Dark Terrors 3 (33 page)

After a time, when our throats were dry and prickly and an itchy sweat was building up inside the Vyella shirts, we sat awkwardly on the ground, undid our buttoned flies and pulled our pricks into the warm air. We did it to ourselves, not to each other. There was no passion in this, not even much friendliness. Indeed, back at school James and I were in different forms, different dormitories, kept away from each other, though occasionally we exchanged expressionless, unblinking glances when we met.

James was a dark, saturnine lad, pretty in a sort of Spanish or Levantine way, with olive skin and a mop of black hair. He said little, seemed to live in a world of his own.

When we’d done that we pushed on down the hill, through the trees, to the electric fence that bounded the highest of Fat Mary’s fields. And while we waited for her to appear (something which did not always happen) we rehearsed the myths that surrounded her, adding our own embellishments and speculations, and listened to the five second pulse on her wire - enough to keep her three Jersey cows in and the deer out.

‘She weighs sixteen stone.’

‘More like twenty.’

‘The hair on her chin is bristly.’

‘So is the hair between her legs.’

‘Her bosoms are great fat sacks of pink blancmange.’

‘With giant strawberries for nipples.’

In those days even to say words like ‘bosoms’ and ‘nipples’ was a thrill, a
frisson,
at any rate.

‘Her bottom is huge. Bigger than the two biggest melons you ever saw . . .’

‘Far bigger. And her bum-hole is a black pit.’

‘Her feet are rotting and smell like over-ripe Camembert. . .’

But we weren’t that interested in her feet.

‘On very hot days she takes off all her clothes and walks around with nothing on.’

‘On one very very hot day she made Smithson-Haig go into her bedroom and do it to her.’

‘So
he says.’

‘Don’t you believe him?’

‘Not really.’

‘Nor do I.’

I pulled a long succulent stalk of milky barley grass, easing it from its cellulose sheath. I sucked it, then chewed.

‘Would you?’ I asked. ‘Would you go into her house if she asked you?’

‘Yes. If you came too.’

‘And do it to her?’

‘I don’t know about that.’

* * * *

The distant chug and rattle of a pre-war bull-nosed Morris had us looking back down the track. Changes in the note and speed of the engine and we knew that just out of sight, around the corner of the woods, Fat Mary had got out of the car, opened her five-bar gate, driven through, and closed it behind her. And here she came, driving between the fences, leaving a thin slipstream of chalk dust mingling with the black of her exhaust. A second fence and a second gate, then she half-circled the foetid pond and came to a standstill outside her tumble-down lattice-work porch. Hens and rooster scurried away towards the barn, the cows looked up from their pasture above her, a very large and mangy ginger tom woke up from wherever he had been sleeping and pushed his chin and cheek against the rough lisle of her stockings.

She was huge. And in spite of the July heat she was wearing a tweed suit, the heavy skirt cut long below her knees, the jacket mannish, very sensible shoes on her feet, and a sort of battered felt trilby on her head. She had gingery straw-coloured hair which was probably quite long since it was always bound up in a large bun above her neck, beneath the trilby. Her shoulders were broad and heavy, her back a rounded wall beneath the tweed. Her bosoms, behind a not over-clean white blouse and a structured bra or corset, forced the lapels of the jacket apart above one strained button. Her hands were like dinner plates with pink uncooked sausages for fingers.

Although we could scarcely make out her face, we had seen her in Sherborne on market days and knew that it was broad, once fair, now red with weather, with broken capillaries on
the cheeks, small pale blue eyes widely spaced but almost lost beneath heavy lids, a spread stubby nose, a big mouth with rubbery lips and discoloured but otherwise large and healthy teeth. She had a large mole beneath the corner of her mouth, and yes, it did nourish bristly hair. Her voice was deep, as mannish as her jacket and shoes, the accent touched with Dorset, but not incomprehensibly broad.

She got out of the car, went round to the boot and hoisted a sack from it, feed of some sort, perhaps, or fertilizer, certainly a hundredweight. Grasping it around its waistless middle she carried it, not with ease but certainly without much difficulty, into the barn. Then she came back, wiping her hands down the sides of her massive hams, and plucked wicker baskets filled with brown-paper-wrapped or bagged shopping out of the back of the car. She put most of it on her doorstep, then reached to a ledge inside the porch for a big iron key and let herself into the cottage.

I batted flies off my forehead, eased my knees away from the coarse grass that had imprinted a network of ridges into them, and ran my tongue across my top lip.

‘Come on,’ I said, and stood up. ‘Show’s over.’

James looked back at me, up over his shoulder.

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Follow me.’

And, bent double, he scouted along the fence and back into the wood. I followed him, but made a less than elaborate attempt to keep hidden. He pushed on, always near the fence to the meadow, and round to the top of the coombe and so into the edge of the yew forest. This was very different from the wood and I wasn’t too happy about going into it.

In the first place it was dark and gloomy and cool - after the heat, almost chilly. Almost nothing grew beneath the low heavy branches, leaving exposed a steep slope of dusty earth, flint stones and chalk. Amongst the dark oily green of the needles yew berries hung like drops of blood. These were obscene - first because they were notoriously very poisonous,
but also because of their form. Each was a tiny succulent cup of red flesh nursing inside it a seed. At one and the same time they suggested to the adolescent mind the glans and foreskin of a nearly tumescent penis and some hazy speculative idea of what the parts of a girl might be like. If you squeezed the flesh they exuded a colourless ichor, balanced somewhere between stickiness and slime, which matched exactly the tiny drop of fluid that could hang on the end of your prick when it lost tumescence without ejaculation.

You must remember that all this took place fifty years ago when, for an adolescent boy in a boarding school, anything to do with sex was cloaked in ignorance and imbued with compulsively attractive feelings of deep, dark guilt.

But there was a second reason why the yew forest was a place of very ill omen. Twice, four years and two years previously, boys from Minster Hill had been found hanging from their belts from one of those dark, seamed boughs. The forensic details of their deaths had not been made public, though in both cases it was rumoured that sexual activity had preceded death and verdicts of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed were returned by a bemused and horrified jury. On both occasions the school Chaplain had used his sermon on the Sunday following the inquests to attack, in coded terms, the practice of masturbation, dwelling on the feelings of shame that could follow, a shame intense enough to make a young lad take his own life . . .

None of this seemed to bother James though he did keep to the lower edge of the forest. Presently he edged forward again as far as the fence that overlooked the meadow and, this time, the rear of Fat Mary’s smallholding. We were much closer than we had been before, not much more than a hundred yards away, and looking down on a graveyard of agricultural machinery.

An old tractor rotted away on huge flat tyres, the multiple tines of an ancient harrow looked like the ribs of a giant dead fish, the rust-red discs of a plough like saurian vertebrae. Grass and brambles grew through them, willow herb too, in spikes of dark pink bloom, and sorrel already brown and crusted with friable seeds. Long ago Fat Mary’s father and brothers had ploughed two of the fields each year and grown rape and flax, barley and oats. The brothers died in Burma, in the forgotten army, Mother hanged herself, Daddy died of drink. Fat Mary survived on and by the animals she reared and let the fields return to pasture.

There was also an ancient pump mounted on a fluted cast-iron column - the only water supply she had . . . And just then, as we settled down to watch again, the back door opened and she came out.

She had taken off all her clothes.

She went to the pump, worked the long handle, filled a bucket, tipped it over her head. Then she did the same again. Next, she scrubbed herself all over with a huge bar of green Fairy soap, before washing the suds away with a third bucketful. The fourth she took to the lean-to toilet shed at the end of the building. We fancied we could hear her pissing. Then she went back indoors. All in all she had been visible to us for about five minutes.

She was magnificent. In the bright, hot July sun her body glowed pearl and rose and a deeper red where her clothes had been too tight. Her neck was an ivory tree-trunk, her shoulders were like fat rounded hams. As she worked the pump, her huge breasts swung like sacks of cream netted in blue veins and nippled with discs like saucers. Once, while pumping, she straightened and used her wrist to wipe the sweat from her brow which was streaked with her coarse, gingery hair and for a moment, upright, with her huge torso tilted back a little, she was a goddess.

When she tipped the flashing water over herself it slid through the suds, driving them down, and the acres of her skin looked sleek and strong like a whale’s. Her huge dimpled buttocks were so pressed together that the cleft was not obvious, until she put her hand between to soap inside, and when she turned her stomach hung like a stuffed hammock and all but buried in shadow the multiple creases beneath and the flattened triangle of straw.

But for all the flabbiness of her body, torso, breasts and buttocks, her limbs, though massive, were strong and round and firm, dimpled again at knees and elbows, but structured by the muscle and sinew deep beneath, the power house that could carry not only her own weight but made nothing or not much of an extra hundredweight, or split the massive logs that were stacked against the wall of her cabin.

The long and the short of it was - I fell in love.

* * * *

Well, what’s your definition of that miserable state?

* * * *

I had never before seen female naked flesh beyond what the pre-bikini swimming costumes of the late nineteen forties (which included hideous rubber bathing caps) allowed. I had no, or hardly any, preconceptions of what constitutes female beauty or what in a female body might stimulate sexual desire. Even the air-brushed or eclectically posed women in
Health and Efficiency
were plump by today’s standards. I had, moreover, been taken to the National Gallery where a visit to Dutch maritime paintings, de Cuyp cows and trompe-l’ceil interiors, all deemed to be aesthetically uplifting, could not be undertaken without a hurried passage through the Rubens rooms. And Fat Mary was not that much fatter than the Goddesses poor Paris had to choose between. So, there was no reason to be repelled by her size.

And the attraction? Fantasy made flesh and dwelling, if not amongst us, then little more than three miles away. As soon as the plank door closed behind her I knew I had to see her again. The summer holidays came and that image haunted me. Surreptitiously I drew crude pictures of her and hid them from my parents. I willed dreams of her and sometimes was visited by her in unwilled dreams. By September, when we returned to school, I was obsessed. I haunted the market and caught glimpses of her in her tweeds, which, perhaps oddly, did nothing to put me off. I just stood in front of her, gawped, turned bright crimson, and imagined what I knew lay beneath. Only one thing bothered me and I pushed that away as an absurd irrelevance - I knew she must be at least twenty years older than me, possibly as much as twenty-five. You cannot now imagine how the repression and ignorance of anything concerning sex and the female body poisoned our minds in those days and led to such deep and foetid infatuations.