THE BOY NEXT DOOR

A shock in her childhood affected Tina for the remainder of her days

Tina was unhappy and had been for almost as long as she could remember.. Had it not been for the odd sparkle of memory from the old days she would probably have taken an overdose by now, or opened the odd artery so that it could bleed out, or invited Growler to feed from her living flesh by starving him. Growler was her pet dog, a happy shaggy cross-breed who would probably have preferred to starve rather than partake of portions of Tina, but she wasn’t to be quite certain of that.

The problem for her was her past.

Once, in her younger years, her early teens, there had been Michael, and he had been perfect. He was good looking, had floppy blond hair she loved drawing her fingers through when he’d let her, and other body parts she found so special they dwelt in her conscious mind even when he was nowhere near her. She had known back then that Michael was for ever.

Until he died, that is.

She hadn’t known it, had no reason to, but he had a heart condition that meant that it might give way, cease to function, die on him, if he, for example tried to run a marathon in record time or partook of some excessive form of exercise like a football match.

And he did just that, and it was possibly her fault. Well, not possibly: definitely.

It was midweek at school and they had met in the playground after a pretty disagreeable lunch. “Gregor’s in Saturday’s game against Saint Bodolph’s,” she said that dreadful day when she really did want him to show her just how perfectly that wonderful body of his might function. Gregor was well know as the most handsome fourteen year old under the huge sky, and there was no doubt about his fitness.

“I’ve been asked to, but I don’t think I will,” he told her, “I sometimes get a bit, you know, painfully breathless, if I run too fast, and I don’t like it.”

“You never said before,” she said.

“I don’t like mentioning it.”

“Is there something wrong with you?”

“Not at all, Tina!”

“Then why don’t you play in the match. It would make me proud, and they have invited you to.”

“They’ve put Gregor on the wing, where I would be,” he told her.

“Gregor with the perfect body,” she sniffed.

And that little bit of sarcasm had done it. He had signed up to play, Gregor had to stand down, which he didn’t like, and it was well into the second half of the match, after a race down the wing and a failed shot at goal from distance, Michael sort of crumpled into a heap on the soggy grass.

The next thing she had heard was that Michael was dead. He was no more and the only place he could live was in her memory. Nobody else’s: hers, because if it hadn’t been for her he might not have played in that match and an unsuspected heart condition that had been with him since his birth would never have manifested itself and he’d still be alive.

And that is why Tina had been unhappy over all the years since then, and there had been a great number of them, more than fifty.

Oh, she had resurrected him times many, especially in the early days. She’d even dyed her hair blond, using stuff her mother bought to use on herself, so that it was like his, and cut is so that it looked just as floppy s his had so that she could run her fingers through it like she had with his, but it wasn’t the same.

No pain lasts forever, though, and a couple of years later, the day after her sixteenth birthday as a matter of fact, a new family moved in next door to where she lived, and there was a boy there. He didn’t look like Michael had, which gave him a chance.

She saw him first on a deckchair reading a book on the next door’s back lawn. He was topless, but already bronzed, had dark hair and stretched his legs out just like she remembered Michael had.

And this was naughty. When he sat there, leaning back and smiling at this or that bit of mischief in the book he was reading, she loved the way his shorts seemed to cling to his body as though a magnet was in them, caressing him.

Michael had worn shorts that sometimes behaved like that. All she’d wanted to do was touch them, but the two of them had only been fourteen and any lust had yet to grow into something bigger than it yet was. Though there had been that time after school in the notorious bike shed when he’d shown her very secretively what he had in those shorts and she had squealed with shocked admiration.

It had been that moment that had guaranteed her everlasting love for a boy who had died not too long afterwards. And part of her memory of him had to do with what he’d revealed to her in the bike shed.

So now there was a boy next door, a different boy but he had floppy hair, not blond but quite dark, and he was wearing shorts on a warm summer’s day, shorts and not much else. She was going to have to talk to him.

She had gone to the dividing fence, stood on an upturned bucked so that he could see her head properly,, and spoke.

“Hello,” she said, “I’m Tina.”

He looked up, frowned fror a moment, and then smiled a white-tooth smile.

“Hi,” he replied, “I’m Alan.”

“Is that a good book?” she asked, because he had been paying the book he’d been holding a great deal of concentrated attention.

“It is,” he replied.

“What’s it called, then?” she asked.

“The Lord of the Rings,”

“I’ve never heard of that. What’s it about?”

“Elves and dwarfs. A wizard or two. And balrogs,” he told her with a half smile teasing her as he spoke.

“You mean, a fairy story?” she asked.

“You might say, but there aren’t any fairies in it.”

“Oh.”

Michael had sort of believed in fairies. But only sort of. He’d once said, ages ago probably when he’d been eleven or twelve, that fairies came and went and people couldn’t see them because human eyes just aren’t good enough, but you can occasionally see a movement out of the corner of your eye, but when you look there’s nothing there. That’s a fairy, he had said, quite seriously, and when she thought about it and it actually happened to her, a flickery movement that was there and then it wasn’t, she thought that maybe he was right. That was before he’d shown her the contents of his shorts, but even then she’d been overwhelmed by his sensitivity.

Alan went back to his book and she stepped down from her bucket because she didn’t want his think she was spying on him, which was something she started doing through a knot-hole in the fence.

After a few minutes she climbed back onto the bucket.

“Ahem,” she said.

“Tina?” he asked remembering her name.

“Hiya,” she said.

“Did you want something?”

“I was wondering,” she asked, “do you play football?”

“What? Me?” he laughed, “I wouldn’t play that game if you paid me!”

“Good,” she said, “why not?”

“Well,” he replied, “not that it’s any of your business, but there’s a heart condition that runs in my family and there’s a danger that racing around a football pitch might not be so good for me.”

She froze inside when he said that.

Michael had suffered from an undiagnosed heart condition, and had he known about it he’d probably be alive right now.”

“Have you got a girlfriend?” she asked.

“You are a nosy little thing, aren’t you?”

That did it” She was nobody’s little thing! How dared he!

“I had a boyfriend, but he died,” she said, stepping back down. “I was too much for him, you know, and that had to be that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, smiling yet again so he wasn’t really sorry.

“He played football,” she said, “he was great.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, goodbye. And I’m not that little, you know, and I’m nobody’s thing!”

She went back into her house. She’d spend a few moments with Michael and maybe go back out and see if Alan was still there and wanted to talk to her.

That was all half a century ago and if it wasn’t for Michael, his shorts and the bike shed it would have been a very lonely fifty years.

The bonus was Alan still lived next door, with a good looking man he called his husband. She sometimes talked to them over the garden fence. They seemed happy enough, and so were she and Michael.

© Peter Rogerson 06.09.22

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