Chapter 6: A Proper Girlfriend Asks for Trouble

I didn’t tell Mum about my new status – either that Bronwyn was now my girlfriend or that we had ‘adult bed privileges’ at the Reed’s. I was relieved she didn’t enquire too closely, and I remembered what Uncle Frank had said about her not seeing anything she didn’t have to, so I didn’t actually need to lie. But I think on some level she knew.

I was certainly pretty happy. I had every teenage boy’s dream, a girlfriend who was a companion, a friend in more than just a ‘dating’ sense, who was keen to explore mutual sexual pleasuring, and a warm, safe, comfortable and secure place to do that.

The other parts of my life were working well too. The study sessions helped me cope with the academic demands the school put on students in the top stream, and that relieved the pressure Mum and Dad were applying.

I was never going to be as good as the top half dozen in my homeroom, but I was able to scrape into the top quartile in most of my subjects, and do a bit better than that in Biology and English. The teachers made it clear that the top guys were destined for National Scholarships and academic or diplomatic careers, the rest of us for the ‘professions’ if we learned to work hard and kept at it.

Cricket gave way to winter sports. I had been very big for my age (still was for that matter), and since rugby was weight graded, my first rugby games as a six year old had pitted me against eight and nine year olds of the same weight. They were much tougher and stronger than me, and I did not enjoy my first season of rugby. The following winter, I played soccer, to the ill concealed disappointment of my Dad, and the quiet delight of my Grandad. There was much less body contact, and I enjoyed the subtlety of ‘the beautiful game’ so I stuck with Soccer. I was good at it, and even though I was only in 9th grade, I played a number of games for the school 2nd XI. Soccer had quite low social status at the school, and many of the rugby players and their hangers on called us ‘Pansies’ and questioned our manhood, but a place in the 2nd XI as a ninth grader nevertheless drew some comment from my peers.

That winter, Grandad gradually became my taxi driver and personal coach, ferrying me to our ‘away’ matches in his old Austin A40, and I often found myself returning to his place after the matches, and eating Saturday dinner with him and Grandma and Uncle Frank.

After a couple of months of my ‘studying’ at the Reeds pretty regularly, Mum asked directly whether Bronwyn was my girlfriend. I admitted she was, and managed the rest of the conversation which followed without either lying directly or admitting our level of intimacy.

My earnings from helping Uncle Frank on jobs in the weekend dropped away as I got busier with study and sport and Bronwyn. Fortunately, I had no call to spend much, since Bronwyn and I conducted our relationship largely at the Reeds, and rarely went anywhere except to her bed. The little old single bed had been replaced with a new double with an innerspring mattress, and we enjoyed both it and each other all through that winter.

I particularly enjoyed the Reed’s attitude to electric heating. Mr and Mrs Reed had no problem with keeping all their living spaces at a comfortable temperature, and in all the time I spent at their house, I never heard them tell either of the twins to turn a heater off. It wasn’t like that at home. Dad was marginally obsessive about fresh air (lots is healthier), and the electricity bill.

“Turn that off! Put some more clothes on if you’re cold!” or “It’s stuffy in here – open a window!”

It was partly economics of course. Dad was a surveyor, and earned a reasonable wage, but Mum didn’t work and there wasn’t a huge amount to come and go on. Both Mum and Dad had been teenagers during the great depression of the early 1930s and would never forget that experience, so bedroom temperatures at home in winter would have discouraged naked frolicking even if Bronwyn and I had had ‘adult bed privileges’ at my place.

As it turned out, Bronwyn came over infrequently. Not that Mum and Dad were unwelcoming. They accepted that I was growing up and had a girlfriend, but we were not allowed what would later be known as PDAs, and if we were in my room, the door had to remain open. So most of our relationship was conducted at the Reed’s.

There was a bit of drama towards the end of the winter term. Bronwyn and I were at the local movie theatre. That didn’t happen often, but Spartacus was showing and she really wanted to go, so we did. My Soccer team had a bye, so we went to the Saturday matinee. The movie was OK, and we had no need for the cover of darkness to explore each other, our bodies were pretty familiar territory by then and we were content just to hold hands.

Trouble started after the show. There had been some bullying at school. That wasn’t unusual. Boy’s schools in NZ at that time could be pretty brutal places, and the staff tended to take the attitude that ‘boys will be boys’, and that the unfortunate kid being treated badly needed to ‘learn to stand up for himself’. But things had gone badly wrong. The hapless ninth grader who had had his head shoved down the toilet had got water in his lungs and eventually been hospitalised with pneumonia. The two 13th grade guys concerned had been given their marching orders as a result. They had not been strangers to the Principal’s office over the previous five years, and had a reputation round the school for general nastiness. It was rumoured that they had ‘gang connections’.

And there they were in the foyer of the Ascot cinema, looking for trouble. They had been drinking. The age for purchasing alcohol in NZ at that time was 21, but the law was honoured as much in the breach as the observance, and it was clear from their condition that they had got some spirits from one of the many local ‘sly groggers’, mixed it with Coke, and had been sipping during the show. It had been a long movie and they were certainly not in any condition to drive.

They leered at Bronwyn. We had to walk past them to get out, and I tried to hurry her, but whether consciously or unconsciously, she slowed just a little.

“Nice tits Darlin’. Whatcha doin’ with this swot?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t smile or give any outward sign of encouragement, but what I now think of as her ‘body energy’ changed and as Uncle Frank would put it, she ‘lit up like a Christmas Tree’. I intuited she was suddenly wet, though there was too much cigarette smoke in the Ascot foyer to smell anything else. I remembered Uncle Frank had told me that some women are excited by ‘bad boys’ and attracted to them sexually. That was an extra complication, but I had no intention of abandoning Bronwyn to their advances.

Despite their somewhat befuddled state, they picked up Bronwyn’s excitement, and the one I knew only as ‘Growcott’ stepped directly into our path.

“Drop this pansy – we’ll giveya a good time.” His mate, one of the Thompsons (Tompsons Tomsens – whatever), added his bobs worth.

“We’ve got some booze and smokes!” They smelled like it!

Growcott grabbed Bronwyn by the wrist. She tried to pull away but he held on. Bronwyn was frightened, I was both scared and determined not to back off.

“Let me go!

“Let her go!”

“Fuck off ya pansy cunt! Stay outa this!”

I should have. Bronwyn was in no real danger in the crowded foyer, and certainly didn’t need physically rescuing at that stage of the proceedings, but I tried to step between Growcott and Bronwyn and reached to grab the hand that was holding her wrist. Bad idea!

Thompson swung a roundhouse punch. I didn’t see it coming and wouldn’t have known what to do if I had. His fist hit me square between the eyes, slamming against my forehead and the bridge of my nose. It hurt a lot for perhaps a tenth of a second before my bruised brain shut down.

The next few minutes were a jumbled and painful blur, and when I ‘came round’ properly, I was sitting in a foyer chair, and Bronwyn was holding a handkerchief to my nose. There was no sign of Growcott and Thompson, and the foyer was nearly empty. The people who remained were studiously minding their own business. That was how people behaved in NZ in those days. The only person ‘fussing around’ was the theatre manager, and it seemed his main concern was not to get my blood on his foyer furniture.

We walked straight home to my place. I was groggy and had a very bad headache as well as a very very sore nose and face, but by then the bleeding had stopped. Of course Mum and Dad wanted to know exactly what had happened, and questioned Bronwyn closely. She didn’t know the guys involved, and I knew only their surnames.

For one of the first times I can remember, Dad was fully engaged. We didn’t have a fridge at that stage, but he went to a neighbour for some ice, and instructed Bronwyn how to hold it over the bridge of my nose, He shone a torch in my eyes and seemed satisfied with what he saw.

After half an hours icing, he told me he was going to check my nose. He warned me it would hurt. He was right. He knelt on the floor, and laid me down on my back with my head between his knees. Then he pressed his forefingers into the place where my cheekbones rimmed my eye sockets with the bony part of my nose between them. He pressed his fingers together. There was a sort of grinding click, and I felt worse pain than I had with the punch, but my head was trapped between Dads knees and I couldn’t move away from the pressure.

“That’ll be OK. You’re going to have an amazing pair of shiners by tomorrow!” He turned to Bronwyn.

“Let’s get you home! Your parents will be starting to worry.” Mum adopted her ‘soothing’ tone. At the time I didn’t know whether she was soothing me or Dad.

“It’s ok. I’ve rung the Reeds and Bronwyn’s staying for tea.” She did, and I was sent to bed straight afterwards with a ‘couple of Aspro’, which was pretty much all there was for pain in those days.