My Little Blue Dress (5 page)

But at least I had the dress.

Despite the obvious untrueness of me grand-da's theory that I was “allergic to the past,” the fact that he had even felt able to
make
a diagnosis on that surreal afternoon, and that to corroborate his claim he had given me an actual
object
with which I did, in truth, feel a weird sort of kinship, both suggested strongly that somewhere out there in the world there was a
rational explanation
for my strange style of speaking and thinking. The little blue dress was conclusive proof that, contrary to appearances, I was not an implausible freak but in fact a
real person
, and with that knowledge, I found, I was able to carry on.

Q
UEEN OF THE
M
AY
that spring was a strawberry-blond Slut named Sophie Fairlop and after closing ceremonies I wrote her a long, thoughtful letter explaining how in my opinion she might possibly be the best May Queen in the entire history of the region; and later that summer, after her honeymoon, Sophie's carriage drew up at the edge of the green where I was playing with Karen and she beckoned me over to tell me that reading my letter had made her cry. Coming from me, Sophie said, it really meant a lot. She'd even
persuaded her husband to buy her a silver frame so she could hang the thing in her dressing room next to her mirror. I was glad, I told her. I'd meant every word. And Sophie leaned out of the carriage window so we could hug.

That was a good day. A real turning point.

Hey, who knew?

Maybe there was even a future in it.

1910–1919
ME AND THE GLOBE AFLAME

A
LL
I
CAN
really remember about the years 1910 to 1913 is that when they were over my best friend Karen and I were easily the two most attractive girls in Murbery. Puberty had treated us both very kindly, especially Karen, who had mutated under its influence from an averagely pretty, rather gangly child with pigtails into a stunningly curvaceous brunette who wore her nut-brown hair in a ponytail. My own metamorphosis was subtler. Though I became taller than I had been, and my ringlets relaxed enough for me to also wear my hair in a ponytail, my womanly form, when it finally arrived, was of the slender, birdlike variety. I was willowy, reader, and lithe. Facially, though, I was still spectacular and taking everything into account I reckon I would have stopped easily as much traffic as Karen, had there been any.

The whistles and stares we attracted as we sashayed arm-in-arm through the village made Karen feel uncomfortable,
but to me they were heavenly balm. For eight long years I'd been keeping a low profile, biting my tongue, fearful that at any moment I might open my mouth and blurt something out that would expose me irrevocably as being . . . well, as being every kind of freak it was that me grand-da had accused me of being on that weird afternoon.

But the arrival of puberty changed all that. All of a sudden I
was
something, something people understood, namely a gorgeous teenage girl, and as long as everyone was staring glazedly at my chest, I realized, the chances of their catching a glimpse into my soul and rejecting me for what they saw there were thrillingly remote.

It was Karen who found a boyfriend first, however. She fell madly in love with the first guy to ask her out, one of the drover's apprentices, an ordinary-looking lad named Greg. But I wasn't jealous. Happy as Karen visibly was in her relationship, and though my desk every morning was inches deep in love notes when I got to school, I felt I owed it to myself to be more discriminating. After the difficult time I'd had as a child, I reckoned my teenage self deserved nothing but the best.

T
HE SUMMER OF 1913
was the sort of long, slow, sticky summer that you just don't tend to see anymore, when the streams and the rivers seemed to bubble with sap, and the sundial's shadow was as long and as straight as the Roman road from Meanly up to Narpenceser. At that year's Summer Fair—another of the annual rituals without which, in my private opinion, our community would probably disintegrate—a local manufacturer of horses' harnesses had sponsored a tree-trunk-pulling contest on the village green, and
one sweltering Sunday I found myself down there, spectating from a deckchair in the shade of a willow as Murbery's menfolk took turns dragging an old knobbled tree trunk down a fifty-yard track with a jar of premium whale-oil saddle cream for the fastest time. That was how the contest was supposed to work anyway. The whole thing was thrown into chaos by this one big lad I didn't recognize who literally made the tree trunk look like it had an engine in it. Again and again and again the young lad roared across Murbery green, shaving seconds off his record each time as he perfected his technique, until gradually the other males stopped even trying. The contest was supposed to last all day but at the stroke of noon the officials threw up their hands, gave the winner his jar of saddle cream and started folding up their paraphernalia. I sat there in the shade, watching the big lad walk away . . . and realized all of a sudden that I didn't
want
him to walk away. As the massive chap was joining some smaller friends at the corner of the green I stepped out of the shadows. “Hail,” I hailed him. “Congratulations. That was really . . . omigod.
Davey
?”

“Aye?”

It was! It was Wee Lickle Davey, the former smallest boy in school, the one Karen and I used to tie up to trees! No one I knew had seen hide nor hair of Davey since 1911, when he'd left school to start a cartwheel-making business with his brother, or maybe . . . or maybe people
had
seen Davey and just failed to recognize him, because to be perfectly frank the proposition that this . . . this raging slab of muscle, oozing sweat into a too-small shirt, had somehow evolved out of Wee Lickle Davey McCracken was one that simply hurt the brain.

“D-Davey,” I stammered, feeling faint, “it's me. Do you
remember? From school?” I fanned my face with my fingers, simultaneously indicating it and cooling it.

His forehead furrowed, then an earthy smile split his giant brown face. “Oh aye! I remember thee, lass. Tha were that lass 'oo were goin' to be Queen o' t'May, but 'oo changed her mind at t'last minute.”

“Exactly.” I beamed.

“But . . .” He touched a finger to his lips and blinked at my breasts, the tops of which you could see over my low-cut neckline. “But tha wert smaller back then, lass. Tha's . . . tha's been
burgeonin
'!”

Someone snickered but I tuned them out and beckoned Davey closer. “Davey . . .” I hissed up at him with some urgency. “You're no small chicken yourself. Davey, I've
missed
you.”

For a second his face was adorably blank, but then the subtext of my words hit home and his eyes sprang wide. Nothing more needed saying. With a jerk of his sandy head we set off across the village green, then away over the fields to the river. With tall stalks of mustard rising up on either side we traced the banks of the quiet Mur as it curled its lazy way through the sun-soaked lowlands of prewar England. With Davey in front, me behind, the jangle and parp of the fayre grew fainter . . . fainter . . . until there was nothing to be heard but the
zoom
and
plink
of dragonflies, the rustle of our feet in the long wet grass, and the forceful subsonic streaming of the water. Hopping first on one foot and then the other, I peeled off my sandals to feel the coolness and the wetness of the grass between my toes because I knew in my gut that I would never be this young again.

We ended up in a place that Davey seemed to know, a natural cathedral of elder trees cradled by the river's elbow.
It was peaceful in there, and very, very green. I just stood there for a while, drinking it all in.

“ 'As tha ever' ad relations wi' a feller before?” Davey asked me presently, cutting straight to the chase.

Still admiring the foliage I hesitated, then came clean. “I haven't in fact. But why do you ask?”

He shrugged. “A lad allus likes to know. If it's thine first time well then it be'ooves me to really make it special.”

I turned to face him. “You think I'm scared?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Um . . .” Davey was taken aback. “Well, it's nat'ral for a lass to be nervous o' 'er first takin'. An' t'lad 'as a responsibility to be gentle wi' 'er.”

“Hmm.” I frowned, peeling my frock over my head and letting it drop to the leaves. “But what if she doesn't want it gentle?”

I began by letting Davey suck my tits from a kneeling position. Even at thirteen I had the kind of nipples that would chug themselves stiff at the slightest stimulation and which, when they were fully engorged, given the smallness and pertness of the breasts that supported them, seemed disproportionately large, like a baby's head, in a way that Davey seemed to find particularly affecting. He moaned and he groaned, and tore at his clothing as he suckled, and pretty soon after that we were “off to the races” as people used to say in those parts.

How long we lay together that day I couldn't tell you, for under the almost industrial pounding of Davey's massive hips my perception of the passage of time simply crumbled apart, like the venetian blinds always do in someone else's house whenever you try to adjust them. Maybe it was an hour, it could have been ten minutes, but eventually orgasm
hit me like a rock in the head and I fell dry lipped and breathless into the papery embrace of the leaves.

That was all very nice but the deepest joy for me came later, picking my way back to Murbery alone with my sandals in my hand. When the spire of Murbery Church appeared over the top of the crop I experienced a surge of adrenaline, and felt suddenly less like a small-boned thirteen-year-old who'd just been forcefully ravaged in a clearing than like a ravager myself, a swaggering conquistador returning in triumph after some famous victory.

Which was pretty close to the actual situation, if you thought about it. After my long years of exile, my lonely wander through the wilderness of Not Quite Fitting In, sex with Davey had finally validated me as an actual, plausible person. Such is the nature of the act. Any scientist will tell you that one of the surefire ways of determining whether two organisms are members of the same species is to lock them in a room and observe whether they copulate. A dog won't mate with a cat or a fish—well, he may
try
, but in the final analysis he will come away unsatisfied. And Davey McCracken, as pure a specimen of genuine local stock as you could imagine, had come away from our coupling
extremely
satisfied. In other words, we were the same, he and I, real authentic Murberyites.

D
AVEY AND
I met for lunch the next day, a Monday, after I'd spent a pleasant morning tormenting Karen with my silence. With her surveilling me from the lunchroom window I snuck faux-furtively across the playground and rendezvoused with Davey at the foot of the steps. He was in the
same clothes as the day before, but with a small wicker hamper strapped to his back.

“Hail.” He smiled shyly. “My queen o' the afternoon.”

“Hail,” I said, looking him up and down. “How are you?”

“I'm 'appy, lass. 'Appy down at me core.”

“Great. Me too. Yesterday was really fantastic.
Really
fantastic.”

“Oh aye?” He blushed. “Tha enjoyed thaself?”

“Yes. Immensely. Especially the sex.” I also blushed and looked away.

“Is tha sayin' tha's in love with me, lass?”

I thought about it. In the distance, in the drover's yard down by the clifftops, a man was unloading something from a cart. “Yes,” I said eventually. “That's what I'm saying.”

“Well, I'm reet chuffed. Because t'fact o' t'matter is I'm in love wi' thee too.”

“Great.”

We set off walking, several feet apart, our knuckles brushing from time to time, and ended up in the little spinney of poplars near my house, where we had a picnic.

Davey's hamper turned out to be stuffed with local delicacies of the absolute highest quality, including bronzed Cornish ham, some deviled heron's eggs, a paper screw of waxy mustard, a brick of good cheese and a powdered lozenge of crumbly sulphor bread. For drinks we had a stoppered flask of ice-brewed orange cider, and for afters there were six gleaming baby quinces, plus thruppence-worth of candied violets, also wrapped in a paper screw.