My Little Blue Dress (6 page)

“Does tha know what I love most about thee, lass?” Davey asked as we lingered over the quinces.

“No.”

“I love thine
energy
. Thine
verve
. T'way that if tha wants a thin' tha just
seizes
it.”

I sucked at my straw. “Wow,” I said. “Thanks.” He was still squinting at me, though. The ball was still in my court.

I cleared my throat. “Well, look, I really love the way you
carry
yourself, Davey. Your whole
stance
.”

“Oh why thankee, lass.” He sounded pleased. “And dost tha know that when tha's not wi' me I 'ave t'image of thine face swimmin' in me 'ead? At all times? P'raps it sounds daft . . .”

“No, not at all.”

It did though.

It did sound daft.

In fact, it sounded ridiculous. This was rapidly turning into the most mawkish and excruciating conversation of my entire young life. Was this love? I found myself wondering to my own dismay. Thrashing about in sun-dappled clearings, fumbling for abstract nouns? Scouring one's heart for emotions one might or might not be feeling?

I rather hoped not.

Because it didn't feel like something I was good at.

“Listen, Davey.” Emphatically I slurped the last of my cider through my straw. “Do you know of any reason why I shouldn't duck behind that tree over there and quickly slide out of my panties?” I winked at him.

“N-none at all, lass,” stammered Davey.

“Well, I do.” Setting down my cup I rucked up my skirt until its hem was at my hips, and then I looked at him. “Because I'm not
wearing
any panties.”

I
T WASN'T ANY USE
, though. As the summer wore on, while the sex remained fantastic, I was forced to face the fact that
my relationship with Davey McCracken was missing some vital element—you could call it love, I suppose—and I had no clue why. Was it me? I would wonder most nights, lying anguished on my bed in bra and panties, behind a locked bedroom door that since my thirteenth birthday had had a Do Not Enter sign on it. Or was it him? Or was everything actually fine?

It was him, I decided. Sometime around the end of August, after searching my soul pretty unflinchingly, I'd come to the conclusion that I wasn't a homosexual. I liked sex with men too much to be any kind of closet lesbian, which was lucky, because these were still the early years of the twentieth century and bigotry was rampant. Gays in that era were beaten senseless every time they went to the shops, and had such a quantity of human excrement shoveled through their letterbox every day that I suspect they probably ended up reading some of it.

No, the problem, I reckoned, lay with Davey, but for my own peace of mind I needed to be sure.

D
URING PHYSICS ONE
morning at the end of June, I finally put Karen out of her misery. We were running a current through a nugget of metal to measure the voltage, and between readings from the voltmeter I confessed to her that Davey and I had been more than just friends for some time. She squealed with excitement and hopped from foot to foot.

“ 'As tha
been
wi' 'im, yet?” she whispered, leaning close.

“Excuse me?”

“ 'As tha . . . 'As tha
lain
wi' 'im?”

“ ‘Lain'?” I frowned, torturing her. “What do you mean? You're going to need to be more clear.”

Karen by this point was red as a tomato and extremely flustered. “Tha knows! Tha knows worr'imean! 'As tha . . . 'as tha . . .
ackquiesced
to 'im yet?”

“Oh . . .”
I nodded. “No. Not at all. Though the other day I
did
let him fuck me with his cock, right in the vagina.”

In a cloud of snorts and giggles Karen vanished beneath the workbench, eventually resurfacing with an entirely purple face. And who could blame her? My remark had been amusing.

“Oh that's reet good news! So when can t'four o' us go out, like? Double datin'?”

I adjusted my goggles. “Well, I wanted to talk to you about that, Karen, actually. I think I need your help. As great as things are going between me and Davey—and they are going great—I'm starting to suspect that there may be something
wrong
with him. The sex part is fine but
afterwards
. All the talking. The staring into each other's eyes. Well, to be perfectly honest it makes me want to claw my own skin off and then take a hot bath.”

“Nay!”

“Yes.”

“But . . . that's not 'ow a lass is s'posed to feel when she's wi' 'er feller!”

“I know. That's what I'm saying. And what I was thinking was that maybe if the four of us went out together you could take a look at Davey and tell me if you think there's something wrong with him.” Grimly I bent to the experiment. “Because if there isn't, then there's something wrong with
me
.”

K
AREN THOUGHT MY
plan was a great idea and that Thursday the four of us went out: me and Davey, Karen and
Greg. On the green we threw horseshoes until the brink of dusk and then went for chicken-in-a-basket at the inn.

Davey had really made an effort, I noticed as we studied our menus. He'd borrowed a white shirt and a pair of clean trousers from his brother, and when he thumped his wallet on the table it occurred to me for the first time that there was a sense in which he owned his own business. I hoped Karen would be able to see past these irrelevancies and discern the true horror that was Davey. Personally, I found it pretty easy. All through dinner, and as we lingered over ices, my heavily muscled boyfriend lectured the table about his plans to open a chain of mechanized cartwheel shops, all across the region, and funnel the profits into a hospital for orphans that he was going to build down in Hughley. I glanced at Karen to see if she was finding him as nauseating as I was, but her eyes gave nothing away. Or rather I
wished
her eyes gave nothing away. In fact, they were shining. She seemed to be
lapping up
Davey's drivel. “Oo, that's a reet philanthropic scheme o' thine, Davey,” said Karen during one of his infrequent pauses for breath and all of a sudden I simply could not take it anymore.

“Karen!” I bounced to my feet. “I'm going to the bathroom now, Karen!”

Bound by the Girl's Code, Karen rose also. “Aye. Me an' all.”

“Well?” I demanded, once we were alone, flattening myself against the ladies' room door to stop Karen from escaping. “What do you think?”

Karen fished her lipstick out of her bag and turned to the mirror.

“ 'Bout what?”

“Don't mess with me, Karen. This thing with Davey is literally killing me. Tell me what you think of him.”

She stretched her mouth wide and started applying the makeup. “What if tha won't like what I 'ave to say?”

My chin began to quiver. “So it's true. You
like
him, don't you? There's nothing wrong with Davey at all, is there? It's me. I'm a cold fucking fish and I will never know love.”

Karen smooshed her freshly painted lips, as one does, then straightened to admire her handiwork. “Aye. There's sumthin'
badly
wrong wi' thee.” She smartly recapped the tube and smirked at me. “Tha's jus' wasted an 'ole week o' thine young life on the soppiest an' most irritatin' lad 'oo were ever born o' woman! That 'ospital for orphans?” Karen mimed vomiting. “I nearly lost me chicken reet back into me basket when 'e were on about that.”

Twenty seconds later, after I'd nearly hugged the life out of Karen, I dragged her into the stall, and started whispering. “God yeah that hospital thing was
awful
. And that's how he is
all the time
, Karen. If he's not actually inside me then it's just . . . well, he's just spewing that soft, sensitive
crap
into my ear. Feelings and emotions and just anything that's on his mind, no filter at all.”

Karen shook her head in sympathy. “Oh, tha poor lass. 'E's a fine-lookin' clump o' man, though. 'T 'as to be said.”

“Yeah I know. And he's hung like Guy Fawkes. But . . . I don't know. I just don't think I can take it anymore. What do you think I should do?”

“Well . . . if I were thee I think I'd satiate myself on what 'e's got in 'is trouser an' then give 'im 'is papers.”

“Find someone else?”

“Aye. Find thaself a feller 'oo fills thine 'eart with as much blood as 'e does thine privates. There's nowt like love, lass. Nowt in t'world.”

T
HE EVENING ENDED
down on the clifftops with two flasks of apple wine. Davey and I were lying on a big flat rock while ten feet away Greg was still fucking Karen behind a crag. The moon was on the ocean and above the crashing of the waves the night resounded to Karen's stifled moans, the swish of her hair on her shoulders, the tiny little clicks from her wetness.

I nudged Davey. “Do you want me again?” I was in a strapless floral halter top and a pair of hessian karate trousers.

“No,” he said, not looking at me. “I want thee to tell me that tha loves me.”

Oh God. Here we went.

I cleared my throat. “I love you.”

Davey turned, his eyes glittering with resentment in the deep blue evening. “Well then why when I'm wi' thee do I allus feel so alone?”