Sunny afternoons and childhood games, Robert and I swimming in the pool over the next hill.

Those far off days of summer holidays when it never rained and the next ice cream was nearer than tomorrow. We’d swum, dunked each other and now were walking back for whatever food we could scrounge from wherever.

Lindy stopped us, wanting to play, wanting the things girls always do in those days before we grew to know we could never satisfy or please and learned our silence was our only shield.

Robert pulled away, rolling his eyes, talking of heading back. I knew that sweet sandwiches lay there but sometimes Lindy came though with cake, biscuits and once even with jelly and ice cream.

Torn there as later I always would between women and friends, this was only the first of many betrayals I would make of my gender peers, but then what is loyalty but betrayal threatened and never realised?

I went with Lindy.

We went to her house, rode bicycles, played with water pistols and buckets, all cooling on that hot day. She fed me then, sandwiches to rival those of Robert, then cake, biscuits.

I ate as only early teen youth can: straight in never touching sides to fill empty bottomless pit. After, we rode bikes some more, slower now and me thinking of how to escape soon without the obviousness of it all. When Lindy’s mum came out.

Lindy’s mum was like all mum’s, grey, shapeless persons who fed, watered and sometimes shouted when unseen dangers had invaded their worlds. We spoke, humoured and did our very best to avoid them-except at feeding and money times when we risked our honour in exchange for tokens…

Lindy’s mum was one of the better one’s, not talking too much, not asking questions and always ready with a biscuit or smile.

Today she smiled rolled out a blanket and began to prepare to sunbathe. She lay there in a lime green bikini and red hair. I’d not noticed this before: how her hair caught the sun, reflecting, turning bright into copper.

Her skin white, freckled somehow tan, her legs long leading to green plump triangles. Lindy digging me in the ribs:

” what’chu staring at?”

and I couldn’t answer, for I no longer knew, all I wanted was to keep on looking, hoping that maybe some answer would present itself. Lindy pulled me away, but food, bikes and water were way beyond me now. Everything in the world unnamed and unknown lay on that blanket.

Then I became aware of her eyes staring at me, my bathing trunks and the bulge in them. I had to sit and cover for running though nothing was big enough to ever hide my blush.

Lindy tugged my arms, trying to pull me away and all I could think of was fever, to leave me alone until it passed, so of course she got her mum to check me over.

Lindys’ mum holding my brow, taking my pulse and I only conscious of loud blood rushing, hard and ashamed of it. Smelling her sweetness, they say redheads smell different and I can still swear now to sweetness in copper and contrast of green and freckle.

Death would have been kinder for they took me home and I lay swaddled in hot blankets for two days, my dreams corrupted forever by her vision.

©neilbenbow