With a heavy heart and light legs from the new trainers I pushed my way through the big wooden doors and entered the bar in The Cauldron. What met me inside was so appalling I could have turned and ran. I was faced with a horrible nightmare, a spectre attacking me on every side, but I had to stay in this place and there would be no escape.
Appalling noise filled every part of the pub. “Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me, twice on the pipe, if the answer is no”. Dawn was belting from the jukebox, loud at the request of the big crowd. They were enjoying beers and music before the sound was lowered for their quiz night. This was a Monday night for God's sake, a Monday that may be the last day of my life, and I knew that the music selection playing me out would be tragic. The Cauldron was full to the brim with mushbies, nerds without computers or girlfriends. There were some mushbiettes waiting for the quiz, I think they were girls. I've never seen so many badly-dressed people with so much acne in one place. I needed a drink, and my stupid idea returned.
This is where a little local knowledge comes in, and the desire for the biggest diversion on the planet. If I'm very lucky I may yet live. Many times before now, before I changed into a cool gangster, we'd often drink late, very late in Billy's pub. One night unbeknown to a very drunken Billy we watched him boost his profits. He liked to slip a percentage of water and a couple of bottles of brandy into his beer. This sound's extravagant until you realise the basement of his pub was equipped with twelve hundred pint tanks of real ale, and six hundred pint tanks of lager. Punters couldn't tell his beer was lower gravity, and the sting from the couple of bottles of brandy put a nice edge on it. People often commented on how good the beer in The Cauldron was.
Understaffed was the way he liked to play. His wife helped, also his daughter, and on special occasions he would get a couple attractive female students to help out for cash. Tonight he was doing it on the cheap because the mushbies drank at a steady pace all evening and over time consumed a considerable amount of beer. All he had to do was be patient and put up with the shite on the jukebox. He loaded this machine with special attention to his captive audience. He prided himself in being the only pub in town with a box loaded with “classics”.
I had a stupid plan, it wasn't a great plan, and the only thing great about it was its stupidity. The beer cellar was entered from behind the bar. This cellar had more than one entrance. A fire door closed off the end of the corridor after the toilets. On summer nights he opened it to let in the breeze creating a draft to push the heavy fog of cigarette smoke around the pub; the air never seemed to clear. Inside the enclosed back yard were set of steel double doors in the ground. These were used when the tanker arrived from the brewery to pump the beer in. The tanker would reverse through the rear gates then deploy a hose to fill the tanks much in the same way as a petrol tanker at a garage. The beer tasted a little better than petrol, and tonight would be a good night, a very good night!
Two years ago the steel plates had a dodgy bolt. Bob and I had speculated if we could open it and borrow a few bottles of beer, we never did. Relying entirely on landlord Billy's tightness with money I figured that nothing would have been changed. Fingers crossed I grabbed the edge of the metal doors. The bolt only engaged a fraction because it was misaligned with the other plate. I took a hard pull at the plateâ¦Nothing! Again I tugged, this time harder, all the while trying to keep the sound downâ¦Nothing! Balls to it I thought! Just give it everything. What have I got to lose? I was starting to think the tight old git had actually put his hand in his pocket and money into the structure of the pub. I tugged and the damn door popped open almost smashing me in the face. The tight old git had kept the money in his pocket.
Part one of my dastardly master plan was now complete. I was standing silently in the yard listening to see if the grinding wrench of metal had disturbed anybody. Inside the pub during these moments I could hear the mushbies enjoying a very loud chorus of “Bridget the Midget” by Ray Stevens. Was I sick with fright, sick with effort of lifting the doors or nauseated by the sound of the not so mighty Wurlitzer?
Part two of my dastardly plan was about to be put into place. It would be interesting if it worked. It might save me and it could change everything.
Inside the sinister black orb the tranquil quietness shocked me. It was cool, it was dark and I was walking with Bob. This must have been the first thing I'd forgotten. I could remember everything up to the moment we pushed out into the night. Going through the grubby side door into a dark future was my last old memory. I was intrigued to know more.
It must have been the drink, because in a situation like this I should have been very nervous. My friend and companion on our journey to manhood, gabbled away like a man possessed. “Blow job⦠hope I don't come too quick⦠I hope Smiggy as it all arranged⦠should I have a wank now?” And so it went on, I was walking in my own soft bubble of quiet.
I was very drunk, but not pissed enough to stop me getting hard, I hoped! Relaxing and being cool was my thing, whereas my friend was driving himself towards a hyper frenzy. At that moment if he'd seen a woman naked I think he would've exploded. He raved and I drifted along the grey brick road towards the mythical world of manhood. My focus was on staying calm, but Bob infiltrating my mind, like a swarm of bees buzzing around inside my head. He must've been very drunk or very scared.
I was back in the viewing seat, sitting on my shoulders watching the rerun, knowing what was going on inside my head down to a certain level, but not into the deep subconscious. I was holding a bottle of wine, a nice low vintage red. By low vintage I mean low price. We were big spenders! This bottle was our sole contribution to the little party. Smiggy had made it very clear, he expected us to sort things out with him later, especially if we lost it! If this girl didn't fancy our little party we wouldn't even give her the bottle. We'd drink off our sorrow at remaining virgins on the walk home, and talk up our chances of losing it tomorrow night.
The Victorian streets got narrower, the buildings taller and closer together. These streets were no longer elegant, now the crumbling tenements of bedsit land. This was a place inhabited by small flats, people on low rent, low rent people high. This was the less elegant end of town. As far as the police were concerned, this area was the town sewer. We were stepping into the shit in the hope that just some of the depravity would rub off on us. We inhabited the world of the fortunate. At the end of the night we could leave, others were trapped here.
We possessed a ticket to the game. Smiggy had given us an old betting slip from the shop next to The Cauldron. Scrawled on it in barely legible handwriting was the girls address. We didn't know if there was going to be one or two of them, our friend in the pub suggested she often had friends staying, dossing down as he put it. Some of these friends might want to join in. We were too naive to understand their motives.
Bob was still going at eight hundred miles an hour. “What if they're scamming us⦠what if the address is wrong⦠what if he's bullshitting?” And so it went on. I watched myself inside the acid bubble. I was drifting on a wind of fate towards a different future. They say you make your own future and you probably do. Tonight a certain black fate dragged us down dark streets that for me would become too black to remember. All the streets were named after local Victorian dignitaries, all now forgotten. We were having difficulty finding the road in the poorly lit maze of housing.
We were looking for 2B, Worthington Road. Whoever Worthington was he'd been celebrated with grand houses for a handful of select families, now home to hundreds. There was very little movement and not many parked cars. Nobody seemed to walk the streets. Everybody was either out, or out of it, on whatever rocked their boat.
Clinging in fear to the shadows across the road an old man was taking a slow walk with his small dog. We spotted him and I bounded across to ask him directions. Imagine it from his point of view. A big young man is running across the road towards him, with another man raving on the other side of the street. The poor old man was frozen in terror expecting to be struck down and robbed of his 44p. He waited to be beaten to a pulp for less than the price of a couple of pints of beerâ¦All I could see were the whites of his eyes, and his yellowy-white teeth visible in his forced smile. In my state this man's terror did not register.
“Worthington Road, do you know where Worthington Road is, please?” I asked.
He understood I meant no harm and the rigid fear left his body. It looked like I'd pulled the plug out of a blow â up toy. His little sausage dog was involved in a passionate affair with the base of the tree and didn't seem to care what his master suffered.
“Down to the end, turn left, two streets along on your right. That should do it,” the old man said, and moved off into the shadows tugging young Nigel (the dog) away from the delicious scent he'd found. Nigel was unhappy, the old man happy he wasn't facing a trip to hospital, or worse.
Part of my tranquil state disappeared when I knew where I was heading. The tension in my stomach grew because I might actually have sex. Was I also nervous because I knew the manner in which I was going to do it? I was going to lose my virginity to a girl who was prostituting herself for reasons I didn't understand, or didn't want to. I stupidly thought a couple of paid for fucks would give me the confidence to chat up all the girls who wouldn't give me sex now. I was seventeen and crammed full of raging hormones, like Bob, but slightly less raving.
A few minutes later we found the house, on the corner, the first house in the street. The address was 2B, which brought me straight back to school Shakespeare. To be or not to be that was my question, a man or not a man, tonight would tell. For some reason we walked up to the front door, six steps above the street. There was no flat 2B, only numbers one to six. Bob used his Dunhill cigarette lighter, a thing he carried even though he smoked about three cigarettes a week. The flickering flame confirmed what we could see under the dim doorway lighting. There was no flat 2B, yet this was definitely number two Worthington Road.
“The bastard! The lying little bastard!” Bob said. He was angry at being misled. I thought I could hear relief behind his cursing. I was convinced Smiggy had been truthful.
Walking down the steps I glanced down to my right and could see a faint yellow light through some gruesomely designed orange curtains, all very 1970s. It came to me flat 2B was the basement, the bottom of the house, the old servant's quarters. The place where people who served had been housed. Those above God had smiled on, and those below for reasons never explained in church had to live in servitude. Nothing much had changed apart from servitude now occupied the entire house. This was still the bottom, the basement, the lowest point.
The door looked as if it had been dragged from The Cauldron. The same worn and peeled look of the door leading out of the pub, and now we were faced with the same door leading us somewhere else. The cool tranquil walk, the interlude between, need never have existed. The door leading from one squalid establishment to the other may well have been the same. I suppose we were looking for a certain kind of squalor, but what greeted us shocked me. Not the old me, but me!
Hesitation was the key. I looked at Bob, and Bob looked back at me. Neither of us knocked. My friend was giving me the go on you go on, look with his eyes. I didn't want the other me to knock, and I did want the other me to run. Hormones were beating on every door, screaming to be freed. I raised my arm and knocked firmly on the door, too firmly I think. The sound echoed around the lower yard. It sounded like a police raid, too much pressure on the door, too much tension in the arm.
Nothing happened. A minute and a half and still nothing had happened. By this time I was convinced the girl was out, and the lights had been left on by accident or for security. I knocked again confident it wouldn't be answered. I'd only touched the door once when it moved away from my hand and there before me was a vision. It didn't shock the teenage me, but I, aware of all the passing years was shaken to the very core! The girl was the most beautiful pixie of the creature I'd ever seen,
petite
and beautiful with tumbling hair. She was the Lylybel, Hysandrabopel, the pixie.
“Come in! Don't stand there like dicks. Get in here,” the girl said. She had a nice way with words.
“What you two saddos brought me? Go on, show us!” The girl continued.
I nervously proffered forward the bottle of cheap wine. She made a snorting noise down her nose and then laughed. Not happy laughter, but the laugh of somebody in trouble. It had a tone of the maniacal, the desperate.
“You wankers can make yourselves a cup of tea. I'm going out to the phone box. Don't touch my stuff!” We'd changed places and now we inhabited the basement while she was out on the dark streets. We were left to look around. What there was to look at was not much, but one thing had surprised me, it wasn't squalid. The smell was the first thing to hit my senses as we entered. The place had a slight musty odour combined with the smell of fried food, and a cloying dampness that stuck in your throat. If you took the sensation of smell out of the equation the place was very neat if poorly furnished.
An old single speaker record player was in the alcove where the fireplace used to be. A few LPs were scattered on the floor in front of it. The settee was hidden below hideous loose covers made from the same material as the orange curtains. The bedroom had to be looked at. We couldn't resist this investigation, and were more than surprised with its neatness. There was no wardrobe and a piece of rope strung across the alcoves either side of the blocked off old chimney breast. She owned few clothes, but her scant possessions were very neat. The room was dominated by a large king-sized bed, out of keeping with the rest of that mean basement. This bed had a quality about it, and looking at this lavish piece of furniture had an effect. My stomach turned. I was looking at the place where acts of love, if that's what you could call them, took place. A few minutes from now I could be lying there naked. I've never been naked in front of any woman other than my mother.
At first glance I didn't notice the strangeness of the bedroom. It contained no windows, only a very high slotted skylight partially obscured by a large poster of Paul Newman. The only light was as artificial as calling this a place where you'd sleep. We wanted expunge the image of the threatening bed, so Bob and I headed for the kitchen to make our cup of tea. He'd gone quiet and I felt sober, though I knew I wasn't.
The more time we spent in the kitchen listening to nothing the more nervous we became. Clutching our cups of tea we sat on the sofa then turned on the record player. The record was a surprise. She seemed to have a lot of Simon and Garfunkel and late Beatles records, however this was “Metamorphosis” by Iron Butterfly, a strange choice. Minutes passed and we started to feel like spare ends. The tea was finished and drink-fuelled lust had turned into sober fear.
This
petite
beautiful girl was going to give us sex for payment. We weren't losing our virginities somewhere in the woods, fumbling and awkward with a long-time girlfriend. We weren't fumbling in the dark bedroom at a party, fuelled on cheap cider with the girl who'd let everybody do it. No, we were paying a prostitute to have sex. She may have been very young, but the connotation was of some old girl on the game, a woman too old to show too much leg, and using too much make-up. This was how I saw a prostitute, not wondrous and beautiful in her delicate form as this young girl was.
An old girl showing two young boys the way seemed more acceptable. This thing tonight almost seemed like the rape of a desperate child. Even to my naive seventeen-year-old self it all seemed very wrong, and I think Bob who was now silent had gone beyond that point. He stood up and suggested we leave. I agreed. We were halfway across the kitchen when she opened the door.
“All arranged. You two want it together or separate? Smiggy tells me you're both virgins!” Then she laughed. She walked straight past us into the bedroom, her mood higher, and she now had a bright confidence about her.
“Toss for it if you can't make your minds up, but come on, let's get started I want to go somewhere later!” Pixie was nothing but direct.
She was wearing a small man's white cotton shirt and tight jeans with some kind of tiny army boots. Our fantastic duo stood looking at each other, both wanting to be first, neither brave enough to run or say this wasn't what we wanted. We had to decide. Moments later she appeared at the door still wearing the man's shirt now open to the waist where it revealed the slight mound of each breast, but not enough to reveal her nipples. We were not concentrating on the breasts because other than the shirt she was completely naked. We could see her beautiful slim legs topped out by her womanhood.
She was standing in front of us on display without embarrassment. This emboldened one of us. Bob moved forwards and she held out her hand smiling. She dragged him into the bedroom, all the while he was fumbling in his pocket looking for his supply of condoms. I wondered if he could last long enough to put one on. I, despite myself, had a very solid erection and I didn't want to let Bob have something over me.
Bob was going to lose his virginity before me. His birthday was six weeks earlier than mine, so I was still ahead of him. What I needed now was to make sure I didn't come before I did the real thing, so I headed into the small bathroom behind the kitchen. Masturbation was the key, and with the image of pubic hair in my mind thirty seconds would do the trick. As a teenager ten minutes would recharge the batteries. I just hoped at the second attempt the bulb wouldn't go off like a camera flash.
“Pete, Pete, it's your turn,” said Bob. I'd only been 20 seconds and was pushing my way out of the bathroom. Bob had lasted less than a minute. He was grinning like a fool.
“She sucked it like a lollipop. She fucking sucked it then swallowed!” Bob said.
“That's it? No proper sex?” I asked.