Royce, Royce, the People's Choice Page 23

  FINDING OUT ABOUT Royce and Penny Turton had come as the polar opposite of a clitorial spasm. It had hit her like a bolt of cold lightning. She had been betrayed by God and Royce in the same year, and over the same matter, but Royce’s perfidy had been worse. He had – she had always unthinkingly assumed – been hers. Or she his … or something – the possession had never been defined. After all, it had been there before the full, complicitous nature of sex had been revealed to her. Once the clitoris – and its knowledge – had been discovered, she easily assumed it would be Royce – her soulmate since her arrival in this town at age eleven – who would impose sin upon her. Together they would advance into the flawed wholeness of their human heritage. She had covertly announced this to him, not long ago: ‘I’ve a feeling things are going to be different when I’m seventeen.’

  November 30th: he knew that. They were doing laps in early spring training; still too cold to train for events like the jumps.

  ‘Yeah? How?’ He didn’t look at her but a bigger breath than his usual steady puffing had happened.

  ‘Oh, just in the way I see things.’

  ‘Don’t feel like changing now, do you?’

  ‘No,’ and she’d given him a little punch, ‘not yet.’

  And as she gave him that little punch, inside herself somewhere, she fainted. Or nearly did. It was fainting in the style of Jane Austen’s time – swooning. She was swooning. She was fighting to see out of this blockage of fog between her mind and her eyes and all she could see through the fog was a fountain of vivid colours – blue, white and yellow – gushing out of him and splashing over her. The colours drenched her. She gasped as a boiling turbulence rolled through her groin. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she forced herself to say, peeled off from the track and ran, on rubber legs, to the Ladies under the grandstand.

  There were the indications of a menstrual accident down there – but out of time: almost equally under and over-due. She explored. The part of her she had manually opened a year ago had now opened itself – far wider than before – and was thickly, hotly wet.

  She classified it as a vision – an internal vision. Her body was telling her it agreed with the promise she had just made to Royce Rowland.

  LINDA AND HER body settled down to sit out the last interim of virginity. Life went on as before: Royce down the back of the class where the deadheads sat, she at the front where the goody-goodies were.

  Why wait? He had asked that, and it was a good question. But there was an answer.

  The person she had been every second of her life would be obliterated by the sin, terminally alienated from her. In a strange, detached way she looked – fondly, if not rather condescendingly – upon the person she was at this moment: doomed to extinction, lost, expectant and impatient. In her detachment she saw that she was in fact detached from the person she was now, and had far more in common with the person she was about to become. But she couldn’t do it yet – it didn’t seem fair to the poor doomed girl she’d always been. She wasn’t yet ready for an act of brutal annihilation. She would let her non-sinning self spend a few more twilight weeks making its farewells, accommodating to the fact that it was to be replaced, in this body and mind, by another. Then, hopefully, the virgin Linda would expire gently and without remorse. She was allowing the condemned to come to terms with its grief.

  ALL THIS HAD been before she learned of Penny Turton. Now she knew she could not make the step mutually with Royce, because he was a step ahead. Perhaps more than one. Predictably, she tested out feelings of hatred upon the situation. Hate didn’t work: it brought a rather banal tenor to a complex condition.

  She sat in blank misery in her bedroom and let varieties of emotions rise, one by one, into her awareness. Like feet trying on the glass slipper. She made no attempt to organise or censor these emotions, and was appalled to find that the most satisfactory one was an intense desire to get on with it. To sin with him – to catch up with him in sin before he drifted too far from her. Her present state suddenly seemed irrelevant, old-fashioned – she was possessed of a virginity she no longer felt entitled to. Grief such as she was feeling did not belong to childhood; it was part of the world of sinning adulthood. She must go there quickly.

  When she heard he was home from his first sojourn at sea, she called him – arranged to meet him at the Doo Duck Inn; waited with wild impatience to do so. But she had collapsed piteously at the sight of her betrayer, then collapsed again as he’d said: ‘I haven’t got a girlfriend.’ The words had annihilated her and she had fled. But not before a cunningly alert, secretarial part of her mind heard him say: ‘But we could be!’ And she had wrapped herself around those words as tightly as her thighs around her hand.

  Now he was back from sea again. That evening she cycled down to the wharf, passing McManus’s pub. The wharf was bare: no lights were on in Dooley Morgan’s office and the Aurora bobbed darkly at its moorings, lifeless as a husk. She returned the short distance to the pub, found him, took him outside and gave him a message she could scarcely believe was from her: ‘Tomorrow night (Tuesday) I am going to use up my Friday night privileges. I will be allowed out till midnight,’ she said to the drunken, philandering wreck that she loved. ‘I want you to buy some of those rubber things, and I will come to your boat at nine o’clock.’

  Then she had left the raucous place and the weaving, dull-eyed Royce and cycled tremulously home.

  That night she dreamed she had asked Royce to deflower her. She awoke to find it wasn’t only a dream. And while remembering this delicious nightmare she remembered also that she was a girlfriend.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  SHE’D WALKED INTO the bar as if she was something conjured up by the magic wand of his erection. But she wasn’t arriving willingly. Her eyes were wide with fright and she moved as if she was walking thigh deep against the tide in the Orowaiti.

  He’d gone over to her without even considering that it wasn’t him she’d come to see, but of course it was. ‘Cripes, Linda …’ he began, sounding so concerned that he forgot to put friendliness into his voice.

  ‘Can we go outside a minute?’ she blurted. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Sure. You don’t want a drink? A lemonade or something?’

  ‘No. I just want you to come outside.’

  She was breathing in little gasps – might even have been shivering a bit. You could tell by her eyes and the colour of her cheeks what a brave thing it was for her to be doing.

  ‘Right.’ He made for the door, and held it for her. ‘There’s a porch on the Merlord’s canteen where we can go. They won’t be using it right now.’ He led her there, already wondering if it was diplomatic to show that he knew so much about sheltered places behind pubs.

  She went to the back of the porch and turned so he could see the fright and the purpose on her face, lit by the security lights over on the wharf. Behind him he could hear the roar of the fans blowing cement dust into the hold of the Buller Lion. ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I’m all right.’ She said it with a determination that seemed to help her become it. Then she began. ‘I don’t think the world is such a good place as it’s cracked up to be, but I think part of growing up is finding that out. If you keep thinking everything’s wonderful, you don’t grow up. You stay a little girl. The older you get, thinking the world’s wonderful, the further out of date you are and the sillier you seem to everyone else.’

  This was heavy stuff. ‘Jeepers, Linda, you’re having some pretty hard thoughts about things.’ Speaking of hard, he now realised his erection had evaporated the second he had set eyes on the girl of his dreams.

  ‘Perhaps I have, but I needed to. When you’re young you learn to look both ways before you cross the road, and not to touch fire and so on. When you’re older you have to learn other things, otherwise you get hurt. You get to learn the world’s not perfect and you have to adapt to that if you’re going to fit in.’

  ‘Hey, Linda, the world’s all
right; you mustn’t start not liking things …’

  ‘The world you are in is all right. It’s not as good as this one, but it’s all right, and I have to cross over.’

  ‘Linda, I really think …’

  ‘It’s better you don’t say anything till you know what I’m talking about, Royce, otherwise you could sound a bit corny,’ she said ringingly. ‘I’m very determined. I don’t know if this is the way people usually go about this thing, but it’s the way I’m going to do it – it’s the way I have to do it now. Tomorrow night I am going to use up my Friday night privileges. I will be allowed out till midnight. I want you to buy some of those rubber things, and I will come to your boat at nine o’clock.’

  Holy … This was amazingly weird! This is the sort of thing you don’t arrange through words, you arrange through feelings. Shit, if he’d put most of his sexual times into discussion form, nothing would have happened – nothing would probably have got bloody well said! This was how you probably went about it with Betty, and Molly Pollock and her daughter. At the same time, it was so new it was exciting; it was coming at sexual things from a completely different direction. And it was with Linda Harvey! She was the one saying these things. She was standing there, beautiful in the shiny dark, and asking him to put the cleft into the painting over his bunk! Hell, they would do it there! – if he wasn’t dreaming right now. His erection tissue was churning about in a state of great confusion. It was getting the right messages, but in the wrong form.

  ‘Well? Are you a statue? Don’t you want to?’

  ‘Cripes, Linda, course I do. It’s just I’d never thought about you like that.’

  ‘Why haven’t you? You thought about that damn Penny Turton like that, and who knows how many others!’

  ‘But that’s just it – I respect you …’

  ‘I don’t want you to respect me!’ And her voice for the first time was shaky with tears. ‘You have to be fallen to be a woman. So …’ And she sort of helplessly put her arms out like a crucifix. It was all a bit worrying – and not exactly sexy.

  ‘It’s a hell of a big step, Linda, and if you do it for the wrong reasons …’

  ‘Royce Rowland,’ she hissed, ‘I told you it’s better you don’t talk.’

  ‘… Do you mean you’d like me to kiss you?’

  ‘If you want to,’ she said, sort of defiantly.

  HE SHOULD HAVE known it – what with her athletic ability and good co-ordination – but when he took the two steps between them she tilted her head to the left as he was tilting his to the right and they plugged into each others’s pucker like Lego. Their lips got it dead right without adjustment, straight off, and he could feel water spurting from under his tongue like it was pouring from the net. He gave just a little prod with his tongue and a prod came back. Then, as the suction continued, her tongue came intruding into his mouth and his erection went up at exactly the same rate.

  ‘Can you feel that?’ he said at their first breath-stop.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and put her right hand on his back and pushed it harder into her lap.

  ‘Do you want to do it now?’ he said at their second breath-stop.

  ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘my parents will be up and I don’t know how to pretend; I might get it wrong.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He was addicted, smitten, bowled over. They were perfect; they twined like swans. Maybe all that training together had really been about this? She was getting really steamed up in a frank, no-holds-barred way that was quaint, somehow – and extremely flattering. Kissing her, holding her was sensational – there was an amazing disparity between the violence of her movements and the softness of her skin. And a quivering tension all over her body that was terrifying and enticing at once.

  ‘I want you to touch me down there,’ she said.

  Well, that set off the ‘no turning back’ tingles under his erection like nobody’s business. He was resigned to ignomy even before he got the brass button and the fly of her jeans undone and the very first touch of her sent him into big bucking judders, while he whispered ‘oh, oh, oh …’ and then put ‘damn’ on the last one.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said, and held him now like a hospital patient, looking into his eyes with a frown.

  ‘You made me come,’ he whispered sheepishly.

  She nodded and continued to look at him. She held his head in her hands so she could look at him even more intently and rode up and down on his hand. Getting his hand correctly aligned had been a bit tricky due to the tightness of her jeans, but she had helped with snakey movements until he held her in the palm of his hand – so to speak. Then he’d curled his fingers upwards and into her. She was cleft. Clefted. Ycleft. She leaned back and moiled around his hand, and that newly created part of her was as dense and wet and hot as the flesh on the backbone of the great big fish – which was not meant in any disrespectful way.

  ‘Yes,’ she began saying to herself, over and over again until the yeses were little gasps of breath. She was leaning backwards, only held up by his arm – she would have fallen if he’d let go. Which would have been the last thing on earth he would ever do; ever again. She was doing most of the jigging now, he was just holding his hand in place. Then she leaned upright and her hair swished forward like it did in the long-jump, and swirled over him like the mermaid’s in the painting. She held his head again and stared at him, mouth opening into an amazed smile, her eyes still hard on him, but unseeing, glazed. ‘Oh Gordon,’ she said.

  Then she gave an unbelieving, giggly gasp, collapsed into him, panting and made his neck a bit mucusy. And that, of course, wasn’t the only place he was mucusy! She held him like that while she got her breath back, and he stroked her hair and pressed big dry kisses into it.

  Then, by the sort of thoughtful little gasps that her breath had turned into, you could tell what she was thinking. When her hand began moving downwards he knew exactly where it was going. ‘It’s one hell of a mess in there,’ he whispered.

  ‘It’s our mess,’ she said. ‘Our first mess.’

  And she was kissing him and almost weeping as her hand went into the goo. ‘I’m your girlfriend now, aren’t I?’ she said from so close that her lips brushed his as she spoke.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And I promise I’ll never …’

  ‘Don’t,’ she’d said, cutting him off from all sorts of extravagant promises that she had made him burstingly full of. She had gone home shortly after, giving him the longest and most drooly kiss of his life before she biked off.

  Yep, he should have known – just as she was good at schoolwork and good at athletics, she was good at sex. She was just someone who had more natural ability than most; in half an hour she’d gone straight to the A-stream in a subject she’d never done before. Poor old Dana Glover was just one of life’s C-streamers.

  HE LOPED OVER to the Aurora, peeled off his gamey undies, wiped himself down with the dry bits, bunged on another pair (not clean ones, just yesterday’s unwashed ones – no use wasting a clean pair on the rest of the night) and headed back to the pub.

  The pub was a fairly conflicting sight in some ways – on one hand he was looking at the world through rose-coloured spectacles now, and that made everything look lovely, but on the other hand, rose-coloured specs cut out a bit of light and sort of worked like sunglasses, so everyone was looking a bit dowdy too. Even Marjorie.

  In fact it was probably Marjorie he really meant. In comparison with Linda she just didn’t rate. Not that she wasn’t still quite attractive, and you didn’t suddenly start finding people’s chin too small or their eyes too close together just because you’re now going with the most beautiful girl in the town – no, you can still see they’re quite pretty, without wanting to do anything about it. It was quite a clever system Nature had set up, actually: being absolutely mad about someone, put you off everyone else, in the nicest possible way.

  About an hour later he felt duty bound to clear the deck of Marjorie, so he’d gone over and
told her he was sorry about propositioning her earlier and she’d looked at him slyly and a bit squiffily and said she might just have changed her mind. At which juncture he’d got a hard on, which absolutely disgusted him. You just have to face it, Royce old boy, Nature don’t give a shit; she don’t set up fail-safe fidelity systems, mate – they’re entirely up to you.

  BOB HAD BEEN a bit pissed off with him when he’d got back in from seeing Linda, and told him to remember he was still on bail and not to go hiving off without permission.

  Royce’d said Bob shouldn’t have worried, because he’d just been outside with Linda Harvey and Bob knew what a do-gooder she was and Bob’d snorted and said from the smell she’d been a good do, all right.

  Shit! Did they all know?

  He’d nearly got into a fight with Terry Ohern later on, then a big, bearded seaman with small merry eyes came over and broke it up. He broke it up in a pretty clever way, actually – he had them both by the scruff of the neck, only just touching the ground, and he’d turned to Royce and said, ‘You gonna bop him, are you?’

  ‘Yeaher, I’m gonna bop the bastard, Stan.’ The seaman’s name was Stan, from off the Buller Lion.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Cos he’s a bastard.’

  ‘You can bop him if you can tell me what you’re fighting over.’

  Trouble was, he couldn’t.