Of Gigolos and Garden Sheds
© 2001-2004 by Nicholas M.
 

You need to know some of the local geography. Nicola's house was up a hill, Firth Street, and round the corner into Peregrine Street, and along about four houses so her back yard and our back yard faced one another across a strip of land that as children we called The Spooky Forest.

The strip of land was common, but someone had claimed part of it by building a large pitch-roofed garden shed. They grew vegetables and seedlings around the shed. The people who owned it weren't people, so legend had it. They were Giants and ate children and carried glinting-sharp axes for butchering their victims - so legend had it. But the main thing I remember about the common apart from the garden shed, was the trees. Oak, sheoak, pinoak. A dark, dense and boundlessly green and reaching forest. During the daytime it was tolerable, but by night the evils that lurked there were formidable. They stole souls. Furry creatures nipped at the ankles of frantically running legs. No one ever went there in the dark except under the most severe dare. Or as a desperate shortcut back from Nicola's.

Now and then when I'm in the area I call in at the old hometown, do the nostalgia thing, sweep through and take a coffee and a sticky bun down at the Apex park by the river. I was there a while back, the first time in ten years or so, and saw how abruptly after all this time the place had changed. The family home was still there but it had been painted up some ghastlyfucking yellow. Round-a-bouts had struck the township like a plague of Druid motifs.The clattery old coat-hanger suspension bridge that we loved to play under had been replaced with a faceless concrete viaduct.

No trip home was every complete without a cruise along Nicola's street. Turning into Peregrine Street, I saw immediately the McMullin & Son Realtor sign right outside Nicola Van De Steeg's house. I knew McMullin's son. He was a prick, which is what I was thinking about as I drove up into Peregrine Street and saw a woman on the verandah behind the realtor sign belting the crap and dust out some carpets and rugs hung over the ballustrade. My fingers tingled.

Sorry about the cliche - old Mrs. Van De Steeg's cheeks were like the two halves of a big blushing, glossy apple. There is no other way to describe her. Her eyes were wide-spaced, pale blue, open and healthy. She wore her autumn-straw-coloured hair in waves that near her temples became ringlets plastered to her scalp by some kind of infallible glue, and then criss-crossed with pins just in case there might be an unruly escape into sensuality. She wore knee-length cotton print dresses that sat square across her shoulders, always in olives and North Atlantic blues. Scrubbing the kitchen floor and washing the house windows, I recall with hindsight, were her two earthly passions.

The woman on the verandah was not Mrs. Van De Steeg, Nicola's mutti. It was Nicola, and the description fits perfectly except for the part about the hair. In contrast to my recollection of her mother, Nicola's frizzy cloud of autumn-straw-coloured hair billowed wildly from under the triangle of an I'm-too-busy-cleaning scarf. I passed the house twice, and twice she was there. I passed a third time and the sunny verandah was empty and a strange panic took me. I pulled over two houses down, walked up the hill. Nicola was out again with some new rugs. She glanced up, then shielded her eyes, then squinted. Then grinned big white teeth. "Hey! Stupid!"

A coffee out back overlooking The Spooky Forest, and Nicola was telling me how they were selling the house because her getting-old mother had just moved down to the city to live with Nicola and husband Fidor, and that name --- Fidor --- struck me. I can't say that anyone had ever actually mentioned an Us and Them thing about ethnic origins, but when she mentioned her husband's name it was obvious she could never, would never, have married one of us. We are too plain and uncultured and generally a very dull race. In fact we are not even a race, just the cross-shagged remnants of a bunch of genetic flotsam and jetsam.

"Go for a walk?" Okay, so we go for a walk and she tells me it's years ago now that her Poppa died, and we discover he died in the same month and year as mine, coincidently just before our respective first children were born. "How 'bout that," she says. Yeah, how 'bout that.

I remember Mr. Van De Steeg but I don't remember him outside the house, or in daytime anywhere. I don't remember much at all except that he sat every evening in a room off the kitchen which they called The Den. He smoked a pipe hooked into the corner of his mouth and had yellow teeth and a black leather reclining chair surrounded by sailing books which he read while Vatching De Teevee. Every night he drank a bottle of claret and it made him breathe loud. But his big bull of a body effortlessly soaked up all that drink. The alcohol merely revealed that he hated other people's children as much as he hated his own life.

"Can I buy you a cola?" I wondered.

"So long as you don't try to kiss me."

What a weird thing to say. We got a cola then headed back to the house and getting there Nicola apologised, "I've really got to get this mess cleaned up." Instead she poured us more coffees and cut some marble cake and we talked and talked then went with our cups outside into the afternoon sunshine.

On the garden chairs under the willow, Nicola talked and swung her sandalled toes in little circles and I watched her and felt a tightening in my chest. She wore a lapelled, calf-length cotton print dress - cavorting yellows and poppy pinks. My fingers felt numb again and it was the middle of an afternoon during the high school holidays and Nicola and me and several others were down in The Spooky Forest and I went up on my own to Nicola's house to get something. The place was quiet and the slamming of the back wire-screen door must have made a lot of noise. I went through the kitchen on the way to Nicola's room and passed the ironing room. Mrs. Van De Steeg was standing in there behind the ironing board. The room was bright, I remember that. She was standing and the top half of her cotton print dress was unbuttoned and down around her waist, the straps of a plain white bra hanging loose across lowered forearms. The cups of the bra were turned down flat over her stomach.

Nicola was telling me about how her children were doing well at school and she and Fidor had saved up to get them into a good private school. I was only half listening. I was wondering if Nicola's breasts were the same honey-ivory colour as her mother's. Should I say, "You know Nicola, I've seen your mutti's tits and frankly, I'm still wanking off about them." I want to know: did that woman hear me arrive into the house? I need to know: why she didn't cover?

Walking again, this time the perimeter of the house garden along where the red and white geraniums grew in damp, stinky patches. Nicola walked with her hands in her pockets and swayed dreamily. She said, "Do you know, several times I've almost called you. To invite you here. To reminisce." Then she wouldn't look at me, not in the eye. Not for a few minutes.

Our last hometown conversation would have been when Nicola left for college at eighteen, and that would have been nineteen years ago. And yet . . . easily, we picked up the threads that hadn't gone cold. We were friends as children and young teens, aware of one another as older teenagers, and now --- as we walked our shoulders brushed. It was sexy getting a cola with her. It was sexy feeling her warmth. It was sexy not mentioning our secrets.

Many of the palings of the rear-most fence were rotted away. Nicola said, "I bet it's a long while since you were last out here." She pulled some climber aside and kicked off a paling and we went through and out onto the common, our spooky forest. I wanted to hold her hand. We used to do that. In fact, we held hands a lot because, as Nicola had once gloomily informed me, our names were similar and so god said we had to get married.

I touched the back of her hand with mine. She smiled up at me, didn't scoop my clasp. We followed the now-gone zig-zaggy track that used to go from her back fence to mine, but you know, it was as if something else far more powerful and important called us. To deny it we wandered haphazardly the common and its canopy of oaks. Then, exactly as she should because everything had brought us here, Nicola halted. Feigning surprise she said, "Hey. There's the garden shed." She went down and I held back and snatched up a blade of grass and chewed it. Nicola went around behind the garden shed, returned to the nearside, put her hands on her hips and like the boy she never was, kicked unenthusiastically at its paint-peeled door. She waved me over, beaming freshly. "I think we can get in."

I relented and went down. 'You used to throw acorns at me just about here.'

Nicola was swinging on the door trying to bust it in. Or out. "Hmm?"

"You never wanted me to go in there with you. Remember? You used to want to be here by yourself and you'd throw acorns at me till I went away and left you alone."

"Is that what you remember? Really? I never did that."

"Big handfuls and you pelted me with them."

She smacked her hands together, Nicola's way of disagreeing. "I used to give you ten cents to go in there with me. That's what I remember." She blushed.

"You did that with my brother."

The door was almost free. Nicola paused to brush some splinters off her palms, then with one last body-jarring tug, she got the door open. Panting from the effort she turned and faced me, smiled faintly but confidently and prettily. "I never went in there with anyone but you. I never wanted to. You were the only one."

Was it always so dark in the old garden shed? . . . like this when Nicola had closed the door behind us and pulled it shut with as much determination as she'd used to get it open. I asked if she thought someone had seen us come in here and she shook her head and said no and then said she didn't care.

The roof was holed and we stood in a deep green light. The floor was mossy brick, a deserted work bench under the one opaque window. I had spun around and around --- remembering --- not remembering --- making a little whirlpool of achy thoughts and may have gone on like this forever if Nicola's voice hadn't arrested me. Softly, earnestly, she was saying, "Do you remember now?" I nodded. She said formally, "Will you demand of me the indignity of asking you for what it is that I want?" I shook my head. Of course not. Then I smiled and that was enough for Nicola. She put onto the old work bench a ten cent coin that had been concealed in the pocket of her dress, since ---  when? "That's for you, Gigolo."

The ritual may be meaningless to anyone but Nicola and me. Lowering silently to her knees, there was something ancient, a worship-like quality to that lowering that reminded me of the nearly-naked figurines that hold up lampshades, or of dusty smells, or of books with lithographs and engravings of bare-breasted, grass-skirted ladies. Nicola's fingers ran down the sides and backs of my trousered legs, and she clasped me, steadying herself. Her bosom crested and fell. This was about the senses. About pleasure and lust and carnality --- about honesty and sexuality --- and too maybe about guilt. I don't think it was ever about Innocence. At least not for me. I will tell you honestly that I wanted to see Nicola's cunt, and so what more can I say. I cannot make excuses for myself. And I knew that Nicola wanted to see and touch my cock and that there were no excuses for her, and that she would never explain to me or anyone the reasons of how or why it excited her. The simple fact was: it did.

Nothing more to say. My hands were shaking and so were Nicola's. Hardly heard above the humming in our ears of that warm Spring day, Nicola whispered, "Show me . . ."

I had been paid so Nicola could demand to have whatever she desired. She wanted to see, so I showed her. Sitting back on her haunches, she watched with the open-mouthed and guiltlessly uncompromised fascination of the birthday-girl at a magician's private show. I tugged down the zipper, unfastened the black leather belt, peeled open my ordinary-grey business trousers. I lifted my white shirt and tugged away the front of the boxer shorts.

She wanted to touch, so she touched. The air was cool and pleasant on the hot but flaccid flesh of my cock. Nicola's touch --- her skin --- was cool. I let my gaze wander up to the green shards of sky and Nicola . . . What was she seeing? I heard a loud, shivering kind of sigh and felt the touches, fingertip and fingernail, swirling and exploring all over my cock and balls. And beneath. And around. And then suddenly the touch was so searing and wet that I knew it was lips and tongue that she used. I sighed because what a sensation that makes: a burning behind the balls that is the urge to lift a woman off her feet and bend her and fill her.

I touched her cheek and wondered about her. Nicola's was the first heart I'd conscientiously listended to, my ear pressed against the warm skin of her chest. Hers were the first eyes I'd peered into. I had tried in vain to see through them and down into her thoughts. I found there instead a light --- a something --- that puzzled me. I would say now that it was a serene light like that of an unwavering candle-flame, but this day in the garden shed, whatever it had been it was gone. In Nicola's eyes I saw something darkly implacable. It was an unopened text like the anger of old disappointment. I don't know what it was exactly, or what had happened to her in the last nineteen years, or who had done this to her. All I knew was that I wanted to make her serene again. And touch her pussy.

Every instinct and cowardly urge was telling me to tell her to hurry. Just please hurry. I couldn't, not without earning Nicola's acid scorn. So I watched silently, held my cock for her like an interesting specimen and fed it in doses to her curiosity and kisses. She gave me one deep eyes-closed suck and that was just too --- too tender. Too needy. Did she want me to fuck her mouth . . . so her lips could feel again? Feel what --- Love? Pain? Humiliation? Sometimes it is good not to be a woman. I held my cock for her and let her kiss it and I was wondering: Why wasn't I hard, sucked like that through Nicola's silk-wet lips?

"Now me . . ." she said. I raised her gallantly by the fingertips and she 
kissed my neck, stroked my arms. Without a word she climbed and sat on the edge of the old work bench and flounced out her cotton print dress and flapped it at me and slipped its hem up along golden-tanned thighs. It made a bunch of summery poppies around her waist above nakedness.

"Come down," I said.

"Oh . . .?" Nicola smiled now, puzzled but unperturbed by Gigolo's silly games. She slipped her panties aside, eased a gymnastic twist to offer me the pink-wet mouth under the autumn-straw-coloured fur, opened it with fingertips and sighed and tempted me closer. "You don't want this?"

"Come down."

She flipped up my shirt. "You're in a strange mood today Gigolo. Tell me you don't want this."

I lifted her from the bench and she gave me a tongue-clacking that is Nicola's and like no other human expression. Then she shrugged, pretending affront. Then she turned her gaze on me attentively because Nicola's moods were quick, and really, she understood this was important. She was quiet now, as obedient as when her moeder would tell her, 'sit up straight for your dinner Nicola,' and she would sit up straight and her mother would sit up straight and Poppa --- breathing loud --- would come to the kitchen from The Den, sometimes to eat, sometimes just to sweep the plate from the table onto the floor.

Imagine how those women jumped when the plate smashed on Mrs. Van De Steeg's freshly scrubbed linoleum. Now it would need scrubbing again. This was how Nicola jumped out of her trance when I pressed my palms onto her shoulders. She smiled and her lips quivered for reassurance and I kissed them softly. I unbuttoned the front of the cotton print dress and opened it and folded it down and off her arms. She wore a full white bra. Lace. I lifted the straps down, left them hanging loose over her forearms, folded the cups down flat on her belly.

"What are you thinking," Nicola smiled softly. "I haven't seen you like this. Not before."

"I was thinking that you're perfect."

"I wish that were true," she said. And blushed wishing it were true what I said.

I meant it. I traced the outline of her half-apple shaped, honey-ivory coloured breasts that each only just filled the space of a cupped hand. The nipples reacted instantly under the touch. I pinched them, caressed them, dared to believe I was feeling what I was feeling. Russet nipples long and cool in the Spring air, hard between my lips, resilient between my fingers. Breasts firm, hot, delicious in my hands. A dog barking. Nicola panting softly. We two bumping heads, glancing down, my cock throbbing out hard from under crumpled-white shirt flaps, Nicola's hand slipping around it beginning to pull. Nicola whispering, "You need this . . ." and a voice calling getting closer and Nicola's chin burrowing on my shoulder as she twists her hips out of the way not sure when I will shoot or where I will shoot, honey-ivory coloured breasts dancing on my fingertips.

The distant voice got louder and less distant and a dog called Galaxy snuffed the crack in the door into the garden shed and smelled people smells. I saw its snout and one round, black eye. I reached under Nicola's cotton print dress and she spread and my fingers went in her. She fell on me. She pulled my cock, harder. I had only one hand for her two breasts, but I managed it and fingered both of her nipples with the one hand and Nicola moaned. The fingers in her pussy were wet and cramped and Galaxy ceased his snuffing and put his ears up at the strange people-sounds mewing from the garden shed.

The middle-aged and fawn-tweed sounding woman who owned Galaxy must have been only yards away. I never saw her. I think I heard her nearby outside in the long grass but it doesn't matter because Nicola interrupted her panting and snapped her head toward the crack in the door and before anyone could get too close she screamed, "Do you mind going away can't you see we are fucking! in! here . . . !"  Did you know, when your fingers are in a woman's cunt, you can actually feel it when she yells like that. It is not unlike orgasm.

Perhaps it is a good thing we were disturbed. Perhaps not. I don't know. 

Nicola was having similar thoughts because on the way up to the house she said, "Fate brought you here today. Sometimes fate isn't kind to us. And sometimes fate comes along and makes apologies."

We strolled toward her house in the afternoon sunshine and Nicola kicked at the young grassheads that carpeted The Spooky Forest, and she was telling me how after her Poppa died it was years before she could admit she never cried. In the same breath she told me how mutti carried Poppa's picture everywhere with her, still, and had gilt-framed photos of him all over in the flat where she lived behind Nicola and Fidor's house. She would tell the neighbours proudly, that she is so much like her father.

And so on. I confess that once again I wasn't really listening. Something else possessed me, an idea so deliciously attainable that my poor brain in its slavish relationship with my balls refused to let it go. At the rear paling fence I took Nicola by the arms and fronted her and looked her in the eye. I shook her arms gently and said, "Nicola, the house is empty."

As stubborn as the old man of the house ever was, Nicola took a long while to answer. "So?"

"Nicola. Before I go I would like to make love to you." And even as I began that sentence she was already shaking her head: No, that is impossible. Her lips were pursed tight. "In the ironing room," I said. And she stopped shaking her head and her eyes went wide and crossed and darted between mine for a moment.

Even just let me hold your tits. Huh? Please-please-please-please?

"It's up to you Nicola. You can forget I said it. That's okay."

We pushed through the rear fence, silent together up along the path under the busted clothes line and past the stinky geraniums and around the willow. We were at the rear stairs up to the house and Nicola turned her eyes on me. Soft, melting, aroused, honey-coloured eyes. And she leaned over the stair rail and slumped on it sluttishly and grinned up at me. "I'm feeling lazy," she said. "If you want me you'll need to carry me."

But when I came forward she jumped away and ran up the stairs. She slipped off the scarf and threw out her hair. From the landing she called, "Save your energy, Gigolo. After the ironing room, I want you in The Den."