24 Sept 2022 | Issue 34
Last week I was on holiday, and this week said adventure culminated in catching germs on a plane. Removal men are arriving imminently, coincidently while tidying my hard disk I came across something I wrote a decade ago.
Not the standard fare, but I hope you enjoy it. Promise, promise, promise, normal service will be resumed next weekend. Paid subscribers are allowed to complain. The rest of you… something about monkeys, peanuts and pox. Or is that pay?
Gum
It's not that my childhood was strict, just circumstances made it a sheltered one. And although I wasn't a boarder, an all girls school still meant no boys.
Dad would drive me each morning, and mother ferry my school friends back and forth when they visited.
Local boys congregated at the nearest village to school; but they thought us snobs and frankly we found them brash. Brothers attended the annual disco but an unspoken rule said a lifetime of ridicule if you got off with them.
Then, a month before I turned sixteen mum went to stay with her sister and rather than miss his work Christmas do, dad said I could accompany him.
There, the mystery of a boy that no friends knew drew me stronger than any force in physics. Only a year older but almost alien in experience: tanned with stubble already, he smoked, he chewed gum. Two things forbidden by life at school.
Out of sight, out of mind on the fire escape, we french kissed all night, dad preoccupied by the free bar. My boy may have told me all about himself as he dragged on another Marlborough, I remember only my tongue in his mouth, intertwined with the gum and cigarette smoke.
As we left by some irrational instinct I asked for the gum from his mouth. Unable to kiss him in front of dad I gave him a look I hoped said my heart had melted as he folded the foil from his cigarette packet around it.
Each night in bed I would unwrap the gum and masturbate, chewing, savouring his taste of smoke and testosterone. His flavour slowly fading with each orgasm.
A month later I had to concede that only memory held the taste. My sullen mood persuading father to drive to town, where something bigger than the village shop would stock pink bubble gum.
I stood blushing in the shop, purchased several pieces. My arousal making me unable to resist popping a piece into my mouth there and then, to masticate like foreplay on the drive home. And my excitement crashing as I tasted... only the saccharin of powdered gum flavour.
Possibly the only girl to ever be disappointed by a visit to a candy shop.
Julian Baker
16 July 2013
Illustration by Fatima Fletcher
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