Low life
Child bride
Jeffrey Bernard
'Yet teenage marriages can last' (Radio Times 21 August 1979.) Horace let himself in with his latchkey, walked in to the hall and hung his satchel on the hatstand. The house seemed strangely quiet. He looked up the staircase and shouted. 'Mary, Mary, I'm home.' Nothing. Not a sound. He walked through to the kitchen and looked around. It was neat enough, spic and span indeed, but still no Mary. Then he saw it on the kitchen table propped up against a ketchup bottle. Her note. 'Your Mars Bar is in the oven. Love Mary XXX' Where the hell had she gone, he wondered. Probably over to Nlivis's house he thought angrily. He sighed, sat down and pulled his battered paperback copy of The Wind in the Willows out of his blazer pocket and began to read. He couldn't concentrate. He put the book down and stared sulkily at the poster of John Travolta on the wall. 'Damn and bother,' he said aloud. They had only been married for three months and yet Mary still insisted that Thursday night was her night for going to Mavis's to play doctors and nurses. Well, tonight he'd have it out with her once and for all. Later, he lay in bed sucking anxiously on a Cadbury sugar cigarette and staring at the exercise book that lay on his knee. `Seges est ubi Troya erat.' Something was where Troy was all right, but what the hell was seges? Then he heard Mary .opening the front door and then her voice. 'Cooee, it's me,' she called. 'About time too,' he muttered under his breath. 'I'll be up in a minute darling,' she continued. 'I'm just going to wash out my gym slip.' God Almighty. Girls. What a soppy lot they were, always washing something. Soon she was standing by the bed and looking down at him. 'I had an absolutely super evening darling.' Oh yeah."Well, aren't you interested?' He threw the excercise book off the bed and it landed on his train set in the corner of the room. 'Of course I'm interested.' Well Mavis pretended she had to have an abortion and . . . ' but Horace wasn't listening. He was watching Mary who was slowly taking off her ankle socks. Just below her right knee there was an old scar that was the result of a hockey accident. It still excited him strangely and he remembered the first time she had let him run his ink-stained fingers over it.
Eventually, she stood there, undressed. Horace stared at her, his eyes peeping over the eiderdown while he surreptitiously picked his nose beneath it. After she had finished brushing her hair she began to put on her pyjamas with the abrupt movements that excited him so. Twice she tripped over and by now he wanted her so badly he had forgotten his acne. She was wearing his favourite pyjamas — the ones with foxes and geese on them —and then the wynciette was beneath his damp hands. Suddenly her body went rigid. 'Horace, for God's sake,' she whispered, 'you know I've got maths in the morning.' You've always got maths in the morning,' he said trying to unbutton her pyjama jacket. 'Well, I have,! can't help it, but I have. As a matter of fact we've got simultaneous equations with Miss Harper'. He turned away from her — angry, hurt and now cold. He thought he loathed her and he wished to God he'd waited until he was 15 before he'd got married. Eventually, the silence between them was broken. 'Darling,' Mary whispered. 'What is it now?' he asked angrily. 'Well, I was thinking. You know when Mallard broke the world speed record for a steam driven engine?' What about it?' Was it in service with the LMS or the LNER?"LNER, of course.' He reached out for her. How could he hate her? They shared the same interests. Railway engine numbers, hide and seek and shoplifting in Woolworths. It was his fault that they didn't get on sometimes he thought. He shouldn't hurry their lovemaking so much. She was, he thought, rather like a gobstopper. She needed time. `Will you still love me when I'm old?,' she asked. 'Course I will,' he said. 'Even when we've taken our '0' levels?"Yes. Go to sleep.' He turned over. Tomorrow, he would take her to Euston after school to see the 5.30 from Liverpool arrive at platform 1
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