because the tug of the cinema was just too powerful for him to resist.

Why, he wondered, did he insist on tormenting himself so much?

By the time he emerged into the early-evening sunsets, after spending a tortuous couple of hours with the ‘Beast From 20.000 Fathoms’ or ‘It’ or ‘The Creature From The Black Lagoon’, he was a muscle-aching wreck, and even the eye-opening, thought-provoking ‘Forbidden Planet’ had shocked him silly with the monster of the Id.

There seemed no end to their proliferation and he saw them all.

It seemed that horror had him by the throat, but the pictures had him by the nadgers.

The conclusion that he had reached then, during the time it took to beat the dark of the lane, compose himself as best he could and deliver the final paper, was that his over-riding love of the movies transcended any other considerations. He would just have to lump it.

That particular train of thought had not been the one his mind had been pursuing before he started his head-long, up-hill charge however, but it was the remnants of a daisy-chain of ideas with which he had been juggling for most of the week. The horrors of the lane had just nudged him on and off track, like changing points on the railroad.

This was nothing new to Warren, as his mind had been performing in that flea-jumping style, like a demented, lily-pond hopping frog, for as long as he could remember.

The number of times in bed when, hovering on the cusp of sleep, he had suddenly wondered what had sparked off the particular line of thought that had stalled him. He could never sleep without knowing, forcing him to plod painstakingly backwards, retraced each connecting knot in the convoluted thread until, generally in a lightening flash of revelatory triumph, he would locate the source, the well-spring, of his thought processes.

He always slept afterwards accompanied by a self-satisfied congratulatory smile.

Warren had been engrossed in a certain amount of soul-searching of late, the description of which he had not long ago realised meant searching through your soul, not for it. Not the whereabouts of the soul within the body, but the manner of things it had accumulated over the years. Much of it thoughtlessly, he reasoned. Could you just dump those early impressions, the ones that did not currently suit you, have a kind of clear-out, discarding those values that were no longer appropriate and just retain the ones that might form the bedrock for the future? He found he was starting to get anxious about beliefs and the truths that seemed to paraphrase his life. He didn’t rightfully know what he stood for, what his moral stance was, and he had decided that he had reached a juncture in his life where it might be advisable to test his parameters.

There was also the nature of the universe to ponder.

One particular subject did not necessarily lead naturally on to another, his thought processes leapt about too much for that, but there were sometimes strands of thought that had tenuous links to others that signposted the way, and it was these that his mind had been juggling with on and off all week.

Like looking up at the night sky with its panoply of stars, might easily set him off thinking about ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’.

So what he was chewing on at the terminus of his paper-round, when the last paper had been despatched through the waiting gap, was not the same problem he had been engrossed in before he started his nightmare sprint, which in its turn was not the thought that grabbed him when he took the first few steps of his trek.

That one, the one that brutally took dominion over all other thoughts, although fleeting in its incisive intrusiveness, had been directly responsible for the train of thought that carried him to the end of the terrace and the first half of his round. That was definitely one thought leading on to another.

It was Mrs Brown who had sparked it all off.

It was Brown’s paper shop that he worked for, and whereas Mr. Brown himself took charge of the morning rounds, which was a far more complex affair with its plethora of magazines and periodicals to add to the range of dailies, took a great deal of setting up and also took a lot longer to deliver than the evening rounds, his wife, Mrs Brown, attended to the later deliveries.

In contrast to Mr Brown, who was extremely animated and noisily verbose with his barking orders punctuating the shop, she was all but invisible, preferring to engage in the minimum of instructions, but getting things organised with a neat efficiency.

Once, a few weeks back, while he was hoisting his bag of papers onto his shoulder in preparation to leave, she had unexpectedly ruffled his hair as though he was a fluffy bunny she could not resist stroking, obliging him to comb it back into its original style the moment he got outside. He wished women wouldn’t do that to him. It irritated, and he hated untidy hair.

So, while it was she that had set his thoughts in motion this evening, it was his butty Tim who had instigated it all.

The previous evening, while they were bagging up their individual paper rounds, Tim had suddenly whispered urgently, ‘ Here, quick. ‘

Warren had looked up to see him grabbing some bars of chocolate and packets of spangles off the counter and handing some to him.

In a panic and without thinking, he had taken the sweets and stuffed them in his pocket, feeling an odd quickening of excitement at the audacity of the action.

‘ She’s downstairs in the flat, ‘ he had told him, in a hoarse whisper. ‘ She does that sometimes. You gotta watch out for it. I’ve done it loads. She’ll never miss these. ‘

They had exited before she reappeared, although Warren would have preferred to wait and act normally nonchalant until she was back again. He had eaten them with a pleasant sense of nervy guilt.

This evening, earlier on, he had found himself completely alone in the shop and toying idly with the idea of replicating Tim’s light-fingeredness himself. It was tempting and scary at the same time. Glancing sharply at the door that led off down to the Brown’s private quarters, he had spotted the lace curtain across the glass pane fluttering slightly as though twitched. No sooner had the image registered with him than the door opened and Mrs Brown’s head appeared around the jamb.

He frowned at this odd apparition, conscious that there was something not quite in keeping with her normal behaviour, but too wary to puzzle it out, when she beckoned him over with a crooked finger. He saw a flash of red fingernails, and wondered if that was what had caught his eye, also whether that was how she usually presented them, but couldn’t remember. It wasn’t as if he looked at her that much.

As he advanced toward the crooked finger, so she retreated back behind the door as though hauling him in like a minnow, until he found himself facing her on a small landing. The beginnings of carpeted stairs fell away into darkness.

She was breathing quickly through her nose, as if she had just run up those very same stairs, and he could smell the tobacco smoke in the confined space along with an odd scent of flowers.

Then, to his utter shock, she had grabbed him and pulled him in to a bear-like hug. Instantly it put him in mind of Auntie Doris, who was forever hugging him whenever she got the chance, and his surprise swiftly turned to resignation. He slumped in to the embrace, waiting for the interminable release.

‘ Oh, ‘ she had sighed as though exhausted and hugged him tighter.

She had then drawn her head back, cobra-like, and said, without releasing him, ‘ Mrs Brown knows it wasn’t you, but your friend Tim is heading for serious trouble if he doesn’t watch himself. I saw him steal the chocolates and give you the spangles. I don’t think it’s the first time. I’ve got my eye on another light-fingered scallywag too. ‘

He had grimaced, thinking ‘Tommy’ and started to say that he would pay for them, and some other fib that he had yet to construct, but she had continued.

‘ We don’t want you following their example now do we? ‘ she had added, staring intently into his face, which he had somehow contrived to imbue with a wide-eyed innocence. ‘ And Mrs Brown wouldn’t want to have to tell your mother now, would she? ‘

She had shaken him gently, said, ‘ Oh ‘ again in a mild mollification, added ‘You are such a beautiful boy ‘, then drew him back into her smoky, flower-scented embrace.

His face was buried in the silk-shiny folds of her blouse, alerting him this time to the conflicting sensations of a hard-wired brassiere and the tremble of soft, curving bosom. He wanted to pull away, to stop her from being embarrassed at this intimate encounter, but she had pulled him so far forward that he was beginning to lose his balance and was forced to compound the contact by steadying himself with his hands against her hips. He hated the silliness certain adults got up to.

Warren’s reaction, rather than inducing her to let him go, only served to encourage her to hug him the tighter, exposing him to the pain of the hard-wired edge digging into his averted cheek and the consequent inflation of ever more bosom-swell which he was just beginning to realise was more than a little, before releasing him again with a despairing groan.

He waited with bated breath and squinting eyes for the Auntie Doris kiss, tightening his lips in preparation for the sticky onslaught, but she had stepped back from him.

‘ I want you to come back after you’ve finished your round, ‘ she had said firmly, ‘ and discuss this a little further. You’re such a lovely boy, Warren, and Mrs Brown would hate to see you mixed up with the wrong crowd. I’m sure your mother wouldn’t like you to either, ‘ she had emphasised pointedly.

Warren had left the shop in a mind-boggling paroxysm of doubt, guilt, and confusion.

His initial concern was whether he would be home in time for the repeat of Tuesday’s ‘Goon Show’ and his second thought was about whether he should be thinking about the situation at all.

‘ Needle noddle noo, ‘ he had intoned nasally, in order to lighten his dilemma.

What was she planning to say? Give him a lecture about being a good boy? Hells bells, she wasn’t religious was she? She definitely wasn’t Methodist, that was for sure, but she could be one of the Apostolic bunch. He hoped not. That would mean long passages out of the Bible being spouted. He’d had that before now. ‘Jesus died to save us’ and all that.

He was pretty sure he would not really have nicked anything, although he would not have wanted Tim to be there daring him.

Take the lecture, he had decided, act contrite and look shamefaced. That combination never failed in his experience.

His mind changed the subject without being told, and he marched on with his new, but linking, imagery.

What he was thinking about now, as he headed along the S-curving stretch of the main road which led eventually to town, after darting up and down those secret-like, semi and detached monuments to affluence, of porches and bay windows, was, how small could Grant Williams become, after climbing through the ventilation grating and off into a strange world of untold dangers.

He had gone to see, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ on his own, which was pretty much a normal occurrence these days. None of his friends harboured his passion for the pictures and almost never went to see anything other than Saturday’s offerings. They rarely cared very much what they were either, as long as they had the opportunity to test the patience of the authorities, or outwit the torch-woman after lobbing empty Kia Ora cartons across the seats.

If something universally acclaimed like ‘The King and I’ was showing, or perhaps ‘The Robe’, the first of the Cinemascope epics, the whole gang went together, although in truth much of it was for the purposes of holding necking competitions.

Not that Warren was averse to a bit of snogging, but he was beginning to find that most of the girls he had grown up with were more friends than kissing partners. It was almost like necking with your sister, he had thought on occasions, and more often than not his preference had been to watch the picture.

What he had noticed, and seemed to have its origins in the summer months just gone, was that there was less fluidity to the couplings now, less swopping and changing about in those giggly kissing games they generally enacted, and more and more of his contemporaries were pairing off and ‘going with’ one another. For one reason or another Warren had drawn back from such tying commitments.

One major reason for his reluctance to join in the current game was to do with a little worm of worry that he nursed inside himself. What came next, after you had mastered the art of kissing to the best of your ability? All the dirty talk in the world conducted in the school-yard breaks, did not really give you any sort of clue about the way to progress.

There was more to girls now, he was aware, than the silly flouncers of previous years. They brought with them now an air of danger, an air of expectancy, and he for one did not want to be found less than equal to the demands. He was beginning to be very wary of his opposite sex.

So he took refuge in the spangling screen and the unattainable worlds it took him to, pursuing his passion, for the most part, alone. It was a serious pursuit and nothing less than serious company interested him.

Which was why he had recently been seen to storm off from the forecourt of the picture house in misty-eyed rage, while his elder brother, Dai swaggered cockily in through those long-handled doors.

Glen Ford in ‘The Blackboard Jungle’ was on, an X-rated film that he was barred from seeing, yet he had read the Evan Hunter novel ages back. Not only that, he had read his next two books as well, which compounded the ban. What further enraged him was that the only thing on everyone’s lips as far as he could see, was the trouble being roused up all over the country by the film’s background music of Bill Halley and his Comets’ ‘Rock Around The Clock’. Hardly a comment in the papers about the merits of the film.

And he really rated Glen Ford.

Even Dai himself had been drawn to the pictures by the distinct possibility of blatantly defying authority by bopping in the aisles, and he knew who it would be who would be enticed to slit the cinema seats with cut-throat razors. Dai went in anticipation of a spot of fighting later on. He only saw the film as a template for delinquent behaviour.

What a waste of time.

Now he had no idea if and when he would ever see the film. He guessed, never. He had wanted to scream at that thought.

What followed on then, from this new craze, was a sudden rash of rock and roll movies bombarding the screen with ever more diverse groups and bands proclaiming themselves. It was Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, Marge and Gower Champion, brought up to date, and Warren was as susceptible to the infection as any excitable teenager. No matter that the plots were transparently flimsy, although he suspected that many of his acquaintances were not concerned about that in any way, the whole purpose was to introduce as many of these new rock and rollers as possible. To Warren, as a keen critic, much of what he saw was simply country and western music speeded up, but there were sufficient genuine stars to satisfy his hunger. It was music to burn energy by.

These were the films that drew his gang to the pictures, and from them they took their attitudes and idioms, and avidly aped the wonderfully choreographic jiving that brought the screen to life. It was almost possible to see the acceptable boundaries of society being systematically demolished. Well, in the rest of the world it was. Not where he lived.

But they were a distraction from what he demanded of his cinema, which was a medium that would complement his love of books, so because there was no one he knew who shared his passion, he pursued it alone.

The fate then, of ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ gave his imagination something to test itself against, intrigued him to pursue paths he might otherwise not have trodden.

By the end of his round, as he rumpled his paper-bag into a scroll, he had concluded with an unyielding finality that the Grant Williams character could not die of just shrinking. He might encounter creatures that were more deadly than he had ever in his life met before, like the cat that chased him with such murderous intent, or the spider that he was forced to kill with a sewing needle, and he could conceivably die of starvation through not knowing what he could and could not eat, but he would not, absolutely could not die of shrinking.

That particular train of thought had kept him occupied all through the week, and he had narrowed his concentration not on the vastness of the universe and its unbelievable distances, which had the power, if he gazed upwards at the stars long enough, to suddenly descend on him with a crushing intensity sending him scuttling indoors in a gasping fit of terror, but of the reverse of vastness.

If the universe was never ending, why should there be a limit to how small you could get. Was there infinity of tinyness? He thought there must be. What if, one day in the far-distant future, a massively-powerful magnification device was developed, enabling man to see smaller and smaller creatures and organisms, until finally we looked down and found that one of them was a perfect image of us.

Lately, he seemed to be finding more and more things of which to be scared.

Warren slowed his pace now as he slung his empty bag behind his back, especially as the light was more intensified the nearer to town it got, because the other skein of thoughts that he had been juggling with all week, the one that had dominated his mind before he set off up the lane, ambushed him with a gut-churning assault.

As his flirtation with things ephemeral sent his mind off on such oblique tangents, so a parallel could be drawn to things of a more physical nature in his life. As a thought can alter a life’s perspective, so an action can do the same.

There was a part of Warren that seemed to have a life all its own, that seemed somehow to have an agenda separate from the rest of his body, that not only disobeyed the instructions from his brain, but also took, on occasions, complete control of his senses.

It had first come to his attention when he won a place at the all boys grammar school. Every single aspect of the school was an awesomely new experience, one of which was his introduction to the delights of a gymnasium and the inculcation into organised sports. It was, he decided, like being let loose in a fairground.

There were changing rooms that smelt of rugby boots and gym daps, of ingrained sweat and musk, of dubbin and damp shorts, and the revelation of compulsory showers. He had never seen a shower before.

Warren had felt instantly at home, as though he had experienced it all before in another life.

The sports master, James-y, refused to tolerate any hint of shyness from day one. Everybody, without fail, was to shower, and all would be naked. No coy knicks were allowed.

Only a few of the boys had fully-developed cocks, Warren among them, and soon enough he became noted for his ability to sport an impressively muscular erection when urged to do so, which he did, hidden behind the upturned lid of his desk, with all the pride of a child with a new toy.

He had not long enjoyed this amazing phenomena and the moment of its announcement into his life was etched deeply on his memory. How fitting that the pictures should be the venue for this surprising discovery.

The kids in his street had all joined the queue to see the spectacularly-billed Biblical motion-picture, ‘Salome’ and Warren had been anxious to evaluate his knowledge of the scriptures that he had memorised from Sunday School Bible-classes.

He was not sure what to expect from the film, and had entertained an uneasy heart at the thought that they might show the face of Jesus. After all, it was about John the Baptist, and he had the distinction of baptising the Saviour in the river Jordon, before having his head chopped off by Herod.

What the dance of the seven veils entailed, the bit they concentrated on in the previous week’s trailer, was a touch beyond his imagination, except that one of his buttys, Adrian, had insisted, with a dirty giggle and a sporadic raking of his crutch, that Salome took all her clothes off. She’d be showing everything, he had said. He was not sure whether to believe him or no, but decided in the end that it was merely the product of his rude mind. It nagged him throughout the week though just the same.

Warren’s age group, the under-elevens, because of their lack of height, were obliged to sit on the edges of their upturned seats which, when released, rose from the horizontal with a well sprung clatter, and it was perched thus that he duly acknowledged the scene where Herod, Charles Laughton, asked Salome, Rita Hayworth, to dance for him.

It was with a sense of unease that he tried to anticipate the forthcoming sequence, which had not been too well illustrated in his Bible-classes.

To his slowly-building consternation, as Salome began to discard the series of multi-coloured veils one by one, and as the camera lingered on Herod’s face becoming ever more grotesquely lascivious, Warren suddenly realised the consequence of her removing the final one. She would be embarrassingly naked. Adrian was right after all.

When there was only one veil left to remove, and he could swear he could see right through it to the curving pink flesh, it was with the utmost shock and dismay that Warren realised his little dicky dido was straining mightily to break free of his trousers. It was as stiff as a poker. And miles longer.

With a covering cough of complete horror, he had slid down the seat until it was all but level, convinced that the whole row, no, the whole house was aware of his discomfort.

His bewilderment was dizzying, and he might have stayed hunched over, fighting the push of the seat’s spring if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of the Baptist’s head arriving on a silver platter.

The gasp of the audience allowed him to resurface unnoticed, and the horribly gruesome sight of the executed head brought him back to reality, and the immediate deflation of his first proper hard-on. He had left the pictures slightly shame-faced and a little frightened.

Then, about a year or so later, Tim had dragged him along to the new houses being erected on the site of the old allotment, where upstairs in one of the bare-boarded empty bedrooms Podge was demonstrating his new-found ability to toss himself off.

Amongst another half-dozen spunk-virgins, he had watched with a degree of disbelief as Podge furiously rubbed his skinny knob until, accompanied by enough deathly groans to simulate a seventeenth century dungeon, white spurts of snotty stuff like semolina pudding had shot Etna-like across the floorboards.

That had been a genuinely startling revelation and he had wandered off, elevating the previously unconsidered Podge to a kind of wondrous esteem.

Not many weeks later, at home in the bath, he had been languidly soaping his cock as it rose majestically out of the suds. He had no thoughts, other than how pleasant it all felt, and how supremely relaxed he had become, when in an instance, with no warning whatsoever, it had exploded in his hand sending a shower of that very same white stuff in all directions.

He had sat bolt up right, with an echoing roar of shock, panic grabbing tightly at his intestines before the reality of what had happened calmed him down.

From then on, no bikinied pin-up in the newspapers was safe from him, as he scissored them out and vented his lust upon them wherever and whenever he could. There seemed to be no end to his desire. He was completely and hopelessly addicted. In bed, he could splatter the wooden headboard aback of him.

Eventually, unsure if he was alone in this, he nervously approached Tim about whether he had experienced a similar epiphany, and his butty had admitted his recent participation.

When Tim surreptitiously produced from within the confines of his shirt a brand new copy of ’Health and Efficiency’ that he had only just nicked from the newsagents outside the school, which contained large-breasted female nudists posing on rocky beaches, they had gone directly to Tim’s house before his parents and two sisters got home and, with a few pages each, had wanked themselves off with an unconscious freedom.

But still he worried.

The female body, the real, live, touchable female body, was a mystery to him. The pictures they lusted over omitted that part between their thighs that puzzled them, only indicating something like a smooth swelling where they held their thighs together.

He had, not long ago, with an idle curiosity, looked at his little sister while she was having her napkin changed, but somehow that fat split did not transfer in his mind to someone older. After all, his cock was nothing like the winkie he used to have.

Which brought up the problem of size.

He had studied his erection with a sense of awe. It must expand something like ten-fold, he decided, if you used the mathematical formula 2Pi.rh, for a cylinder. Surely that was too big to put into a girl, if that was what you did. It depressed him to think that his could be too big and would frighten off any potential partner. In any case, how did it go in? And how much went in anyway. The idea of some kind of tunnel, like a large test-tube disappearing up into their bellies, did not strike him as a probability. Perhaps just the first bit went in, the knob, the policeman’s helmet, like a boiled egg slipping in to an egg-cup. Did you just prod away until it found its own way in, as though it was imbued with the secret knowledge of it all and was just waiting for the opportunity to dive in, because it would be too embarrassing by half for a girl to see you hefting your own cock in your hands? What would his female acquaintances think if they knew what he was doing now?

The overwhelming spectre of rudeness had inhibited his imagination from speculating too much, and caused him to blush hotly at the graphic images that ensued.

And then there was the question of hair. He had a swathe of it, and under his arms. Did they?

The stretch of the imagination it would take to amalgamate all those idiosyncrasies beat him for the moment, and the possibility of getting access to that information seemed to him to be nothing short of remote.

So he all but gave up on finding out, and contented himself with the depravity invoked by the pin-ups he collected.

Until about two weeks ago.

On Fridays, his mother and father played Whist and Newmarket with some friends, so he was generally relegated to his aunty Dot’s and Uncle Jim’s, who also went out visiting but left him in the care of his older cousin, ‘Rene, who had his year younger cousin, Ruth, also under her charge. He usually took some homework with him or some swotting material, until it was time for cocoa and then home.

When he had arrived he found Ruth and her friend Doreen playing draughts on the kitchen table, while ‘Rene was sprawling in the armchair idly perusing a magazine.

He had said his hellos, told them he had history homework to finish, and had gone into the front room for the peace. He had bet himself that there would be bakestones with the cocoa. Dark brown with currents in them, just as he liked.

He could faintly hear the intermittent shrieks and giggles coming from the kitchen, and then shortly afterwards, an outside door clicking shut.

The War of Captain Jenkins’ Ear was not very invigorating, and he had fleetingly had the daring idea of wanking off into the fire-grate, which was damped down with a crust of small coal. Nobody would bother him, and he was finding that it was quite exciting to do it in places that were almost public. He had done it in the summer in the swimming baths changing- cubicles, thrashing away in mute ecstasy as he gazed in wonder at the transformation from cold water shrivelledness to rock-hard muscle.

He wondered a bit about Doreen.

She was big for her age, much bigger than Ruth. He had noticed lately that his little cousin had a habit of flouncing when she sat down, so that her frock billowed up before she smoothed it down again, and a tendency to squeeze past him in doorways for no good reason. He would be forced to tuck his stomach in to allow her access, tutting her as though she were dull.

Warren was just acknowledging the complicit swelling in his trousers, when the door suddenly opened and Ruth slid in like a wraith. Doreen followed directly behind, as though she were an intruder. He watched his cousin carefully, eyeing her up for the hidden glass of water she had the propensity to throw over him when she got the chance, or the suddenly bursting balloon that elevated him a foot off the chair. Thank goodness he hadn’t taken his cock out, he thought wryly.

‘ ‘Rene’s gone outside for a while, ‘ she said coming closer. ‘ She said she wouldn’t be long. She’s only by the gulley. ‘ Ruth smirked.

‘ She’s got a boyfriend. From down Brynna street. They’ll be snogging in the hedge. ‘

‘ How do you know that? ‘ he had queried interestedly.

‘ We’ve watched ‘em before, haven’t we, Do’. ‘

Doreen nodded, and sat on the edge of the settee staring unblinkingly at him.

‘ What’re you reading? ‘ said Ruth, leaning over him in a pretence of looking at his books.

‘ History, ‘ he had said with a nervous cough, because she was pressing her body against his arm and there was a distinct cushiony softness to it.

Warren moved on the pretext of shifting his manuscript.

‘ She’ll be about an hour all told, ‘ said Ruth, as though it was an important point.

Warren was watching Doreen from under his eyebrows while idly shuffling his books about, as she casually leaned back on her elbows pushing forward what he could clearly see were two arching mounds under her blouse. Two buttons were undone. The tip of her tongue stroked her bottom lip.

She crossed her legs as though fidgeting for comfort, adjusting her pleated skirt with a flicking movement of her fingers so that a flash of white thigh was momentarily exposed.

‘ Who? ‘ He said distractedly.

‘ ‘Rene. She always is. Christine Golding says you’re a good kisser. ‘

The sudden switch of subject shook him.

‘ What? ‘

‘ Christine Golding says you are a very good kisser. Is that right, Warren?’

He laughed in surprise. ‘ Where’d you get that idea from? ‘

‘ We heard it from Joan Thomas. She said Christine Golding’s telling everyone. ‘

He laughed again, slightly pleased at the compliment but not entirely sure where this was heading.

‘ Well. Are you? ‘ She said insistently.

‘ I don’t know, ‘ he answered modestly, wriggling like a worm on a hook. He wasn’t fussy on being interrogated.

‘ Try Doreen, Warr’. ‘

‘ Wha’,’

‘ Doreen. Kiss Doreen like you kissed Christine Golding. ‘

‘ Why? ‘

‘ Because, ‘ she replied. ‘ You don’t mind, Do’, do you. ‘

Doreen shook her head very slightly, her eyes wide and unblinking, but otherwise made no move.

‘ Well, I don’t know if…’

Ruth grabbed his arm. ‘ Come on, she’s willing. She’s dying to be kissed by you. ‘

‘ Ruth, ‘ Doreen protested with a squeal, giving her a sharp look with her eyes, but still remaining in the same pose.

Warren sat up slowly, his interest awakening. Christine Golding, hey. Talking about him. There’s a turn up. Wouldn’t harm his reputation any rate.

‘ Go on then, ‘ he said challengingly.

He stood up resolutely, while Doreen slid off the arm onto the settee itself.

This was interesting. He had the beginnings of a rule-book here, if he took particular note. Rule one, he decided, moving toward Doreen, would be to be bold at all times, to show no hesitation, and not shy away if even the semblance of an opportunity arises. Advance and see what transpires.

He was extremely conscious of Ruth watching him, but he wasn’t overly concerned. She had started this, not him.

He saw Doreen’s auburn hair gleaming like a well-polished sideboard, noticed that her green eyes shone like marbles and how plump and full her lips were, as though they had become inflated in readiness. He hadn’t noticed that one before. He felt as though he was in the laboratory, taking note of the chemical and physical changes in an experiment.

He sat on the front edge of the settee, trying not to see Charles Boyer in his mind’s eye, or Clark Gable in ‘Mogambo’ grabbing Grace Kelly, then slid his left hand behind the curtain of her hair to cup the nape of her neck. He placed his right hand somewhere between her waist and her shoulder, and pulled her towards him until his lips met her’s.

Standard procedure, so far.

He began to move his fingertips up and down the taut sinew that led down to her shoulder-blade, gauging the softness and mobility of her lips and stroking her back with the other hand, feeling the yielding ribs and the intrusion of a bra-strap.

He sighed, more for effect than any thing else, and went in harder as though he meant business. This was a direct result of his experiences with Christine Golding, who had unquestionably enjoyed it. He put more urgency into his lip movements, hearing her start to moan softly and shift her body on the settee cushions in response.

Now he let her fall back, following her down, pressurising her until her head was resting on the scatter-cushion and she was horizontal. She wriggled for comfort and suddenly his hand, his thumb, was caressing the slopes of a rounded, stiffly-brassiered breast.

He was poised over her now, working his mouth and sucking at her lips, and then she was retaliating, hooking an arm about his neck and dragging him closer so that his chest was flattening hers.

He was barely conscious of his surroundings, so involved was he with his orchestration of movements, and Doreen was making mewing and panting noises in ever-ascending exhalations. Then, suddenly, it was all over, as she jack-knifed upwards and pushed him away gasping wildly.

‘ I can’t breathe, ‘ she gurgled, ‘ I can’t breathe. ‘

Warren rolled over onto the floor, acutely aware that he was sporting a painfully-restricted erection.

‘ Wow! ‘ said Ruth, eyes glittering excitedly, ‘ Wow! ‘

‘ O my God, ‘ Doreen panted staring at Ruth, her face suffused with a red glow. ‘ My God. ‘

Warren suspected his colour was no different. It was like being in the kitchen with the oven going full blast.

‘ Glass of water anybody? ‘ he asked and rolled uncomfortably away. This one wasn’t going to go down in a hurry, he felt.

He crabbed his way awkwardly to the door.

In the kitchen he gulped the water greedily, adjusting his cock so that it pointed hotly up his belly. He hoped it would deflate as quick as it had risen, although he had not been conscious of it until he was on the floor.

Mind of its own, he thought again.

That was brilliant, and in its own way almost as good as Christine Golding.

He filled two glasses of water and took them in. They were both on the settee at opposite ends, so he passed the water over and sat back in the armchair.

‘ Wow! ‘ said Ruth again.

‘ Yeah, wow, ‘ repeated Doreen, her face still aglow. She hitched her skirt once more and caught him snatching a glance at the flash of thigh.

‘ Is she a good kisser, Warr’? ‘ asked his cousin, eagerly.

‘ Terrific, ‘ he confirmed.

‘ Really? ‘ Ruth said, as though she doubted his testimony.

‘ Really