Chapter 106

I had invested the princely sum of 2p in a British Railways platform ticket, so I was standing there ready to greet Julie when her train came in to Middlesbrough Station. She poked her head out of the window, spotted me and waved like a lunatic, and I ran down to where I reckoned her carriage would come to a halt. I got it about right, and was able to get there and open the door for her before she could. She was laden with luggage; a shopping bag, two suitcases and a rucksack. I helped her get it all off the train and onto the platform, then we hugged as if it had been longer than a week since we had last been together. I picked up a suitcase in each hand and we headed outside to find a taxi.

We got to the parade of shops twenty minutes before our appointment, which gave me a chance to explain exactly where we were and what I had seen so far. I listed a few of the benefits I’d noted, including being able to open an account for the utilities rather than having to keep 50p coins handy, as we had to at the Richmond Road flat. She was all in favour of that; the memories of having to go down two and a half flights of stairs in a rush whenever the electricity went off were too recent. She also seemed happy with the area – okay, we were seeing it at its best in blue sky and sunshine – which reassured me.

Our future landlord was himself five minutes early; I introduced him to Julie, and he led us up to the flat, opened the door, and invited her to have a good look around. I nervously crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. What would I do if she hated it?

I’m not convinced that I did actually breathe until Julie finally finished her tour of inspection and came back to us. Luckily for my health and state of mind, she was smiling broadly; her eyes shining as she decided that this was indeed the place where we were, at last, going to set up home together.

Our landlord was grinning too.

“I take it that it’s a yes?”

“No... , it’s actually a yes please!”

He laughed at that.

“Nice to see that you were dragged up proper! Okay, twelve month initial lease, here’s a draft rental agreement for you to have a look at. I take it that next Saturday is okay to start the lease?”

I looked at Julie, she nodded, and I said ‘Yes’.

“Okay. Shall we meet here at say ten? If you bring the references and the deposit, and the first months rent, then we can get it all sorted pretty quickly. The utilities are on, so it’s just a matter of reading the meters and you taking over the accounts. Two sets of keys?”

“Please. Will a cheque be okay, or do you want cash?”

“A cheque is fine. I’ll bring my bank details and then you can set up a standing order. Saturday will be the third of July; it means you lose a couple of days of the calendar month, if that’s okay?”

I laughed.

“It will be a miracle if we can get ourselves ready that quickly. It will probably be sleeping bags on the floor for a couple of weeks!”

We shook hands and parted. I took Julie back to the Loftus’s (again by taxi because of the luggage) and introduced her to Mrs Loftus. Then I told my landlady that I needed to give her notice as we had taken the flat. I had been worried that I’d end up paying for two places for a while, but Mrs Loftus kindly reminded me that I had warned her that I intended moving out several months earlier, and said that she was more than happy with a week’s notice.

“It will give us a chance to redecorate your room before we advertise for a new lodger, so that helps us. And my guess is that you’ll both want a bed and a meal next Friday night, so why don’t you pay up to next Sunday when you clear out your room, and we’ll be square.”

That was more than fair, so I thanked her very much. She gave us a cup of tea and a thick slice of fruit cake, and then we lugged Julie’s stuff up to my room. I pretended to mop my sweating brow after all the effort.

“Have you come for the whole week?”

She giggled.

“No, silly, I’ve come for the rest of my life! You’ve forgotten, I’m now homeless!”

I slapped myself on the forehead in contrition and kissed her thoroughly before replying. Okay, so it was still a pretty weak response to her declaration, but she’d taken me by surprise – I hadn’t looked at it that way.

“I’m sorry, my darling – with everything that’s been going on, that had completely slipped my mind. You know me, sometimes I’d forget my head if it wasn’t bolted on to my neck!”

She nodded in understanding. We’d actually been pretty well organised until the twins’ 21^st birthday party, and then Vee’s somewhat unexpected wedding the previous weekend had thrown us a bit. Julie had been finishing her course, and I’d been frantically looking around for a place, and the days had passed rapidly. I had known that Julie had left college on Friday and would be at Jen’s on Saturday ready to come up if needed, but I hadn’t connected the dots.

“Have you got your overnight things handy?”

She opened her rucksack and took out her sponge bag, holding it up proudly. Then she dipped into it and produced a tube of Badedas bath gel.

“Jen sent this as a housewarming present, along with her apologies that you never did get to have another bath with her at Reading.”

She passed it over to me. It had been opened and was no longer full. I raised an eyebrow at her.

“Well, it was like this, your honour. Hamish nipped home on Thursday night to see his bank manager yesterday, so last night Jen suggested that I could be your proxy, and that the two of us could have a bath together. She’d already got this for us, and we thought that you wouldn’t begrudge us a small squeeze of it.”

The mental image of my sister and my girlfriend soaping each other up in a bath hit Gustav like a sledgehammer; he’d seen them both in a shower together, and he would have very much liked to have been present the previous evening. The blood rushed from my other extremities into just one. I had to reach down into my trousers and straighten him up; Julie of course noticed what was happening and smirked at me. I tried a riposte.

“So you didn’t get much sleep, then?”

She giggled.

“Actually, smartarse, we had the bath not long after supper, dried our hair, went to bed, gave each other a couple of lovely orgasms, and were snuggled down by ten. We girls don’t need to prove our virility by staying up half the night! Besides, it was far too hot for anything very energetic.”

I smiled. I smiled even more when she ferreted around in her rucksack again and this time came up with a piece of material, which she shook out to show me was actually her baby doll nightie.

“I’m sorry, darling, but I haven’t had a chance to wash it since this morning, so it reeks of Jen and I.”

She passed it over. I took a sniff. Yeah, Jen Juice, Julie Juice, and a little afternote of Badedas. In the immortal words of E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Gustav immediately got three Brinell numbers harder than diamond. If I hadn’t just straightened him up, he’d have been through the material of my trousers.

I looked up to see that my little minx was grinning like a hyena. I waited for the other boot to drop.

“Oh, and Jen sent something else, but I’m afraid that it’s not for you.”

I tilted my head in query.

“It’s for Gustav. Would you mind getting him out for me?”

I did just about have the presence of mind to slide the privacy bolt on the door. The Loftus’s were meticulous respectors of my privacy, but this was the first time that I actually had need of it.

Gustav twanged out of my ‘Y’fronts before they were half way down my hips; Julie squatted down on her haunches so that she was at his level.

“Hello, Gustav, it’s very nice to see you again. Your Auntie Jen sent you a present - would you like it now or later?”

He didn’t say anything. She giggled and looked up at me.

“I’ll take that as ‘now’, shall I?”

She stood up again, moved the couple of feet to my bed, and sat down on it.

“Okay, Gustav, are you ready for your kiss?”

I moved over and stood in front of her. She reached for Gustav, and kissed him on the tip.

“This is with all her love from your Auntie Jen, Gustav.”

She kissed him quite a lot more; and it didn’t take very long before I was warning her that he was about to blow. She swallowed the lot, then looked up at me and grinned before deliberately licking her lips. I stood back and she got to her feet, and gave me a rather spermy kiss, then smiled at me.

“Great! Jen would never have forgiven me if I’d forgotten to give you that. Now, where are you taking me out to dinner in the hope of seducing me into your bed later?”

I’d put some thought into this. Middlesbrough was sufficiently up-to-date (unlike some other nearby towns) to have both Indian and Chinese restaurants, but I thought that the occasion of choosing our first flat deserved better. I’d hardly eaten out at all in the ten months I’d been there – it was foolish to pay Mrs Loftus to feed me, and then miss a meal – but I had heard of a place in town where you could get a pretty good steak. If Julie didn’t fancy that, then I had the option of the hotel where ICI had put me up the night before my interview, where I knew the food was good and non-residents were welcome.

We washed and brushed up, both cleaning our teeth, and Julie quickly rinsed out her baby-doll nightie before hanging it up to dry in my bedroom, rather than in the shared bathroom. Then we set off to find some food.

Luckily, not only did she fancy a steak after many weeks of institutional food, but the place lived up to its recommendation, AND they served the house red wine by the glass. Replete but not sozzled, we made our way back to the Loftus’s in the cooling evening air, holding hands all the way.

“Has it been as hot up here as down South?”

“Not too bad until this last week or so; but people are so used to it raining that it’s the drought they’ve been talking about.”

“That’s getting quite worrying down South; they’ve been talking about hosepipe bans and maybe water rationing for a while. It just hasn’t rained properly for weeks.”

“Mrs Loftus was saying last night that she heard on the news that it’s touched ninety degrees somewhere in England the last two or three days, and the heatwave is forecast to continue. She’s just thankful that she lives on the coast.”

“Thanks, darling, for reminding me that I’m about to spend a week miles from the sea!”

“Yes, but then you’ll be back here. I just hope it’s cooled down a little when we all go to Jen’s graduation ceremony.”

“Yeah, it won’t be a lot of fun if we’re all sweltering.”

We got back to my lodgings, I put my head round the door of the Loftus’s sitting room to let them know we were back and they could bolt the front door, and went upstairs. A quick wash and brushing of teeth in the bathroom, and we were in my bedroom with the door fastened, taking off our clothes in the light of the bedside lamp. That done, I opened the curtains and window to let some cool air in, switched off the light so as not to encourage nocturnal insects to join us, and found my way to the bed easily by the glow of the streetlights.

Before we got started, I positioned Julie on one of my towels (so that I wouldn’t have any dodgy stains on my sheet when Mrs Loftus came to do the laundry), and told her that I would really appreciate it if she might please give Jen something from me.

“Oh, what’s that?”

“As if you didn’t know! An especially nice oral orgasm, just like this one!”

She seemed to very much enjoy my ministrations; she was certainly holding my pillow over her face as she bucked and writhed to her climax. I let her settle down, and moved over her to hold her tight. When she had recovered enough to be kissed lovingly, I lifted myself off her again.

“I nearly forgot, darling! Sheila will be there as well. Could you please give her something from me too?”

The love of my life looked a little wary.

“I don’t think I want to know!”

“Oh yes you do!”

She did.

If anything she had an even better come, but she was bright red in the face when she released the pillow again.

“You won’t forget, will you?”

She grinned.

“Not likely! Now, do you mind if I take care of Gustav for you?”

“Be my guest!”

This time it was me lying on my back on the towel as my blonde bombshell mounted her eager steed and slowly rode both of us to a loving and gentle release. Then we cuddled together and slept soundly until morning.

Julie took first go in the bathroom, and once we were both dressed, we went downstairs where Mrs Loftus greeted us with breakfast and her opinion that it was going to be another hot day.

We spent the morning strolling around Middlesbrough while I showed Julie a few of the sights; we also got to know the area around our new flat a bit better. It was pleasantly quiet on a Sunday morning, but there was enough activity around for us to feel that there was a community around us.

Julie, carrying an almost-empty suitcase with just an empty rucksack and her sponge bag inside it, reluctantly caught the train after lunch. She had promised to help out at the vegetable factory for a week before the schools broke up, and the money would certainly come in useful. Besides, I was working all week and she had nowhere to go, so she was much better off being with the others. I was still very sad to see her leave. At least she telephoned me (care of Mrs Loftus) when she got to our house, before Mum took her off to the factory to join the others, so I knew she was back home okay and not stuck ‘in engineering works south of Doncaster’. It had been a flying visit, and I was very much looking forward to her permanent re-appearance on Friday.

On the Tuesday night, I went out for a few beers with Gareth, my fellow lodger, to thank him for all his help. He’d been the perfect person to share a bathroom with – never there at weekends and well house-trained – and had also been very kind in helping me find my way around. I was sure that I’d bump into him again at the Sports and Social Club, but I reckoned that I owed him a farewell drink.

The first priority now that we had found the flat was getting ourselves a bed to sleep in; although we had considered buying a new one, we weren’t keen on incurring that amount of expense. We had a stroke of real luck here; at Anita’s suggestion, I was glancing at the notice board at work when I spotted a card advertising some furniture for sale – one of the senior chemical engineers was leaving (it turned out that he’d accepted a job with BP in Nigeria) and they were selling most of the big furniture.

I went off to find the bloke, and we arranged that I should accompany him home that evening to take a look at the stuff; he was intending to get local bespoke furniture out there, and depending on how they got on with it, to bring it back at the company’s expense when he eventually returned to the UK.

I ended up with one double divan bed, one wardrobe, two small bookcases, a chest of drawers, two bedside tables and two matching bedside lamps, one full-length mirror on a stand, a standard lamp, a toaster, an electric kettle, six place settings of crockery and cutlery, a small formica-topped kitchen table and four chairs, all for £35! Someone else had already reserved the living room furniture, otherwise I’d have grabbed a bargain there as well. The even better news was that he was packing up to leave the second week in July, so Julie & I would only be without furniture for one week. I almost couldn’t believe my luck!

On Thursday when I got home, there was an envelope in Jen’s handwriting waiting for me. It actually contained three sheets, one from each of the girls. Jen and Sheila both thanked me for the present I had sent via Julie, and Julie just said that they were having a very good time and she was looking forward to seeing me on Friday, but she didn’t yet know which train she’d be on, so she would make her own way to me.

Sheila’s letter also warned me about the medical dangers of gorging after deprivation, saying that if I went from zero to nine times a night, I’d hurt myself. It was signed ‘S. Carter, Dr. (60%)’. I thought she was being a little harsh, I don’t think even when I was in regular training with Julie and the insatiable Vee ganging up on me that I’d ever managed more than five or six times in a row! It made me smile; I kept the letter with all the others (safely locked up in my briefcase), hoping at some time to be able to use it against Sheila if she ever claimed that she’d had enough before Gustav had given up the ghost. No, not really very likely, but I could always hope...

It was payday that week; although I did have more than enough money saved up for the required deposit and rent in advance, it didn’t hurt to have a bit more cash in the bank. I knew that there were bound to be some additional expenses that we hadn’t yet considered. There were a couple of Duty Officer payments on my payslip, which certainly didn’t hurt.

As expected, my better half turned up in a taxi at the Loftus’s at ten o’clock on the Friday night, with her sleeping bag, another full suitcase and a bulging rucksack, which dinged against the wardrobe when I dumped it upstairs. She giggled.

“Your Mum sent us some cooking utensils; she said that you’d develop spots if you spent a whole week eating chips out of the newspaper morning noon and night!”

“She’s probably not wrong! Anyway, have you enjoyed yourself?”

“Yup! The drought and heatwave have mucked up the crops, so yields are down and some things are ready early. Poor Mr Johnston is doing his nut because it’s so unpredictable. Anyway, we haven’t had any late nights, so we went off to the hayfield every evening – it’s too hot to sleep in the caravan until a couple of hours after the sun sets, so we’ve been sunbathing and playing cards outside in the yard.”

“You do look a bit more suntanned.”

She giggled.

“Wait until you see the rest of me!”

Mrs Loftus had kindly put the kettle on, and she called us down for a cuppa. We drank that and thanked her, and went upstairs again. Julie proudly showed me how well her all-over tan was going, and then it wasn’t long before we were in bed and falling asleep. Even the excitement of moving into our own place the next morning failed to keep us awake.

When my alarm clock woke us the next morning, the pent-up anticipation did finally hit us. We had a few spontaneous bonus hugs as we packed up our luggage; I’d scrounged a few cardboard boxes for things like my books, and there was quite a pile on the bed when Mrs Loftus called us down for breakfast.

Fortified by bacon and eggs, we sallied forth with my briefcase and chequebook. Our new landlord was ready and waiting. He took us straight upstairs, and we knelt down on the living room carpet while he got his papers out, and we got ours. First up was the tenancy agreement; there were no surprises there, and we signed on the dotted line and handed over two cheques, one for the security deposit, and the next for the first month’s rent in advance. Next was the inventory – there wasn’t very much to check – bath, washbasin, mirror, toilet, curtains, carpets, gas cooker, gas water heater, gas fire, fridge, kitchen sink and cupboards, lampshades, gas and electricity meters, and two sets of keys. We read the meters and both made a note of the readings. Then we assured ourselves that everything was working okay and plugged in the fridge, which started whirring away satisfactorily.

And that was that. Five minutes later, he had shaken our hands and gone down the stairs, and the place was ours.

I did of course suggest that we might immediately start the process of christening all the rooms in the flat. My now live-in-girlfriend did seriously consider the proposal, but we reluctantly agreed that it was more important to get our stuff over and sorted out before the shops shut for the weekend.

We found a taxi and got him to take us to the Loftus’s; it took five minutes to fill his boot and the front passenger seat with our goods and chattels, and then he drove us back to our flat. It took almost a dozen trips up and down the stairs, and I was sweating freely by the time I’d finished.

Julie was busy sorting out the kitchen – we knew that we’d be without a kettle and toaster for a while, but a saucepan would do for boiling water, and the gas grill would make toast. She’d checked that the fridge was indeed cooling down, and had prepared a short shopping list.

Having a grocer, a greengrocer and a butcher just downstairs was ideal. She was back in ten minutes with everything we needed for the weekend. Well, almost everything. I nipped out to another small parade of shops about a quarter of a mile away, where I knew there was both an off-licence and a florist. Twenty minutes later I was back with a bottle of Blue Nun and a bunch of flowers to brighten the place up.

Apart from Valentine’s Day, it was the first time I’d brought Julie flowers. Her eyes got a bit misty and I received a very nice hug, and then she found a glass that would just about work as a vase to put them in.

There wasn’t a great deal of unpacking that we could do with no furniture. I hung my suit up on the curtain rail so it wouldn’t get any more creased, unrolled our sleeping bags in the better bedroom, Julie piled our motley collections of pans, crockery and cutlery in the kitchen, and I placed our sponge bags in the bathroom. Everything else I moved into the second bedroom, so at least we were tidy.

Lunch, once we had washed up the crockery and cutlery, was a ham sandwich with Branston Pickle, accompanied by a sliced tomato and some lettuce, and washed down with some orange squash. Then we had a go at making tea by boiling water in a saucepan; it was harder to pour into our mugs than I had thought, and the new dishcloth Mum had sent up got its first task: mopping up the spilled water.

Then we sat down to make lists. Julie had ‘liberated’ a couple of school exercise books and we shamelessly misused them for our own purposes. The first page was for the errands that we now needed to run, and the second a list of items that we probably needed to buy.

After half an hour, Julie reckoned that she already had more than enough things on her ‘to-do’ list to fill Monday and Tuesday! We decided to get a bit of fresh air, and went for a stroll round the local area, exploring the routes to the town centre. The bus stop signs showed which were the major routes, and we hardly got lost at all – although my ‘short cut’ down a couple of side streets did bring us out a couple of hundred yards from home, instead of at the closest road junction as I had expected. We had passed a couple of local parks; you could hardy see the grass for people out enjoying the hot weather! There was an ice cream van playing its tune somewhere nearby, but we didn’t see it, which was a shame, as we wouldn’t have minded a cornet.

Back in the flat, we opened the windows to let in what breeze there was, but it didn’t seem to make a huge difference. Plan ‘B’ was to remove our clothes and hope to cool down a bit that way, but the only thing that achieved was getting Gustav all excited, and me slightly hotter under where my collar would have been had I still been wearing a shirt.

Julie said that she was going to take a tepid bath; of course that reminded me that there was a tube of Badedas in her sponge bag. As she was picking up her towel, I chanced my arm.

“Do you think two of us would fit in that bath tub?”

She shrugged, the movement doing very interesting things to her boobs, and by some miracle of thought transference, to Gustav.

“We won’t know unless we try, will we?”

Suffice it to say; we did both get into the tub at the same time, the tepid water was quite refreshing, and all of Julie’s nooks and crannies were scrupulously clean by the time we were finished. We took the worst of the moisture off our skin with a towel, deciding that a bit of natural evaporation would help keep us cooler for a little bit longer.

We went into our bedroom and Julie bent over to get some panties out of her bag. Like me, Gustav was very much enjoying the view, and we got caught peeking. She turned round sooner than we expected, and gave us a mock glare of disapproval.

“Gustav! It’s rude to stare! Take a detention!”

I did notice that she dropped her panties back on the bag, rather than stepping into them, so I decided to play along.

“Oh, sorry Miss!”

She put her hands on her hips.

“Sorry for staring, or sorry about getting caught, Gustav?”

“Umm, just sorry, Miss.”

She sighed.

“When are you ever going to learn how to behave, Gustav? How many detentions have you already received? They just don’t seem to work on you. It’s a crying shame that corporal punishment isn’t allowed any longer, or you’d be getting six of the best from the Headmaster. What on earth am I going to do with you? Is there anything you really don’t like doing?”

I could see where this was going.

“I get claustrophobic, Miss. If I’m put into a warm dark place and made to jump up and down for a while, I tend to throw up, and then get all limp and useless. Real horrid it is, Miss. Not nice at all.”

“Hmmm. That sounds a bit messy. I suppose that you mean it when you say you really don’t like doing it?”

On Gustav’s behalf, I lied like a trooper.

“Oh no Miss, I absolutely hate it. Awful, it is.”

She shook her head again.

“Okay, Gustav, stay there. I’ll be right back.”

She was as good as her word. She was holding a tube of KY jelly.

“Right, Gustav. One special detention coming up. This is going to be cold, but I don’t want to hear any whining from you.”

With a practised hand, she quickly covered him in the cold lubricant.

“I’m only doing this for your own good, Gustav. Follow me into the kitchen, and you’ll serve your detention there.”

She leant forward on the little bit of worktop to the right of the sink that acted as a draining board; fortunately it was clear of crockery so we didn’t have to waste any time moving things out of the way.

“In you get, Gustav. It’s for your own good.”

“Aww, Miss?”

“NOW, Gustav.”

He did as he was told.

One special detention later, Gustav had received his ‘punishment’ and Miss Andrews had made enough noise for him to remind her of the old saying of the parent punishing their child – ‘this is going to hurt me more than it will you‘ – and she nodded in agreement. We both chuckled.

“Cup of tea, Miss?”

“Yes please, Gustav. I’ll just clean up a bit while you’re making it.”

I part filled the saucepan with water and made a pot of tea; it went down well even in the heat.

“What’s next, Miss?”

“Good grief, Gustav! Have you lost your timetable already? It’s Biology practical now, and then double P.E. after that.”

She led the way to the ‘biology lab’; I discovered that she had moved our sleeping bags and towels into the living room. She laid herself out on the temporary bed, and I got down between her legs and demonstrated my knowledge of the female genitalia and how best to stimulate the clitoris with lips and tongue.

“Gustav, you’ve got a ‘VG’ for that. Now, will you please pick up the mats and take them to the gymnasium?”

I guessed correctly that the spare bedroom was the ‘gymnasium’. The first period of P.E. was spent with Miss Andrews doing squat thrusts until her upper body turned pink, and the second period involved Gustav doing press-ups until he couldn’t do any more. Sadly it was still too hot for teacher and pupil to cuddle for long, so I rolled off and we lay there panting as the sweat slowly cooled on both our bodies.

“God, I’ll be glad when this heat-wave is over!”

She giggled.

“Yes, who would have thought, as we had miserable wet weather for weeks on end in Cardiff, that a year later we’d be praying for rain?”

It was indeed true. There had already been reports that the churches were being urged to pray for an end to the drought.

“The jug of water in the fridge should have cooled down by now – can I get you a glass of squash?”

“Please, darling – make it quite weak will you?”

There were even some ice cubes in the little gold aluminium ice-maker in the freezing compartment, so I popped a couple into each glass and filled up the gaps with water, hoping that they’d freeze before we used up all the solid ones.

“Here you are, my love. Here’s to us!”

We drank. A little bit of steam came out of my mouth, but I think it was only condensation over the ice. We hadn’t got THAT hot.

We lay chatting for a while longer, and then Julie sat up. She made a mock-megaphone with her hands around her mouth.

“Attention please! Gustav Baker to report to Miss Andrews at the Staff Room immediately! Gustav Baker!”

She switched back to her normal voice.

“Crikey, Gustav, what have you been doing now? You’d better get there quick, you know what Miss Andrews is like when she gets stroppy!”

She got to her feet and went out of the room. I followed and got into the corridor just in time to see our bedroom door shut behind her. I knocked timidly on the door.