stairs

Wendy sat sideways two steps higher than me. Her body was sprawled out like human graffiti, smelling of Calamine lotion and her sleeveless red top staining the wall as she leaned her shoulders backwards, denim legs akimbo, her right Adidas Kick sannie sloping and sliding back and forwards as she shuffled and marked out her impatience. I sat scrunched against the roughcast stairwell, the opposite side of her as if waiting to be hit by lightning, my feet asleep on the slabbed path. Henry’s grass was mostly overgrown with a sprinkling of dandelions, the buried bombs of Sandie the fat Golden Labrador’s dog shit, buzzing with predatory insects, things hatching and decaying. I could feel the gold flecks in her eyes eating into me, willing me to find something, anything, to do.

‘We’ll never get up the hills at this rate.’ She leaned her chin in her hands, mouth open in a surly whine.

‘Sure we will.’ My voice soared with the kind of doomed adult certainty of vegetables are good for you. I lowered my eyes and shrugged.

Wendy wasn’t smiling. Her eyes stayed on me.

Through the metal walls of Henry’s house we heard the clumping of someone coming down the internal staircase two-at-a-time. Our heads turned together. Mr Henry stood shaking his front door to make sure it was shut properly. I leaned across to Wendy and whispered: ‘Can you imagine that for your da’?’

Her Da was old as a locked tomb and mine was his own vision of madness. Everything about Mr Henry was matter of fact: arms, legs, feet, even the way he walked. His hair was just a shade of grey shorter than grey, swept up a version of the exiled Elvis.

‘Fuck off,’ spat Wendy.

Mr Henry’s head slowly turned, his dark eyes drifted down, noticing us for the first time, making us real. Wendy pulled her legs in to let him pass, then slid them out again. He tapped me on the head, with two fingers like an egg, which was a kinda of hallo and cheerio. The waft of aftershave that might have been Brut disappeared up the path with him.

‘You sometimes wish you could just plum vanish?’ Wendy spat through her buckteeth, a grogger, onto the path.

‘Like a ghost?’ I chewed on my bottom lip. ‘If I could appear and disappear like a ghost I’d…’

‘Jesus…’ Wendy leaned forward as if she was goin’ to push me on the shoulder, but just shook her head. Because she hung about with boys all the time she was more boy than girl and could think ahead. She knew who I was planning to follow home to see scuddy, but she didn’t say any of this. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she said, to shut me up.

‘Whit would you dae if somebody locked you in a haunted house? Whit would you dae?

The sun was a little higher, the sky a little bluer. Wendy's eyes squinted and narrowed, as she considered this, as she considered me. She huffed through her nose at such a suggestion. ‘I wish I’d enough to buy a fag.’ Her fingers began to scratch and pick at a patch of denim on her right leg that was discoloured and frayed. She unpicked them one by one like guitar strings until a bit of moon-white thigh began to show through to the sun.

I moved up a stair closer to get a look and my index finger wiggled and wagged to hook and unstrand a piece of highly strung denim. She moved across an inch or two to the wall so I could squidgy in beside her and we could sit bum to bum as we worked. Unfolding in my reptile brain a denim-blueprint was unspooling to work my hand a little higher on her thigh and a little slower. Sweat poured down my forehead and cheeks, my face was brighter than a bloodstain spreading through my body, but with a mouth so dry I didn’t think I could speak if she asked me anything. I felt her leg flex as I got two fingers inside, then three. Denim ripped as I got my whole hand inside and pushed down. I waited for her to say something, there was a build-up of noise inside my head like bagpipes and my heart was a walking drum. We sat in silence for a minute as I fondled her kneecap.

‘If they don’t hurry up, ah’m no’ goin’,’ she said.

My hand jerked out and I shuffled down a step, then two, not looking at her. I raised my eyes, imploring her, letting her know that I didn’t mean it. Up the street the stop start of a rotary push-mower on long grass chewed up the brooding silence and, after a few seconds, the smell of summer drifted down filling my nostrils and lungs.

Wendy got up slowly and sucked in a deep breath, cat-like, rolling her neck, stretching her arms out behind her shoulders, clavicles meeting like thumb prints on burnished clay at her throat, stretching the material, a drop of sweat sliding slowly to her budding breasts, before she plonked herself down on the step beside me. She picked at the stringy material on what was left of denim that wasn’t torn, her leg touching mine, looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

My legs were shaking, but I edged my bony bum across, cushioning the weight of her knee, of her thigh against mine. I rubbed at her leg like a window cleaner trying to remove a stubborn stain. I stopped, job done. I let the silence hold us. There was a slight shift of her right foot and she said ‘Uhu.’

My ears were burning red, as if she was listening to my thoughts. My hand crawled upwards, disappearing like an arm inside a glove puppet, up her denim leg. I lent on my knee to give me extra leverage. Her eyes were closed as I diddled my fingers on the edge of her knickers. My forefinger found something and she grunted. She sat up straight my arm sliding down her leg, before we heard the bounding on the stairs. Cammy appeared underneath the canopy of their stairs first, with Jim behind him.

Wendy stood up. ‘Ah cannae be bothered goin’ now.’ She grogged on the wall and walked slowly down the path and up towards her own house.