Therapy

just stood there in the dark, beside the dustbins, passive and trembling very slightly, like a lamb brought to the sacrifice. She wasn’t wearing a slip. Holding my breath I gently released a breast, the left one, from its cup. It rolled into my palm like a ripe fruit. God! I’ve never felt a sensation like it, before or since, like the first feel of Maureen’s young breast — so soft, so smooth, so tender, so firm, so elastic, so mysteriously gravity-defying. I lifted the breast a centimetre, and weighed it in my cupped palm, then gently lowered my hand again until it just fitted the shape without supporting it. That her breast should still hang there, proud and firm, seemed as miraculous a phenomenon as the Earth itself floating in space. I took the weight again and gently squeezed the breast as it lolled in my palm like a naked cherub. I don’t know how long we stood there in the dark, not speaking, hardly breathing, until she murmured, “I must go,” put her hands behind her back to do up the fastener of her brassière, and vanished up the steps.
    From that night onwards our kissing sessions invariably incorporated my touching her breasts under her clothing. It was the climax of the ritual, like the priest raising the glittering monstrance aloft at Benediction. I learned the contours of her breasts so well that I could have moulded them in plaster blindfolded. They were almost perfect hemispheres, tipped with small pointed nipples that hardened under my touch like tiny erections. How I longed to see them as well as touch them, and to suck and nuzzle them and bury my head in the warm valley between them! I was also beginning to harbour designs on the lower half of her anatomy, and to dwell licentiously on the possibility of getting my hands inside her knickers. Obviously none of this could be decently accomplished standing up in the dank basement area. Somehow or other I must contrive to be alone with her indoors somewhere. I was racking my brains for some such stratagem, when I suffered a sudden and unexpected setback. As I was seeing her home one night, she came to a halt under a lamp-post at some distance from her house and said, looking at me earnestly and twisting her hair in her fingers, that the kissing, and everything that went with it, had to stop. It was all because of the youth-club Nativity play.
     
    The idea of the play had come from Bede Harrington, the chairman of the club committee. I had never heard of anyone called Bede before, and when I first met him I asked him in all innocence if his name was spelled B-e-a-d, as in rosary. He obviously thought I was taking the piss and informed me stiffly that Bede was the name of an ancient British saint, a monk known as the Venerable Bede. Bede Harrington himself enjoyed a fair amount of veneration in the parish, especially from the adult members. He was a year or two older than me and Maureen, and had had a brilliant academic career at St Aloysius’s, the local Catholic grammar school. At the time of which I write he was Head Boy, in the third-year Sixth, and had just obtained a place at Oxford to study — or, as he liked to say, showing off his inside knowledge, “read” — English the following year. He was tall, with a long, thin, white face, its pallor heightened by his heavy horn-rimmed glasses, and by the coarse black hair that seemed to part in the wrong place, since it was always sticking up in the air or falling over his eyes. In spite of his intellectual achievements, Bede Harrington lacked the accomplishments most highly valued in the youth club. He didn’t dance and he didn’t play football, or indeed do any other sport. He had always been excused games at school because of his short-sightedness, and he claimed simply not to be interested in dancing. I believe he was in fact very interested in the opportunities it offered to get into physical contact with girls, but knew that, with his gangly, ill-coordinated limbs and enormous feet, he probably wouldn’t be much good at it, and couldn’t bear to look ridiculous while he was learning. Bede Harrington had to excel at whatever he did. So he made his mark on the youth club by getting himself elected as chairman of the committee and bossing everybody else around. He edited a club Newsletter, a smudgy, cyclostyled document written largely by himself, and forced upon the reluctant membership occasional events of an intellectual nature, like debates and quizzes, at which he could