She'll do. The fair-haired one in the middle of the giggling, school-bagged, plaid-skirted trio walking home along the footpath. They are probably discussing their boyfriends in the ribald terms that girls only reveal when talking among themselves. She looks tasty. Medium height, slim, small high breasts, plump rounded bum. Too bad they make girls her age wear white ankle socks just like the juniors at the school. First thing she'll do when she gets home is take those silly socks off. But she isn't going home…not yet. First, I will enjoy her.
I call out to the girl and she slows her pace, dropping behind her friends. They stop and turn to ask her what is the matter. They are quite attractive as well. One day I will try it with two, or even three, but for today she is The One. The girl shakes her head in bewilderment. She doesn't know herself what it was that caused her to slow down and almost stop. I call out to her again. She finally comes to a halt and looks back at the car. She hesitates and then, I can tell by her gestures, she tells her friends to carry on. She is telling them that she will catch up with them later. The two try to persuade her to go with them, but she shakes her head in adamant refusal. They shrug their shoulders and turn away. The girl watches them until they disappear around the corner some seventy metres off, and then she turns and walks towards the car.
I let the girl approach and only hit the button for the electric window when she bends over to look into the car. The side windows are so heavily tinted she would not have been able to see more than a dim shadow inside. Her eyes are a clear, pale blue under straight, serious eyebrows. Wide mouth with full pink lips and just a hint of recent acne marking her left cheek, and a stubby nose, too short for beauty but nevertheless teenager cute, complete the picture. She does not fully match up to my first impressions, but my choice is made, there is no going back. I tell her to put her bag on the back seat and get in front with me. She does as she is told.
We stare into each other's eyes for a long moment. I tell her to tell me her name.
The girl smiles nervously, still puzzled at how her presence here with me came about, "Melanie…Melanie Simpson."
Her voice is light and slightly husky. And, thank you God, she is not wearing braces!
"Well, Melanie Simpson, I am going to take you to my place. There, I will strip you naked and then we will fuck," I tell her.
Melanie nods, wide-eyed like a trapped rabbit. But she makes no effort to get out of the car.
I Got The Power!
I first found out that I had The Power after the accident. I had been a high up, ultra-sound testing welding repairs to the Cracker when I heard a faint shout. The platform swayed sickeningly, then in an instant I was in the midst of a crashing, clanging, smashing storm of steel pipes as the scaffolding beneath me collapsed, taking me with it twenty metres to the hard concrete below.
I could not feel a thing. My world was blacker than night and totally silent. I thought, "So this is what death is like. I could make a fortune if I could just tell someone!" But then I realised that my nostrils were filled with the smell of acrid dust from the collapse. That did not compute! I tried to move, but found it impossible. And then I heard the sound of running footsteps as people came to my aid. I was alive after all, but why couldn't I see, or feel anything?
They uncovered me slowly, carefully as if they were playing a giant game of Pick Up Sticks. When they finally got to me I heard them gasp in awe. I was still breathing! "How the fuck could he have survived that?" I heard one of them mutter, "Every bone in his body must be broken!" I tried to smile encouragement to them that I was all right and I heard a familiar voice cry out; "Oh My God!" followed by the sound of violent retching. I recognised him as my sidekick, Bill. Was it the ghastliness of my bloody grimace that affected him so? Or perhaps it was the sight of my skull impaled so deeply by the scaffolding pole? I knew nothing of any of these things at the time.
For the next sixty-odd days I laid in intensive care whilst they sewed and pinned and plated me back together. They had to be very tender lifting me onto the gurney to take me to the hospital, I was saggy as a bag of Jelly Beans. Just about every major bone was shattered apart from my right leg, which escaped unscathed aside from a few deep cuts. Smashed face, nose and one cheekbone and jaw that side shattered beyond repair, ruptured spleen, collapsed lung, one kidney pulped. I overhear them saying, "He was lucky his eyes were spared." Lucky? I cannot see nor can I speak!
The refinery will pay anything to keep me alive. The industry has had enough bad press recently without letting go of this 'Miracle Man'. Hour after hour upon hour under sedation apart from when they picked the debris from my skull out of my brain. That was surreal. I heard everything. There are no nerves in the brain, therefore, no need for an anaesthetic. "With all the damage in here the man should not be alive. At best he will be a vegetable." The surgeon resented the obscene amount of money being spent on what he saw as a hopeless case. The man had halitosis. The stink of his breath made me determined to prove him wrong.
Physiotherapy: hours of wracking pain, frustration and total exhaustion re-learning how to sit up, to stand and then walk. There's no way I will pass through an airport metal detector again without setting the alarms howling; I have more steel inside me than the average family car! I wished I could scream at the therapist to leave me alone, that it was all too much. But I still could not speak. It was not, is not, a physical a thing they can fix. Something is missing inside my head.
One day on the walking machine I tripped and fell, banging my newly repaired skull against a railing on my way down. I woke up back in my bed and saw a bright, fuzzy light. It was sunlight streaming through the window.
I was not allowed to leave my bed for the next several days whilst they fussed and discussed and shone bright lights into my eyes. Morning by morning my vision grew clearer, and then, one day when I awoke, I saw Becky properly for the first time, doing her chores, tidying up my room before the day began. She was as I had imagined her from her voice: late thirties or early forties, matronly breasted, heavy hipped, worn, but kindly face with twinkling green eyes. She must have been a real beauty once.
Becky was a nurse's aide who had looked after me frequently since my arrival. She chatted to me constantly as she went about her work, not knowing or even caring if I could hear her in my early, more vegetable-like days, telling me about her life and family. And then, when my consciousness became more apparent, she confided in me about her worries about her son Pete who had disappeared off to 'God Knows Where' after a fight with his sister Emily.
"I think Pete may have caught Emily in bed with a friend…a girl friend…does that shock you? I think it may have blown Pete away and he couldn't handle it, so he took off with a whole load of camping gear. I hope he's ok, we haven't heard from him for two weeks now. No, Em and Debbie don't bother me overmuch. I've suspected something was going on for quite a while. Anyway, I did the same thing when I was their age. Didn't catch the real Swinging Sixties, I wasn't old enough, but the early Seventies were pretty cool just the same. I personally don't see anything wrong with being lesbian, or having a life-period in a girl-girl relationship. It's a way of being different from the standard female wife and mother role model. And it can be fun, provided you can work out what you're supposed to do with and to each other. Do I think the same's right for boys? No, probably not. They're not strong enough for a start…"
As I laid back and listened to this remarkable monologue I tried to imagine what this 'strange' woman looked like. And now, at last, I knew. And I was impressed. It was at this instant that I first began to learn that I had The Power.
