Once Upon A Time, A Summer Holiday
During the week, I thought that I had reblogged an image from ourmkmblog with what was probably a caption that was too long. Rather than try the same again, I’m going to write the story and encourage you to check out their blog that provided the inspiration. The picture below is NOT from their blog but more closely resembles my recollection.
http://ourmkmblog.tumblr.com/image/119827863351
It was over thirty years ago and I was a callow, spindly youth in my early teenage years. All acne, unrequited hormones and apathy. As was often the case, the family took the summer vacation on the South coast of England, specifically Brighton.
This was the late 70s or early 80s and Brighton was popular destination so when we took our first day to the beach, it was packed. Finding some corner of an English beach to call forever ours, the chairs came out for my parents to sit and snooze, the bucket and spade came out for my annoying younger brother to start on the Channel Tunnel and my teenage self put his Sony Walkman headphones on (ok, it wasn’t a Sony, it was a cheaper version from Argos) to listen to Meat Loaf, Madness and Duran Duran.
The closest neighbour on the beach was a young woman/girl no more than ten years my senior but a lifetime away in maturity. She was possibly an overseas student from a local college/uni/polytechnic and she was magnificent.
Her dirty blonde hair was naturally curled but not naturally streaked, lemon juice probably, this was the 80s. Her skin glowed bronze and freckled. She wore paisley cotton triangles of fabric connected by cords into a bikini. She was sat on her towel, with a smouldering cigarette in one hand and French magazine in the other.
I lay on my own towel, behind cheap plastic sunglasses and watched her closely, examining every inch of her back, every curve and bulge and every dimple. And then my world changed.
She stubbed her cigarette in the sand and lay back on her towel and all was revealed to my virgin eye. The angle of her location to mine meant that my eye line passed over her shoulder, across her stomach, around her hip and beneath (yes beneath) the top of her bikini bottoms.
There before me was my first glimpse of the female sex. Until then, all I had seen had been in magazines I found in my dad’s garage or in the woods around my home.
But now before my gaze, I could see a beautifully lady-scaped pubis, trimmed closer than the cut of her bikini and short enough to be retain a similar curl to that on her head. It was perfect. I struggled to keep my composure and not gasp out loud.
I don’t know how long I stared, time slowed and yet sped away from me. In what seemed like an eternity and an instant, she sat up again to pull Hawaiian Tropic or similar coconut-based sun oil from her string bag.
She poured and spread the oil with practised ease and then without a moment’s hesitation or self doubt, she tugged the knot of her bikini top free and lifted it over her head and into the bag. She completed the application of sun oil then sucked the tar and nicotine from her next cigarette with the hollowed cheeks of someone struggling with a fast food thick shake.
Once the fate of the cigarette was sealed, it was stubbed alongside its predecessors and she lay back down again. Once reclined, she pushed the strings of her bikini bottoms down, rolling the fabric to form a bikini bridge.
Glistening female flesh a matter of feet from me, exposed and vulnerable. Every folical and freckle was etched into my mind from that moment to this as I stared and stared and stared. Moments became minutes, minutes extended into something imprecise and beyond description.
Later, she rolled onto her stomach. Now it became tricky. If she looked to her left, I was in her eye line and it would be hard to avoid her gaze but more importantly her to avoid mine. She rolled her bikini bottoms down further to expose almost all of her buttocks. For a brief and magnificent moment, I thought that she had mistaken this beach for the nudist one nearby.
My heart leapt into my mouth at the thought of her complete nakedness and almost burst through my chest at the same time. I was certain that she could hear it, either or both. If she could, there was no change in what she did or acknowledgement of my existence.
She completed rolling her briefs to her satisfaction and brought her magazine back to continue reading. And I continued staring. And staring. And staring.
Eventually, nature called and I slouched self-consciously away to the public washrooms. Swim shorts were not common place so I was in trunks, not Speedos, not budgie smugglers and let’s face it, at thirteen or fourteen my fully engorged erection was not going to catch anyone’s eye, let alone poke someone’s out.
When I returned, she was gone. The only evidence that she had ever existed was the congregation of stubbed out cigarettes and the dents and undulations in the sand where her curves had rested.
I never saw her again, nor any other sight similar that week. In fact it was over five years from that day until I saw any female nakedness. But to that mysterious girl with more self confidence and joi de vivre than I had ever seen and seldom seen since, the teenage boy and the man I have become, thank you. EM
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