Chapter 68

But Andrew didn’t have time to mope over being dumped by two young women on the same day. He had to stop and think about that sentence, very much the definition of first world problems. The one thing Andrew knew was he had not misled anybody. He might not be in the running for boyfriend of the year but he had not deceived either Tanvi or Katie. And he had shown Herculean restraint for the last six months. What did the most to alleviate his bruised ego was the long anticipated birthday shoot. The nearly 40 months in the planning birthday photo shoot.

Andrew was 16 years and 15 days old and had been invited to be one of the photographers at a shoot with a naked model. Everyone made a fuss about 16 because that was the legal age to photograph women naked. It would be another 20 years before the age was raised to 18. But it also didn’t make sense because there was no law about the age of the photographer, just the age of the model. But it was a convenient milestone that everyone had latched onto. Now Monica had just turned 23 and had been modelling since before she was 19. What did make Andrew smile was imagining his mother’s reaction. His parents, getting ever more remote from his life, consumed as they were by their new son Scott, and their own self-absorption. But his mother still worried about appearances, especially to the ever judgemental neighbours. If she knew what he was doing that night...

Okay there were the previous two Hogmanays, visits to the home of a Court of Session judge and his anally obsessed daughter, when Andrew stopped and thought about it, his mother was acting like an ostrich with her head in the sand.

The teasing from Maggie about the shoot had almost totally stopped. She and Andrew knew each other’s secrets. There was no need for teasing, no need for try and make Andrew blush. Maggie enjoyed modelling part-time and they both knew she was looking forward to the shoot, and that she would be turned on for a variety of reasons because Andrew was there. Andrew expected the shoot to be a one-off. There were eight men in the group, all over 30 and three of them over 40. Five ran their own businesses, three shops, a scrap merchant and Archie with his removal business. They were successful men who had money and indulged their passion for photography. Andrew did not expect them to accept him as anything but a one-off his presence. One of the guys Pat, the oldest in the group had a grandson who was only three years younger than Andrew. So Andrew wanted to enjoy the shoot, get the most out of it.

Nine guys were too many, that was immediately obvious. There were too many oblique angle shots and the dynamic within the group was different to the previous practice shoot. Tony and Angus quietly checked on Andrew but he just waved them off. Instead he was upset for Monica. This had built up in her mind and was not playing out as she had hoped. When her bra came off and Andrew finally got to see her wonderful breasts another of the photographers practically jumped in front of him. Cockblocking was a term that did not exist at the time in Britain but two of the guys, Kenny and Marty, were being significant dicks to Andrew during the shoot. There was nothing Andrew could do and so he took many fewer photographs than he originally expected to. When the session wrapped up, Andrew played the role of the grateful schoolboy, took the mild ribbing and just ignored the occasional snide comment.

The whole evening had been a huge disappointment and an anti-climax after literally years of build-up. There was probably a lesson in there somewhere. After a shoot the group normally hung around the studio and had a few beers. As Andrew had seen on several Saturday mornings often it was more than a few. So Andrew thanked everyone and got the hell out of there. Monica had given him the eye and he waited at the corner and two minutes later she joined him. Monica had already been replaced by Maggie.

“I am so sorry Andrew. Those two fucking idiots spoiled the night for you. And they knew what they were doing, jealous little pricks.”

“Don’t worry about it. Kenny is mad at me for solving the development problem with colour film. He had been charging a fiver to develop a roll of film and Tony only charges £3. The guys gave him shit for being a greedy fuck. I have no idea what Marty’s issue is.”

Andrew slyly smiled.

“Maybe he just likes your body.”

Maggie laughed and slipped her arm into his.

“He’s seen it enough times. You think he could have let you have a proper look.”

They both laughed. But Andrew had been thinking and had a suggestion.

“The start of the summer is pretty busy but I will have time later in July. If you would let me I would like to hire you as a model one evening. Just you and I, no one else there. Would you like that?”

“Really? That will be pretty pricey for you Andrew.”

“That is not an issue. Nine was too many people, even without the two clowns. I was thinking near the end of the session that I would like to at least once do a proper shoot with a model. Just me, not having to watch out for someone else, take shots of their ideas. I would like to spend a couple of hours, trying different things, different poses, different outfits. I really liked the second pair of heels you wore tonight. They did great things to your legs and bum.”

Maggie squeezed his arm.

“I have no idea why I am relaxed and comfortable chatting away to you about a shoot and I am already thinking about the next shoot. You think in about a month?”

Andrew nodded. They were about to part and Maggie pulled him round and down and kissed him for the first time.

“I can’t wait. Good night Andrew.”

Andrew sat in a confused daze on the bus on the way home. He had never really thought about whether he had a thing for older women but it was starting to be irrefutable. Women who were not just a year or two older liked him but women five years older and more also liked him. Leslie, Nikki and Fran were all platonic and he had thought of Maggie in the same way. But he had seen her naked that very night and he definitely needed to take a late-night shower when he got home. Now he had just come out and asked for a one on one photo shoot with her, naked, and she had agreed with alacrity and then kissed him. Horny and confused. Andrew was no different than every other 16 year old boy on the planet. Hmmm.

CCF camp was the perfect place to bring make Andrew snap out of his confusion. No time for thinking. ‘You’re in the Army now lad, we don’t want you to be thinking!’ Not completely true but true enough to give him pause.

The CCF platoon were in Perthshire, remote southwest Perthshire, at Scotland’s, indeed Britain’s, Alcatraz. Everyone knows the story of Alcatraz, the island prison in San Francisco Bay, the place where all the disruptive prisoners were sent. They only held the worst of the worst. Pick your own cliché, you know the tale. During the Second World War the British separated the worst Nazis, the true believers, from the normal rank and file Germans. The prisoners who were assessed as disrupters, the ones who planned to escape and cause havoc, they were also separated. So where do you think that the British sought to stash these troublesome malcontents? Any guesses? Cultybraggan Prisoner of War camp. And what do you think the British military did with it after the end of the war? Made it a camp where they sent schoolkids.

Miserable, god-forsaken place. Now Scotland has no shortage of miserable god-forsaken places. You could argue that there were whole parts of Scotland that God wanted nothing to do with. Dante never made it to Scotland or there would have been a tenth level of hell. Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, Treachery and Scottish Army bases.

It rained the whole bloody time. Andrew, together with everyone else there, gave up trying to be dry, stay dry or get dry. Damp and wet were the two choices. There were 250 13 to 17 year old cadets running round the Scottish hillside, camping out in tents, whining away and bemoaning their lot in life. It was definitely the wrong week to be out practicing living in the field. But nobody starved, nobody got trench foot and when they came back everyone was tired, hungry and very smelly. Andrew’s mother passed him his robe in the vestibule and made him strip naked before she would let him in the house. And even then he had to go straight to the shower. But a couple of showers and a weekend of constant eating and Andrew was raring to go.

The first couple of weeks back were if school was still in session. Up early, exercise and run and then off to the pool. The Commonwealth for the summer followed by studying in the morning and coding in the afternoon. Andrew had finished the fifth course with four ‘A’s and two ‘B’s and pushed hard at the first two modules of the 6^th course. That one was all to do with databases and matrices. How to store and retrieve data, efficient designs. All things that were going to be hugely useful in the program as they kept developing it.

The next week he and Leslie were going to head off for a couple of days and think about his life goals, her life goals and the intersection of the two. They had two rooms booked in a small rural hotel on the northern outskirts of Perth. Just an hour away but a chance to escape from the usual routine.

Leslie had three main goals; money and making a difference, family and career. She was going to pursue a career in some form of business, but as yet she did not know what. It was not going to be law but she was thinking about accountancy. She sat with Creighton going through the finances of the two active and one dormant company. She understood the tax implication of things much better than Andrew did and he thought back and realised that he had come to rely on her for the background on these things. Often she would tell him she had looked at it and it was okay, and he would immediately move on. She had a knack for the numbers and Andrew trusted her. Her degree was business and management and she was loving it, she was in the top 10% of her class at the end of her 1^st year. Her career was the most pressing goal that she had to make a decision on.

The family goal was obvious in some ways and not others. She made Andrew blink away tears right at the start of that part of the discussion by telling him she considered him family. Two and a half years of seeing each other every week, getting on so well and the emotional connection between them had confirmed this. They were now brother and sister. Then she surprised him.

“I am lonely Andrew, and to be blunt, horny as hell the whole time. When you come back from one of your adventures it drives me crazy. I imagine all the things you do to those girls happening to me. It is all right don’t look so freaked out. I imagine this shapeless man fucking me. Well defined until the chest and then it all blurs out. I am lonely and horny but just to complete the misery, also very picky now. It is frustrating in the extreme. I would like to have children someday, I am not desperate right now but I know I want to have kids. Finding the man is the challenge. I have not had my heart touched in more than three years. I think the dry spell since Matt is impacting this goal at the moment. It is the life goal but I am all over the place on it, as you can tell.”