The Woodcutter

It’s a marvellous place to be, beautifully airy in three directions with the huge bulk of Pillar Fell itself looming behind.

She drank it all in then she turned towards me, a wide smile on her face.

‘Thanks,’ she said, pulling her hat off so that her golden hair once more floated in the gentle breeze.

Then in one fluid movement she pulled her T-shirt over her head, kicked off her trainers, pushed down her shorts and stepped out of them.

‘Would you like to fuck me?’ she said.

I stood staring at her, dumbfounded.

Part of me was thinking that anyone on their way up the path to the summit of Pillar has a perfect view of the top of the rock.

Another part was thinking there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen. She was as far as you could get from those pneumatic images in the porn mags that got passed around at school.

But despite the danger of being overlooked, despite her lack of any obvious feminine attractiveness, my heart and my soul and, yes, my body was crying out in answer to her question: Oh yes, I’d like to fuck you very much!

And I did.

What was it like? It was a first for me, and for her too. I knew that because I ended up with blood on my cock. So, a pair of raw virgins, but we meshed like we’d been doing it for years, and unless they ran lessons in faking it at that expensive boarding school of hers, she enjoyed it every bit as much as I did. I can’t take any credit for that. While it was happening I was totally absorbed in my own feelings. But afterwards as we lay wrapped in each other’s arms, I knew I wanted this to be for ever.

In the end it was her who pushed me away and stood up.

‘Mustn’t be late,’ she said, ‘or those two will run scared and give the game away.’

She got dressed as quickly as she’d stripped, but not through any modest need to cover up. I’ve never met anyone as unselfconscious as Imogen.

I lay there and watched her, then followed suit. She would have done the descent unroped, but I wouldn’t let her.

On the long walk back I don’t think we exchanged more than half a dozen words. There was lots I wanted to say but, like I told you, communication wasn’t my thing.

With about a quarter mile to go she halted and put her hand on my chest.

‘I’m OK from now on,’ she said.

I said, ‘Yeah. When…how…?’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you when I want you.’

And she was gone.

So there you have it, Elf. Sex, rites of passage, teenage trauma, all the steamy stuff you people like to paddle your inquisitive little fingers in.

Watch out that you don’t find yourself touching something nasty!

But that’s what turns you on, isn’t it?

That’s what turns you on!

Elf (#ulink_ab421730-5635-572d-9b61-8276d8e79000)

i

When she was thirteen Alva Ozigbo’s English teacher had asked her class to write about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

That night Alva sat so long over the assignment that both her parents asked if there was something they could help with.

She regarded them long and assessingly before shaking her head.

Her father, Ike, big, black and ebullient, was a consultant cardiologist at the Greater Manchester Teaching Hospital. Her mother, Elvira, slender, blonde and self-contained, had been an actress. She’d left her native Sweden in her teens to study in London in the belief that the English-speaking world would offer far greater opportunities. For a while her Scandinavian looks had got her parts that required Scandinavian looks, but it soon became clear that her best future lay on the stage. The nearest she got to a film career was being screentested for a Bergman movie. She still talked of it as a missed opportunity but the truth was the camera didn’t love her. On screen she became almost transparent, and by her mid-twenties she was resigned to a career of secondary roles in the theatre. She was Dina in The Pillars of the Community at the Royal Exchange when she met Ike Ozigbo. When they married six months later, she made a rare joke as they walked down the aisle together after the ceremony.

‘I always knew I’d get a starring role one day.’

To which he’d romantically replied, ‘And it’s going to be a recordbreaking run!’

So it had proved.

Thirteen-year-old Alva was proud of her father, but it had always been her mother she pestered for stories of her life on the stage. Now, after vacillating for a good hour between the two main exemplars in her life, it was not without a small twinge of disloyalty that she finally wrote that what she wanted to be was an actress.

At the time she meant it. But somewhere over the next few years that urge to get inside the skin of a character had changed from interpretation to analysis. She discovered that wanting to understand was not the same as wanting to be. The actress had to lose herself in the part; Alva found that she wanted to preserve herself, to remain the detached observer even as all the intricate wirings of personality and motivation were laid bare.

Psychiatry gave her that option, but she soon discovered that the observer had to be an actor too. When she read Hadda’s account of his first encounters with Imogen, she felt a great surge of excitement. To be sure, there was a deal of hyperbole here. The bolder the picture he painted of himself as the victim of a grand passion for one woman, the dimmer his sense of that other degrading and disgusting passion became. But in his effort to stress that his love for Imogen was based on some collision of mind and spirit rather than simply a natural adolescent lust, he had fallen into a trap of his own setting.

What did he say? Here it was…there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen…Yet he’d been sexually roused by this prepubescent figure, and sexually satisfied too. This was probably what he saw in his fantasies thereafter, this was the source of those desires that had brought about his downfall.

She recalled a passage in the first piece he’d written for her, when he was in his best hard-nosed thriller mode.

Imogen was sitting up in bed by this time. Even in these fraught circumstances I was distracted by sight of her perfect breasts.

Stressing his red-blooded maleness, trying to distract her attention, and his own, away from the fact that it was unformed new-budding bosoms that really turned him on.

And now she knew she would need to call upon her acting skills when next she saw him. She must give no hint that she saw in this narrative anything more than an honest and moving account of first love. Indeed, it might be well to give him a quick glimpse of that Freudian prurience he was accusing her of. He was, she judged, a man who liked to be right, who was used to having his assessments of people and policies confirmed. No way could she hope to drive such a man to that final climactic confrontation with his own dark inner self, but with care and patience she might eventually lead him there.

Another spur to caution was the fact that he’d obviously got the writing bug. She’d seen this happen in other cases. The people she dealt with were more often than not obsessive characters and this was something she liked to use to her advantage. Her guess was that he’d have another exercise book ready for her, but if she annoyed him, he’d punish her by not handing it over.

That was his weapon.

Hers of course was his desire that what he wrote should be read! Withholding it might punish her, but only at the expense of punishing himself.

So she prepared for her next session with more than usual care.

ii

‘Wolf,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your father.’

‘What?’

She’d wrong-footed him, she could tell. He’d expected her to home in on that first sexual engagement on top of Pillar Rock.