The Lost Manuscript 3

Dark was darker than death when you were younger. Light a flashbulb. No fat kids. No coloured kids, unless it was the black babies’ pictures you saved up to buy with your pennies from the teachers. Faces so pale you all looked like corpses caught by the moonlight.

Jesus hung aglow on all the walls. His heart torn out by suffering, knitted together with barbed wire and his hands bleeding. He held one up to show you how sore it was. He knew what you were up to in the dark. He brought his mum, the Virgin Mary in blue, and all his mates to look on as witness. Popish purple and with a smidgen of green and gold. Smug faces. Monk in brown robes, looking up to heaven, because they too knew what you’d done. St Joseph almost dropped the baby Jesus from his back, he was so appalled.

The devil was walking up and down the earth and he could smell a masturbator from the seven-tier of Hell. Each stroke of your fingertips lit a flame. And he’d send you a thought, an image, to test you. Sweet Jesus, girls with the fringes and long hair. Shining and newly cut. It had that smell and sense of something Pauline Moriarty would never have thought of because she was so pure.

The devil weighed your heart. He knew you were looking at their breasts. Forever and ever. Amen.

Fingertips that touched yourself and dreamed of running free. Agnostic. Hedging your bets like an unbeliever. It felt good. So damned good to. Oh, so good, good, good.

You remembered her well. Red hair. Red faced, Sharon. A girl’s job was not to make it easy or they’d be called a slut. You breathed each other in. Chaste pepper-minty kisses. The devil stood between you. A flutter in your stomach. Rising cock. Ready to crow. Tracking the way your hand edged and squeezed. Spidering forward to a place where clocks no longer ticked and it would find the shape of things with a nipple attached.

The ghost of a breast had been seen in the shadows of a street corner. But that was in China, not Dalmuir. The Chinese, with their indistinguishable grey Mao suits, were small and capable of things like that

Breasts had to be cajoled, side-tracked, lied to. They could never be addressed directly. Pressure groups Focus Groups. Research Groups and lobbying groups like Mary Whitehouse, or Mary Shitehouse as your da called her, addressed the issue indirectly.

Mrs Burns, drawled over your head to your mum, like a stubborn woman that knew she was going to live to her nineties. Her breasts had flattened themselves out and long gone to lie down in pasture. ‘Has he got a job or girlfriend, yet?’ This was one of her two topics of conversation, which she returned to with lip-smacking regularity.

It was the constant yakking of the ‘yet, yet, yet,’ that killed you.  Made your face a sweat-stained tinderbox of squinting. Shamefaced, rigor-mortis smile as if you were taking it well.

Your mum would answer for you with a wave of her cigarette and a sincere smile, which was worse.   

Too frightened to have a girlfriend. Terrified of not having a girlfriend. Engraved on a Babylonian stone tablet with your name squiggled in sand. Your face printed in The Clydebank Post, next to the births, deaths, and marriages. Weekly Clydebank Virgins’ column. You’d sweat over getting the wording right and opted for simplicity: ‘Desperate. Ugly Truth. Will except a fat bird or a woman with any other disability as long as I don’t know her and she won’t tell anybody.’

The devil knows what you won’t accept. A breastless world. Mrs Kerr, a holy wee woman, who routinely cuts the breasts out of page 3 of The Sun. She’d tiptoed around God. She would have cut off the breasts of her three daughters too if her scissors hadn’t been so blunted by all that tabloid pornography.

The kind you took into the toilet. God help you.

He couldn’t think of the right words. The chicken and lamb problem. He thought of what could have been. There was cheery Cherry. She was ugly, but in a nice way. Frowning as if she expected something of life.

He’d pitched up in his bin lorry and they’d got talking in the sunshine. Her hand up at her forehead as a visor as she stared at him. Standing close. Too close. Like they were movers and shakers. She stood on tiptoes to kiss him.

Cherry was married too. She was all the business when it came to sex. She’d the four-poster with all the toys. A loud kisser, she devoured his lips, tongue and face. Licked his brain clean. A loud everything. The kind the neighbours hated. The kind of neighbours that would report you for parking your bin lorry for an hour at a time, stinking up their nice-clean, willy-white, neighbourhood. Why bother?