Love story

My wee girlfriend had no neck, no shoulders, no breasts and untamed gorgon hair. Ali wasn’t really my girlfriend but lived beside me. She flicked her no-neck about lots to show it off and modelled herself on Ali MacGraw in Love Story. We all know how that ended. She got cancer and died after showing too much backhand and leg above the knee.

I was auditioning for the support role but was never sure how to play it. She sometimes took pity on me. Let me feel her up above the white stockings but below the less than white pants. She wriggled her fat hips and suggested we make love.

I wasn’t sure where it was. But I responded with passionate intensity. Pushed her headlong into the coal cellar beneath our stairs. Left her with a massive love bite on a place where her neck should have been. Well, it was more a pressure sore than a love bite. If she could have seen it, she would have been suitably impressed by the mark of the beast.

I dropped her soon afterwards and joined a Prayer Group and the Boy Scouts. My soul was safe. Even my mum commented on it. I also learned how to tie a decent knot. I was going to the next level. Leaving behind all forbidden things. Jumping to the next level between heaven and hell and gaining a yellow toggle.

There was such joy in my heart I couldn’t contain it any longer. I had to go forth and do God’s work. Ali seemed a suitable candidate for all the right reasons. She wasn’t hard to find, always hanging about the overgrown green at communal back garden. Sunbathing she called it.  Smooching her new boyfriend—not that I was ever her boyfriend—Alasdair.

He went to the same school and was lanky, much taller than me but was a bit backwards and had cockpits for eyes. I didn’t mean that in an offensive way. That was just part of his unsuitableness and uselessness as a boyfriend. I felt nothing but compassion for him.

‘Here comes that wee fat bloke,’ he mouthed, in an unblinking stare. ‘What’s his name? Em, probably still a virgin.’

He made himself hunchback with his hand hovered about Ali’s non-existent breasts or what she used to call décolletage, which never worked in a tank top but now she wore something too white and too revealing. It was almost see through. Not that I was looking.  She smirked at me, turned her no-neck and pecked him on the lips. His hand dropped and fondled a breast and nipple through the thin cloth.  

I swallowed the words rather than spoke them. ‘Um no a virgin.’

They both glanced at me as I’d already left. As if I was just using up precious daylight and breathing space, like walking talking privet, until they went back to their orgy.

Alasdair flung his monkey arm over her. Short of swallowing her snakelike leaving just the bumps, he couldn’t have pulled her closer. And he was pushing his dick against her backside.

She crinkled up with laughter and postbox-red lipstick and cried, ‘Don’t,’ which meant don’t stop.

‘Aye, who’ve yeh shagged then?’ Alasdair crinkled up and magnified her laughter.

‘Nobody you know.’ I rubbed at the spots and blackheads on my chin. ‘When I was in Tenerife.’

His body trembled with suppressed laughter. He guffawed, ‘Aye, naebody yeh know either’.    

No neck wiggled and rubbed her big bouncy bum against him.

‘Wanking at a picture in the lingerie section of Littlewoods’ catalogue isn’t sex.’ Her breasts jiggled and jumped as she laughed and looked up to him for approval.

That had been a terrible secret, I’d once told her. She’d faithfully promised never to divulge it. I could have cast a few stones at her. To think I was going to present her with a GOD SAVES badge or her own. I forgave her in the way Jesus had taught us and turned my less plukey cheek toward her, towards them. “Whosever shall smite thee” I whispered.

A reddish heat gathered in my cheeks and necks. I unbuttoned the top button in my shirt and fingered my newly won woggle.

Alasdair despite his tongue gymnastics with her found time to leave off and push me in the back, rather forcefully. I stumbled but did not fall. ‘Fuck aff, Virgin,’ he said. ‘If I see yeh back here bothering my bird again, I’m gonnae batter yer cunt in.’

‘Don’t, he’s no worth it,’ said Ali. She stuck out the tip of her pink tongue at me.

Not even a collective Kumbaya and Christian Prayer Group on a Thursday night, speaking in tongues, could save her.