| SPRING 2003 |
flashquake Fiction |
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I have had truly perfect sex just once in my whole life. I was nineteen. And my friend threw a party because his parents were on holiday. It was typical of such events. Listless girls danced to "Madness" in the lounge with boys holding beer cans, who gave the thumbs up to their mates, who stood in the kitchen and watched. In an upstairs bedroom they passed around a badly rolled spliff, and nodded emphatically to everything that was said. And, in the bath, I slept off the after-effects of a spliff too many, while people came and went around me to piss and snog and vomit. 
Then the police came, and the first I knew of it Mary was standing on top of me and trying to climb out of the window. I watched her quietly for a minute. Her neat nineteen-year-old legs, bare beneath her tiny skirt and almost perfectly white, shivered with the strain of standing at full stretch. Her clear blue eyes were full of fear and concentration as she wrestled with the reluctant window. Then I howled as a high-heel pinched the lose flesh of my inner thigh against the porcelain. "Shhh..." she snapped, looking at me and pressing her finger against her mouth. "The police are downstairs." "So?" I whispered. "My parents will kill me," she said. "Can't you help?" I glanced at the tiny window above us, and at the door that she'd locked behind her. And I thought about the police who had probably already gone and I smiled and I said: "Sure." So we scrambled out of the window, and crept across the flat roofed garage. I hung from the guttering, my hands scraping up fistfuls of gutter-sludge, and dropped heavily to the ground. Then Mary threw her shoes after me, sat delicately on the edge of the garage, and dropped neatly into my arms. We ran along the narrow alleyway that bordered the side of the house, my shoes slapping on the wet cobbles and the blue lights flickering on the wooden fencing. We laughed away our adrenaline, and suddenly, I could almost hear "The Jam" playing just for me — full volume inside my head. We stopped, breathless, a couple of streets down and crouched behind a dustbin. "Do you think they're after us?" she asked, peering around me, her hot breath scolding the nape of my neck. I didn't think you were allowed to say things like that unless you were in a bad teen movie with Molly Ringwald. But that's what life was like at nineteen. I didn't think the police would give a shit where we were. But we hid anyway, for nearly an hour. And then hiding turned into snogging. And then snogging turned into shagging. And so we did it, right there, against the wall and amongst the dustbins. Part way through, my trousers crumpled around my ankles, my belt clinking rhythmically, and Mary's porcelain legs wrapped around my waist, I looked down and saw that my foot was edging ever closer to a pile of dog shit. But it didn't matter. It was perfect sex. It was poetic, dramatic, romantic, heroic, sexy sex. Between the build up, and the adrenaline, and the danger, and the reprieve. It didn't matter that it only lasted three minutes. It didn't matter that we were nineteen and having sex was a bit like trying to solve the Rubik Cube in the dark. It didn't even matter that I got dog shit on my trousers. It was epic sex. It was the kind of sex that Ulysses or Humphrey Bogart would have had. It was perfect.
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