It was difficult to believe that only a week ago I had been sitting in the drab lounge of my mother’s drab house in a drab grey suburb of London wondering if there was ever going to be any excitement in my life. I was already thirtyone years old, single and so little experienced in the ways of the world I hadn’t even had a boyfriend since leaving college ten years before. It had been round about then my mother had fallen seriously ill and I had had to sacrifice my own life to look after hers. My father had left home when I was two and I had no siblings. I was working, of course, but my social life stopped dead.
Within a few weeks I was as housebound as her.
I didn’t begrudge her my time – I loved my mother, naturally – but as the years dragged by and she slowly deteriorated, I became all too conscious of how my life was slipping away from me. Friends fell in love, fell out of love, fell in love more suitably, got married, had children, moved away, stopped phoning. What little time I had outside work I spent catering to the constant demands of my mother then falling into exhausted sleeps in front of the TV. I realised that to all intents and purposes I had become a nun.
Then, quite suddenly, a month ago my mother died. I say suddenly, because by then I had become resigned to the fact that though she had been almost continually at death’s door for ten years, she would always be there, barely alive, but just enough to stop me being so.
It took me some time to adjust to my new circumstances. I spent the next few days busying myself with all the bureaucracy a death seems to generate. Then there was the funeral. Then I was alone.
To tell the truth I was at a bit of a loss. My mother – like so many of her generation – had been frugal, and what with being housebound for the last few years of her life, had managed to save quite a bit of money, which I, as her only child, inherited. It wasn’t enough to make me wealthy, but it was enough to enable me to stop working. So I handed in my notice. Not so much because I wanted to – work had been, after all, virtually my only contact with other people for the last ten years – but simply because I could.
I spent the next week in bed. Or so it seemed. I suppose I must have got up to go shopping, eat, wash, and so on; I wasn’t about to become a recluse. But it must have been the accumulated exhaustion of the last ten years; I just needed a rest.
Until one morning – an unusually blue sky for England, an even more unusually bright sun filtering through my bedroom curtains – I awoke and found that I was no longer tired. I lay feeling the unaccustomed warmth on my face and smiled the first smile I had allowed myself for what seemed like my entire life. It was a strange feeling and for a moment I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.
Then it came to me. I was actually looking forward to the day.
I showered, wrapped myself in a kimono and had breakfast on mother’s small patio. The morning sun on my skin felt exhilarating, the ordinary food tasted delicious. Absurdly I felt like throwing off the kimono, running out into the garden and rolling naked on the lawn. What would the neighbours say? I imagined the horror on the faces of the middle-aged couple who lived next door, he who I had only ever seen washing his car in the drive every Sunday morning and she who had knocked on my mother’s door only once during the last ten years “to see how you’re coping, dear”. Perhaps their sixteen-year old son would have taken it in his stride, a rather skinny, awkward but athletic looking boy who was already taller than his father but who was so shy he had never said a word to me, not even when we had almost collided with each other outside our front gates.
I imagined him peeping out at me from behind the curtains of his bedroom window, fascinated by the sight of his first, live, naked woman. And not an unattractive woman, either, I flattered myself. All right, I wasn’t a page three model – which was probably his immature ideal of feminine beauty – but everything was in proportion. I had good sized breasts – not too large, not too small – a trim waist, smooth rounded hips, slim legs I was never ashamed to show off in a knee-length skirt. Perhaps most importantly, the hard physical exercise of looking after mother – all that running up and down stairs, lifting her in and out of bed – had kept me completely free of cellulite.
For a thirtyone-year old, I told myself, I didn’t look bad. And all topped off by a head of dramatic henna’d hair, the one feminine indulgence I had allowed myself during the last ten years.
I smiled to myself. What was I doing, thinking like this? Imagining a sixteen-year old boy admiring my body. No man had ever seen my body, not even Peter, my last boyfriend at university, not completely naked anyway. I recalled our amateurish fumblings in the dark with embarrassment and shut them out of my mind. Today wasn’t a day for looking back, for regret. Today was a day for looking forward, for enjoying sunshine, for relishing my new-found freedom. I almost giggled to myself. For thinking about athletic sixteen-year old boys.
I lay back in mother’s recliner and closed my eyes against the sun. The patio was a perfect sun-trap, backed by the house and protected from the wind – and prying eyes – by a high wall on one side and a thick hedge on the other. Vainly I tried to think just of the sun warming me, of plans I needed to make for my future, but against my will my mind kept returning to the boy. I imagined him gazing at me from his window, wanting me, but too shy to do anything about it. I imagined him comparing me with the pictures of naked girls in the magazines I knew every teenage boy kept hidden in their bedrooms. Wasn’t my naked body so much more attractive in the flesh than all those photographs?
I imagined him in an agony of frustration. I saw the telltale bulge in his – what? pyjamas? No, too middle-aged. Boxers. Which he touched, unable to stop himself. I saw his hand rubbing gently along the length of his erection, hidden under the front of his shorts. The touch of cotton was exquisite, but eventually his desire was too much and he had to take them off. In a hurry now, he pushed them down his legs and his – yes, I told myself, call it his cock, that crude exciting word – his cock stood tall and thick and naked.
Still gazing longingly at my body lying unaware on the lawn, he put his hand around his cock and started to pump it. Being young, he was inexperienced in the techniques of prolonging his pleasure, and within only a minute or two, his face contorted, he climaxed, his other hand vainly trying to catch his spurting semen to prevent it landing on the curtain or staining the carpet. Then I imagined him collapsing back on the bed, his face a mixture of relief and the guilt I knew most boys felt when they masturbated. Didn’t I feel the same myself when I did it?
Without realising, I had put my hand under my kimono and between my legs. As if coming to, I felt a familiar wetness under my middle fingertip and a blush of embarrassment creep up my face. Instinctively I pulled my hand away, as if I had been caught in some forbidden act. But then my new reality came back to me. I was alone. No one could see me. Mother wouldn’t be calling me. Not now. Not ever. I was free to do what I liked. The sun was shining. It was a new day. It was a new life.
With an inner smile at my own wickedness I returned my hand to the place it wanted to be. I even allowed my kimono to loosen a little, though should anyone have happened to see me, I would still have looked perfectly decent. After years of lonely practice I knew exactly how to please myself, where and for how long to stroke myself before finally succumbing to the demands of my clitoris to be touched. To help me I conjured up another picture of the boy next door. This time I wanted him to discover me – in flagrante, as it were.
