Therapy

travelling by tram or bus, and changing in damp cheerless huts with a toilet and cold-water handbasin if we were lucky, but never baths or showers. The mud caked on my knees on the way home, and sitting in the bath later I would slowly straighten my legs in the water and pretend my knees were two volcanic islands sinking into the sea. When they had disappeared my engorged penis would rear up from the steaming, murky water like a wicked sea-serpent, as I thought about Maureen who would be washing her hair at the same time in preparation for the Sunday-evening social. She had told me she usually did this while taking a bath, because it was difficult to rinse her long hair while bending over a sink. I imagined her sitting in the warm, sudsy water, filling an enamel jug from the tap, pouring it over her head and making the long tresses stick to the curve of her breasts, like a picture of a mermaid I had seen once.
    Maureen and some of the other girls from the youth club used to come to the Sunday-afternoon football matches to support us. When I scored a goal, I would look for her on the sidelines as I trotted back to the centre circle with the modest, self-contained demeanour I imitated from Charlie Vaughan, the Charlton Athletic centre-forward, and receive her adoring smile. I remember one goal in particular I scored with a spectacular flying header, I think it was a match against Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Brickley, the neighbouring parish, and therefore something of a local derby. The goal was a pure fluke, actually, because I was never a great header of the ball. It was two-all in the last minutes of the game when I collected the ball from a clearance by our goalkeeper, beat a couple of opposing players and passed the ball out to our right-winger. His name was Jenkins — Jenksy, we called him: a small, prematurely wizened, stooped-shouldered boy, who smoked a Woodbine not only before and after every match, but also at half-time, and had been known to beg a drag of a spectator’s cigarette during a lull in the game itself. In spite of appearances, he was surprisingly fast, especially going downhill, as he was on this occasion. He scuttled down the wing towards the corner-flag and crossed the ball, as he usually did, without looking, anxious to get rid of it before the opposing left-back caught up and crunched into him. I came pounding into the penalty area just as the ball came across in front of me at about waist height. I launched myself into the air and by lucky chance caught it smack in the middle of my forehead. It went into the net like a rocket before the goalie could move. The fact that the goal had a net (not many pitches we played on ran to such refinements) made it all the more satisfying. The opposing players gaped at me. My team-mates pulled me to my feet and clapped me on the back. Maureen and the other girls from Immaculate Conception were jumping up and down on the sidelines, cheering like mad. I don’t think I have ever experienced a moment of such pure exultation in my life since. It was that night, after walking Maureen home from the youth club social, that I touched her breast for the first time, outside her blouse.
     
    That would have been about a year after I first spoke to her. We advanced in physical intimacy slowly, and by infinitesimal degrees, for several reasons: my inexperience, Maureen’s innocence, her parents’ suspicious surveillance. Mr and Mrs Kavanagh were very strict, even by the standards of those days. They couldn’t stop us meeting at the youth club, and they could hardly object to my escorting her home afterwards, but they forbade her to go out with me alone, to the pictures or anywhere else. On Saturday evenings she was required to babysit while they went to an Irish Club in Peckham, but she wasn’t allowed to have me in the house while they were out, and she wasn’t allowed to visit me at home. We continued to meet every morning at the tram stop, of course (except that it was a bus stop, now: the London trams were being phased out, and the tracks ripped up and tarmacked over — my Dad was given a desk job in the depot, and didn’t complain) and we left our respective houses early to have more time to chat. I used to hand Maureen love letters to read on her way to school — she told me never to post them because her parents would have been sure to intercept one sooner or later. I asked her to post hers to me because it seemed grown-up to be receiving private