WARM LAGER

by
Stephen J. Golds

I saw a lot of women on the street when I was walking around town. Women and girls in short skirts, smiling and on their way to work. Sometimes I gave tickets to these women and they all knew all they had to do was smile at me to make me crumble and void the ticket, put it under a VDA, Vehicle Driven Away, do the paper work to make the thirty pound fine disappear.

Unfortunately, these women tended to avoid me as much as possible when I wasn‘t giving their vehicles fines. What woman wants a traffic warden? Ninety percent of woman avoided eye contact with me. The other ten percent stabbed me with eyes like machetes. In my career as a traffic warden, I only met one woman who didn’t give a fuck, a woman who liked me. If it only was for a short while I wore that blue uniform and stood a chance with a woman, her name was Kathy, and she kissed me on the lips when she nailed me to the cross.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon and I had told the supervisors that I wasn’t feeling well and needed to go home. I gave in my equipment, handed in my paper work and the three copies of the tickets that I had given out. Signed the end shift sheet and clocked out. I told them that I had diarrhoea and feared I would shit myself if I continued until the end of the shift so I got to leave un-hounded with suspicious questions. It was three fifteen by the time I stepped out of the car park into the warm yellow sunshine. I intended to go home and lay in bed watching shitty kid’s cartoons and smoking. I went to the corner shop to buy matches and a cheap pack of cigars. The streets were busy with school kids and tired, gone to pot housewives pushing ugly kids in prams. She wasn’t outside the corner shop when I went in. Or maybe I didn’t see her. I saw her stood there when I came out. She was leaning with her back against the shops glass window and was slipping her left foot delicately in and out of one of her high-heeled shoes. A small foot making slow love to a high heel. She had her hair wrapped up in a beautiful mess on the top of her head. Her school skirt was hitched up and she was wearing black tights that had cobweb patterns that let me see some of the milky flesh hidden underneath. She looked at me and I saw that her eyes were a shining black. She smiled at me with lips that were very plump and bloody with lipstick. We looked at each other and she didn’t look away, so I did. I looked at the grey wrinkled concrete on the path and I looked at my scuffed broken down shoes. “Some of my friends judge men by their shoes” she said.

I didn’t know whether she was talking to me directly or to herself or maybe someone else so I just nodded my head slightly. She pushed herself off of the shop window by curving her back and pushing against the glass like a cobra. I unwrapped the cigar box in my hand and took out a cigar, unwrapped the cigar from the plastic and put it into my mouth. Bits of tobacco fell onto my tongue and I took the cigar from my mouth and picked them out slowly. I looked at the brown flakes on my finger, flicked them into the road, and then returned the cigar to my mouth.

“Why do you smoke cigars?”

She was closer to me now and I could smell her perfume. It was a heavy scent and it screamed down my nostrils and burst into my lungs. I guessed she was sixteen or maybe fifteen. She had the body of a woman though. Her tits were big and rose out of her tightening her white school shirt. Mountains of untouched snow. Her thighs were tight and I imagined them wrapped hard around me. It was only the school uniform and her dark eyes that gave away how young she was.

“I don’t know” I said “maybe their cheaper then cigarettes.

“You think you’re sophisticated”

I didn’t know whether that was a question or a statement so shrugged my shoulders and shook my head like a retarded old man. She continued holding her night coloured eyes on me. She was like a beautiful angel of death. She bent down and reached into a black schoolbag that had white Tipex graffiti scrawled all over it. My eyes were bad so I had to squint to try and make out any of the writing. Her skirt fell away from her thigh as she knelt down and I looked at the top of her thigh and felt very desperate and destroyed. I felt like a piece of iron stuck out of the sand looking at waves with dead sightless eyes. She took out a cassette case that had a couple of cigarettes in it, opened it and took a cigarette out penetrating her lips with it.

“Can you give me a light please Mr Sophisticated”

My hands crawled nervously around my body looking for the box of matches and found them in my trouser pocket.

“What’s with the cassette case” I handed her the box of matches and I felt her skin on mine for an instant.

“I steal cigarettes from my ma and keep them in this case so they don’t get broken or crushed or something. I’m clever you see.”

She lit the cigarette and inhaled it like fresh air. Sighing as she let the blue breathe out of her red lips and out of her small nostrils.

“Yeah I think I did something like that once.”

“You’re clever too then” she smiled and I saw her teeth. They were very white and looked like bricks that fairies made their houses with. She held the blue box of matches out to me and I stepped back.

“You can keep those.”

“That’s sweet. My first gift from you.”

She looked me up and down with her large Spanish eyes and sucked hard on her cigarette.

“I wonder what gift I can give you.”

Her face was serious, but her eyes were glittering and I couldn’t tell whether she was taking the piss out of me. She was maybe the first woman to show any sort of interest in me in weeks. She was maybe even the first woman to even look at me in weeks. “That leather jacket is too small for you. You know that don’t you?”

She leaned into me and took hold of the sleeve. Her fingers were long and fine looking and her fingernails had black nail polish on them. I took a drag on my cigar and tried to look disinterested.

“Yeah. Yeah, I did know that but thanks for mentioning it. I can’t afford a new one right now.”

“I think you’re nervous. You’re a nervous old boy.”

I felt my face burn. She knew me and I had only gave her a box of fucking matches.

“I’m not old I’m twenty three.”

“That’s almost middle aged” she smiled and laughed and I laughed too even though I didn’t want to. I couldn’t help it. She made me feel drunk. Happy, good drunk.

“Are you sure you want to be talking to me?”

“Why’s that then?”

“I’m a traffic warden. I’m a cunt for a living.”

She touched my arm and ran her long black painted fingernails down the leather leaving white scratch marks.

“I know. I’ve seen you in town walking about looking bored.”

I didn’t know what to say again so just kept quiet and waited to see if she said anything else.

“I think you look sexy in your uniform” she said as she flicked her cigarette into the street. She fixed her black eyes on mine and then smiled letting blue smoke funnel from her nostrils.

“No not really you look like a bit of nerd, but I have never met a black hearted cunt before.”

I don’t know why but her comment hurt me, angered me so I told her I had to go and walked towards the bus stop. She called something out to me but I didn’t hear and I didn’t look around.

When I got home, my parents were sat watching the television. There were pans on the stove and a few plates with scraps next to the sink. The light in the kitchen was the colour of piss and it coloured everything else the same colour. Even my guts. I made myself a ham sandwich, took a can of lager out of the fridge and said hello to my folks. My mum smiled and asked me how my day was and my father reached for the remote control to heighten the volume on the television. I went to my room.

That night when I showered I wanked myself off thinking about the schoolgirl with dark eyes. I thought about fucking her in the park underneath a large pine tree. Her skirt pulled all the way up. Pink knickers ripped aside. That blood coloured mouth on mine. Those tight hips asphyxiating me as I ripped into her like a demon fucking an angel. Feeling her pussy tight around my cock struggling to keep hold of the last lingering shred of its innocence. After I came, I looked down at the shiny white porcelain and the black plughole and felt bad; I was twenty-three and wanking over a fifteen-year-old girl. But then I kept thinking about her body, the body of a woman. It didn’t seem all that important.

She was outside the corner shop the next day.

“Can I try one of your cigars today? And I‘m sorry, did I upset you yesterday?”

“No, I was just pissed off about something else.”

I felt my head lighten on my shoulders and it felt as though something had shifted in my stomach. The shit that had thrashed around in my guts had now crawled into my large intestines and I couldn’t feel it. Maybe I was happy. I didn’t know. I wasn’t too sure what that felt like now. I couldn’t recollect it. I suppose that it is something you can only feel when you feel it. I gave her one of my cigars and I liked the way she let it hang from her lips. She was wearing a silver coloured lipstick and I thought she looked very pretty. I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed the day before. She had a lot of pink coloured scars about an inch long all over her hands. She saw me looking and pulled the sleeves of her shirt down over the small lines of smooth flesh. I didn’t know what to say.

“Did you have a fight with a cat and lose?”

“No. I had a fight with myself and lost.”

“Oh” I said. I smoked a little more of my cigar and looked at the orange burning tobacco at the tip to try and make the silence and the awkwardness fade a little. It didn’t. I told her I had to go and quickly left again her again to catch a bus back home. Back to my cold, sterile, house to spend the night feeling the darkness spreading like cancer towards me and the voices bouncing around the cushioned room that was my mind.

On the bus home, it was very hot and the roads were blocked with cars. I looked at the people who were driving and I could see that they had the contorted faces of demons. Sometimes I know this is hell. Hell is in my eyes and everyone else’s faces. An old man, hobbling with a walking stick crossed the street about twenty metres in front of the bus and I felt myself cheer for the bus to run him down. Blood all over the windscreen and a delay to going home to the voices and there twisted sad faces. The old bastard made it across the street safely and the wheels of the bus went round and round. Round and round.

When I got home, my parents were not there.

I drunk a few cans of lager and went to sleep.

After work, I walked towards the corner shop. I walked very fast because I was late getting out of work. I didn’t need any cigars; I had brought a pack in the morning. I was going to go and buy some matches even though I had a half-full box in my pocket. I saw her stood there. She was leaning against the window again and smoking a cigarette. She had a fat blonde girl with her. The fat girl had fat tits and fat thighs and a nose that hooked down like a kestrels. When my dark haired girl saw me, she jumped up and down and I watched her tits bounce as I walked towards them.

“Here he is. Here he comes” she said to her fat friend.

The blonde girl tilted her head and looked at me and I looked back repulsed. I thought even her eyes looked fat.

“He has come to buy cigars because his sophisticated” she said.

“If we keep meeting here like this you are going to have to give me your name” I said that because I needed to feel the way her name formed on my lips.

“My names Kathleen and this is my friend Carla” she nodded her head at the fat kid next to her and I nodded hello, not taking my eyes off of Kathleen. She was wearing her long dark hair down and it spread over her small shoulders like ravens wings. In my head, her name was pouncing around like a panther in a burning cage. Kathleen. Kathleen. Kathleen. Kathleen. Kathie. Beautiful Kath.

“You know what my name means?”

“I don’t know. Something good I bet.”

“It’s French for ‘petite and feminine‘ but it‘s also German for ‘courageous tiger’.”

“Sounds about right to me, though I don’t know what to think of the ‘courageous tiger’ bit though. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if you maul anyone.”

She laughed and just the sound of her laugh made me feel good, it made me feel happy.

“Will you buy us something to drink” the fat one with the hooked beak was talking.

“Not pop or any shit like that. Buy us something sophisticated” Kathleen said.

“If I do that” I said “I will have to drink with you. Adult supervision and all that.”

We went into the shop and I watched Kath as she danced around the shelves that were stacked with beers and lagers and that alcoholic pop shit we all drank as kids. The hem of her dress was swaying gently as she danced and I watched the muscles in her legs and thighs as they tightened and relaxed. Kath picked up a six-pack of lager and her fat friend picked up an alcoholic pop that was purple in colour.

“I thought maybe me and you could share these.” She held the can of lagers in the air towards me and winked her left eye and it opened and closed like butterfly wings. The girls took the drink and put it on the counter. The Bangladeshi man behind the counter looked at me very hard. His eyes were extremely white and bulged out against his brown skin.

“I can not serve you. I am sorry. These girls are just children.”

“Look Abdul or whatever your name is. The drinks are for me so just serve us please.”

I looked cool and collective and I could feel Kath’s eyes on me. Burning into me like needles carving her name all over my pale skin. I paid for the drinks and we left the store. We went to the park and sat underneath a weeping willow tree. I took off my leather jacket and laid it down for Kath to sit on. Her friend made a comment about not having anything to sit on and I ignored her. The fat cunt wouldn’t stop talking and I kept praying that she would just fuck off so I could be alone with Kath. She sat there, her large legs folded over like mounds of white dirt and gulped slowly at her purple drink. I got the impression she didn’t approve of Kath hanging around with me and was only there with us because she wanted to keep an eye on us. She kept asking me questions. Trying to make small talk with me.

Was it true that I was a traffic warden?

Was I married?

Did I have kids?

Did I have any kids my own age?

How much money did I make being a traffic warden?

I kept giving her short answers and finally she took the hint and sat in silence, gulping disgustedly at her drink. Finally, she left and Kath and I were finally left alone. Kath’s leg was against mine. My heart was beating fast and I was shaking a little. She drank her lager slowly and I watched as she put the aluminium can to her wet mouth. We didn’t talk. We didn’t need to. The lager was warm and I could hear the hum of traffic in the background. I smelt her perfume on the hot flowery breeze. I was shaking bad and she took my hand in hers. Our fingers were entwined like vines. I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She didn’t pull away and she didn’t flinch, she smiled at me and put her lips to the lager again. I moved the can away from her mouth and put my lips on hers. Her mouth was warm and moist as I slipped my tongue inside her. I felt her tongue on mine and it felt as though I had ripped a hole through a cloud and climbed through it. I felt her hands pushing against my chest as I leaned into her guided her down into the grass. Her long black hair lay across the grass like a sea of stunning darkness against the green. Her eyes were closed and I noticed for the first time that the edges of her eyelids turned down sadly. She grimaced as I squeezed her thigh. Then her hands were on my chest again pushing harder. I sat up as she scrambled from underneath me and walked hurriedly across the park. I called out to her but she only started to walk quicker so I doubted she heard me. I sat there for a while and finally picked up my jacket, put it on and went home.

© Stephen J. Golds
Reproduced with permission

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