Timothy Lea - Timothy Lea's Complete Confessions

Hours later I am still waiting and there is no sign of either of them. I have a pretty good idea where Garth is, and the very thought of it is more than I can bear in my condition. By this time I have returned to the changing-room, where it is slightly easier to breathe and am trying to sleep on one of the benches. I must have half dozed off when I hear a ‘click’ which sounds like a key turning in a lock. I listen for a moment but there is no other noise, and it is only desperation that makes me drag myself across to try the door. It opens! Either Mr. Carstairs has relented or Julia has managed to slip away and release me. Probably the latter. There is nobody on the other side of the door so I don’t hang about but tiptoe across the ankle-deep carpet and climb out by the first sash window I come to.

By the cringe, it is cold! It has stopped snowing and is now freezing hard and I almost wish I had hung on long enough to find a pair of shoes before doing a bunk. Unless I keep moving the soles of my feet stick to the ground and the wind cuts me like a knife. Luckily, I stop a bloke in a van at the end of the lane and scramble in before he has a chance to see my bare feet. He nearly jumps out of his skin when he does and drives like fury to the end of Mrs. B.’s road, where I thank him through chattering teeth and stagger the last hundred yards trying to keep my circulation going by swinging my arms.

Of course, I don’t have a front door key, so I have to steer a frozen finger to the bell-push and after a couple of rings a light goes on at the top of the stairs.

Mrs. B. pulls open the door and I practically fall into the hall before she can say anything. She has obviously been on the point of giving me the mother and father of all bollockings but my pitiful condition changes all that.

“Good heavens!” she gasps. “What on earth have you been up to? You look half dead.”

A glance in the hallstand mirror confirms her impression. There is a rim of frost across both eyebrows, my eyelashes look as if they had been dipped in sugar, and my hair is white. I might have been chipped out of a deep freeze.

“I b-b-b-b-b-b—” I croak and luckily the Florence Nightingale in Mrs. B. comes surging to the fore.

“Never mind,” she says urgently. “You can tell me later. If we don’t do something about you, you’re going to freeze to death. Can you get upstairs?”

I nod bravely and reach for the bannisters whilst she goes on ahead to run a bath. Can my body stand it, I ask myself. Boiled alive one moment, frozen the next; it reminds me of how we used to harden up conkers when I was a kid. Certainly my own personal set are in a pitiful condition, having shrunk to a size that would give a four-year-old boy an anxiety complex. But that is not one of my immediate problems. My body is so numb that you could drive nails through my feet without me feeling anything. But when I get into the bath—yeeow! The pain is excruciating and I groan away, hardly conscious that Mrs. B. is standing there watching my naked agony.

“Brandy and hot lemon. That’s what you need,” she says motheringly. “I think there’s some in the medicine cupboard.”

She pads off and slowly the pain is replaced by a kind of pleasant tiredness. I pull myself out of the bath and have just draped a large towel round my shoulders when she reappears, carrying a steaming mug. It must be one of the best drinks I have ever tasted and I gulp hungrily, trying to make grateful noises between mouthfuls.

“That’s all right, dear. Don’t talk. You’re not up to it.”

I become aware that Mrs. B.’s sensitive fingers have started towelling me down and that her warm, fragrant-smelling body is close to mine. She is wearing a long, white linen nightdress dropping low enough at the front for me to see her rich creamy boobs and this revelation coincides with the arrival of her healing fingers at the source of most of my great moments in sport.

“O-o-ooh, that’s good,” I moan.

She can take that any way she wants and I don’t think it is my imagination when the pressure round my John Thomas increases.

“You poor boy,” she murmurs. “You poor, poor boy.”

She is shivering more than me now and somehow our mouths just seem to collide. My towel drops to the floor and I am digging my fingers into her soft arse as her tongue fights to get past mine.

It’s funny, but sometimes when you are nearly out on your feet you really fancy a bit of the other, and tonight is no exception. I feel warm and cosy, but at the same time charged with a great desire to make love. I start to pull up Mrs. B.’s nightdress but she takes my hands and leads me down the corridor to where her bedroom door opens invitingly. I can see the outline of the big double bed and the eiderdown swollen like an over-pumped Lilo. The sheets are thrown back from when she got up to let me in and there is a soft white valley into which we collapse. Her hands help mine to pull the nightdress over her head and I reach out to support her freed breasts.

“Come down into the warm,” she murmurs and wriggles over on to her back, pulling me and the bedclothes with her. My fingers glide over her belly and down to the smooth luxury of her thighs, which part invitingly. Her hand reaches past mine and removes a hot water bottle which I hear thud against the floor.

“We won’t need that now,” she says, and, hugging me to her, she sets out to prove it.

Garth is very apologetic about not coming back, but says that Mrs. Dent had his old man out before they got to the crossroads and that one thing led to another and that he thought Mrs. C. would let me out anyway and that, yes, he knew I didn’t have any clothes but it would have been giving the game away to leave mine in the changing-room and he thought Mrs. C. would take care of that too.

I can’t really blame him because I don’t reckon I would have acted any differently in his position. Mrs. Dent, I know from experience, can be a very demanding lady.

I am pretty certain that I will never see Mrs. C. again and this worries me somewhat because Cronky thinks that the Department of the Environment shines out of her arsehole and is not likely to take kindly to the disappearance of his favourite pupil. But, to my surprise, she shows up per schedule, bright as an old penny, and starts gushing the moment we have got out of earshot of the E.C.D.S.

“Frightfully sorry … felt so awful … poor you … wasting away … what a shame … your divine friend … silly old George … can be so difficult … bee in the bonnet … had the most awful trouble … couldn’t get away … marvellous idea … new wonder pills … two in his brandy … mad lust … endless lovemaking … staggered down … hardly turn key … sorry too much.”

I get interested towards the end and make her take me through it again. It appears that she has got her hands on some tablets which are the ideal cure for wilting Willy. Not only that, but they are a winner on the old desire stakes as well. Given a couple of those in their Ovaltine, Lady Lewisham and Malcolm Muggeridge would have to be separated with a firehose. Quite where Mrs. C. got them from is a secret she keeps to herself but I have a suspicion she has been having it away with some boffin at Python’s Pesticides who specialises in that kind of thing. Certainly her old man didn’t give them to her—be a bloody fool to, wouldn’t he? They must work, because she is highly chuffed and makes no reference to another painting session. Bloody egg heads put the mockers on everything. But, I reason to myself, if science can work against me, it can work for me, and you never know when the deadly brewers’ droop is going to strike. One or two of those little fellows could come in very handy. I press Mrs. C. on the point and after a fair amount of dithering she promises to get me a few.