Short Fiction

So Tony Morris, who covers the North, comes back from his paper mill visit the other day and straight away my ears prick up, because not even my office glazing can muffle that whistle of his. Not even solid rock could. When I look up, he's winking like a carnival queen and swaggering towards me with this glossy bundle under his arm. Average seller, Tony, and a cocky little sod at the best of times. Well, I'm adding up VAT receipts on Milly's machine and the number five keeps sticking, which means there's more till-roll in the bin than street bunting at a Royal wedding. But mine, the one I've used for years that never lets me down has got the wrong roll diameter or something and it’s been phased out by the supplier. So it's that or nothing and God knows what I'll do when she comes back from her lunch.

Anyway, he snakes around the door with this daft tippy-toe style that makes him look like a pinstriped Elmer Fudd and flops this stack of magazines onto my table. "Couple of print over-runs for you boss," he winks, and I'm so annoyed at the interruption I just look at him and say "Is there something wrong with your eye?"

Without dropping the smug expression he nods at the literature splayed out all over January's expense receipts, knocking them out of alphabetical order and grins: "Pristine. Not a single page stuck together." Then taps his nose. "It's not what you know."

You don't do that to a tidy workspace. You don't just come in and plonk stuff everywhere like a heathen. But that was Tony, buttering me up in his own clumsy way. I couldn't begin to imagine how many paperclips had leaked through the hole where your computer leads are meant to go, that you always lose the little plastic disc for that covers it up. The whole tub had gone over.

"Just be bloody careful in future!"

I follow his undaunted ‘nudge-nudge’ look and it finally lands on the boob-laden covers of the magazines. 'Jazz mags' we used to call them back in the day and they hadn't changed a lot, either in theme or content. I could even identify, among such bawdy sobriquets as Double D Housewives and Barely Legal Babes, a few familiar ones from my time: Escort and Fiesta. That was the thing about porn in my day - more refined somehow, more innocent. Single word titles with 'step inside' attributes. Not spelling it out like common trollops.

"Christ, are they still going?" I say, getting wistful in spite of myself.

Then, as we leaf through them, leering like schoolboys, it suddenly rises up, large as life. The spotty spectre of a furtive youth - instant transport to that adolescent era of Clearasil, mood swings and spontaneous erections; the flagship aroma of council-cut grass and the estate where I lived shimmering boldly into view. Fields, carved with quicklime into football pitches littered with white dogshit; maisonettes rising into the murky sky and a candlewick bedspread flapping on a neighbour’s line. My older mate pointing out the streak of ecru staining its middle and sniggering, 'Bet it's spunk'.

There was a truck stop nearby. Greasy, industrial smells of pooled oil on hot tarmac. Hempy whiff of ropes lashing tarpaulins down. DERV they called it then, not diesel, but it would still make puddle rainbows on wet days that dogs allegedly drank from and were driven mad by. Perhaps that was what bleached their shits as well. Anyway, if on one long, boring day of those endless summer holidays, with nothing to do (as my friend Peter Johnson once famously put it) except 'watch Hong Kong Phooey and have loads of wanks'; if, on one of those particular days you were apt to spend a little time scouring the low suburban hedges, you would find, not only Blackbirds’ nests (they were ten a penny - it was the commonest egg in anyone's collection) but what truck drivers sometimes left behind.

Of course I couldn't make such a connection back then, at fourteen. Couldn't know it was truck drivers who were responsible, same as I couldn't know that Peter Johnson was a double phallic name. I thought it might be God leaving me clues, maybe. But both of these later-life revelations told me much. It was the same Peter Johnson who bet it was spunk, rather than aggressive bleaching on Mrs. Weatherby's bedsheet, and Peter's dad was a truck driver. It made a kind of cosmic sense.

Anyhow, it doesn't take a genius to understand what I mean. Well-thumbed scraps of Knave, Penthouse and Mayfair hidden in the bushes, christened by bird shit and crinkled where dogs had cocked their legs. Single word titles of an artier refrain. Course, there were exceptions: Razzle, with its penchant for amateur-style photography and resultantly messy burger shots and Hustler, with added penetration. All fairly bewildering to the unschooled eye, but for me, this tattered, incomplete outdoor library of filth was the closest to a sex education I would ever come, because my dad was neither a truck driver nor had a suspiciously bulging mattress.

Gazing now at the shiny folds of these supine spines on my office desk launches me squarely into the most lucid flashback of all; the day I found an immaculate stack of them, tucked away near a priveted ginnel on Briar Hill. Three things about the occasion were perfect. One, they had clearly not long since been deposited, presumably by long-distance Stan, who could now dispense missionary relief to Domestic Doreen with a clear conscience. Two, they were (apart from the odd stuck page) remarkably complete. Three, it was the drought summer of seventy-six. They were bone dry. Actually, thinking about it, there was a fourth: I was on my own that day - no sharesies.

It was like stumbling onto the Necronomicon of Fanny, a shady hinterworld of come-hither looks and grown-up desires, populated by ladies called "Vanessa, from Cirencester" with their own private Idaho growing down there like some sort of testament to topiary. They were mine though, and I coveted them jealously, poring, in secret, over each photo-spread, each tacky cartoon, each softcore Betamax production review featuring Maria Shriver or Sylvia Kristel. But the stories, especially the ubiquitous Reader's Letter - 'I am not normally inclined to write to this sort of publication, being a tireless servant of the Women's Institute, but felt I had to confide about a recent experience I had while supervising an over 60s fell walk...' The letters were the final piece of the puzzle, the words that explained the pictures. A Rosetta Stone of awakening right there, in my sweaty palms, in plain English, laid bare. This was what our parents did when we were tucked up in bed at night, listening to the muffled, alien cries, rhythmic headboard percussion and the gentle sough of plaster coming away from the wall.

The 'He fucked me like a badger in heat' style typified by the grittier mags got old after a while so I gravitated towards the more upmarket confession, such as might be found between the covers of Playboy or Club. Here, you could expect a classier style of prose, with proper spelling and even punctuation. Also, there were words in these that I had never come across before, so I knew I was on the right track.

Two things took some serious hammer that summer, and the second of them was my dictionary. Once, when mum asked what the heck I was looking up this time, I abstractly said "Cunnilingus". Fortunately, she didn't know what it meant either and went back to ironing 'wunda-web' onto the turn-ups of my school trousers. Slowly though, bit by bit, I deciphered all the arcane terminology, then proceeded to flog it to my wide-eyed playground peers, behind the bike sheds and huddled around the worn 'D' of the concrete five-a-side pitch. An unveiling of the clitoris was worth ten pence or half a Curly Wurly. In my reverie, I wondered how many of them believed I had knowingly oversold that vision of a 'glorious pink nubbin' when (or if) they finally came across one. Likewise labia and vulva, although a riot nearly ensued the day Cuckoo Simmonds found all three referenced openly in a standard biology textbook.

"Ahh, yes - but," I protested madly at the hostile crowd, "where does it say 'Doggy style', eh? Where are the 'shuddering orgasms’? The 'looping strings of pearly jizz'?"

In the course of a single summer, I became a man of the sexual world, a hero, an authority. All completely vicarious, of course, but they weren’t to know that.

At this point the daydream evaporates, and I come home to my deskbound self. Two existential truths strike me with the force of epiphany. First: how tame these once-revered publications now seem in the context of a free internet where everything can be done to everybody at once; possibly with a harnessed animal in tow. If you went to an orgy these days, you'd need a kilo of Duracells, a daypass for World of Leather, and a horse box.

Morris looks at me and says, "You okay, boss? Need anything else?"

"Nah," I say, feeling an obscure but heartfelt pang for Vanessa, of Cirencester, if only to offer her a comb and tell her to tidy herself up a bit. I'm not his boss, just a lowly clerk, it's all part of the process. What he's after.

The wink returns. "Enjoy, then. Err, you will get that expenses cheque to me before Tuesday. Tough month see?"

"I know," I say sharply, and the second thing dies on my tongue, because I suddenly recognise that if it really is true, I wouldn't be sitting here on a lumbar cushion, squinting through pebble specs at a borrowed adding machine with a sticky key. If I say it out loud it will just add to all the sadness of the world I seem to have failed to move on from. He will know that too, and it'll embarrass us both that he'll have to pretend for the sake of his early cheque, and between the awkward silence and the inevitable tit joke, I'll see pity and scorn in his lowered gaze. So I wait for the inevitable tit joke and whisper it at the same time his Gucci watch clinks against the closing door.

"I'm twice the salesman you are."