3 posts tagged “refraction”

There was, however, one attractive girl in the lab that I had not asked out. Moira Dooley was a couple of years older than myself. She had a degree-equivalent technical qualification, and supervised some of the junior staff.  When I first started I was in a different section, but after a month or so I was moved into Moira's team. She was tall and blond, a physical type that was to play an important role in my later life, but at first I didn't even consider forming any extra-professional relationship with her. For a start, even though the age gap was only a few years, she struck me as an "older woman" and therefore out of reach. I had heard of guys getting off with girls older than themselves, but I had never actually met anyone who had done it. Such triumphs were spoken of in hushed voices. Secondly, she sported a large engagement ring, which she liked to look at and fiddle with in public. I assumed she was unavailable.

 I needed to learn several new techniques when I joined the team, and Moira was the obvious person to demonstrate them to me. For my first week, therefore, we spent a lot of time in each other's company, so that a certain familiarity quickly crept into our conversation. I don't mean flirting, but joking and gossiping, about the bosses or about the other girls in the team. She seemed to have a full knowledge of which of them I had asked out.

 Mini-skirts had not yet gone completely out of fashion and Moira, who had a lovely pair of legs, wore one most of the time. We often needed to sit close to one another, and from time to time her thigh would brush against mine. I enjoyed this, and would leave my leg where it was rather than edge away. She also liked to wear loose fitting blouses with the top button or so undone. Whenever she bent over I had a good view of her cleavage. She was not large breasted, and could just about get away without wearing a bra. Indeed, one day she came into work without one on. I spent virtually the entire day with an erection - I'm sure she noticed it, although she didn't say anything, and I was too shy to comment. Anyway, I was rapidly becoming highly aware of her physically.

 If I left work promptly in the evening, and walked flat out to the station, I could often catch an early train and save myself a forty minute wait. One evening I was belting along as usual when I heard someone calling me. I looked round and saw it was Moira running to catch me up.

 "Why do you walk so fast?"

 I explained, but nevertheless felt obliged to slow down so that she could walk with me. She also caught a train each evening, but in the opposite direction - she lived in Runcorn. From then on, she would occasionally stop me on my way out after work:

 "Hold on, I'll come with you. You can catch the later train."  I also began to suspect that she would deliberately keep me very busy in the late afternoon so that I would be forced to stay on for a few minutes to tidy up. After a few weeks our walk together to the station became a routine. We could chat more freely than in the lab, and she told me more about her private life. She had been engaged for a few years, but no date had been set. The idea was that they would marry when they could afford to buy a house. She complained that John, her fiancé kept getting passed over for promotion, and implied that he had too little ambition. I also caught other hints of dissatisfaction with the engagement, and suspected that she would be relieved if it were broken off. I began to wonder if she was trying to pick me up: one evening she probed me about my sex life (I answered evasively, while trying to give the impression that I had one), and on another occasion I was sure that her hand brushed deliberately against mine.

 What to do? I thought about making a pass at her, but I was terrified about making a fool of myself - she was my boss after all. And even if she said OK, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be used as an excuse for breaking off an engagement.

Section 1.04 is a bit smutty, so I will only post it for family & friends (most of my family & friends are smutty themselves.). I've decided also tolimit all future Refraction postings to friends and family. If any regular readers want to keep up with the story, then add a comment to that effect & I'll get it to you.

I had heard that he had given up his marketing job and was trying to make a full time career out of restoring Victorian machinery - fairground rides like this one, canal boats, motor cars. He was now on a working holiday, having put one of his rides on a low-loader, and was making a short European tour, travelling from town to town and looking out especially for village fetes like the one we were at.

 While he  was explaining all this a spectacularly pretty girl approached. He put his arm around her waist and introduced her by her first name. I raised my eyebrows at this, but before I could formulate my question he answered it for me:

 "Rachel doesn't much like the fairground life, so she's gone back to her family in Stockport with the kids. Eileen here is helping me out in various ways."

 He looked Penny up and down with a lascivious grin, and the old twinkle in his eye:

 "What about you then? You seem to have done all right for yourself. Come on then, introduce us!"

 "Sorry. This is Penny.  We're getting married next month."

 A wry smile: "Married eh? I suppose I ought to congratulate you, but I can't really recommend it myself."

 What had gone wrong between him and Rachel? I was bursting with curiosity, but didn't want to go into details in the presence of Penny and Eileen. The conversation moved on to various old friends and what they were doing now. Eventually I asked about Hopper. Was Jane still with him?

 "Funny you should ask that. I'm surprised you didn't know. They're over here in Brussels. He's launching a new European political party. Martin's an important guy now. There's been telly programmes about him."

 This was amazing news, and I pressed Frank for a contact address or 'phone number. He didn't have any more information, and in any case he and Eileen had to rush off. I would not have noticed it, but there had been a change of tone in the racket coming from the steam engine. Fixing that together took higher priority than reminiscing with me. Penny had her ride and we moved on to see the rest of the fete. Before we left for Brussels I tried to speak to Frank again, but he had disappeared. Eileen thought he had probably found a bar somewhere.

 In the car on the way back home Penny enquired about Frank, Rachel and Martin. As I pieced together the story for her, I had the disconcerting feeling that my mind had gone into auto-rewind. Back slowly at first, to the wedding, the last time I had seen any of the three. Then, with increasing speed, back again to that September before the start of our second year at Oxford. Still faster to that summer between school and university. Before the tape ran out and the cassette ejected, I mentally hit the stop button.

going up

 Were I to meet myself as I was at eighteen I don't suppose I would  like myself very much. As teenage boys go I wasn't outstandingly selfish or arrogant, although I was bad enough. What I would now find objectionable would be the pseudo-philosophical clap-trap I used to justify these attitudes. I left school at Christmas, but it was the middle of February before I found a job. In the mean time, determined to give the impression of being a left-wing intellectual when I started at Oxford, I buried my nose in Marx and Nietsche, Darwin and Einstein, Sartre and Tolstoy. You know the stuff - total bollocks most of it. I told myself that it was perfectly reasonable not to give a toss about anybody else's feelings. Fortunately my reading was interrupted by an unexpected acceptance for a job in an industrial chemistry laboratory in Widnes.

 We didn't have a car in the family in those days, so I had to travel by train from Liverpool city centre. This necessitated an early start, and a late return home, so that from Monday to Friday I was much too tired for any serious reading. My mind turned, perhaps more healthily, to sex. 

 My school only admitted boys, and in any case I had always been something of a swot, so that up to then I hadn’t spent much time with girls. This now changed. Girls formed about two thirds of the technical support staff in the lab, and there were several pretty ones that immediately attracted my attention. Unfortunately, one by one, they all turned me down flat. I used to sit in Widnes railway station each evening, cold and wet, and feel thoroughly lonely and depressed.  Paul Simon's song "Homeward Bound" was inspired by Widnes railway station, and I could understand why.

:Vanity publishing again. Refraction is an unpublished novel - unpublished mainly because I never submitted it anywhere. At least I finished it, unlike Fixation. I sat on it for two reasons: primarily because I was dissatisfied with it, although I think there are some good bits, but also because I know that the publishers get buried with coming of age stuff like this & rarely get past the first page. Anyway, Vox gives me the chance to put it up in 500-1000 word tranches & let interested people take a look. I originally called it Primary Colours, but soemone else nicked that title for a political novel.

FAIRGROUND ATTRACTIONS

              I never could see the point of fairground rides, even as a boy. I mean, why pay out a large fraction of your pocket money just to be thrown around violently for five minutes or so, and then to be deposited back where you started? It's not as if I ever found the rides exciting. I suppose I always had too logical a way of looking at things: if hundreds of people rode on a particular machine every day without getting thrown out, then I wouldn't be thrown out either. Perhaps my attitude rather spoilt the fun for me, but it also had its advantages. I could show off in front of tougher kids by going on rides that would scare the pants off them. Once, as a teenager, I spent an entire big dipper ride enjoying a tight embrace from a pretty girl that I hardly knew, who was obviously convinced that she was going to be sent flying at any moment.

              I feel the same way about all those outdoor pursuits, such as skiing and wind surfing, that are really just complicated ways of getting from A back to A again. Why not just stay where you are? I reckon sunbathing is just about the best sport there is, although cricket's not too bad (least ways, not the way I play it).

              I once tried to develop a philosophy of life around this attitude, but it didn't work. I reasoned that whatever we do in life, nothing much changes, so why do anything? Why go on holiday, for example, when after a couple of weeks you'll be back where you came from? For a few days I even managed to depress myself with this dismal outlook; everything seemed so utterly futile. Fortunately a solution soon came to me: So what if our passage through life is futile? That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to enjoy the journey. It was a silly philosophy anyway. Although it might make sense on a five minutes time scale, it broke down completely when applied to longer periods. For all the ups and downs on a big dipper, you're basically the same person when you get off. On the other hand, unless you're a hermit, you'll meet a lot of people as you travel through life and something's bound to rub off. Even if a complicated series of emotional or financial snakes and ladders appears to have landed you back at square one, you'll still be an older person when you get back. Probably wiser too, though you can't guarantee that. Some people never seem to learn.

               I tried to explain all this to Penny recently but she told me to shut up waffling. Penny doesn't have much time for metaphysics. What I wanted to say, if she hadn't wandered off, was that it was the self-same fairground ride that had closed a key chapter of my life, which now seemed to have opened another. 

*

               Shortly before we married, Penny and I went to Breeskens in Dutch Flanders for a weekend. The Sunday afternoon was too cold for sunbathing so we went into the village, where there was some sort of local celebration going on. A large, colourful, noisy merry-go-round was attracting a lot of attention, and Penny, who was not so familiar with such fairground rides wanted to go and have a look.

               The guy in charge of the carousel had his back to us, but his greasy, thin, blond hair, and his tall, slender figure seemed familiar to me. He was trying to persuade the Dutch to identify which children sitting on the merry-go-round were theirs, and to part with a guilder for each child. This was not proving easy, and he was muttering in English some unpleasant remarks about the Dutch and their attitude to money. I immediately recognised the voice.

               "Frank Mortimer! What on earth are you doing here?"