PSoML Part 11

Part 10 is here

part 11: jumper

There had been a time, shortly after Ronnie left school and before she and Dave had, Lucy visited him where he was staying. Ronnie wasn’t exactly living in the best circumstances, but he made the effort to get the place as clean as possible for her weekend visit. It was during Easter. Ronnie was sharing a flat with a couple of other members of his band, and he had a choice, while Lucy was there, of sleeping on the couch in the communal living area, or sticking a camp bed in his bedroom. She was really nice about it and insisted he use the camp bed option. Otherwise there’d have been no getting to sleep.

They went out for the day, wandered around London, stopping frequently for coffee and talk; then sat in a pub for the evening and missed the last bus home. Neither Ronnie nor Lucy could afford a taxi by this time, so they walked home, which turned out to be about three or four miles. They’d been talking all day, but carried on, hardly noticing the distance they were having to walk, or the blisters on their feet. Arriving home in the small hours, they went to their separate beds. The flat was cold, so Lucy was borrowing one of Ronnie’s jumpers. It was an old, baggy, woolly jumper that he’d scalded by drying it too close to the electric fire. So it was blue with a kind of orange burn on it that people mistook for spilled paint. It was as close as Ronnie ever got to seeing Lucy naked. She had the most beautiful legs: smooth and brown. She was wearing nothing but his big baggy jumper and her underwear, and he got a quick look at her legs as she got into bed and under the covers. Ronnie’s fingers were burning with the anticipation of what it might feel like to touch her, to gently run his hand over her skin.

They sat in the café and talked about it. Lucy said, “I knew you were checking me out. I was exhausted from the walk, and I’d been thinking all day how odd it was that you hadn’t made a move on me. I mean, I knew you had always been a loyal friend to Dave, but things were different now. Time had moved on. You weren’t seeing him every day, and we were a long way from him. But we spent the whole day together, not two feet apart, and you didn’t even try to kiss me.”
“I was like a busted radio,” said Ronnie, stirring his second coffee. “I just didn’t pick up any signals from you. Or couldn’t, more to the point. Didn’t know what to look for.”

They had lain in the dark for about another hour, talking about things, voices croaking from the effort of keeping up a 12-hour conversation. They’d spent the evening talking, then the long walk home talking, and then they couldn’t stop talking. It was the first and only time they’d had so much time together, and certainly the only time he got to spend as much time with her without Dave being there. Staring at the ceiling in the dark, feeling the night breeze blowing across his room from the open window, Ronnie was saying a silent prayer that she’d ask him to get in bed with her. No way he was going to make the first move. His best friend’s girl and all.

“I wrote a song about it,” said Ronnie, after a pause.
“I know,” Lucy said. “Who was it recorded it? Jody somebody?”
“Jo Dee Peters. But I did record it too.”
“When? I never heard it?”
“It was on that record I’m trying to get back off my first wife.”
There was a long pause. Then she smiled at him.
“We’re trying to get back a lot of things, aren’t we?” said Lucy. “It’s so hard.” She stared down the street towards the church. “We need to put things back where they belong.”