Chapter 1

"AW, COME on, Bill! It's the only way I can get to see Annika. It's been nearly two weeks!"

"So whose fault is that?" Billy sniffed. "Her mam and dad did catch you at it in their bed. They'd only gone down to the garden centre for an hour."

Rob was getting tired of explaining. "Her dad forgot to take his credit card. And they didn't catch us at it. I escaped out of the window and across the garage roof."

"And left the poor girl changing the sheets on her parents' bed."

"I didn't tell her to do that. It's not my fault she's too domesticated. And it was all..."

"Yeah, you keep telling us; it was all her juices anyway."

"That's right! Annika's a wet girl. And I hadn't finished. So nothing happened, really."

"You were fucking a girl in her parents' very own bed, and they come home, and you say nothing happened?"

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman. It's not sex unless you come."

Billy gasped at his friend's capacity for self-deception. Rob hadn't finished.

"I haven't come since. Well, not often. Only twice a day. I'm getting hairs on the palms of my hands, look."

Davie couldn't see any. "I don't see why it's okay for her to see you again as long as she brings a friend along."

"They're not stopping Annika from seeing me," Rob explained patiently. "She's not allowed to see any boys at all. That's why she's only allowed to go out with Penny."

"What do you mean?"

Rob shuffled his feet. "Well, Penny's a girl, isn't she? It's all right for Annika to spend time at another girl's house."

"How do they know this Penny doesn't invite a bunch of boys round to her place... ?"

"There wouldn't be room. It's only a little house and Penny's got a whole load of sisters. Annika's mam knows what she's doing. C'mon, Bill! Penny might be all right."

"She might be? You mean you haven't even seen her?"

"Not exactly. I mean I've seen her from a distance. I 'spect she's a good laugh. Girls with lots of sisters have to have a sense of humour."

"Yeah, but what's she look like? She might be a horror story. You'll have Annika - six feet tall, built like a supermodel with tits, big green eyes, blonde hair down to her waist ... and..."

"Don't stop, don't stop..." Rob was caressing his groin, his eyes bulging from his head.

" ... and I'll be stuck with a right little dog! How could I go out with a girl called Penny, anyway? Penelope!"

"It's a pretty name. And she won't be a dog. Annika wouldn't make friends with an ugly girl. Look. Just this once. Just for me! Just this time, and if you don't get on with Penny, I'll make sure Annika brings a top girl along for you next time, okay? But I bet Penny's all right. You'll see. Anyway, it will be dark..."

That last remark filled Billy with a deep gloom. So this Penny was the sort of girl you weren't proud to be seen with. "What are we going to be doing on this date, anyway?"

Rob's face lit up. Victory was in sight! "Oh, just the usual. You can ... we can do what we like. We might take them for a drink, or ... anything."

A drink, preferably somewhere really dark. Billy reviewed the options. There weren't any. Rob was his mate, his buddy, his best friend. This was the least he could do. Maybe, one day, Rob would do the same for him. Fat chance!

Billy often wondered why Annika had chosen Rob instead of him. Annika was the ideal height for Billy, who had always been in demand at school. Girls used to ask him to get books down from the top shelf. Rob was four or five inches shorter than Annika, and she seemed to enjoy her height advantage, making the most of it by wearing heels when she went out with him. They made a startling couple: Annika, enormously tall and graceful as a swan; Rob, short and dumpy. 'Dumpy' sounded nicer than 'fat'.

"I won't forget this, mate. I'll call Penny now."

"You'll call Penny?"

"Yeah. I call Penny and tell her it's okay, and she calls Annika to invite her round to her place for a sleepover on Saturday night. Then Annika's mam doesn't suspect anything."

"Saturday night? You mean, all night?"

"Of course! I'll take her in at the back gate and we'll spend the night in the summer house. I've got blankets and stuff, and the heater from the garage..."

"But the summer house is only tiny. There's no room for four of us in there..."

"That's all right, pal. Once you and Penny get acquainted, we'll leave you to it. You don't want to have us hanging round your necks. Besides, I want to see how many times we can do it in one night. There's this bloke at work who does it five times every night with his missus. I bet me 'n Annika can beat that easy!"

Billy groaned. It was too late to pull out of the arrangement now. A totally wasted Saturday night was coming up. Lumbered with some dog of a girl while his fat friend dragged the statuesque blonde beauty away to a night of lust and world records.

Billy's worst fears were realised. And then some. He didn't even get a chance to feast his eyes on Annika for more than a minute. She seemed to be positively glowing with the thought of her night's entertainment. She was almost dragging Rob away as soon as they met in the street outside Penny's house. Not that Rob was resisting. They were like two dogs in the mating season.

"We'll leave you to it, Billy-boy."

"Yeah, see you later, Billy! I'll call you in the morning, Pen."

"Okay, right," Penny replied dully. It was the first time she had said more than one word since the two girls had stepped out of the shadows as the boys came down the hill.

They watched glumly as the ill-matched Rob and Annika accelerated briskly away to their waiting bed. Disgusting! It wasn't even eight thirty yet.

Penny leaned against her front gate and regarded Billy without enthusiasm. "You're tall," she accused him. The implication seemed to be that he would have been better suited to Annika than Rob was. Certainly, Penny would have been a more suitable a companion for Rob. She was substantially less than five feet tall, and assembled along the lines of a brick shit-house. In the yellow glare of the street-lights, it wasn't easy to gauge her dress sense, but she seemed to be wearing all grey; grey jeans, a bulky grey sweater, and a ridiculous grey woollen hat pulled right down over her ears. Even her glasses seemed to have grey frames. "What d'you want to do?" she asked him. "You can go straight home if you want. I'll cover for Annie if her mam phones."

"Home? It's only half eight." Billy forced a laugh. "The night is young."

"Yeah. I s'pose it is. There's nothin' on telly. Anyway, the night's so young, my sisters haven't gone out yet. You don't want to meet them."

"We could go for a walk... ?"

"Walk?" Penny thought about the word, as if it were part of an alien language. "You mean, walk? Us?"

"Yeah, why not?"

The girl laughed. It was an unexpectedly musical sound. "Well, look at us." She detached herself from the gate and stepped forward. The top of her woolly hat came up to Billy's chest. When she looked up at him, her glasses reflected the street-light. She stepped back and plucked them off, tugging the earpieces out from her hat, then produced a hankie and began polishing the lenses. She peered blindly at her hands, apparently working entirely by feel.

"Come on, then. Which way?"

Penny completed her task and laboriously replaced the glasses. Then she peered experimentally out through them, surprised to see him still there. "Up the hill. Then it will be downhill coming back."

She placed a hand in his. It was tiny, and Billy had a ludicrous feeling that he was helping a little child to cross the road. "How tall are you?" he asked her.

The girl gave a little shudder. "Don't ask! Four feet seven in my heels. We're all short, my sisters, my Mam. She's only four ten. Dad was Irish," she added, as if that explained something. "A jockey." Which did explain something.

"Was?" The word was out before Billy could stop it. He had meant to ask if her dad was something else instead of Irish these days.

"Horse kicked him. In the balls. Mam said her prayers had been answered. A bit late, since she'd already had seven daughters, but she must have prayed too hard, 'cos he died anyway."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay. It was years ago. It was on the news that night, and we had all the neighbours in to watch the telly. Mam was pregnant, of course. She nearly always was. That made eight of us when Tommy was born."

"So she had a boy at last?"

"No, Tommy's short for Thomasina. The horse that kicked Dad was called Tommy's Tantrum, so Mam said she was going to name the baby after the horse, whether it was a boy or a girl. The baby, not the horse. So I'm the oldest of eight girls. Never a dull moment in our place. You don't want to know all their names, do you?"

"I'd never remember them."

"Nor can I, half the time. You got any brothers or sisters?"

"No, there's just me."

"You're lucky. Look at this lot..." She detached her hand and pirouetted ponderously under a street-light. "These are all the clothes I could find. For a Saturday night date! My sisters have borrowed everything they haven't already stolen." She replaced her hand shyly and set off up the hill again. Not too far to the top now. She was panting slightly with the exertion.

"You want to stop for a minute?" There was a wooden bench here, looking out across the city. A popular spot in summer.

"The seat will be wet," she pointed out. "Let's go on up to the bus stop."

It was another hundred yards, by which time they were both puffing. She pulled him into the little shelter, where the seat was dry. About the same size as Rob's Dad's summer house, Billy thought. Those two would be at it by now. Fucking.

They stared out over the broad vista of lights. Down there, miles down, the city throbbed with Saturday night life. Neon flashed, traffic lights changed, buses and cars threaded their way silently around the roundabout in the middle. The floodlights were still on at the football ground, although the game would have finished hours ago. A pale moon hung just above the horizon, but the stars were invisible in the sodium haze of ten thousand street-lights. The stars were there, though: it was a clear night, and up here, bitterly cold. Their breath hung in the still air.

"Do you come here often?" she asked, then giggled. "What a fucking stupid question!"

"Not usually in winter. It's enough to freeze your balls off." He thought for a while about cuddling the girl closer, but it seemed a little premature. He'd only met her ten minutes ago. Her posture was neutral, neither encouraging nor forbidding. She seemed not to have heard his reply.

"I'm not a virgin," she said, somewhat surprisingly.

"Oh?" Billy wondered how priests felt in the confessional. "I am," he said, going instantly hot and cold. What did I tell her that for? The whole town will know by tomorrow!

She gave no sign of having heard. "I've only done it the once. It wasn't very good. I wonder how the lovers are getting on. They were going in Rob's dad's shed. They'll freeze. Serve them right."

"Summer house. It's not a shed, it's a summer house. It's got curtains and a couch that turns into a bed."

"They'll still freeze. And it still serves them right."

"They were going to try and set a new world record, or something, Rob said."

"Oh, yeah?" Penny glanced up at him then looked away at the view again. A bus was grumbling its way up the hill.

"D'you want to go down town? Have a drink, or something?" Why am I saying 'or something' all the time?

"Thanks, but I'm not dressed for it. You want to walk for a bit?" She stood up without waiting for a response, and stepped out on to the weedy footpath. The bus driver saw her and prepared for a hasty stop. Billy took her hand and the two of them turned to walk on as the bus squealed to a halt and the doors hissed open. Nobody got off. It was a daft place for a bus stop, really; there weren't any houses within a quarter of a mile. There was a muffled cursing, cut off as the doors closed again, and with a roar, the bus resumed its journey.

They took a different route back, down through the park. It was darker, but not so cold, somehow. "Don't you like Annie?" she asked him, a voice out of the night.

"Annika? She's okay. A bit stuck up, but she's really pretty. She could have been a model."

"Her tits are too big," said Penny. "I don't mean they're too big, but they told her they were too big when she tried to get a modelling job. When she was sixteen, her mother took her to an agency. They said they might be interested if she had a reduction. Annie told them to get stuffed."

"I didn't know. Why do models have to be skinny? Lots of real girls have nice well-developed figures, so why shouldn't models be the same?"

"Tell me about it!"

Billy waited, but the girl didn't elaborate. They emerged from the park gates on to the main Backhurst Road. "There's a chippy down here. Or a Chinkie. You fancy anything?"

She smiled, her glasses glinting. "Fish and chips! I've got some money..."

"It's all right." He felt in his back pocket. A couple of tenners. Penny was a cheap night out. She took her glasses off as soon as they went into the shop. It was the first time he'd had a good look at her in the light. She blinked and peered at him.

"What are you staring at?"

"You look different without your glasses."

"You look different without my glasses, too. They get all steamed up in here." Her hankie came out again and she polished them, concentrating hard.

She really wasn't a bad looking girl at all. On an impulse, he took her woolly hat off.

"Hey, what ya doin'?" But she smiled and shook her hair out. The thick dark-brown mane caught the light as it swung around her shoulders. "My hair will stink of beef drippin' now. They'll all know where I've been."

"Haddock n' chips twice, love." The young woman behind the counter took the money. "Salt and vinegar, help yourself."

"Why don't they ever sound Chinese," Penny wondered as they waited to cross the road. She blew out her cheeks and fanned her mouth. "Hot chip," she explained.

"They've never been near China. She was probably born and brought up within a mile of here. You expect them to sound Chinese, though. It always sounds wrong."

"I can't come out next Saturday." Another of her sudden statements.

Billy ought to have felt relieved, or at the very least unconcerned. As it was, he pretended to choke on a piece of hot fish. He realised he was covering his disappointment. She patted him gently on the back, like burping a baby.