They come all too rarely, these immaculate summer days, and this one's a criminal waste, like the weather's just doing it to taunt me, flexing its omnipotence. Two weeks earlier and I'd have been in the university park, the boys playing football while the girls lounged in strappy tops and floral dresses, and we'd tire and lie on the grass with them, drink cider and flirt, limber flesh blushing in the sunshine. I'd sidle up to Natasha, easy as you like; she'd put down her magazine and dance her fingers lightly across my chest, our noses touching as she sucked a bonbon, passing it into my mouth, and sooner or later we'd get up and say farewell to the guys, freshly freed from all examination, and I'd follow her tight denim shorts upstairs and fuck her till the evening.
But today I'm sitting on my bed, the sloped grey roofs of our corner of London spread before me, back living with my old man. Through the window a faint reggae beat drifts in and out as the lazy afternoon breeze switches. The room is stale, so I stand up and open the window wide, put my head out and feel the sun on me directly, burning my skin. An aeroplane buzzes overhead. Oh, to be on the beach now - but Dave's sticky fingers cost him his pub, so the job's gone, and the boys will go to Ibiza without me. 'You've been on holiday all year', Dad said, but the thing about having no money at uni is that nobody else has any either, so you improvise. In London you're just broke. The heat is overwhelming, so I go back to my bed, concede to lying this time, my eyes closing, and soon I am cradling Natasha, her warmth up against me. I pull the duvet over fully, trap it between my legs, Tash's long back pressed to my stomach, hardening between her thighs, her breasts in my hands as I strum her nipples, slide down her smooth downy skin, warm, tender, lower, drift into the folds of the soft, smothering cocoon.
There is a sound, at the edge of my consciousness, of a door or something distant opening, and it recalls me from the precipice of sleep. I pull down the covers, wonder if Dad's come home early for something, and drag my heavy carcass upright, blinking like a mole. A second slam, and outside across the rooftops I catch a movement. Two bare arms are emerging from a skylight, followed by a head of long brown hair tied back. I close my eyes, run my hand firmly down my face for a moment, then open and refocus. The woman is in a red bikini over bronzed skin. She lays a towel over the tiles, on the level bit above the slopes, and as she bends to spread its corners the contours of her thighs and ass stretch taut. Then she sits cross-legged, clasps her hands together, extends her arms straight above her head and leans forward, touching the ground, her whole back flat. She holds the position and I am transfixed, locked like her arms in the moment, until she releases her grasp and sits back up again. She pauses to fan her face with her hand, then takes her left leg and hoists it up straight, as high as she can get it, so her lean thighs are separated and the curve of her buttocks, flawlessly formed through the bikini, are displayed to the roofs and the chimneys and the holidaymakers zooming overhead. She tires, switches legs, but cannot hold this one for quite as long, so she fans herself uselessly again and lies back staring at the sky. I have begun to sweat.
Presently she rises, and after adjusting her bottoms flicks her hands upwards in dramatised frustration, what's the use?, then descends through the skylight. I get up, grab my crumpled teeshirt and jeans from off the floor, my dick twitching in my boxers like an wounded animal as I hit the stairs. In the kitchen I put the kettle on and pour myself a coffee, trying to shock my system into action. On the table Dad's left a to-do list, a fucking to-do list!, like I'm his fucking errand boy or something, instead of a nineteen-year-old perfectly capable of making his own decisions about how he spends his days, cheers. We're out of milk, and I can't take instant coffee black, so I tip the rest down the dirty plughole and jump into a cold shower until my hard-on subsides - Jesus, I need a woman - and I feel properly awake. In the mirror my hair is matted and I need a shave, but fuck it, why bother? I need to make some calls, got a list of job agencies pinned to the fridge, but it can wait. The longer you're out of work the less you see the point.
Upstairs - and she's back again! Just sunbathing this time, with a huge pair of shades that make her look like some kind of giant insect, her knees bent and splayed. She's brought a highball of dark red liquid, the colour of the bikini, and she leans over, the absolute minimum amount of effort required, to suck some through a straw. I sit back on my bed and think about reading or watching something on my laptop, but this is better entertainment by an easy distance. I'm not sure I can be seen, but I guess I can see her, and you know what, it's a free country, you lie there like that and I'm going to stare. I wonder how old she is; it's a little too far to see her face properly, but her body is seriously toned, fatless, like she's worked hard on it. I wonder if the tan's real, or perhaps she's a little Mediterranean herself. Her breasts are a nice size too, just right for the beach: filling out the top but not so big they flop over. She sips the drink again, it's on my side, and as the straw enters her mouth she hesitates, the bug-eyes pointed directly at me. My hands and throat get a little tight, waiting for her to lie back over, but she doesn't, and in that moment I know I've been busted. So she stands up, those gorgeous limbs in action, places one hand to her hip, lifts the shades to her crown, and stares right back.
I go over to the window and she just stands there in the same position. She must have untied her hair: it curls wide past her shoulders. I open my hands, well, here we are, and then gesture at the roof where she stands. She shrugs, turns around, and before I know what I'm doing I'm lifting my leg through the window. Just beneath my room our house there's a small ledge where the ground floor juts out, where my brother and I used to perch and share clandestine cigarettes while our folks rowed. I walk slowly, barefoot, across the ledge, hugging the wall, and there's a gap of a couple of feet to the next row of sloped roofs. In next door's garden their kids are playing, the little boy chasing the little girl around, squealing after her, and what if they see me? - it's bizarre, I'd feel like a bad example - but the woman is lying back down again like a siren, so I hop over and start to pick my way across the boiling tiles, adrenalin coursing through my body. The sky is ludicrously blue, and the clouds look like pillows, luxuriant pillows glutted with goose-feathers -
crack!
- the slate slips from beneath my feet and I fall onto the slope, grasping at the tiles as the slate crashes into the ground below, and I pull myself up and lie breathing rapidly on the flat. The children stop shouting momentarily and the woman laughs through her nose, her shoulders rising and falling, her body parallel to mine. She is probably in her late twenties and very beautiful, oval-faced, so beautful my stomach tenses; her eyes are wide and long-lashed, but though her make-up is slight I wonder why it's there at all, if this is all she's doing. She doesn't need it. My knee and arm sting slightly, and I can feel myself sweating again. What do you say in this situation? What prepares you for this? I want to make a remark about 'enjoying the view', but that's so crappy, so I settle on
"Lovely day for it."
God that is awful. She laughs again and turns away, shielding her eyes from the sun.
"Lovely for what?"
"Oh, anything you like. Lying around, sunbathing, drinking."
"Exercise?"
Have I been busted again? Does she know I was watching before? She lowers her lips to the straw again and drains her drink. The final drop falls onto the towel, resting there like an incriminating blot of blood.
"What kind of exercise do you mean?"
"Oh, anything you like."
The reggae is louder from out here; there's park beyond our row of houses where sometimes they'll put up a rig, and set the sound undulating across the rooftops. Lovely day for it. The woman lifts herself onto all fours, stands, and - Jesus! - begins to dance on the towel, slowly rotating round - she moves like a salsera too, from the hips, and just above the bikini bottoms she has a small brown mole which draws me in, hypnotised. I never understood what a beauty spot meant before. The bikini clings to her supreme buttocks, makes her ass look like ripe fruit. She turns back round again. My tongue must be on the floor.
"Do you want to da-"
She loses her balance for a split-second as a fresh gust of wind blows over us, collects herself with another little laugh, but this time it's an aside-laugh directed at herself. She picks up the empty glass.
"Can I get you a drink? Come on, come down."
The bedroom is done in white and light woods: by the stepladder there's an elegant dressing table, a wardrobe, and above the bed there's a painting in vivid blues and greens of a lakeside park, a man and woman in expensive old clothes laughing gaily with a picnic spread before them. The room is pristine, really tasteful and lit well by the sun. I think of our house of men; artless, messy, cluttered. As the sound of glass and ice-cubes comes from the kitchen I look in the mirror and worry again about my hair, my scrappy three-day beard, my unironed shirt. I feel clumsy just moving around the room. She comes back in with the drinks, motions for us to sit on the bed, and we clink glasses. The shades are gone, and her hair cascades over her shoulders.
"Jesus, this is strong."
"What's the problem? Something you've got to hold yourself together for?"
